Books: Personal Pangs

COLLECTED POEMS—James Joyce—Viking ($2).

Last week U. S. booksellers might well have lined their window-displays with a border of shamrocks. Novelist-of-the-week was Liam O'Flaherty (see col. 3); and for the first time since the U. S. publication of Ulysses (1934), famed James Joyce had brought out a book.

When, in Ulysses, James Joyce succeeded in crowding pre-War Dublin piecemeal through the eye of a verbal needle, he was hailed as the largest literary giant Ireland had ever produced. Seeing a giant, however, is not necessarily believing in him: and Ulysses' gigantic size seemed, to...