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A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen (review)

Adaline Glasheen (1920–1993) was a phenomenon. An M.A. in English from Washington University in St. Louis, turned Farmington, Connecticut housewife and mother, she began, in 1946, to “fiddle,” with the proper names in Finnegans Wake, in their various punning and disguised manifestations and, within a few years, had produced the first version of her famed A Census of “Finnegans Wake”: An Index of the Characters and their Roles. The Census went through three editions and made Glasheen a major player in Joyce studies, although by her own insistence, she advanced no claim to be a Joyce critic, much less a literary historian or theorist. As she told Hugh Kenner, whom she first approached in 1953 on the recommendation of the Cambridge don Matthew Hodgart, who pronounced Kenner to be “the best Joyce critic in your country” (3): “I don’t in the least regret having made the census because I don’t teach, I don’t have a career to make or a family to support and if I weren’t making a census of FW I might be doing something really destructive like hanging crossed white dotted swiss curtains or belonging to the league of women voters” (6). If these words now strike us as charmingly quaint (Glasheen often adopts a “who, little old me?” tone), think again. In her own way, this self-made scholar was nothing if not ambitious, and by the 1970s, with Kenner’s help, she was contributing essays to Joyce collections and giving papers at international Joyce conferences. But because her concern was always with hard facts, with precise and often highly obscure information, Kenner seems to have confided in and trusted her as he did few other Joyceans (or, for that matter, Poundians); certainly, she became an important sounding board for his own studies of FW and Ulysses. Accordingly, the voluminous correspondence between these somewhat unlikely kindred spirits, meticulously edited by Edward M. Burns, whose annotations alone—a kind of “Census” of Kenner’s own discoveries and evolving formulations about Joyce’s writing—are worth the price of this volume, makes for fascinating reading, even for those, like myself, who are not Joyce scholars. The bulk of the correspondence took place in the 1970s when Kenner, having finished The Pound Era and Samuel Beckett, came back to Joyce, working up the material that was to go into Joyce’s Voices (1977) and Ulysses (1980). For example, on 24 January 1974, Kenner tells Glasheen: