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Until recently, little attention has been paid to the relationship between D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, in part because it has been difficult to think of two major modernists whose work was so different. A generation ago, Zack Bowen began his essay "Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses" (1985) by commenting on what "the two giants of Modern British fiction" thought of each other's in/famous novels. He needed only a small sample of their nastier comments for readers to conclude that these two "giants" hated each other's work-primarily, but not exclusively their two banned novels. To Bowen's view of the two writers caught up in a "love-hate relationship" might be added Paul Delany' s essay "A Would-Be-Dirty Mind': D. H. Lawrence as an Enemy of Joyce." It asserts that "Lawrence and Joyce must be counted among the great pairs of literary enemies" (76). While Delany's generalization may be extreme, Bowen himself comes up with little evidence of even a modicum of "love" between the two writers. On the other hand, their reactions to each other's work tend to be "one-liners" and criticism too often plagued by being based on hearsay, leaving the reader uncertain of the actual context and tone of either writer's remarks. Additionally, the remarks often seem primarily performances for the benefit of listeners or readers. Finally, it is easy to give in to the impulse to overemphasize the negative reactions of Joyce and Lawrence to each other's work-in a sense, egging them on-as though to affirm that even eminent authors can react in an all-too-human fashion.
The difficulty of puzzling out the relationship between the two writers is further exacerbated in that the more scholarly biographers of Joyce and Lawrence, one senses, would prefer to ignore a relationship that does not reflect well on either writer. Richard Ellmann, the author of what is universally acknowledged as the biography of Joyce, mentions Lawrence very rarely. The Cambridge University Press Lawrence biographers Mark Kinkead-Weekes and David Ellis do offer more insight, in large part because they completed their biographies over a half-century after the publication of Ellmann's work, allowing more letters and other primary materials to become available. To complicate the matter further, another factor is the troubling but frequently ignored relationship between Joyceans...