introduction . Anthony Powell . in introducing Jocelyn Brooke &apos;s investigation of Proust and Joyce , I shall not pick out the plums of the essay by naming the many points which I enjoyed in it . these can be read in their proper place . there are , however , aspects of Brooke &apos;s approach to which attention should be drawn . in the first place , he is ( like myself ) a warm admirer of both great writers . his criticism is that of love , not hate . this makes it far more valuable . in the second place , he writes in a manner that is completely informal . the views are expressed just as if we were talking with him over the dinner table . to write literary criticism in this way is not as easy as it looks . to discuss writers in this easy , conversational style , dealing with important topics at one moment , trivial at another , is a delightful gift , and often gets to the core of a book in a way that more formal articles never manage to attain . I agree with almost everything Jocelyn Brooke says , except that I think I should myself place a wider gulf between the two writers , Proust seeming to me to possess greatly superior powers . the essential gift of a novelist is that he should be interested in people . Proust comes through this test with flying colours ; Joyce gets held up with his own special preoccupations . if Joyce does not know about anything - and vast areas of human experience are completely alien to him - he usually sneers at it . we may tire of Proust &apos;s determination that in the end every character he writes about should be homosexual or of his obsession with jealousy . in spite of these King Charles &apos;s heads , one continues to feel that everything and everybody fascinated him - perhaps at times too much . Gissing used to ask has he starved ? when a novelist was named , implying starvation to be a sine qua non of effective writing . Joyce did , of course , starve ; Proust did not , except when the waiters at the Ritz were inattentive . indeed , Proust is a good example to prove the futility of Gissing &apos;s question . I myself should prefer to ask : does he put over what he sets out to say ? here , both Proust and Joyce must be admitted to be successful . how is this done ? Brooke maintains - and I can not disagree - that Proust was a bad novelist when it came to narrative , that Joyce had a dull mind . in both cases Brooke &apos;s arguments and instances are undeniable . at the same time no one can exactly say how certain things are put over in a novel . there exists the mystery of art . if the works of Joyce and Proust were pruned of their obvious faults , would they remain of equal stature ? Brooke observes that both writers were regarded thirty years ago as immensely daring in their treatment of sex , as well as in their innovations of style . there can be no doubt at all that their fame owes something to this sexual emancipation of language . indeed , one might paraphrase Nietzsche by saying that a good novel in those days justified some obscenity , but that good obscenity often justified a very bad novel in the eyes of the highbrows . it is interesting to consider how a novelist like Galsworthy would now be regarded , had some sudden illness or accident produced a psychological change in him , resulting in his treatment of subjects then regarded as forbidden . supposing in the Forsyte saga instead of Irene leaving Soames for Bosiney , Soames had left Irene on account of that same young architect ? what would have been the verdict of those who now deplore , and no doubt rightly deplore , Galsworthy &apos;s lack of psychology and his cardboard characters ? would he have been hailed as a novelist who saw beneath the surface of things ? it is an interesting question . however , there we enter a world of vast speculation . I shall say no more than to recommend Jocelyn Brooke &apos;s trial of Proust and Joyce on the serious charge of chronic literary imperfection . Proust and Joyce . the case for the prosecution . 1 . Combray and Rathmines . Proust and Joyce : their names , even today , tend to be bracketed together , and thirty-odd years ago the conjunction was commoner still , chiefly I suppose because - for the generation which grew up in the twenties - they were without question the dominant literary figures of that period . to a later age , however , the association may seem surprising , for surely no two writers could , on the face of it , have been more dissimilar , either as artists or as human beings . if Ulysses has little in common with a la recherche du temps perdu , still less has the lower middle-class Dubliner , brought up in poverty and squalor , with the rich French rentier , the prot&amp;eacute;g&amp;eacute; of the Faubourg Saint Germain . so wholly disparate do they seem , indeed , that it comes as something of a shock to remember that , on at least one occasion , the two men did actually meet in the flesh , though the encounter seems to have been anything but a success . yet for all their dissimilarity , Proust and Joyce have a good deal more in common than one might suppose , and the tendency to bracket their names together is less unjustified than appears at first sight . both , in the first place , were revolutionary writers , in the sense that their work revealed new aspects of the human mind and of man in relation to society . both , too , were technical innovators , though in the case of Proust his innovations were mainly in the sphere of narrative and construction ( for all his stylistic complexity , he remained basically faithful to the traditions of French prose ) , whereas Joyce , after a series of incredibly ingenious and daring experiments , was compelled at last to invent a brand-new language of his own . both Proust and Joyce , moreover , attempted to portray in their works the totality of human experience : to write , in fact , a kind of Com&amp;eacute;die Humaine ; though Ulysses , I suppose , is the human comedy seen through the wrong end of a telescope - or , as Aldous Huxley &apos;s typewriter once brilliantly expressed it , the human vomedy . in both , however , this ambition was partially frustrated by a shared egocentricity , a neurotic self-absorption hitherto unparalleled among great writers . for Joyce as much as for Proust , it was the I , the moi , with which he was ultimately concerned : both were autobiographers for whom the objective world about them was largely subordinated to their own specialized and highly subjective mental attitudes . for both of them this intense self-absorption was to result , finally , in a kind of partial insanity , aggravated in the one case by chronic asthma , in the other by near-blindness and alcoholism . with Proust , this insanity took the form of a maniacal obsession with sexual jealousy ; with Joyce ( the purer artist of the two ) , his reason foundered in a morass of over-elaborated verbal techniques and private jokes . both , finally , were obsessed to an inordinate degree with the past . with Proust , le temps perdu is the eponymous hero of his novel ; and as a human being , though remaining intellectually alert , he virtually lost contact - save on a relatively superficial level - with the outside world after the age of thirty-three . in Joyce &apos;s case the retreat from present reality was earlier and even more uncompromising : after the 16th of June , 1904 ( when he was twenty-two ) , his whole attention as an artist became concentrated , exclusively and obsessively , upon the world of Dublin in the nineties and the early nineteen-hundreds , with special reference to the naive and limited preoccupations of his own boyhood and adolescence . it would hardly , in fact , be going too far to say that the similarities between Proust and Joyce , considered as psychological types , outweigh their differences . yet I think that the habitual bracketing of their names had , a generation ago - and perhaps has still - a more cogent and less respectable explanation : namely , that both writers had acquired a reputation for obscenity and immorality . to young people today this must seem scarcely credible , but it is easy to forget how profoundly the climate of moral opinion has changed during the last thirty years . in the case of Proust the charge of obscenity must seem particularly surprising , for la recherche is seldom obscene in the crude sense of the term ; yet the fact remains that Proust was the first important novelist to deal extensively and in detail with the then forbidden subject of homosexuality , and in 1922 , even in France , the publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe was attended by something of a scandal . ( in England , Scott Moncrieffs &apos; translation was delayed until 1929 , when it appeared in a limited edition , issued not by Chatto and Windus , who had published the earlier volumes , but by the more courageous American firm of Alfred Knopf . ) Joyce is another matter : it can scarcely be denied that Ulysses - judged even by the far laxer standards of today - is defiantly and in every possible sense obscene . personally , if I were home Secretary , I would impose no restrictions whatsoever in such matters , but if rules are going to be imposed at all , then Ulysses must surely top the list in any Index Expurgatorius , and the fact that it is now obtainable in this country ( and has been for a quarter of a century ) makes nonsense of the existing regulations . that its obscenity is aesthetically justified may be perfectly true , though I think this a doubtful point ; but obscene it undoubtedly is , within the meaning of any act which attempts to define so equivocal a term . on the other hand , Joyce is the least pornographic of writers : nobody , I should imagine , has ever been thrown into transports of sexual excitement by the obscene passages in Ulysses , though one can never , of course , be sure , for almost any book , however harmless by intention , is capable of provoking an erotic thrill in somebody . ( I know people who find Bulldog Drummond far more exciting in this respect than Lady Chatterley &apos;s lover ; and did not Lawrence himself profess to find Jane Eyre revoltingly pornographic ? ) if Joyce , in revising Ulysses , could have been persuaded to omit the more flagrant obscenities ( most of which , after all , are incidental to the book , and do not form an integral part of it ) , we should have been left with an experimental novel of great interest , which would doubtless have created a considerable stir in avant-garde circles at the time . but would Joyce &apos;s reputation , in such circumstances , have survived his lifetime - and survived ( one might add ) the publication of Finnegans wake ? would Ulysses and Finnegan have provided - as in fact is the case - a perpetual and profitable stamping-ground for the writers of Ph.D theses ? it is possible ; but I , myself , rather doubt it . similarly , if Proust &apos;s treatment of sex had been as orthodox as that of , say , Galsworthy , a la recherche du temps perdu would still remain a great novel ; for that matter , when one compares Swann and the jeunes filles - in which the theme of homosexuality remains latent - with the shoddiness of the later volumes , one is inclined to wonder whether it might not , in fact , have been even greater . true , it is hard to imagine a la recherche without Charlus ; yet it is at least arguable that , if Proust had made Charlus a womanizer , and Albertine a perfectly normal heterosexual girl , the novel would have been , qua novel , neither better nor worse than it is . but would it , one wonders , have created quite so much stir as , in effect , it did ? once again , I have my doubts . both writers - no doubt lacking this adventitious appeal - would have enjoyed a certain r&amp;eacute;clame in literary circles , but neither , I feel , would have attained to the celebrity which each , in fact , achieved during his lifetime , and which survives to this day . the twenties were a period of sexual emancipation , Havelock Ellis and Freud had not done their work for nothing , and it went without saying that enlightened persons should fly , from the highest motives , to the defence of any serious writer who treated the subject of sex with greater freedom than his predecessors . 