It was not to Joyce that he read out his book when it was quite finished, but to Janet Rockingham Welford, author of “Mixed Marriages,” “The Surplus Virgins,” and other alarming works. With her usual desire for information, her habit of asking the most searching and intimate questions, she had gained his admission some time ago that he was no longer searching for a “job” because he had found his object in life—this book on the war, and the gift of words. He didn’t call it a “gift” to her. He called it his new obsession, and was pleased with her excitement.
She was vastly excited. She vowed that she had seen “in the blink of an eyelid” that he had something to tell the world that the world should know.
“Don’t be timid!” was her advice. She urged him to be brutal, to tell the truth in its starkness. She hated those little scribblers who still covered the filth of war with rose-water, concealing its stench. She wanted Bertram to be cruel to himself and to his readers, not to spare them a jot.
“Make their nerves jump,” she said. “Take them by the scruff of the neck and thrust their noses into the horror, and say, ‘Look at this! That’s what it’s like! And this is what it’s going to be again, to your little snub-nosed boys, to your annoying but necessary husbands, to your best beloved, unless you’re jolly careful.’ ”
Bertram said that was his idea. He’d been honest, anyhow. Not brutal for literary effect, but true to the things he’d seen.
Janet wasn’t satisfied with that. She wanted him to be true to the things he’d felt as well as seen. She wanted him to remember his own agony in the worst hours, to get into his book all the agony of all the men, blinded, crippled, shell-shocked.
“Make it a masterpiece!” she implored. “Write it to revenge my blinded men.”
Bertram told her she expected too much, and warned her that he was only a beginner at the writing game. He needed criticism.
“You’ll get it, little one!” promised Janet Welford. “Read it out to me, and I’ll make your flesh quail if you haven’t been honest with yourself.”
That was her invitation, and he accepted it with the sensitive, wistful, urgent desire of all beginners in the art of Literature not for criticism—which is terrible to suffer—but for encouragement, interest, understanding, praise.