It’s a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind) & unformed & unimportant drivel; & until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & thought can make a work of art without the cook’s intervening.
ATTRIBUTION:
Edith Wharton (1862–1937), U.S. author. letter, Jan. 6, 1923, to art connoisseur and historian Bernard Berenson. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).
Wharton was commenting on Ulysses, which had been published in Paris the previous year. She went on, “The same applies to [T.S.] Eliot,” whose The Wasteland had also been recently published.
