SOURCE: Clurman, Harold. A Review of Exiles. The Nation (11 June 1977): 732–33.

In the following review, Clurman asserts that the lack of believability of Exiles supports the notion that Joyce was “no playwright.”

Extraordinarily intelligent, supremely self-conscious, James Joyce did not wholly understand himself. What eluded him was the fact that he was seeking within himself the essence of godhood that could not be found there. A lapsed Catholic, he believed himself an enemy of the Church, when in truth he never ceased being deeply, ineradicably Irish Catholic. His formidable intellectual equipment served on the personal level to addle his brain and conscience. Fortunately he was a lord of language and a genius.

If I begin my review of Exiles, the play Joyce completed in 1915 shortly after writing A Portrait of the Artist, in this abstruse way, it is because there is something in Exiles and in much of Joyce's...