Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress is a 1929 collection of critical essays, and two letters, on the subject of James Joyce's book "Finnegans Wake", then being published in discrete sections under the title "Work in Progress". All the essays are by writers who knew Joyce personally and who followed the book through its development: Two "letters of protest" are also included in the "Exagmination", from G.V.L. Slingsby ("Writes a Common Reader") and Vladimir Dixon ("A Litter to James Joyce"). "G.V.L. Slingsby" was  the pseudonym of a woman journalist who complained about the difficulty of "Work in Progress" to Sylvia Beach, the publisher of Joyce's Ulysses. Since Joyce wanted the collection to contain negative criticism as well as positive, Beach invited the woman to write a pseudonymous article in dispraise of Joyce's new work. The journalist complied, choosing her pseudonym from Edward Lear's "The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World". Stuart Gilbert and Sylvia Beach believed that Joyce wrote the second letter of protest himself, as it is addressed to "Mr. Germs Choice" and "Shame 's Voice" alternately (two puns on Joyce's name), and the letter itself is written in a pastiche of the punning style that Joyce was then using in his published work. Their assumption, however, was challenged and proven false by the discovery in the late 1970s of a number of books and letters authored by the historical Vladimir Dixon, a minor poet of Russian verse living in France during the 1920s.