The wider literary community were equally disparaging, with D. H. Lawrence declaring in a letter to Maria and Aldous Huxley, having read sections of the "Wake" appearing as "Work in Progress" in "Transition", "My God, what a clumsy "olla putrida" James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate journalistic dirty-mindedness – what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!" Vladimir Nabokov, who had also admired "Ulysses", described "Finnegans Wake" as "nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room [...] and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity." In response to such criticisms, "Transition" published essays throughout the late 1920s, defending and explaining Joyce's work. In 1929, these essays (along with a few others written for the occasion) were collected under the title "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress" and published by Shakespeare and Company. This collection featured Samuel Beckett's first commissioned work, the essay "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce", along with contributions by William Carlos Williams, Stuart Gilbert, Marcel Brion, Eugene Jolas and others. As Margot Norris highlights, the agenda of this first generation of Wake critics and defenders was "to assimilate Joyce's experimental text to an already increasingly established and institutionalized literary avant-garde" and "to foreground Joyce's last work as spearhead of a philosophical avant-garde bent on the revolution of language".