Stuart Gilbert's diary reveals the obverse to the position of support expressed in his "Prolegomena to Work in Progress." Gilbert writes of Joyce's method of accumulating portmanteau'd punnings of town names in one chapter of Finnegans Wake: "The system seems bad for (1) there is little hope of the reader knowing all these names--most seem new even to Joyce himself, and certainly are to me. And supposing the reader, knowing the fragment dealt with towns, took the trouble to look up the Encyclopedia, would he hit on the 30 Joyce has selected. (2) The insertion of these puns is bound to lead the reader away from the basic text, to create divagations and the work is hard enough anyhow! ... What he is doing is too easy to do and too hard to understand" (Gilbert 1993, 21).