A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

346 Pages·2000·1.08 MB·english

by  James Joyce & Jeri Johnson

oxford world’s classics
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
AS A YOUNG MAN
James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Dublin, eldest of ten surviving
children born to Mary Jane (‘May’) Murray and John Joyce. Joyce’s father
was then a Collector of Rates but the family, once prosperous, had just begun
its slow decline into poverty. Educated first at the Jesuit Clongowes Wood and
Belvedere Colleges, Joyce entered the Royal University (now University
College, Dublin) in 1898. Four years later Joyce left Dublin for Paris with the
intention of studying medicine but soon his reading turned more to Aristotle
than physic. His mother’s illness in April 1903 took him back to Dublin. Here
he met and, on 16 June 1904,first stepped out with Nora Barnacle, a young
woman from Galway. In October they left together for the Continent. Return-
ing only thrice to Ireland––and never again after 1912––Joyce lived out the
remainder of his life in Italy, Switzerland, and France.
The young couple went first to Pola, but soon moved to Trieste where
Joyce began teaching English for the Berlitz School. Except for seven months
in Rome, the Joyces stayed in Trieste for the next eleven years. Despite
disputes with recalcitrant publishers, severe eye problems and the pressures
of a growing family (both a son and a daughter were born), Joyce managed to
write the poems that became Chamber Music (1907), as well as Dubliners
(1914). He also began, abandoned, began again, and completed A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which appeared first in instalments in The
Egoist from 2 February 1914 (Joyce’s thirty-second birthday). (The first
attempt, Stephen Hero, was published posthumously in 1944.) By the time the
family moved to Zurich in July 1915, he had also begun Ulysses.
Over the next seven years, first in Zurich, later in Paris, Ulyssesprogressed.
Partial serial publication in the Little Review (1917–18) brought suppression,
confiscation, and finally conviction for obscenity. Sylvia Beach, proprietor of
the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, offered to publish, and the
first copies arrived in Joyce’s hands on 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday.
The acclaim publication brought placed Joyce at the centre of the literary
movement only later known as Modernism, but he was already restlessly
pushing back its borders. Within the year he had begun his next project,
known only mysteriously as Work in Progress. This occupied him for the next
sixteen years, until in 1939 it was published as Finnegans Wake. By this time,
Europe was on the brink of war. When Germany invaded France the Joyces
left Paris, first for Vichy then on to Zurich. Here Joyce died on 13 January
1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer. He was buried in Fluntern
Cemetery.
Jeri Johnson is senior Fellow in English, Exeter College, Oxford. She has
written on Joyce, textual theory, feminist literary theory, and Virginia Woolf,
and edited Joyce’s Ulysses and Dubliners for Oxford World’s Classics.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JERI JOHNSON
1
3
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Data available
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Joyce, James, 1882–1941.
A portrait of the artist as a young man / James Joyce ; edited
with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson.
(Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Dublin (Ireland)––Fiction. 2. Young men––Fiction. 3. Artists––Fiction. I. Johnson,
Jeri. II. Title. III. Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)
PR6019.O9 P64 2000 823′.912–dc21 00-038595
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CONTENTS
Abbreviations vi
Introduction vii
Composition and Publication History xl
Select Bibliography xliv
A Chronology of James Joyce xlix
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
AS A YOUNG MAN 1
Appendix: List of Selected Variants 215
Explanatory Notes 222
ABBREVIATIONS
CDD Stanislaus Joyce, The Complete Dublin Diary, ed. George
H. Healey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971)
E Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; rev. edn. 1982; corr.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
LI,LII,LIII Letters of James Joyce, 3 vols.: vol. i ed. Stuart Gilbert;
vols. ii and iii ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking,
1957,1966)
INTRODUCTION
‘astounding bad manners’
When A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in
instalments in the English ‘little magazine’ the Egoist in 1914,1 men
of letters at least took note: Ezra Pound described it as ‘damn well
written’; W. B. Yeats praised its author as ‘a man of genius’ and ‘the
most remarkable new talent in Ireland to-day’.2 With book publica-
tion two years later, the reviewers divided themselves unequally
between those who found it ‘extraordinarily dirty’, who declared
that ‘no clean-minded person could possibly allow it to remain with-
in reach of his wife, his sons or daughters ... is it Art? We doubt it’,
and those who found ‘passages in this book comparable with the best
in English literature’.3 H. G. Wells famously diagnosed Joyce as in
the grips of a ‘cloacal obsession. He would bring back into the
general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern
decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation.
... If the reader is squeamish upon these matters, then there is noth-
ing for it but to shun this book’,4 while Virginia Woolf confided to her
diary that she was ‘disillusioned’ by reading Joyce as by ‘a queasy
undergraduate scratching his pimples’.5 Against this, the young
American poet Hart Crane went so far as to claim for Joyce abilities
1 Portrait appeared in the Egoist in 25 instalments from 2 February 1914 (Joyce’s
32nd birthday) to 1 September 1915; B. W. Huebsch published it in book form in the
United States on 29 December 1916 and The Egoist Press in England on 12 February
1917 (see ‘Composition and Publication History’).
2 Ezra Pound to H. L. Mencken (18 Feb. 1915),Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941,
ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1951),94; W. B. Yeats to Edmund Gosse (24
July 1915) and to the Secretary of the Royal Literary Fund (29 July 1915),Letters of
W. B. Yeats (London: Hart-Davis, 1954),597,599.
3 All in unsigned reviews: the first, in ‘A Study in Garbage’,Everyman (23 Feb. 1917);
the second, in Irish Book Lover,8/9–10 (Apr.–May 1917); the third, in New Age,21/11
(12 July 1917); all reprinted in Robert H. Deming (ed.), James Joyce: The Critical
Heritage,2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), i. 85,102,110.
4 H. G. Wells, ‘James Joyce’,Nation,20 (24 Feb. 1917); repr. in Deming (ed.), Critical
Heritage i. 86.
5 The Diary of Virginia Woolf,5 vols. (1978; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981),
ii.188–9. In fairness to Woolf, we should point out that her comment concerns her
response to Ulysses, not to Portrait, and was made on 16 August 1922, though one
cannot imagine her finding the earlier ‘undergraduate’ any less ‘queasy’-making.
viii Introduction
‘common to only the greatest’ writers and to declare Portrait‘spiritu-
ally the most inspiring book’ he had ever read (‘aside from Dante’):‘It
is Bunyan raised to art and then raised to the ninth power.’6
Everything Joyce ever published caused a commotion at least the
equal of this. Dubliners, the volume of short stories which itself
appeared in 1914, had been refused by scores of publishers, includ-
ing two who agreed to print, then withdrew, one of whom went so far
as to destroy the proofs already pulled for fear of being prosecuted
for libel or obscenity. The stories were, he claimed, too frank, too
willing to use real names of real people (including that of a recently
dead king of England) in contexts and conversations less than
flattering. By the time Ulysses appeared in 1922, its serial publication
had already been thrice suppressed, twice burned, and once success-
fully prosecuted for obscenity.7 And by the time Joyce’s last work,
Finnegans Wake, emerged in 1939, it had already become infamous as
being synonymous with impenetrable obscurity. Today, Joyce is fre-
quently cited as the greatest writer of prose fiction of the twentieth
century, but the mention of his name still causes a shiver of appre-
hension to pass through listeners. He is still rumoured to be ‘dirty’
or‘difficult’.
But in 1914, Joyce was virtually unknown. Born in 1882 into a
respectable middle-class Catholic family just prior to that family’s
relentless, demoralizing financial decline, Joyce grew up in an
Ireland subject to British rule on the one hand and Roman Catholic
domination on the other. And the claims of Ireland (as against
Britain) often conflicted with those of the Church. Most formatively
for Joyce, they did so when Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the
Irish Parliamentary Party and, many thought, the man most likely to
achieve Home Rule for Ireland, was discovered to have been having
an ‘affair’ for ten years with a married woman, Katherine O’Shea.
First Gladstone, the Prime Minister who had formed an alliance
with Parnell at Westminster, then the Catholic bishops condemned
the adulterer as unfit for public life. He lost control of the Party and
his candidates lost the ensuing election in Ireland. Within the year
6 Hart Crane, ‘Joyce and Ethics’,Little Review,5/3 (July 1918),65; repr. in Deming
(ed.),Critical Heritage, i. 124.
7 See Jeri Johnson, ‘Composition and Publication History’, in James Joyce, Ulysses:
The1922 Text, ed. Jeri Johnson, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press1993), pp. xxxviii–xlii.
Introduction ix
Parnell died. Though only 9 at the time, Joyce would never forget
what he considered the treachery of the priests and their hand in the
destruction of Ireland’s‘uncrowned king’.8
The episode provided him with material for one of the most
vividly realized scenes in Portrait, and occasioned his earliest pub-
lication, a poem entitled ‘Et Tu, Healy’ in which he lionized Parnell
and indicted those closest to him as traitors. In the title, he equates
the Parnellite Timothy Healy’s turning on Parnell with Brutus’s
betrayal of Caesar.9 The precocity of the allusion (he was 9 when he
wrote the poem) suggests not only imagination but a decent educa-
tion. Far from being the ‘self taught working man’ Woolf imagined
him,10 Joyce was educated at the Jesuit Clongowes Wood and
Belvedere Colleges. He attended university, though not Trinity
College, Dublin. That institution had been founded by Elizabeth I in
1591 with the express purpose of furthering the Protestant reforma-
tion in Ireland––the express purpose, that is, of eradicating Catholi-
cism, not educating its adherents. Until 1873 entrance was restricted
to those who submitted to religious tests, effectively to those who
were the offspring of Anglo-Irish Protestents, the landholding
minority who for centuries had been Britain’s ruling class in Ireland.
By Joyce’s time, Catholics could attend, though the clergy strongly
urged them not to set foot in the heathen institution. He studied
instead under the auspices of the Royal University (what would
become University College, Dublin), an institution carrying the
imprimatur of no less a Catholic than its first rector, John Henry,
Cardinal Newman. Here, he made a name for himself as clever, if
prone to cause a certain kind of trouble: he refused to sign a petition
denouncing Yeats’sCountess Cathleen as defaming Ireland, refused to
modify a paper delivered to the college’s Literary and Historical
Society to include in it an insistence that drama have an ‘ethical’
dimension, refused to accept the non-acceptance for publication by a
8 See notes to pp. 5,13,22,25–7,30,33,210, below.
9 The poem does not survive, but Stanislaus Joyce, Richard Ellmann, Herbert
Gorman, and John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon all give accounts of its having existed
and, indeed, of James’s father John Joyce having had it published (Stanislaus Joyce, My
Brother’s Keeper (1958; repr. New York: Viking, 1969),45–6;E33; Herbert Gorman,
James Joyce (1939; repr. London: John Lane and Bodley Head, 1941), 36; John J.
Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce: 1882–1941 (1953; repr.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971),3–4).
10 Virginia Woolf, Diary (16 Aug. 1922), ii. 189.