A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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Editorial matter © Jeri Johnson 2000
Text © Copyright 1964 by the Estate of James Joyce

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First published 2000

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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

ISBN 0–19–283998–5

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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

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

J
AMES
J
OYCE
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. Returning 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,
Ulysses
progressed. 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.

J
ERI
J
OHNSON
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.

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

Introduction

Composition and Publication History

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of James Joyce

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

Appendix: List of Selected Variants

Explanatory Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

‘astounding bad manners’

W
HEN
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 publication 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 within 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 nothing 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
‘common to only the greatest’ writers and to declare
Portrait
‘spiritually 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, including 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 successfully 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 frequently cited as the greatest writer of prose fiction of the twentieth century, but the mention of his name still causes a shiver of apprehension 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
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