A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (44 page)

Stephen Hero
and
Portrait
are both like and utterly unlike one another, the relationship that obtains between them so complex that noting here the similarities and differences would double the length of these notes. The former, which Joyce described to Harriet Weaver as ‘rubbish’ (
c
. 7 April 1934),
¹
is the
kind of (unfinished) novel that Stephen Dedalus might have written. When Joyce rejected it, began again, and wrote
Portrait
he entered the world stage as ‘a man of genius’ whose early ‘errors’ became ‘the portals of discovery’ (
U
182). I do not mean to imply that I agree with Joyce’s assessment, however, merely that the two works are so different as to make the fact that one is the precursor of the other seem at times implausible. Anyone seriously interested in Joyce should read both. The former has been published:
Stephen Hero
, ed. Theodore Spencer, rev. edn. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (1963; repr. St Albans: Triad, 1977).

The following works are repeatedly referred to in the notes that follow by the abbreviations listed below, indicating either a source for the gloss or that readers may find therein fuller, more detailed information. Biblical references are to the King James version unless otherwise noted.

[epigraph]
Et ignotas … Ovid, Metamorphoses, viii. 188
: Latin: ‘So then to unimagined arts he set his mind’ (the line continues ‘and altered nature’s laws’), of Daedalus in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, viii. 188–9 (trans. A. D. Melville, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 177); Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43
BC
–
AD
17 or 18), Roman poet, author of
Heroides
and
Metamorphoses
, a loosely linked series of tales from ancient mythology all of which concern changes of shape. In this tale, Daedalus (whose name means ‘cunning artificer’) creates three devices, each of which leads to difficulty. In the first, he fashions for Queen Pasiphae a wooden bull into which she might get so that she might mate with a bull for which she has developed a passion. Of this union is born the Minotaur, a creature half man, half bull. Pasiphae’s husband, King Minos of Crete, enraged at Daedalus’s collusion with Pasiphae’s plot, demands that he now build a labyrinth in which the Minotaur may be kept. Daedalus creates the labyrinth so cleverly that he finds he and his son Icarus are now trapped within it. To escape, he fashions wings of wax and feathers so that he and Icarus may fly away. This they do, though Icarus, overcome by euphoria (and no little pride in his own newfound ability) flies too near the sun. The wax in his wings melts; he falls into the sea and drowns. Daedalus flies safely, landing in Sicily where he finally dies, having continued his creative life. The line quoted comes as Daedalus sets about making the wings.

CHAPTER I

5.1–3
moocow … tuckoo
: see John Joyce to his son James, 31 January 1931: ‘I wonder do you recollect the old days in Brighton Square, when you were Babie Tuckoo and I used to take you out in the Square and tell you all about
the moo-cow that used to come down from the mountain and take little boys across?’ (
LIII
212)—a version of the tale of the mythical cow (itself a version of ‘silk of the kine’, one of the names of Ireland) that took children away from ordinary life to an island fairy world whence they were eventually safely returned.

5.5
glass
: monocle.

5.7
lemon platt
: braided lemon candy.

5.8–9
O, the wild … green place
: after H. S. Thompson, ‘Lily Dale’, the chorus of which is: ‘Oh, sweet Lily, sweet Lily, dear Lily Dale, | Now the wild rose blossoms | O’er her little green grave, | ’Neath the trees in the flow’ry vale.’ Note the change of ‘grave’ to ‘place’.

5.20
Dante
: not the Italian poet, but a childish mispronunciation of ‘Auntie’ (from the elision of ‘and Auntie’?); the young James Joyce’s name for Mrs Conway, on whom Dante Riordan is modelled (Stanislaus Joyce,
My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years
, ed. Richard Ellmann (1958; New York: Viking, 1969), 7).

5.22
press
: a wardrobe.

5.23–4
Michael Davitt … Parnell
: Michael Davitt (1846–1906), Irish nationalist (organizing secretary of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1868), founded the Land League of Mayo (1878) and with Parnell the National Land League (1879) to agitate for reform of the practice of (often absentee) landlord ownership of land farmed by local farmers from whom rents were extracted. Davitt came to advocate national ownership of land, but in this he was virtually alone (
F
415). Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91) as Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster (to which Ireland had sent MPs since the 1800 Act of Union which dissolved the Irish Parliament and merged it with the British) parlayed his Party into a position of power which he used to try to secure Home Rule for Ireland: in exchange for securing Gladstone’s commitment to Irish Home Rule, he agreed to support the Liberal Government (which needed Irish Party support to form a government in 1885). For Gladstone, see 210.31 n.

5.24
cachou
: ‘a sweetmeat, made of cashew-nut, etc., used by smokers to sweeten the breath’ (
SOED
).

6.1–9
eagles … Apologise
: cf. Joyce’s first ‘epiphany’ (
PSW
161).

6.11
prefects
: boys or masters put in positions of particular authority or leadership.

6.13
footballers
: probably rugby rather than Gaelic football, the latter being revived in 1884 with the Gaelic Athletic Association’s endorsement of traditional Irish sports, but the former (‘rugby union’) much more likely to have been played at this date in an élite Jesuit school like Clongowes Wood College (see 46.34 and 12.21 nn. below). Both have fifteen players (see 35.26–7). The question remains, though, why the ball is described as an ‘orb’, for a rugby ball is oval, a Gaelic football round.

6.18
third line
: the schoolboys were divided into three major groups by age. In descending order they were the higher (aged 15–18), lower (aged 13–15), and third (under 13) lines; each ‘line’ was further divided: the higher into
poetry and rhetoric, the lower into second and first grammar, the third into elements and third grammar (
G
).

6.21
greaves in his number
: ‘shin guards in his locker’.

6.26
Stephen Dedalus
: after St Stephen, the first Christian martyr (a Jew educated in Greek), who was stoned to death for blasphemy (
c
.
AD
34) (Acts 7: 57–9,), and Daedalus, Ovid’s ‘cunning artificer’ (see note to epigraph).

6.33
magistrate
: one of 64 ‘resident magistrates’ who acted as Ireland’s judiciary throughout Ireland (excepting Dublin); though by the late nineteenth century open to Catholics, more usually occupied by Protestants.

7.9
the castle
: the central buildings of Clongowes Wood School (see 12.21 n.); site of a medieval castle destroyed (1642) ostensibly because it was the site of Catholic resistance, rebuilt by the Browne family who bought Clongowes in 1667 (see 15.17–32 n.).

7.15
peach
: to inform on.

7.16
the rector
: an ecclesiastic and head of the whole college, which was divided into an academic and a domestic/disciplinary division, the former presided over by the prefect of studies (see below) and comprising the school masters, the latter by the minister and prefect of discipline. See Sullivan and
G
.

7.17
soutane
: long black gown with sleeves, buttoned at the front, usual uniform of the Jesuits (see 46.34 n.).

7.22
scrimmage
: (usually abbreviated ‘scrum’) in rugby football, ‘an ordered formation in which the two sets of forwards pack themselves together with their heads down and endeavour by pushing to work their opponents off the ball and break away with it or heel it out (1857)’ (
SOED
).

7.30
seventyseven to seventysix
: days until the Christmas break, hence it is October.

7.33
Hamilton Rowan
: Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1751–1834), member of the United Irishmen (which wanted Irish independence from England as well as Catholic emancipation); he was tried and sentenced for sedition in 1794 but escaped when being transported to prison, taking refuge at Clongowes Wood Castle. Local lore has it that the troops arrived just as he entered the castle, that to trick them into thinking he had leapt from a window and fled, he tossed his hat onto the ‘haha’ (see 7.34 n.) but actually hid inside. He did escape to France. (See
E
29.)

7.34
haha
: a ditch with a wall on its inner side below ground level; it forms a border without breaking into the view.

7.37
the community
: the priests who comprise the faculty of the college.

7.39
Leicester Abbey
: the Anglican abbey of Saint Mary Pré in Leicester in central England; Stephen thinks of it, of course, because of the ‘spelling rhyme’ recalled below.

8.1
Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book
: probably
A Grammar for Beginners
(1838) by James Cornwell (1812–1902) and Alexander Allen (1814–42), a spelling primer, used in Ireland as well as England (
G
). Education at the time was supervised by the Intermediate Education Board (founded by an
Act of 1878) which set up a system of education very like the English system of public examinations with funding tied to results. Memorization of set texts typically followed.