A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (61 page)

211.9
Still harping on the mother
: cf. Polonius, remarking on Hamlet: ‘Still harping on my daughter: yet he knew me not at first’ (
Hamlet
,
II
. ii. 190–2).

211.9–12
A crocodile … eat it or not eat it
: answer: assuming a crocodile who keeps his word, ‘eat it’.

211.13–14
Lepidus … operation of your sun
: the drunken comment of Lepidus, one of the triumvirate that includes Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, in Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
: ‘Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun; so is your crocodile’ (II. vii. 29–31).

211.17–18
Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien’s
: Dublin biscuit-makers and teashop proprietors.

211.21
Shining quietly behind a bushel of Wicklow bran
: Joyce to his translator: ‘An allusion to the New Testament phrase “The light under a bushel”’ (
LIII
130); Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Ye are the light of the
world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house’ (Matt. 5: 14–15).

211.22
Findlater’s church
: see 135.7 n.

211.24–5
shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead
: ‘Tara’: the ancient seat of Irish kings; ‘Holyhead’: port in Wales where ships from Ireland landed; hence, the shortest way to the heart of Ireland is departure. Cf. Joyce in his Trieste notebook: ‘The shortest way from Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn is to sail away from it. The shortest route to Tara is via Holyhead’ (
WD
101).

211.30
how he broke Pennyfeather’s heart
: Joyce to his translator: ‘In rowing. Compare Rower’s heart. The phrase of course suggests at once a disappointment in love, but men use it without explanation somewhat coquettishly, I think’ (
LIII
130); ‘rower’s heart’: heart enlarged from exercise which is then thought to be vulnerable if exercise stops.

212.3
Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty
: original title of Yeats’s poem ‘He Remembers Forgotten Beauty’ (1899).

212.4–5
when his arms … loveliness which has long faded from the world
: after the opening lines of ‘He Remembers Forgotten Beauty’: ‘When my arms wrap you round I press | My heart upon the loveliness | That has long faded from the world …’.

212.8–15
Faintly, under the heavy night … what tidings?
: cf. Joyce’s‘epiphany’, no. 27 (
PSW
187).

212.19
tundish
: see 158.15 n.

212.25
west of Ireland
: supposedly the ‘true’ Ireland, at least its more rural side.

212.25
European and Asiatic papers please copy
: as though an obituary of one of great importance has been composed.

212.33–4
It is with him I must struggle … till day come
: cf. Jacob’s wrestling with the angel in Gen. 32: 24–30.

212.37
Grafton Street
: see 154.22–3 n.

213.3–4
spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus … Dante Alighieri
: cf. Dante’s carefully poised, platonic, admiration of Beatrice in
La Vita Nuova
.

213.16–22
The spell of arms … terrible youth
: cf. Joyce’s ‘epiphany’, no. 30 (
PSW
190 and
LII
79).

213.27–8;
to forge in the smithy of my soul … conscience of my race
: cf. Ethan Brand’s determination in Ibsen’s
Brand
(see 144.15 n. and
G
).

213.29
Old father, old artificer
: Daedalus, again. Note that this makes Stephen Icarus.

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.

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: The 1922 Text
, ed. Jeri Johnson, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993), pp. xxxviii–xlii.

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;
E
33; 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.

¹¹
See James Joyce, ‘Drama and Life’ (1900) and ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ (1901),
Critical Writings
, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (1959; repr. New York: Viking, 1973), 38–46, 68–72, and James Joyce,
Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing
, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 23–9, 50–2.

¹²
‘Ibsen’s New Drama’,
Critical Writings
, 47–67, and Barry (ed.), 30–49; ‘The Day of the Rabblement’,
Critical Writings
, 70, and Barry (ed.), 50.

¹³
Francis Hackett, ‘Green Sickness’,
New Republic
, 10/122 (3 Mar. 1917), repr. in Deming (ed.),
Critical Heritage
, i. 94; J. C. Squire, ‘Mr James Joyce’,
New Statesman
, 9 (14 Apr. 1917). repr. ibid. i. 100.

¹⁴
Ibid.

¹⁵
‘A. M.’, ‘A Sensitivist’,
Manchester Guardian
, 22,018 (2 Mar. 1917), 3, repr. in Deming (ed.),
Critical Heritage
, i. 93; John Macy, ‘James Joyce’,
The Dial
, 62/744 (14 June 1917), repr. ibid. 107–8; A. Clutton-Brock, ‘Wild Youth’,
Times Literary Supplement
, 789 (1 Mar. 1917), 103, repr. ibid. 89.

¹⁶
Egoist
1/15 (1 Aug. 1914), 289. The British Library holds a composite copy of
Portrait
, prepared by Joyce and Harriet Weaver from
Egoist
tearsheets, proofs, and galleys, marked by Weaver to show the printer’s excisions (BL C.116.h.6, p. 29r). See also Hans Walter Gabler, ‘Towards a Critical Text of James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
’,
Studies in Bibliography
, 27 (1974), 3; Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson,
Dear Miss Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver: 1876–1961
(New York: Viking, 1970), 92, 99, 103.

¹⁷
CDD
20, entry for 10 March 1904; James Joyce,
Stephen Hero
, ed. Theodore Spencer, rev. edn. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (1963; repr. St Albans: Triad, 1977).

¹⁸
CDD
12 (2 Feb. 1904).

¹⁹
Early versions of ‘The Sisters’, ‘Eveline’ and ‘After the Race’ appeared in George Russell’s
Irish Homestead
(13 Aug., 10 Sept., and 17 Dec. 1904) under the pseudonym ‘Stephen Daedalus’.

²⁰
James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 19 November 1904,
LII
71.

²¹
Wells, in Deming (ed.),
Critical Heritage
, i. 87.

²²
Stephen Hero
, 35, 114, 48.

²³
See notes to the novel’s epigraph and to p. 6, line 26.

²⁴
John Joyce in a letter to his son James: ‘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?’ (31 Jan. 1931,
LIII
212).

²⁵
See e.g. J. F. Byrne,
Silent Years: An Autobiography with Memoirs of James Joyce and Our Ireland
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953); C. P. Curran,
Struggle with Fortune
(Dublin: Browne and Nolan, n.d.) and
James Joyce Remembered
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Eugene Sheehy,
May it Please the Court
(Dublin: C. J. Fallon, 1951); and Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain (eds.),
The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’
, Part II: ‘The Artist as a Young Man’ (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 111–237.

²⁶
See e.g.
E
; Chester G. Anderson (ed.),
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, Viking Critical Edition (New York: Viking, 1968), notes
passim
; Anderson painstakingly identifies the ‘real’ equivalents of virtually every character in the novel.

²⁷
In this respect, note at least Joyce’s comment to Frank Budgen: ‘ “Some people who read my book,
A Portrait of the Artist
, forget that it is called
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
.” He underlined with his voice the last four words of the title.’ Budgen, himself an artist, provides a suggestive gloss on what might be meant by Joyce’s comment and a useful comment on the art of portraiture more generally (
James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’
(1934; repr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 60–1.

²⁸
Stanislaus Joyce, quoted in
E
148.

²⁹
Hugh Kenner, ‘The Cubist
Portrait
’, in Thomas Staley and Bernard Benstock (eds.),
Approaches to Joyce’s ‘Portrait’: Ten Essays
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 178–9.

³⁰
Joyce to Frank Budgen, quoted in Budgen,
James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’
, 67–8.

³¹
Joyce to Grant Richards, 5 May 1906,
LII
134.

³²
‘Idiolect’—an individual’s own distinctive form of speech—derives from the Greek
idios
, meaning ‘own, private’, and
legein
, ‘to speak’, and is related to ‘idiom’—the form of speech peculiar to a people or country—which itself comes from the Greek
idioma
, ‘property’, and
idios
, ‘own, private’; so
idiomatos
: ‘private property’. The etymological implication is that one’s peculiar mode of speaking, the particular arrangement of these words in this order, is one’s own private property (a principle upheld by, for example, copyright law).