A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce wrote a short autobiographical essay called A Portrait of the Artist in a single day in January 1904 and offered it to a Dublin magazine, Dana, which turned it down. He started a long novel instead, on his twenty-second birthday that February, and called it Stephen Hero. He got through twenty-five chapters, gave up in 1907, and began again from nothing — the same life, compressed from a sprawling manuscript into five chapters, with almost everything explanatory cut away. The abandoned draft survived and was published in 1944, decades later, as Stephen Hero; reading the two together is the clearest lesson in method Joyce ever left behind.

Ezra Pound placed the finished book with The Egoist, a small London magazine edited by Harriet Shaw Weaver, which began running it in instalments on 2 February 1914 — Joyce's thirty-second birthday — and finished on 1 September 1915. Getting it between covers was harder. Seven English printers refused to set the type, all on grounds of decency: printers, not just publishers, could be prosecuted under English obscenity law, so a refusal at the press was the end of the matter.

The book was rescued from New York. B. W. Huebsch, an American publisher willing to take on writers nobody else would, printed the first edition and published it there on 29 December 1916; the London issue used sheets shipped across the Atlantic, under Weaver's Egoist imprint, because there was no other way to get an English copy made. Weaver went further and began sending Joyce money, which is how he was able to write full time for the rest of his life. Six years later Stephen Dedalus walks back into a Dublin novel, twenty-two years old and still not having written anything, in the opening chapters of Ulysses.

The novel follows one Irish boy, Stephen Dedalus, from infancy to the edge of adulthood, in five chapters that each jump forward several years. It opens inside a small child's head, in a child's words — a story about a moocow, a wet bed, the smell of his mother — and then puts him, at six, into Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school in County Kildare. He is small, short-sighted and homesick. A boy shoves him into a ditch of cold water and he gets a fever; a priest beats his hands with a leather bat for breaking his glasses, which was not his fault; he walks up to the rector's office to complain and is cheered by the other boys for it. At home in the middle of all this, the family Christmas dinner turns into a screaming row about Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish political leader who had just died after his affair with a married woman split the country and set the Catholic clergy against him. Stephen sits at the table and watches the adults he loves come apart over it.

Then the money goes. His father, Simon Dedalus, drinks and talks and mortgages his way through what is left; Stephen is taken out of Clongowes, the family moves to a poorer house in Dublin, and he is put into Belvedere College as a day boy. At about sixteen he starts going to the brothel quarter, and by the third chapter he is convinced he is damned. His school holds a religious retreat — three days of sermons — and the preacher spends most of it on hell, described in slow physical detail: the walls four thousand miles thick, the fire that burns without giving light, the stench, and an eternity measured out as a bird carrying away a mountain of sand one grain at a time. Stephen goes home, is sick, finds a church where nobody knows him, confesses everything, and comes out into the street feeling clean.

What follows is months of relentless devotion — prayers counted like coins, every sense deliberately mortified — until the college director sends for him and suggests, gravely and flatteringly, that he might have a vocation and should consider joining the Jesuit order. Stephen walks home turning it over, and something in him refuses. He goes to university instead, argues aesthetics with his friends Lynch and Cranly, writes a poem for a girl he has been circling for ten years, and refuses to sign a peace petition, learn Irish, or join anything. His mother wants him to take communion at Easter. He will not.