A PORTRAIT of the Artist as a Young Man should be compulsory reading for every young man and woman. I doubt if I was seventeen when I read it first, in a copy removed from the Students’ Library at University College, Cork, because of its indecency. Though I had had a more sheltered childhood than most boys, I wasn’t in the least shocked or disturbed by it. I felt too strongly that Joyce had understood as no one else seemed to do the problems of the serious adolescent growing up in squalid circumstances. Young people are like that. What they get out of a book is more often what they need for their own adjustment to life than what the author intends. What I got out of Dostoevsky at the same time was not the sadism – I never noticed it – but a realization that the lies I told almost automatically were more comic than serious, and this gradually made me stop telling lies at all.
After this, Joyce was the Irish writer who influenced me most. I came on Ulysses also in an erratic way and was moved and excited by everything in it that dealt with Stephen Dedalus, not so much by the chapters that dealt with Bloom. From what I knew of Russian fiction I got the impression that Bloom was a flat figure. I still find him rather flat. When ‘Work in Progress’ – later titled Finnegans Wake – began to appear in print, I learned parts of it by heart and wrote in praise of it in The Irish Statesman, though the editor, George Russell, tried in private to restrain my enthusiasm. ‘You shouldn’t say Joyce is a genius, you know,’ he said reprovingly. ‘An enormous talent, of course; a colossal talent, but not a genius. Now, James Stephens is a genius.’ In those days I looked down on Stephens and repeated Russell’s verdict with derision; which shows not only that you can’t put an old head on young shoulders but that you shouldn’t try.
I even made a youthful pilgrimage to see Joyce and liked him a lot, though I was disturbed by the remark he made when I was leaving. The story of the cork frame has been argued and argued by Joyceans since Desmond MacCarthy first printed it, and the reader must argue it for himself. I had admired an old print of the city of Cork in a peculiar frame and, touching the frame, asked ‘What’s that?’ ‘Cork,’ said Joyce. ‘I know that,’ I said, ‘but what’s the frame?’ ‘Cork,’ replied Joyce. ‘I had great difficulty in getting a French frame maker to make it.’
The main significance of that silly little anecdote relates to myself, for after that I began to see cork frames all over Joyce’s work, and they always gave me the same slight shock I got when he said ‘cork’ for the second time. Finnegans Wake was the first book of his I lost interest in, because, though I knew it much better than those who criticized it, I always had a lingering doubt whether what I was defending was really supreme artistry or plain associative mania. Later, I stopped rereading great chunks of Ulysses which had always bored me – the parodies, the chapter of errors, the scientific catechism – till I was left with only 25 per cent of the book and had to admit that Joyce not only had no sense of organic design but – what was much worse – no vision of human life that had developed beyond the age of twenty-one.
On the other hand, I began to see that he was the greatest master of rhetoric who had ever lived. By rhetoric I mean the technique of literary composition, the relationship of the written word to the object. This, I think, is the aspect of A Portrait of the Artist that should appeal most to middle-aged people. His brother, Stanislaus, was shocked when Joyce told him that he was interested in nothing but style, because Stanislaus was a moralist, and his principal interest was in the material and the viewpoint. But Joyce was telling the literal truth; by that time he had ceased to care for anything but the art of writing.
It had not always been so, and this was the tragedy of the relationship between those two brilliant brothers, as it so often is between two strong characters who grow up side by side, mutually dependent. There had been another James Joyce, much closer to Stanislaus, and whom only Stanislaus remembered – poor, angry and idealistic – and to him the material had mattered intensely. One can find this earlier Joyce in Stephen Hero, a fragment of the rejected early draft of A Portrait of the Artist. Before its publication, I had been hearing of it for years from acquaintances. One of them had told me it was written in the manner of Meredith, and, indeed, it contains a number of awkward ironic references to the hero, like ‘this fantastic idealist’ and ‘this heaven-ascending essayist’, which recall Meredith at his archest. But it is not the style of Stephen Hero that matters, for it has none; it is the rage, the anguish, the pity, the awkwardness in it. I remember thinking when I read it first, ‘This is the worst book ever written, but after it I shall never be able to read A Portrait of the Artist again.’
This, of course, was an exaggerated reaction; in fact, I find it hard to reread Stephen Hero, while I can always read A Portrait of the Artist again, though never in the same way. Less and less do I hear the echoes of my own tormented youth in Cork, and more and more do I find myself admiring the devices of the great master of rhetoric. This is not so much a description of a tormented childhood and youth as a reconstitution of it in another form that excites all the detective instinct in me. I do not know what the total pattern is, but I recognize sections of a total pattern here and there as, when I am out archaeologizing, I can identify portions of some great building from humps and hollows in the ground. First, there is the over-all rhetorical pattern by which the book is divided into three sections – lyric, epic and dramatic. While the character of Stephen is still fluid, his experiences are expressed in lyric form, each ending in a cry; when he finally takes shape as an individual, he speaks in his own particular voice, through his diary.
Under that is the basic psychological development that accompanies and sustains the artistic one, and this has to be understood in terms of Aristotle’s De Anima. It is not for nothing that young Stephen Dedalus notices the two faucets in the men’s room in the Wicklow Hotel which are hot and cold, or the school badges which are red and white – hot and cold – or the illness which makes him sweat and shiver; for these are the extremes between which the individual lives who is neither hot nor cold. ‘The mean,’ says Aristotle, ‘is capable of judgement, for it becomes in reference to each of the extremes another extreme. And as that which is to perceive white or black must not itself be actually white or black, but both of these potentially … so also in the case of touch, it must not be either hot or cold in itself.’ So, too, when Dante says, ‘A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his flock what is right and what is wrong,’ and Stephen thinks, ‘It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel,’ we are present at the birth of a mind which alone decides what is right and wrong and differentiates us from the world of sensation. Aristotle adds: ‘Neither is thought, in which right and wrong are determined – i.e. right in the sense of practical judgement, scientific knowledge and true opinion, and wrong in the sense of the opposite of these – thought in this signification is not identical with sensation.’
I have no illusion that I have said the last word on the matter, nor do I think that Joyce stuck to Aristotle any more closely than he stuck to Homer or Vico – in fact, I should be very much surprised if he had. I should suggest that the reader might follow a pattern leading from ‘heart’ through ‘mind’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ and ‘imagination’ to ‘freedom’, and see how it works out for him. One of the best student papers I ever read in America was by a young poet who analysed the book in terms of the rubrics.
‘Analysed’ – the very word is like a knell. Why should a work of art have to be subjected to analysis? And where is the Joyce whom Stanislaus knew and who cared deeply about the things Stanislaus and myself and so many others have cared about and who never grew up? My friend V. S. Pritchett has called Joyce ‘a mad grammarian’, and I have said myself that his work is ‘a rhetorician’s dream’, saying little more than Joyce himself said to his brother when he told him he was interested only in style. Joyce believed, as Yeats did not, that ‘words alone are certain good’ and that all that happens to human beings can be expressed fully in language. This, as we say in Ireland, is where the ferryboat left him, because it can’t. Experience, as older people know, is always drifting into a world where language cannot follow, where, as Turgenev says, ‘perhaps only music can follow’. Robert Browning wrote:
A fancy from a flower-bell, someone’s death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides, –
And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic thing,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again, –
The grand Perhaps!
Younger readers will read, careless of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the pattern of human life and how rhetoric may follow it, and not notice how every word has been brooded upon until nothing can be neglected; and older readers will read, pursuing every hint, in the hope that they may understand their children’s revolt. But this great book is one about which they can both hope to be right, because, as an elderly man, I can still think back on the boy who read it first in a provincial town forty-odd years ago and was comforted by it, and almost wish I were sixteen again.