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Joyce and Autobiography

Having started from Finnegans Wake, and backtracked in frustration first to Ulysses, then to A Portrait, and then to Stephen Hero, I now find myself wrestling with the ur-Stephen-Hero, an autobiographical essay titled "A Portrait of the Artist", written out in a single day on 7 January 1904, submitted to the newly-founded Dana, but rejected for its sexuality and its obscurity.

And indeed it's obscure, to the point where I wonder if some sections were accurately transcribed (I'm copying below from Anderson's Viking Critical Portrait). But the rule with Joyce is always to assume he knows what he's doing, and that it's us who need to see more deeply.

One has to assume Joyce had been composing it for some time before 7 January-- Byrne says the 1899 Ibsen essay, 'Drama and Life', was a labor of two months. So it's a reasonable guess that Joyce was already composing the essay on 10 December 1903, as he walked the 14 miles to millionaire Thomas Kelly's house in Celbridge, expecting to close a deal for a new Dublin daily with Joyce at its helm, to be called The Goblin. For this reason I'll call it the 'Goblin Portrait'.

A great deal is known about the large-scale architecture of U and FW, but while the five-chapter Portrait is surely symmetrical around the Hellfire sermon (chapter 3 of five), no one has proposed any detailed model of that symmetry. And while there are surely motifs that return with variations in each chapter, I haven't seen these inventoried.

The Goblin Portrait offers a startingpoint for looking for these patterns. It's transcribed below, broken into sentences or phrases (formatted as brown indented text) and annotated to show how it anticipated Stephen Hero and the published (or 'Trieste') Portrait.

I've also collated various bigraphical witnesses, and the surviving evidence of Stephen Hero, mostly previously unanalysed. Along with Spencer's miserable transcript, there's notes and letters and contemporary witnesses that survive. (For starters, Spencer broke Joyce's chapter 18 into two, and quietly incremented all subsequent chapter numbers. And he integrated some of Stannie's marginalia into the text.)

The Goblin 'manifesto' had led quickly to Stephen Hero, begun on 2 February, written consecutively, 1000 pages in 18 months. (Costello has recently begun to claim SH goes back years earlier, on the evidence of a sister's memory of Jim reading it to their mother. But I don't see any hint of this in the Goblin Portrait or anywhere else.)

Its style is usually dismissed as banal, but this is the same Joyce who was crafting lyrics and epiphanies word by word, following the theories of his Aesthetic ('Paris') Notebook, so it deserves our full-bore attention.

(cf 1908 Trieste notebook: "Dedalus: He shrank from limning the features of his soul for he feared that no everlasting image of beauty could shine through an immature being.")

All of SH is lost up to the University episodes, but I'll quote the surviving notes below, in 'typewriter' font.

With his serious messiah complex, Joyce in SH would have wanted to surpass his autobiographical models for truthfulness: George Moore, George Meredith, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. He was also channeling the same energy that would have gone into his recent (failed) project for a new Dublin paper called the Goblin-- so he was aiming to awaken the slumbering masses, believing he understood the real solution to their problems. And he had stylistic models, too, in Ibsen, Flaubert, D'Annunzio, and Maeterlinck.

Stannie wrote (in the Dublin Diary, of which only a forged later copy survives): "The chapters are exceptionally well written in a style which seems to me altogether original. It is a lying autobiography and a raking satire.... Jim's style in prose writing many times is almost perfection in its kind, holding in periodic, balanced sentences and passages a great spiritual delicacy. But between these passages, instead of writing quietly and relying on his lifelike dialogue, he tortures his sentences in figurative psychology and writes strenuously." [DD20, 79]

He was anything but shy about showing SH around, to Stannie, CP Curran, Aunt Jo, and George Russell, who was inspired to commission the first Dubliners stories for his paper. Curran characterised the style with adjectives like: mature, formidable, sustained, copious detail, difficult reading, prevailing gloom, monotonous, oppressive.

My section-headings for the Goblin Portrait:

• # Intro: The art of autobiography
• # Pre-1898: Religious fervour
• # 1899-1901: Scorn for peers
• # 1902: Heretical missionary
• # 1902-03: The Muse of Mortality
• # 1903: Humiliating doubts
• # 1904: Addressing posterity

The plain text is available here.

"A Portrait of the Artist"

This title would be entirely generic if it refered to a painting [examples] but becomes entirely provocative applied to a writer.

Stannie took credit for this title, but he's highly unreliable. He surely didn't suggest the title before Joyce composed the essay, so it would have had to have been written in afterwards. Given the allusions to portraiture in the first sentences, this seems pretty unlikely.

The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron, memorial aspect.

This sentence really sucks. There's a comma needed after 'portrait'. And 'for... that' is ungrammatical!

In the Trieste Portrait Joyce solves the portrait-of-infancy problem by trying to capture the voice of the infant. ("His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face." Was Joyce definitely the first to do this, though?) And we can deduce that SH allotted six chapters to Stephen's pre-Belvedere years, but almost certainly used the conventional narrative voice.

Curran reports that the first chapter of SH, finished on 10 Feb, was lyrical, with obscure reveries on distant happenings. (Perhaps it fleshed out these first sentences of the Goblin Portrait?) He claims [cpc54] that J later referred to the Goblin PoA as an 'introductory chapter'.

Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.

Here's the root of the leitmotif-and-variations model of the Trieste Portrait. Joyce was looking not just at what made him unique in the present, but at the evolution of that character across 22 years. This structural aspect of Portrait is well-known-- Hugh Kenner in particular analysed the persistent motifs on just the first page-- but it has never been systematically analysed.

Kenner's analysis is included in the Viking Critical Portrait (p418ff). Motifs include: the five senses, words and poems and performances, rose and cow and path and eagle. Each of these is re-visited thru the "fluid succession of presents", seen each time with new eyes.

Pynchon would have alluded to calculus here. Joyce had read Aristotle, Aquinas, Nietzsche, and some Theosophists.

Stannie claims [mbk17] of Stephen Hero 'the idea he had in mind was that a man's character, like his body, develops from an embryo with constant traits. The accentuation of those traits, their reactions to hereditary influences and environment, were the main psychological lines he intended to follow, and, in fact, the purpose of the novel as originally planned.'

Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches...

(Why not 'acquaintenceS'? Too close an echo with recognises, probably.)

"Beard and inches" is a very odd phrase. (Joyce's notes for the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses reflect a 'measurement' motif that's also very strong in the Tristan vignette for FW, suggesting a male DIY-householder, or Finnegan the Builder.)

And 'again' must refer back to 'iron, memorial'.

...and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art, by some process of the mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts.

Joyce here seems to slip here from a discussion of the art of biographical portraiture into his idee fixe about the misunderstood artist. (The whole essay sounds like someone who's badly lost touch with his audience-- a knifeblade without a whetstone.)

Stephen's esthetic theories are similar in SH, and in Trieste Portrait V (p206): "Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part."

And still in Ulysses: "So that the art of gesture renders visible not the lay sense but the first formal rhythm." (Circe draft)

Looking for evidence that the first chapter of SH might have expanded on these first few Goblin-sentences, we find this surviving note:

Chap. I: 'The middle age discovered America; 
our age has discovered heredity.'  Thus do the 
ages exchange civilities like outgoing and 
incoming mayors. The spirit of our age is not 
to be confounded with its works; these are 
novel and progressive, mechanical bases for 
life; but the spirit wherever it is able to 
assert itself in this medley of machines is 
romantic and preterist. Our vanguard of 
politicians put up the banners of anarchy and 
communism; our artists seek the simple 
liberation of rhythms; our evangelists are 
pagan or neo-Christian, reactionaries. 
[Workshop of Daedalus 69]

(Cf SH22 p174)

Is 'preterist' the opposite of 'progressive'? Are anarchy and communism seen as preterist in this sense? Is Joyce still making common cause with Yeats et al? (The Stephen of 16 June will be far less sociable.)

Is he setting the scene for Stephen's generation to exchange civilities with Simon's? The Linati schema characterises Nestor's theme as "The wisdom of the old world".

But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.

I'm not clear why or whether this 'curve' requires the portrait to include the features of infancy...?

(And 'such as these' and 'identificative paper' are really embarrassing! "Talk like a Vic-tor-ian..." ;^)

Use of reason is by popular judgment antedated by some seven years...

I assume this is an odd way of saying that reason is born at 7yo. (Ignatius Loyola supposedly claimed if he got to a boy before age seven, he had him for life. Joyce was 'half past six' when he started at Clongowes.)

...and so it is not easy to set down the exact age at which the natural sensibility of the subject of this portrait awoke to the ideas of eternal damnation, the necessity of penitence and the efficacy of prayer.

Notice these are the only ideas he considers important, pre-University! (The Trieste Portrait also emphasizes words and poems, performances, social class, self and other, male and female, Ireland's burdens, etc etc etc.)

How does the antedating make this harder? Could he mean that if he awoke before 7yo, his lack of reason would make them harder to recall?

A surviving "Epiphany" about this awakening was used in the Trieste Portrait (and likely in SH too) with Dante replacing Vance:

Bray: in the parlour of the house in Martello Terrace.
Mr Vance (comes in with a stick): "...O, you know, he'll have to apologise, Mrs Joyce."
Mrs Joyce: "O yes... Do you hear that, Jim?"
Mr Vance: "Or else-- if he doesn't the eagles'll come and pull out his eyes."
Mrs Joyce: "O, but I'm sure he will apologise."
Joyce (under the table, to himself):

"Pull out his eyes,
Apologise,
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes.

Apologise,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise."

In the Trieste version, this serves as the last image before Clongowes. [old Bray pix]

His training had early developed a very lively sense of spiritual obligations at the expense of what is called 'common sense.'

Training at Belvedere? Or earlier at Clongowes? Or earlier still with Dante?

Or via the rituals of the Church?

What forces do we see acting on Stephen in the Trieste Portrait?

He's rewarded first by his parents for singing, then by Dante for bringing her tissue paper. Then Dante threatens him about saying sorry, using Greek rather than Judeo-Christan imagery.

So far this is a rational system of reward and punishment (though the punishment is rather severe!). But at Clongowes he's confronted with the rough society of the boys, who punish for no good reason. Stephen's sensitive soul reacts by trying to be very good, by the standards of the Jesuits. (This is probably exaggerated-- Joyce had a mischievous, rebellious streak, too... though it may have arisen later.)

But the Jesuits themselves range from sensitive to sadistic, with Father Dillon as bad as Wells the bully. (If they were all sensitive, how different his story would have been!) Stephen shows his faith by protesting a sadist to a sensitive, and wins. (Portrait II p65 declares that even at Clongowes Stephen feels different, special, destined for a realer life adventure. This faith in himself is extended to the Church secondarily.)

At home, Simon and Casey are violently anti-Church and pro-Parnell. They would certainly never have awoken Stephen's sense of sin and hell. (Why did Jack hand James over to them, anyway? Just to be rid of him? Was it May who chose Clongowes? Simon says the Jesuits will help Stephen get ahead.)

Portrait II shows Charles encouraging Stephen to athletics, and to sampling fruit without paying at the grocer's (pretense of privilege, cf Nietzsche). Stephen claims to feel no piety (p62), so Clongowes seems ruled out as awakening it.

Stephen picks up storytelling from his father, and romance from Dumas and Napoleon. He intuits that he needs a woman's love to become complete, perfect.

Of all this, it's the protest to Conmee that most suggests common sense sacrificed to spirituality, though here it turns out to be almost miraculously effective. The romance about destiny and privilege may also echo this spirituality...?

The surviving notes for Stephen Hero give only a few hints about the lost chapters. None of the Trieste Portrait's Clongowes episodes are even hinted at here-- Conmee, the other boys, the squareditch, the pandybat, the nurse or the fever-- but this probably means they were already complete when he prepared these notes. (At a rate of two chapters per month that would have been April.) [pic] [school]

A few hints in the text of SH (noted below) suggest that there was significant overlap with the Trieste Portrait's version. And Portrait II p86 seems to imply that a lost scene showed a younger Stephen on a train with his father-- on the way to Clongowes, perhaps. (I think one of SH's readers recalls this scene as the opening of the story, ie chapter two. But Joyce's slip may instead refer to an intermediate version between SH and Trieste.)

Especially interesting among the SH notes are the following lists of characters [Workshop of Daedalus 73]:

Mary Daedalus
Simon Daedalus
Stephen Daedalus
Maurice Daedalus
Isabel Daedalus

All Joyce's sisters and brothers are here condensed to one name each. In the Trieste Portrait there are many of each mentioned, but none named.

Mrs Riordan
John Casey
Aunt Essie
Uncle John
Aunt Brigid
Uncle Jim

Brigid and Jim were Aunt Jo and Uncle William (unnamed in the Trieste Portrait, Aunt Sara and Richie Goulding in Ulysses). James loved Aunt Jo, and saw William as a Shem prototype like himself.

Essie and John were Aunt Lillie and Uncle John (just Red Murray in Ulysses).

Dante and Casey reached A Portrait and Ulysses unscathed, so the Xmas fight may well have originated in SH, already written when this list was compiled.

Mike Flynn
Richard Sleater
Vincent Hearne/Heron        [the slashed form here means Joyce
Fr MacNally                  substituted the second version]
Mr ?Demers/Tate

Jack Joyce's fall was symbolised geographically by the family's moving north of the Liffey river, into the poorer Catholic side of town [pic]. Flynn survives in Portrait II (p61), as the last gasp of Simon's south-of-the-river phase, so Sleater might be Raynold the Protestant (Aubrey Mills in Portrait II) with whom Joyce wrote a novel in 1892, imitating Dumas.

But more likely Sleater is someone from Belvedere-- maybe even Byrne, who James already knew slightly there.

Heron in Portrait II was Albrecht Connolly, possibly with features from Vincent Cosgrave, who was still on good terms with Joyce in 1904.

MacNally is explained at SH16 p35 as the Rector of Belvedere (real name Father Henry), parodied by Stephen in the play of Portrait II, with a pedantic bass and shrewd harsh northern face. Thomas Bodkin calls him harsh and insensitive. He cross-examined Stannie about James's morals before approving him for the Sodality. He may also be the one "who had taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a courtly English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and potsherds and chines of bacon" ...but this is more likely Father Browne, the University censor.

Mr Tate in Portrait II is Dempsey.

Missing here, implied in SH: Father Healy ( = Conmee?)

Fr Webster
Fr Dillon
Miles Davin
James Brennan
Matthew Lister
Thomas Nash
Oliver Flanagan
Patrick Hoey
Owen Hoey
Annie Hoey

Mostly University friends. [pic] [school]

Father Dillon in SH is the President of the University, who at first censors Stephen's speech on Drama and Life. Webster likely became Father Butt (real name Darlington).

Davin here was Clancy in life, Madden in SH and Ulysses, and Davin again in the Trieste Portrait.

Brennan is probably Jeff Byrne, Cranly in SH, the Trieste Portrait, and Ulysses. Ellmann's Plate V shows Joyce, Byrne, and Clancy posed as a group.

Lister might be Cosgrave/Lynch, or SH's Wells, Whelan, Temple, or Glynn.

Thomas Nash survives in the Mullingar chapter of SH, where it appears he was Stephen's enemy at Belvedere-- in the Trieste Portrait he holds Stephen's arms in the fight with Heron and Boland. (So why is he not in the list with Heron?)

Flanagan is surely Gogarty (Goggins in the Trieste Portrait, Mulligan in Ulysses), and is mentioned by Temple as a new name at SH25 p225.

The Hoeys may be the Sheehys, called the Daniels in SH.

Missing here, present in SH: Father Moran (whose name was taken from Nora's personal history)

John ?Butter
William Judge
Joseph Magennis
John Andrews
Christopher McCann
Hon Mrs Ambrose
James MacCormack

Many gaps here! These seem to be University-or-later, but not James's friends.

Magennis was a University professor who encouraged James, and appears in Ulysses.

Philip McCann was Joyce's godfather's real name, but he becomes Fulham in SH. Phil McCann in SH is Skeffington.

MacCormack may be the singer (John) who James visited in March 1904, and shared a platform with in August. (If so, the naming here is interesting!)

Missing: Hughes the Irish teacher; Artifoni

Also: Colum, Thomas Kelly the millionaire, Russell, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Eglinton, Archer, Kettle, the Sheehy boys

Clare Howard/Eileen Dixon
Emma Clery
Gertrude Mayne/Martha Albin/Sarah Albin
Charlotte Harrington
Esther Osvalt
Elinor Forde

These interesting clues are surely much closer to truth about Joyce's youthful affections than anything in the later works.

Eileen has been identified with one or another of the Sheehy girls (cf Annie Hoey above), or one of Aunt Jo's girls. A Miss Howard appears in the Mullingar chapter of SH, apparently Fulham's heir.

The unidentified love-object in "Araby" may be one of these. Peter Costello has definitely identified Emma as M.E. Cleary, with some added characteristics of Elizabeth Justice.

Gerty and Martha (the names) are perhaps recycled in Ulysses.

Osvalt appears in Ulysses as a Parisian, probably a prostitute. (What a loss, then, that these Paris chapters were never written!)

Elinor Forde sounds rich and Protestant and inaccessible.

Missing: Lucy the bird-girl

The plotting for the Belvedere period of SH is outlined in the same notebook:

Chap VIII: 
1) Business complications
2) Aspect of the city
3) Christmas party
4) Visits to friends
5) Belvedere decided on [WoD73]

So by elimination we have chapters 2 thru 7 as covering Clongowes and earlier. Joyce mentions an early plan for 63 chapters total (SL56, 2-28-05 to SJ), which suggests a possible architectual design based on nine sets of seven or seven sets of nine. Chapter seven might have set up this new cycle with the Joyces' move north of the river, a major stage in Jack's business complications.

Joyce's project, remember, required him to use these events to show the evolving curve of his emotions, the origin of the sense of sin, and the impractical spiritual idealism.

Simon's decline threatens Stephen's heroic fantasies-- unknown enemies are conspiring against them. Portrait II inserts epiphanies here, of the beautiful Mabel Hunter, and a senile aunt.

The Xmas party here survives in Portrait II (p69), where he fails to kiss Emma. SH21 p158: "He remembered the first mood of monstrous dissatisfaction which had overcome him on his entrance into Dublin life and how it was her beauty that had appeased him."

In Portrait II he's inspired to try a poem, and finds he knows how to do it. (Intuition again! He may personify this, below.)

Chapter IX: February 1893 to June 1893: 
Rivalry with Vincent Heron
Letter from Eileen Dixon: Eileen and Emma. 
Belvedere. Essays.  Reading.  
Mr Casey + himself. 
Fight with Heron
Epiphany of Mr. Tate. 
The Play at Whitsuntide:  Emma again. [WoD70-71]

This material also mostly looks familiar from Portrait II.

The references to 1893 are peculiar, seeming to condense many years into one over the next few chapters. Eg, the play in the Trieste Portrait II should have been 1898, just before graduation... but maybe there were several plays, originally. Portrait II p73 puts the play in Stephen's second year at Belvedere.

Eileen and Emma are definitely distinct, with Emma being the one he loves more, Eileen going farther back.

Stephen in Portrait II has established a degree of nobility in spite of his father. He's known for his chaste habits-- no smoking, drinking, or swearing, but he's mischievous enough to parody the rector in public, on a dare. Presumably it's his brains that endear him to his teachers, making it worthwhile to try to please them in other ways.

The epiphany of Tate must be the heresy anecdote in Portrait II. It's presented there in a flashback to the year before, along with the fight with Heron. Stephen defers to Tate (not a priest, in fact), but passionately defends his preference for Byron over Tennyson, against Heron and his thugs. (Heron is also smart, but has not chosen chastity.)

Biographical timeline:

Nov92: move north; Christian Brothers' school?
Apr93 to Jun98: Belvedere College (weekly essays for very appreciative Dempsey, written quickly without rough drafts)
Summer 1893: Cork trip ("FOETUS" paranoia at age 11?)
May94: Araby Bazaar
Jun94: Encounter w/perv
Summer 1894: Trip to Glasgow (and Edinburgh?)
Sep94: 1st academic prize?
c1894-97: battle with 'Heron' over Byron?
May95: Oscar Wilde's fall
1895-6? JAJ jiggles (frigs?) furiously (14th year or age 14?)

Portrait II p78 makes a strange claim that Stephen was reading subversive writers: "All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose gibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings."

The sorts of writers we might expect him to be reading were Kipling, HG Wells, and Conan Doyle. The Capel street library offered more exotic fare like Rabelais, Balzac, and Zola, but we have no evidence Joyce was reading them this early, nor Thomas Hardy et al. More likely, if it's true at all, it refers to penny dreadfuls or the Police Gazette. (Portrait also claims he had ceased to pray, and was utterly consumed by the blackest lusts.)

He's mature enough though, in the PoA version of things (p82), to have recognised that novels falsify their stereotyped emotions, though, and to care little about the 'points of honour' that preoccupy Heron. Portrait II p83-84 offers a nice meditation on the various inner voices making demands on Stephen's future.

At the play, Stephen's consciousness of Emma's presence makes everything magical, briefly, fulfilling his expectation about woman's love (and again equating woman and inspiration!). But she disappears after, leaving him hugely frustrated.

Chapter X: June 1893 to September 1893: 
The affairs of Mr. Daedalus. 
The journey to Cork
Meeting with godfather in train coming home 
Her reproving eyes, his dreams.
Bray: Eileen and Wells.
Soixante-Neuf. (after a walk)
 
1) The day in Edinburgh 2) We cannot educate our fathers

More Portrait II: Simon has abandoned the future for the past. Stephen is still embarrassed by him, but in many ways Simon is the better man, especially because Stephen is so alienated from his sexuality.

'Her reproving eyes' are surely Miss Howard's, accompanying Mr Fulham. SH14 p240 says "...perhaps the uncontaminated nature which he had then imagined accusing him..." so he already feels his own nature to be contaminated, despite his chaste reputation. He had discovered masturbation in 1895 or '96 (the experience with the pissing nursemaid), but the actual trips to Cork [old pix] were in '93 and early '94, and to Edinburgh/Glasgow in summer '94. The 'foetus' epiphany in Cork also shows his spiritual paranoia at this early age.

Wells was a bully at Clongowes who'll be studying for the priesthood by SH18. It seems unlikely he's really paired with Eileen here-- they may be two separate encounters from his past. (This is one trick for doing theme-and-variations-- have the same characters reappear regularly, seen with different eyes.)

"69" is mind-boggling, but may survive in the Trieste Portrait as his first encounter with a prostitute (p100). However, Costello's researches date Joyce's first real encounter with a prostitute to Summer 1898, between Belvedere and University. So this '69' may have involved some girlfriend... but at age 11???

Portrait II also adds a scene before the prostitute, with Stephen's prize money inspiring a burst of false but sincere good works.

Curran recalls a chapter ending "interminable wastes of bogland, interminable servitude of mind" that sounds like it's seen from a train. But the notes here about Edinburgh are only ambiguously placed to follow the '69'.

On 15 July 1904 (with Nora turning into a serious possibility), James wrote "I have finished the awful chapter-- 102 pages-- and Russell (A.E.) has the book now." This was probably the Retreat:

August 1893 to December 1893

1) Sensations coming home.
2) Gradual irreligiousness (Epiphany of Thornton)
3) Return to Belvedere: in second class:
     prefect at sodality: Fr MacNally.
4) Retreat before feast of S. Francis Xavier.
   Six lectures
1) Introductory, evening before 1st Day
2) Death         }  2nd
3) Judgment      }  Day
4) Hell    }    3rd
5) Hell    }    Day   (Epiphany of Hell)
6) Heaven        morning after 4th Day [WoD68]

The August date here overlaps chapter ten's September, making it uncertain where he's "coming home" from (Cork? Bray? Edinburgh? Or most likely: just the 69 walk!). And there's a considerable quantity of material to cover before the Retreat, so he might have broken it into two... unless a numerological scheme made this inconvenient! Starting a chapter like this with a coming-home also seems like promising architectural evidence.

The epiphanies of Tate (SH9), Thornton, and Hell were surely already-written pieces, to be inserted at these points. Richard John Thornton was a model for Mr Kernan of "Grace"... but Joyce wouldn't have reused the SH epiphany in Dubliners, since SH was still planned for publication. Stannie claimed another Thornton brother was the model for the narrator of Cyclops... and it's highly likely that epiphanies cut from the Trieste Portrait would have been recycled in Ulysses! (So look for a U-Cyclops epiphany that might have hastened James's slide into irreligiousness?) And a Mrs Thornton was a midwife at some Joyce-family births. (Costello has a book in the works on the Thorntons and other families within the Joyce orbit.)

The Trieste Portrait III p102ff shows Stephen perfectly divided between Catholic moralism and pagan libertinism. The sermon there offers no insights into why sexuality is so unacceptable to the Catholic god, only a supremely vivid depiction of the same old 'eagles pulling out eyes'.

The Hell epiphany survives, and holds the same relative position in the Trieste Portrait (p137): "A field of stiff weeds and thistles alive with confused forms, half-men, half-goats. Dragging their great tails they move hither and thither, aggressively. Their faces are lightly bearded, pointed and grey as indiarubber. A secret personal sin directs them, holding them now, as in reaction, to constant malevolence. One is clasping about his body a torn flannel jacket; another complains monotonously as his beard catches in the tufted weeds. They move about me, enclosing me, that old sin sharpening their eyes to cruelty, swishing through the fields in slow circles, thrusting upwards their terrific faces. Help!" (This is as good, early in 1904, as the Trieste Portrait in general. It's obviously a dream.)

[End of sidebar]

The Goblin Portrait continues:

He ran through his measure like a spendthrift saint,

(As if one were only given a fixed quantity of devotional energy?)

This metaphor may have found a literal embodiment in the prize money of Portrait II p96ff, which is mirrored (dialectically?) in the devotional economics of Portrait IV p147ff. Since the Retreat is unmentioned in the Goblin Portrait, we have to see a continuity between the two. {I can't remember what I was getting at here!]

...astonishing many by ejaculatory fervours, offending many by airs of the cloister. One day in a wood near Malahide a labourer had marvelled to see a boy of fifteen praying in an ecstasy of Oriental posture.

In 1897 the Joyces were living in Fairview, north of Dublin, south of Malahide [pic] [map]. James had attended a retreat with Father Cullen in Nov 96, so this likely represents the post-retreat zeal portrayed in Portrait IV (pp147-153): "The attitude of rapture in sacred art, the raised and parted hands, the parted lips and eyes as of one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer, humiliated and faint before her Creator."

SH21 p156: "He thought of his own [fervid] spendthrift religiousness and airs of the cloister, he remembered having astonished a labourer in a wood near Malahide by an ecstasy of Oriental posture..." (At this late point in SH he's contrasting his early spirituality with Emma's lack of same.)

Timeline (cont, pre-University):

Sep96: Prefect of Sodality ( = head boy)
Nov96: Retreat
early 1897: Malahide fervor
c1894-1903: Sheehy parties?
1897 reading: Meredith, Hardy, maybe Rousseau
Sep97: more prizes
Jan98: Vice Versa play
Jun98: graduated Belvedere
Jul98: Lucy the birdgirl?
Aug98: first prostitute?
Sep98: more prizes, spent in Nighttown? (Monto)

It was indeed a long time before this boy understood the nature of the most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without ordering one's life in accordance with them.

At the earliest, then, this realisation would date to 1897. (Is age 15 so very late to still be idealistic?)

Do we see this understanding emerge, in SH or the Trieste Portrait? He left the Church formally around Easter 1902-- was this when the understanding took hold?

SH21 p156: "...he wondered whether the God of the Roman Catholics would put him into hell because he had failed to understand that most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without in the least ordering one's life in accordance with them..." This placement is after he's left the Church, implying he'll never understand it, except from the outside. (And he surely understood it from the outside long before.)

Simon is an example of this effortless hypocrisy... isn't he? Or Fulham and Heffernan are better ones. Or Father Dolan.

The digestive value of religion he never appreciated and he chose, as more fitting his case those poorer humbler orders in which a confessor did not seem anxious to reveal himself, in theory at least, a man of the world.

SH21 p156 (continuing from just above): "...and had failed to appreciate the digestive value of the sacraments."

Eg, Franciscans vs Jesuits. But James's interest in the Franciscans was more like 1902, wasn't it? SH22 p177: "...nor anxious to reveal themselves, in theory, at least, men of the world." (This anachronism may be evidence that the Retreat-crisis actually happened at University, after his first experience with a prostitute.)

From "Grace": ""Father Purdon? Father Purdon?" said the invalid. "O, you must know him, Tom," said Mr. Cunningham stoutly. "Fine, jolly fellow! He's a man of the world like ourselves.""

From the Trieste Portrait V (p190, of the University dean): "A desolating pity began to fall like a dew upon his easily embittered heart for this faithful servingman of the knightly Loyola, for this halfbrother of the clergy, more venal than they in speech, more steadfast of soul than they, one whom he would never call his ghostly father: and he thought how this man and his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the hands not of the unworldly only but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during all their history, at the bar of God's justice for the souls of the lax and the lukewarm and the prudent."

Joyce had scandalised everyone with his unworldliness by choosing the course in modern languages at the University-- normally the girls' domain. But the faculty appreciated his intelligence, and his essays were read as exemplary (and uncontroversial) in composition class, with publication being discussed. (See 'Force' and 'The Study of Languages' in "Critical Writings".) His favorite reading in 1898 included Macauley, Ruskin, maybe Yeats, and finally Ibsen.

In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards, he was still soothed by devotional exercises when he entered the University.

So, even after his first experience with the prostitute, he continued to pursue his peculiar visions of saintliness...

This is where Stephen Hero picks up, but I don't think we see much of the devotional exercises there or in the Trieste Portrait. He did continue with the Sodality there, in his first year or three, but this fact is apparently inconvenient to Portrait's argument.

SH15 p29: "Already while the fever-fit of holiness lay upon him he had encountered but out of charity had declined to penetrate disillusioning forces. These shocks had driven him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards and the most that devotional exercises could do for him was soothe him. This soothing he badly needed for he suffered greatly from contact with his new environment."

Trieste Portrait IV shows Stephen in the period between the Retreat and University, giving Catholic doctrine every chance to prove itself, but gradually accumulating a set of arguments against it that seem to him absolutely objective. (Each 'shock' may have strengthened these arguments.)

His scrupulous experiment qualifies him to pursue the office of priest, but this would require maintaining the wall around his sexuality, while the arguments supporting this grow shakier and shakier.

The earliest surviving fragments of SH are framed as being the summer before entering University, though they seem based on two visits to Mullingar that Joyce took with his father in the summers of 1900 and 1901. In SH, the Retreat has taken place the previous December. (Stephen smokes cigarettes in the chapter!) Again, this may indicate that in both SH and the Trieste Portrait, Joyce has shifted his first year or two of University back onto Belvedere, which they more closely resembled in terms of conformity, etc.

Final SH notes:

For 'University College':
The ice-cream Italian
The marsupials
Literature, Poetry, Lyric epic, dramatic
Art has the gift of tongues
Indignation
Special reporter novels
'We cannot educate our fathers'
The Day in Edinburgh
'It is a great mistake to have piratical ancestors' [WoD69-70]

Italian = Artifoni?

Novels about reporters having adventures while doing special reports?

Is it possible there was an unrecorded trip to Edinburgh during University?

Whose ancestors were pirates?

Pic of University

About this period the enigma of a manner was put up at all comers to protect the crisis.

Comers may be corners. ('at' seems a bit odd here.)

SH15 p27: "...he was busy constructing the enigma of a manner."

We may look in Portrait II for the absence of this manner-- guilelessness about Byron and Newman, for example? And in Portrait IV for its first glimmers.

To reinvent himself in this way would probably require that most of his fellow University students (400 total, 64 in his entering class) had not known him before, especially at Belvedere.

The most obvious form this manner took was seeking out obscure references like "the Nolan". There's a definite strain of dishonesty about it-- Stephen's lies are mentioned in the Ulysses notes.

He was quick enough now to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance.

Joyce's control of punctuation was always shaky, and there's a comma missing here after secrecy.

Disentangling his affairs is like flying past the nets.

SH15 p29: "Besides this Stephen was quick enough to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance for him."

His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic.

This charade is made explicit in Ulysses (U7.782): "--Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O'Molloy said to Stephen.... Speaking about me. What did he say? What did he say? What did he say about me? Don't ask."

SH15 p29: "His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem impolitely curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic."

It was part of that ineradicable egoism which he was afterwards to call redeemer that he imagined converging to him the deeds and thoughts of the microcosm.

This is the messiah-complex, clinically termed 'ideas of reference'.

It was indeed, absolutely, the quirk that drove him to the heights he achieved, despite the world's indifference.

SH16 p34: "In spite of his surroundings Stephen continued his labours of research and all the more ardently since he imagined they had been put under ban. It was part of that ineradicable egoism which he was afterwards to call redeemer that he conceived converging to him the deeds and thoughts of his microcosm."

Is the mind of boyhood medieval that it is so divining of intrigue?

There may be hints in Portrait I that give this more context-- was it just James's mind, or all boys? (All shy people tend to assume people are thinking about them...)

SH16 p34: "Is the mind of youth medieval that it is so divining of intrigue?"

Field sports (or their correspondent in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure,

Stephen and Cranly play handball in SH chapter 19 (called 20 by Spencer). It seems worth looking for whatever the mental equivalents might be, eg the math contest in Portrait I

(Is Joyce saying that a solid dose of failure in competitions might-- theoretically-- have swayed his self-love? He never did that great in exams.)

SH16 p34: "Field-sports (or their equivalent in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure and Anglo-Saxon educators favour rather a system of hard brutality."

...but for the fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic hunt was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage.

Joyce rejected whatever humbling lesson field sports and mental sports might have tried to teach him.

Note that 'idealist' is still an honorific here.

SH16 p34: "But for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic warfare was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage."

But behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered.

indurating = hardening, getting callouses

Answered... the call?

SH16 p34: "Behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered:"

Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to the highlands after their game-- there was his ground: and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers.

This is the sensitive's answer.

SH16 p34: "Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to my highlands after their game. There was his ground: and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers."

There was evident self-flattery in the image but a danger of complacence too.

So he's not blind to his own grandiosity, and he's taking care not to let it mislead him. (When he goes too far, he gets those 'shocks'. I suspect the whole autobiographical project is partly to explain to Dublin why he had to seem so shocking to them.)

Cf U-Proteus: "You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara."

Wherefore, neglecting the wheezing bayings in that chorus which leagues of distance could make musical, he began loftily diagnosis of the younglings.

P.U.!

His judgment was exquisite, deliberate, sharp; his sentence sculptural.

Probably true.

The plural 'sentences' would have hurt the rhythm here.

These young men saw in the sudden death of a dull French novelist the hand of Emmanuel God with us; they admired Gladstone, physical science and the tragedies of Shakespeare; and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs, in the church diplomatic.

Zola would die in 1902, so this is slightly anachronistic.

The comedies were too bawdy for the Irish?

This and the next few sentences were recycled in SH22 p172ff: "Moynihan alluded also to the strange death of a French atheistic writer and implied that Emmanuel had chosen to revenge himself on the unhappy gentleman by privily tampering with his gas-stove. ...They admired Gladstone, physical science and the tragedies of Shakespeare; and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs, in the church diplomatic."

In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed a nervous and (wherever there was question of authority) a very English liberalism.

This is definitely illustrated in the later books.

It's remarkable what short shrift he gives the pre-University years, here in the Goblin Portrait.

SH22 p172: "...in their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed a nervous and (whenever there was question of authority) a very English liberalism."

He remarked the half-admiring, half-reproving demeanour of a class, implicitly pledged to abstinences towards others among whom (the fame went) wild living was not unknown.

There should be a comma after abstinences-- it's "demeanour towards".

SH16 p35: "On his side chastity, having been found a great inconvenience, had been quietly abandoned and the youth amused himself in the company of certain of his fellow-students among whom (as the fame went) wild living was not unknown."

Nicely trimming the clumsy Goblin observation to four words.

During his first year at University, Joyce supposedly frequented the Gaiety theater and Nighttown. He was still taking long walks with Stannie at this point.

Though the union of faith and fatherland was ever sacred in that world of easily inflammable enthusiasms a couplet from Davis, accusing the least docile of tempers, never failed of its applause and the memory of McManus was hardly less revered than that of Cardinal Cullen.

Thomas O. Davis (1814-1845) wrote "A Nation Once Again" [etext] [Cambridge on Davis]

At the Xmas fight (Portrait I, p38) Casey praises McManus and damns Cullen.

It appears the first stage of Joyce's liberation required that he diminish his peers.

SH22 p172: "The memory of Terence MacManus was not less revered by them than the memory of Cardinal Cullen."

They had many reasons to respect authority; and even if a student were forbidden to go to Othello ("There are some coarse expressions in it" he was told) what a little cross was that?

Cf SH15 p29; SH23 p193.

Was it not rather an evidence of watchful care and interest, and were they not assured that in their future lives this care would continue, this interest be maintained?

The priests as cradle-to-grave moral nannies.

SH23 p193.

The exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intentions never.

Jack Joyce was an obvious exception!

Who, therefore, readier than these young men to acknowledge gratefully the sallies of some genial professor or the surliness of some door porter, who more solicitous to cherish in every way and to advance in person the honour of Alma Mater?

Are these enacted in the later books?

FW (esp. Mamalujo) and Ulysses both exploit the door-porter motif.

SH23 p193.

For his part he was at the difficult age, dispossessed and necessitous, sensible of all that was ignoble in such manners who, in revery at least, had been acquainted with nobility.

His financial dispossession had little to do with his age...?

Other Dubliners often recalled James as 'common'-- especially M.E. Cleary.

SH23 p193: "The mortifying atmosphere of the college crept about Stephen's heart. For his part he was at the difficult age, dispossessed and necessitous, sensible of all that was ignoble in such manners, who in revery, at least, had been acquainted with nobility."

An earnest Jesuit had prescribed a clerkship in Guinness's...

Ellmann says Jack suggested Guinness's in 1902.

...and doubtless the clerk designate of a brewery would not have had scorn and pity only for an admirable community had it not been that he desired (in the language of the schoolmen) an arduous good.

So: Because he desired the arduous good, he had only scorn and pity.

SH23 p193.

It was impossible that he should find solace in societies for the encouragement of thought among laymen or any other than bodily comfort in the warm sodality amid so many foolish or grotesque virginities.

This is the Blakean idea of Experience, as against Innocence/ virginity.

SH21 p159: "...in the circle of foolish or grotesque virginities..."

SH23 p193.

Familiar from the Trieste Portrait.

Societies: Sodality of the Blessed Virgin, Literary & Historical Society (L&H), Sheehy parties, Gaelic classes

Timeline (cont):

Feb99 Ibsen night at L&H (arouses interest of group "eager to back winners")
1899 readings: Dante, Aristotle, Yeats, Blake, Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio, Wagner, Skeat's Dictionary
Mar99: sees play "Magda" about "genius breaking out"
Sep99 essay: 'Ecce Homo'
Jan00: 'Drama and Life'
Feb00: Fortnightly Review buys Ibsen review
Apr00: London jaunt
May00: Gaelic classes
May00: return to London
May00 play: "A Brilliant Career" (dedication: "To My own Soul I dedicate the first true work of my life.")
Summer 1900: Mullingar
Sep00: Archer rejects play
1900 readings: Tolstoy, George Moore, Bruno, Aquinas?

Late in 1899 (probably), Joyce read Arthur Symons's "Symbolist Movement in Literature" which must have rung many bells, featuring Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, decadence, orgiastic excess, and visions, and mentioning Ibsen and Yeats. Symons was living in Dublin then [bio page].

Moreover, it was impossible that a temperament ever trembling towards its ecstasy should submit to acquiesce,

Redundant!?

This ecstasy has to refer back to his devotional zeal-- nothing else has been mentioned! (Blake might be one source.)

...that a soul should decree servitude for its portion over which the image of beauty had fallen as a mantle.

When and how did this happen? Lucy the bird-girl?

One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library, he said to his friend "I have left the Church."

Byrne/Cranly

Costello fixes this date around Easter 1902-- March 30. Georgie Joyce died on 3 May.

SH20 p138ff "I must have liberty to do as I please. ...I want to live."

Portrait V p238ff "I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can..."

The Trieste Portrait offers only 15 pages after this break. SH promised 44 chapters (and delivered six)!

And as they walked home through the streets arm-in-arm he told, in words that seemed an echo of their closing, how he had left it through the gates of Assisi.

Echo of the gates' closing.

Jesuits exchanged for Francis's penniless hippie kinship with all life.

Timeline (cont):

1901 readings: Theosophists and mystics, Flaubert, Mangan, Nietzsche?, Whitman
1901 poems: "Shine and Dark" including poems called Wanhope, The Final Peace, Commonplace, The Passionate Poet, Tenebrae 1901: Peace-pledge incident described in PoA
Summer 1901: Mullingar again, translating Hauptmann
Sep01: Archer rejects poems
Oct01 essay: 'Day of the Rabblement'
Feb02 essay: 'James Clarence Mangan'
Mar02: Easter apostasy
May02: Georgie dies
1902 readings: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Poe, Swedenborg Aug02: proposes self to George Russell as Irish messiah

Extravagance followed. The simple history of the Poverello was soon out of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies.

Poverello = Francis

Can the diary entries at the end of the Trieste Portrait carry this weight?

SH21 p176f explores Franciscan heretics. In the preceding pages, fictional sister Isabel died.

SH22 p179: "A certain extravagance began to tinge his life."

In the Dublin Diary of 1904, Stannie claims: "I hate to see Jim limp and pale, with shadows under his watery eyes, loose wet lips, and dank hair. ...He likes the novelty of the role of dissipated genius. ...running after every chit with a petticoat on it and making foolish jokes to them in a high weak voice..." And: "He is trying to commit the sin against the Holy Ghost for the purpose of getting outside the utmost rim of Catholicism."

Joachim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs of initiation cast their spells upon him.

Should this be 'heresiarchs'? (SH22 p176; U1.656 et seq)

He descended among the hells of Swedenborg and abased himself in the gloom of Saint John of the Cross.

So after leaving the Church, he is more haunted than ever.

His heaven was suddenly illuminated by a horde of stars, the signature of all nature, the soul remembering ancient days.

This motif runs everywhere thru Joyce.

Like an alchemist he bent upon his handiwork, bringing together the mysterious elements, separating the subtle from the gross.

Purely literary? Or also, eg sexual experiments?

SH15 p30 shows this process began much earlier.

For the artist the rhythms of phrase and period, the symbols of word and allusion, were paramount things.

(But 18 months later, his instrument can still be really awkward.)

And was it any wonder that out of this marvellous life, wherein he had annihilated and rebuilt experience,

Portrait IV p172 "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!"

...laboured and despaired,

Labor of writing?

...he came forth at last with a simple purpose-- to reunite the children of the spirit, jealous and long-divided, to reunite them against fraud and principality.

Jealous of who? Divided since when?

A thousand eternities were to be reaffirmed,

1000 eternities = eternal recurrence? (Nietzsche)

Or just eternal verities?

...divine knowledge was to be re-established.

Joyce must have pictured himself being crowned in a ceremony much like Bloom's in U-Circe. These fantasies are hinted in U-Proteus.

Alas for Fatuity! as easily might he have summoned a regiment of the winds.

So he first thought 'the children of the spirit' were his school-peers!? (Or Russell and Yeats?)

The wind motif here implies uncontrollability.

They pleaded their natural pieties-- social limitations,

'People will laugh.'

...inherited apathy of race,

'We Irish aren't built that way.' (maybe locatable in SH?)

...an adoring mother,

'How could you treat your mother that way, James?' (How many of these does Mulligan incarnate in U-Telemachus?)

...the Christian fable.

'I'd go to Hell!'

Their treasons were venial only.

Quickly resolved via Purgatory

Wherever the social monster permitted they would hazard the extremes of heterodoxy,

Timid pseudo-rebellions:

...reasons of an imaginative determinant in ethics,

I have no idea what this means!

...of anarchy (the folk),

"extremes... of anarchy"? Or 'reasons... of anarchy'???

WoD69: "...the spirit wherever it is able to assert itself in this medley of machines is romantic and preterist. Our vanguard of politicians put up the banners of anarchy and communism..."

...of blue triangles,

Russell's mysticism

...of the fish-gods,

(Isn't this 'folk'?)

...proclaiming in a fervent moment the necessity for action.

Never acting, but occasionally glimpsing that it's needed.

His revenge was a phrase and isolation.

Missing comma.

He lumped the emancipates together-- Venomous Butter--

Not much of a phrase!??

butter: melts, fattens

venomous: motivated by negativity, poisonous to partake

emancipates: eg, Skeffington?

...and set away from the sloppy neighborhood.

Geographic location? From University, towards Nighttown?

Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy

Aesthetic notebook?

SH16 p33: "...saying solemnly to Maurice-- Isolation is the first principle of artistic economy."

Punning the isolation of the artist within society, and the isolation of discrete images from their complex contexts.

...but traditional and individual revelations were at that time pressing their claims and self-communion had been but shyly welcomed.

(What claims were these? Girls? Classes?)

But in the intervals of friendships (for he had outridden three)

Stannie, Byrne, and who? Not yet Gogarty. Cosgrave or Elwood, probably.

U9.977 (Stephen of the Library crew): "Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these."

...he had known the sisterhood of meditative hours...

Is this a personal association from his many sisters?

Or is he saying meditation is inevitably feminine?

...and now the hope began to grow up within him of finding among them that serene emotion, that certitude, which among men he had not found.

He's playing a game here, ambiguously speaking either of hours or of females.

The emphasis seems to be on certainty/perfection vs frailty/mortality (below).

An impulse had led him forth in the dark season to silent and lonely places where the mists hung streamerwise among the trees;

Dark season = winter = dark night of soul

...and as he had passed there amid the subduing night, in the secret fall of leaves, the fragrant rain, the mesh of vapours moon-transpierced, he had imagined an admonition of the frailty of all things.

At this time the household was in Glengariff Parade (just north of Eccles, 1901-1902) or Phibsborough (a little further north, Oct 1902 to March 1904).

Nature admonishes, 'don't seek perfection' ?

Timeline (cont):

Autumn 1902: Jack Joyce's "Grace" retreat, followed by house purchase
Oct02: St Cecilia's med school; meets WB Yeats
Nov02: drops out of St C's
late 1902: suggestive postcard to ME Cleary (?)
Dec02: Paris
Xmas to mid-Jan03: back in Dublin for holidays
Jan-Apr03: Paris, Aesthetics notebook
Mar03: "My book of songs will be published in the spring of 1907. My first comedy about five years later. My 'Esthetic' about five years later again."
Apr03: mother's cancer diagnosed
Aug03: mother's death 1903 political readings: Benjamin Tucker, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Spencer

In summer it had led him seaward.

So 'dark season' was winter, when forests were more pleasant (shaded from wind?) than the sea?

Summer 1902 would have been after university finals.

Wandering over the arid grassy hills or along the strand, avowedly in quest of shellfish, he had grown almost impatient of the day.

So he sometimes caught their family dinner?

Waders, into whose childish or girlish hair, girlish or childish dresses, the very wilfulness of the sea had entered-- even they had not fascinated.

Cf Portrait IV p170.

Odd, how this contradicts the birdgirl Lucy. (Normally she would have fascinated, but this one day, not?) And in Portrait it's apparently moved four years earlier (1902 to 1898).

But as day had waned it had been pleasant to watch the few last figures islanded in distant pools;

Portrait IV, p170: "Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the shallow tide, and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow currents of the beach were lightclad gayclad figures, wading and delving."

...and as evening deepened, the grey glow above the sea he had gone out, out among the shallow waters, the holy joys of solitude uplifting him, singing passionately to the tide.

p170: "The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him; and the grey warm air was still: and a new wild life was singing in his veins."

p171: "He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him."

So in the Goblin Portrait, Lucy has not yet been personified/ incarnated? Or is he just shy about mentioning her publicly?

Sceptically, cynically, mystically, he had sought for an absolute satisfaction

Projecting his messianic certainty.

(Does 'cynically' imply perverse sexual satisfaction here?)

...and now little by little he began to be conscious of the beauty of mortal conditions.

Might we distinguish a difference in his poems before and after this revelation? Is this what the 'Tantris' poem "Nightpiece" [qv] is about?

Curran remembers another chapter of SH ending with the girl in water, as in Portrait. James would explain to Stannie: "Stephen's change of mind is not effected by that sight as you seem to think, but it is that small event so regarded which expresses the change. His first skin falls." (to SJ 2-7-05)

Since that SH chapter doesn't survive, it too (like the Trieste Portrait) must have been predated to the summer before University.

He remembered a sentence in Augustine-- "It was manifested unto me that those things be good which yet are corrupted; which neither if they were supremely good, nor unless they were good could be corrupted: for had they been supremely good they would have been incorruptible but if they were not good there would be nothing in them which could be corrupted."

U7.842: "It was revealed to me that those things are which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That's saint Augustine."

A philosophy of reconcilement ....... possible ..... as eve ... The ......... of the ..... at lef ........

The page is torn here.

...bor lit up with dolphin lights but the lights in the chambers of the heart were unextinguished, nay, burning as for espousal ...

Harbor lit up, surely.

Dearest of mortals!

His dreamgirl.

In spite of tributary verses

Chamber Music, etc.

Joyce's known poetry by this point (dates estimated):

1900 "Dream Stuff" (poems, under spell of EM Cleary, Stannie called it "prostitute poetry")
1901 poem: 'Nirvana'
1901 "Shine and Dark" (poems, titles incl: 'Wanhope', 'The Final Peace', 'Commonplace', 'The Passionate Poet', 'Tenebrae'. Sample quote: "And orient banners they outfling/ Before the ripple-bearded king." Title 'Shine and Dark' from Whitman's: "Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river")
1901 songs-- halfdozen settings of poems, incl Yeats and Mangan
1901? "Moods": 50-60 lyrics

...and of the comedy of meetings here and in the foolish society of sleep...

Here in Dublin, there in dreams?

Cf Emma in SH.

...the fountain of being (it seemed) had been interfused.

This whole sentence uses riverine imagery.

Why would the verses obstruct the fusing?

Years before, in boyhood, the energy of sin opening a world before him he had been made aware of thee.

BVM + Muse + prostitute + ideal lover-wife ?

The yellow gaslamps arising in his troubled vision against an autumnal sky, gleaming mysteriously there before that violet altar-- the groups gathered at the doorways arranged as for some rite-- the glimpses of revel and fantasmal mirth-- the vague face of some welcomer seeming to awaken from a slumber of centuries under his gaze--

Portrait II p100: "He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, undismayed, wondering whether he had strayed into the quarter of the jews. Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. The yellow gasflames arose before his troubled vision against the vapoury sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries."

The Trieste Portrait locates this before the Retreat (cf "Years before, in boyhood..." above). Strangely, his 1898 encounter was outside of Nighttown-- so had he visited it already, intentionally or not, without partaking?

That both Stephen and the random welcomer are awakening from the slumber puts them on equal footing for once!??

...the blind confusion (iniquity! iniquity!) suddenly overtaking him--

This is HCE's stutter, surely-- the well-rehearsed Shaun-lies undermined by the bald fact of his own virginity.

...in all the ardent adventure of lust didst thou not even then communicate?

So he's making peace with his conscience about that lust.

Cf. his argument (where?) that anything that gives a person pleasure must for that fact alone be in part pleasing to God.

Beneficent one! (the shrewdness of love was in the title)

(Meaning, he's really soliciting blessings, by calling Her this?)

U14.766: "Beneficent Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures, how great and universal must be that sweetest of Thy tyrannies which can hold in thrall the free and the bond, the simple swain and the polished coxcomb, the lover in the heyday of reckless passion and the husband of maturer years."

...thou camest timely, as a witch to the agony of self devourer,

Prostitute redeems masturbator?

Witch seems non-negative, here.

...an envoy from the fair courts of life.

What courts are these? Something ancient, long lost?

How could he thank thee for that enrichment of soul by thee consummated?

Sex with prostitutes as enrichment?

Mastery of art had been achieved in irony;

Cf static emotions, detachment?

...asceticism of intellect had been a mood of indignant pride:

His preference for obscure heretics?

Cf WoD69 "Indignation" above.

...but who had revealed him to himself but thou alone?

So, by accepting mortality, he was able to forgive himself for his sexuality?

Archdruid Berkeley in FW IV seems to be revealing King Leary to Patrick.

In ways of tenderness, simple, intuitive tenderness, thy love had made to arise in him the central torrents of life.

(This is pretty ridiculous to be passing around, much less publishing!)

What torrents had been missing?

Thou hadst put thine arms about him and, intimately prisoned as thou hadst been, in the soft stir of thy bosom, the raptures of silence, the murmured words, thy heart had spoken to his heart.

It seems unlikely this could be anyone but a prostitute, or a fantasy.

As unsuccessful as the writing is, it still does manage to capture a great deal of feeling.

Thy disposition could refine and direct his passion holding more beauty at the cunningest angle.

Portrait V p216:"Their trim boots prattled as they stood on the steps of the colonnade, talking quietly and gaily, glancing at the clouds, holding their umbrellas at cunning angles against the few last raindrops, closing them again, holding their skirts demurely."

So is 'thy' still, in 1904, the flesh-and-blood M.E. Cleary, a bit?

Thou wert sacramental imprinting thine indelible mark, of very visible grace.

(Could this be a very rude double entendre???)

A litany must honour thee: Lady of Apple Trees, Kind Wisdom, Sweet Flower of Dusk.

Nice! (Could be names of perfumes!) This is the voice of Chamber Music.

In another phase it had been not uncommon to devise dinners in white and purple upon the actuality of stirabout

Curran: "Huysman's symbolism of colours fitted in, too, with the Rimbaud sonnet, Voyelles, which Joyce would repeat to me. Imitating Rimbaud and A Rebours, we would push these fin-de-siècle fancies... to the correspondence of colours with the sounds of musical instruments and with the sense of taste, compiling, for example, monochrome meals, tables d'hôte in black puddings and caviare, black sole with Guinness and black coffee..." [cpc29] (Curran thinks this could have been as early as 1900, but the only dates he specifies indicate 1903, post-Paris)

...but here, surely, is sturdy or delicate food to hand; no need for devising.

In the presence of the Muse?

In the world transformed by forgiving its mortality?

Dialectic resolution of either-sturdy-or-delicate-but-not-both to both-or-either-as-needed.

His way (abrupt creature!) lies out now to the measurable world and the broad expanses of activity.

Beard-and-inches measurable?

Cf U7.915: "Dublin. I have much, much to learn."

The blood hurries to a galop in his veins;

'galop' for 'gallop' may be a simple spelling error.

...his nerves accumulate an electric force;

Cf Galvani?

...he is footed with flame.

St Elmo's fire?

A kiss: and they leap together, indivisible, upwards, radiant lips and eyes, their bodies sounding with the triumph of harps!

Prostitute, or fantasy

Again, beloved! Again, thou bride! Again, ere life is ours!

Ere = before, so life isn't their until the kiss has been multiplied?

In calmer mood the critic in him could not but remark a strange prelude to the new crowning era in a season of melancholy and unrest.

IE, his purpose to reunite the spirit wasn't going as planned?

He made up his tale of losses-- a dispiriting tale enough even were there no comments.

He rationalised his failure to his friends, and they mocked him?

The air of false Christ was manifestly the mask of a physical decrepitude, itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours;

He became depressed at the idea he'd been fooling himself.

SH21 p162: "Even the value of his own life came into doubt with him. He laid a finger upon every falsehood it contained: egoism which proceeded bravely before men to be frightened by the least challenge of the conscience... mastery of an art understood by few which owed its very delicacy to a physical decrepitude, itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours."

...whence ingenuousness, forbearance, sweet amiability and the whole tribe of domestic virtues.

And returned to humility, which was beginning to seem cowardly?

Sadly mindful of the worst, the vision of his dead,

Georgie, surely. Maybe his mother by now? (Where is the Paris adventure?)

Cf "The Dead"

...the vision (far more pitiful) of congenital lives shuffling onwards between yawn and howl,

yawn = boredom
howl = pain?

yawn = birth
howl = death?

...starvelings in mind and body, visions of which came a temporary failure of his olden, sustained manner, darkly beset him.

He was shaken out of his pose of superiority?

SH21, p162 "The vision of all those failures, and the vision, far more pitiful, of congenital lives, shuffling onwards amid yawn and howl, beset him with evil..."

The cloud of difficulties about him allowed only peeps of light;

This was probably his mother's illness during 1903.

...even his rhetoric proclaimed transition.

Newspaper pieces, 1902-3?

He could convict himself at least of a natural inability to prove everything at once...

Prove that he was right to reject the conventional order.

I personally felt this same pressure in the 1970s, and responded with a phrase, 'We begin without understanding.'

...and certain random attempts suggested the need for regular campaigning.

Random attempts to prove his ideas to others were at best partially successful, indicating a path towards greater articulacy.

His faith increased.

Thruout his life, Joyce saw himself as having enormous faith, that enabled him to pursue his idealistic course.

It emboldened him to say to a patron of the fine arts 'What advance upon spiritual goods?'

Lady Gregory

So the increased faith is in himself.

...and to a captalist 'I need two thousand pounds for a project.'

Thomas Kelly, 5 Dec 1903 (just one month before this writing)

The project was a newspaper, The Goblin. (Who else would he have worked with? Apparently he saw his 'gang' as potential collaborators???)

He had interpreted for orthodox Greek scholarship the living doctrine of the Poetics...

Peter Costello sees Father Henry Browne of the Royal University as an overlooked influence on Joyce's appreciation of Homer.

...and, out of the burning bushes of excess, had declaimed to a night policeman on the true status of public women;

Cf U-Circe? (If drunk, this seems little enough to brag about!)

...but there was no budge of those mountains, no perilous cerebration.

He still didn't impress any of them to the extent of changing their thinking one iota.

In a moment of frenzy he called for the elves.

I think this is an Ibsen reference-- Peer Gynt?

cf? early draft poem [etext]

The kindly elves the pine-wood
    To revel go,
And peace, sweet peace there
    Should we know.

Many in our day, it would appear, cannot avoid a choice between sensitiveness and dulness;

How is this more than a truism???

...they recommend themselves by proofs of culture to a like-minded minority...

IE, choosing sensitiveness.

(Isn't Stephen doing this in U-Scylla?)

...or dominate the huger world as lean of meat.

Is this choosing dulness??? Lean = muscular?

(Is the phantom 'hunger' here intentional?)

But he saw between camps his ground of vantage,

Presumably because the sensitives weren't sensitive enough, though, right?

...opportunities for the mocking devil...

Cf Goblin?

...in an isle twice removed from the mainland,

Europe to Britain to Eire. He still sees Europe as an improvement on Ireland, in terms of open-mindedness.

...under joint government of their Intensities and their Bullockships.

The sensitives and the dullards, surely?

His Nego, therefore,

Latin "I deny" (opposite of Credo)

...written amid a chorus of peddling Jews' gibberish and Gentile clamour, was drawn up valiantly...

Jews = Intensities, Gentiles = Bullockships?

Where would Joyce have encountered any Jews, anyway? This must mean 'Judeo-Christians who embody Jewish stereotypes'...?

Joyce's school essay on 'Ecce Homo' (1899) says "...that horrible cast of countenance, so common among the sweaters of modern Israel". [CW34]

...while true believers prophesied fried atheism...

SH25 p232

...and was hurled against the obscene hells of our Holy Mother:

The Nego was hurled.

...but, that outburst over,

Could he mean one of his school speeches-- Day of the Rabblement or Drama and Life? These seem years too early.

It seems like "Nothung!" in U-Circe.

...it was urbanity in warfare.

SD, 17 June 1904?

The sentence shows a bit of unintentional Eumean anticlimax.

Perhaps his state would pension off old tyranny-- a mercy no longer hopelessly remote-- in virtue of that mature civilisation to which (let all allow) it had in some way contributed.

The Church has lost enormous power in Ireland in the last few years, not least because of sex scandals breaking out everywhere.

Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world,

Oddly cliched prediction of electronic utopia?

...already the generous idea had emerged from a thirty years' war in Germany and was directing the councils of the Latins.

?

To those multitudes not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word.

He sees his audience as emerging 50+ years hence?

Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come,

cf U14.1410: "By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore."

...the lightning of your masses in travail;

Marxist!?

...the competitive order is employed against itself,

The is reminiscent of his strategy of turning the teachings of the Church against it, but here it sounds like capitalism is the target. Does he expect to make a great financial success in spite of the system?

...the aristocracies are supplanted;

With Joyce the new King?

...and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action.

confederate = uniting various parties as allies

Jas. A. Joyce 7/1/1904

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Ulysses:
chapters: summary : anchors : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12a 12b 13 14a 14b 15a 15b 15c 15d 16a 16b 17a 17b 18a 18b
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reference: Bloom : clocktime : prices : schemata : Tower : riddles : errors : Homeric parallels : [B-L Odyssey] : Eolus tropes : parable : Oxen : Circe : 1904 : Thom's : Gold Cup : Seaside Girls : M'appari : acatalectic : search
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