Mabel Joyce / Mabel Joyce

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

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. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only. Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches 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. But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.

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

~ His training had early developed a very lively sense of spiritual obligations at the expense of what is called ‘common sense.’ He ran through his measure like a spendthrift saint, 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. It was indeed a long time before this boy understood the nature of that most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without ordering one's life in accordance with them. The digestive value of religion he never appreciated ~ Black

~ 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. 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.Black

About this period the enigma of a manner was put up at all corners to protect the ~

~ crisis. He was quick enough now to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance. 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. 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. Is the mind of boyhood medieval that it is so divining of intrigue? Field sports (or their correspondents in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure, but for this 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. But 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. ~ Black

~ There was evident self-flattery in the image but a danger of complacence too. Wherefore, neglecting the wheezier bayings in that ~Black

~ chorus which no leagues of distance could make musical, he began loftily diagnosis of the younglings. His judgment was exquisite, deliberate, sharp; his sentence sculptural. ~

~ These young men saw in the sudden death of a dull French novelist the hand of Emmanuel God with us; they admired Glastone, 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. Black

~ 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. 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. ~ Black

~ 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? ~ Black

~ 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 exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intention, never. 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 sollicitous to cherish in every way and to advance in person the honour of Alma Mater? Black

~ 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: and ^|abut and^a| doubtless the clerk-designate of a brewery would not have had scorn and pity only for an admirable community ^|anor had had it not been that he^a| desired (in the language of the schoolmen) an arduous good. It was impossible that he should find solace in ~ Black

~ 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. Moreover, it was impossible that a temperament ever trembling towards its ecstasy should submit to acquiesce, that a soul should decree servitude for its portion over which the image of beauty had fallen as a mantle. ~ Black

~ 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.” Black

~ 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.

Extravagance followed. The simple history of the Poverello was soon out of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies. Joachim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs of initiation cast their spells upon him. He descended among the bells of Swedenborg and abased himself in the gloom of Saint John of the Cross. His heaven was suddenly illuminated by a horde of stars, the signatures of all nature, the soul remembering ancient ~

~ days. Like an alchemist he bent upon his handiwork, bringing together the mysterious elements, separating the subtle from the gross. For the artist the rhythms of phrase and period, the symbols of word and allusion, were paramount things. And was it any wonder that out of this marvellous life, wherein he had annihilated and rebuilt experience, laboured and despaired, he came forth at last with a single purpose — to reunite the children of the spirit, jealous and long-divided, to reunite them against fraud and principality. A thousand eternities were to be reaffirmed, divine knowledge was to be re-established. Alas for fatuity! as easily might he have summoned a regiment of the winds. They pleaded their natural pieties — social limitations, inherited apathy of race, an adoring mother, the Christian fable. Their treasons were venial only. Wherever the social monster permitted they would hazard the extremes of heterodoxy, reason of an imaginative determinant in ethics, of anarchy (the folk), of blue triangles, of the fish-gods, proclaiming in a fervent ~

~ moment the necessity for action. His revenge was a phrase and isolation. He lumped the emancipates together — Venomous Butter — and set away from the sloppy neighborhood.

Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy but traditional and individual revelations were at that time pressing their claims and self-communion had been but shyly welcomed. But in the intervals of friendships (for he had outridden three) he had known the sisterhood of meditative hours 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. An impulse had led him forth in the dark season to silent and lonely places where the mists hung streamerwise among the trees; 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.

In summer it had led him seawards. Wandering over the arid, grassy hills or along the strand, ~

~ avowedly in quest of shellfish, he had grown almost impatient of the day. Waders, into whose childish or girlish hair, girlish or childish dresses, the very wilfulness of the sea had entered — even they had not fascinated. But as day had waned it had been pleasant to watch the few last figures islanded in distant pools; 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.

Sceptically, cynically, mystically, he had sought for an absolute satisfaction and now little by little he began to be conscious of the beauty of mortal conditions. 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.” A philosophy of reconcilement [[??] . . . possible ... as eve ... ]. The ~

~ [... of the ... at lef ... bor .. .lit] up with dolphin ^|alights^a| but the lights in the chambers of the heart were unextinguished, nay, burning as for espousal.

Dearest of mortals! In spite of tributary verses and of the comedy of meetings here and in the foolish society of sleep the fountain of being (it seemed) had been interfused. Years before, in boyhood, ~

~ the energy of sin opening a world before him, ~Black

he had been made aware of thee. ~

~ 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 — the blind confusion (iniquity! iniquity!) suddenly overtaking him — in all that ardent adventure of lust didst thou not even then communicate? ~ Black

~ Beneficent one! (the shrewdness of love was in the title) thou camest timely, as a witch to the agony of the self-devourer, an envoy from the ~

~ fair courts of life.

~ How could he thank thee for that enrichment of soul by thee consummated? Mastery of art had been achieved in irony; asceticism of intellect had been a mood of indignant pride: but who had revealed him to himself but thou alone? In ways of tenderness, simple, intuitive tenderness, thy love had made to arise in him the central torrents of life. 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. Thy disposition could refine and direct his passion, holding mere beauty at the cunningest angle. Thou wert sacramental, imprinting thine indelible mark, of very visible grace. A litany must honour thee; Lady of the Apple Trees, Kind Wisdom, Sweet Flower of Dusk. In another phase it had been not uncommon to devise dinners in white and purple upon the actuality of stirabout but here, surely, is sturdy or delicate food to hand; no need for devising. His way (abrupt creature!) lies out now to ~

~ the measurable world and the broad expanses of activity. The blood hurries to a gallop in his veins; his nerves accumulate an electric force; he is footed with flame. A kiss: and they leap together, indivisible, upwards, radiant lips and eyes, their bodies sounding with the triumph of harps! Again, beloved! Again, thou bride! Again, ere life is ours!

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. He made up his tale of losses — a dispiriting tale enough even were there no comments. The air of false Christ was manifestly the mask of a physical decrepitude, itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours; whence ingenuousness, forbearance, sweet amiability and the whole tribe of domestic virtues. Sadly mindful of the worst the vision of his dead, the vision (far more pitiful) of congenital lives shuffling onwards between yawn and howl, starvelings in mind and body, visions of which came as temporary failure of his olden, sustained ~

~ manner, darkly beset him. The cloud of difficulties about him allowed only peeps of light; even his rhetoric proclaimed transition. He could convict himself at least of a natural inability to prove everything at once and certain random attempts suggested the need for regular campaigning. His faith increased. It emboldened him to say to a patron of the fine arts ‘What advance upon spiritual goods?’ and to a capitalist ‘I need ^|athre two^a| thousand pounds for a project.’ He had interpreted for orthodox Greek scholarship the living doctrine of the Poetics and, out of the burning bushes of excess, had declaimed to a night policeman on the true status of public women: but there was no budge of those mountains, no perilous cerebration. In a moment of frenzy he called for the elves. ^|aFew Many^a| in our day, it would appear, cannot avoid a choice between sensitiveness and dulness; they recommend themselves by proofs of culture to a like-minded minority or dominate the huger world as lean of meat. But he saw between camps his ground of vantage, opportunities for the ~

~ mocking devil in an isle twice removed from the mainland, under joint government of Their Intensities and Their Bullockships. His Nego, therefore, written amid a chorus of peddling Jews' gibberish and Gentile clamour, was drawn up valiantly while true believers prophesied fried atheism and was hurled against the obscene hells of our Holy Mother: but, that outburst over, it was urbanity in warfare. Perhaps ^|athe his^a| state would pension off old tyranny — a mercy no longer hopelessly remote — in virtue of that mature civilization to which (let all allow) it had in some way contributed. Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world, 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: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightning of your masses in travail; the competitive order is employed against itself, the aristocracies are supplanted; ~

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

Jas. A. Joyce
7⁄1⁄1904

August 1893 to December 1893

1) Sensations coming home. Black

2) Gradual irreligiousness

^|a(Epiphany of Thornton)^a|

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 1^st Day
2) Death /
3) Judgment           2^nd Day
4) Hell /
5) Hell           3^rd Day
6) Heaven morning after 4^th Day

^|a(Epiphany of Hell)^a|

[marks]

Chap. [I]

“The middle age discovered America; our age has discovered hereditry.” Thus do the ages exchange civilities like outgoing and incoming mayors. ^|aThe spirit of^a| Our age is not to be confounded with its works; these are novel and progressive, mechanical bases for life: but the spirit ^|ais everywhere preterist wherever it is able to assert^a| 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 simplest liberation of rhythms; our evangelists are pagan or neo-Christian, reactionaries.

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.”

90⁄100 [+] / 1⁄10 · 9⁄10 = 9⁄100 / [=] 99⁄100

Chapter IX

February 1893 to June 1893

Rivalry with Vincent Heron

Letter from Eileen Dixon

Eileen and Emma

Belvedere. Essays. Reading. ^|a(Mr Casey amp; himself)^a| Fight with Heron.

Epiphany of Mr. Tate.

The Play at Whitsuntide: Emma again.

Chapter X

June 1893 to September 1893

The affairs of Mr. Daedalus.

The journey to Cork

Meeting with godfather in train coming home ~

~ ^|aHer reproving eyes, his dreams^a|

Bray: Eileen and Wells.

Soixante-Neuf. (after a walk)

1) The Day in Edinburgh

2) We cannot educate our fathers

Christ's unique relations with prostitutes Black

Enigmatical Christ — en[a]gmatical ^|amen^a| [connected] ^|awith him^a|

Christ and his Father: he knows him.

Father recognises him only once Black

Satan and Christ: objectivised

A more imperfect type than Buddha or S. Francis

Muhammed a maniac ~

~ ^|aComparison with Hamlet / Simple and complex.^a|

His methods of generalship

Man of Grief: “Cause of our sorrow”

His pride and hatred of his race

Knowledge of men's hearts: writing in the sand

Jesus wept ~

~ Christ and Leonardo: ^|athe exoteric and^a| esoteric.

“Whoso looketh upon a woman”

Not a eunuch priest. ~ Black

~ Melchisedec.

A more intellectual type than Buddha or Francis

His two interpreters: Blake and Dante

^|aCreeping / Jesus^a|

[LEFT COLUMN]

Mary Daedalus
Simon Daedalus
Stephen Daedalus
Maurice Daedalus
Isabel Daedalus

oo

Mrs Riordan
John Casey
Aunt Essie
Uncle John
Aunt Brigid
Uncle Jim
Mike Flynn
Richard Sleater
Vincent Heron
Fr MacNally
^|aMr Demers Mr Tate^a|
Fr Webster
Fr Dillon
Miles Davin
James Brennan
Matthew Lister
Thomas Nash
Oliver Flanagan
Patrick Hoey
Owen Hoey
Annie Hoey

[RIGHT COLUMN]

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

oo

Eileen Dixon
Emma Clery
^|aGertrude Mayne Clare Howard^a|
|aMartha Sarah^a| Albin
Charlotte Harrington
Esther Osvalt
Elinor Forde

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

Note

The foregoing pages are the first draft of an essay of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a sketch of the plot and characters, written (January 1904) in a copybook of my sister Mabel (b 1896, d 1911). The essay was written for a Dublin review Dana but refused insertion by the editors Mr. W. K. Magee (John Eglinton) and Mr. Frederick Ryan.

20-1-28

Paris

James Joyce

[PRINTED MATTER]