Rough Portrait

STEPHEN HERO--James Joyce--New Directions ($3.50).

Mrs. James Joyce has hitherto been noted chiefly for her comment after reading Ulysses: "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, surely!" Now Joyce's admirers find themselves deeply indebted to this quiet, unpublicized woman for Stephen Hero, a fragment of the first draft of Joyce's autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. After it had been rejected by 20 different publishers, Joyce flung the 914-page manuscript into the fire. Mrs. Joyce risked her own skin to retrieve pages 519-902, now owned by the Harvard College Library.

"Schoolboy Production." Stephen Hero was written when Joyce was 19 or 20, rewritten into the Portrait when he was about 30. The two books are significantly different. The Portrait is masterfully compressed and polished; Stephen Hero, covering Joyce's college years, is comparatively diffuse, though a more human, spontaneous and revealing study of an embryonic genius. Though Joyce dismissed it as a "schoolboy's production," it is sensitive and readable by almost anybody's standards. In the early draft Joyce is a more recognizable college student--swaggering, confused, arrogant, emotional, but brilliant.

Stephen's (i.e. Joyce's) frustrating experience with the girl Emma Clery, touched on rather abstractly in the Portrait, is set forth with adolescent flourish. Emma's "loud forced manners shocked him . . . until his mind had thoroughly mastered the stupidity of hers." But Stephen ached for her body. "I felt that I longed to hold you in my arms," said Stephen. "Just to live one night together, Emma, then to say goodbye in the morning and never to see each other again! There is no such thing as love in the world. . . ." "You are mad," said Emma. "You must not speak to me any more."

Denunciations & Epiphanies. Other aspects of Joyce's intense life which are more extensively and dramatically reported in the first draft are his wild hero worship of Ibsen ("Ibsen has the temper of an archangel"), his fierce denunciations of things Irish ("I don't think the Irish peasant represents a very admirable type of culture"), the "plague of Catholicism," and the Jesuits ("He spurned before him the stale maxims of the Jesuits and . . . swore an oath that they should never establish over him an ascendancy").

The passage in Stephen Hero (omitted entirely from the Portrait) which throws most light on Joyce's artistic origins deals with epiphanies. "By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. . . ." When one perceives the epiphany of an object, "its soul, its whatness leaps out to [one] from the vestment of its appearance . . . [becoming] that thing which it is. . . ." Stephen felt that it is the artist's duty to record epiphanies.

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