James Joyce[1]

James Joyce[1]

I suppose Mr. Joyce had some idea in mind when he gave his book the title of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But the critics seem to want it their own way and say, “Mr. Joyce paints the Irishman as he really is.”... Irishman, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, I suppose. Francis Hackett says it “reveals the inevitable malaise of serious youth.” Why then doesn’t this inevitable malaise of all our serious youth end inevitably like this: the call “to create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, a living thing, new and soaring, and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.”

H. G. Wells assures us that the youth of his country need not suffer such tortures of adolescence because of England’s more common-sense treatment of the sex question. And all the time Mr. Joyce was talking about the artist of any land, not the youth of England or any other country. In this country there is only God to thank that the young artist does not go entirely mad over one and all of its institutions. In our country the young artists could suffer tortures far beyond anything suffered by Stephen, over the utter emptiness of the place. But he will always suffer. He will always be “a naked runner lost in a storm of spears.”

There is too much geography of the body in this education of ours. You can talk about or write about or paint or sculpt some parts of the body but others must be treated like the Bad Lands. You can write about what you see that you don’t like, what you touch, taste, or hear; but you can’t write about what you smell; if you do you are accused of using nasty words. I could say a lot more about the geography of the body, and how its influence goes all the way through until the censor makes a geography for your mind and soul. But I want to talk about nasty words. The result of this education is that we have all the nasty words in the world in our language. How often a European or an Oriental will say: “Oh, to us it is something very nice—beautiful; but to you it would not be nice; it is much different in English.” When they told James Joyce he had words like that in his book he must have been as surprised as a painter would be if he were told that some of his colors were immoral.

His story is told the way a person in a sick room sharply remembers all the over-felt impressions and experiences of a time of fever; until the story itself catches the fever and becomes a thing of more definite, closer-known, keener-felt consciousness—and of a restless oblivion of self-consciousness.

jh.

This James Joyce book is the most beautiful piece of writing and the most creative piece of prose anywhere to be seen on the horizon to-day. It is consciously a work of Art in a way that Jean-Christophe made no effort to be; it is such head and shoulders above Jacob Stahl or Gilbert Cannan’s Mendel that one must realize those books as very good novels and this as something quite more than that. It can be spoken of in terms that apply to Pelle the Conqueror, but only in this way: each is a work of Art and therefore not to be talked of as lesser or greater; but while Pelle is made of language as it has been used the Portrait is made of language as it will come to be used. There is no doubt that we will have novels before long written without even as much of the conventional structure of language as Mr. Joyce has adhered to—a new kind of “dimension in language” which is being felt in many places and which George Soule has illustrated beautifully in an article in The New Republic.

But that isn’t the most important thing. The interest in Pelle is in the way its stories are told. The interest in the Portrait is in the way its æsthetic content is presented.

For instance, these fragments:

He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could....

The corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit. Soon all would be dark and sleeping. There was cold night air in the chapel and the marbles were the colour the sea was at night. It was cold and dark under the seawall beside his father’s house.

There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy. But they were very holy peasants.... It would be lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf, in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy.

The altar was heaped with fragrant masses of white flowers: and in the morning light the pale flames of the candles among the white flowers were clear and silent as his own soul....

... The air of the late March evening made clear their flight, their dark quivering bodies flung clearly against the sky as against a limp hung cloth of smoky tenuous blue.

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: Six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.

He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind the wainscot: a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry as shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools....

A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the seadusk over the flowing waters.

M. C. A.