A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is, like almost everything Joyce wrote, autobiographical—that is, largely based on the events and experiences of his early life in Ireland. Joyce loved Ireland, but he hated its narrowness and its restrictions on feeling and expression. His country, he thought, was paralyzed and could not break out of the web of illusions and self-deceits that entrapped it. The Portrait starts with a very young boy and carries him onward to the moment when he is finally able to tear himself away and to become the free and feeling artist he has always wanted to be. A wonderful, moving journey is described in this book; perhaps no artist ever revealed himself more fully and completely, unless it was Rembrandt in his last self-portraits or Rousseau in his Confessions or Beethoven in his last quartets. But those men were all old; Joyce did it when he was still in his twenties.
The beginning of the Portrait is lovely and very famous: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo … ” The end is just as famous. It takes the form of a diary; the month is April, but the year does not matter. It is spring, a new beginning. Stephen (the name Joyce used for the hero of this autobiographical novel) writes in his diary:
26 Apriclass="underline" Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
27 Apriclass="underline" Old father, old
artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
Perhaps nothing Joyce wrote has been quoted and pondered over so many times. Almost every young writer, man or woman, has thrilled to those lines.
Joyce wrote most of Ulysses during World War I. He had been living in Trieste, but when war broke out the Italian authorities allowed him and his family to go to Zurich, where he spent the next five years. He was beset by poverty, which was relieved only from time to time by small grants of money from two American friends and supporters, Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Harriet Shaw Weaver. In fact, Miss Weaver’s contributions cannot be called small; by 1930 they had amounted to more than £23,000, a large sum for those days.
Chapters from Ulysses began to appear in the American Little Review starting in March 1918 and continuing until 1920, when the book was banned in the United States. It was an era when bluestocking sentiment was rampant, and the banning of Ulysses ran parallel to the banning of alcohol. Ulysses regained its legitimacy sooner than alcohol; furthermore, it was published in Paris in 1922, by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of a bookstore called Shakespeare & Co., and soon everyone who was anyone had a copy. There is nothing like banning a good book to make people think it is great, and the ban had that effect on Ulysses. The ban combined with the mysterious difficulties of the novel had the effect of making it an irresistible object of passionate scholarly concern on both sides of the Atlantic.
Is Ulysses not a great book, then? Of course it is. However, it seems to me to be disorganized and overwrought in many places, and harder to read than it ought to be. At the same time it is full of wonders. They are more important than the faults, if that’s what they are.
The book’s beginning and its end are both extraordinary. Stephen Daedalus—Joyce’s alter ego—conducts a long discussion of Hamlet, in which he shows that even in 1922 there were new things to be thought and felt about that play. This conversation, which winds throughout the book, is fascinating. And the last chapter, consisting of eight immensely long paragraphs that reveal Molly Bloom’s thoughts as she lies in bed after a day made especially interesting by an act of adultery, is deservedly famous. Molly is earthy, cunning, goodhearted, and loving, all at the same time. And although she has betrayed her husband, Poldy, her affection for him has not really been betrayed, and one is certain that their future together will be no worse, if it will not be better, for her escapade.
Leopold (Poldy) Bloom is an enigmatic character. The book is the story of a single day in his life—Bloomsday, Joyce called it (it was in fact the anniversary of the day, June 16, when he had first fallen in love with Nora Barnacle, his wife). Bloom visits various symbolically important places in Dublin; these correspond to parts of the body; and these in turn represent the various arts and sciences; while all are hung upon a structure based on The Odyssey of Homer. Thus, for example, Chapter 3 of Part 2, “Hades,” occurs at 11 A.M., in the graveyard, where the heart is the symbol and all of this represents religion.
I rebel, and you may, too. Ulysses may be a more enjoyable book if you do not work too hard at reading it. At any rate, Molly is worth the trouble of finding her out.
HENRIK IBSEN
1828–1906
A Doll’s House
About certain authors one has an impression that may have little basis in reality, but that is hard to eradicate and that stands in the way of true comprehension and appreciation. About Ibsen I have an impression of murky darkness, of a kind of sad foreignness and strangeness. This is quite wrong: Ibsen, although a serious man and artist, was not the somber, unpleasant person of my imagination. As a result of my impression, however, whenever I see a play of Ibsen’s on the stage or read it in a book, I am surprised at how good it is, how interesting and absorbing, and how much fun.
I know where my impression comes from. Bernard Shaw was envious of Ibsen, whom he thought of as his only living competitor (Shakespeare, after all, was dead); at the same time Shaw could not help but admire Ibsen. When English audiences, and critics, would hoot a new play of Ibsen’s off the stage, Shaw would “defend” him with praise that was a little below enthusiastic and with enigmatic analyses. Shaw’s book The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) helped to create my impression, and that of many others, of Ibsen as a dark, tortured spirit who had in the final analysis perverted drama by turning it into a vehicle for social criticism. The fact that Shaw admitted that Ibsen was a great dramatist and an able social critic, and the fact that Shaw did all the things he accused Ibsen of doing, was lost in the rhetorical fireworks of this “defense.”
Henrik Ibsen was born in a desolate lumbering town in northern Norway in 1828. His childhood and youth were not happy; his father went bankrupt, the family had to move to another town, Henrik did badly in school, and his first plays were either disasters or just unsuccessful. A shy, introverted man, he nevertheless obtained a job as a producer of plays. During this time he was miserable but at least learned everything that could be known about the theater. Still, he’d enjoyed no success of any kind by the time he was thirty-five and decided that life in Norway was impossible for him. He therefore went to Rome, and, as with many northern artists who exchanged their dark, cold surroundings for the warmth and gaiety of the south, Ibsen’s life and career suddenly bloomed.