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By Root 1621 0

a distant part of the city, is like nothing in any boy’s experience who has been trained under modern conditions. Compare its stuffy horror with Conrad’s account of how under analogous circumstances Lord Jim wept. And a second thing of immense significance is the fact that everyone in this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated. There is no discrimination in that hatred, there is no gleam of recognition that a considerable number of Englishmen have displayed a very earnest disposition to put matters right with Ireland, there is an absolute absence of any idea of a discussed settlement, any notion of helping the slow-witted Englishman in his three-cornered puzzle between North and South. It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients itself. I am afraid it is only too true an account of the atmosphere in which a number of brilliant young Irishmen have grown up. What is the good of pretending that the extreme Irish “patriot” is an equivalent and parallel of the English or American liberal? He is narrower and intenser than any English Tory. He will be the natural ally of the Tory in delaying British social and economic reconstruction after the war. He will play into the hands of the Tories by threatening an outbreak and providing the excuse for a militarist reaction in England. It is time the American observer faced the truth of that. No reason in that why England should not do justice to Ireland, but excellent reason for bearing in mind that these bright-green young people across the Channel are something quite different from the liberal English in training and tradition, and absolutely set against helping them. No single book has ever shown how different they are, as completely as this most memorable novel.

-from New Republic (March 10, 1917)

PADRAIC COLUM

Joyce, when I knew him first, was a student in the Old Royal University (since organized as the National University). He was very noticeable among the crowd of students that frequented the National Library or sauntered along the streets between Nelson’s Pillar and Stephens’s Green. He was tall and slender then, with a Dantesque face and steely blue eyes. His costume as I see him in my mind’s eye now included a peaked cap and tennis shoes more or less white. He used to swing along the street carrying an ashplant in his hand for a cane. (That ashplant is celebrated in Ulysses; Stephen Dedalus carries it with him all through the day and frequently addresses it.) Although he had a beautiful voice for singing and repeating poetry, he spoke harshly in conversation, using many of the unprintable words that he has got printed in Ulysses. Stories were told about his arrogance. Did not this youth say to Yeats, “We have met too late: you are too old to be influenced by me.” And did he not laugh in derision when Arthur Symons spoke to him of Balzac? (Balzac at this hour of the day!) We, the fry swimming about in the National Library, looked with some reverence on the youth who already had an article published in the Fortnightly Review. He had taught himself whatever Scandinavian language Ibsen wrote in—he used to repeat Ibsen’s lyrics in the original—and when We Dead Awaken was published in English his essay on it came out in the Fortnightly— William Archer had it published as a sort of preface to his translation....

After I had made his acquaintance he went to Paris for a while and then returned to Dublin. It was then that he wrote the stories that are in Dubliners and began the writing of Portrait of the Artist (Dublin 1904—Trieste 1914). After he had begun that book he went abroad to take a place as a teacher of English in a Berlitz school. A few years later I met him when he was back in Dublin. He had his son, a little boy, with him, of whom he was very proud. He was more mellowed than