A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners - James Joyce [4]
INTRODUCTION
Now that the dust of the previous century has settled, there seems little doubt that James Joyce was the most significant, the most influential English-language prose writer of the twentieth century. His one short-story collection, three novels, one play, and two volumes of poems have won him the devoted attention of students, scholars, and general readers alike; in scholarly terms alone, Joyce is now the second most densely explicated of English-language authors, after only Shakespeare. He has become, in both the public and scholarly imagination, the bespectacled (or sometimes eye-patched) public face of modern literature, in all its difficulty and hard-won pleasures.
Such a fate was far from evident in the early reaction to his writing: Both his collection of fifteen short stories, Dubliners (1914), and his autobiographically based first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), very nearly never saw the light of day. The eventual publisher of Dubliners, London-based Grant Richards, first issued Joyce a contract for the book in February 1906; the collection itself wasn’t published until more than eight years later, however, and after a running battle with a series of publishers and printers that Joyce described in an open letter, “A Curious History,” which he later proposed Richards publish as a preface to the book. At issue, first and foremost, were questions of obscenity and libel—epiphenomena of the realism of Joyce’s stories—for which publishers believed they would be prosecuted. Joyce’s indiscretions are, by contemporary standards, quite tame: A man conducting an adulterous affair is described as having “two establishments to keep up”; King Edward VII is called by one character “a bit of a rake”; and the obscene colloquialism “bloody” pops up with uncomfortable frequency in the second half of the collection. At the same time, as Joyce peevishly pointed out in a 1906 letter to Richards, the much grosser obscenity of stories like “An Encounter” and “The Boarding House” had been completely overlooked. Richards replied, by return mail, that “On consideration, I should like to leave out altogether ‘The [sic] Encounter.’” Censors very rarely have a sense of humor.
In “A Curious History,” Joyce throws in the towel:
I wrote this book seven years ago and, as I cannot see in any quarter a chance that my rights will be protected, I hereby give Messrs Maunsel publicly permission to publish this story [“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”] with what changes or deletions they may please to make and shall hope that what they may publish may resemble that to the writing of which I gave thought and time.... I, as a writer, protest against the systems (legal, social and ceremonious) which have brought me to this pass (James Joyce, Letters, edited by Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, New York: Viking Press, 1957-1966; vol. 2, p. 293).
The pre-publication difficulties of Dubliners mark a minor episode in the larger struggle over censorship that was waged by early twentieth-century writers like D. H. Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall, and was fought most memorably over Joyce’s own 1922 masterpiece Ulysses. As it turns out, Joyce’s “A Curious History” was curiously proleptic, however : It was written in August 1911, when the book’s strange odyssey was barely half done. A Dublin edition of the stories, having been set in type by Maunsel & Co., was summarily destroyed by a scrupulous printer in September 1912. On the back of the annulled contract Joyce wrote a broadside poem, “Gas from a Burner”; it opens with these lines, spoken by a figure compounded of Maunsel’s manager, George Roberts, and the scandalized printer, John Falconer:
Ladies and gents, you are here assembled
To hear why earth and heaven trembled
Because of the black and sinister arts
Of an Irish writer in foreign parts.
He sent me a book ten years ago.
I read it a hundred times or so,
Backwards and forwards, down and up,
Through both ends of a telescope.
I printed it all to the very last word
But by the mercy of the Lord
The darkness of