A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners - James Joyce [5]
And I saw the writer’s foul intent (Joyce, Critical Writings,
pp. 242-243; see “For Further Reading”).
As Joyce’s poem closes, the heretical work goes up in flames, as all heretics must: “I’ll burn the book, so help me devil. / I’ll sing a psalm as I watch it burn” (p. 245). While Joyce’s martyr imagination believed his book to have been burned, in fact the print run was probably just cut and pulped; having come this close to fruition, however, the book’s publication was thus delayed by another twenty-one months, until Grant Richards stepped back into the fray and brought the book out in June 1914.
Even while Dubliners was fitfully slouching toward London to be born, Joyce was at work on his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (as well as his first volume of poems, Chamber Music, published in 1907). Conceptually, Portrait is the earlier book: Its germ is to be found in a 2,500-word essay that Joyce wrote on January 7, 1904, “A Portrait of the Artist,” whereas the earliest of the Dubliners stories, “The Sisters,” was not begun until six months later. Like Dubliners, Portrait nearly went up in flames before it found its readership: In a famous story, the unfinished manuscript was snatched from the fireplace by Joyce’s sister Eileen in 1911, after Joyce had thrown it on the flames in a fit of despair.
This rescued manuscript had already gone through an intermediate stage, in which the short essay “A Portrait” was expanded into an unfinished novel of twenty-six chapters; the remaining portions of that earlier version were published after Joyce’s death as Stephen Hero, though the manuscript is said to have been rejected by twenty different publishers before Joyce began its wholesale revision as Portrait. Even with the novel in its final form, however, and with both Chamber Music and Dubliners already in print, Joyce had a great deal of difficulty finding a home for Portrait. In what is surely a characteristic opinion, the reader’s report prepared for the publisher Duckworth & Co. in June 1916 found both Joyce’s social realism and his narrative experimentation a bit too much to contend with:
James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” wants going through carefully from start to finish. There are many “longueurs” [boring passages]. Passages which, though the publisher’s reader may find them entertaining, will be tedious to the ordinary man among the reading public.... It is too discursive, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent; indeed at times they seem to be shoved in one’s face, on purpose, unnecessarily....
The author shows us he has art, strength and originality, but this MS. wants time and trouble spent on it, to make it a more finished piece of work, to shape it more carefully as the product of the craftsmanship, mind and imagination of the artist (James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes, edited by Chester G. Anderson, New York: Viking Press, 1968, p. 320).
Having worked on the novel by turns for more than twelve years, Joyce cannot have been pleased to read that the manuscript was in need of “time and trouble spent on it.” Although the author of the report acknowledged that some of “the old conventions” concerning fiction were then falling away, he could not yet discern the larger outlines of Joyce’s narrative experiment, in which great “time and trouble” were spent precisely in honing the novel’s continually evolving prose—blurring his protagonist’s ultimate fate and the novel’s plot trajectory, as Joseph Conrad had done in Heart of Darkness, in a healthy dose of narrative fog.
While Joyce struggled against what, in “A Curious History,” he called “legal, social and ceremonious” systems in order to get Dubliners published, his vision for the stories seems not to have changed significantly from his earliest conception: It was from the beginning to be a collection written “to betray the soul of that hemiplegia [partial paralysis] or paralysis which many consider a city,” written “for the most part