James Joyce: Notes - Textual History [1/4: Epiphanies, &c.]

Notes on the Works (by Texts)

Notes on the Works (by titles)

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Epiphanies [1] Conventionally dated 1901-1903; at least 71 written, of which 22 in Joyce’s hand are held in the Lockwood Mem. Library of State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. 18 more are held in in the Joyce Collection of Cornell Univ. Library, all of these being in Stanislaus hand with one exception. Some of these duplicate those at Buffalo. The holograph epiphanies are numbered, possibly in autobiographical sequence, but not their eventual order of use in the works. Their importance in Stephen Hero is indicated by Joyce’s comment on one of them as the transitional point between two sections of the novel (Letters, II, p.79.) The Buffalo epiphanies were edited and published by O. A. Silverman in 1956; later all forty were included in The Workshop of Daedalus, ed. Robert Scholes & Richard Kain (1965).

Note: Stephen Hero contains a lengthy explanation of the process of epiphanisation but the term itself is not included in the corresponding section of A Portrait of the Artist (viz., Stephen Hero, London: Jonathan Cape [1944; rev. edn. 1956] 1969, pp.216-17; Grafton Edn., 1977, p.188-89).

Epiphanies [2]: See Robert Scholes & Florence L. Walzl, ‘The Epiphanies of Joyce’, in PMLA, 82, 1 (March 1967), pp.152-54 - an exchange in which Scholes argues that the term was never used by Joyce for Dubliners and facetiously suggesting - à la Yeats - that ‘there is more enterprise in walking naked’. Walzl seeks to broaden the term to include the ‘more general signification’ that Joyce attaches to it in his theory of epiphanies [SH188-89] where he relates it to the apprehension of whatness - or, as Walzl actually writes, ‘In the esthetic discussion of Stephen Hero, where the qualities of beauty are defined as integritas (wholeness) consonantia (symmetry) and claritas (radiance), he defines epiphany as an apprehension that radiance is quiddity.’ [sic] (p.152.) Scholes’ contribution to the article occupies only one column of the first page, the rest being devoted to Walzl’s argument.

Oliver St. John Gogarty: When Gogarty was spending an evening with Joyce and others, Joyce suddenly said ‘Excuse me’ and left the room. Recalling the event, Gogarty writes: ‘I don’t mind being reported but to be an unwilling contributor to one of his Epiphanies. Probably Fr. Darlington had taught him. as an aside in his Latin class - for Joyce knew no Greek - that “epiphany” meant a “showing forth”. So he recorded under “Epiphany” any showing forth of the mind by which he considered one gave oneself away. / “Which of us had endowed him with an “Epiphany” amd semt him ot the lavatory to take it down?’ (As I Was Walking Down Sackville Street, p.285; quoted in Theodore Spencer, Introduction to Stephen Hero [1944], Jonathan Cape 1968, p.22, n.2.)

Epiphanies [3] - Richard Ellmann writes: ‘[H]e began in 1900, and continued until 1903, to write a series of what, because he was following no one, he declined to call prose poems as others would have done. For these he evolved a new and more startling descriptive term, “epiphanies”. The epiphany did not mean for Joyce the manifestation of godhead, the showing forth of Christ to the Magi, although that is a useful metaphor for what he had in mind. The epiphany was the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing,” the moment in which the “soul of the commonest object [...] seems to us radiant”’ (James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.87.) ‘Joyce never insists, and lets the effect trail off. He cradles here the technique which has now become a commonplace of modern fiction. Arrogant yet humble too, it claims importance by claiming nothing; it seeks a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be an interference. It leaves off the veneer of gracious intimacy with the reader, of concern that he should be taken into the author’s confidence and instead makes the reader feel uneasy and culpable if he misses the intended but always unstated meaning, as if he were being arraigned rather than entertained. The artist abandons himself and his reader to the material.’ (James Joyce [1959] 1965 Edn., p.88.)

Note: In quoting Joyce’s explanatory sentences, Ellmann stumbles into inaccuracy by combining passages of Stephen Hero and A Portrait - from the second of which term ‘epiphany’ is starkly absent even though the aesthetic ideas associated with it in the first are substantially reiterated: viz., ‘The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.’ [SH 218.] ‘The radiance of which he [i.e., St. Thomas’s claritas] speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing.’ [AP 217]. It is worth noting that the word ‘revelation’ which Ellmann thrusts into his quotation does not appear in the original, and only figures once in Stephen Hero in an arguably related context when Stephen speaks of the independence of ‘the artist in his revelation of the beautiful’ from puritanical critics [Joyce’s italics; SH 85]. (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [1959 Edn.] Oxford UP 1965, p.87.) [BS]

Epiphanies [4]: See Maurice Beja, Epiphany and the Modern Novel (London: Peter John 1971) - on epiphany: ‘The word of course refers to the manifestation of Christ on the 12th day, January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany. The word would therefore necessarily have been known to the young Joyce, and as a Catholic he need not have waited, as Oliver St. John Gogarty has suggested he did, to learn its meaning “as an aside in his Latin class.”’ [As I was Walking Down Sackville Street]. Joyce did not know Greek, but he may have known the original meaning of [Greek epiphany]: a manifestation, striking appearance, esp. an appearance of a divinity, according to the OED, which also relates the verb to manifest. In English, the word has for the most part kept its theological context, although the OED does cite figurative adaptions of it. The attempt to determine sources for it other than the ecclesiastical one for Joyce’s application of it have proved unconvincing.’ (p.72.) Note that Beja makes no allusion to Skeat’s Etymological English Dictionary (1882) - which Joyce claims to have read by the hour (Stephen Hero, Cape. Edn., p.32).

Epiphanies/phainos: Joyce’s term epiphany derives from the liturgical calendar feast marking the presentation of the infant Jesus to the priests in the Temple at Jerusalem. Besides harping on the literal sense of epiphany as a “shewing forth” in the sense that the meaning of the thing seen is instantaneously perceived by the observer, Joyce’s abrogation - even theft - of the term carries with it a great deal of the theological sense that the saviour/messiah thus heralded is a type of the kind of artist that he intends to be and that the artists is, correspondingly, endowed with christological powers. In the Stephen Hero episode where the first literary epiphany is introduced and the term defined, the surrounding language echoes the Introit in the liturgy for the epiphany - i.e., Surge Illuminare ...; as infra.)[BS]

William Walter Skeat, Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1879-82; 4th rev. edn. 1910) See Concise Etymological Dictionary (rev. ed. 1927) - available online as pdf.

- available at Internet Archive -online

[ See also notes on ‘rabblement’ and ‘tundish’, under “Rabblement” > Skeat - infra. ]

Epiphanies [5] - Epiphany 21, 1903 (I.A.14) - written in Paris - reflects Joyce’s view of his mother’s funeral and was reworked for the Hades episode of Ulysses. (See Buffalo Library Exhibits, Bloomsday; online - accessed 29.12.2008.] Note: the Paris Bourse epiphany in “Proteus” stems from the same date.]

Paralytic affections: In Stephen Hero, where he introduces the term “epiphany”, Joyce writes of Eccles Street as one of those Dublin streets of brown brick houses which seemed to him (Stephen) the “very incarnation of Irish paralysis” - an epithet that Joyce employed in several places, most notably in the opening paragraph of “The Sisters” in Dubliners. While the dominant context for the signification of the term is the medical one - particularly importing the symptoms of g.p.i., or “general pareisis [commonly paralysis] of the insane”, which was the tertiary and final stage of the syphilitic infection - the terms has also an Irish folkloric sense, as in the footnote to T. C. Croker’s story of a man who is “fairy struck” by a “good people” seeking to learn of the parish priest (who he is entertaining to dinner) if fairies can enter into Christian heaven. Croker explains:

Thomas Crofton Croker: ‘The term “fairy struck” is applied to paralytic affections, which are supposed to proceed from a blow given by the invisible hand of an offended fairy; this belief, of course, creates fairy doctors, who by means of charms and mysterious journeys profess to cure the afflicted. It is only fair to add, that the term has also a convivial acceptation, the fairies being not unfrequently made to bear the blame of the effects arising from too copious a sacrifice to the jolly god. / The importance attached to the manner and place of burial by the peasantry is almost incredible; it is always a matter of consideration and often of dispute whether to deceased shall be buried with his or her “own people”.’ (“The Confession of Tom Bourke”, in Fairy Legends [... &c.] (London: John Murray & Thomas Tegg 1838): p.49, n.; my italics [BS].)

Epiphanies [6]: James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce (8 Feb. 1903): ‘Words cannot measure my contempt for AE at present ... and his spiritual friends. I did well however to leave my MSS with him for I had a motive. However I shall take them back as my latest additions to “Epiphany” might not be to his liking ...’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.14; quoted in Jorn Barger’s “Joyce Portal” [online; 19.02.08].)

Cf. Stanislaus Joyce (My Brother’s Keeper): ‘Another experimental form which his literary urge took [...] consisted in the noting of what he called epiphanies - manifestations or revelations. Jim always had a contempt for secrecy, and those notes were in the beginning ironical observations of slips, and little errors and gestures - mere straws in the mind - by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.’ (MBK, p.124.)

Epiphanies [7]: Lines engraved on the memorial stone of Ted Hughes bear lines from “That Morning”, a poem recollecting the epiphany of a huge shoal of salmon flashing by as he and his son Nicholas waded a stream in Alaska: ‘So we found the end of our journey / So we stood alive in the river of light / Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.’ The memorial service was accompanied by readings by Seamus Heaney and the actress Juliet Stevenson. (Cited thus on the Wikipedia page on Hughes - online; accessed 18.01.2012.)

Night of the Epiphany: Joyce bought a rocking-horse for Georgie on the Night of the Epiphany, Jan. 1907 - writing to his brother from the bank where he was working: ‘They are celebrating this week in Sylvester’s Church the union of the rites. Every morning a different rite. I should love to go. But I might as well be in Cabra for all I see of anything Coptic, Greek, Chaldean, &c. Excuse the way I scrawl. Any minute the banker’ [breaks off here]. (Letter to Stanislaus, [postmarked] 10 Jan. 1907; Via Monte Brianzo, 51, IV°, Rome; Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, Faber 1976, p.143; Letters, Vol. II, Faber 1966, p.206.) See also reference to the Night of the Apophanypes in Finnegans Wake, 626.05

Epiphanies [8] - Stanislaus Joyce writes in his Dublin Diary (1971; rep. 1994): ‘His “epiphanies” - his prose pieces (which I almost prefer to his lyrics) and his dialogues - are again subtle. He has put himself into these with singular courage, singular memory, and scientific minuteness; he has proved himself capable of taking very great pains to create a very little thing of prose or verse. The keen observation and satanic irony of his character are precisely, but not fully, expressed. Whether he will ever build up anything broad - a drama, an esthetic treatise - I cannot say. His genius is not literary and he will probably run through many of the smaller forms of literary artistic expression. He has made living his end in life, and in the light of this magnificent importance of living, everything else is like a rushlight in the sun.’ (The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. George H. Healey [Cornell UP 1971] Dublin: Anna Livia Press 1994, p.2 [see longer extract under Stanislaus Joyce - q.v., or as attached.)

Waste paper?: Joyce writes to Stanislaus of Nora (letter of 7 Feb. 1905), ‘When she saw me copy Epiphanies into my novel she asked would all that paper be wasted - which made me think of Heine.’ Richard Ellmann annotates: Heinrich Heine, the German poet, had a mistress, Eugénie Mirat (“Mathilde”) who later became his wife. She was an almost uneducated shop-assistant, but he remained devoted to her until his death.’ (Selected Letters, Faber 1975, p.51.)

Epiphanies [9] - Stanislaus Joyce writes in My Brother’s Keeper (1958): ‘Another experimental form which his literary urge took while we were living at this address [Glengariff Parade] consisted in the noting of what he called “epiphanies” - manifestations or revelations. Jim always had a contempt for secrecy, and these notes were in the beginning ironical slips and little errors and gestures - mere straws in the wind - by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal. “Epiphanies” were always brief sketches hardly ever more than some dozen lines in length, but always very accurately observed and noted, the matter being slight.’ (p.134; see further under Stanislaus Joyce, infra.) [Note that 32 Glengarriff Parade (NCR/Drumcondra), was the family address in autumn 1900.]

Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Faber 1944; rev. edn. 1960) - on epiphanies: ‘What seems trivial details to others may be portentous symbols to him, In this light, Joyce’s later works are artificial reconstructions of a transcendental view of experience. His dizzying linguistic experience and pornographic confession, between myth and autobiography, between symbolism and naturalism, are attempts to create a literary substitute for the revelations of religion.’ (p.38.) See also “Revisiting Joyce”, the additional chapter in the 1960 edition: ‘the term [epiphany] itself has already become a catch-word’. (p.187.)

[Further]: ‘This is simply an attempt to define what is so often referred to as the nuance. The epiphany, in effect, is the same device. Though grounded in theology, it has now become a matter of literary technique. It has become Joyce’s contribution to that series of developments which convert narrative into short-story, supplant plot with style, and turn the raconteur into a candid-camera expert. The measure of success, in so attenuated a form, is naturally the degree of concentration.’ (Ibid., p.39; see also under Commentary, supra - or go to longer extracts in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Authors” - via index or direct.)

Epiphanies [10] - William T. Noon (SJ) writes: ‘The Joycean epiphany in literature may be described as a formulation through metaphor or symbol of some luminous aspect of individual human life, some highly significant facet of the most intimate and personal reality, some particular radiant point to the meaning of existence.’ (James Joyce and Aquinas, Yale UP 1957, p.39.) Fr. Noon is positive that Joyce’s uses of Aquinas’s triad was ‘a misunderstanding, if not a wilful distortion of the Aquinatian point of view.’ (p.17.) [See further under Commentary, supra.]

Epiphany revival?: Deborah Warner, ‘The Ballast-Office Time Ball and the Subjectivity of Time and Space’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 35, 4 / 36, 1 (Summer-Fall, 1998), pp. 861-64 [available at JSTOR - online]. See also Sam Slote, ‘Epiphanic “Proteus”, in Genetic Joyce Studies [online].

Epiphanies [11] - In Dublin’s Joyce (London: Chatto & Windus 1955), Hugh Kenner writes that ‘The possibility of epiphanies depends on the composite structure of things, signate matter plus intelligible form.’ (p.46) - adding in a footnote that St. Thomas Aquinas’s epistemological theory (i.e., hylomorphism) is ‘the only metaphysic in which the theory of epiphanies is meaningful.’

[ See also ‘Eccles St.?’ - in Notes > Sundry - infra; also the connection between Joyce’s theory of epiphanies and the Aristotelian hylomorphism of St. Thomas Aquinas - under Notes > Literary Figures - Aquinas - supra. ]

Epiphanies [12] - Note Sam Slote’s conception of the epiphany as a form of palimpsest or primary text in Ulysses - and specifically in ’Proteus’, where subsequent revisions produce the effect of ’silted language’ marking a difference between the phenomenological and the verbal content of the epiphanies enshrined in Stephen’s interior monologue. Thus he writes:

‘The fragmentary or epiphanic disposition of the NLI draft is also an example of silted language. The final form of the episode bears little or no trace of this preliminary configuration; the epiphanic form has been silted over. And yet, now that this draft has resurfaced, certain traits of this revised, or revising, form of the epiphany can be made clear. For example, in reworking the Paris epiphany on the NLI draft, Joyce is no longer treating the epiphany as simply the representation of some particular and peculiar event within the world – i.e., a phenomenological event – but rather as a linguistic event, an event of an already-written, i.e., already-drafted, text that is being revised. In other words, and with other words, the epiphany is silted. If Joyce originally construed the epiphany as a mode of artistic re-vision, then the NLI draft suggests that the horizon of re-vision is entirely linguistic. This is, of course, exactly what is performed during any compositional revision; it is as if one draft serves as the epiphany for the next. Each new draft supplementing the one before and standing as another potential epiphany for some forthcoming subsequent draft. In other words, revision shows that the act of æsthetic apprehension and representation as described by Stephen is not immediate and ontologically self-sufficient. Protean, it evolves, it changes. It is dynamic. It silts over. It is also, potentially, an endless sequence of textual evolution. ’ (Slote, “Epiphanic “Proteus””, in Genetic Joyce Studies, Spring 2005; accessible online - accessed 26.06.2011.; see copy - as attached.)

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The Day of the Rabblement (pub. 14 Oct. 1901): Two Essays: “A Forgotten Aspect of the University Question” by F. J. C. Skeffington, and “The Day of the Rabblement” by James A. Joyce (Dublin: Gerrard Bros. 1901) - the only extant copies are held at the Lockwood Library of State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and in the Harley K. Croessmann Collection of Emory University, Georgia (Irish Literary Collection). Joyce’s essay is reprinted as “The Day of the Rabblement” in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason (NY: Viking Press [1959] 1966), pp.68-72.

The Day of the Rabblement (1901): For an account of the inclusion of a reference to Bruno the Nolan, calculated to mystify contemporary Irish readers, see Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber & Faber 1958), pp.152-53 [US edn., p.146]. Another telling of this matter is given by Samuel Beckett in his essay in Our Exagmination (1929) where he writes of Joyce’s Dublin readers that ‘they finally succeeded in identifying this mysterious individual with one of the obscurer ancient Irish kinds. In the present work [Finnegans Wake], he appears frequently as “Browne & Nolan” the name of a very remarkable Dublin bookseller and Stationer.’ (Our Exagmination Round his Factification for an Incamination of a Work in Progress, NY: New Directions 1962, p.17.)

Cranly’s “rabblement” (in Stephen Hero): ‘Cranly’s chosen companions represented the rabblement in a stage of partial fermentation when it is midway between vat and flagon and Cranly seemed to please himself in the spectacle of this caricature of his own unreadiness.’ [SH, Cape. Edn., p.127.]

Note on Irish aristocracy: In 1907 Joyce saw this class as ‘[p]oor fallen kings, recognizable even in their decline as impractical Irishmen’ and wonders why they don’t go to America to win the hand of the daughter of a ‘some other king even though he may be a Varnish King a Sausage King.’ (See “Ireland, Isle of Saints and Sages”, in Critical Writings [1959] 1966, p.168.) When Mr Deasy says, ‘We are all Irish, all kings’ sons’, Stephen says, ‘Alas’ [U39].

Rabblement, in Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary (1888), p.486: A noisy crowd, mob. O. Low G[erman]) Levins has rabel, rable, rablement. Halliwell has ‘rabble, to speak confusedly’, with an example of M. E., rablen used in the same sense; also, ‘rabblement, a crowd, or mob.’ So named from the noise they make; cf. O. Du. rabbelen, ‘to chatter, trifle, toy’. Skeat also supplies Greek and Sanskrit origins (ramba, to sound, and rambhá, the lowing of a cow). He adds: ‘the suffix -le adds frequentative force; a rabble is that which keeps on making noise. And see Rapparee. Der. rabble-ment (with F. suffix), Jul. Caes., i. 2., 245. [Available online at Internet Archive - online.

William Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, by the Rev. Walter Skeat, M.A., Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge [1882] (Oxford: Clarendon Press MDCCCLXXXVIII [1888] - available at Internet Archive online.

Note: In Stephen Hero we are told that the protagonist read ‘Skeat’s etymological dictionary by the hour.’ [Stephen Hero, Cape Edn. 1968, 32].

Oxford English Dictionary
- rabble, sb. - late ME. pack, string, swarm of animals; disorderly crowd of people, a mob. late ME. b. Applied contempt, to a class or body of persons imagined as a mob. 1529. c. Without article: Persons of the lowest class 1687. 3. Disorderly collection [...] 4. A long string of words [with] little or no meaning or value -0 1656. b. A rigmarole.
- rabble, sb. = L rutabulum, fire-shovel, oven rack.
- rabble. v. late ME. M. Du. rabbelen, LG, rabbeln. 1. a. trans. To utter (words or speech) in a confused manner. b. To speak or read in this fashion; to gabble. 2. To work in a hurried slovenly manner (dial.)
- rabble. v. To attack or assail (a person or his property) as, along with, or by means of, a rabble; to mo. 2. To become a rabble.
- rabble. v. To stir, skim, or rake with a rabble. Hence rabbler, one who uses a rabble.
- rabblement: same as rabble sb in various senses. b. Tumult or disturbance like that of a rabble; riotous conduct (rare) 1590. Examples incl. Spenser: ‘Heaped together in rude rablement.’

Doctor Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
Rábblement. n.s. [from rabble.] Croud; tumultuous assembly of mean people. [E.g.,] Spenser, ‘A rude rabblement, / Whose like he never saw, he durst not bide, / But got his ready steed, and fast away ‘gan ride.’ (Spenser, Faerie Queene.) ‘The rabblement houted, clap’d their chopt hands, and uttered a deal of stinking breath [... because he refus’d the crown.]’ (Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar). ‘There will be always tyrants, murderers, thieves, traitors, and other of the same rabblement.’ (Camden’s Remains.) [See longer extracts]

Concise Etymological Dictionary, Ernest Weekley [rev edn.] (London: Secker & Warburg 1952)
- rabble, Orig. string of animals. Origin unknown. The earliest sense is exactly that of F. ribambelle. (p.341.)

Merriam-Webster (online)
Rabblement: People looked down upon as ignorant and of the lowest class haughty - e.g., ‘nobles who ignored the rabblement at their own peril ...’ (1548)

Note: In the Shem chapter of Finnegans Wake [1939; Bk. 1.7], Shaun asks: ‘Pray, what is [172] the meaning, sousy, of that continental expression, if you ever came acrux it, we think it is a word transpiciously like canaille?’ The correct answer is, presumably, “rabblement”. The French word, used with derogatory connotations, is derived from the Italian French, from Italian canaglia, a ‘pack of dogs’, from cane, ‘dog’. Cf. Portuguese canalha, as in Lula da Silva’s remarks on Judge Moro: ‘Preciso provar que o juiz Moro não era um juiz. Era um canalha.’ (08.11.2019).

Note that Skeat gives as first example under gibberish - Holinshed ‘gibberishing Irish’ (Descript. of Ireland, [1577]) - formed from the old verb gibber, to gabble (Hamlet, I, i., 126.)

Rap: Skeat gives rap as Irish for a forged half-pence and cites the phrase ‘I don’t give a rap’ as its unique instance - but Brewer lists rap as R.A.P. and identifies it as ruppees, annas and pies, corresponding to our £.s.d [pounds, shillings and pence]. (Brewer does not list rabble.)

peripatetic-al: walking about (L., -Gk.) ‘Peripatetical, that disputes or teaches walking, as Aristotle did; from whence he and his scholars were called peripateticks“; Blount’s Gloss., ed.1674. - Lat. peripateticus - Gk. perpatetikós [symbols] , given to walking about, esp. while disputing; Aristotle and his followers were called peripatetikoí [symbols] - Gk. perpatío, I walk about - Gk. peri, about, and patéw [symbols], I walk, from pátos [symbols], a path, cogtnate with E. path. See Peri and Path.

See remarks on Stephen’s “tundish” in A Portrait - infra.

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“Portrait of the Artist” (autobiographical essay of 1904; aka “The 1904 Portrait”) - I: The holograph draft written in a Vere Foster Ruled Exercise Book bearing the name of Mabel Joyce is held at the Buffalo Univ. Library Joyce Collection as Buffalo II.A, wherein the notice: Joyce wrote this brief, quasi-autobiographical sketch for the magazine Dana, although the editors declined to publish it. One editor, John Eglinton, explained “I can’t print what I can’t understand.” (Irish Literary Portraits, 1935, p.136.) In this piece, Joyce combines a fictionalized autobiographical narrative with philosophical exposition in order to describe the evolution of artistic sensibilities in an unnamed young man. Joyce subsequently expanded upon the ideas expressed in this piece in his aborted novel Stephen Hero and, ultimately, in the second version of that novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which ironically reprises and rephrases the title of this essay. Many of the incidents found in that novel can be traced back to this earlier essay. This draft is written in an exercise book that belonged to Joyce’s sister Mabel (1893-1911).

Timeline: Joyce dated it January 7, 1904 and subsequently used the exercise book to write the notes for Stephen Hero which occupy its later pages. In 1928 he gave the whole to Sylvia Beach. (See Buffalo Library Exhibits, Bloomsday; online - accessed 29.12.2008; also a copy in RICORSO Library, “Irish Classics > Major Authors > James Joyce” - as infra.)

Bibl.: When Joyce sought to give the original of the 1904 “Portrait” essay to Sylvia Beach in 1928, Stanislaus set about getting the flaked manuscript typed. The result included numerous errors of transcription. Joyce gave the holograph to Beach and it continued to deteriorate. The respective destinations of the original and the copy were the Lockwood Library of State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and Cornell University Library.

Scholes & Kain write: ‘A few years ago Cornell University acquired Stanislaus Joyce’s typed copy of of the essay, and in 1959 the University of Buffalo acquired the original. [...] Most of the materials in this introductory note and the text of the essay itself were originally published by the editors in the Yale Review, Spring 1960, XLIX, pp.355-59.’ (See The Workshop of Daedalus, Northwestern UP 1965, p.59. [See further at Wisconsin University - contents.]]

“Portrait of the Artist” (1904; aka “The 1904 Portrait”) - II: Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 8 Nov. 1916 outlining on a ‘enclosed slip’ the publishing history of his works. Under the heading A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, he wrote: ‘I began this novel in notes before I left Ireland and finished it Trieste in 1914. Before I left I offered an introductory chapter to Mr Magee (John Eglinton) and Mr Ryan, editors of Dana. It was rejected.’ (Letters, Vol. I, 1966, p.98.) [Note the implication that the essay is essentially the same writing as A Portrait published in 1916.]

Note: Richard Ellmann writes of the manner of the “Portrait” essay of 1904: ‘This magnetization of style and vocabulary by the context of person, place and time, has its humble origin in the few pages Joyce wrote for Dana.’ (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.151; see longer extracts in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Authors”, via index, or attached.)

Tundish - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - ‘April 13. That tundish has been on my mind for a long [255] time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us. Damn him one way or the other!’

Vide Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary:

Tun, a large cask. See Ton [667]. No tundish is given in the 1888 edition but dish is said to be ‘of very early use’ and related to Lat. disco. Remarks: If Skeat is the dictionary Joyce/Stephen consulted, he would not have got the result spoken of in A Portrait (Chap. V) [as above]. ‘Ton, a cask’ is referred to ‘ton’ which is given as a heavy barrel, a hogshead [&c.], with instances in Chaucer, the AS Chronicles, and Icelandic and Sweden literature but also Irish and Gaelic tunna, a tun, barrel. (W. W. Skeat, Etymological Dictionary of the English Language [1882], Oxford 1888), p.667.

See Rev. William Walter Skeat, Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1882) - online.

Cf., Adam Mars on Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018): ‘Irish writing often makes a conscious effort to brand itself as such. Rooney’s does not. Her diction is low-key, the rhythms uninsistent. Local variations of vocabulary, preferring “press” to “cupboard” or “culchie” to “yokel”, don’t have the sociolinguistic significance here of Stephen Dedalus’s “tundish” as measured against the dean’s “funnel” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ireland as presented here is in its essentials a modern state, where a custom such as the anniversary mass held for Marianne’s father generates a plot point rather than an examination of the role of religion in national life.’ (London Review of Books, 27 Sept. 2018.)

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“The Holy Office”

“The Holy Office”: composed in Dublin, August 1904; offered to St. Stephen's (UCD) and refused in an amusing card which calls it the ‘unholy thing’ by the then editor, his friend Constantine Curran, 8 Aug.; a proof printed for the author by the Dublin Printing Company, 14 Aug. 1904; sheets destroyed for lack of payment; the whole printed in Trieste, 5 June 1905; one copy of the poem is held in British Library; another in the National Library of Ireland; yet another in the Harley K. Croessmann Collection at Emory University Library’s Irish Literary Collection [see online].

See James Joyce Centre: Joyce wrote his satirical poem ‘The Holy Office’ at the beginning of August 1904.  He submitted it to his friend Constantine Curran for publication in St Stephen’s, the student magazine of University College Dublin. On 8 August Curran rejected the poem and Joyce tried instead to have it privately printed. He took the poem to the Dublin Printing Company, and on 14 August they sent him the proofs of the booklet, asking for them to be corrected and returned. However Joyce wasn’t able to pay for the printing and the print company refused to give him the printed sheets unless he paid for them. Joyce didn’t find the money to pay the printer before he left Dublin in October 1904. Writing from Pola in mid-November 1904, Joyce told his brother Stanislaus that he had written to the Dublin printer and hoped his poem would be released in a week. This didn’t happen, possibly because the Dublin printer had already discarded the printed sheets. Nothing of the Dublin printing of ‘The Holy Office’ is extant. Instead, Joyce organised to have the poem printed in Trieste, and 50 copies of the poem were sent to Stanislaus in June 1905 for distribution in Dublin. (Available online; accessed 03.10.2018; here reparagraphed.]

See BL: The poem is Joyce’s earliest published literary work, written in 1904 and published in 1905 when he was in his twenties. It is rare, believed to exist in fewer than 100 copies. [It] was rejected by the University College Dublin’s magazine, St Stephen’s, and publication again failed - this time for financial reasons - after taking it to the Dublin Printing Company. Eventually, Joyce printed the poem in Pola, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where he lived between November 1904 [recte Oct.] and March 1905. (British Library - online; accessed 03.10.2018. [Note the false ascription of its publication to Pola rather than Trieste and the number of copies involved [100 for 50].

See NLI: The copy held at the National Library of Ireland is part of the Hans Jahnke Bequest - viz., ‘Printed broadsheet, signed and dated by Joyce. Published 1901; this copy is dated 16.xi.[1]929’. [Note the erroneous publication date: BS.]The location of the holding is given as Zurich James Joyce Foundation; Augustinergasse 9, 8001; Zurich, Switzerland and the reference cited is James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 42/43, No. 1/4 (Fall, 2004 - Summer, 2006), pp. 17-21. The National Library also holds another edition designed and lettered by Joseph Vogel in Columbus, Ohio (1980). (Available online - accessed 03.10.2018.)

A rare surviving copy of “The Holy Office” was put up for auction at Mealy’s in Dec. 2010, along with two letters to its former owner Thomas Koehler, dated 1937.

See Ian McKay - Sold@Auction (Art & Object / March 2011) - writes: The Holy Office, by James Joyce, €26,400 ($35,600) at Mealys of Castlecomer on December 14 [2010]. James Joyce’s earliest venture into print is almost mythical, since no copy of the broadside poem on the death of the Irish political leader Charles Parnell, Et Tu Healy - believed to have been printed in 1891 at the instigation of the proud father of the then nine-year-old Joyce - has ever come to light. So with entry A1 in Slocum & Cahoon’s standard bibliography only a collector’s dream, The Holy Office is the earliest obtainable separate publication, [i.e., apart from “The Day of Rabblement which was publishedwith another work by F. J. C. Skeffington in a pamphlet called Two Essays] but it too is of the utmost rarity.  Another broadside poem, it is an artistic and literary statement and, to quote his biographer, Richard Ellman[n], a ‘first overt angry declaration that he would pursue candour while his contemporaries pursued beauty,’ those bathing in the “Celtic Twilight:” Yeats, Synge, Gogarty, and others are damned, and Joyce proclaims his role as purgative. ‘That they may dream their dreamy dreams / I carry off their filthy streams ... Thus I relieve their timid arses / Perform my office of Katharsis.’  The Holy Office was distributed privately amongst his friends, but his bibliographers have determined that there were two distinct printings in the years 1904-5, one in Dublin and the other in Pola, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Pula in Croatia), where the writer was living and teaching at the time. No copies of the Dublin edition are extant. Stanislaus Joyce, his brother, claimed that the Dublin printer declined to hand over copies as they had not been paid. Only three or four of the Pola copies are recorded.  The very copy on which Slocum & Cahoon based their bibliographical entry A2, this one was owned by Thomas Koehler, one of Joyce’s close friends during his early days in Dublin, and a much later but related letter from Koehler to Joyce was part of the lot. In 2004, at Christie’s London, the copy in the Quentin Keynes library sold for £28,800, then $53,155.

Available online; accessed 03.10.2018.

See Sotheby’s (London) in 2015: Joyce, James - The Holy Office [Pola - late 1904/Early 1905]; estimate £12,000-18,000; broadside printed on one side on white wove paper (289 x 221mm.). FIRST EDITION, (though an earlier edition was reputed to have been printed in Dublin, none are known to have survived), one of probably less than 100 copies, Thomas Koehler’s copy, inscribed on the reverse in his hand ‘Joyce | The Holy Office | Sept. 09’, folded for mailing with short splits at ends of vertical crease [with]: autograph letter signed by Koehler to Joyce (12, Charleville Road, Rathmines, Dublin, 12 February 1937), sending him one of Koehler’s works and recalling that ‘I still have a copy of the “Holy Office”’ (probably a retained draft), with envelope; together in collector’s black chemise and morocco backed box by the Chelsea Bindery. [Note: the ‘retained draft’ is in fact a printed copy presumably dropped in his letter-box by Stanislaus in circulating the poem in Dublin, as asked by Joyce: BS].

Sotheby’s Catalogue note: The earliest extant Joyce publication, from the library of Joyce’s friend Thomas Koehler (sometimes Keller) who - so reports the author's brother Stanislaus - was the recipient of the first copy of the work, as Joyce had instructed. Koehler and Joyce had become good friends in the years before Joyce's departure for Europe in 1904; Koehler later became manager of the printing firm Hely’s, where Leopold Bloom would once have worked. No copy of Joyce’s supposed first publication, “Et Tu, Healy!”, a poem written at the age of nine and printed by his father, has ever been located. Cites Slocum & Cahoun’s: Copies of “The Holy Office”, scabrous attack on members of the Irish Literary Revival and other literary compatriots, and a declaration of Joyce’s alternative aesthetic, was printed at the author’s expense in Pola - then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire - between November 1904 and March 1905. Copies were then sent by the author to Russell, Gogarty and other targets of the piece in Dublin. The poem had been written in Dublin in the summer of 1904 before Joyce and Nora’s elopement to the Continent. Joyce initially sent it to Constantine Curran, editor of the University College magazine St. Stephen's, but the editor returned the ‘unholy thing’ to the author with a humorous letter on 8 August; Joyce then undertook to publish the broadside himself, but when the printer, at the end of the same month, asked him to pay for the broadsheets and to collect them, he could not find the money (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce ([rev. edn.] 1982), p. 167)’.

See Sotheby‘s - online; accessed 03.10.2018.

[ See also page-images of “The Holy Office” copies in BL, NLI and Sotheby’s (2015)- as attached. ]

“Gas from the Burner” (1912): On 12th September 1912, travelling from Dublin to Trieste immediately after the destruction of the would-be First Edition of Dubliners by the printer John Falconer, Joyce wrote a verse-broadside called “Gas from a Burner” which he then had printed on his arrival in Trieste and asked his brother Charlie to circulate back in the Irish capital which Joyce would never again visit. Extant copies are held at the British Museum, the National Library of Ireland and Tulsa University Library.

‘This lovely land that always sent / Her writers and artists to banishment / And in a spirit of Irish fun / Betrayed her leaders one by one./ ‘twas Irish humour, wet and dry, / Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye [...] / O Ireland my first and only love / Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove!’ (1912). See further under Quotations - infra

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Stephen Hero (1944) - ed. Theodore Spencer from the MS which was sold to the Lockwood Library (Buffalo) by Sylvia Beach in 1938.

For the origins of Stephen Hero in the rejection of the “Portrait” Essay of January 1904 by the editors of Dana, and Joyce’s resolve to write a novel which would indict them and Ireland - see the account given by Stanislaus Joyce in his Dublin Diary, ed. George Healey (1963; rev. & enl. as Complete Dublin Diary, 1971) - as infra.

For a Chronology of the Composition of Stephen Hero - see “Chronology of Works” [to be viewed in this frame or in a separate window. ]

Stephen Hero (1944): Sylvia Beach received a portion of the MS as a gift from Joyce [in 1935], and sold it to Harvard College Library in 1938, these being pp.519-902 - the first 518 pages having apparently disappeared. The 383 extant pages have a kind of unity in themselves, the period covered by occupies the last 80 pages of A Portrait in the Jonathan Cape Edn. The text in the edition of Stephen Hero published in 1963 [London 1969] consists of a total of 391 MSS pages, comprised of those given to Sylvia Beach together with 25 more bought acquired from Stanislaus Joyce by John Slocum for the Yale Univ. Library in 1951 [Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library]. These latter - being pp.477-78, 481-89, 491-97 and 499-505 of the original MS - were added out of chronological order to the edition of 1959 [that is, made to follow the originally published text]. These 5 pages are held in the Cornell Collection, are largely occupied by the Mullingar episode which Richard Ellmann has identified as part of Chapter XIII. In the 1977 edition prepared by Slocum and Cahoon, those sold by Sylvia Beach in 1938 appear as pp.27-208 and are followed by additional MS pages, now pp.208-20, being pp.477ff. of the MS original. (See Thomas E. Connolly, ‘Stephen Hero’, in Companion to Joyce Studies, ed. Bowen & Carens, 1984, p.245).

See Stanislaus Joyce’s - account of the origins of Stephen Hero (in Complete Dublin Diary, ed. George Healey, Cornell 1971; rep. Dublin 1994) - 29 Feb. 1904: ‘I suggested the title of a paper of Jim’s which was commissioned for a new review to be called Dana in February last. [...] Jim has turned the paper into a novel the title of which - “Stephen Hero” - I also suggested. He has written eleven [19] chapters. The chapters are extremely well written in a style which seems to me to be altogether original. It is a lying autobiograpy and a raking satire. He is putting nearly all his acquaintances in it, and the Catholic Church comes in for a bad quarter of an hour. [...]’

See also The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. George H. Healey, Anna Livia Press Edn. 1994, pp.19-20; prev. in Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. Healey, Cornell UP; London: Faber & Faber 1962, p.25; also rep. in Robert H. Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, Vol. 1, p.112.

[For longer extracts, see under Stanislaus Joyce, as infra. Note also his second and slightly variant account - as infra. Stanislaus adds MS marginalia listing parody-names he himself thought up - e.g., “Sighing Simon”, “Stuck-up Stephen”, “Morose Maurice”, at al. [ibid.].

Note: that Jorn Barger contests the veracity and consistency of Stanislaus’s account - as copied under Stanislaus Joyce, infra. ]

Herbert Gorman writes of A Portrait when first conceived [as Stephen Hero] as - ‘a personal history, as it were, of the growth of the mind, his own mind, and his own intensive absorption in himself and what he had been and how he had grown out of the Jesuitical garden of his youth. He endeavored to see himself objectively, to assume a godlike poise of watchfulness over the small boy and youth he called Stephen [Daedalus] and who was really himself.’ (Quoted in Alexander Atkins, ‘Why did Joyce Burn His Manuscript?’, at Atkins aBooksShelfz,- online; accessed 05.03.2023; see Gorman’s more extensive remarks under Joyce > Commentary - supra.]

Chronology - For a time-line of the composition of Stephen Hero, see “Chronology of Works” in Appendix > Schema - in this frame, or as attached. For remarks on the supposed circumstances of its beginning, see under Stanislaus Joyce - as infra.

Stephen Hero: Chronology of Composition (from Excomologosis, TCD 1979)

In the first month of 1907, he signalled his intention of abandoning the work (‘Is there any use continuing it?’ [SL143]), when he could hardly have had much more to do than the closing part which was to adumbrate the author's ‘voluntary exile’ [SL56]. When Richards renewed encouragements in 1912, Joyce thought of the manuscript again: ‘If only my book is published [i.e. Dubliners] then I will plunge into my novel and finish it.’ [SL204] From this, it is not quite clear whether the parts already written had been immolated four years earlier, as Herbert Gorman recorded [James Joyce, 1940, p. 149] or on Joyce’s return to Trieste after his stay in Dublin in Autumn 1912. The latter is more likely as answering better to the story Joyce purveyed that he had destroyed the MS in a fit of frustration at the treatment meted out to him by his Richards. In any case, A Portrait was begun afresh and completed within two years, 1912-24, though the idea of changing the title of the manuscript back to that of the early autobiographical essay of 1904 had struck him twice at least before that date, in 1905 [SL56] and 1909 [SL155]. 7 Jan 1904: A Portrait of the Artist (Dana essay) 2 Feb 1904: Conversation with Stanislaus (supra) 24 Oct 1904: Joyce leaves Ireland with 12 chapters ? 1906: adds chapter XXV Feb 1906: tells Richards he has ‘1,000 pages’ Jan 1907: ‘Is there any point continuing it?’ 3 Sept 1907: Joyce told Stanislaus that he would rewrite SH completely after the completion of “The Dead” 22 Aug 1912: ‘If only my book [Dubliners] is published then I will plunge into my novel and finish it.’ In Starchamber Quiry, Hugh Kenner writes: ‘no one knows precisely when SH was rewritten as AP.' (‘Notes towards an Anatomy of “Modernism“’, in A Starchamber Quiry: A James Joyce Centennial Volume 1882-1982 (London: Methuen 1982), [p.17?]

—Bruce Stewart, Excomologosis: A Study of the Epistemological Methods of James Joyce’s Literary Art from Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake [Ph.D] (TCD 1979), p.83.

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Stephen Hero (1944) - See Theodore Spencer, Introduction, Stephen Hero [1944] (London: Triad 1977, 1986): ‘There is some confusion about the date of this manuscript. In her catalogue Miss Beach, to whom Joyce originally gave it, says that it dates from 1903, and adds the following sentence: “When the manuscript came back to its author, after the twentieth publisher had rejected it, he threw it in the fire, from which Mrs. Joyce, at the risk of burning her hands, rescued these pages.”’

See however Bozena Berta Delimata [b. 9 Feb. 1917], ‘Reminiscences of a Joyce Niece’, ed. by Virginia Moseley, in James Joyce Quarterly, 19, 1 (Fall 1981), pp. 45-62: ‘Two of my mother’s recollections about their family life during the years before she married remain vivid in my own memory. When Uncle Jim had a tiff once with Aunt Nora over her not taking his writing seriously, my mother happened by to see him stuffing a manuscript into the lighted oven and Aunt Nora still laughing. Mamma ran over immediately and snatched out as much as she could, but some five hundred pages were burnt. So were her hands. Next day he bought her some mittens, a collar, and a bow to match.’ ([q.p.])

[Theodore Spencer - cont.:] ‘This story is to some extent supported by Mr. Herbert Gorman, who says in his life of Joyce, writing of the year 1908 [James Joyce, NY 1940, p.196]: “Joyce burned a portion of Stephen Hero in a fit of momentary despair and then stared the novel anew in a more compressed form.” No surviving page of the manuscript shows any sign of burning. / Joyce himself was not very communicative on the subject. When the present writer wrote to him about the manuscript at the end of 1938, he received a reply from Joyce’s secretary which said: “Apparently the very large MS. of about 1,000 pages of the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he calls a schoolboy’s [11] production written when he was nineteen or twenty, has been sold in lots to different institutions in America. He feels that he can do nothing in the matter except to state this fact which he certainly can scarcely be blamed for not having foreseen at the moment of the presentation he made of it.”’

Note: Spencer further quotes Joyce’s letter to Grant Richards of 13 March 1906 speaking of SH as half-finished: “You suggest I should write a novel in some sense autobiographical. I have already written a thousand pages of such a novel, as I think I told you, 914 to be accurate. I calculate that these twenty-five chapters, about half the book, run into 150,000 words. But is is quite impossible for me in present circumstances to think the rest of the book much less to write it.”’ (Spencer, pp.11-12; see Letters, Vol. II, 1966, pp.131-32 - also given in Chronology of Works, as attached.)

Spencer inserted an editorial remark at the end of the first [unnumbered] chapter of Stephen Hero (1944) - as follows: ‘In the MSS. “End of First Episode of V” is written in red crayon at this point.’ (Spencer, ed., Stephen Hero; Cape Edn., 1969, p.32.) See also Spencer’s further comments on Stephen Hero under Commentary, supra, and note Hans Walter Gabler’s corrections to the chapter-numbers of the 1944 edition of the novel - infra.]

Note: On 22 Aug. 1912 Joyce wrote to his brother that he would plunge in and finish A Portrait [... &c.] if Dubliners were printed (Letters, II, p.310). It appears to follow that the MS which suffered at Joyce’s hands during a fit of frustrated - aggravated by Nora’s scorn - was that of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
  The fact that there is no fire-damage on the surviving remnant of Stephen Hero suggests that the MS which was so-treated was the version rewritten as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Here the date of Eileen Joyce’s arrival in Trieste is pertinent since A Portrait had been in progress since 1907 - in November of which year the first chapter was already finished. In fact, Chapter XXV was probably complete early 1906 (by Grant Richards, 13 March 1906). Eileen arrived in Trieste in January 1910 and cannot have ‘rescued’ the MS before then.
 Eileen Joyce married Frantisek Schaurek on 12 April 1915 and the couple remained in Trieste for some time before moving to Prague [?date]. Her daughter’s saying that ‘she happened by’ suggests that she was living elsewhere - as could only have been the case if she was married. If this is so, then the episode of the burning and rescue of the MS must have fallen after April 1915.
  It happens that Grant Richards delivered his decision not to publish A Portrait on 18 May 1915 - and this might have triggered Joyce’s fit of rage with the manuscript; but, in fact, the serialised of the novel in The Egoist had already begun by Jan. 1915. [BS 24.05.2014; see also Chronology of Works, as attached.]

Note: It is now apparent that the allusion to burnt pages refers to Chaps. 1-3 of A Portrait of the Artist which Joyce threw away in disgust at the persistent difficulties and ultimate frustration surrounding the publication of Dubliners in 1911. (BS 2023; see Jorn Barger, ‘Resources for A Portrait’, online [defunct 04.03.2023.]

Stephen Hero - [Theodore Spencer, cont.]: ‘Joyce had the bulk of his library, left in Trieste in the care of his brother Stanislaus, forwarded by him to Paris when he settled there [1919]; among the papers were the MSS pages of Stephen Hero which Joyce in time gave to Sylvia Beach; but Stanislaus ‘retained a certain number of manuscript items including twenty-five additional pages of Stephen Hero which were purchased by John J. Slocum in 1950’ - and are included in the 1956 revised edition of the novel (ed. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon). The additional material is discontinous with the pages held by Sylvia Beech, and begin: “nations. They were held out to say: We are along - come: and the voices said to them: We are your people: and the air was thick with their company as they called to him, their kinsmen, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.” (1956 edn., p.240.) Written here between paragraphs in blue crayon is the holograph line: ‘Departure for Paris’ - and this is followed by the Mullingar episode, which is clearly a unified episode in spite of two, one and one pages being missing at different points.’ (See John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, Foreword to Stephen Hero, Jonathan Lane 1956 edition [and reps.]; Grafton edn. 1977, & edns. 1982, 1984, 1986.) [See also Epiphany 30 - as attached.]

Slocum and Cahoon, Foreword to the Revised Edition [1956] (London: Jonathan Cape 1969): ‘[...] The words “Departure for Paris”, words that mark the end of A Portrait, have been written by Joyce in blue crayon across the page at the conclusion of the first eight lines [of MS p.477, destined to become the last part of the diary entry of 16th April at the conclusion of A Portrait]. It is probable, though by no means certain, that the pages preceding page 477 were discarded as they were used [9] in the creation of A Portrait. It is also probable that the missing pages from this episode included descriptions or dialogues that eventually found their way into A Portrait. Joyce’s known economy of episode and phrase was such that even the rejected portions of his manuscripts usually contributed heavily to the published work.’ (pp.9-10.)

Further: ‘[...] James Joyce’s copy of D’Annunzio’s The Child of Pleaure bears Joyce’s signature and the words “Mullingar July.5.1900” the manuscript of his translation of Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang is inscribed “Summer, 1901. MS/Mullingar. Westmeath.” (Joyce altered the actual events considerably in representing Mullingar as the home of Stephen’s godfather Philip McCann, who had no connection with Mullingar and had died in 1898.) This fiction is continued in the later pages of Stephen Hero, where Mr. Fulham is mentioned repeatedly as the source of money for Stephen’s university expenses. It is conceivable that an undiscovered patron is represented by the figure of the godfather. [...; p.10] There are also hints that he originally intended to give Mr. Fulham a more important role in his book; when his plans changed, the episode became a little irrelevant.’ (Slocum & Cahoon, op. cit., p.11.) [See Stephen Hero, rev. edn., Jonathan Cape 1969, p.10-11.)

Stephen Hero (1944): The idea that the title of Stephen Hero is owing to “Turpin Hero”, an old English ballad which Stephen mentions in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (corr. edn. 1964, &c., p.219) seems to have originated with Hugh Kenner in Dublin’s Joyce (1955, p.109.) There the critic draws out a detailed analogy between the ballad, which Stephen cites as an example of the progression from lyric to epic by a process of impersonalisation (‘that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person’). For Kenner, to whom Joyce is the latter-day embodiment of the Flaubertian artist setting out to épater le bourgeois, an extended comparison can be drawn between Stephen and the picaresque highwayman who ‘spends must of the ballad achieving gestes at the expense of a gallery of middle-class dummies’ (p.109). [See note on Yeats’s use of the tripartite series, lyric, epic, drama - infra.]

Further: ‘Joyce first conceived the story of Stephen Dedalus in a picaresque mode. The original title was meant to incorporate the ballad of Turpin Hero, a reference to which still survives in the final text P252/244. (Kenner, op. cit. p.109.) [...] The ballad ends with Turpin in jail condemned to the gallows; Stephen Hero was presumably to end, as the Portrait does, with Stephen Protomartyr on the brink of continental exile, acknowledged enemy of the Dublin people. This Stephen is an engaging fellow with an explosive laugh, S59/49, an image of the young Joyce whom Yeats compared to William Morris “for the joyous vitality one felt in him” or of the student Joyce who emerges from his brother’s Memoir [quotes Memoir:] ‘Uncompromising in all tha concerned his artistic integrity, Joyce was, for the3 rest, of a sociable and amiable disposition. [...]’ (Kenner, op. cit, p.110; see full-text version in RICORSO Library > “Criticism > Major Authors”, via index, or attached.

Note: Richard Ellmann has given it as a fact that Stephen Hero is based on “Turpin Hero” in a note to the Selected Letters of James Joyce (1975) where he writes: ‘When “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was rejected by the review Dana, Joyce decided on his birthday, 2 February 1904, to rewrite it as Stephen Hero, after the ballad of “Turpin Hero”. Stanislaus Joyce said that both titles had been suggested to his brother by him.’ (Letters, II, 1966, p.83, n.10; Selected Letters of James Joyce, Faber 1975, p.56, n.1.)

Stephen Hero (1944) - Joyce wrote to Stanislaus (10 Jan. 1907, Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome): ‘The other day I was thinking about my novel. How long am I at it now? Is there any use continuing it? Everyone appears to think I am behaving very well better than they expected. But it’s not pleasant behaving well to please people. I understand Nora is about to have another child. [...] ‘ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.143.)

Stephen Hero (1944) - Hélène Cixous writes: ‘Stannie characterises this novel as a mendacious autobiography and a keen satire. The victims of the satire were at this stage simply everyone Joyce knew, and the Catholic Church; the work was an obvious reply to the editors’ rejection [i.e., the eds. of Dana].’ [Vide Stanislaus Joyce, ‘lying autobiography and raking satire’ - as supra] She goes on to quote the Complete Dublin Diary (p.12), as cited in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, p.152; Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce [trans. Sally Purcell], London: John Calder 1972, p. 230) - viz.:

‘[...] It is to be almost autobiographical, and naturally as it comes from Jim, satirical. He is putting a large number of his acquaintances into it, and those Jesuits whom he has known. [...; &c.]’ (The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce [Cornell 1962], ed. George H. Healey, Anna Livia Press, Dublin 1994; p.12.)

Note: Cixous he briefly summarises the chronology in these terms: ‘In September 1907, [Joyce] decided to move on from Stephen Hero to the Portrait, a work which was not finished until 1913. On the other hand, he was already planning to turn the novella [sic] “Ulysses” into a book.’ In a footnote she quotes Joyce’s remark to Stanislaus on Mr. Hunter [as infra]. (Cixous, op. cit., 1972, p.228.) Note: the date of Stanislaus’s entry is 2 Feb. 1904; the version given here is taken from the Complete Diary, 1994 Edn. [BS].

Stephen Hero (1944): Hans Walter Gabler, Preface, A Portrait [ ... &c.]: A Facsimile Manuscript of the Manuscript Fragments of ‘Stephen Hero’ (James Joyce Archive, Vol. 8), consists of extant portions of Stephen Hero beginning with Chapter IX at MS p.477 and dealing with Joyce’s student days at the Royal University. On chapter numbers in Stephen Hero (ed. Spencer 1944; rev. edn. John J. Slocum [see infra] & Herbert Cahoon, 1955 & 1963), Gabler explains that ‘the 11 chapters of the University College episode in the MS are numbered [XV] to XXV. Spencer’s edition mistakenly counts 12 chaps. and numbers them XV to XXVI. The editorial error arises in Chap. XVIII. Halfway through MS Chap. XVIII, at the bottom of p.610, appears the note ‘End of Second Episode of V’ ...] these [i.e., this and others like it such as ‘End of First Episode of V’] as we now know, are markings related to the composition of Portrait [... U]nfortunately Spencer assumed a revisional new chapter division and, introducing XIX, renumbered all subsequent chapters [...] Correctly speaking Chaps. XVIII and XIX are one chapter, [being] Chap. XVIII; and Chaps. XX to XXVI should be correctly numbered XIX to XXV.’ (See John Paul Riquelme, ‘Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait’, in Attridge et al., eds., Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 1990, p.129.)

Gabler writes: ‘[Spencer] either misread the blue crayon entry “Chapter XVIII”, or believed Joyce to be in error about it. All it presumably means, however, is that Joyce for some reason took the Stephen Hero manuscript apart at this point and reminded himself that the pages removed still belonged to chapter XVIII. Theodor Spencer unfortunately assumed a new chapter division and, introducing “XIX”, he proceeded to renumber all subsequent chapters. Users of the Stephen Hero editions must therefore be warned that chapters XVIII and “XIX” are one chapter, chapter XVIII, and that chapters “XX” to “XXVI” should correctly be numbered XIX to XXV. Only with this correction can the editions be matched against Joyce’s comments about the novel in his letters.’ (Quoted in lana Natali. ‘The Ur-Portrait: Stephen Hero ed il processo di creazione artistica in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ [doct. thesis], Firenze Univ. Press 2008, p.vii - available online; accessed 12.11.2021 [orig. with diacriticals as per the surrounding Italian text - e.g., «XX», &c.].)

See also Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; 1965 Edn.): Ellmann provides a running chronology of the chapters of Stephen Hero, as follows: ‘By March 15 [1905] he had finished 18 chapters, 20 by 20 April 4, 21 by May, and 24 by June. The last of these chapters represented Stephen’s proposal that Emma Clery go to bed with him for one night; Joyce was justly proud of his skill in this scene. He sent the chapters off to Stanislaus with instructions to show them only to Cosgrave and Curran. Curran lent them to Kettle, but when Stanislaus told his brother, Joyce ordered him peremptorily to recover the manuscript. He did not distrust Kettle, but Kettle’s friends. He enjoyed conspiring against conspirators. / While he still had 39 chapters to write in Stephen Hero, he was able to bring Dubliners to completion much more rapidly [...]. (p.215.)

Lyric, epic, drama: Note that Yeats identifies the periods of narrative poetry, the epic or ballad period,followed by the dramatic period, and after that the lyric period — all in his Irish Literary Soc. lecture ‘Nationality and Literature’, 91 May 1893; printed John Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, Vol. II, 1975, pp.267-275); p.271.

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Chamber Music (1907), compiled for book-publication 1904, sent Chamber Music to Grant Richards Oct. 8 1904; Chamber Music [1st Edn.] (London: Elkin Mathews 1907); Chamber Music, ed. W. Y. Tindall (NY: Columbia UP 1954); Do. (London: Jonathan Cape 1971), 40pp. [36 poems].

Chamber Music (1907): When it came to preparing it for publication in autumn 1906, Joyce repudiated the title as ‘too complacent’ saying, ‘I should prefer a title which to a certain extent repudiated the book, without altogether disparaging it’, but was persuaded back to it by Stanislaus (Ellmann, op. cit., p.241; see longer extract, infra.). Note however that Stanislaus makes a denial of the origin of the poem-collection’s title in this scatalogical context: ‘I have already suggested that Jim had accepted the title Chamber Music for the colection. Another version of the original of the title is given in Herbert Gorman’s biography of my brother, but the story there told, which seems to have tickled the fancy of American critics and been the occasion of at least one book, is false, whatever its source.’ (Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 1958, p.209.)

... Tinkle?: The title was purportedly inspired by the sound of a prostitute urinating in a brothel during a reading of the poems given by Joyce in her room while he and St. John Gogarty were at a brothel. In Ulysses, Bloom reflects: ‘O, look we are so! Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustic that is. Tinkling. empty vessels make most noise. [...] the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water.’ Bodley Head Edn., 1967, p.365; quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.160 & ftn.)

Chamber Music (2) - Joyce wrote to Stanislaus: ‘The reason I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent. I should prefer a title which to a certain extent repudiated the book, without altogether disparaging it.’ (Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 18 Oct. 1906; Letters, II, p.82; quoted in Stephen Heath (‘Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce’, in Attridge & Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce, Cambridge UP 1984, p.45.)