Writing: In my head, mainly, the idea of typeset, letter presses.
Thinking about: What makes James Joyce James Joyce?
Oh, Leopold! This is why I'll never be taken seriously as a Joyce scholar. I think of Bugs, not Bloom. The only Bloom for me is Molly, big with seed.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast....
It was on this day in 1916 that James Joyce published his first novel: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce had tried to write the same story in several forms before. In 1904, he wrote an autobiographical essay, but it was rejected. [He wrote a volume of poems, Chamber Music, and a play, Exiles; now he branches into memoir. There is no suggestion for me that in the single-note poems or in the taking-turns voices of dramatic dialogue we're watching the development of a master of contrapuntes, whose voices in their rounds are dizzying]. When he got the rejection letter, he sat down at his kitchen table and sketched out a plan to expand the essay into a novel, and within a year, he had written 900 pages of a book about a character named Stephen Daedalus, entitled Stephen Hero.
Then he left Ireland, started teaching English for almost no money, and was trying to support his family. [He'd gone to Paris to study medicine, but found the lectures in anatomy and physiology to hard to follow; he had only schoolboy French]. He found it harder and harder to finish his novel. So he decided to write short stories instead, and he wrote a collection called Dubliners. A publisher in London accepted it, but then the publisher asked him to clean up some of his language. He did that, but then the publisher wanted the subject matter changed, then an entire story removed, and finally Joyce refused.
So Joyce decided to return to his novel. But he didn't like it anymore. He thought it was too conventional. So he started from scratch [the "desk drawer revision"], and he re-titled it A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Joyce had spent nearly 10 years trying to get his fiction published, and then, in 1913, he received two letters — one from a publisher who wanted to reconsider publishing Dubliners, and a second from Ezra Pound, who was looking for new fiction to publish in a magazine. Dubliners was published in 1914, and Pound published a serial version of A Portrait of the Artist. The complete novel came out on this day in 1916, with its famous first line: "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." [What do you think the WWI-era reader thought of this? I think there's the liberation of rhythm in the lines here that comes to fruition in Ulysses There's also the idea of the fairy tale as mythopoesis?].
The novel ends with Stephen Dedalus as a young man, vowing to leave Ireland and to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." [Away, come away--Yeats at the end of "The Hosting of the Sidhe"? Obverse of The Answerer, Fragarach, in Irish mythology--a sea sword brought from the other world, and no one can lie with this blade at his throat? And if there's so much Irish reference in Portrait, why did Joyce go to Greece/Homer for Ulysses]?
(Aside: Maybe there's another example of TS Eliot "borrowing?" On page 251, when there's Not this. Not this at all, p. 251. CF Prufrock?).
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