James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

JAMES JOYCE was born on 2 February 1882 in Dublin, eldest of ten surviving children born to Mary Jane (May) Murray and John Joyce. Joyces father was then a Collector of Rates but the family, once prosperous, had just begun its slow decline into poverty. Educated first at the Jesuit Clongowes Wood and Belvedere Colleges, Joyce entered the Royal University (now University College, Dublin) in 1898. Four years later Joyce left Dublin for Paris with the intention of studying medicine but soon his reading turned more to Aristotle than physic. His mothers illness in April 1903 took him back to Dublin. Here he met and, on 16 June 1904, first stepped out with Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway. In October they left together for the Continent. Returning only thrice to Irelandand never again after 1912Joyce lived out the remainder of his life in Italy, Switzerland, and France.

The young couple went first to Pola, but soon moved to Trieste where Joyce began teaching English for the Berlitz School. Except for seven months in Rome, the Joyces stayed in Trieste for the next eleven years. Despite disputes with recalcitrant publishers, severe eye problems and the pressures of a growing family (both a son and a daughter were born), Joyce managed to write the poems that became Chamber Music (1907), as well as Dubliners (1914). He also began, abandoned, began again, and completed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which appeared first in instalments in The Egoist from 2 February 1914 (Joyces thirty-second birthday). (The first attempt, Stephen Hero, was published posthumously in 1944.) By the time the family moved to Zurich in July 1915, he had also begun Ulysses.

Over the next seven years, first in Zurich, later in Paris, Ulysses progressed. Partial serial publication in the Little Review (191718) brought suppression, confiscation, and finally conviction for obscenity. Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, offered to publish, and the first copies arrived in Joyces hands on 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday.

The acclaim publication brought placed Joyce at the centre of the literary movement only later known as Modernism, but he was already restlessly pushing back its borders. Within the year he had begun his next project, known only mysteriously as Work in Progress. This occupied him for the next sixteen years, until in 1939 it was published as Finnegans Wake. By this time, Europe was on the brink of war. When Germany invaded France the Joyces left Paris, first for Vichy then on to Zurich. Here Joyce died on 13 January 1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer. He was buried in Fluntern Cemetery.

JERI JOHNSON is senior Fellow in English, Exeter College, Oxford. She has written on Joyce, textual theory, feminist literary theory, and Virginia Woolf, and edited Joyces Ulysses and Dubliners for Oxford Worlds Classics.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

JAMES JOYCE

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JERI JOHNSON

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Editorial matter Jeri Johnson 2000

Text Copyright 1964 by the Estate of James Joyce

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First published 2000

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Joyce, James, 18821941.

A portrait of the artist as a young man / James Joyce; edited
with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson.

(Oxford worlds classics)

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Dublin (Ireland)Fiction. 2. Young menFiction. 3. ArtistsFiction. I. Johnson,
Jeri. II. Title. III. Oxford worlds classics (Oxford University Press)
PR6019.O9 P64 2000 823.912dc21 00-038595

ISBN 0192839985

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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WHENA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in instalments in the English little magazine the Egoist in 1914,

Everything Joyce ever published caused a commotion at least the equal of this. Dubliners, the volume of short stories which itself appeared in 1914, had been refused by scores of publishers, including two who agreed to print, then withdrew, one of whom went so far as to destroy the proofs already pulled for fear of being prosecuted for libel or obscenity. The stories were, he claimed, too frank, too willing to use real names of real people (including that of a recently dead king of England) in contexts and conversations less than flattering. By the time