ABSTRACT
From this point [1908-9] Joyce becomes for me, in retrospect, an heroic figure. He had ‘stooped under a dark tremendous sea of cloud’, confident that he would ‘emerge some day’, ‘using for my defence the only weapons I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning’. Pause on that word ‘exile’, a favourite one with Joyce. Why was it necesssry for him to conjure up the grandiose image of his rejection by his countrymen? Ireland, though famous for flights of wild geese, banishes nobody, and Dublin had no quarrel with her Dante; …
His mind meanwhile retained some illusions: for example, that he was a poet. He has, in fact, published more than one volume of poems; but I will take Æ’s word for it that most of them ‘might have been written by almost any young versifying sentimentalist’. Another illusion was that he could write, in the ordinary sense, a novel; for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which took him ten years to write, is no more a novel than is Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man. In style it is, for the most part, pompous and self-conscious, and in general we may say of it that it is one of those works which become important only when the author has done or written something else. That Joyce should have been able to make Ulysses out of much the same material gives the book now an extraordinary interest. It tells us a great deal about Joyce himself which we had hardly suspected, and both its squalor and its assumption wear quite a different complexion when
we know that the author eventually triumphed over the one and vindicated the other. Genius is not always what it is supposed to be, self-realization: it is often a spirit to which the artist has to sacrifice himself; and until Joyce surrendered himself to his genius, until he died and came to life in his Mephistopheles of mockery, he remained what Goethe called ‘ein trüber Gast auf der dunklen Erden’.
