Perceptions of Portrait

I loved this 1958 essay by John Kelleher about James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. It is a book I have read probably 4 times, all the way through, and I feel that I am never done with it. I can never say, “Okay, won’t be reading that again, probably.” There are only a few books like that, for me.

Portrait continues to morph, and grow – in my perception as a reader. It never seems like the same book twice.

Kelleher writes about this:

I remember that when I first encountered Stephen Dedalus I was twenty and I wondered how Joyce could have known so much about me. That is what I mean by the sort of reading the book will continue to get, whatever literary fashion may decree. Perhaps about the third reading it dawned on me that Stephen was, after all, a bit of a prig; and to that extent I no longer identified myself with him. (How could I?) Quite a while later I perceived that Joyce knew that Stephen was a prig; that, indeed, he looked on Stephen with quite an ironic eye. So then I understood. At least I did until I had to observe that the author’s glance was not one of unmixed irony. There was compassion in it too, as well as a sort of tender, humorous pride. By this time I was lecturing on Joyce, and I was having a terrible time with the book. I could not coordinate what I had to say about it; and the students; as their papers showed, were mostly wondering how Joyce could have known so much about them–which was fortunate, for the lectures made very little sense, and it was well that the victims had their own discoveries to distract them.

Beautiful!

I also very much appreciated Kelleher’s thoughts on Joyce’s technique and themes. Because Joyce is often misunderstood. As Joyce himself said in regards to Ulysses:

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book [Ulysses], or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

If you miss the fun, if you miss that part of his work … you miss most of it.

Kelleher writes:

He was past master of the confessorial technique that confesses nothing because it blabs too much. He could rarely permit himself to write simply from the heart, though when he did–as in the ending of Finnegans Wake or in the poem, “Ecce Puer,” on his father’s death and his grandson’s birth–a most poignant power was released. Such passages give the lie to his usual affectation of wearing his heart up his sleeve. Why, then, the affectation? Partly, perhaps, because his artistic discipline was primarily late nineteenth century, art for art’s sake, absolute subordination of subject to form, and because his subject was usually his own, often bitterly unhappy experience. What impelled him, I think, to choose and continue such a discipline was not just his artistic proclivities or the fact that he grew up in a cultural province where that view of art and the artist was still high fashion, but rather that he had a very Irish nature (counter to another Irish nature) that instinctively chose mockery if the alternative was tears. It is useless to observe that tears might often have been better for his health or that there are many places in his work where open emotion could have been admitted without loss of integrity. He was what he was. He hated what he called the “whine” in Irish poetry. When he noticed the impulsive tear and smile mingled in Ireland’s eye his instinct was to give it a rough wipe. He did his best to keep his own eye dry in public. If he sometimes succeeded all too well, that was only what he intended.

Marvelous insight, I think. It’s a funny thing: the Irish have a reputation for being full of sentimentality and twee-ness … but the opposite is also true. Joyce despised sentimentality. Kelleher’s thoughts there are quite good.

And the ending of the article brought a lump to my throat. That is my response to his letters to his daughter Lucia as well. Upsetting. But full of love.

Joyce fans: Read the whole thing.

(Here is just one of my many posts about Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.)