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144 J A M E S [ 1904 ]asked, 'Where have you been for two days? Were you ill?' 'Yes.' 'Whatwere you suffering from?' 'Inanition,' Joyce answered without hesitation. 3His hunger fed his pride.John Joyce, still mourning his wife and dislocated by her death, wasexasperated by both sons and daughters. James's idleness he might condone,but Charles was volatile, and drank so heavily that he becameknown at the police station, and Stanislaus was ostentatiously sober andsurly. To make matters worse, Stanislaus quit his clerkship at Apothecaries'Hall on January 30, 1904, and joined James in sensitive inactivity,4trying to decide what to do next. John Joyce felt put upon. After drinkingheavily at the Ormonde bar he would return home, tonguelash his sonsand perhaps whip any small daughter, who happened to be within reach.'An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died,' he wouldsay, and rebuke them for fancied ingratitude, 'Wouldn't care if I wasstretched out stiff.' He anticipated their response to his death, 'He's dead.The man upstairs is dead.' He threatened to go back to Cork, 'I'll leaveyou all where Jesus left the jews.'* Margaret, as the oldest daughter, hadalready determined to become a nun, but she kept a promise made toher dying mother by remaining until the children were a few years older.Then, in 1909, she became a Sister of Mercy. 5James Joyce withdrew too, but in his own way. The very incongruityof ambition in such a setting helped to sustain it in him. In the gloomy,rancorous house, he prepared to become great. At the beginning of 1904he learned that Eglinton and another writer he knew, Fred Ryan, werepreparing to edit a new intellectual journal named Dana after the Irishearth-goddess. On January 7 he wrote off in one day, and with scarcelyany hesitation, an autobiographical story that mixed admiration for himselfwith irony. At the suggestion of Stanislaus, he called it 'A Portrait ofthe Artist,' and sent it to the editors. This was the extraordinary beginningof Joyce's mature work. It was to be remolded into Stephen Hero, a verylong work, and then shortened to a middle length to form A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man. But this process took ten years.In 'A Portrait of the Artist,' for the firsttime since writing A BrilliantCareer, Joyce was willing to attempt an extended work, to give up thepurity of lyrics and epiphanies. He was resolved to gather the stages ofhis spiritual experience together in a connected pattern. It is difficult tosay whether what he wrote was essay or story, for it has elements of both,the essay strained by apostrophe and dramatic exhortation, the narrativepresented for the most part discursively. At the age of twenty-one Joycehad found he could become an artist by writing about the process ofbecoming an artist, his life legitimizing his portrait by supplying the sitter,while the portrait vindicated the sitter by its evident admiration for* His daughters confirm the evidence of Ulysses (238 [306]) that John Joyce made theseremarks.