And A Very Good Time It Was: A Short Life of ... - The Modern Word

Joyce’s family was beginning to notice his genius, and his brother Stanislaus (two years
younger than him and his first supporter) ignored his assignments at Belvedere and instead read
what his brother did. Staislaus later claimed he, and not Nora’s Barnacle’s unpunctuated and
rambling letters or a forgotten novel by Dujardin, gave Joyce the inspiration for the interior
monologue. As children, while Joyce and Stanislaus fell asleep, they would talk and examine the
intricacies of their sleepy speech. 14 Much of Stanislaus’ later resentment of his brother begins
here, as Joyce was obviously the favored son: he was given special treatment at home around
examination time and, considering the size of the family, he was still given his own room. And,
less than a mile away from home, was the City of Dublin Public Library on Capel Street, whose
stacks the young Joyce could credit as perhaps the true start of his independent education.
In November, 1896, Joyce attended the hell-fire retreat that comprises most of chapter 3 of
Portrait, and for a brief time he had his own religious revival. But this new strain of piety did not
last for long, and as he abandoned religion completely over the next few years, his faith now
became centered on art. He wrote his first books, the prose sketches of Silhouettes and the poems
of Moods. Both foretell, in the fragments that survive, his later journal of Epiphanies in prose, and
the poetry that would become his first published book, Chamber Music.
Peter Costello 15 places the date of Joyce’s first sexual experience in the second week of
August, 1898. After attending a play on South King Street, he came upon a prostitute. Beginning
in that fall and probably for awhile after he met his wife six years later, he continued to see
prostitutes. The experience seems to have the double-effect we would expect from Joyce—both
disgust at the act but a necessary need for the experience; as Costello says, Joyce “was not a
sentimentalist; he was in search of a deeper reality.” 16 Even here we can perhaps see Joyce’s
aesthetic at work: though this “deeper reality” could be both pleasurable or unpleasant, there was
no reason to judge (or avoid) the unpleasant for its own sake: life is life.
Joyce read voraciously, and his most important discovery was the Norwegian playwright
Henrik Ibsen, which Edna O’Brien says “ranks for Joyce as definitive as Saint Paul’s conversion
on the way to Damascus.” 17 Barely known in Ireland (and where known, derided), Ibsen
convinced Joyce of an art beyond the simple moralizing didacticism he’d grown up with. And
even though a census form states Joyce and Stanislaus could both speak and write Irish 18 , this is
no more evidence of his devotion to the then-thriving Irish Revival than knowing Latin was
indicative of his Catholic faith. Because just as Joyce could absorb, reject, and use to his own
means the teachings of the Catholic Church, the same is true for the Irish Revival. And while
Joyce and Ireland are indistinguishable now, the only way he could truly write about Ireland was
by becoming a European, which required a different emphasis and a wholly personal (but at the
same time universal) mythology.
In the summer of 1897 he found the secular inspiration he needed in seeing a beautiful girl on
Sandymount Strand. Described in Portrait, she was the symbol that freed him to follow art and
nothing else:
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She
seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and
beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure
save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the
flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips,
where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down.
Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind
her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of
some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and
touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.