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dedalus_1947Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman
You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister
You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah
But what do you care? Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister
Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame
You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name
(Jokerman: Bob Dylan – Infidels, 1984)
Fittingly, it was on June 16th, Bloomsday, that I finished reading James Joyce: A New Biography, by Gordon Bowker. I found the book so captivating I read it at the same speed I normally reserve for good novels or great science fiction. I was fascinated and also troubled by what I learned of this eccentric artist. Who would have believed that a Joyce fan like me had NEVER read a comprehensive biography of one of the most lauded authors in English Literature? I plead guilty with no defense. I loved the stories in Dubliners, and was captivated by the hero in the novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I never got around to investigating the author. I was always satisfied with the many autobiographical items embedded in his works, and the tidbits of information I picked up from peripheral sources like magazine articles and travel books. I have to admit that since my introduction to Joyce in college, I was always more interested in him as an artist than as a man. As far as I was concerned, his work WAS the man, and I particularly loved his fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus. Well James Joyce the son, brother, man, husband, and father, whom I discovered in his biograph, did not reach the lofty pedestal upon which I had placed his fictional character. Joyce may have been an exceptional artist and genius, but he was such a flawed and weak man that my opinion of him was greatly challenged.
While Joyce became my idealization of an artist, he was never my favorite author. My favorite novelists were a pantheon of American writers I discovered in high school, beginning with Herman Wouk, Harper Lee, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, and John Steinbeck, and increasing in college with the addition of Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Heller. Two notable teachers – Mr. Thomas McCambridge, in high school, and a forgotten professor in college influenced this pantheon. Both teachers rhapsodized about the writers of The Lost Generation who became my lynch pins to literature. Joining these writers in my literary Olympus were their iconic characters: Jay Gatsby, Atticus Finch, Holden Caulfield, Tom Joad, and Jake Barnes. Of these American novelists, I would put Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby at the top of the list. Gatsby was clearly the favorite of my teachers, and he became the subject of my first REAL book report in high school.
Book reports have to be the most boring type of writing that exists, because it is simply a means by which a teacher checks on a student’s completion of a task – the reading of a book. If I were assigned a book to read, I would read it for fun and enjoyment, and then write the report by paraphrasing the synopsis on the side covers of the book. However, Mr. McCambridge challenged that approach when he assigned Gatsby. He explained that Fitzgerald had a message just for me in the book, and it was a message hidden in clear sight. The story had “a theme” which the author was expressing through his words and descriptions, and it was my job to discover it by following the clues. Gatsby was the first book in which I highlighted the words as I read, and it struck a chord with me on two levels. First, the words became important because Fitzgerald’s style was so approachable and engaging, and his descriptions were lyrically beautiful. Secondly, his central character called forth that uniquely American desire which I shared, to strive and achieve the unobtainable, which he expressed wonderfully in his last page:
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… and one fine morning --- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
It was only later in college, while reading the Norton Anthology of English Literature that I discovered the wonders of the English language in all its many expressions, and came across James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus.
In the quarter system of UCLA in the late 1960’s, a semester or, to be more accurate, a “tri-mester”, consisted of a 10-week period of time to complete a course. For The American Novel, this meant a delightful reading list of 10 novels, filled in with lectures three times a week. The English Lit course, on the other hand, covered the entire 20th Century using the Norton Anthology. The novels on the Required Reading List of this class had to be decreased and carefully selected. The only book that affected me the same way as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Until that course, I’d only heard about Joyce in terms of his being a member of “The Lost Generation”, and the author of a notorious book called Ulysses. Along with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, Joyce was simply another expatriate living in Paris after WWI. It was this course, with its emphasis on English literature that finally showcased Joyce; first through his short stories in the Dubliners, and then his first novel, Portrait of the Artist.
Reading Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist was an epiphany. From my professor I learned of Joyce’s epiphanies embedded in his stories, and his revolutionary use of the inner monologue, or stream of consciousness in his writing. I found his portrayal of Dubliners even more stunning, because they were so radically different from the stereotypic characterizations I’d seen of the Irish in movies and television. His characters were deeper and more complex, hiding the dark malevolent secrets we all shared. However, it was in Stephen Dedalus, the artist in Portrait, that I found the mirror to my own youthful conflicts and aspirations. Reading about Stephen’s education in Catholic schools, his struggles with sexual temptations and religious repression, and his desire to be free, were reflections of my own life. I identified with Stephen more than any other fictional character I had read about, and I envied his courage at rejecting the values and teachings of the Irish Catholic Church, the shackles of Irish nationalism, and courageously pursuing the creative life of the universal artist. The last lines of the novel on the eve of his self-imposed exile from Ireland thrill me to this day:
“Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead”.
So what would I say of James Joyce now, after having read a very comprehensive biography on his life? Was he the Stephen Dedalus character he created in Portrait and Ulysses, or was he someone else? Should I write about what he was, or what he wasn’t?
Well, to begin with, as a self-portrait, Joyce’s portrayal of Stephen was broadly accurate. Joyce was a gifted student, trained under Jesuit supervision. He became a recognized literary talent in Dublin and wrote for newspapers and periodicals, and he worked as an English tutor and teacher for Berlitz, the famous language school. He was a particular genius at words and language, with an ear and musical gift for song. However, rather than gravitating toward Irish nationalism, as many young Irishmen of his generation, Joyce found inspiration in the creative views and artistry of Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian author and playwright. That was the first surprise for me. Ibsen, not W.B. Yeats, the driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, was his guiding artistic star and model. Although he would only write about Dublin and Dubliners, Joyce, like Ibsen, would become a “man without a country”, a universal artist of the world, and not a parochial Irish author.
The biggest letdown was learning that in many ways Joyce became his father’s son – a failed businessman and spendthrift who was barely one step ahead of eviction and bankruptcy. Joyce always lived beyond his means, borrowing money from his brother, relatives, friends, and loan sharks, and never worrying about repayment. In many ways Joyce was a gifted conman. With his talent and charm he won the confidence of friends, siblings, artists, publishers, and wealthy patrons who recognized his exotic genius, and then Joyce exploited them unmercifully, without question or qualm. Oddly enough, this story has been told in many versions and languages – the self-centered, artistic genius who never sees beyond his art, and other people are simply a means to produce it. That’s Joyce in a nutshell.
My last shattered illusion was the hope that Joyce was a more prolific author than I suspected, and a comprehensive biography would finally unearth a treasure trove of unknown works to me. Well, surprise! My own thumbnail bibliography of Joyce’s work was pretty accurate after all:
Dubliners, 1914 – Portrait of the Artist, 1916 – Ulysses, 1922 – Finnegan’s Wake, 1939
The only writings I was unaware of were the early book reviews and essays he wrote while in Dublin, an early version of Portrait called Stephen Hero (1904-06), poems, a collection of poems called Chamber Music (1907), a rarely performed play called Exiles (1915), and a pocket book of poems, called Pomes Penneyeach (1927). Much of the material that he would include in Finnegan’s Wake was serialized in magazines and periodicals over the 15 years he struggled with it, and simply called it a “Work in Progress”.
More than anything else, what I learned from this biography was what Joyce WAS NOT. He was not a romantic Irish nationalist, not a prolific writer, and not a hardworking, self-sufficient, dependable man. What was he? He was clearly a genius of the English language who played with it like an improvisational master. He was an artist who created words and descriptions and took them to the outer edges of what readers and critics found acceptable. In essence, Joyce created his own language, making up rhyming words and run-on sentences that seemed to have no meaning unless one had the codebook. Many readers of the serialized portions of Finnegan called him a fraud, and claimed that he was mocking them with nonsensical, make-believe words, limericks, and impossibly intricate sentences, and calling it “literature”. In a fashion, Joyce did play with language like a trickster, or joker. He reminded me of a 20th Century representation of that universal trickster of myth and legend: the coyote of Indian legends, Loki of Norse mythology, and Maui of Polynesian myths. Joyce too was “a clever, mischievous person who achieved his ends through the use of superior intelligence and trickery. A trickster who tricked others simply for their amusement, to help them survive in a dangerous world, or to demonstrate the absurd chaos that the world needs to function”. Then again, others found a unique beauty in his words – a beauty I HEARD when I employed an audio book to listen to a reading of Ulysses. Without a doubt, Joyce’s work is best HEARD than read. Joyce plays language with an ingenious, whimsical style, like a jazz artist improvising his music.
I suppose there is one benefit to having waited almost 50 years to learn these facts about Joyce and how he lived his life. At 69 years of age I’m a lot less judgmental than I was at 18 or 20. Especially after having spent the last 8 years listening to incarcerated men tell me of their flaws, failings, and addictions. Joyce would have fit right in with these imprisoned men. He was a selfish, egoistical, and impulsive conman. He was a manipulator and scoundrel. At the same time he was a child of his time and place, living under the dual oppression of the Irish Catholic Church and British Imperialism. At his core Joyce was Irish and that always came out in his stories, descriptions and writing. But he was foremost a genius of the world and an artist of the English language. He was an artist of the genre that included Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh – he was obsessed and self destructive, left ruin in his wake, but created truth and beauty in his art. I can’t be disappointed that Joyce never lived up to the qualities he projected onto his creation Stephen Dedalus, or his other characters. They were fiction, and he was real. I can’t confuse the artist with his creation. I should just enjoy his art.
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman
You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister
You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah
But what do you care? Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister
Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame
You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name
(Jokerman: Bob Dylan – Infidels, 1984)
Fittingly, it was on June 16th, Bloomsday, that I finished reading James Joyce: A New Biography, by Gordon Bowker. I found the book so captivating I read it at the same speed I normally reserve for good novels or great science fiction. I was fascinated and also troubled by what I learned of this eccentric artist. Who would have believed that a Joyce fan like me had NEVER read a comprehensive biography of one of the most lauded authors in English Literature? I plead guilty with no defense. I loved the stories in Dubliners, and was captivated by the hero in the novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I never got around to investigating the author. I was always satisfied with the many autobiographical items embedded in his works, and the tidbits of information I picked up from peripheral sources like magazine articles and travel books. I have to admit that since my introduction to Joyce in college, I was always more interested in him as an artist than as a man. As far as I was concerned, his work WAS the man, and I particularly loved his fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus. Well James Joyce the son, brother, man, husband, and father, whom I discovered in his biograph, did not reach the lofty pedestal upon which I had placed his fictional character. Joyce may have been an exceptional artist and genius, but he was such a flawed and weak man that my opinion of him was greatly challenged.
While Joyce became my idealization of an artist, he was never my favorite author. My favorite novelists were a pantheon of American writers I discovered in high school, beginning with Herman Wouk, Harper Lee, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, and John Steinbeck, and increasing in college with the addition of Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Heller. Two notable teachers – Mr. Thomas McCambridge, in high school, and a forgotten professor in college influenced this pantheon. Both teachers rhapsodized about the writers of The Lost Generation who became my lynch pins to literature. Joining these writers in my literary Olympus were their iconic characters: Jay Gatsby, Atticus Finch, Holden Caulfield, Tom Joad, and Jake Barnes. Of these American novelists, I would put Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby at the top of the list. Gatsby was clearly the favorite of my teachers, and he became the subject of my first REAL book report in high school.
Book reports have to be the most boring type of writing that exists, because it is simply a means by which a teacher checks on a student’s completion of a task – the reading of a book. If I were assigned a book to read, I would read it for fun and enjoyment, and then write the report by paraphrasing the synopsis on the side covers of the book. However, Mr. McCambridge challenged that approach when he assigned Gatsby. He explained that Fitzgerald had a message just for me in the book, and it was a message hidden in clear sight. The story had “a theme” which the author was expressing through his words and descriptions, and it was my job to discover it by following the clues. Gatsby was the first book in which I highlighted the words as I read, and it struck a chord with me on two levels. First, the words became important because Fitzgerald’s style was so approachable and engaging, and his descriptions were lyrically beautiful. Secondly, his central character called forth that uniquely American desire which I shared, to strive and achieve the unobtainable, which he expressed wonderfully in his last page:
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… and one fine morning --- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
It was only later in college, while reading the Norton Anthology of English Literature that I discovered the wonders of the English language in all its many expressions, and came across James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus.
In the quarter system of UCLA in the late 1960’s, a semester or, to be more accurate, a “tri-mester”, consisted of a 10-week period of time to complete a course. For The American Novel, this meant a delightful reading list of 10 novels, filled in with lectures three times a week. The English Lit course, on the other hand, covered the entire 20th Century using the Norton Anthology. The novels on the Required Reading List of this class had to be decreased and carefully selected. The only book that affected me the same way as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Until that course, I’d only heard about Joyce in terms of his being a member of “The Lost Generation”, and the author of a notorious book called Ulysses. Along with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, Joyce was simply another expatriate living in Paris after WWI. It was this course, with its emphasis on English literature that finally showcased Joyce; first through his short stories in the Dubliners, and then his first novel, Portrait of the Artist.
Reading Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist was an epiphany. From my professor I learned of Joyce’s epiphanies embedded in his stories, and his revolutionary use of the inner monologue, or stream of consciousness in his writing. I found his portrayal of Dubliners even more stunning, because they were so radically different from the stereotypic characterizations I’d seen of the Irish in movies and television. His characters were deeper and more complex, hiding the dark malevolent secrets we all shared. However, it was in Stephen Dedalus, the artist in Portrait, that I found the mirror to my own youthful conflicts and aspirations. Reading about Stephen’s education in Catholic schools, his struggles with sexual temptations and religious repression, and his desire to be free, were reflections of my own life. I identified with Stephen more than any other fictional character I had read about, and I envied his courage at rejecting the values and teachings of the Irish Catholic Church, the shackles of Irish nationalism, and courageously pursuing the creative life of the universal artist. The last lines of the novel on the eve of his self-imposed exile from Ireland thrill me to this day:
“Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead”.
So what would I say of James Joyce now, after having read a very comprehensive biography on his life? Was he the Stephen Dedalus character he created in Portrait and Ulysses, or was he someone else? Should I write about what he was, or what he wasn’t?
Well, to begin with, as a self-portrait, Joyce’s portrayal of Stephen was broadly accurate. Joyce was a gifted student, trained under Jesuit supervision. He became a recognized literary talent in Dublin and wrote for newspapers and periodicals, and he worked as an English tutor and teacher for Berlitz, the famous language school. He was a particular genius at words and language, with an ear and musical gift for song. However, rather than gravitating toward Irish nationalism, as many young Irishmen of his generation, Joyce found inspiration in the creative views and artistry of Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian author and playwright. That was the first surprise for me. Ibsen, not W.B. Yeats, the driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, was his guiding artistic star and model. Although he would only write about Dublin and Dubliners, Joyce, like Ibsen, would become a “man without a country”, a universal artist of the world, and not a parochial Irish author.
The biggest letdown was learning that in many ways Joyce became his father’s son – a failed businessman and spendthrift who was barely one step ahead of eviction and bankruptcy. Joyce always lived beyond his means, borrowing money from his brother, relatives, friends, and loan sharks, and never worrying about repayment. In many ways Joyce was a gifted conman. With his talent and charm he won the confidence of friends, siblings, artists, publishers, and wealthy patrons who recognized his exotic genius, and then Joyce exploited them unmercifully, without question or qualm. Oddly enough, this story has been told in many versions and languages – the self-centered, artistic genius who never sees beyond his art, and other people are simply a means to produce it. That’s Joyce in a nutshell.
My last shattered illusion was the hope that Joyce was a more prolific author than I suspected, and a comprehensive biography would finally unearth a treasure trove of unknown works to me. Well, surprise! My own thumbnail bibliography of Joyce’s work was pretty accurate after all:
Dubliners, 1914 – Portrait of the Artist, 1916 – Ulysses, 1922 – Finnegan’s Wake, 1939
The only writings I was unaware of were the early book reviews and essays he wrote while in Dublin, an early version of Portrait called Stephen Hero (1904-06), poems, a collection of poems called Chamber Music (1907), a rarely performed play called Exiles (1915), and a pocket book of poems, called Pomes Penneyeach (1927). Much of the material that he would include in Finnegan’s Wake was serialized in magazines and periodicals over the 15 years he struggled with it, and simply called it a “Work in Progress”.
More than anything else, what I learned from this biography was what Joyce WAS NOT. He was not a romantic Irish nationalist, not a prolific writer, and not a hardworking, self-sufficient, dependable man. What was he? He was clearly a genius of the English language who played with it like an improvisational master. He was an artist who created words and descriptions and took them to the outer edges of what readers and critics found acceptable. In essence, Joyce created his own language, making up rhyming words and run-on sentences that seemed to have no meaning unless one had the codebook. Many readers of the serialized portions of Finnegan called him a fraud, and claimed that he was mocking them with nonsensical, make-believe words, limericks, and impossibly intricate sentences, and calling it “literature”. In a fashion, Joyce did play with language like a trickster, or joker. He reminded me of a 20th Century representation of that universal trickster of myth and legend: the coyote of Indian legends, Loki of Norse mythology, and Maui of Polynesian myths. Joyce too was “a clever, mischievous person who achieved his ends through the use of superior intelligence and trickery. A trickster who tricked others simply for their amusement, to help them survive in a dangerous world, or to demonstrate the absurd chaos that the world needs to function”. Then again, others found a unique beauty in his words – a beauty I HEARD when I employed an audio book to listen to a reading of Ulysses. Without a doubt, Joyce’s work is best HEARD than read. Joyce plays language with an ingenious, whimsical style, like a jazz artist improvising his music.
I suppose there is one benefit to having waited almost 50 years to learn these facts about Joyce and how he lived his life. At 69 years of age I’m a lot less judgmental than I was at 18 or 20. Especially after having spent the last 8 years listening to incarcerated men tell me of their flaws, failings, and addictions. Joyce would have fit right in with these imprisoned men. He was a selfish, egoistical, and impulsive conman. He was a manipulator and scoundrel. At the same time he was a child of his time and place, living under the dual oppression of the Irish Catholic Church and British Imperialism. At his core Joyce was Irish and that always came out in his stories, descriptions and writing. But he was foremost a genius of the world and an artist of the English language. He was an artist of the genre that included Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh – he was obsessed and self destructive, left ruin in his wake, but created truth and beauty in his art. I can’t be disappointed that Joyce never lived up to the qualities he projected onto his creation Stephen Dedalus, or his other characters. They were fiction, and he was real. I can’t confuse the artist with his creation. I should just enjoy his art.
