Stephen Hero

Contents

Foreword by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon

Introduction by Theodore Spencer

Editorial Note

Stephen Hero (pp. 511 ff. of the Manuscript)

Stephen Hero (additional Manuscript pages, 477 ff.)

Illustrations

Program, University College Literary and Historical Society

Notes on Tenebrae, in Joyce’s hand

George Clancy, J. F. Byrne and James Joyce

Page 827 of the Stephen Hero manuscript

Foreword

TO THE NEW EDITION

The personal library of James Joyce, with the literary manuscripts which he had chosen to preserve, was left in Trieste in the care of his brother Stanislaus when Joyce moved to Paris in June, 1920. Subsequently, at Joyce’s request, his brother sent him the greater portion of the library including the bulk of the surviving pages of the early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, known as Stephen Hero. Joyce turned over many of these manuscripts to Miss Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses. Stanislaus Joyce retained a certain number of manuscript items including twenty-five additional pages of Stephen Hero which were purchased by John J. Slocum in 1950 and are here printed for the first time. These pages, as numbered by Joyce, precede numerically the 383 pages edited by the late Theodore Spencer and are numbered 477-8, 481-9, 491-7, 499-505; the first manuscript page of the text Spencer published in 1944 is numbered 519. In this edition the additional material, however, follows the originally published text.

This newly discovered portion of the manuscript is actually an episode by itself, although still incomplete; this unity may be the reason that it was preserved by James Joyce. The first eight lines of manuscript on page 477 were destined to become, with a few changes, the last part of the diary entry of April 16 at the conclusion of A Portrait. The remainder of the manuscript tells of a visit that Stephen Daedalus made to his godfather, Mr Fulham, in Mullingar, Westmeath, sometime after he had begun his studies at University College in 1898. The words, “Departure for Paris,” words that mark the end of A Portrait, have been written by Joyce in blue crayon across the page at the conclusion of the first eight lines. It is probable, though by no means certain, that the pages preceding page 477 were discarded as they were used in the creation of A Portrait. It is also probable that the missing pages from this episode included descriptions or dialogues that eventually found their way into A Portrait. Joyce’s known economy of episode and phrase was such that even the rejected portions of his manuscripts usually contributed heavily to a published work.

Mullingar, in the center of Ireland, has none of the urban polish of the other two Irish cities Joyce describes in his work, Dublin and Cork, and he perhaps intended at first to use these scenes of provincial life to fill out his picture of Ireland. He knew Mullingar well, having accompanied his father there during the summers of 1900 and 1901, when John Joyce was charged with the duty of straightening out the confused Mullingar election lists. James Joyce’s copy of D’Annunzio’s The Child of Pleasure, now in the Yale University Library, bears Joyce’s signature and the words, “Mullingar July.5.1900.”; the manuscript of his translation of Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang is inscribed, “Summer, 1901. MS/Mullingar. Westmeath.” Joyce alters the actual events considerably by representing Mullingar as the home of Stephen’s godfather, Mr Fulham. (Joyce’s godfather was Philip McCann, who had no connection with Mullingar and had died in 1898.) This fiction is continued in the later pages of Stephen Hero, where Mr Fulham is mentioned repeatedly as the source of money for Stephen’s university expenses. It is conceivable that an undiscovered patron is represented by the figure of the godfather.

Many of the incidents in these pages must have had their origins in Joyce’s “epiphanies,” those unostentatious moments of revelation which Joyce was in the habit of recording for future use. The descriptions of the lame beggar and of Mr Garvey of the Examiner are based directly upon two surviving “epiphanies” now in the Joyce Collection of the Lockwood Memorial Library of the University of Buffalo. In turn these pages sometimes affect later work. So Nash who appears in this Mullingar episode, and Mr Tate who is mentioned in it, return in A Portrait. There is an echo of Captain Starkie’s story of the old peasant in the April 14 entry of Stephen’s diary in the last chapter of A Portrait. Stephen’s remark to Mr Heffernan, “My own mind is more interesting to me than the entire country,” is close to his remark to Bloom in Ulysses, “You suspect that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint-Patrice called Ireland for short…. But I suspect that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.” It is close, too, to Joyce’s remark to Yeats in 1902 that his own mind “was much nearer to God than folklore.” Finally, Mullingar is mentioned several times in Ulysses because Milly Bloom is said to be working there in a photographer’s shop.

But Joyce never used the bulk of the Mullingar episode, perhaps because he came to feel that the role of Stephen showing off against the provincials had something disagreeable in it. There are also hints that he originally intended to give Mr Fulham a more important role in his book; when his plans changed, the episode became a little irrelevant.

These new pages do not add any new dimensions to the character of Stephen, but the arguments and situations, in which Stephen, as usual, emerges triumphant, contain some excellent expositions of his attitudes toward religion, Irish nationalism and his countrymen. The sensitive, self-righteous, honest and cruel young man is beautifully displayed.

In preparing these pages for publication we have followed the editorial procedures of Professor Spencer as set forth in his editorial note. We are grateful to Professor Richard Ellmann of Northwestern University for his advice and criticism, to the late Stanislaus Joyce, and to the Estate of James Joyce and the Yale University Library, owner of the manuscript, for permission to publish these additional pages.

John J.