Slocum
Herbert Cahoon

Since the publication of this edition in 1955, five more pages of Stephen Hero have come to light, and the unfortunate gaps in the Additional Manuscript Pages have been filled. The story of the lame beggar and the argument with Mr. Heffernan are now complete and we know what was on the paper near the corpse of the woman from the asylum. But the page added at the end of the episode leaves us in greater suspense than ever, for Stephen seems about to begin a romantic scene with Miss Howard. Perhaps, in time, more pages of Stephen Hero, like fragments of Aquinas, will appear to add to our knowledge and satisfy our curiosity.

These new pages were first published in A James Joyce Miscellany, Second Series (1959) but appear in this volume for the first time with the other portions of the surviving text. They are printed with the permission of their owner, the Cornell University Library, the Estate of James Joyce, and the Southern Illinois University Press.

Introduction

IN 1935, Miss Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, issued a catalogue from her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, 12 Rue de l’Odéon, Paris, in which she offered for sale, among other things, certain manuscripts of James Joyce. One of these consisted of pp. 519–902 of an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in Joyce’s handwriting. These pages were bought by the Harvard College Library in the autumn of 1938, and are here, with the permission of Joyce’s executors, and of the Harvard College Library, printed for the first time.

There is some confusion about the date of this manuscript. In her catalogue Miss Beach, to whom Joyce originally gave it, says that it dates from 1903, and adds the following sentence: “When the manuscript came back to its author, after the twentieth publisher had rejected it, he threw it in the fire, from which Mrs. Joyce, at the risk of burning her hands, rescued these pages.” This story is to some extent supported by Mr. Herbert Gorman, who says in his life of Joyce, writing of the year 1908: “Joyce burned a portion of Stephen Hero [as the book was then called] in a fit of momentary despair and then started the novel anew in a more compressed form.” *

No surviving page of the manuscript shows any signs of burning.

Joyce himself was not very communicative on the subject. When the present writer wrote to him about the manuscript at the end of 1938, he received a reply from Joyce’s secretary which said: “Apparently the very large MS of about 1000 pages of the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he calls a schoolboy’s production written when he was 19 or 20, has been sold in lots to different institutions in America. He feels that he can do nothing in the matter except to state this fact which he certainly can scarcely be blamed for not having foreseen at the moment of the presentation he made of it [sic].”

Since Joyce was born in 1882, the ages here mentioned suggest that the manuscript was written in 1901–02, instead of 1903, as Miss Beach’s catalogue says. Both dates, however, are apparently too early. Mr. Gorman, whose book was checked by Joyce, tells us that when Joyce left Ireland in 1904, he took with him a first chapter and notes for Stephen Hero, and he prints [p. 148] a letter from Joyce to Grant Richards written on March 13, 1906, which speaks of the book as half finished:

You suggest I should write a novel in some sense autobiographical. I have already written a thousand pages of such a novel, as I think I told you, 914 pages to be accurate. I calculate that these twenty-five chapters, about half the book, run into 150,000 words. But it is quite impossible for me in present circumstances to think the rest of the book much less to write it.

From this account it seems clear that Stephen Hero was written between 1904 and 1906.

The discrepancy between the different dates may be reconciled, I believe, by remembering that when Joyce left Ireland he took with him “notes” for his book. Mr. Gorman prints some of them [pp. 135 ff.]. It seems highly probable that there were also fuller notes than these, consisting of transcripts of conversations, etc., which were incorporated without much change into the manuscript: the reader of the following pages will undoubtedly agree that much of the talk sounds as if it had been taken down immediately after it had been spoken. If this is so, then we can think of the manuscript as representing the work of the years 1901 to 1906. It is a very clean copy, with only a few corrections, and Joyce’s handwriting is remarkably legible.

The first 518 pages have apparently disappeared for good; I doubt very much if they have been “sold in lots to different institutions in America.” * Probably the story of their having been burnt is correct — although there is no evidence in Mr. Gorman’s book to indicate that the manuscript was ever sent to twenty publishers. Yet though the loss of the early pages is greatly to be regretted, the 383 pages that remain have a kind of unity in themselves. As Joyce planned it, Stephen Hero was to be “an autobiographical book, a personal history, as it were, of the growth of a mind, his own mind, and his own intensive absorption in himself and what he had been and how he had grown out of the Jesuitical garden of his youth. He endeavoured to see himself objectively, to assume a godlike poise of watchfulness over the small boy and youth he called Stephen and who was really himself.” [Gorman, p.