133.] The Harvard manuscript describes about two years of Stephen’s life; it begins shortly after he enters the National University, and it breaks off just as Stephen’s emancipation from all that the University implies reaches a kind of climax. It does not give us a picture of the “small boy,” but it gives us a very vivid and coherent picture of the “youth” who is called Stephen Daedalus, but who, in his appearance, his actions and his thought, is so evidently James Joyce.

It can be seen at a glance that this early version is very different from the version eventually published as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The period covered by the 383 pages of the manuscript occupies only the last 93 pages of the published version [Modern Library Edition] — the manuscript account of Stephen’s two years at the University is at least as long as the whole history of his development in its final form. It portrays many characters and incidents which the published version leaves out, and it describes the growth of Stephen’s mind in a far more direct and less elliptical form than that with which we are familiar. Consequently, though Joyce rejected it, and in his later years scorned it — from the reader’s point of view, unjustifiably — as a “schoolboy’s production,” the interest of the manuscript to admirers of Joyce is great. It not only gives us a wonderfully convincing transcript of life, it throws light on Joyce’s whole development as an artist by showing us more clearly than we have been able to see before what the beginning of that development was like.

-II-

Every reader of the present text will want to make his own comparisons between its picture of Stephen Daedalus and the picture given by the final version; I do not want to forestall any such critical pleasure by making exhaustive comparisons myself. Nevertheless there are certain characteristics of the manuscript which are of such special interest that they may, I hope not too obtrusively, be briefly pointed out in advance.*

The most obvious of these characteristics is the wealth of detail with which incidents and people are described. For example the Daedalus family is much more clearly seen than in the final form of the book; the family gives a richly sordid background to the arrogant growth of Stephen’s mental independence through his University years: in the final version, the members of the family have virtually disappeared from the scene by the time Stephen has gone to the University. In the Portrait we have nothing like the description of Mr. Wilkinson’s house [pp. 159 f.]; we hear nothing of Stephen’s intimacy with his brother Maurice; the pathetic and shocking account of the illness and death of Stephen’s sister Isabel [pp. 164 ff.] is entirely omitted; nothing is said of Stephen’s attempt to convert his family to an admiration of Ibsen [pp. 84 ff.]. Even when the same incidents are mentioned, the present text usually treats them in a different manner — a more direct and dramatic manner — than that used in the Portrait. A typical illustration of this is the handling of Stephen’s refusal to perform his Easter duty. In the present text [pp. 131 ff.] the argument between Stephen and his mother is given as a dialogue — no doubt as it actually occurred — and it is a very effective piece of writing. But in the Portrait [Modern Library Edition, p. 281] the scene, which is a crucial one in Stephen’s history, is merely referred to in a conversation with Cranly.

We can easily understand, of course, what Joyce was aiming at when he discarded his first draft and re-wrote the material. He was aiming at economy, and he was trying to place his center of action as much as possible inside the consciousness of his hero. To do this he evidently decided to sacrifice the method — which is, after all, the method of Dubliners rather than that of the Portrait — of objectively presenting one episode or character after another. As a result the Portrait has more intensity and concentration, a more controlled focus, than the earlier version. In the Portrait, as Mr. Levin observes, “drama has retired before soliloquy.” The diffuseness of real life is controlled and ordered by being presented from a single point of view. Furthermore the method used in the Portrait of merely hinting at an episode or conversation instead of describing it in full (compare the way Giordano Bruno is introduced in the Portrait [p. 294] with the way he is introduced in the present version [p. 170]) —this method makes Stephen’s thoughts and actions more suggestive than they are as Joyce describes them here. In the Portrait we are looking at a room through a keyhole instead of through an open door; the vague shapes which we can with difficulty see in the dark corners add portentousness to what our framed and limited vision can perceive. In the present version the door is open, and everything is made as visible as possible. To change the image: we here see things in daylight, instead of under a spotlight; here there is less emphasis, less selection, less art.

But the increased pressure of concentration to be found in the Portrait, however desirable or admirable it may be, is gained at a loss. For example: in the Portrait we are introduced to Stephen’s friends — Cranly, Lynch and the rest — as items, so to speak, in Stephen’s mind. They are not pictured for us; Joyce expects us to take them for granted, as features in Stephen’s landscape which need no further identification beyond their names and their way of speaking. But in the present text these friends are much more clearly identified; Joyce introduces us to them by describing their appearance and their points of view; they have an independent reality of their own, like the people in Dubliners; they are not merely sounding boxes or slot-machines, as they are in the Portrait, for the ideas of the all-important Stephen.

This is particularly true of the girl to whom Stephen is physically (though not otherwise) attracted. In the Portrait she has only initials — E.C.