An endurance test should always be preceded by training. It requires real endurance to finish “Ulysses.” The best training for it is careful perusal or reperusal of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” the volume published six or seven years ago which revealed Mr. Joyce's capacity to externalise his consciousness, to set it down in words. It is the story of his own life before he exiled himself from his native land, told with uncommon candour and extraordinary revelations of thought, impulse, and action, many of them of a nature and texture which most persons do not feel free to reveal, or which they do not feel it is decent and proper to confide to the world.
The facts of Mr. Joyce's life with which the reader who seeks to comprehend his writings should be familiar are: He was one of many children of South Ireland Catholic parents. In his early childhood his father had not yet dissipated their small fortune and he was sent to Clongowes Wood, a renowned Jesuit College near Dublin, and remained there until it seemed to his teachers and his parents that he should decide whether or not he had a vocation; that is whether he felt within himself, in his soul, a desire to join the order. Meanwhile he had experienced the profoundly disturbing impulses of pubescence; the incoming waves of genesic potency had swept over him, submerged him, and carried him into a deep trough of sin, from which, however, he was extricated, resuscitated, and purged by confession, penitence, and prayer. But the state of grace would not endure. He lost his faith, and soon his patriotism, and he held those with whom he formerly worshipped up to ridicule, and his country and her aspirations up to contumely. He continued his studies in the Old Royal University of Dublin, notwithstanding the abject poverty of his family. He was reputed to be a poet then, and many of the poems in “Chamber Music” were composed at this period. He had no hesitation in admitting the reputation, even contending for it. “I have written the most perfect lyric since Shakespeare,” he said to Padraic Colum; and to Yeats, “We have met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me.” If belief in his own greatness has ever forsaken him in the years of trial and distress that have elapsed between then and now, no one, save possibly one, has heard of it. Mr. William Hohenzollern in his sanguine moments was never as sure of himself as Mr. James Joyce in his hours of despair.
After graduation he decided to study medicine, and, in fact, he did pursue the study for two or three years, one of them in the medical school of the University of Paris. Eventually he became convinced that medicine was not his vocation, even though funds were available for him to continue his studies, and he decided to take up singing as a profession, “having a phenomenally beautiful tenor voice.” These three novitiates furnished him with all the material he has used in the four volumes that he has published. Matrimony, parentage, ill-health, and a number of other factors put an end to his musical ambitions. He taught for a brief time in Dublin and wrote the stories that are in “Dubliners,” which his countrymen baptised with fire; and began the “Portrait.” But he couldn't tolerate “a place fettered by the reformed conscience, a country in which the symbol of its art was the cracked looking-glass of a servant,” so he betook himself to a country in the last explosive crisis of paretic grandeur. In Trieste he gained his daily bread by teaching Austrians English and Italian, having a mastery of the latter language that would flatter a Padovian professor. The war drove him to the haven of the expatriate, Switzerland, and for four years he taught German, Italian, French, English, to anyone in Zurich who had time, ambition, and money to acquire a new language. Since the Armistice he has lived in Paris, first finishing the book which is his magnum opus and which he says and believes represents everything that he has to say or will have to say, and he is now enjoying the fame and the infamy which its publication and three editions within two years have brought him.
As a boy Mr. Joyce's cherished hero was Odysseus. He approved of his subterfuge for evading military service; he envied him the companionship of Penelope; and all his latent vengeance was vicariously satisfied by reading of the way in which he revenged himself on Palamedes. The craftiness and resourcefulness of the final artificer of the siege of Troy made him permanently big with envy and admiration. But it was the ten years of his hero's life after he had eaten of the lotus plant, that wholly seduced Mr. Joyce and appeased his emotional soul. As years went by he realised that his own experiences were not unlike those of the slayer of Polyphemus and the favourite of Pallas-Athene, and after careful deliberation and planning he decided to write an Odyssey. In early childhood Mr. Joyce had identified himself with Dædalus, the Athenian architect, sculptor, and magician, and in all his writings he carries on in the name of Stephen Dædalus. Like the original Dædalus, his genius is great, his vanity is greater, and he can brook no rival. Like his prototype, he was exiled from his native land after he had made a great contribution to the world. Like him, he was received kindly in exile, and like him, also, having ingeniously contrived wings for himself and used them successfully, he is now enjoying a period of tranquillity after his sufferings and his labour.
“Ulysses” is the record of the thoughts, antics, vagaries, and actions—more particularly the thoughts—of Stephen Dædalus, an Irishman, of artistic temperament; of Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Hungarian Jew, of scientific temperament and perverted instincts; and of his wife, Marion Tweedy, daughter of an Irish major of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers stationed in Gibraltar, and a Jewish girl. Marion was a concert singer given to coprophilly, especially in her involutional stages, spiritual and physical. Bloom's acquired perversion he attempted to conceal by canvassing for advertisements for The Freeman.
Dublin is the scene of action. The events—those that can be mentioned—and their sequence are:
“The preparation for breakfast, intestinal congestion, the bath, the funeral, the advertisement of Alexander Keyes, the unsubstantial lunch, the visit to Museum and National Library, the book-hunt along Bedford Row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay, the music in the Ormond Hotel, the altercation with a truculent troglodyte, in Bernard Kierman's premises, a blank period of time including a car-drive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leave-taking, ... the prolonged delivery of Mrs. Nina Purefoy, the visit to a disorderly house ... and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver Street, nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge.”
And these are some of the things they thought and talked of:
“Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, Jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen's collapse.”
Mr. Joyce is an alert, keen-witted, educated man who has made it a life-long habit to jot down every thought that he has had, drunk or sober, depressed or exalted, despairing or hopeful, hungry or satiated, in brothel or in sanctuary, and likewise to put down what he has seen or heard others do or say—and rhythm has from infancy been an enchantment of the heart. It is not unlikely that every thought he has had, every experience he has ever encountered, every person he has ever met, one might say everything he has ever read in sacred or profane literature, is to be encountered in the obscurities and in the franknesses of “Ulysses.” If personality is the sum total of all one's experiences, all one's thoughts and emotions, inhibitions and liberations, acquisitions and inheritances, then it may truthfully be said that “Ulysses” comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book I know.