Stephen Hero — Commentary

In brief

Before A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there was a vast, straightforward autobiographical novel about a Dublin student called Stephen Daedalus. James Joyce wrote it between about 1904 and 1906, gave up on it, and rebuilt the material into the compressed five chapters of Portrait. What survives covers about two years of Stephen’s time at university: his arguments with priests and friends, a paper on drama that fails to shake anyone, his sister’s death, and a clumsy proposition to a girl who refuses him. It was never meant to be read in this form. It appeared in 1944, three years after Joyce died.

The argument

Stephen Hero is a worse book than Portrait and in several ways a more likeable one. Its Stephen is ruder, sillier and more dependent on what other people think of him. He wants his family to admire Ibsen. He wants the audience at his paper to be overthrown. He wants Emma Clery and goes about it like a man reading out a manifesto. The later Stephen has burned all this off, and the reader of Portrait gets a cold, intense young man seen almost from inside his own skull.

Theodore Spencer, the first editor, found the image that everyone has used since: in Portrait we look at a room through a keyhole, and here the door stands open. That is right, and it cuts both ways. The open door gives you the Daedalus household, the talk of the students, the smell of a house with no money. It also gives you everything else, at the same volume, with a narrator on hand to explain what Stephen thinks. The fragment’s real value is as a measure. Set beside it, Portrait stops looking like a natural growth and starts looking like what it was, an act of ruthless subtraction.

The manuscript

Joyce’s plan was enormous. In a letter of March 1906 to the publisher Grant Richards he reported “914 pages to be accurate”, twenty-five chapters, and reckoned that was “about half the book”. The title echoes the ballad of Turpin Hero, which Stephen mentions in Portrait as starting in the first person and ending in the third.

Only a part remains. In 1935 Sylvia Beach, to whom Joyce had given the manuscript, offered pages 519 to 902 for sale from Shakespeare and Company. Harvard College Library bought them in the autumn of 1938, and Spencer’s edition followed in 1944. The chapter numbers that survive in the manuscript run up to XXVI. Slocum and Cahoon’s new edition of 1955 added twenty-five earlier pages that John J. Slocum had bought from Stanislaus Joyce in 1950, an unfinished episode in which Stephen visits his godfather in Mullingar. Five more pages turned up later and were worked in by 1963.

The first 518 pages have never been found. Beach’s catalogue said that Joyce threw the manuscript on the fire after twenty publishers rejected it, and that Nora rescued these pages “at the risk of burning her hands”. It is a good story and may hold some truth, but no surviving page shows any sign of burning, and Spencer found no evidence of the twenty publishers. Joyce’s own later verdict, passed on by his secretary, was that it was a “schoolboy’s production”. He also went through the pages with a coloured crayon, slashing what he disliked, and Spencer’s edition marks those slashes, so a reader can watch Joyce turning against his own sentences.

What Portrait cut

The 383 pages of Spencer’s manuscript cover ground that Portrait gets through in its last 93 pages in the Modern Library edition. Spencer lists much of what went, and the list is the best short lesson in Joyce’s method.

Isabel. Stephen’s sister sickens and dies in a long, shocking sequence. “Isabel died a little after midnight”, and the father, not quite sober, weeps on tiptoe round the room. Portrait does not contain her at all.
Emma Clery. In Stephen Hero she has a name, a manner and a temper. He stops her in the street and offers her “We will live one night together”, then a goodbye in the morning; she calls him mad and leaves with tears in her eyes. In Portrait she has shrunk to the initials E.C.
The paper. “Drama and Life” is read publicly to the college’s Literary and Historical Society, after the President, acting as censor, first forbids it and then gives way. In Portrait the aesthetic theory becomes a walking conversation with Lynch, placed just before the departure.
The family. Maurice, the brother who takes notes on everything Stephen says, disappears. So do the attempt to convert the household to Ibsen and the visit to Mr Wilkinson’s house.
The Easter duty. The argument with his mother is played out as dialogue here. In Portrait it is merely reported to Cranly.
The friends. Cranly, Lynch and McCann are described here and have views of their own. Later they exist largely to reply to Stephen.

The trade was deliberate. From about 1907 Joyce set out to centre everything inside one consciousness, and a consciousness does not need to introduce its own acquaintances. What is lost is the sense that other people were real.

The epiphany

One idea appears here and nowhere else in Joyce’s fiction in the same terms. Walking through Eccles Street, Stephen overhears a scrap of flirtation and thinks of collecting such moments in a book. “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation”, either in speech and gesture or in the mind itself, and the writer must record them with care because they are “the most delicate and evanescent of moments”.

He then tells Cranly that the Ballast Office clock is capable of one: passed time after time, it comes suddenly into focus, his glimpses of it being “the gropings of a spiritual eye”. Stephen ties this to Aquinas, making the radiance of a thing the moment it is recognised for exactly what it is. Cranly is bored, and Stephen glances at the dial to save face: “It has not epiphanised yet”. The joke is the best thing in the passage, and it is the kind of joke Portrait’s Stephen could not make.

Joyce did keep notebooks of such moments, about forty of which survive, and Spencer argued that Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake can all be read as enlargements of this theory. Critics have since made the word carry a great deal, perhaps too much, given that Joyce took it out of the later book. Still, “epiphany” in its modern literary sense comes from this page.

What you can read free

The position is awkward, so it is worth stating plainly. Stephen Hero was first published in 1944 with a New Directions copyright, and Wikisource lists it as in copyright in the United States until 2040. Project Gutenberg does not carry it, and neither does Wikisource or Standard Ebooks. In the European Union and Britain Joyce’s work published in his lifetime went out of copyright at the end of 2011, but this book was published after his death, and commentators at the time disagreed about how the posthumous and unpublished material was affected. The editors’ introductions have copyrights of their own.

So this page links no full text. Scans do circulate on the Internet Archive, but their status is doubtful in the country that hosts them. What is free: the epiphany passage is quoted at length in the Joyce Project notes, and A Portrait of the Artist is complete on Project Gutenberg. The book itself is in print from New Directions. The few words quoted here are short extracts for comment.

Readers and critics

Harry Levin had already used the manuscript for his critical study of 1941, and Spencer quotes his formula for the difference: in Portrait “drama has retired before soliloquy”. Spencer himself made the case for the fragment in its own right, praising its freshness while conceding its immaturities. Later judges have been cooler. Derek Attridge calls it “a thinly disguised autobiography, stylistically undistinguished and immensely long”, which is fair, though it leaves out how funny and how painful the best scenes are. Slocum and Cahoon’s summary of Stephen in the new pages, sensitive, self-righteous, honest and cruel, remains the most useful thing to carry into the book.

How to read it

Read Portrait first. The pleasure here is comparison, and it needs the finished book in mind.
Start with the set pieces. The interview with the President, the row with his mother, Isabel’s death, the scene with Emma in the street and the walk with Cranly are the best of it.
Watch the double angle brackets. In Spencer’s text they mark what Joyce slashed in crayon. They show what he had already turned against.
Do not expect an ending. The manuscript stops mid-conversation, with Stephen denying that Emma matters to him any more and Lynch not believing it.
Use the 1963 edition or a later one. Earlier printings lack some or all of the Mullingar pages, which are placed after the main text. That is where Stephen announces “My own mind is more interesting to me than the entire country”.