by Unknown
PARIS,
1922–1939.
STEPHEN HERO
This 1944 posthumously-published autobiographical novel reflects only a portion of an original manuscript, part of which was lost. Many of its ideas were used in composing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The first edition
CONTENTS
Start of text
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
Start of text
anyone spoke to him mingled a too polite disbelief with its expectancy. His [stiff] coarse brownish hair was combed high off his forehead but there was little order in its arrangement. [The face] A girl might or might not have called him handsome: the face was regular in feature and its pose was almost softened into [positive distinct] beauty by a small feminine mouth. In [the] a general survey of the face the eyes were not prominent: they were small light blue eyes which checked advances. They were quite fresh and fearless but in spite of this the face was to a certain extent the face of a debauchee.
The president of the college was a sequestrated person who took the chair at reunions and inaugural meetings of societies. His visible lieutenants were a dean and a bursar. The bursar, Stephen thought, fitted his title: a heavy, florid man with a black-grey cap of hair. He performed his duties with great unction and was often to be seen looming in the hall watching the coming and going of the students. He insisted on punctuality: a minute or so late once or twice — he would not mind that so much; he would clap his hands and make some cheery reproof. But what made him severe was a few minutes lost every day: it disturbed the proper working of the classes. Stephen was nearly always more than a quarter of an hour late and [so] when he arrived the bursar had usually gone back to his office. One morning, however, he arrived at the school earlier than usual. Walking up the stone steps before him was a fat [young] student, a very hard-working, timorous young man with a bread-and-jam complexion. The bursar was standing in the hall with his arms folded across [the] his chest and when he caught sight of the fat young man he looked significantly at the clock. It was eight minutes past eleven.
— Now then, Moloney, you know this won’t do. Eight minutes late! Disturbing your class like that — we can’t have that, you know. Must be in sharp for lecture every morning in future.
The jam overspread the bread in Moloney’s face as he stumbled over some excuses about a clock being wrong and then scurried upstairs to his class. Stephen delayed a little [while] time hanging up his overcoat while the large priest eyed him solemnly. Then he turned his head quietly towards the bursar and said
— Fine morning, sir.
The bursar at once clapped his hands and rubbed them together and clapped them together again. The beauty of the morning and the appositeness of the remark both struck him at the same time and he answered cheerily:
— Beautiful! Fine bracing morning now! and he fell to rubbing his hands again.
One morning [he] Stephen arrived three quarters of an hour late and he thought it his decenter plan to wait till the French lecture should begin. As he was leaning over the banisters, waiting for the twelve o’clock bell to ring a young man began to ascend the winding-stairs slowly. At a few steps from the landing he halted and turned a square rustic face towards Stephen.
— Is this the way to the Matriculation class, if you please, he asked in a brogue accenting the first syllable of Matriculation.
Stephen directed him and the two young men began to talk. The new student was named Madden and came from the county of Limerick. His manner without being exactly diffident was a little scared and he seemed grateful for Stephen’s attentions. After the French lecture the two walked across the green together and Stephen brought the newcomer into the National Library. Madden took off his hat at the turnstile and as he leaned on the counter to fill up the docket for his book Stephen remarked the peasant strength of his jaws.
The dean of the college was professor of English, Father Butt. He was reputed the most able man in the college: he was a philosopher and a scholar. He had read a series of papers at a total abstinence club to prove that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic: he had also written against another Jesuit father who had very late in life been converted to the Baconian theory of the authorship of the plays. Father Butt had always his hands full of papers and his soutane very soiled with chalk. He was an elderly greyhound of a man and his vocal ligaments, like his garb, seemed to be coated with chalk. He had a plausible manner with everyone and was particularly —
[Text Missing]
of verse are the first conditions which the words must submit to, the rhythm is the esthetic result of the senses, values and relations of the words thus conditioned. The beauty of verse consisted as much in the concealment as in the revelation of construction but it certainly could not proceed from only one of these. For this reason he found Father Butt’s reading of verse and a schoolgirl’s accurate reading of verse intolerable. Verse to be read according to its rhythm should be read according to the stresses; that is, neither strictly according to the feet nor yet with complete disregard of them. All this theory he set himself to explain to Maurice and Maurice, when he had understood the meanings of the terms and had put these meanings carefully together, agreed that Stephen’s theory was the right one. There was only one possible way of rendering the first quatrain of Byron’s poem:
My days are in the yellow leaf
The flowers and fruits of love are gone
The worm, the canker and the grief
Are mine alone.
The two brothers tried this theory on all the verse they could remember and it yielded wonderful results. Soon Stephen began to explore the language for himself and to choose, and thereby rescue once for all, the words and phrases most amenable to his theory. a He became a poet with malice aforethought.
He was at once captivated by the seeming eccentricities of the prose of Freeman and William Morris. He read them as one would read a thesaurus and made a garner of words. He read Skeat’s
There was a special class for English composition and it was in this class that Stephen first made his name. The English essay was for him the one serious work of the week. His essay was usually very long and the professor, who was a leader-writer on the
hat in a short time perhaps he might contribute something to one of the Dublin papers or magazines. Stephen found this encouragement kindly meant but mistaken and he launched forth into a copious explanation of his theories. Father Butt listened and, even more readily than [Stephen] Maurice had done, agreed with them all. Stephen laid down his doctrine very positively and insisted on the importance of what he called the literary tradition. Words, he said, have a certain value in the literary tradition and a certain value in the market-place — a debased value. Words are simply receptacles for human thought: in the literary tradition they receive more valuable thoughts than they receive in the market-place. Father Butt listened to all this, rubbing his chalky hand often over his chin and nodding his head and said that Stephen evidently understood the importance of tradition. Stephen quoted a phrase from Newman to illustrate his theory.
— In that sentence of Newman’s, he said, the word is used according to the literary tradition: it has there its full value. In ordinary use, that is, in the market-place, it has a different value altogether, a debased value. “I hope I’m not detaining you.”
— Not at all! not at all!
— No, no . . .
— Yes, yes, Mr Daedalus, I see . . . I quite see your point . . . detain . . .
The very morning after this Father Butt returned Stephen’s monologue in kind. It was a raw nipping morning and when Stephen, who had arrived too late for the Latin lecture, strolled into the Physics Theatre he discovered Father Butt kneeling on the hearthstone engaged in lighting a small fire in the huge grate. He was making neat wisps of paper and carefully disposing them among the coals and sticks. All the while he kept up a little patter explaining his operations and at a crisis he produced from the most remote pockets of his chalkey soutane three dirty candle-butts. These he thrust in different openings and then looked up at Stephen with an air of triumph. He set a match to a few projecting pieces of paper and in a few minutes the coals had caught.
— There is an art, Mr Daedalus, in lighting a fire.
— So I see, sir. A very useful art.
— That’s it: a useful art. We have the useful arts and we have the liberal arts.
Father Butt after this statement got up from the hearthstone and went away about some other business leaving Stephen to watch the kindling fire and Stephen brooded upon the fast melting candle-butts and on the reproach of the priest’s manner till it was time for the Physics lecture to begin.
The problem could not be solved out of hand but the artistic part of it at least presented no difficulties. In reading through ‘Twelfth Night’ for the class Father Butt skipped the two songs of the clown without a word and when Stephen, determined on forcing them on his attention, asked very gravely whether they were to be learned by heart or not Father Butt said it was improbable such a question would be on the paper:
— The clown sings these songs for the duke. It was a custom at that time for noblemen to have clowns to sing to them . . . for amusement.
He took ‘Othello’ more seriously and made the class take a note of the moral of the play: an object-lesson in the passion of jealousy. Shakespeare, he said, had sounded the depths of human nature: his plays show us men and women under the influence of various passions and they show us the moral result of these passions. We see the conflict of these human passions and our own passions are purified by the spectacle. The dramas of Shakespeare have a distinct moral force and ‘Othello’ is one of the greatest of tragedies. Stephen trained himself to hear all this out without moving hand or foot but at the same time he was amused to learn that the president had refused to allow two of the boarders to go to a performance of ‘Othello’ at the Gaiety Theatre on the ground that there were many coarse expressions in the play.
The monster in Stephen had lately taken to misbehaving himself and on the least provocation was ready for bloodshed. Almost every incident of the day was a goad for him and the intellect had great trouble keeping him within bounds. But the episode of religious fervour which was fast becoming a memory had resulted in a certain outward self-control which was now found to be very useful. Besides this Stephen was quick enough to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance for him. His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem impolitely curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic. Already while that fever-fit of holiness lay upon him, he had encountered but out of charity had declined to penetrate disillusioning forces. These shocks had driven him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards and the most that devotional exercises could do for him was to soothe him. This soothing he badly needed for he suffered greatly from contact with his new environment. He hardly spoke to his colleagues and performed the business of the class without remark or interest. Every morning he rose and came down to breakfast. After breakfast he took the tram for town, settling himself on the front seat outside with his face to the wind. He got down off the tram at Amiens St Station instead of going on to the Pillar because he wished to partake in the morning life of the city. This morning walk was pleasant for him and there was no face that passed him on its way to its commercial prison but he strove to pierce to the motive centre of its ugliness. It was always with a feeling of displeasure that he entered the Green and saw on the far side the gloomy building of the College.
As he walked thus through the ways of the city he had his ears and eyes ever prompt to receive impressions. It was not only in Skeat that he found words for his treasure-house, he found them also at haphazard in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. He kept repeating them to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables. He was determined to fight with every energy of soul and body against any possible consignment to what he now regarded as the hell of hells — the region, otherwise expressed, wherein everything is found to be obvious — and the saint who formerly was chary of speech in obedience to a commandment of silence could just be recognised in the artist who schooled himself to silence lest words should return him his discourtesy. Phrases came to him asking to have themselves explained. He said to himself: I must wait for the Eucharist to come to me: and then he set about translating the phrase into common sense. He spent days and nights hammering noisily as he built a house of silence for himself wherein he might await his Eucharist, days and nights gathering the first fruits and every peace-offering and heaping them upon his altar whereon he prayed clamorously the burning token of satisfaction might descend. In class, in the hushed library, in the company of other students he would suddenly hear a command to begone, to be alone, a voice agitating the very tympanum of his ear, a flame leaping into divine cerebral life. He would obey the command and wander up and down the streets alone, the fervour of his hope sustained by ejaculations until he felt sure that it was useless to wander any more: and then he would return home with a deliberate, unflagging step piecing together meaningless words and phrases with deliberate unflagging seriousness.
