James Joyce

Our Examination Round His Factifiation for Incamination of Work in Progress is unique among the many books Finnegans Wake has evoked from other writers. This symposium was published in Paris ten years before Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was completed. The contributors were all friends or acquaintances of the authors: Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams. There are also ’Letters of Protest’ from G. V. L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon. Prepared in such circumstances, with the active encouragement of James Joyce, the book could only have appeared under one imprint, that of Shakespeare and Company, publishers of Ulysses. This edition also includes the characteristic introduction by Miss Sylvia Beach, the original publisher.

Stephen Hero is an early version of Joyce’s famous A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was originally rejected on grounds of indecency—so the story goes—by twenty publishers, whereupon Joyce threw the manuscript in the fire, but Mrs. Joyce rescued several unburnt portions. Although Joyce later entirely rewrote his novel of a young Irishman’s rebellion against church, country and family, this early version is beautifully composed, the mood being more discursive and personal than in A Portrait. Many episodes later cut for the sake of good novelistic form, especially autobiographical episodes of sensual and family life, are fully presented, with some of the most vivacious dialogue Joyce ever wrote. Between them, the two versions give us a clear example of Joyce’s literary development as well as many details of his life.