Portrait of an Artist

JAMES JOYCE--Herbert Gorman-Farrar & Rinehart--($3.50).

The utmost type of heroism, which alone is worthy of the name, must be described, merely, as complete self-faithfulness: as integrity. On this level the life of James Joyce has its place, along with Blake's and Beethoven's, among the supreme examples. It is almost a Bible of what a great artist, an ultimately honest man, is, and is up against.

Of what that is, Joyce himself has given such intense and definitive statement--directly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Voting Man, by implication in every word he has written--that no biographer can hope to add to it. None should try. But any biographer may add much in the way of purely factual material.

Herbert Gorman cannot resist trying to comment as well as to present, and his comments usually fall short of their subject. But because he has a good deal to present that has not been presented before, including several excellent photographs, his book is by no means without value.

The general outlines of Joyce's life and many of the particulars are already well and widely known : the years of his youth in Dublin, the years of his exile in Paris, in Zurich, in Trieste, in Rome, again in Paris; his agonizing poverty during year after early year; the years of almost in conceivable misuse at the hands of publishers and, in his case, of printers; the horrifying succession of attacks on his eyes; his relief at length, thanks to Miss Harriet Weaver, from financial worry; the 34 years of unprecedented work he has done in the teeth of all deterrents: work which in the opinion of many mature critics gives him a place beside Shakespeare and Dante.

What Gorman valuably does is to add by the hundreds facts and anecdotes which intensify the significance of this quiet life and the image of the man himself. What he does still more valuably is to quote with some abundance from Joyce's own letters, unpublished verses and notebooks. Sample facts: His middle names are Augustine Aloysius; he used to sign himself Jas. A. Joyce. During his first visit to Paris, when he was 20, he often had no food for 40 hours at a stretch, was speechless with toothache when he did eat. At around 19, under the influence of Ibsen, he wrote a five-act play-lost-which he dedicated to his own soul. (His father, reading that in bed one night, bawled "Holy Paul!") Passing the Arc de Triomphe, Valery Larbaud asked him how long he thought the Eternal Flame would burn. "Until the Unknown Soldier gets up in disgust and blows it out."

Of Joyce's own writing the book contains, among other things: several of his letters to English Publisher Grant Richards over Dubliners--as shriveling a statement of the artist-publisher situation as has ever seen print; an extraordinarily beautiful letter he wrote to Ibsen when he was 19; two invective poems which suggest Swift's and are quite as good. One of them, addressed to the Dublin litterateurs he held in such contempt, ends with these proud lines:

So distantly I turn to view

The shamblings of that motley crew,

Those souls that hate the strength that mine has

Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.

Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed

I stand, the self-doomed, unafraid,

Unfellowed, friendless and alone,

Indifferent as the herringbone,

Firm as the mountain ridges where

I flash my antlers on the air.

Let them continue as is meet

To adequate the balance-sheet.

Though they may labour to the grave

My spirit shall they never have

Nor make my soul with theirs as one

Till the Mahamanvantara be done,

And though they spurn me from their door

My soul shall spurn them evermore.

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