The Beginnings of Joyce

Abstract

As I think of Joyce a haunting figure rises up in my memory. A pair of burning dark-blue eyes, serious and questioning, is fixed on me from under the peak of a nautical cap; the face is long, with a slight flush suggestive of dissipation, and an incipient beard is permitted to straggle over a very pronounced chin, under which the open shirt-collar leaves bare a full womanish throat. The figure is fairly tall and very erect, and gives a general impression of a kind of seedy hauteur; and every passer-by glances with a smile at the white tennis shoes (borrowed, as I gather from a mention of them in Ulysses). It was while walking homeward one night across Dublin that I was joined by this young man, whose appearance was already familiar to me; and although I cannot remember any of the strange sententious talk in which he instantly engaged, I have only to open the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to hear it again. ‘When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience.’

Extracted from Irish Literary Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1935) pp. 131–40.