The portrait and the artist

The text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is dated ‘Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914’. 1904 was the year in which Stephen Hero was written and Joyce left Dublin with Nora Barnacle to become a language teacher on the Adriatic. Ten years later, after some vicissitudes, he was still there. His life was about to be transformed, thanks to the First World War (which would force him to move to neutral Switzerland), and to a chance letter from Ezra Pound in December 1913, which marked the beginnings of his literary celebrity. Pound arranged for serial publication of the Portrait to begin in the Egoist, a small avantgarde literary and political magazine, in February 1914; in June of the same year the London publisher Grant Richards at last brought out Dubliners.

The writing of the Portrait thus spans ten years during which Joyce kept rigorously to Stephen Dedalus's programme of ‘silence exile and cunning’. His literary silence was broken only by Chamber Music and by a small quantity of essays and journalism, some of it written in Italian. His exile, at first only temporary, was confirmed by his unhappy experiences in revisiting Ireland in 1909 and 1912. Cunning is evident in the far-reaching revisions with which he transformed Stephen Hero, a raw apprentice-work, into the Portrait with its eloquence of style and fastidious pursuit of artistic impersonality.