A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManJoyce, James
General
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce, James
Artists -- Fiction; Autobiographical fiction; Bildungsromans; Dublin (Ireland) -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
—When you kick out for yourself, Stephen—as I daresay you will one of
these days—remember, whatever you do, to mix with gentlemen. When I was
a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent
fellows. Everyone of us could do something. One fellow had a good
voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic
song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could
tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and
enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of
it either. But we were all gentlemen, Stephen—at least I hope we
were—and bloody good honest Irishmen too. That’s the kind of fellows I
want you to associate with, fellows of the right kidney. I’m talking to
you as a friend, Stephen. I don’t believe a son should be afraid of his
father. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated me when I was a
young chap. We were more like brothers than father and son. I’ll never
forget the first day he caught me smoking. I was standing at the end of
the South Terrace one day with some maneens like myself and sure we
thought we were grand fellows because we had pipes stuck in the corners
of our mouths. Suddenly the governor passed. He didn’t say a word, or
stop even. But the next day, Sunday, we were out for a walk together
and when we were coming home he took out his cigar case and said:—By
the by, Simon, I didn’t know you smoked, or something like that.—Of
course I tried to carry it off as best I could.—If you want a good
smoke, he said, try one of these cigars. An American captain made me a
present of them last night in Queenstown.
Stephen heard his father’s voice break into a laugh which was almost a
sob.
—He was the handsomest man in Cork at that time, by God he was! The
women used to stand to look after him in the street.
He heard the sob passing loudly down his father’s throat and opened his
eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight breaking suddenly on his
sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses
with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and
powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of
the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself
beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from
the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries
within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and
insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship,
wearied and dejected by his father’s voice. He could scarcely recognise
as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:
—I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is
Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is
in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and
Stephen and Victoria. Names.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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