Crocodile Tears

Do I have to describe it? Isn’t the title enough? You’ve read it, of course. And imagined yourself the central character, though the Catholicism is not quite to your taste. A cheap horror show with poor special effects, isn’t that how you described it? Still, I will work myself up into an ersatz terror.… I’m sorry, you don’t know what I’m talking about? What! Not got it yet? Slow today sir; too much Dorothy L. Sayers last night, I can see. It is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; James Joyce, you know, the author.

_______________

We leave. Leaving behind one’s home, the nation, its beliefs and politics. Can I say this enough? We abandon our friends, their ideas, the myths rooting us to this place; scattering the feelings that blossom around us; those thoughts dead leaves in an autumn fall we enjoy treading into mulch. To leave. And sail to a foreign land. The artist like the wind has no care for the seasons. He blows when he wills.

Long before he’s on that boat the artist has already left. This city cannot contain him. He floats above its streets and squares in a private world of symbol and meaning. James Joyce looking down at Dublin from his own hot air balloon. But like all young bucks he plays the fool, taking too many risks he climbs onto the basket’s rim - to declaim drunkenly to the traffic below - the basket tips, and shakes wildly…oh, mother of Jesus! The balloon drops twenty feet.

Enjoying his years of adolescent freedom the artist falls into sensuous excess, which both stimulates and threatens his powers: a woman’s body exciting the imagination, but Ulysses will not be written in a brothel. The young artist delights in the senses; yet they are a trap in which he is easily caught: women, drink, drugs, each a razored iron to snap shut on the ankle. If that is too coarse for your cultivated taste - I hear Lord Peter Wimsey is a great one with the ladies - how about handcuffs on a wrist, filigree silver with a rococo lock? The young artist should be a fleet-footed thief. This one stealing into plumply-filled beds, quickly removing silk drawers and rummaging its contents, before swiftly skipping out of the back window.

Back in that balloon: our hero has lost his hat. And the sun burns and burns. This young man has a headache. God, with his call to the conscience and to the mind’s cloister, where the adept whips himself with the ideal, this too is a danger for the artist; the lash of the idea scourging him of love, beauty, and the delights of the mundane, its details the necessary piquancy of art. To luxuriate in thought, as it dribbles down the body in a bloody catechism…Stephen, drunk on the hard spirits of theology, its conceptual delights, has lost his head. He makes the sign of the cross over St Stephen’s Green.

The sun is too strong. Our hero is uncomfortable. A friend gives him a hat; while sensible John Jenkins steadies the balloon, which floats down safely to Phoenix Park, where the old man waits, smoking a cheroot. Stephen’s father is this artist’s true progenitor. A man of strong opinions and charisma, he is also a failure, who reduces his family’s bourgeois existence to the squalor of the lumpen-proletariat. With age the charm has faded, while the incompetence hardens into tyranny; the failed talent becomes the irascible tyrant whose stage is no longer the city’s cavernous bars but the cramped quarters of his wife and children. 

There is politics, his father’s religion, but this has little appeal to Stephen. Lucky the artist who avoids that dangerous path, a crumbling track on the edge of a collapsing cliff.

Hopeless parents are good for the artist. They encourage independence; the artist to cultivate the will that resists domestic entreaties, the bindweed of familial affection. Not to be trapped in the parental hothouse, with father’s prize orchids, mother’s mini-palms and outsize ferns; its wealth of established success. We too are in a balloon, so high we see none of these characters: the dysfunctional family isn’t that wonderful. Artists, lest we forget, are born as well as made. Right from those first oracular cries, Stephen cradling Aquinas in his cot, there is an opacity and a distance that is perfectly in tune with the impersonality and ambiguities of art; then there is the ability to think in symbols; while  this boy regularly receives the visitations of verse: words flow out of him as a stream a spring. Stephen is just different from those around him. Temple is right: Stephen Dedalus the most individual thinker in Dublin. There from the very beginning. The artist squeezed out of the womb like paint from its tube, straight onto the palette.

Art is a comely maiden. She sways her hips, dances an aggressive march, her red skirt swinging at her calves; then she smiles, those eyes sing….

Woman and the metaphysical muse fuse into a single being. The pleasures of a woman’s body merging with the joys of art to contaminate the mind with a bad conscience; making it vulnerable to the Church, its gothic horror-show. Adolescence always a difficult time for the artist. Stephen, contrite after a terrifying sermon, exiles himself both from female flesh and his poetry. There’ll be no more scansion of the female form. The verse’s vulva now protected by a priest’s cassock; armour or chastity-belt we are not quite sure which - the simile wobbles. Mr Sun smiles smugly in the sky; his rival, he thinks, has been defeated. Art, that big villain, locked up inside a bishop’s breviary.

Like a weed in a municipal bed the artist will pop up, spoiling the floral geometry; we cannot read the flowered calligraphy of DUBLIN 1904 for the graffiti that grows up around it. An artist is too intellectual and too self-conscious to accept the habits of worship; he disdains the fading pictures, while his scorn melts the mediocrity of the Church’s statues. He cannot be a low-temperature believer like ordinary folk. He is a performer, and overplays the role. You hadn’t guessed? Stephen is an exemplary student, a candidate for the priesthood.

He held open the heavy hall door and gave his hand as if already to a companion in the spiritual life. Stephen passed out on to the wide platform above the steps and was conscious of the caress of mild evening air. Towards Findlater’s church a quartet of young men were striding along with linked arms, swaying their heads and stepping to the agile melody of their leader’s concertina. The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandpit turrets of children. Smiling at the trivial air he raised his eyes to the priest’s face and, seeing in it a mirthless reflection of the sunken day, detached his hand slowly which had acquiesced faintly in that companionship.

Serving God is a dull business. Not like the vaudeville attractions of art. The dancing girls in their gaudy dresses high-kicking to a raucous orchestra; the actresses bewitching you with their body’s wit. The beer. The jokes. One’s hand on a soft satin breast. The city calls to the Artist, who needs its intoxicating effects, its potency, its fun. To write verses again on a woman’s trembling torso…he visit’s Mary’s bedroom, where she unhooks her skirt.

Not all is lost. The artist never gives anything away. The spirit of medieval Catholicism has permeated Stephen’s aesthetic imagination, which now contemplates art as the old monks their saviour. His art - or to be precise: his ideas about art - now more rigorous and abstract than before; the previous lyricism stiffened by an intellectual skeleton, giving it the backbone of philosophy, ribbed around by symbol. Art no longer a private grove where one wanders with a girl, it is to be a cathedral, whose every nook and niche contains a relic from the bibliographic past. Each chapter of Ulysses a chapel, where we pray to Homer’s memory. 

There is a long talk with Lynch, where Stephen speaks of art transcending ordinary existence, whose essence is abstracted and recast in artificial forms, by the artist himself. Here is a religion where gods are grown like seeds from a packet. There will be no divine elevator to carry them down from the heavens. A pack of coolies pushes a cloud off stage, capsizing God, who clings desperately to his cardboard empyrean; crying out in thuggish abuse, he threatens Stephen with hellish tortures. Stephen grabs Molly around the waist, and laughs as God bangs his head on a beam. 

We see the artist at work; the words flowing through him like waves through a bay, until a stanza washes up onto the beach. In the dunes is a girl, in a white dress, with a pink sash tied tightly under the bust; her long auburn hair chaperoned by a pink bow, flickering in the light breeze. She holds a parasol, and looks across the horizon, as Stephen splashes into the sea. 

Stephen is lucky. His love is returned as a bounced cheque. The social distance is too wide to cross: his poverty, that aloofness (her presence makes him shy) and her gregariousness, are all obstacles to their relationship. She doesn't want him. His love unconsummated, he transmutes her into a muse, whom he fucks on the page. A lucky boy indeed.

The artist mustn't get too close to people (or at least not for very long). He should be wary of love, which is a terrible trap for the talented, drawing you away from your alienated self, the source of your wits, the wellspring of your originality. It weakens the will. There is the sentimentality. But you know this, my friend, you know all about this by now.

In his late teens and early twenties the artist meets like-minded souls. The artist needs friends; they stimulate him, give him a good and lively time; widen his ideas, make him receptive to new influences. There is a stretching of the self, and a confidence, that buttress against future doubts and the world’s indifference. But friends are a risk; sensitive to the point of utmost porosity, the artist is easily waterlogged by another’s ideas, or dunked head-first into the pool of their obsessions: so easy, it is, to copy Browning’s style - a coterie’s current totem - or to pontificate upon nationalist politics or world peace. World peace! It levels the landscape of its contingent interests, drowns the poppies and cow parsley, the rubies and lace that decorate the green monotony, the dull cotton, of the local fields. This artist, wilful and obtuse, survives. He fills up the pores, to stop these ideas from getting inside. Or he drains them of value and meaning. Nevertheless, these friendships, their intellectual sympathy going to the core of the self, are hard to break; far harder than those of the family, against whom he naturally rebels. The attraction is strong…a bunch of cronies throw a rope around Stephen; securing the knot they pull and strain and sweat and curse; heave-ho; heave-ho…the artist as big as a boulder does not move. But the artist is not safe. There are other ways to bring him down. Stephen meets his love in the street; he mentions his poems….

Exile. It is the only safe place. Even Dublin is too small, it is too intimate, for Stephen Dedalus. The city overwhelms him. He has to escape. It was the same with his creator. Joyce runs away, although his imagination is stuck forever amongst its streets and characters. So Joyce tries again. There is the baroque prose; the cathedral architecture of his symbolism; still the pubs and whores sing their siren songs. The further the artist runs away the longer the rope that pulls him back…the art arising in this tying to break free. Yes, my friend, the worst thing that can happen to an artist is liberty. The artist’s lot a melancholy one. He is an elastic band played by a puckish fool. Stretch and release. Stretstretstretstretchchch and release. He may whine. He cries out for help. But deep down he is having a party on the page. Exile. Get me out of here as fast as the ship sails…so that I can draw my exquisite pictures of loss and loneliness.

(Review: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)