school

SCHOOLDAYS
When he came to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce relied heavily on autobiography: in outline and in many details, the novel follows his own life from birth up to the age of twenty. His family and acquaintances often appear recognizably, with only a change of name, while schools, streets, businesses, hotels, and public figures generally appear under their real names--an unusual practice at the time that Joyce also followed in his book of short stories, Dubliners, and that caused him endless trouble when he tried to publish the book. But as Richard Ellmann clearly established, there are important differences between James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus. The timing of Stephen's attendance at Clongowes is altered so that Parnell's death occurs earlier. Although Joyce briefly attended a Christian Brothers' school after Clongowes, Stephen does not. Stephen avoids sports of all sorts, whereas Joyce was quite proud of winning a schoolboy race. Joyce in youth was called "Sunny Jim" by his family because of his cheerful disposition, while Stephen is more or less withdrawn and sullen. Joyce's relationship with his father appeared friendly to others, while Stephen's is increasingly bitter and tense. At parties Stephen is aloof, while Joyce, who could indeed be distant in manner, was also known for his songs (he had a voice of professional quality), his impersonations, and his occasional manic, spidery dances.

His family fortunes continued to worsen, in part because Joyce's father had been a paid canvasser for Parnell. Joyce began attending the Jesuit Belvedere College in Dublin in 1893. The following year, in a nation-wide examination, he won one of the top prizes, or "exhibitions," worth twenty pounds. That year or the next, he began to patronize local prostitutes. Meanwhile, he was chosen Prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary at school, an honor meant to recognize both his academic achievements and his moral character, and one that might well indicate that the boy was thought to have a vocation for the priesthood. A retreat sermon delivered by a priest from Clongowes in 1896 had a strong effect on Joyce, who was struggling with sexual guilt and self-hatred at the time, but during the following several years his precocious reading of Byron and "dangerous" modern authors like Meredith, Hardy, Ibsen, and his countryman Yeats had an even more powerful cumulative effect. From these he began to acquire a critical attitude toward social institutions of bourgeois Ireland, including the Church itself, and from Yeats in particular he learned to see the world of art as an autonomous sphere removed from the pragmatic world of everyday experience, and to see the figure of the artist as part prophet, part priest, the potential savior of his race. By the time he entered the Royal University in Dublin, also known as "University College," he was permanently disaffected from Catholicism, much to the distress of his mother.

Joyce's University experience was crucial in forming his character and public image. University College had been founded by the famous convert John Henry Newman in 1854 to offer a liberal Catholic education alternative to the predominantly secular Trinity College, where the sons of the Protestant Ascendancy were educated. But Newman had failed to win independence from the bishops in making his appointments, and by 1898, when Joyce entered, the school, controlled by the Jesuits, offered a conservative and intellectually undemanding curriculum. Modern thought and modern art were condemned or ignored. When Joyce began to enthuse about the playwright Ibsen, who had been praised by the London intelligentsia for years, he gained a great deal of local notoriety as a dangerously radical thinker.

But if the instructors were relatively backward, the student body at University College were sensitive to the political and social turmoil of the time. Parnell's cause had not died with him, but after the apparent failure of parliamentary activism, more radical Nationalists came to the fore. A local branch of the Gaelic League, which encouraged the study of the Irish language and the playing of native Irish sports, was established by Joyce's friend George Clancy (Davin in Portrait). Somewhat less publicly, it organized military training for Nationalists who hoped for a popular insurrection (such as the one that indeed occurred in 1916); Davin in A Portrait is said to be practicing military drill. But from Joyce's perspective, the most significant movement of the time was probably what later became known as the Irish Literary Renaissance.