A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This book, James Joyce's 1916 quasi-autobiographical novel, was utterly sublime. I read the bulk of it on the coach to and back from Glastonbury last month* and oh my goodness that asterisk-comment was not intended to run on so long.

   I should probably talk about the book.

   It's about Stephen Dedalus (who also appears as an adult in Ulysses) as he transitions, over the course of several years, from childhood to youngmanhood, in ways stilted and tilted by his incorrigible aesthetic leanings - from Jesuit boarding school to Trinity College in Dublin, we see Stephen grow and become alienated from almost everything and everyone held in the suspension of normality - questioning his religion, his family, Ireland itself, finding clarity and solace only in the abstract constructions of philosophical and literary thought as he delves into books as his escape and his direction into the possibility of new avenues for life and thought. Exquisitely written, the stream-of-consciousness aspect that characterises Joyce's work is not as impenetrable as in other works, and so (other than semi-regular phrases in Latin) this works as a fairly accessible bildungsroman of the highest quality, bringing the reader squarely into Stephen's head as he tries to make sense of the world around him. There's really not that much I need to say. If you like incredible literature, you'll like this, especially if you yourself identify as an artist and have felt, growing up, like something of an outsider - there are passages that rang so deeply true with me that I was left feeling profoundly astonished at the sheer capacity for similarity in the turbulent chasms within each unique human self.

* Fitting, since Glastonbury last year was where my own budding intent to become an Artist was cemented in the strangest of ways. I'd been brewing my ideas for a novel, or possibly series of novels, for just over a month, and was toying with the idea of instead of trying to do a PhD and get into a political-economic think-tank after my Masters to just find a random day-job and focus on creative writing - and somehow, the core idea for the characters and story arcs that would eventually unspool into the eight (ikr) books I have since planned around it just fell, as if from nowhere, into my head, and it was there, in the Glade stage that Thursday afternoon, listening to a tune that I could neither remember nor remove from my head for the next four days, that I realised "well, okay, so that is what I am going to do."
   This conviction was only bolstered two days later (strap yourself in, this is a long weird anecdote but I'm going to tell it anyway because why not) when I insisted on going to see Madness despite none of my friends wanting to. I have a tendency to wander off or just get separated from the group at festivals and on nights out, and if you lose your friends at Glastonbury (with a dead phone, a festival site the size of a small city, and two-hundred-thousand flamboyant revellers slowly grinding their way from fun to fun in six inches of squelchy mud like herds of migratory wildebeest) it's unlikely you'll find them again before it's evening-time and you're meant to be heading to Shangri-La - and so, when I was set on travelling to the Pyramid Stage while my crew remained at The Park, it was decided that a pair of friends-of-friends** would accompany me to make sure I got there and back without getting lost. However, they really annoyed me, exuding as they did a glib air of condescending snobbery and detached ungrateful poshness that was not at all in the spirit of Michael Eavis nor Madness nor whatever level of vibe I was on at the time, and so I hatched a plot to run away from them as soon as we reached the Pyramid Stage - and so, as we neared, one of my appointed guardians told me as one would an unruly toddler "okay now don't lose us or anything", then checked their phone, I seized my chance - and bolted. I ran as fast as I could (given wellies and deep sticky mud and dense milling crowds) for about thirty seconds, then stopped and laughed, realising, almost shocked, that I was alone - and had no reference points. Fortunately, these were plentiful - lots of people at Glastonbury take flags to help them find their tents or each other in crowds, and so I decided that as a reference point I would simply head towards whatever nearby flag resonated most with me - which as it turned out was a Yorkshire flag about a hundred yards away, but I never reached it.
   Halfway there, I stumbled upon one of the most exuberant and refreshingly strange geezers I had ever (and still have ever) seen: a middle-aged man with tobacco-yellowed teeth and scruffy grey stubble, shiny black aviator sunglasses, a tweed flatcap with an unidentifiable feather in it, a heavy sheepskin jacket, a t-shirt which struck me as eccentric but sadly as of now I can't remember what was on it, a kilt, and sandals (at Glastonbury 2016 - as such, his feet and legs were caked thickly in wet and dry mud up almost up to his knees); he had half a spliff in his left hand, a can of Polish lager in his right, and was beaming like a maniac as he belted out the lyrics to Parklife (though he was not alone in this - they were playing it on the big speakers, as they do in between acts). I decided that this gentleman made a far better reference point than a mere flag, identical to the one flying proudly as a translucent second curtain in my window at home - this character was pure Glasto: he had an aura of ridiculous yet vaguely respectable straightforwardness about him. Anyway, we spoke for about twenty minutes, in which time I learnt that he was the manager of a furniture and household appliances warehouse in Bognor Regis - and that he was a self-proclaimed Madness mega-fan, having previously been a bouncer who'd lucked his way into working with the band for a stint in the 1980s.*** Then the band came on (he asked me, "where're your mates mate?" and I told him they didn't want to come and see Madness and he bellowed, "tasteless bastards!") and played as hilarious and heartwarming a set full of classics as I could have hoped for, my new acquaintance whose name I never asked for singing and skanking along with me and the tens of thousands of others present.
   After they finished, I turned to him and said that I needed to go and find my friends, and wished him an excellent remainder of the festival - he asked me if I had a spare cigarette before I went, which I didn't think I had, but remembered I had earlier forgotten that I was looking after a packet of Camels for a female friend who had no pockets, and found it crumpled at the bottom of my tote bag, with only a single slightly-bent cig left. "Last one!" I said, fishing it out and handing it over, adding without much thought, "that's poetic innit?" At this, he raised his shades onto his cap and crinkledly squinted at me with fisherman eyes, almost regarding me with suspicion, and asked, "are you a poet?" to which I replied, "no,"**** confused, and he said, through a mouthful of cig-butt as he struggled to light it in the wind, "well you fucking should be kid, you've got the, the, whatever it is," at which I laughed, thanked him, and upon then returning to The Park found my friends surprisingly easily and made absolute mincemeat of trying to recount the story, fresh as it was, to them.

** I hope they're not reading this. They probably aren't.

*** This was quite a revelation. I asked him, "what's Suggs like to work with? I bet he's a reyt character!" and he made a noise that sounded like a pig coughing that was probably intended as an affirmative chuckle, and said, "yeh, yeh he is, a proper laugh."

**** This is no longer strictly true, of course - and though since starting writing poetry I have felt it to be a fairly organic process, not triggered or catalysed by any particular event or experience, this is such a good anecdote that also happened to happen before I properly started writing that I may as well claim ownership of it as my Poet Origin Story.

Ulysses

This book, James Joyce's seminal masterwork of obscurely innovative writing, has a literary reputation preceding it like almost no other book. It's notorious for being just downright difficult to read, and so having been informed as such by my A-Level English Language teacher (who as this blog goes on it will become obvious had a huge influence on my reading habits) I found it in a second-hand bookshop and started reading it out of sheer determination. That was two years ago (I read many books simultaneously and the longer harder ones get finished very slowly as a consequence), but having barely read anything in January due to exams I decided to tackle the remaining-unread 300ish pages in another burst of effort and so finished it just in time for the next term to recommence tomorrow. The book's general gist[s] is[are]:

• Leopold Bloom, a jewish advertisement editor, goes about the events of his day on 16th June 1904, encountering and interacting with many friends and acquaintances, primarily his wife, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the son of an old friend. Within the book's twenty-four hour span these three characters go about their varyingly mundane days in Dublin, doing things from attending funerals to regretting affairs to surprisedly discovering a forgotten potato in one's pocket. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE BECAUSE
• It's also a parody/homage of Homer's Odyssey* (hence the title), with each succession of events vaguely mirroring a chapter of the Greek epic, albeit in necessarily less dramatic scope; for example, where Odysseus and his crew are captured and attacked by the Cyclops, Bloom and his friends are accosted by a drunk nationalist who throws a biscuit-tin at our not-eponymous-hero. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE EITHER BECAUSE
• Joyce was a pioneer of prose, experimenting with writing techniques throughout the book which I will not embarrass my lack of literature-jargon by failing to explain; and so the language with which the story unfolds is almost endlessly diversely immersively unpredictably obtusely brilliantly creative. The prose dips and flickers almost without warning between dialogues, descriptions, perceptions, memories, thoughts, current occurrences and odd half-metaphorical fantasies. The three main characters' heads are entered to a remarkably personal extent, with their streams of consciousness often played out in grand strings of idiosyncratic wordage. Chapters even vary between the genre and form of their written style - one interspersed with sensationalist newspaper headlines describing updating situations, one composed entirely from questions and answers of varying length, one written as a script replete with amusing stage directions, one written as a single fifty-page-long sentence without any punctuation at all. This is what people are talking about when complaining of how hard to read it is BECAUSE IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE.

   So the book, despite a fairly simple story and a fairly comprehensible set of mythic parallels, becomes nigh on impenetrable because of how it is written. Of course it helps not at all that on top of this the text is also littered with references to contemporary Irish culture, often in minute detail of politics or communities, plus spattered untranslated phrases in Latin, Italian, Irish and a handful of other languages, plus many a word that is simply either misspelt or made up. Much of these latter difficulties could be avoided with an annotated version (which I didn't have) but that adds on a good 240 pages of reading and probably doesn't add 240-pages-worth of enjoyment, so allow yourself to not understand certain things. I think in short it's fair to say that there was a pretty large proportion of the book that was lost on me, and could probably be lost on anyone except those highly-skilled in literary deconstruction and with a lot of spare time for analysis.

   Don't let that put you off in the slightest. This is renowned as one of the most difficult books but it is also absolutely superb: the rewards are so much greater for the increased mental strain of reading it. If they weren't, the first person to have read it would have considered it meaningless gibberish and tossed it aside and it wouldn't be the monstrously famous 20th-century novel that it is. Reading it is often like wading through glue, yes, but only because you're collecting pots of gold scattered about the surface of the glue-pond (please pardon that ridiculous sentence). The sheer liquid delight of the writing style's inventiveness as the words seem to play with themselves, the life-affirming splendour of some of the descriptions of feelings and people, the irrepressible grin or chortle as some benign or opaque phrase turns its own meaning into something entirely different - once you get the knack of not being put off by the text, you can stumble through it and see its fleeting beauty. This post is naturally meandering somewhat because there is so much to potentially say about this book and yet I wouldn't know where to start, so apologies. I'm just trying to outline how great it was to read.

   On the back of my edition, there's a quote by Samuel Beckett about the novel: "His words are not the polite contortions of twentieth century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and flame and disappear". I cannot put it better; reading the book makes you feel as though you are reading minds, and of course this is hard to comprehend, to retain, to dissect; but it is full of insights and snippets of pure originality and excellence. Molly and Stephen and especially Leopold Bloom do not feel like characters in a novel - they feel like real existing humans with minds and bodies and communities; like we're allowed to peer into their innermost lives through James Joyce's meticulously** crafted prose-tinted glasses.

   It is a cliché to say so but this is a work of genius (it wouldn't be a cliché if people hadn't thought it were true frequently enough to make it one). There aren't many books I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who enjoys reading should attempt before they die, but this is certainly among them.

* I did start off trying to read Ulysses and the Odyssey in parallel, chapter to chapter, but of course the one was an epic journey with monsters and adventures in plain prose and the other was a day in Dublin with acquaintances and errands in the unplainest prose I've ever encountered - and for some reason I got bored of the first one and finished the second one first.

** the book had a thoroughly arduous journey from inception to proper publication, due to various factors including: Joyce's povety-stricken conditions; his developing eye-disease; inept copytypists; disinterested publishers; government censorship; and World War One. The pains of a genius' labours are great to birth such a great work as this. Fortunately the original text survives to today in a variety of affordable readable mass-market paperbacks.