A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. James Joyce, 1916

Beginnings are only known once the events they set in motion become discernible as a sequence linked by cause and effect rather than mere chronology, and that moment of discernment may take years or even decades.

But to begin:

Chapter I

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the green wothe botheth
When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.
His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.

The opening lines of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: the book that made me want to write a novel. Made me, at age seventeen, want to write something for myself and not at the behest of a teacher. What I wrote isn’t important; what matters is that I wanted to write.

Along with not knowing a beginning until years later, we can also misremember the attribution and while the hero here, apart from Stephen Dedalus, obviously, is Mr Baker of Sandown Court Secondary Modern School, ultimate responsibility must lie with The Associated Examination Board who selected Joyce’s novel for the 1977 to 1979 ‘A’ Level English Literature course. But I prefer to give the credit to Mr Baker.

Sandown Court did not have a good reputation. Built in either 1960 or 1968 (mine is not the only beginning that’s muddled) it took those pupils who had failed their Eleven Plus and thus failed to get into Tunbridge Wells’ grammar school. That its most famous alumnus was John Simon Ritchie, better known as Sid Vicious, whose path I may have briefly crossed as he was only three years my senior, is all you need to know. That and, for present purposes, that I was happy there and five decades on am seldom happier than in a classroom of some kind or other. Sandown Court is no more, unlike my primary schools both of which survive, albeit one is now a Baptist Church. Sandown Court was first renamed, then renamed again, then demolished, and replaced with an academy. Fortunately, a school is its teachers, not its architecture, and teachers live on in their students.

Mr Baker, forty-ish, short, rotund, black-bearded, enthusiastic and engaging, was only the last in a happy line of mostly excellent and inspiring English teachers I enjoyed at Sandown Court: so much so that Mr Moore, Mr Griffiths, Miss Dickinson, and Mr Baker, are akin to the signatories on the American Declaration of Independence, and, so far as inspiring me, rewarding me, and educating my imagination, were far more influential than my ‘socially aspirational’ parents who never really knew what to make of a child who lived in his imagination.

Note: the importance of a book may be as much, if not more, to do with the time, place, and circumstances in which it is read than its content.

But of course, The Associated Examination Board had not only selected A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Also read for ‘A’ Level were: A Passage to India, The Power and the Glory, Othello, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Prologue and Miller’s Tale, Jude the Obscure, and Wordsworth’s Collected Poems. All were read at the same time, in the same setting, for the same purpose, but none had anything like the effect on my seventeen-year self as Joyce’s novel and it took me decades to understand why.

Prior to this point my reading had moved from the childhood classics of Biggles, Narnia, Dr Doolittle, Professor Branestawm, John Pudney, Willard Price, and Gerald Durrell, through the ‘grown-up’ thrillers of Ian Fleming, Hammond Innes, and Alistair MacLean, and then the ‘golden-age’ science fiction of Norton, Clarke, and Asimov, but despite the precociousness of reading nominally adult fiction as early as twelve, all these books can be labelled adventure stories in which people who were not at all like me invented things, travelled to exotic places, did extraordinary things, and suffered and caused suffering to others. I did not then know the word, but they were all escapist.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was the first novel I read where the main character, the hero, was someone I recognised as being like me. Uncertain, bemused, misunderstood, failing to comprehend the whys and wherefores of the world in which he was expected to function, economically and socially, but also aware that I was in an unknowable way, different. With hindsight, that unknowable difference was that like Stephen Dedalus I saw the world differently to those who expected me to join in with them.

Along with recognising myself in Dedalus there was a sense the I and he were on the same journey. The novel is, in part, autobiographical—Dedalus is Joyce’s alter ego—and because Joyce had achieved so much as a writer that we were studying his novel at school, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (the clue is in the title) both told me my journey and that the journey could end in success, so long as I discounted going blind and dying relatively young and in poverty. Though, oddly, I am almost blind in one eye and have seldom known wealth.

There are two other aspects of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that were surprising, even enlightening, though I may be guilty of reading too much into them so many years later. The first is there in the quote from Chapter One. Bear in mind that twelve years of schooling had taught me the rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and that all those adventure novels were written in ordinary ‘correct’ English, and then look at the opening lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce ignored everything I thought was correct to depict the viewpoint of Baby Tuckoo seeing a moocow. Language used to express character, as opposed to being a medium for imparting knowledge, was new to me, as was the knowledge, beautifully illustrated by Joyce, that rules could be broken. In fact, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is masterful in its language and style for, as Stephen Dedalus matures throughout the novel, the prose style matures with him.

One might say A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was the first novel I read where the language was central to the story the novel tells, rather than merely the means of its transmission.

The other aspect of the novel that I distinctly remember noting, mainly because Mr Baker drew the class’s attention to it, is Joyce’s punctuation of dialogue. Again, bear in mind those years of learning correct punctuation as though it was as fixed as Pythagoras’s Theorem, and here comes Joyce.

Ennis, who had gone to the yard, came back, saying:
—The boy from the house is coming up for the rector.
A tall boy behind Stephen rubbed his hands and said:
—That’s game ball. We can scut the whole hour. He won’t be in till after half two. Then you can ask him questions on the catechism, Dedalus.
Stephen, leaning back and drawing idly on his scribbler, listened to the talk about him which Heron checked from time to time by saying:
—Shut up, will you. Don’t make such a bally racket!

Joyce, Mr Baker told the class, had decided double quotes and single quotes for dialogue were cumbersome, so he didn’t use them. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that writers didn’t have to follow the rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation and certainly none of the writers I had read had done so. But here was Joyce, lauded and famous, doing just that. I can’t recall if Mr Baker referred to it as the ‘Continental Dash’ but that is what it is. It’s not Joyce’s invention, just something he adopted because he thought it better. I sometimes use it in my novels to indicate dialogue that is recalled many years after it was spoken, so an echo of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man exists in my work. I now know that the double or single quote mark for dialogue is not a rule in the way arithmetic has rules, but simply a cultural preference.

I mentioned in the introduction to Cornerstones that it was initially to be called Foundations. Well, if I had to choose a foundation book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would be it. It made me want to write for myself, showed me that someone like me could be the hero, and it gave me permission to do it my way. Quite simply, and with no exaggeration, the book changed my life.

I also said that the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man inspired me to write wasn’t important, apart from the desire to write it, but that isn’t strictly true. I showed Mr Baker the manuscript, typed out on my birthday present typewriter, and he was encouraging.

Epilogue.

In June 1979, I left Sandown Court for employment in an insurance office in London and all my schoolbooks were returned to their various departments. All except A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It remained with me for almost four decades until, at the end of a year taking English Studies: creative writing with critical practise at Ruskin College, Oxford, I donated it to the college library. It seemed fitting somehow; a return to the beginning or, by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to a place of learning.