A New Novel from Mr Joyce

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and the 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.

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.
Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.
The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:
‑O, Stephen will apologise.
Dante said:
‑O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.

Pull out his eyes,
Apologise,
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes

Apologise,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise.

The first instalment of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published one hundred years ago today in The Egoist, which, as Ezra Pound had informed him in a letter from the previous December had until recently “coursed under the unsuitable name of `The New Freewoman’ …” under the editorship of the “small, handsome, grimly intellectual” Dora Marsden and which was now being edited by Harriet Shaw Weaver, later to become a major benefactor of Joyce. Publication of the Portrait coincided with Joyce’s thirty-second birthday and 1914 was to prove a good year for him, if not for everyone else. Dubliners was finally published in June. The way was now clear to work on Ulysses, which he had already been preparing to write for several years.
2/02/2014