If the day should come that I walk into the classroom, unfurl my opening lecture on Joyce; and find at the end of the hour that I had as well been talking about Alfred Lord Tennyson, I shall not be unduly surprised. No writer's original fame lasts forever with the young. Joyce has already had an unusually long run with them; and though their interest shows no present signs of weakening, when it does fail it will likely fail suddenly. Everything in literature has its term, and, if worthy, its renewal. That the rediscovery of Joyce will occur, with full fanfare, within a generation after his rejection, may be taken as certain. However, that will be no affair of mine. Meanwhile, I predict with confidence that when the rest of Joyce's books pass into temporary disfavor A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man will go on being read, possibly as much as ever, by youths from eighteen to twenty-two. They will read it and recommend it to one another just as lads their age do now, and for the same reasons. That is, they will read it primarily as useful and reassuring revelation -- not as literature, for they will be blind to its irony and its wonderful engineering, the qualities Joyce most labored to give it. They will use it as a magic mirror: as boys of thirteen use Huckleberry Finn and as sixteen-going-on-seventeen looks into the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for graceful corroboration of its own grim apprehension of The Meaning of Life. I should think it doubtful that Joyce had these readers in mind when he wrote the book, any more than Fitzgerald foresaw for his nearly original poem its permanent audience of callow fatalists; but, like it or not, this is part of his achievement. Joyce did complain that readers tended to forget the last four words of the title. He could have remarked, too, that the book was not the Self-Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. All too often it is read as if it were so named. Then the author himself is belabored for the sins and the more than occasional priggishness of his hero, or, conversely, is credited with having possessed in youth the same astonishing clarity of purpose and action. Either assumption is unjust to Joyce. True, Stephen Dedalus is endowed with a personal history quite similar to his creator's; his experiences are modeled on those Joyce himself suffered or enjoyed at that age; and as Joyce, writing the book, is the mature artist, so Stephen is a representation of the artist-by-nature as he discovers his vocation, defines his creed, and sets forth to practice it. There, I think, close resemblance ends. Joyce's life happened to him as everyone's life happens -- at all hours and seasons, any old way, with chronic inconvenience. Stephen's existence, though presented in rich detail, is at once the product and the illustration of deliberate composition in terms of a consciously created aesthetic. I remember that when I first encountered Stephen Dedalus I was twenty and I wondered how Joyce could have known so much about me. That is what I mean by the sort of reading the book will continue to get, whatever literary fashion may decree. Perhaps about the third reading it dawned on me that Stephen was, after all, a bit of a prig; and to that extent I no longer identified myself with him. (How could I?) Quite a while later I perceived that Joyce knew that Stephen was a prig; that, indeed, he looked on Stephen with quite an ironic eye. So then I understood. At least I did until I had to observe that the author's glance was not one of unmixed irony. There was compassion in it too, as well as a sort of tender, humorous pride. By this time I was lecturing on Joyce, and I was having a terrible time with the book. I could not coordinate what I had to say about it; and the students; as their papers showed, were mostly wondering how Joyce could have known so much about them -- which was fortunate, for the lectures made very little sense, and it was well that the victims had their own discoveries to distract them. The trouble was, I was trying to examine separate parts of the book separately. There aren't any separate parts. One might as well attempt to study a man's gestures by pulling off his arm and dissecting it. The book is all of a piece, one organic whole. It is, as it were, written backwards and forwards and sideways and in depth, all at once. A score of premises is laid down in the first twenty-odd pages. From these, with deliberate and unobtrusive engineering, everything else is developed in the most natural-looking way possible. The same words or the same basic images in which the premise was expressed are used over and over again, development usually being measured by the variations of context in which they occur or by new combinations of these identifying words and images.

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