Volume 5, Number 2 · August 26, 1965
A Man of Words
By Denis Donoghue
James, Seumas and Jacques: Unpublished Writings of James Stephens
edited by Lloyd Frankenberg
Macmillan, 228 pp., $6.95
James Stephens: His Work and an Account of His Life
by Hilary Pyle
Barnes & Noble, 196 pp., $6.00
'Joyce was strangely in love with his own birthday and with mine. He had discovered somehow that he and I were twins, born in the same hour of the same day of the same year in the same city. The bed it seemed was different, and that was the only snag in our relationship.' The city was Dublin, the year 1882, the day February 2nd, the hour six in the morning, the Joyce James, the speaker James Stephens. The truth of the matter is probably less poetic. Hilary Pyle tries to show that Stephens was born on February 9th, 1880, but I am happy to report that the evidence is inconclusive. In any event Joyce believed in the poetry; so much so that in 1927 when things were going badly with Finnegans Wake he thought of having Stephens finish the work. Stephens's qualifications were indisputable. His name, like Joyce's, was James, he was a poet, a Dubliner, fortunately born, nominally close to the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and he had good eyesight. Finally, the lettering on the book would be JJ and S, as Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver, 'the colloquial Irish for John Jameson and Son's Dublin whisky.' The auspices were unimpeachable. Two years later Joyce and Stephens were still discussing the notion. So it petered out.
Review, 1923 words
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