![]() ![]() ![]() “Little failed saints,” Montague wrote, “we knew eternity too early.” Almost every section of Joyce’s book belonged to common Irish Catholic experience. ![]() The Dublin of my student days was strewn with versions of Stephen Dedalus, including myself, though I wonder what the women thought of it!” In an essay written in 1982 to mark the centenary of Joyce’s birth, the Irish poet John Montague, who died earlier this month, a writer who had also mined his own childhood, wrote of the influence of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “No one could overestimate the effects of on later Irish writers … Or on the national psyche: many young Irishmen came to painful consciousness reading those corrosive pages. When I read the hell fire sermon, I had heard some of those words, though I was born 40 years after the book came out For many Irish male writers who came after Joyce, from Frank O’Connor to John McGahern to Seamus Heaney, the sifting of early memory, the detailed description of parents, domestic space, school, religious belief, came with the matching account of the young artist’s effort to navigate these through solitude and reading, through knowledge and language. ![]()
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