A Portrait won Joyce a reputation for his literary skills, as well as a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, the business manager of The Egoist.[4]
In 1916, in his reader's report to Duckworth & Co., Publishers, Edward Garnett wrote that, to make it publishable, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man needed to undergo extensive revision, especially at the beginning and the end. The public would call the book "as it stands at present, realistic, unprepossessing, unattractive". He said it was "ably written" and "arouse[d] interest and attention", and he approved of the rendering of the period and the characterizations. But he found the novel "too discursive, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent". He concluded that the "author shows us he has art, strength and originality", but needed "to shape [his novel] more carefully as the product of the craftsmanship, mind and imagination of an artist".[63][64]
In 1917 H. G. Wells wrote that "one believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction", while warning readers of Joyce's "cloacal obsession", his insistence on the portrayal of bodily functions that Victorian morality had banished from print.[65]
In 1917 Ezra Pound wrote, "James Joyce produces the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we now have in English." A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man "will remain a permanent part of English literature." He went on to further phrase Joyce for writing in accord with Imagist standards: "Apart from Mr. Joyce's realism... apart from, or a piece with, all this is style, the actual writing: hard clear-cut, with no waste of words, no bungling up of useless phrases, no filling in with pages of slosh."[66]
In 1918 Ezra Pound wrote, "[Joyce] has his scope beyond that of the novelists his contemporaries, in just so far as whole stretches of his keyboard are utterly outside of their compass." He continued, "[In] A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there is no omission; there is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation—without, above all, the profanations of sentiment and sentimentality—and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with metallic exactitude."[67]
In 1927 E. M. Forster wrote, "[Joyce] has shown (especially in the Portrait of the Artist) an imaginative grasp of evil. But he undermines the universe in too work-manlike a manner, looking round for this tool or that: in spite of all his internal looseness he is too tight, he is never vague except after due deliberation; it is talk, talk, never song."[68]
In 1927 Wyndham Lewis criticized Joyce's diction in a sentence from chapter 2 of A Portrait:
Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his tall hat.[69]
Fifty years later, Hugh Kenner used Lewis's criticism to formulate what he called the Uncle Charles Principle. "Repaired" and "brushed scrupulously" are words Uncle Charles himself would use to describe what he was doing. Kenner argued, "This is apparently new in fiction, the normally neutral narrative vocabulary invaded by little clouds of idioms which a character might use if he were managing the narrative. In Joyce's various extensions of this device we have one clue to the manifold styles of Ulysses."[70]
Kenner, writing in 1948, was critical of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of A Portrait, arguing that he "does not become an artist at all... but an aesthete" and "to take him seriously is very hard indeed". Kenner lamented, "[I]t is painful to be invited to close the book with an indigestibly Byronic hero stuck in our throats."[71]
A later version of Kenner's 1948 essay appeared in his first book on Joyce published in 1955.[72]
Writing in 1959, William York Tindall was also critical of Stephen Dedalus, saying "he never sees himself entirely". Tindall regretted Stephen's "failure to realize himself", adding that "this is attended to in Ulysses, which makes A Portrait seem preliminary sketch."[73]
In 1963 S. L. Goldberg took issue with Kenner's negative appraisal of Stephen, conceding that "Mr. Kenner is certainly right in pointing to the irony with which Joyce views him in both the Portrait and Ulysses", but faulting him for concluding that in doing so Joyce is rejecting Stephen himself. For Goldberg, Joyce's "irony is a qualifying criticism, which does not imply a total rejection".[74]
