Books: Rough Portrait

STEPHEN HERO—James Joyce—New Directions ($3.50).

Mrs. James Joyce has hitherto been noted chiefly for her comment after reading Ulysses: "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, surely!" Now Joyce's admirers find themselves deeply indebted to this quiet, unpublicized woman for Stephen Hero, a fragment of the first draft of Joyce's autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. After it had been rejected by 20 different publishers, Joyce flung the 914-page manuscript into the fire. Mrs. Joyce risked her own skin to retrieve pages 519-902, now...