When Stephen thinks, "Talk that to someone else,
Stevie: a pickmeup," he is clearly talking himself out of
his interest in the girl at the Hodges Figgis' window, in
the same way that he has urged himself earlier in Proteus
to be more financially prudent
("go easy with that money like a good young imbecile"), or to
give up his fascination with obscure
medieval texts ("Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is
not there"), or to get over his religious piety ("Cousin
Stephen, you will never be a saint"), or to stop lusting after
women in the street ("Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags
pinned round a squaw"). But why does he call himself Stevie?
And what is a pickmeup? The sentence seems to recall a
conversation that Stephen had with his friend Davin in the
last chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The nickname Stevie appears nowhere else in Ulysses, but
Joyce had used it in earlier fictions. In Stephen Hero Stephen is
addressed that way several times by his university companion
Madden, a young man from Limerick: "—You know, Stevie, he said
(Madden had a brother Stephen and he sometimes used this
familiar form) you always told me I was a country buachail
and I can't understand you mystical fellows." In A
Portrait Stephen acquires another university companion
named Davin, from the countryside south of Limerick. Davin
appears to be a reincarnation of Madden based on his intense
Irish nationalism, his unassuming country folksiness, and his
use of the nickname Stevie: "—A thing happened to myself,
Stevie, last autumn, coming on winter, and I never told it to
a living soul and you are the first person now I ever told it
to. I disremember if it was October or November. It was
October because it was before I came up here to join the
matriculation class."
This "thing" was an attempted seduction. Davin was late
leaving a hurling match in the town of Buttevant, missed the
train home, and began walking back along a very dark country
road. When he saw a cottage with a light in the window, he
knocked on the door and asked the woman inside for a glass of
water. She gave him milk and, "half undressed," implicitly
offered herself to him as well, saying that her husband was
away: "And all the time she was talking, Stevie, she had her
eyes fixed on my face and she stood so close to me I could
hear her breathing. When I handed her back the mug at last she
took my hand to draw me in over the threshold and said: Come
in and stay the night here. You've no call to be frightened.
There's no one in it but ourselves. . . . I didn't go
in, Stevie. I thanked her and went on my way again, all in a
fever. At the first bend of the road I looked back and she was
standing at the door."
So it seems that in Proteus Stephen is channeling
the chaste Davin, imagining his friend saying to him, "Don't
go there, Stevie. It would just be a one-night stand." I have
not found documentation for this use of "pickmeup," however.
