Notes on the New Joyce Manuscripts

G&S Typesetters PDF proof Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 14, Summer 2003© 2003 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 Two other “Léon collections” exist, one in the NLI that Léon gave to Count O’Kelly, the Irish Ambassador in Paris, to hold in trust until the end of the War, and one at the University of Tulsa. 2 See Arnold Goldman, “Two New Ulysses Working Drafts,” JSA 2001, 3–9. 3 There’s also the La Hune/Buffalo V.A.19 (see Michael Groden, p. 6). Notes on the New Joyce Manuscripts ARNOLD GOLDMAN In May 2002, the Irish Government and the National Library of Ireland announced the purchase of an astonishing hoard of previously unknown Joyce manuscripts. The seller was Alexis Léon, son of Joyce’s friend Paul Léon.1 Coincidentally in Dublin on the day of the Irish Government announcement, I remembered that only months before her death in 1972, I’d interviewed Lucie Noël, Mrs. Paul Léon, in her Paris apartment (for a BBC Radio program about Joyce and the tenor John O’Sullivan). Possibly sitting within arm’s length of what by 2002 would be worth £12 million (say $12 million), it didn’t occur to me to ask if she owned any Joyce memorabilia. As she lived very modestly, I suppose that she didn’t know that she had anything of such value as the manuscripts her son would discover thirty years later. No new Joyce MSS had surfaced for decades when a working draft of “Eumaeus” was sold in 2000 (to an anonymous buyer) and one of “Circe” in 2001, bought for the NLI.2 Reading the publicity attendant on its arrival in Dublin—for example, “ULYSSES IS COMING HOME”—you had to recall that the book was famously written in “Trieste-Zurich-Paris/ 1914 –1921” by the author who chose not to set foot in Ireland after 1912. In 2001, a Dublin home for an additional3 manuscript of “Circe”—the NLI then owned no other Ulysses manuscript—only seemed to contribute to the diaspora of 01-T2928 3/3/04 11:01 AM Page 3 G&S Typesetters PDF proof 4 notes on the new joyce manuscripts pre-Rosenbach manuscripts. But the new purchase changed things utterly: Ireland had won the Sweeps. To chart a path for scholarship, JSA2003 contains Michael Groden’s article, “The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts: An Outline and Archive Comparisons,” 5–17. Inter alia Groden here supersedes the episode-by-episode list of extant manuscripts that he provided in James Joyce’s Manuscripts: An Index (NY: Garland, 1980), and he also enhances the stemma of Ulysses manuscripts he earlier established in “Ulysses” in Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). All who use these books should now consult and reference this article. That the Irish re-possession—or possession—of Joyce has taken a great leap forward is undeniable but to give the modern Dublin/ Irish background and context to that story, JSA2003 publishes Terence Killeen’s “Ireland Must Be Important . . .” (18–36). Killeen gives testimony to how much distance has to be made up in specified quarters and where credit lies. As I write, the Library has now made digital reproductions of its new manuscripts available to scholars on a dedicated workstation.They’ve clearly been working hard on the project. JSA had earlier imagined that it might already have been able to present other indications of the manuscripts’ significance and importance for Joyce scholarship —genetic, editorial, and critical—in 2003: another defeat for the Gracehoper. Arnold Goldman 16 June 2003 01-T2928 3/3/04 11:01 AM Page 4 ...