Two on Joyce

JSLT 38:2 1995 literary terms, which may be a life preserver for students drowning in terms with which they have little or no famUiarity. I would not recommend this volume for your own personal critical library. Though there are some nice individual readings in the essays, they're pitched pretty low, and there's not much that is original. However , I would have no qualms about using it in the classroom, with the few caveats I have mentioned above. We owe students every ounce of help we can give them, and most of the text is good introductory material that can help them negotiate the difficult waters of contemporary theory and Joyce criticism. Daniel Schwarz's edition The Dead does precisely what it sets out to do, and it seems to me a valuable resource for the undergraduate classroom. Mary E. Donnelly ---------------------- University of Miami Two on Joyce James Joyce. The James Joyce-Paul Leon Papers in the National Library of Ireland: A Catalogue. Catherine Fahy, comp. Dublin: National library of Ireland; Syracuse University Press, 1992. xviii + 254pp. Cloth $44.50 Paper $24.95 James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. R. B. Kershner, ed. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1993. xii + 404 pp. Paper $18.95 A CACHE of James Joyce's papers remained under a fifty-year seal at the National Library of Ireland until April 1992. For years Joyceans had speculated about what treasures the coUection could possibly include: notes for an unpublished work? Nora Barnacle's side of the Joyce correspondence now known as the infamous 1909 exchange of erotic letters? The manuscript of an uncompleted novel based on the life of St. Patrick? A decoder ring that would finally answer all of our questions about the structure of Finnegans Wake? Although the public unveUing of the collection provided few such dazzling fireworks, it did provoke quite a firestorm of controversy. In her foreword to the catalogue of the coUection, National Library Director Patricia Donlon explains the curious history of the papers. In 1940, Joyce's friend and business representative Paul Léon rescued books, papers, and contracts left behind when Joyce and his f amUy fled German-occupied Paris. At this time Léon deposited nineteen sealed 264 book Reviews envelopes, containing a decade of private and business correspondence, with the Irish ambassador in Paris, Count OTCeUy. Léon asked OTCeUy to hold these documents until Léon requested them; however, if Léon died, OTCeUy was instructed to give the envelopes to Joyce. If both Joyce and Léon died, OTCeUy would deposit the materials with "the Public Library of Ireland or the British Museum." When he learned of Joyce's death on 13 January 1941, Léon hastily wrote to OTCeUy indicating that the nineteen envelopes should go to the National Library of Ireland in Dublin: "As this correspondence involves thrid [sic] persons and is partly of an intimate character I must put to this donation the condition that access to it for biographers and litterary [sic] persons should not be granted until fifty years after Mr. Joyce's death and that the representatives of the famUy should be consulted before any publication is allowed." It is the National Library's interpretation of this last stipulation that set the stage for acrimonious exchange involving Stephen Joyce, James Joyce's grandson; Irish Senator and Joycean David Norris; and the Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach, Mr. T. Kitt. In her foreword, Donlon admits that the Library "released a very limited number of papers of a purely personal family nature to Stephen James Joyce." The Library also deemed it necessary to further seal selected papers, to disallow "access to or publication of certain of the papers prior to the 31st day of December 2050." No stranger to Joyce scholars, Stephen Joyce makes occasional appearances at conferences to berate what he considers a Joyce industry voyeuristic and eager to capitalize on his grandparents' private lives. Although many are sympathetic to his argument that the 1909 correspondence between his...