The National Library of Ireland's New Joyce Manuscripts: An Outline and Archive Comparisons

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 Terence Killeen, “Vast Joyce Manuscript Archive Arrives in Dublin,” Irish Times (May 30, 2002): 9. The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts: An Outline and Archive Comparisons MICHAEL GRODEN On May 29, 2002, the National Library of Ireland announced its acquisition of a large collection of previously unknown Joyce manuscripts . The documents had been in the possession of Alexis Léon, son of Joyce’s Paris friends Paul and Lucie Léon, and Alexis Léon gave the National Library the exclusive opportunity to buy them. Sotheby’s in London negotiated the transaction, which took sixteen months to work out. The Library paid £8 million for the manuscripts— 12.6 million Euros or US $11.7 million—and agreed to pay the costs in three installments, with over 5 million Euros coming from the Heritage Fund set up by the then Irish Ministry of Arts, Heritage , Gaeltacht, and the Islands (“Gaeltacht” refers to the Irishspeaking regions of Ireland) and the remainder from the Allied Irish Bank Group, operating under the Irish government’s tax credit scheme. “At one bound,” Terence Killeen wrote in the May 30, 2002 issue of the Irish Times, “the National Library, which already had impressive Joyce holdings, has established itself as one of the world’s major Joyce repositories.”1 In September 2001 the Library asked me to look at the manuscripts and to report on their authenticity, contents, and value—in 02-T2928 3/3/04 11:02 AM Page 5 G&S Typesetters PDF proof 6 the nli’s new joyce manuscripts 2 James Joyce, Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols. (NY: Viking, 1957, 1966), 3:40. 3 See Sam Slote, “Preliminary Comments on Two Newly-Discovered Ulysses Manuscripts ,” James Joyce Quarterly 38 (Spring/Summer 2001): 17–28; Arnold Goldman, “Two New Ulysses Working Drafts,” Joyce Studies Annual 12 (2001): 3–9; and also the two auction catalogs: “James Joyce’s Ulysses: The John Quinn Draft Manuscript of the ‘Circe’ Episode,” Christie’s New York, Thursday, 14 December 2000; and Peter Selley, “The Lost ‘Eumaeus’ Notebook: James Joyce, Autograph Manuscript of the ‘Eumaeus’ Episode of Ulysses,” Sotheby ’s London, 10 July 2001. qualitative rather than dollar terms. In mid-November 2001 I went to London, where by then the manuscripts were located after being moved from Paris, and I spent two intense days in Sotheby’s offices looking at each of the documents, most of them notes and drafts for Ulysses but also two notebooks from earlier years and a few materials for Finnegans Wake. After the establishment of several major library collections of Joyce manuscripts in the 1950s and 1960s, nothing new surfaced for almost forty years. Then, two Ulysses manuscripts came to light and were sold for huge sums in late 2000 and mid-2001. First came a draft of “Circe.” In April 1921 Joyce sent this draft, in addition to the document that eventually became the “Circe” part of the Rosenbach manuscript, “as a curiosity” to John Quinn, who was purchasing the entire Ulysses manuscript in episode sections as Joyce finished each one.2 Quinn’s heirs put this draft up for sale in 2000, and in December 2000 the National Library of Ireland bought it for $1.5 million at a Christie’s New York auction. The second manuscript, a completely unknown one, was a draft of “Eumaeus” (its cover says “Eumeo”) that apparently either Sylvia Beach or Adrienne Monnier gave or sold to Henri Hoppenot, a French diplomat and writer. It went to a French book dealer after Hoppenot’s death, Sotheby’s in London auctioned it for that dealer in July 2001, and an anonymous private collector purchased it for £860,000 ($1.2 million).3 Its whereabouts are now unknown. These two documents, tremendously exciting as they were, nevertheless turned out to be tantalizing teasers for what was to come. I prepared my report for the National Library in which I described the contents of the collection in as much detail as I could, given the limited...