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  • Clive Hart (1931-2016)
  • Fritz Senn

The shocking news came at the end of August. Clive Hart died of a heart stroke on the 27th, a great loss for the Joyce community even if few of us had seen him in recent years.

An Australian, he studied at Cambridge University and was one of the first scholars to devote himself to Finnegans Wake, which, until that time, had hardly been considered worthy of academic attention in England. His dissertation resulted in a pioneering 1962 study, Structure and Motif in “Finnegans Wake,” an early comprehensive view of the book as a whole. Through immense labor, he also put together A Concordance to “Finnegans Wake” in 1963, one of the most important and useful tools ever compiled, which, in the days before digital accessibility, enabled us to find any word in the labyrinth. Clive soon became a member of a dispersed group that exchanged glosses on specific items in the Wake, out of which A “Wake” Newslitter evolved; from 1964 to 1980, the group’s members assembled annotations and brief glosses from an increasing number of contributors. Clive did practically all of the necessary editorial and administrative work.

Together with David Hayman, he initiated the simply titled James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1974, a collection of essays on the eighteen episodes by different authors, a standard work that still has not been replaced or updated (as it should be after forty-odd years). Clive focused on the realistic aspects of Ulysses, as in his own essay, where he traced the paths of all the characters in “Wandering Rocks.” It is one of the most solid pieces of criticism that exists and served as the basis for a peripatetic reenactment of the episode by actors and Joyce scholars in the respective locations on Bloomsday 1982 as part of the anniversary Joyce Symposium. Clive took part in many of our International Symposia and was active in the organization of the one in Monte Carlo in 1980.

Clive had an important part as an advisor for Hans Walter Gabler’s Critical and Synoptic Edition of “Ulysses,” which was launched during the 1986 Frankfort Symposium. The text, based on new principles, caused a great deal of substantial—but even more insubstantial—controversy. Hart’s and Philip Gaskell’s (his fellow advisor) views on editorial procedures were not all in agreement with those of the Munich editors, so they published a volume, “Ulysses”: A Review of Three Texts, containing “Proposals for Alterations to the Texts of 1922, 1961, and 1984” in 1989. Accordingly, he took an active part in a conference set up by George Sandulescu in 1985 in Monte Carlo that was devoted entirely to textual issues of Ulysses, and his own essay in a subsequent [End Page 7] volume contains some of the most insightful commonsense views.

Clive was an excellent scholar. He initiated the first collection of essays on Dubliners as well as a volume for the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Finnegans Wake. Originally, it should have contained more short articles than were finally assembled in the 1966 Twelve and a Tilly (Jack P. Dalton is listed as co-editor, but “collaboration with Dalton” was by that time a contradiction in terms). I nearly forgot how prolific Clive was in those pioneering days and almost overlooked his A “Wake” Digest, which contained gleanings from the 1968 Newslitter.

He naturally became a board member of the International James Joyce Foundation, and for a number of years he was an executor on the board of the James Joyce Estate, no doubt a precarious position.

Clive’s approach was strictly of the no-nonsense variety, one further result of which is his Topographical Guide to “Ulysses” from A Wake Newslitter Press in 1975. Revised in 1981 with the assistance of Leo Knuth, it contains maps charting all the locations in the novel, together with lists of shops and institutions, another immensely practical tool. It was subsequently revised and much expanded in 2004 to become James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of “Ulysses,” in collaboration with Ian Gunn and Harald Beck. I remember that during the second Symposium of 1969 Clive...

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