An Early Manuscript of "Tutto è Sciolto"

I recently came across a fair-copy manuscript of the poem "Tutto è Sciolto" bearing the date of 13 July 1914 in Joyce's hand next to his signature, among the holdings of the Martin Bodmer Foundation in Switzerland (see Figure 1). The existence of this manuscript has apparently escaped the attention of Joyce scholars. A note from Bodmer, the founder of the library and museum bearing his name, records that he bought the manuscript from the London bookseller Martin Breslauer in 1953. The poem is written on a sheet of paper that has been folded, as if it were a presentation copy to be inserted in an envelope. A facsimile is printed in a 1977 catalog of the Bodmeriana's English and American Autographs by Margaret Crum.¹ Among all of the poems eventually collected in the 1927 Pomes Penyeach, this melancholy lyric, whose title is borrowed from Vincenzo Bellini's La Sonnambula, appears to have been revised more than any other between the date of its original publication and its final published version, possibly because of the nature of the emotional event in Joyce's life that it represents (CP 51). In his 1968 introduction to Giacomo Joyce, Richard Ellmann connects that prose work to "Tutto è sciolto" as concerned with the same love affair, both works having been composed in the summer of 1914 (GJ xviii).

In order to place the Bodmer manuscript in the history of the poem's successive transformations, let us review its other extant versions in manuscript and typescript. There are three typescripts at Cornell University circa 1916, according to Robert Scholes,² a fair-copy holograph manuscript at the University at Buffalo dated 1918-1919 (Buffalo IV.A.I), and a manuscript and typescript at the Huntington Library dated 1927. These are noted by Ilaria Natali in an informative article in Genetic Joyce Studies, where she gives the date of "about 1915" for the Cornell typescripts.³ Another typescript of the 1927 version is part of the Hans Jahnke bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, elegantly bound in a handmade volume that may be the work of Joyce's daughter Lucia.

The poem was first published in the May 1917 issue of Poetry magazine; a substantially rewritten version appeared in the first edition of Pomes Penyeach published in Paris by Shakespeare and Company in 1927.⁴ The final version gives the place and date of the poem's composition as Trieste, 1914, yet none of the known versions, which vary considerably, appears to correspond materially to that date. In their 1953 biography of Joyce's work, John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon write, "[A]pparently the poems are dated by time of inspiration rather than composition."⁵

Before commenting on the specific importance of the Bodmer manuscript, it would be useful to review the general structure of the poem, which remains in place despite the numerous revisions in diction and punctuation. The title may be translated as "All Is Undone." It is a lyric consisting of three stanzas of four lines each of alternating pentameter and dimeter iambs. The first stanza evokes a seascape at dusk and addresses the poet's heart, which has its own memories. The next stanza names those memories as the eyes, brow, and hair of the lost lover, comparing her "falling" hair to the falling light of the present scene. The final stanza asks a poignant question of the heart: why repine if her love was "never" (1917) or "all but thine?" (1927).

As mentioned above, the date of 13 July 1914 in the Bodmer manuscript apparently refers to the original occasion of the poem, if not to the actual production of the fair copy. Based on the sequence of versions noted in Natali's article, my conjecture is that the Bodmer version, if not the original fair copy, represents a revision of the circa 1916 Cornell typescripts, because it incorporates differences from that version that appear in the version published in Poetry magazine in May 1917. It would thus predate all other holograph manuscripts of the poem known so far. The differences in the Bodmer...