“Reading Joyce Again Through New Letters:”: A Report on Bill Brockman’s Presentation at a Meeting of the New York James Joyce Society held at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House, 1 Washington Mews at Fifth Avenue, New York City, New York, on 15 March 2019

Among the more pleasant investigative inquiries not currently being conducted by the United States Congress nor pursued by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York is the search for all the unpublished correspondence of James Joyce. Bill Brockman is a member of a team of researchers in this endeavor including Kevin Dettmar, Bob Spoo, and Michael Groden. Following up on his presentation six years ago, Brockman’s Ides of March 2019 talk at a meeting of the New York Joyce Society focused on several new discoveries and outlined progress toward publication on digital and hard-copy fronts. To date, and without the issuance of a single subpoena, Brockman and his colleagues have already uncovered more than two thousand previously little-known pieces of Joyce’s correspondence.

On an unusually warm late winter evening, about two dozen Joyceans turned out at New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House to hear Brockman’s presentation. Proving that important unpublished Joyce correspondence can still be found, one of the meeting’s attendees began the session by circulating a copy of a four-sentence Joyce letter that had recently surfaced at the United States National Archives. Written at Saint-Gérand-Le Puy (central France) on 29 October 1940 (just eleven weeks before Joyce died), the letter was addressed to a “Mr. Cunningham,” and it enclosed some forms to be forwarded to the “Paris Embassy,” as part of Joyce’s efforts to secure permission from the authorities to leave occupied France. The letter also informed the recipient that Louis Gillet would be bringing him hundreds of Joyce’s books for safekeeping as well as “m.s. Finnegans Wake (dummy copy with corrected misprints of 1st edition).” The letter’s final sentence reads: “My son will fetch these in the course of a few days.” The succinct nature of this correspondence seems to convey the urgency with which Joyce wanted to put some of his affairs in order during a particularly pressing time period. Brockman commented that the exact identity of the letter’s recipient, Mr. Cunningham, is still under investigation.

Opening his formal remarks with some background information, Brockman noted that there are some sixty or so repositories of originals of Joyce’s letters and postcards including the National Library of Ireland, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, and the Zurich Joyce Foundation, among others; he suggested that an unknown number of places may hold at least one piece of original Joyce correspondence. He also mentioned books of various collections of Joyce’s letters that have already been published: the three volumes edited by Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, the Joyce/Ezra Pound correspondence, and the letters to Sylvia Beach. Brockman pointed out, however, that of the 3,808 pieces of Joyce’s correspondence currently identified, only about 45 percent have been published. Among those unpublished, he said that a few letters were found in the Sean Kelly collection of Joyce material that was recently donated to the Morgan Library in New York; those will be displayed by the Morgan in an exhibition planned for the centennial of the publication of Ulysses in 2022.

Brockman detailed three principal reasons for the project to identify as much of the unpublished Joyce correspondence as possible:

1. 1. While he was not a great letter writer like Pound or Virginia Woolf, Joyce’s correspondence to agents and publishers in particular provides background regarding the composition and publication of his fictional works and comments (though infrequently) on these writings.

2. 2. The correspondence offers insights into Joyce’s personal life, and especially his travels, his relations with family members, and contacts with significant supporters such as Harriet Shaw Weaver.

3. 3. Joyce’s letters and postcards are frequently humorous, alternately self-promoting or self-deprecating, thereby adding perspective to our portrait of him.

In describing the process of reading, transcribing, and annotating Joyce...