Harriet Shaw Weaver, to whom T. S. Eliot dedicated his
Selected Essays "in recognition of her services to English
letters," was the daughter of a country physician who brought her up in the
Quaker tradition. It is Quaker modesty and aversion to extravagance which
characterizes her in this collection of correspondence, for she allowed
herself few autobiographical utterances and few flights of praise for the
works she so much admired and whose author she befriended for
twenty-four years. Still, where the letters of her colleagues are overt
revelations of personality, where we are rapt by Wyndham Lewis' zeal,
Ezra Pound's fireworks, or James Joyce's sharp wit, Miss Weaver's letters
are solid witness to Eliot's dedication. They are a record of her
"services."
The hitherto unpublished collection of letters from the Cornell
University Joyce Collection covers the time from April 22, 1915, to June
6, 1920, corresponding approximately to the period when Harriet Weaver
began her connection with Joyce and extending up to the conclusion of the
Egoist magazine's efforts to continue the serial publication of
Ulysses. Miss Weaver became the editor of the
Egoist in June, 1914, taking over from Dora Marsden who
had
begun the magazine in 1911 as a feminist review, the
Freewoman. As the editor of the Egoist, it was
Harriet Weaver's business to attend to the serial publication of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Miss Marsden had
agreed to publish after being introduced to the novel by Ezra Pound. Miss
Weaver was faced with many difficulties in carrying out
the
Egoist's commitment, the chief ones being the wartime
breakdown of easy postal exchange between Joyce's various European
locations and London, and the reluctance of English publishers and printers
to handle outspoken novels in the wake of D. H. Lawrence's troubles with
The Rainbow.
The letters contain the details of her problems with publishers and
printers, their last minute refusals and their willfullness in editing Joyce's
text, as well as the details of desperate measures nearly adopted to see
Joyce's work in covers, such as Ezra Pound's plan to paste little slips of
paper containing excised passages from Portrait into blank
spaces in a proposed first edition. The problems in acquiring accurate texts
for the Egoist, in providing American publishers with revised
texts, and in getting them back herself, are also related in the letters. Miss
Weaver writes of a variety of texts of Portrait, of the famous
Dublin Holograph, of some made up from corrected copies of the
Egoist, of a text sent to the American publisher John
Marshall
made up in part from the supposedly destroyed original typescript, and of
corrections in the supposedly unrevised second English edition. The letters
also contain a wealth of information about the sales
of Portrait and about decisions concerning the price of the
book.
But the story of the struggle to publish Portrait is best told by
the letters themselves, as is the story of the growing friendship between
Harriet Weaver and James Joyce which led to her patronage of the author
and continued on to the executorship of his literary estate.
The transcribing of these letters has been quite painless, for they are
in good condition and Miss Weaver's handwriting presents few problems.
She was not fond of abbreviations or private shorthand devices, and the few
mannerisms of her hand are easily decipherable. No attempt has been made
to edit Miss Weaver's occasional irregularities in punctuation or her
infrequent misspellings. In addition to any self-justification for my handling
this correspondence, I have three motives for including footnotes with the
collection: (1) to explain the context of many of Miss Weaver's statements
which are often direct replies to questions or remarks made by Joyce in
previous letters, (2) to refer the reader to related letters, and (3) to supply
biographical and circumstantial information about some of the many names,
places, and events mentioned in these letters.
For economy's sake, I have not copied letterheads. They are as
follows, my brackets indicating Miss Weaver's own handwriting. The
letters, Cornell Joyce Collection numbers 1298 and 1299, are on business
stationery headed "The Egoist, / Oakley House Bloomsbury Street, /
London, W. C." On business stationery headed "The Egoist
/ (Published by the proprietors, The New Freewoman, Ltd.) / Oakley
House, Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.," Miss Weaver wrote the letters,
Cornell numbers 1300-1303, 1307, 1316, 1317, 1319, 1328, 1330, 1335,
and 1336. Letters, Cornell numbers 1304-1306, 1308-1315, 1318, 1320,
1321, 1323-27, 1329, 1331-34, 1337-43, 1345-50, 1352-55, and 1357, are
on Harriet Weaver's personal stationery headed "74 Gloucester Place, /
[London,] W." Cornell numbers 1322 and 1358 are headed "The Vicarage,
/ Brighouse. / [Yorkshire]." Number 1351 is headed "[Arnewood / The
Avenue / Totland Bay / Isle of Wight]." Letter number 1356 is a card
headed [74 Gloucester Place, London, W. 1]; number 1359, also a card, is
headed "[c/o Miss Wright / Frodsham / Warrington / England]."
I have omitted Miss Weaver's signatures as well as the letterheads.
She signed all the correspondence "Harriet Weaver" except for the first two
letters, numbers 1298, 1299, which she signed "Harriet Shaw Weaver," and
the telegram which, of course, has no signature. The postscripts in letters,
numbers 1298 and 1304, are initialed "H. S. W."
