 | JOYCE'S ULYSSES LIBRARY
by
TRISTAN POWER
|  |
JOYCE'S ULYSSES LIBRARY
by
TRISTAN POWER
THERE is a great amount of evidence for the books read by Joyce
from 1914
to 1922 while he was writing Ulysses, but it has not been given the full
attention that it deserves.
1
Six hundred items survive in the Nelly Joyce collec-
tion, almost all of which are genuine works
belonging to Joyce from his Trieste
library.
2
Besides these, ninety further titles have
been obtained from the external
evidence of Joyce's shelf inventory and bookstore
bills duringthis period, but esti-
mates of the library suggest that it contained at
least another five hundred books,
which have left few if any documentary traces that
are external to the novel
itself.
3
Book lists in his Ulysses notebooks have also thrown light on his
reading,
particularly for his years in Zurich, when he read
books from the public library,
4
as
well as for the composition of the work's final episodes in Paris. However, the
current transcriptions of all this evidence remain
either incomplete or filled with
errors. By emending these lists with different
conjectures that solvea number of
textual cruxes, several new works not previously
known to have influenced Joyce
may be discovered. This essay corrects mistaken
readings of the surviving docu-
ments related to Joyce's
library during the composition of Ulysses. I use the
word
"library" in thesame wider sense as Ellmann, who
included not only books that
I
Let us begin with the bill dated 23 May 1914 from the Libreria F. H. Schimpff in Trieste, recording fifty crownsowed for twenty books that had been purchased by Joyce over the previous seven months. 6 Three of the titles on this bill are inaccurately transcribed by Ellmann, who was the first to deal with this document: 7
- Berlitz, I
- Sauer, Englische Grammatik
- Schlüssel, Englische Grammatik
Based on inspection of the bill itself (fig. 1), the first entry is more precisely
"Berlitz,
I livre," making it identifiable with M. D. Berlitz's
Premier livre pour l'enseignement
des langues modernes.
8
It was therefore a French textbook, and
may even have been
for Joyce himself, who knew the language but was continuing to
study it at this
time.
9
The initial
parts of Ellmann's other two entries are misguided. These are
not authors' names at
all: the first is the title of the series, "Methode Gaspey-
Otto-Sauer," in which the language book Englische Konversations-Grammatik was
published;
10
while the word
Schlüssel
means "Keys" in German, and Ellmann
has evidently also missed the abbreviation "z." for the preposition
"zur." As
the bill shows, the actual line is "Schlussel z
— — [i.e., Engl. Grammatik]"; in
answer book to the previous title on the list, 11 which stands to reason, since both
texts were purchased onthe same day. Joyce no doubt purchased both books to
teach English to his Triestine students, some of whom were German.
Ellmann,
"Joyce's Library in 1920,"
p. 97. On this subject, see Dirk Van Hulle, "Digi-
tal Library History: The
Virtual Bookcases of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett," Quaerendo
46
(2016), 192–204.
F. H. Schimpff, "Bill Sent to James Joyce," James Joyce Collection, #4609, Division
of
Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Series II, Box
3, Folder 26, MS
1401. This bill did not appear in the The
James Joyce Archive (hereafter JJA), ed. Michael
Groden
et al., 63 vols. (New York, 1977–1979), but is
reproduced here as figure 1. It is suggested by
Gillespie, "A Critique of Ellmann's List," p. 33 that since the bill was
not fully paid, Joyce may
not have owned all of these books. However, it is more
likely that he bought them all on credit,
as he usually did, which often led to
threats of being sued; see Gordon Bowker,
James Joyce: A
Biography
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2011), 159, 173–174, 186, 207.
These transcriptions are from Ellmann, "Joyce's
Library in 1920," pp. 101, 126. Com-
pare also id.,
James Joyce,
rev. ed. (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 779.
M. D. Berlitz, Premier livre pour l'enseignement
des langues modernes: partie française pour
adultes (Berlin: S. Cronbach,
1902).Joyce probably bought the revised edition, which was
newly
available (New York: Berlitz,
1913).
See e.g. James Joyce,
Notes, Criticism, Translations & Miscellaneous Writings: A
Facsimile
of Manuscripts & Typescripts, 2 vols., ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland, 1979), 2:
72
(= JJA 3: 72); also Bowker,
James Joyce,
pp. 23, 56, 134.
Thomas Gaspey, Englische Konversations-Grammatik
zum Schul- und Privatunterricht,
2nd ed., ed. H.
Runge (Heidelberg: J. Groos,
1852). The most recent edition of this book was
the twenty-fifth
edition, which had been published in 1911.
II
On the fifth page of Joyce's 1917 subject notebook, we find a list of
authors
and titles from English literature that has not been completely
transcribed.
12
Once fully
understood, the list is discovered to be a chronologically backwards
selection (from
the nineteenth to the fourteenth century) of authors and titles
from Edmund Gosse's
A Short History of Modern English Literature.
13
This work also
proved useful for
the linguistic evolution of the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, as
is clear from a letter
by Joyce on that episode, in which he refers to "a choppy
Latin-gossipy bit, style
of Burton-Browne."
14
He gets this
verdict from Gosse,
who likens Thomas Browne to Robert Burton, referring to the
former's "abrupt
transitions," and claiming that there is "muchmore that is his own,
in relation
to parts adapted from the ancients, than in Burton."
15
Let us examine Joyce's list
of
notes from this book exactly as it is written:
- Peacock (Thomas Love): Headlong Hall, Nightmare Abbey
- Galt (John): Annals of the Parish
- Shelley (Mrs): Frankenstein
- Ferrier (Miss): Marriage
- Brunton (Mary): Selfcontrol, Discipline
- Hallam (Henry): View of Middle Ages
- Crabbe (Geo): Borough
- (Thos): Fudge Family in Paris
- Burney (Frances): Evelina, Cecilia
- Edgeworth (Maria): Castle Rackrent
- Burke: Letter to a Noble Lord
- Sterne: Tristram Shandy
- Berkeley: Siris: Hylas & Philonous
- Mandeville: Fable of the Bees
- Pope: Essay on Criticism
- Southerne: Comedies
- Wycherley: Plain Dealer
- Temple Sir William
- Crashaw (Richard): Vaughan
- Browne: Burton
- Fuller (Holy War) wit
- Carew (Thos) coarse
- Donne ( John): Green (Robert)
- Tallis: Giles Farnaby
- Sidney: Wilson (Art of Rhetoric)
- Lyly: Sir Thomas Wyatt: Skelton
- Will. Dunbar: Ballad to Our Lady, Uplands Mouse & Burgess Mouse
- James I: The King's Quair
- Langland: Harrowing of Hell, Piers Plowman
With only one exception (see below), all of the information on this list appears
in
Gosse's book. That the work by Gosse is Joyce's source,
and not George Saints-
bury's A Short
History of English Literature, which also appears to have been among
the
sources for "Oxen of the Sun,"
16
is
confirmed by the shared misspellings of
the two Scottish poems cited in the
third-to-last line: Robert Henryson's "Tale of
the Upland
Mouse and the Burgess Mouse" and William Dunbar's "A Ballad
of
Our Lady."
17
Joycedid not catch the errors, and alsointroduced an
interpolation
of his own, "Giles Farnaby," of whom he must
have been remindedby Gosse's
mention of Farnaby's predecessor, the composer Thomas Tallis.
18
Further sup-
port for the source is found in Joyce's
uniquenotes "Fuller (Holy War) wit/Carew
(Thos) coarse," which are taken straight
from Gosse:
Carew invented a species of love-poetry which exactly suited the temper of the
time.
It was a continuation of the old Elizabethan
pastoral, but more personal, more ar-
dent, more coarse, and more virile
... [Fuller's] activitybetween 1639, when he pub-
lished the Holy War, and 1661, when he died, was prodigious …
Without endorsing
the extravagant praise of Coleridge, we must acknowledge that the
wit of Fuller was
amazing, if he produced too many examples of it in forms a little
too desultory for
modern tastes.
19
These unique errors and details confirm that Joyce's source for this genealogy
of
English literature was indeed Gosse, who had been reluctantly persuaded
by Yeats to
help Joyce receive a grant in 1915, although he later became
more
critical, denouncing the author of Ulysses as "a sort of
Marquis de Sade."
20
It is
rather
ironic, then, that Gosse's book was used in its composition, when he was
still
considered an ally by Joyce. Some of the titles on this list may have been
tually been tracked down, since he customarily compiled bibliographies in his
notebooks that he never used. 21 Other lists, however, do seem to have been of
books intended for purchase, since they contain exact editions with prices, such
as the seven titles in Joyce's early commonplace book, 22 but we do not know if
they were in fact ever bought.
Thomas Gaspey,
Englische
Konversations-Grammatik zum Schul- und Privatunterricht:
Schlüs-
sel,
2nd ed., ed. H. Runge
(Heidelberg:
J. Groos,
1897). The most recent edition of this book
was the fourth edition,
which had been published in 1906.
James Joyce, "II.i.1. Notebook," Joyce Papers
2002, Department of Manuscripts,
National Library of Ireland, MS
36,639/3, p. 5. This book list was mostly transcribed by Wim
Van Mierlo, "The Subject Notebook: A Nexus in the Composition History of Ulysses—A Pre-
liminary Analysis," Genetic
Joyce Studies 7 (2007), 9; Danis Rose
(ed.),
James Joyce: The
Dublin
Ulysses Papers, 6 vols., rev. ed. (East Lansing: House of
Breathings, 2012), 3: 23–26. As Rose
demonstrates (3: 25), Van Mierlo's "Up Tails All" for line 37 should instead be
"Tallis." Neither
identifies "Vaughan" (line 32), "Browne:
Burton" (line 33), which Van Mierlo finds "illegible"
(9), or "Uplands
Mouse & Burgess Mouse" (line 40).
Edmund Gosse,
A Short History of Modern
English Literature (London: W.
Heinemann,
1897), 331,327–328, 325, 318–319, 295, 291,244,
229, 225, 208, 195, 191,183, 156, 152–153,
146, 135, 97, 89, 86, 64, 80, 67, 57,
51,48, 38, 10. The reverse order of the list may be explained
by the book having
been marked as Joyce read, and then the notes recorded as he
flipped
backwards through his markings.
Letters of James Joyce, 3 vols., ed. Stuart
Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (New York:
Viking
Press, 1957–1966), 1: 139.
A copy of this book survives from the Trieste library; see
Gillespie,
James Joyce's
Trieste
Library, p. 199.On Joyce and
Saintsbury, see also Michael
Gooch, "Saintsbury's Anglo-Saxon
in Joyce's
'Oxen of the Sun,'" Journal of Modern Literature 22
(1998–1999), 401–404.
III
The next important documentation of Joyce's reading during this period is
found in
his 1918 Zurich notebook, which is composed of notes on books that
he
consulted in the Zentralbibliothek. Among these works is long assumed to
have
been the English prose translation of the Odyssey by
S. H. Butcher and A.
Lang,
based on references to Homer's poem in this notebook.
23
However, in his notes
to Book 11 of
the Odyssey, Joyce refers to Zeus by his Roman name Jove, and to
Oedipus' mother as
"Jokaste" (Ἰοκάστη),
24
rather than Epicaste as she is called
in this particular book of
Homer (Od. 11.271). The gloss suggests that Joyce was
here instead following the
translation by William Cowper, the only one to use
Roman
names (including "Ulysses") and to specify Jocasta in a footnote.
25
Her-
ring's conjecture of "?didipur"
26
for the word under "Jokaste" should obviously
be emended to "Oidipus," which is likewise a
transliteration of the Greek spell-
ing (Οἰδίπους). Atsome point Joyce also obtained
his own contemporary copy
of this translation that survives from his Trieste
library, and it is a version of the
tale that he favored more than has been
realized, despite his dislike of Cowper's
own poetry.
27
Butcher and Lang were certainly read by Joyce too, but
there is
no evidence that he did so at the Zentralbibliothek. They are not the only
old-
in the "Nausicaa" episode. 28 Clearly, he also had in mind the even more archaic,
but hitherto overlooked, style of Cowper's verse translation.
See e.g. Frank Callanan,
"James Joyce and the United Irishman,
Paris 1902–3,"
Dublin
James Joyce
Journal 3 (2010), 88–89.
James Joyce, "I.ii. Notebook with
Accounts, Quotations, Books Lists, etc.," Joyce
Papers 2002,
Department of Manuscripts, National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/2/A, p.
43.
The list has been mostly transcribed by Luca Crispi, "A Commentary on James Joyce's National
Library of Ireland 'Early
Commonplace Book': 1903–1912 (MS 36,639/02/A)," Genetic Joyce
Studies 9 (2009), 24. However, he does not
correctly identify two ofthe editions: Oscar Wilde,
Art &
Morality, rev. ed., ed. Stuart Mason (London: F. Palmer,1912); Frederick
Corder,
Wagner
(Masterpieces of Music) (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack,
1912).
Phillip F. Herring,
"Ulysses Notebook VIII.A.5 at Buffalo," Studiesin
Bibliography 22
(1969), 294, 308–309 (repr. in id. [ed.],
Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for Ulysses: Selections
from
the Buffalo Collection [Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia,
1977], 10, 28–29).
James Joyce,
Ulysses:
Notes & "Telemachus"Scylla and Charybdis"; A Facsimile of Notes for
the
Book & Manuscripts & Typescripts for Episodes 1–9, ed. Michael Groden
(New York: Garland,
1978), 160 (=JJA 12:
160).
William Cowper,
The
Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, 2 vols. (London: Printed for
J. John-
son, 1791), 2: 257. A copy of this edition is
indeed held by the Zentralbibliothek.
Herring, "Ulysses Notebook VIII.A.5 at
Buffalo," p. 308 = Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts
for
Ulysses, p. 29.
Pace
Keri Elizabeth
Ames, "Joyce's Aesthetic of the Double Negative and His Encoun-
ters
with Homer's Odyssey," in Beckett, Joyce
and the Art of the Negative, ed. Colleen Jaurretche
(Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2005), 27, 29–30. For his edition of Cowper's translation, see
Gillespie,
James Joyce's Trieste Library, p.
99.
IV
Another bill dated 20 April 1920 from the bookseller Simmel & Co. in
Leipzig
contains the name "Joyce" (fig. 2),which Brown has argued denotes a
German
translation of Joyce's own play Exiles.
29
Brown also reads the previous
entry on
this bill as "Seawards," suggesting that it refers to Jane Porter's Sir Edward Se-
award's Narrative of His Shipwreck.
30
But the actual 1910
catalog from which the five
works on this list were ordered (Catalog 229) concerns
exclusively philological
matters, as announced by its theme: Germanische und Keltische Sprach-und Altertum-
skunde. It offered a total of
4,114 items for sale, all of them relating to Germanic
and Celtic languages,
especially English. These were obviously stylistic sources
for "Oxen of the Sun,"
which Joyce was writing at the time, using Latin and early
forms of English and
Irish. Had Brown actually found this catalog and looked up
no. 346, he would have
discovered that "Joyce" is in fact P. W. Joyce's
Irish Local
Names Explained.
31
This work, it seems, was the realsource of the Gaelic
word
"Deshil"
(Deisiol) at the beginning of that episode (U 14.1),
32
and not the same
author's A Social History of Ancient Ireland, as has long
been thought.
33
Brown's
transcription "Seawards" from the bill turns out simply to be a misreading
of
"Sea words." The catalog entry for this item (no. 1982) reveals the
actual Edward
not to be Edward
Seaward, but Edward FitzGerald," author of Sea Words and
Phrases along the Suffolk Coast, which Joyce is already known to have used for a
passage in "Oxen of
the Sun" (U 14.1440–1550).
34
For imitation of Butcher and Lang's prose in Ulysses, see
Cynthia Hornbeck, "Greekly
Imperfect: The Homeric
Origins of Joyce's 'Nausicaa,'" Joyce
Studies Annual (2009), 91–93.
Simmel & Co., "Bill Sent to James Joyce," James Joyce
Collection, #4609, Division of
Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University
Library, Series II, Box 3, Folder 36, MS
1402. See Brown, "Addenda and
Corrigenda," p. 315. This bill was also not included in The
James Joyce Archive, but is reproduced
here as figure 2.
See Simmel & Co., Lager-Katalog 229: Germanische und Keltische
Sprach-und Altertumskunde
(Leipzig: Simmel & Co., 1910),
12.
P. W. Joyce,
A Social History of Ancient
Ireland, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green &
Co., 1903), 1:
301, cited by Fritz Senn, "Nausicaa," in
James
Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed.
Clive
Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1974), 283 n. 2 (repr. in
Fritz
Senn,
Joyce's Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as
Translation [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ.
Press, 1984], 186 n. 2); Don
Gifford and Robert J. Seidman,
Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James
Joyce's
Ulysses,
rev. ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1988), 408. On the works of P. W.
Joyce
that were read by Joyce, see Tymoczko, The Irish Ulysses, pp.
289–293. Joyce's frequent
of his English As We Speak It in
Ireland is documented by R. W. Dent,
Colloquial Language in
Ulysses: A Reference Tool (Newark,
DE: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1994), passim.
Edward FitzGerald,
Sea Words and Phrases
along the Suffolk Coast (Lowestoft: S. Tymms
, 1869). See
Simmel & Co., Lager-Katalog 229, p. 68. This discovery has
been anticipated by Ro-
nan Crowley, "Earmarking 'Oxen of the Sun': On the Dates
of the Copybook Drafts," Genetic
Joyce Studies 18
(2018), 17 with bibliography. The work is simply a book edition of FitzGerald's paper by the same title in East
Anglian 3 (1869), 347–363. The other three conjectures
by
Brown, "Addenda and Corrigenda," pp. 314–315 for items on this bill prove
correct; see Sim-
mel & Co., Lager-Katalog 229, pp.
47–48, 60; cf. Crowley, "Earmarking 'Oxen of the Sun,'"
pp. 17–18 on the entry
"Specimens."
V
The front and back of the single extant page from Joyce's
inventory of his
library shelves in Trieste, which he himself took before moving to
France in the
summer of 1920, are
unquestionably our most important evidence for his back-
ground reading at the
time.
35
What is nowhere mentioned by
Ellmann, or Scholes
in his cataloging of this list,
36
is that on the verso of this page,
which pertains to
"Shelf 3: Back," Joyce significantly
writes the words "from Miscellany" in the
bottom-right corner (fig. 4), indicating
the rather general nature of this second
set of books on the inventory. A Norwegian
play by Hamsun entitled Ved rigets
port that survives from
Joyce's
Paris library may also be found on the
Trieste
inventory,
37
suggesting
that this was originally a full list, and not merely of the
books Joyce left behind that could be sent for later. Several still mysterious
items
remain on the inventory. None of the entries is as puzzling as the second of
the
first two titles by Tolstoy (fig. 3):
- Tolstoi: Saggi
- Tolstoi: Scritti
No one has commented on the contents of the second book, but the first title
Saggi ("Essays") appears among Joyce's
surviving Trieste books on the cover of a
rebound volume that consists of four
paperbacks from the "Biblioteca universale"
series: Agli uomini
politici; La guerra russo-giapponese (1911), Piaceri crudeli (1910), Ai
soldati, agli
operai (1912), and Ai governanti, ai preti
(1910).
38
Only the first
of these
four titles is given by Ellmann.
39
Two individual Italian translations of works
Joyce's library. 40 The fact that the first two titles on the inventory were paired
on the shelf, and no Italian work by Tolstoy with the title Scritti was published
in this era either, suggests that the lost volume was not a novel, but instead like-
wise a rebound hardcover made up of another four of Tolstoy's remaining five
works in this series: Le imitazioni (1901), Dal dubbio alla fede (1902), Katia; Di che
vivono gli uomini (1902), Le confessioni (1879–1881) (1913), and Le novelle della morte
(1919). 41 This conjecture may explain the more general title Scritti ("Writings"),
rather than Racconti ("Stories"), if this book included the non-fictional work Le
confessioni.
One entry was misidentified by Ellmann with an extant title
from the Trieste
library: "21–22. Moliére: Works (2 vols)"
(fig. 3). He associated this item with a
set of two volumes by Moliére that survives among Joyce's books: Théâtre comp-
let illustre (1909).
42
Ellmann's conjecture was accepted by Gillespie in his com-
ments on this work: "This title appears on Joyce's library inventory."
43
However,
"Théâtre complet illustré" is by no means written on the
inventory, but rather
the title "Works," which almost certainly denotes a
publication in English. Al-
though the French title has the benefit of being a
two-volume edition, this cor-
respondence is probably coincidental.Joyce may well have read the French texts
of Molière's plays as well as English translations. Since Joyce's other citations on
the inventory are all precise
recordings of titles taken from the books themselves,
which generally indicate their
language, we should not assume, as Ellmann ap-
pears to
do, that "Works" is an arbitrary or casual designation. Two English
editions of
Molière with the title The Works may be suggested, to which these
vo-
lumes plausibly belonged: Baker and Miller's ten-volume edition of
1748, which
contained both French and English, or Van Laun's twelve-volume edition of
1890, which was only in
English.
44
The latter is preferable
by far, due to its more
recent publication date and also the fact that Joyce owned a separate French
edition, which the former would
render unnecessary. If we are to determine the
exact two volumes from the
translation by Van Laun that were in Joyce's library,
the second and eighth volumes in particular are strong
possibilities, containing
translations of the plays Sganarelle, ou
Le cocu imaginaire and George Dandin, ou Le
by their mention in his notes to Exiles. 45
Another title that is attributed to Tolstoy on the inventory
was identified by
Ellmann with Der Roman
der Ehe, a German translation of one of this author's
stories, based on an
entry that he seems to read as simply "32. Tolstoi: Ehe."
46
Gillespie has since similarly
connected this transcription with the surviving copy
of that work from Joyce's Trieste library, which had not been noticed by Ellmann,
but supports his case.
47
While the abbreviation of this title as "Ehe" would
cer-
tainly have been possible, when we inspect the actual line itself, we see that
Joyce
instead wrote "Ehre" (fig. 3), as Brown has
already noted, despite his acceptance
of Ellmann's
conjecture: "Ellmann is to be thanked for identifying '32.
Tolstoi:
Ehre' as Der Roman der Ehe."
48
On the contrary, I should argue that this work
is
rather the play Die Ehre (1889) by Hermann Sudermann, whose later dramatic
work Heimat (1893) was attended by Joyce in
its English production
Magda
during
his youth, and he purchased two other plays by this author a couple of years
later
in Italian translations.
49
The error on the inventory no doubt originated with
Joyce
himself. It is easy to see how he could have mistakenly written "Tolstoi"
for the author of this work, since Sudermann's drama was greatly influenced by
Tolstoy, and the two writers are often compared. Even Joyce could have recalled
the wrong author for a book with the Tolstoyan
title Die Ehre. It would not be
the only mistake on the
extant page of the inventory: Joyce not only
misspells
Hueffer's
The Troubadours as "Trobadours" (fig. 4), which Ellmann did correct,
but also misnumbers as "21–22" what
should have been "22–23" on the front,
and as "26" what should have been "25" on the
back.
50
Ellmann errs in his transcription of a language book on Joyce's inventory,
just as he did with his linguistic
textbooks in French and German. This time, it
is an
Italian course book for learning English. At the back of Joyce's third shelf,
he records a further four books that are carelessly
transcribed by Ellmann:
51
1.Ferdinando Bracciforti, Grammatica della lingua inglese
2.Bracciforti, Chiave dei temi sceneggiati
7–8. Melani, Lettera italiana (2 vols.)
12. History of Excess
Joyce's inventory (fig. 4), but the title supplied by Ellmann is that of a different
work, the fifth and final part of the English language textbook Corso graduato e
completo di lingua inglese, which was revised by Ferdinando Bracciforti. 52 Once
again, we must differentiate between an original text and its answer book. As with
Schlüssel, Ellmann does not recognize that Chiave is Italian for "Key." Joyce must
instead have had the fourth volume of this course, entitled simply Temi sceneggiati,
to which the work identified by Ellmann merely provides the solutions. 53 These
books do not so much inform Ulysses as the daily life of a professor of languages
that surrounded its composition. This last book, however, does have bearing on
the early material for Ulysses in Giacomo Joyce, since it is for the private lessons
of the Italian student behind it that the textbook was almost certainly used by
Joyce.
The third and fourth entries above require closer examination of the inven-
tory's
manuscript, for they were not misidentified, but rather misread in the first
place,
which has hindered their identification. Let us take "7–8. Melani, Lettera
italiana (2 vols.)."
54
As comparison with Joyce's handwritten entry
itself proves (fig. 4), this title is actually to be identified with Alfredo Melani's
Pittura italiana
(1885–1886), a discovery which
is particularly interesting in light of the fact that
Joyce's knowledge of the history of painting has formerly been questioned.
55
As
the presence of this book in his
library demonstrates, his interest in the subject
was greater than has been thought.
In fact, he may have appreciated one of this
book's illustrations in particular, a
Vatican fresco depicting the visit to Hades in
Homer's
Odyssey.
56
The
third entry, given by Ellmann as "12. History of Excess,"
has also been misread in the most tantalizingly
scandalous way. Although Joyce
had read several
pornographic works, this was not one of them, despite the
general acceptance of
Ellmann's false interpretation in later discussions,
which
describe the work as "erotic," "prurient," and "unrecoverable."
57
If we are fa-
miliar with Joyce's hand, we know that he usually begins his uppercase "G"
with
entries "5. Hodgson: Errors in Use of English" and "9. Eliot: Mill on the Floss"
from the preceding lines. 58 This detail discounts any possibility that the last word
of the second title is "Excess," since it does indeed have an initial loop (fig. 4).
The next thing to notice is the second letter of this word, which Ellmann takes
for an "x," but which could only be one if it was left uncrossed. This seems un-
likely, and the alternative proposition that it should instead be an "r," which fits
Joyce's handwriting perfectly, must therefore be preferred. We might compare
the "Gr" in "Grammatica Inglese" at the top of the same page, denoting the
second part of the Italian course discussed above. 59 A much better conjecture
now presents itself: the word is not "Excess," but "Greece."a Comparison with the
word "Greece" in a handwritten letter by Joyce from 1905 confirms the reading. 60
What could be a more fitting title in the library of the man writing Ulysses than
History of Greece? This title also suits the themes of other miscellaneous works at
the back of this shelf, such as John Lingard's A History of England, Thomas and
Katharine Macquoid's Pictures & Legends from Normandy & Brittany, 61 and Gu-
glielmo Ferrero's L'Europa giovane.
Because Joyce gives no author, it is uncertain which exact
work is meant, as
there are a few single-volume books with the title History of Greece that were avail-
able in Joyce's day.
62
However, we
have seen that he was particularly interested in historical accounts by Irish scholars
such as P. W. Joyce, and the History of
Greece in question is therefore probably the student's book by W. F. Collier,
63
whose History
of Ireland for Schools was
certainly used by Joyce for Ulysses.
64
It makes sense that
he would also have used an Irish history of Greece for his own Irish version
source for
Joyce's
references to Greek history. The first is at the very beginning of
Ulysses, when Buck Mulligan says to Stephen: "Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must
teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great
sweet mother" (U 1.79–80). Molly repeats this phrase in English at the end of
her soliloquy: "the sea the sea" (U 18. 1598). These allusions are to the shout of
Cyrus the Younger's army, the Ten Thousand, towards the end of Xenophon's Anabasis, when they reach the mountains (Xen. An. 4.7.24). But Joyce need not
have read an edition of this ancient work itself. He could instead have drawn the phrase from Collier, who not only preserves the same Greek transliteration "Thalatta, Thallata" as a subheading to his chapter "The Ten Thousand," but also narrates the historical moment itself:
After forcing their way through hosts of barbarians, the vanguard reached the
summit
of the ridge Theches (now Kóp Tagh), and with tear-dimmed eyes saw the
waters
of the Euxine heaving against the northern horizon. From rank to rank, in the
var-
ious dialects of the Grecian tongue, a joyous cry spread: The Sea! the Sea!
and
weather-worn warriors fell sobbing on their comrades' necks, as they thought of
their escape.
65
Joyce's next reference occurs in the "Nestor" episode. Stephen asks the students
in his class, "What was the end of
Pyrrhus?" (U 2.18), and then recalls how the great Greek general
had ironically "fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos" (U
2.48). This was by no means the only version of the tale, but it is the exact
same variant accepted and told by Collier: "Pyrrhus then turned away to Argos … a tile,
flung from a housetop by a woman, stunned Pyrrhus, and an enemy cut off his head."
66
Joyce again appears to follow Collier for the battle of
Aegospotami,
with the Athenian fleets of Aegospotami" (U 7.566–568). This closely accords
with the vivid description of this event's outcome in Collier, especially his refer-
ence to "the Athenian fleet":
Retribution, swift and complete, came next year at Aegospotami in the strait of
the
Hellespont, wither the Athenian fleet had followed Lysander and his ships … On
the
fifth day Lysander's spy-galleys hoisted a shield, when they saw the Athenians
out of their ships—and then down, like a cloud of sharp-beaked falcons, darted the
waiting
squadrons of the Spartans.
67
Joyce's reference to "Pisistratus" in the "Oxen of the Sun"
episode (U 14.1112) seems
no less owed to Collier, who
devotes a chapter to the tyrant in his book.
68
These four
rather specific details from Greek history, although
hardly recondite, establish the
source with great certainty when taken together,
especially the view that Pyrrhus
was killed by a roof tile
in Argos, rather than by Antigonus' troops, since all of them
are contained in
Collier's work. History of Greece provided material for the
Hellenism
of Joyce's characters, in keeping with his
generally Homeric theme. With regard to
the ancient past, Joyce relied not only on biographical sources such as Plutarch and Suetonius,
69
but
also read the more current histories by Collier.
In one case, it is certainly Joyce who nodded, and Ellmann who did not
discover the typo on the inventory. Two
entries after History of Greece (fig. 4), we
find what Ellmann transcribes as "14. Mercredy,
Map of Ireland."
70
This work has
never been discovered, and for good
reason: Joyce miswrites the name of "R.
J.
Mecredy," whose road and neighborhood maps of Ireland were very popular at
the time, especially those for cyclists and
tourists. Mecredy himself was a famous Irish cyclist and
writer who had published a full Road Map of Ireland,
71
which
is
probably the title on the inventory, but also sold five smaller sections
separately for Kerry,
Donegal, Connemara, Down, and East Central
Ireland, as well as
various maps of Dublin.
Joyce's error may be understood as a common example
of metathesis, where
the letters "cr" became rearranged as "rc" in his original
transcription.
Four other titles on Joyce's
1920 inventory have indeed been properly tran-
scribed, but never
correctly located. The first was identified by Ellmann as
the
same work as the German volume
Katharina
II
that survives from Trieste, since
plet illustré, the existence of Katharina II does not preclude Joyce from having also acquired translations of Sacher-Masochian stories about Catherine the Great. If
we look at the inventory (fig. 3), the spelling of the title is in fact slightly different:
"41. Masoch: Catherine II." This spelling suggests that Joyce refers instead to an
English collection. Either of the following therefore fits better: Tales of the Court of
Catherine II, and Other Stories (1896), or Venus and Adonis, and Other Tales of the Court of
Catherine II (1896). 73 As the latter contains translations of several of the tales already collected in Katharina II, including "Disgrace at Any Price," to which
Joyce alludes in Ulysses 74 the former seems the more likely, especially because the
abbreviated title on the cover of this book of entirely different stories reads "Tales
of Catherine II," which Joyce could have simply recorded as "Catherine II." It
may be relevant to Joyce's Exiles that Tales of the Court of Catherine II, and Other
Stories contains a translation of Guy de Maupassant's brief story "L'épingle"
about a man who wishes to be sexually betrayed by his beloved, which is falsely
attributed to Sacher-Masoch and significantly entitled "The Exile." 75
The second title on Joyce's inventory that has not been
precisely pinpointed
is recorded two entries later in the same part of the
inventory: "43–46. Masoch:
Grausame Frauen (4 vols)." Brown connects it with a
1905 book by Sacher-
Masoch published under this title,
76
but despite the fact that this book has
been
mistaken for a third volume of the first edition of Grausame
Frauen, it is merely
a reprint of the second volume of that edition, which
contained only two volumes
in total.
77
Since Joyce owned at least four unspecified
volumes of this title,
which were presumably all from the same edition, they
probably belonged to the
expanded six-volume edition published in
1907.
78
A passage from
one story in
episode, but without reference to Joyce's inventory. 79 Since no strong allusion
to that tale in Ulysses has been established to support Joyce's knowledge of this
volume, it need not have been among the four that he owned. The third entry
that has never been found is "30. Ohnet: La Via della Gloria" (fig. 4), an Ital-
ian translation of Georges Ohnet's novel Le chemin de la gloire. 80 There were two
editions by this title: a 1904 complete translation, and a 1910 abridged version. 81
Which text Joyce owned is revealed only once we identify the fourth unknown
title, Ohnet's Eva, which immediately precedes it on the inventory, and is a dif-
ferent 1910 abridged version of the same novel, taking its name instead from the
story's heroine ève Brillant. 82 Joyce's La via della gloria was therefore more likely
the unabridged version, since he already had at least one abridged copy. This
love-triangle novel concerns a female soprano caught between two musical art-
ists, a plot which may have given Joyce the idea of making Molly a singer who
is having an affair with her musical colleague Boylan. 83 It was clearly of enough
interest to Joyce that he tracked down two Italian copies, including probably a
full edition of the work.
JamesJoyce, "Listing of His Books [Partial],"JamesJoyce Collection, #4609, Division
of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Series I, Box 1, Folder
32,
MS 1400; reproduced in id., Notes, Criticism, Translations
& Miscellaneous Writings 1: 634–637
(= JJA 2:
634–637) and here as figures 3–4.
Robert E. Scholes,
The
Cornell Joyce Collection: A Catalogue (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press,
1961), 209.
Knut Hamsun,
Ved rigets
port: forspil (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen, 1895). This
title
was first correctly transcribed from the inventory (fig. 3) by Ellmann ("Joyce's Library in
1920,"
p. 111), but later misrepresented by him in his biography
of Joyce
(James Joyce,
p. 786) as Ved
rikets port, which is the alternative spelling found in
an anachronistic edition of the work (Oslo:
Gyldendal, 1921). The
error is unfortunately reproduced by both Gillespie, "A
Critique of
Ellmann's List of Joyce's Trieste Library," p. 34 and Connolly, "The Personal Library of
James
Joyce," p. 27.
Leone Tolstoi,
Agli
uomini politici; La guerra russo-giapponese, trans. Maria
Salvi (Milan:
Società editrice Sonzogno, 1911); id., Piaceri crudeli: La felicità; La mia professione di fede
(Milan:
Società editrice Sonzogno, 1910); id., Ai
soldati, agli operai, trans. Maria Salvi
(Milan:
Società editrice Sonzogno, 1912); id., Ai
governanti, ai preti, trans. Maria Salvi (Milan:
Società editrice
Sonzogno, 1910). See Brown, "Addenda and
Corrigenda," p. 316.
Ellmann,
"Joyce's Library in 1920," p. 130; id.,
James Joyce,
p. 785. Contrast Gillespie,
James Joyce's
Trieste Library, p. 238.
Leone Tolstoi,
Le
imitazioni, trans. Nino De Sanctis (Milan: Società edi-
trice Sonzogno,
1901); id., Dal dubbio alla fede: racconto,
trans. A. M. (1902); id., Katia; Di che vivono gli
uomini
(Milan: Società editrice Sonzogno, 1902); id., Le confessioni (1879–1881) (Milan: Societå
editrice
Sonzogno, 1913); id., Le novelle della
morte, trans. Nino De Sanctis (Milan: Società editrice
Sonzogno,
1919). For other works by Tolstoy that were
known to Joyce, but are not extant from
his library,
see Ellmann,
James Joyce,
p. 247 n.; Joseph A. Kestner, "Tolstoy and Joyce: 'Yes,'"
James Joyce Quarterly 9
(1972), 484 – 486; Neil Cornwell,
James Joyce and the Russians
(Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1992), 29, 31;
Bowker,
James Joyce,
pp.
125–126.
Molière,
Théâtre
complet illustré, 2 vols., ed. Théodore Comte (Paris: Bibliothèque La-
rousse, 1909). See Ellmann,
"Joyce's Library in 1920," p. 120, citing
parenthetically the inven-
tory entry "Works (2 vols)" that is transcribed in
his biography of Joyce
(James Joyce,
p. 786).
Molière,
The
Works, 10 vols., trans. Henry Baker and James
Miller (London:
J. Watts,
1748); id., The Works, 12 vols., trans. Henri Van Laun (Paris: Barrie, 1890).
James Joyce,
Exiles (New York: Penguin Books,
1973), 159–160. For Molière's infl-
uence
on Joyce, see e.g. Scarlett
Baron,
"Strandentwining Cable": Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 118–119.
Leo Tolstoi,
Der Roman
der Ehe, trans. Wilhelm Thal (Berlin: H. Steinitz,
1901). See
Gillespie,
James Joyce's Trieste Library, pp.
239–240.
As Brown, "Addenda and Corrigenda," p. 317 n. 11 observes, Ellmann
(James Joyce,
p. 786) only takes note of the second of these misnumberings with "[sic]." For
another typo by
Joyce on the inventory, see the
discussion of the entry "14. Mercredy: Map of Ireland" below.
These transcriptions are again from Ellmann,
"Joyce's Library in 1920," pp. 102,
112,
119. Compare also id.,
James
Joyce
, p. 786.
John Millhouse,
Chiave
dei temi sceneggiati collapronuncia figurata: a norma del nuovo English and
Italian Pronouncing Dictionary, 4th ed. (Milan: A spese dell'autore,
1853). It was first published
as Chiave ossia
traduzione dei temi sceneggiati (Turin: Presso l'autore, 1842).
The most recent pub-
lication of this volume, under the new title, was the
eighth edition by Ferdinando Bracciforti (Milan: G.
Bernardoni, 1885).
John Millhouse,
Temi
sceneggiati: ossiano, dialoghi italiani ed inglesiper isvolgere le regole
della
grammatica (Milan: A spese dell'autore, 1842). The
most recent publication of this volume was
the tenth edition by Ferdinando Bracciforti (Milan: A spese dell'Amministrazione
Millhouse, 1882).
. See e.g. Mary T. Reynolds,
"Mr Leopold Bloom and the Lost Vermeer," in Essays for
Richard Ellmann: omnium gatherum, ed. Susan Dick et al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ.
Press,
1989), 330–331; Marianna Gula,
"'Reading the Book of Himself': James Joyce on Mihály
Munkácsy's Painting 'Ecce
Homo,'" in Joycean Unions: Post-Millennial Essays from East to
West,
ed. R. B. Kershner and Tekla Mecsnóber (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 47–48.
See Gillespie, "A Critique of Ellmann's List," p. 34; id., Inverted
Volumes Improperly Ar-
ranged: James Joyce and His
Trieste Library (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 72;
Brown,
James Joyce and
Sexuality, p. 133 respectively. For Joyce's real
knowledge of erotica, see Tristan
Power. "'Married His Cook to Massach':
Masochistic Fiction in Ulysses," Joyce studies Annual
(2017), 135–162.
The latter entry was first correctly identified with Joyce's surviving edition of George
Eliot's
The Mill on the Floss by Ellmann
("Joyce's Library in 1920," p. 107), but
subsequently
mistranscribed by him as "The Mill on the
Foss"
James Joyce,
p. 786). For the
extant copy of this
book, see Gillespie,
James Joyce's Trieste Library, p.
89.
John Millhouse,
Grammatica analitica (Turin: Presso l'autore, 1842). The most
recent
publication of this volume was the sixteenth edition by Ferdinando Bracciforti (Milan: G.
Ber-
nardoni,
1896). Ellmann's conjecture Grammatica della lingua inglese should more precisely be
emended to Corso graduate e completo di lingua inglese, parte II: grammatica
analitica.
James Joyce, Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 28 Feb. 1905, James
Joyce Collection, #4609,
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,
Cornell University Library, Series III, Box 4,
p. 4; transcribed in Letters of James Joyce
2:
84.
Thomas and Katharine Macquoid,
Pictures & Legends from Normandy &
Brittany
(Lon-
don:
Chatto and Windus,
1879). This work corresponds to the entry "11. Macquoid: Legends
of
Normandy & Brittany" (fig. 4). Only one of its
authors is cited by Ellmann, "Joyce's Library
in
1920," p. 118; cf. id.,
James
Joyce,
p. 786. A second edition of this work was also published in
1881.
See e.g. J. R. and Catharine Morell,
History of Greece (London:
T. J. Allman,
1873);
C.A. Fyffe,
History of Greece (London:
Macmillan and Co., 1875).
Id., History of Ireland for Schools, 4th
ed. (London: Marcus Ward & Co., c. 1888).
See
Gillespie,
James Joyce's Trieste Library, pp.
74–75; Tymoczko, The Irish Ulysses, pp. 27–28,
119,
224–225; Andrew Gibson,
Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses
(Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 85, 92–93.
Collier, History of Greece, p. 78. It is
thought by R. J. Schork,
Greek and Hellenic Culture
in Joyce
(Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1998), 29
that Joyce himself must have read this
passage
directly in school, but there is no evidence for his acquaintance with Xenophon's origi-
nal text. We might compare Kerouac's later knowledge of the phrase indirectly from Joyce; see Christopher Gair,
"'Thalatta! Thalatta!' Xenophon,
Joyce, and Kerouac," in Hip Sublime:
Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition, ed. Sheila
Murnaghan and Ralph M. Rosen (Columbus:
Ohio State Univ. Press,
2018), 38–54. The Xenophonic phrase "Thence
they advanced five
parasangs" (U 15. 1450),
which Schork considers an "extraordinarily cryptic" allusion to the
Anabasis, is simply clichéd, much like the proverbial
expression to "appeal from Philip drunk to
Philip sober," on which Joyce similarly plays (U 15.2512). Both
references had in
fact become removed from their original contexts, being widely
used in popular culture, and therefore re-
quired no first-hand reading of
classical literature; see Gifford and Seidman, Ulysses
Annotated,
pp. 442, 496 respectively. As Schork himself concedes (p. 29),
Joyce's knowledge of Greek his-
tory was "largely
mediated" by modern sources. It may also be worth noting that this
formula
imitated by Joyce is also frequently found in
the Jewish writer Benjamin of Tudela's account
of his
march to Jerusalem; see e.g. The
Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela,
ed. Marcus Nathan Adler
(London:
H. Frowde,
1907), 43: "Thence it is five parasangs to Hillah, where there are
10,000
Israelites and four Synagogues."
Collier, History of Greece, pp. 117–118.
For the different reports of Pyrrhus' death,
see Petros Garoufalias,
Pyrrhus, King of Epirus
(London: Stacey International, 1979),
140–141.
However, the "gorescarred book" (U 2.12–13) with
which Stephen teaches the class is more
likely based
on Collier's companion volume on Roman history, where the names of the
places
"Tarentum" (U 2.2) and
"Asculum" (U 2.12) may be found
in a fuller account of Pyrrhus, as
well as this same story of his death; see
W. F. Collier,
History of Rome (London: T. Nelson
and Sons, 1867), 35–37.
Joyce owned an English copy of Plutarch's biography of Alcibiades,
in which there is
also an account of the battle of Aegospotami (Alc. 36–37): J. and W. Langhorne,
Plutarch's Lives
of Alcibiades &
Coriolanus, Aristides & Cato the Censor (New York: Cassell & Co.,
1886), 55–56.
See Gillespie,
James Joyce's Trieste Library, pp.
185–186. On Joyce's use of Suetonius, see
Tristan
Power, "Bloom and Caligula," Notes and Queries 63
(2016), 288–291.
Ellmann,
"Joyce's Library in 1920," p. 119; id.,
James Joyce,
p. 786. This
inaccurate
transcription is repeated by Robert
Scholes,
Protocols of Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press,
1989)> 32.
R. J. Mecredy,
Road Map
of Ireland
(Dublin: R. J. Mecredy & Co.,
1900). This is not to
be confused with the same author's Road Book of Ireland,
which had been
published in 1892.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Katharina II: russische Hofgeschichten (Berlin:
Schreiter,
1898). See Ellmann,
"Joyce's Library in 1920," p. 126, equating
this work with the inventory
entry "Catherine II" that
is transcribed in his biography of Joyce
James Joyce,
p. 786).
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Tales of the Court of Catherine II, and
Other Stories (London:
Ma-
thieson,
1896); id., Venus and Adonis, and Other Tales of the
Court of Catherine II
(London:
Mathieson,
1896). Joyce knew at least one Mathieson edition of
Paul de Kock's novel The Girl with
the
Three Pairs of Stays (U 15.1023–1024); see
Weldon Thornton,
Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated
List (Chapel Hill:
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 74.
"The Exile," in Sacher-Masoch, Tales of the
Court of Catherine II, and Other Stories,
pp.
115–122.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Grausame Frauen (Leipzig: Leipziger Verlag,
1905).
See Richard Brown,
James Joyce and Sexuality
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985),
182 n. 93.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Hinterlassene Novellen: Grausame Frauen, 2 vols.
(Dresden:
H. R. Dohrn,
1901). Michael Farin,
"Sacher-Masoch-Bibliographie 1856–2003," in
Leopold
von Sacher-Masoch, ed. Ingrid Spörk and Alexandra Strohmaier (Graz:
Droschl, 2002), 319
incorrectly lists the 1905
Grausame Frauen as a third edition. Farin (p. 318) also omits
the story
"Bovo" from the 1898 Schreiter edition of Sacher-Masoch's
Liebesgeschichten (pp. 245–284) that
was owned by Joyce; contrast Gillespie,
James Joyce's Trieste Library, p.
198.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Grausame Frauen, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Leipzig:
Leipziger
Verlag, 1907). It seems unlikely, based on Joyce's recording of his four books under this
single
title, that he had a mixture of volumes from this edition and the later
three-volume edition in
the "Galante Bibliothek" series, which contains two
reprinted volumes of the 1907 edition in
each book: Dämonen und Sirenen (Leipzig: G. H. Wigand, 1920),
Grausame Frauen (Leipzig: G. H.
Wigand,
1920), Das Rätsel Weib (Leipzig: G. H. Wigand,
1920). Joyce may simply have kept
the
remaining two volumes of the 1907 edition on a different shelf,
or have had them out to read,
since he was just beginning "Circe".
VI
Lastly, two other literary histories that were used by Joyce
can be discovered
from another set of notes that he compiled at a late stage in the
composition of
Ulysses. At the end of one of his four extant
Ulysses notebooks, there is a list of
fourteen titles
relating to French and Italian drama:
84
Bataille – Le Scandale
Wolff – L'Amour Défendu
Guitry – Le Veilleur de Nuit
Guinon – Le Bonheur
Bernard – L'Accord Parfait
Guitry – Mari, Femme et Amant
Farjolle – Qui Perd Gagne
– Monsieur de Courpière
Soffici – La Giostra dei Sensi
Gherardi – Il Nudo nelle Anime
Savinio – Ermafrodito
Venditti – Quells che t'assomiglia
– Uccello del Paradiso
Maugham – Moon and Sixpence
Rose claims that this list is "not in Joyce's
handwriting,"
85
but the writing in
fact
bears all the hallmarks of his script. The first eight titles are from Paul Abram's
Notes de critique littéraire et
dramatique, with the exception of Guitry's
Le mari, la
femme et l'amant, of which Joyce may have been reminded by the above note on they
same author's Le veilleur de nuit.
86
The source Notes de critique littéraire et
dramatique
is especially noteworthy, because the chapter from it that Joyce utilized on these
French plays
specifically addresses the character of "the ridiculous husband":
cette fois les hommes prirent leur revanche. Ils créèrent le mari-héros. Des
courants
d'opinion y avaient préparé … Ce sont là des notions dont ont profité les
dramaturges
modernes. Ils ont ainsi montré que, parce qu'un homme devenait un mari,
il n'en
demeurait pas moins un homme. Ils ont su lui conserver un cœur et le faire
souffrir,
tout comme un amant malheureux ou révolté.
This time the men have taken their revenge. They have created the
husband-hero.
Currents of opinion had laid the groundwork … These notions have
profited mod-
ern playwrights. They have shown that, even though a man may be a
husband, he
remains nonetheless a man. They have preserved his heart and made him
suffer, like
an unhappy lover or rebel.
87
Abram's discussion was published in 1913, the
same year that Joyce wrote the
surviving notes to his own
dramatic work Exiles, which, as the following passage
shows,
are concerned with the very same literary theme:
Since the publication of the lost pages of Madame Bovary the
centre of sympathy ap-
pears to have been esthetically shifted from the lover or
fancyman to the husband
or cuckold. This displacement is also rendered more stable
by the gradual growth
of a collective practical realism … Praga in La Crisi and Giacosa in Tristi Amori have
understood
and profited by this change ...
88
Although these antecedents are more wide-ranging authors and works than those
that
appear in Abram, Joyce's notes bear signs of influence by
Abram's discus-
sion of French
plays in their rather similar contextualization and phrasing. The
overlapping date
of this book's publication with the early stage of Exiles
can
also hardly be a coincidence. Besides these points, the confirmation of Joyce's acquaintance with the work in his Ulysses notebook now establishes it as the most
likely direct inspiration
for his examples of the adultery theme in the notes to
his own play, and for his
perception of an overall trend in literature towards the
popular figure of the
cuckold.
The other book that Joyce uses here is Idling in Italy by Joseph Collins, with whom he was
personally acquainted.
89
Collins' book is the Italian source
for the
last six items on the same list from one of Joyce's
Ulysses notebooks, including his
puzzling last entry The Moon and Sixpence, which is the only English novel.
90
These
notes suggest that he did not
read either source carefully, mistaking the character
of René Farjolle in Pierre
Veber's Qui perd gagne for the play's author, based on
his
misunderstanding of a line in Abram: "l'impudent
Farjolle de Qui perd gagne ou le
cynique Monsieur de Courpières."
91
Joyce also misattributes to Mario Venditti the
plays Quella che t'assomiglia and L'uccello del
paradise, which were in fact written by
Enrico
Cavacchioli. The confusion is explained by the fact that the two
authors
are discussed one after the other in Collins'
book.
92
This list of books relating
to
drama appears on the very last page of the notebook, and does not match
the
rest of it, which is organized according to headings and written with a
different
pen. Nonetheless, it indicates that Joyce
returned at the end of writing Ulysses to
an interest in the
same kind of love-triangle plays that he had read for Exiles,
as
well as to the sort of literary histories that he had used in his early subject
note-
book for the novel. Both general works by Abram and
Collins should therefore
be included in Joyce's library, together with his other survey books on
English
literature, Italian painting, Greek history, and Irish geography.
The existing evidence for the books that Joyce owned or had
read when he
was writing Ulysses is greater than has been
realized, and it has been generally
undervalued by critics, who have not been
sufficiently diligent in their assessment
of the surviving documents relating to his
library. Too often they have
relied on the faulty transcriptions by Ellmann, or have not thoroughly pursued
the identifications of
unknown titles, considering them impossible to discover.
There has also been a
tendency to connect items on Joyce's inventory with
his
library's remains, and an undue willingness to make the two fit neatly.
However,
Joyce was a multilingual writer who sometimes
consulted various editions of the
same work in more than one language. The wide
attention to his more recently
uncovered drafts and notebooks has distracted from
older manuscripts that have
handwriting, and to his citations of the works that he owned, entirely new sources
for Ulysses have been found that may now be compared with the novel, improving
our knowledge about the origin of much of its material.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, "Der rote Edelhof," in Grausame
Frauen (1907), 6: 94–96.
See David
Cotter,
James Joyce and the
Perverse Ideal (London: Routledge,
2003), 215–218, following
a late twentieth-century translation of the
story.
Georgio Ohnet, La via della gloria,
trans. Giuseppe Dominione (Milan:
Sonzogno,
1904); abridged: id., La via
della gloria, trans. Giuseppe Dominione (Naples: S. Romano,
1910).
Georgio Ohnet,
Eva, trans. Giuseppe
Dominione (Naples: Società editrice Parteno-
pea, 1910). Ellmann,
"Joyce's Library in 1920," p. 121 does not
identify this work, and even
mistakenly attributes it to the Schimpff bill by
stating "Purchased Trieste, 1913–14," possibly
confusing "Ohnet" with
"Oriani" in that bill's entry "Oriani, Gelosia" (fig. 1).
James Joyce, "II.i.3. Notebook," Joyce Papers 2002, Department of Manuscripts,
National
Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/5/A, p. 60. The list is mostly
transcribed by Rose,
The Dublin Ulysses Papers 4: 438–439,
who does not identify two of the works: Abel Hermant,
Monsieur
de Courpière (Paris: L'illustration,
1907); Margherita Emplosi Gherardi, Il nudo
nelleèanime: impressioni sceniche (Rome: P. Maglione and C. Strini,
1919).
Joyce, Exiles, p. 150. On Flaubert's "lost pages," see Baron, "Strandentwining Cable,"
pp. 109–110, 116–117. For Joyce and love triangles, see e.g. Dominic Manganiello, "The Ital-
ian Sources for Exiles:
Giacosa, Praga, Oriani and Joyce,"
in Myth and Reality in Irish Literature,
ed. Joseph Ronsley (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press,
1977), 227–237; Brown,
James
Joyce and Sexuality, pp. 22–35; Cotter,
James Joyce and the Perverse Ideal, pp.
201–218.
See David Hayman,
"Dr J. Collins Looks at J.J.," in
Joyce and Popular Culture, ed. R. B.
Kershner (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1996), 89–101.
Joseph Collins, Idling in Italy: Studies of Literature and of Life (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1920), 157.
Most of the known library is gathered by Richard Ellmann, "Joyce's Library in 1920,"
in
The Consciousness of Joyce (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 97–134, but merely
through
the spring of 1920 up to Joyce's move to Paris, when he had only reached as far as the very
early draft stage of
the "Circe" episode. Other discussions include Richard
Brown,
"Addenda
and Corrigenda to Ellmann's
The Consciousness of Joyce," James Joyce
Quarterly 17 (1980), 313–317
and Michael
Patrick Gillespie, "A Critique of Ellmann's List of
Joyce's Trieste Library," James
Joyce Quarterly 19
(1981), 27–36. For the books that survive from Trieste, see id.,
James Joyce's
Trieste Library: A
Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center (Austin:
Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, 1986); for the remains of the Paris library, which
mostly relate to Finnegans
Wake,
Thomas E. Connolly, "The Personal Library of James Joyce: A
Descriptive Bibliography; Fifth Edition," in
James Joyce's Books, Portraits,
Manuscripts, Notebooks,
Typescripts, Page Proofs (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen,
1997), 1–89. On a new digital catalog of
Joyce's books, see Dirk Van
Hulle, "A James Joyce Digital Library," in New Quotatoes: Joycean
Exogenesis in the Digital Age,
ed. Ronan Crowley and Dirk Van Hulle (Leiden: Brill Rodopi,
2016),
226–242. References to Ulysses
(hereafter U) follow the text of James
Joyce,
Ulysses: A Critical
and Synoptic Edition, 3
vols., ed. Hans Walter Gabler,
Wolfhard
Steppe, and Claus Melchior
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1984) by episodeand line number.
I wish to thank the anony-
mous readers of Studies in
Bibliography for helpful comments on an earlierdraft of this paper.
| JOYCE'S ULYSSES LIBRARY
by
TRISTAN POWER
| |