University of Virginia Library

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

still not been appreciated. By giving greater attention to the subtleties of Joyce's
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.