Afternoon with James Joyce

Abstract

I had heard that James Joyce, if he were ever to be encountered anywhere, would be found in Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, so I dashed there hoping to get a look at him, maybe to manage an interview, though feeling that was probably a vain hope. The walls of the shop were almost papered with pictures of the sacrosanct circle, but mainly of Joyce, the man whose novel had become internationally famous — not because it was widely read but because it couldn’t be read at all except illegally. (All of the smugglers of Ulysses didn’t risk a scrimmage with customs out of high literary curiosity. There was a profitable black market in copies, and I heard of one compulsive yearner for its contents who paid five hundred dollars for a copy.)

Extracted from Many Lives — One Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) pp. 269–72. Editor’s title.