Abstract
Ahead of the publication of an edition of Joyce’s unpublished letters, this chapter considers the place of Joyce’s 3800 surviving letters in relation to his fictional and non-fictional output. Considering the chronology and availability of the letters published so far, as well as case studies from the new letters to add to its narrative, the chapter uses the conceit of the epistolary novel form to distinguish the different kinds of images of Joyce that each volume of letters encourages. It asks and answers questions such as “Why read Joyce’s letters?” and “What kind of story do they tell?” The chapter also considers the gap between life and art in relation to Joyce’s example as letter-writer—how it can be bridged and where it remains unbridgeable.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Hugh Kenner , “The World—Gritty, Particular,” review of LII and III, National Review 19, 5 September, 1967, 969.
- 2.
Charles Dickens , David Copperfield, 1850, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1.
- 3.
Marvin Magalaner, review of LII and LIII, Books Abroad 41:3, Summer, 1967, 348; Leon Edel, review of LI, New Republic 136, 10 June, 1957, quoted in Richard F. Peterson and Alan M. Cohn, “James Job: The Critical Reception of Joyce’s Letters,” James Joyce Quarterly 19:4, Summer, 1982, 429.
- 4.
John Wain, review of LII and LIII, Irish Times, 3 December, 1966, quoted in Peterson and Cohn, “James Job,” 434; Chester Anderson, “Joyce’s Letters and His Use of Place,” James Joyce Quarterly 4:2, Winter, 1967, 62.
- 5.
Robert Martin Adams, “Choice Litters,” review of LII and III, Hudson Review 20:1, Spring, 1967, 153; Stanislaus Joyce to Herbert Gorman , 8 August, 1931, LIII 225–26. For more detail on the Trieste period, see John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).
- 6.
Richard B. Watson and Randolph Lewis, The Joyce Calendar: A Chronological Listing of Published, Unpublished, and Ungathered Correspondence by James Joyce (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1994), revised by William S. Brockman (2009); “The Joyce Calendar: Published, Unpublished, and Ungathered Correspondence by James Joyce,” online: http://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/jamesjoycechecklist/calendar.cfm [accessed 11 June, 2017].
- 7.
James Joyce, James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921–1940, ed. Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).
- 8.
Catherine Fahy, compiler, The James Joyce-Paul Léon Papers at the National Library of Ireland: A Catalogue (Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 1992).
- 9.
Robert Spoo , “The Uncoordinated Public Domain,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 35:1, 2016, 107–51, and Without Copyrights: Piracy Publishing, and the Public Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 273–76.
- 10.
Seán Sweeney, Trustee, Estate of James Joyce and Stephen J. Joyce, letter to the editor, James Joyce Quarterly 32:1, Fall, 1994, 156.
- 11.
The story of the editing is also dramatic. As Ira B. Nadel has shown (in “‘Unriddling the Writing’: The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1,” Joyce Studies Annual 3, Summer, 1992, 77–97), various editors were considered between the start of the project in the mid-1940s and the eventual choice of Gilbert , including Maria Jolas, Padraic Colum, Harry Levin, and even Samuel Beckett . Also, most of the editorial work, including tracking down the letters and choosing which ones to include, was done by Harriet Weaver , with Gilbert receiving substantial help in locating letters and securing permission from their owners for inclusion from Patricia Hutchins, author of James Joyce’s Dublin (London: Grey Walls Press, 1950) and James Joyce’s World (London: Methuen, 1957).
- 12.
Scarlett Baron, “In Pursuit of Fact: Joyce and Flaubert’s Documentary Letter-Writing,” Genetic Joyce Studies 16, Spring, 2016, 4, n.pag. online: http://www.geneticjoycestudies.org/articles/GJS16/GJS16_Baron [accessed 25 June, 2017]. Shinjini Chattopadhyay’s paper at the Toronto Joyce Conference in June 2017, “Republic of Letters: Reconstruction of Dublin from Epistolary Exchanges,” alerted me to Baron’s article.
- 13.
Baron, “In Pursuit of Fact,” 1.
- 14.
Mary T. Reynolds , “Joyce as a Letter Writer,” in A Companion to Joyce Studies, ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 63, 64; Nadel, “‘Unriddling the Writing’,” 91, 95. Several of the letters to Frank Budgen are also presented with ellipses, both in Gilbert’s 1957 printing and bizarrely in the corrected 1966 reissue. For example, the famous letter from 16 August 1921 specifies three of the “four cardinal points” of “Penelope ”—“female breasts, arse, womb”—but the fourth one is replaced by an ellipsis and the genteel footnote, “Unprinted here but easily imagined by adult readers” (LI 170). Also, a 3 January 1920 letter tells Budgen that “I heard nothing more from Sykes … or the English foulplayers, but people tell me they still perform” (LI 134). The ellipses that are carried over into the 1966 reissue are bizarre because both letters appear uncut in Ellmann’s 1959 biography, where adult or other readers need not tax their imaginations to supply “cunt” in the “Penelope ” letter (JJI 516), and will discover that the unprintable phrase after “Sykes” in the other letter was “thank God” (JJI 488). There is no indication in the 1966 reprint that the letters appear complete in the earlier biography. Ellmann’s Selected Letters in 1975 is the first edition of Joyce’s correspondence to print the unexpurgated texts of these and several other letters. A similar situation apparently exists regarding Samuel Beckett’s letters , some of which appear truncated or are omitted entirely in the second volume of his correspondence from 2011, even though they are printed in full in a 1996 biography. See Alan Jenkins, review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume Two: 1941–1956 (2011), TLS, 2 November, 2011, online: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/samuel-beckett-how-i-dislike-that-play-now/ [accessed 10 June, 2017].
- 15.
William S. Brockman , “Letters,” in James Joyce in Context, ed. John McCourt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 29–30.
- 16.
Brockman , “Letters,” 29.
- 17.
Reynolds , “Joyce as a Letter Writer,” 50.
- 18.
Reynolds , “Joyce as a Letter Writer,” 44.
- 19.
Lionel Trilling , “James Joyce in His Letters,” Commentary 45:2, 1 February, 1968, reprinted in Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. William M. Chace (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 150.
- 20.
David Hayman , “On Reading Ellmann’s Edition: Notes on Joyce’s Letters,” James Joyce Quarterly 4:2, Winter, 1967, 56.
- 21.
Cited and quoted in quoted in Peterson and Cohn, “James Job,” 436.
- 22.
Fahy, James Joyce-Paul Léon Papers, 26; Joyce, unpublished letter to Paul Léon, 14 August, 1937, National Library of Ireland.
- 23.
Reynolds , “Joyce as a Letter Writer,” 67.
- 24.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar , William S. Brockman , and Robert Spoo , “Publishing the Unpublished Correspondence,” James Joyce Quarterly 49:1, Fall, 2011, 143; italics in original.
- 25.
William S. Brockman , “The Silent Author of James Joyce’s Dictated Letters,” in James Joyce’s Silences, ed. Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 123–33.
- 26.
Brockman , “Silent Author,” 130.
- 27.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar , “Selling Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 30:4/31:1, Summer-Fall, 1993, 808 n4.
- 28.
Dettmar , Brockman , and Spoo , “Publishing the Unpublished Correspondence,” 144–45.
- 29.
Joyce, unpublished letter to John Quinn , 29 May, 1917, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. Myron Schwartzman notes this letter and partially quotes it in the first of his two articles regarding Quinn’s letters to Joyce, “‘Quinnigan’s Quake!’: John Quinn’s Letters to James Joyce, 1916–1920,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 81:2, Summer, 1978, 226.
- 30.
Joyce, unpublished letter to Ezra Pound , 1 November, 1918, Beinecke Library, Yale University. The transcriptions of the letters to Pound are by Robert Spoo . Dettmar , Brockman , and Spoo quote this letter without comment in “Publishing the Unpublished Correspondence,” 151.
- 31.
Quoted in Edward A. Martin, ed., In Defense of Marion: The Love of Marion Bloom and H. L. Mencken (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969), xxix.
- 32.
David Hayman , “A Case for the Re-Edition of the Letters,” James Joyce Literary Supplement 4:1, Spring, 1990, 24.
- 33.
Joyce, unpublished passage from a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver , 7 June, 1926, British Library; cf. LI 241–42. The transcription of the letter to Weaver is by Kevin Dettmar and William Brockman .
- 34.
Ezra Pound , from transcript of radio talk given ca. 1941, quoted in Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce (New York: New Directions, 1967), 268; Pound’s capitalization.
- 35.
Joyce, unpublished letter to Giorgio and Helen Joyce, 9 July, 1931, Zurich James Joyce Foundation.
- 36.
Joyce , unpublished letter to Ezra Pound , 30 June, 1915, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
- 37.
Joyce, unpublished letter to Ezra Pound , undated but probably late November-early December 1917, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
- 38.
Joyce, unpublished passage from a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 17 December, 1923, British Library; cf. LI 207.
- 39.
Gabriel Josipovici, review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume One, 1929–1940 (2009), TLS, 11 March, 2009, online: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/letters-from-beckett/ [accessed 10 June, 2017].
- 40.
Brockman , “Letters,” 35.
- 41.
Brockman , “Letters,” 33; Reynolds, “Joyce as a Letter Writer,” 39, 67; David Daiches, review of LI, Saturday Review, 15 June, 1957, summarized in Peterson and Cohn, “James Job,” 431.
- 42.
Kenner , “The World—Gritty, Particular,” 968.
- 43.
Peterson and Cohn, “James Job,” 437–38.
- 44.
Adams, “Choice Litters,” 154.
- 45.
Trilling , “James Joyce in His Letters,” 164.
- 46.
Reynolds , “Joyce as a Letter Writer,” 67.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Groden, M. (2018). “Please, Mr. Postman”: Joyce’s Expanding Epistolary Novel. In: Ebury, K., Fraser, J. (eds) Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72242-9_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72242-9_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72241-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72242-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)