Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece – BBC
James Joyce met publisher Sylvia Beach in 1920 shortly after he moved to ParisUlysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece
1 February 2022.
By Colm Kelpie, BBC News, NI
In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be “ranked among the classics in English literature”.
“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” she wrote of James Joyce’s acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.
And it did.
On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce’s 40th birthday.
Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly – and is now celebrated as one of the world’s most influential texts.
‘Tosh’
TS Eliot, writing in 1923, believed Ulysses was “the most important expression which the present age has found”.
But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many – even among some in the literary community.
Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookshop was a haven for American expatriates during the 1920s and 1930sVirginia Woolf described it as “tosh”.
Parts had been serialised by US magazine Little Review in 1920, resulting in an obscenity trial that concluded with the editors being fined and ordered to cease further publication. It was also censured in Great Britain.
Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.
Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to “put every single centime aside to pay” the book’s printer.
Prof Keri Walsh, outside the modern incarnation of Shakespeare & Company, in ParisProf Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York’s Fordham University, says Beach’s decision to publish turned her into a “culture-hero of the avant-garde.”
“There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it,” Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.
Ulysses: ‘Don’t read the criticism, read the book’Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.
He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.
Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.
“Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family,” she adds.
“She was much more than a publisher – a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well.”
But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel’s rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.
Sylvia Beach eventually ceded the publishing rights to Ulysses after her relationship with Joyce souredRandom House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year.
That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to “claim” Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.
While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.
“He wouldn’t change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.
“He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth.”
Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses
Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy
Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.
If you know something about music that would be a big help.
If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.
Don’t try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
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