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Ulysses (1922): A Textual History of Ulysses
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| Ulysses (1922) - A Textual History |
| Ur-Ulysses: The first mention of Ulysses occurs as a postcript in to letter to Stanislaus from Rome of 30 September 1906: ‘P. P. S. I have a new story for Dubliners in my head. It deals with Mr Hunter.’ (Letters II, p.128). On 13 November he writes, ‘I thought of beginning my story Ulysses: but I have too many cares at present’ - and then, within the same lengthy letter, ‘How do you like the name for the story about Hunter?’ (Letters, II, pp.190, 193.) On 3 December 1906 he asks Stanislaus to ‘[w]rite to me about Mr. Hunter’ - that is, Alfred Hunter, the initial model for Leopold Bloom (Letters , II, p.198). On 6 Feb. 1907, while still in Rome, Joyce tells his brother that the “Ulysses” had ‘never got any forrader [i.e., forward] than the title’ (Letters, II, p.209). JAJ returns to Trieste, 11 March 1907. On 10 Nov. 1907, Stanislaus tells his diary that his brother would expand the story into a ‘short book’ (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [1959], 1965, p.274; full entry given under Stanislaus Joyce, infra.
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Publication history: The serial publication of Chaps. 1-14 of Ulysses was conducted in The Little Review, ed. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, during March 1918-Dec. 1920, and terminated by a successful action against them for obscenity in a New York court in 1921 - resulting in fines of $50 each for obscenity and denial of permission to continue publishing. The action was defended by John Quinn who pleaded that the novel was incomprehensibel (much to Joyce’s dismay - but possibly laying the ground for the Judge Woolsey’s decision to permit printing of the novel later conferred on Huebsch). Harriet Shaw Weaver brought out a a selection of Ulysses in The Egoist, printing Chaps. II, III, VI & X during Jan.-Dec. 1919 until he printer refused to proceed further. (No other willing to risk prosecution was to be found.) An attempt to recruit the Woolfs having failed, Sylvia Beach offered to publish Ulysses in Paris, selling the plates on to Miss Weaver for a London edition as soon as hers was sold out.
The job of printing was given to Maurice Darantière of Dijon on Adrienne Monnier’s recommendation. By this means the first edition of Ulysses (Shakespeare & Co. Edn., 1922) appeared in light blue cover and white lettering on 2 Feb 1922. The Egoist Press edition followed in London on 12 Oct. 1922, using the Darantière plates as agreed. Each of these ran to several editions, with corrections and resettings at different times. In 1932 a new edition was prepared by Stuart Gilbert for the Odyssey Press in Hamburg. By then a pirated edition had been produced by Samuel Roth in 1929, following a serialised version in his Two Worlds Monthly (June 1926 onwards), which was blocked by a court action on Joyce’s behalf on 27 Dec. 1928. (This followed a petition published on 2 Feb. 1927.) In 1934 - and in the wake of Morris Ernst’s successful challenge to the the ban, heard before Judge Woolsey, Dec. 6 1933 - Bernard Cerf produced a Random House edition in New York under agreement with Joyce, using the Odyssey edition as copy-text. The Bodley Head Edn. of 1936, published by John Lane in London, incorporated corrections by Joyce and Stuart Gilbert. (100 copies were signed by author.) |
Joyce’s list of errata in the 1922 edition were incorporated in the Shakespeare & Company 1924 edition, and further corrections made in subsequent printings. Stuart Gilbert, having worked on the French translation of 1929 with Auguste Morel and Valéry Larbaud, added further corrections to the Odyssey Press edition. Joyce himself examined the text of the Bodley Head edition prior to the publication in 1936, and freelance corrections - in many instances introducing errors - were made in sundry subsequent editions. A so-called Corrected Text (properly the Garland Press Critical & Synoptic Edition) was produced by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior on the basis of MSS evidence of the fair copies, chiefly examined in photostat, in conjunction with early printed versions - comprising together a “genetic text”. [For “Rationale of the Critical and Synoptic Edition of 1984 (ed. Hans Walter Gabler)”, see attached.]
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From 1917 onwards, Joyce made fair copies to provide to John Quinn under the terms of a purchasing agreement with the author for a total sum of $1,200 over 5 years. Fair copies in Joyce’s hand exist for “Telemachus”, “Nestor” and “Proteus” (Chaps. 1-3), together with a penultimate draft of “Proteus” (Chap. 3). Fair copies also exist for each other chapter of the novel excepting “Wandering Rocks”, “Ithaca” and “Penelope” (Chaps. 10, 17 & 18), which survive in their final-draft form only. On 16 Jan. 1924, Quinn sold the resultant collection of eighteen manuscript episodes of Ulysses MS by auction at at Anderson Galleries for a sum of $1,975. The buyer was Dr. Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, a Philadelphia book dealer whose collection is now held in the Rosenbach Foundation, and the sole extant complete manuscript set of Ulysses is therefore known as the Rosenbach Manuscript.
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In making his fair copies, Joyce added some corrections as he went along and in many, but not all, instances he copied these back to the working manuscript which provided the copytext for the typescript, as can be seen from those examples of both which have survived and from the printed versions. Three typed copies were made of each episode - i.e., a top copy and two carbon copies. The first of these was used for The Little Review serialised version; the second for the Egoist edition which was never completed, and the third was sent to Maurice Darantière as a last resort to serve as copy-type for the Shakespeare & Co. edition (Feb. 1922) and the Egoist edition (Oct. 1922), the latter being printed from the same plates by sale-agreement.
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The third copy - which therefore stands in direct line of transmission to the original version of Ulysses published in book-form - was free from any of the corrections made on the other two. In contrast with the previous printings, however, he added as much as one third in length of the novel on the galleys printed by Darantière. In some instances, but not in all, these additions incorporate changes made to the first and second copies which had passed out of his hands four years earlier. In consequence he was only able to add the changes that he could remember and did not, apparently, check with the printed versions in The Little Review which in any case are marred by the printer’s resort to asterisks for passages he refused to print. The typescripts employed by Darantière are extant for all chapters of the novel excepting 1-3 (“Telemachiad”), 5 (“Lotus-Eaters”), the second half of 4 (“Calypso”), and the beginning of Chap. 6 (“Hades”). [For Rationale of the Synoptic [Corrected] Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, see attached; and see also quotation from Philip Gaskell and Clive Hart (Ulysses: A Review of Three Texts, 1989, in Commentary, supra.]
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Plan or Schema of Ulysses
| The Plan of Ulysses |
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Plan as given in Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (1955); rep. in Nicholas A. Fargnoli & Michael Patrick Gillespie, Critical Companion to James Joyce: The Essential Reference to his Life and Work [rev. edn.] (NY: Facts on File 2006).
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