The Pola Notebook [so-called]

Bibliographical remarks: The notes given here were copied by Herbert Gorman in James Joyce (1939), and subsequently reprinted in The Workshop of Daedalus, ed. Richard Kain & Robert Scholes (Northwestern UP 1965), pp.80-105. [Notes for Stephen Hero are given on pp.83-85.] In those works they were treated as the contents of two separate notebooks, one connected with Paris and the other with Pola and hence called “The Paris Notebook” and “The Pola Notebook”. Since the acquisition of the manuscript source by the National Library of Ireland it is now known that there was only one notebook - now called the ‘Commonplace Book’.
According to Frank O’Rourke, the whole may be regarded as ‘something of a pocket atelier, or ambulent workshop’ since, as being ‘[f]illed with a variety notes, reflections, accounts, booklists, poems and quotations, it affords precious insights into both his daily concerns and asrtistic interests during that formative period.’ (O’Rourke, “Allwisest Stagyrite”: Joyce’s Quotations from Aristotle [NLI Joyce Studies, 21], NLI 2005, p.1.)
Gorman described the notes he copied as a selection from the original and this indeed proves to be very much the case, as comparison with the holograph purchased by the National Library in 2002 reveals. Between Gorman’s use of it and its date of purchase, the notebook was unseen by scholars, having remained among the papers of Joyce which Paul Léon rescued from his flat in Paris before being murdered by the Nazis. The previous parts of the papers which Léon had deposited with the Irish ambassador before his own arrest had not included any such notebook materials and the materialisation of the Paris-Pola notebook took the world of Joyce studies entirely by surprise. A scholarly edition of the notebook has yet to be attempted and no facsimile copy is available at the time of writing [March 2004].
The editorial notes added to Gorman’s transcriptions by Kain and Scholes have been retained in summary-form where useful, as have the the strike-throughs in that edition reflecting Joyce’s own erasures and emendations. Aside from these differences, I have made a few changes in the format of the text consistent as being best adapted to the present medium.
A second document exists in relation to the contents in the form of materials apparently regathered by Joyce from Stephen Hero after its abandonment in 1907 for use in A Portrait. This is held The latter is held in Cornell University Library. An account of Michael Healy’s room in it helps to fix a date for the later contents at 1909.

[Note: All the foregoing remarks are subject to revision in the light of a future inspection of the Paris-Pola notebook at the National Library of Ireland where it is held as part of NLI MS 36,639.]