In our new blog series, we ask experts from Trinity’s arts and humanities which events, for them, make 2022 ‘A year to remember’. This series opens with Professor Sam Slote’s observations on Joycean birthdays and the publication of Ulysses, 100 years ago, in February, 1922.
Birthdays are a curious ritual, they mark the link between our own personal calendar and the more public calendars shared by other people; or if you’re astrologically inclined, birthdays indicate our connection to the cosmos at large. And birthdays are personal, but never singular. February 2nd is not just James Joyce’s birthday, it is also Candlemas and Groundhog Day. Candlemas – the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple – links Christ to the strictures of Judaism and the Jewish calendar since, according to Mosaic law, a mother must present a male child forty days after his birth for a ritual cleansing. And so Candlemas connects a Jewish chronology to the Christian calendar of Holy Days. In terms of other connections, Joyce also shares his birthday with Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, a fact which I think matters for Stephen Dedalus’s argument in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ chapter of Ulysses. (Other connections are less fortuitous: it pains me to say this, but Joyce shares his birthday with the writer Ayn Rand.)
On November 1st 1921, shortly before Ulysses was published, Joyce wrote to his editor and patron Harriet Shaw Weaver to explain the role of birthdays in his publications:
A coincidence is that of birthdays in connection with my books. A Portrait of the Artist which first appeared serially in your paper on 2 February finished on 1 September [Weaver’s birthday]. Ulysses began on 1 March (birthday of a friend of mine, a Cornish painter [Frank Budgen]) and was finished on Mr Pound’s birthday [October 30], he tells me. I wonder on whose it will be published.
And so birthdays and publication dates are intertwined for Joyce. Joyce is entirely correct about A Portrait, which was first serialised on his birthday in 1915. At present it is impossible to substantiate or refute his claim about having begun Ulysses on March 1st (or, for that matter, any other date). And Joyce’s claim that he had finished Ulysses on October 30th, two days before writing this letter, is not entirely accurate. On that day, he wrote to the French writer Valery Larbaud with a slightly more accurate assessment of Ulysses’s endgame: ‘I finished Ithaca last night so that now the writing of Ulysses is ended, though I have still some weeks of work in revising the proofs’. To be sure, an important phase in the composition of Ulysses had ended on October 30th, but work on it continued almost right up to its publication. A similar thing happened seventeen years later with Finnegans Wake, where over a course of several months between late 1938 and early 1939 Joyce claimed multiple endpoints for that book, even as work on it continued on and on.
In the letter to Weaver, Joyce wondered on whose birthday Ulysses would be published. As we now know, it was published on his fortieth birthday, February 2nd 1922. However, this endpoint was a late development in the history of its publication. In this same letter Joyce anticipated publication in November and the initial prospectuses indicate publication in the autumn. Even by September, Maurice Darantiere, the printer tasked with producing the first edition of Ulysses, informed Joyce and his publisher Sylvia Beach that due to Joyce’s extensive revisions a November date was likely not feasible. On some copies of the first prospectus, Beach crossed out ‘Autumn 1921’ and replaced it with ‘January 1922’. The third, and final, prospectus for the first edition wisely does not list any specific publication date.
On January 23rd, Joyce told his friend Robert McAlmon that the book would be published on the 30th. On the 28th, Darantiere telegrammed Beach to say that he expected to have the first copies on February 4th. Two days later he refers to a telegram she sent (which hasn’t survived) and says that it doesn’t seem likely that he could be ready by February 2nd. So, it seems that the decision to publish on February 2nd came as late as January 29th, when Joyce saw that his birthday as the work’s publication date was within the realm of possibility.
It is only with a little leniency in calendrical exactitude that one can say that birthdays informed the publication schedule of Joyce’s major works. Joycean birthdays are not necessarily fixed and are eminently malleable and adaptable. They are movable feasts.
Professor Sam Slote
The very last revisions Joyce made to Ulysses were on a set of proofs that Darantiere received on January 31st. Even with these final revisions, Darantiere was able to get the first two copies finished and expedited to Paris by train in time for Joyce’s birthday. So, the February 2nd publication date really only means that just two copies were printed and assembled. These copies – numbered 901 and 902 – had slightly different covers because Darantiere hadn’t yet managed to arrive at the specific shade of blue that Joyce requested. These two copies were never sold and their current location is unknown. The remainder of the first edition were printed over the following weeks and production of the first edition only ended on March 16th.
With Finnegans Wake, Joyce was dealing with a real publisher and the indulgence afforded him by Beach was gone. He eventually finished work on the Wake in December 1938 and Faber was able to send him an advance copy for his birthday on February 2nd 1939, but official publication had to wait until May 4th. For his birthday party, Helen Joyce, his daughter-in-law, arranged a spectacular cake that featured replicas of Joyce’s seven books, with the Wake being given pride of place.
It is only with a little leniency in calendrical exactitude that one can say that birthdays informed the publication schedule of Joyce’s major works. Joycean birthdays are not necessarily fixed and are eminently malleable and adaptable. They are movable feasts.
On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin will host the 28th International James Joyce Symposium, and invite Joyceans to return once again to the city he situated so durably and resoundingly on the literary map. For further details, see here:
JAMES JOYCE: ULYSSES 1922–2022
XXVIII INTERNATIONAL JAMES JOYCE SYMPOSIUM
12–18 June 2022
Trinity College Dublin
University College Dublin
https://www.tcd.ie/English/ulysses-100/
About Professor Sam Slote:
Sam Slote is Associate Professor in the School of English, TCD. His Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, co-authored with Marc Mamigonian and John Turner, is published by Oxford University Press, 2022. He is also author of Joyce's Nietzschean Ethics (2013) and co-editor, with Luca Crispi, of How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake' (2007). In addition to Joyce and Beckett, he has written on Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Queneau, Antonin Artaud, Dante, Mallarmé, and Elvis.