The National Library of Ireland's New Joyce Manuscripts: A Narrative and Document Summaries

Abstract

JL he list of new email messages on that day in late September 2001 seemed unremarkable: the usual barrage of promises of better porn and lower debt, plus a few items of real correspondence. Those did not appear to be particularly important. Among them was one from Noel Kissane, someone whom I didn't know, who identified himself the Keeper of Manuscripts at the National Library of Ireland. He asked if he could call me to talk about the manuscript ofthe Circe episode of Ulysses that the National Library had purchased the previous December and also about recent associated I knew a little about the Circe acquisition ? it was a draft that Joyce had sent as a curiosity1 in April 1921 to John Quinn, who was purchasing the entire Ulysses manuscript in episode sections Joyce finished each one; the Library had bought it for one and a half million dollars at a Christie's New York auction. I hadn't seen the manuscript when it was exhibited in London, Dublin, or New York before the auction, however, and I had only skimmed the Christie's sale catalogue,2 so I knew very little about it. I couldn't imagine what I could tell Mr. Kissane that he didn't already know or couldn't learn from someone else in much greater detail. He didn't want to talk about Circe at all, it turned out, but about the associated developments. Some other Joyce manuscripts had surfaced, he told me in confidence, and the owner had given the National Library an exclusive opportunity to buy them. Would I consider coming to London in the next month or so to look at these manuscripts and report on them to the Library? My first reaction was to balk ? this was two weeks after September 11; I had just canceled an end-of-October com? mitment to talk on a panel at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Houston because I didn't want to fly there; and I had moved from London, Ontario, to Toronto four months earlier