Thomas F. Staley: Alchemist and Time Traveler

Abstract

Thomas F. Staley:Alchemist and Time Traveler Sean Latham In 1963, the legend goes, an ambitious young professor with a newly minted Ph.D. from Pitt came home to Tulsa with the aim of making what was then the oil capital of the world into an intellectual powerhouse. So he took to his garage and, with the help of a few students, began laying out a modestly sized magazine audaciously titled the James Joyce Quarterly. Thirty-six cheaply set pages were stapled between Kelly green covers and accompanied by a deceptively reserved editorial statement: "The idea of the JJQ grew out of a modestly conceived notion to draw Joyceans together and to publish provocative essays dealing with Joyce's life, work, and milieu." Those who knew Tom understood there was nothing modest about this venture at all. It entered into an already crowded field of competing Joyce journals and aimed to make Tulsa rhyme with Dublin, Paris, Zurich, Paris, and Trieste. Almost 63 years later, the James Joyce Quarterly has become not simply the international journal of record for one of the world's most influential novelists, but an intellectual touchstone for those interested in modern literature and culture more generally. During Tom's tenure at the helm, it drew widespread attention for its innovative articles and eager attempts to bring artists, scholars, novelists, and Joyce's fans into active dialogue. Seamus Heaney published poems in its pages while painters jostled to have their work appear on its often lavishly illustrated covers. Issues went out to avid readers around the world, and our subscription archive still contains some remarkable surprises, not least among them the renewal cards from John Lennon. For most of us, this would be enough. The JJQ is a fine and enduring legacy to Tom's robust vision. It turned out, however, that he was only getting started. Just a few years after publishing that first issue, he founded the International James Joyce Foundation and helped institutionalize haphazard Bloomsday celebrations into a juggernaut symposium that moved from one glittering European city to another, its hundreds of participants spending a full week delving into the ever-twisting texts Joyce created. As the current secretary of that Foundation and editor of the JJQ, I can affirm that we all continue to stand on Tom's broad shoulders, benefitting day after day, year after year from his ambitious drive to cement Joyce into our cultural and intellectual foundations. And yet, the JJQ and the Foundation remain a footnote to a now much larger story. My first inkling of what Tom was actually doing came in the early 1990s when, as a college student, I stumbled across some copies of the [End Page 401] JJQ while trying to make sense of what would remain--for a few more years anyway--my largely decorative copy of Ulysses. The first page of each issue had a small logo with what appeared to be some kind of castle, captioned "University of Tulsa." That castle, it turned out, was McFarlin Library, the home to what I now think of as Staley's practice run for his real life's work. As I set to work in graduate school on a study of modern literature, that little castle began to loom ever larger. It popped up in footnotes; my professors mentioned it in passing as a place they had visited; and some of my colleagues strangely left the Rhode Island seaside for what they described then as the inferno-like summers of Oklahoma, just so they could explore the treasures of this odd prairie fortress. Within its walls, it turns out, Staley had been collecting an extraordinary range of letters, manuscripts, artworks, and archives focused almost exclusively on the early twentieth century. Thanks, in part, to his deep roots in the community and keen ability to charm donors, artists, and agents alike, he had engaged in the best kind of alchemy: slowing transforming Tulsa's vast oil wealth into boxes and boxes of paper. If you haven't done so, I urge you to take just a passing look at what McFarlin's Special Collections now hold. Yes, there's acres of Joyce stuff gathered from...