December 25, 1975

Original 'Ulysses' MS. Being Issued

By ALDEN WHITMAN

he holograph manuscript of James Joyce's "Ulysses" is being published in facsimile for the first time this month after lying for 50 years in the hands of an American collector. The history of the manuscript and the problems of making it into a book are both as complex as some readers find the novel.

A comparison of the manuscript and printed editions of the novel disclose hundreds of errors even in the corrected and revised edition issued by Random House in 1961, according to Clive Driver, a Joyce scholar who provides a bibliographic preface to the facsimile edition. Many of the errors have to do with punctuation, he said in a recent interview, but some slightly alter the meaning of some scenes and conversations. None, however, are so gross as to affect the over-all evaluation of the book.

Nonetheless, Dr. Driver said, an effort will be made to have published an authoritative edition based both on the manuscript and on Joyce's corrections on galley proofs and of earlier editions. Many of these are also reproduced in a volume that accompanies the facsimile edition. In all there are three volumes, two of which carry the 810-page manuscript.

Bought for $1,975

The manuscript is among the treasures of the Rosenbach Foundation Museum in Philadelphia. Now insured for $200,000, it was purchased for $1,975 in 1924 from John Quinn, an extraordinary New York lawyer and patron of writers and artists. The buyer was Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, the shrewd bibliophile and collector of rare manuscripts. With his brother, Philip, he established the Philadelphia museum.

Quinn, who had given the impecunious Joyce various sums over the years, bought the "Ulysses" manuscript in segments, as the author completed them. He paid a total of $1,200 in six installments beginning in 1918. But he did not acquire the novel's final passage, the Molly Bloom soliloquy, because Joyce had wanted to keep that secret until the first edition was issued.

As Joyce finished each portion of the novel, according to Dr. Driver, it was given to a typist to transcribe. There were many typists over the years, all of whom had trouble reading Joyce's cramped handwriting. This process introduced errors and omissions. But as soon as each segment was typed up, it was sent to Quinn, Dr. Driver said.

Thus, Dr. Driver continued, when Joyce corrected galleys and page proofs, he was unable to read back the print against the manuscript. He made some effort to correct the most flagrant errors, but he also made handwritten revisions on the proof.

The difficulties were not only with Joyce's penmanship, Dr. Driver said, but also with the novel's sexual explicitness. The husband of one typist, he said, "in a fit of moral outrage, threw the offending pages in the fire," and Joyce had to get a photographic copy of his manuscript from Quinn in order to restore the missing passages.

When the typists copied the manuscript, they made a fair copy and two carbons. The fair copy, with Joyce's emendations, was set for the Shakespeare and Company edition that was published in Paris in 1922. One of the carbons was given to Ezra Pound, who bowdlerized it for serialization in The Little Review in the United States. The other carbon went to Harriet Shaw Weaver, a friend.

"Ulysses" ran into censorship problems in this country from the outset. Despite Pound's sanitizing, The Little Review was prosecuted, and the United States Customs Service banned importation of the Shakespeare and Company edition, as well as a printing in France.

Finally, in 1933, the ban was lifted and Random House published an edition the following year based on the first and later editions. Meantime, the manuscript remained in Dr. Rosenbach's collection, passing to the museum on his death in 1952.

"Curiously, the manuscript has been studied by very few scholars," Dr. Driver said. "At least part of the reason for this neglect is a long-standing myth, originating with Sylvia Beach [of Shakespeare and Company], that the Quinn manuscript is merely a fair copy, that Joyce, after completing each episode, sat down and wrote out by hand a duplicate of the final text to sell to Quinn."

Publication of the facsimile edition has been held up over the years by lack of money and by legal tangles. These were solved about two years ago by Octagon Books, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which, with the Rosenbach Foundation, is co-publisher of the present work.

Ultimately, according to Michael DiCapua of Octagon, Random House, which owns the American rights to "Ulysses," agreed to license publication of the facsimile. And a royalty arrangement was made with the Joyce estate, which owns the substance of the novel.

The facsimile edition, limited to 1,775 copied in the United States and 750 sets in Britain, is printed in five colors by photo-offset. It sells for $150 a set.

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