Joyce began writing Ulysses in late 1914 or early 1915, a time marked by major transitions in his lit- erary career and in his private life: Giacomo Joyce was written some time in 1914, Dubliners was pub- lished in June 1914; Exiles was finished in 1915 (published in 1918); and A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (previously serialized in the EGOIST)
was published in book form in the United States by B. W. HUEBSCH in December 1916. In 1915, the Joyce family moved from TRIESTEto ZURICH, where they resided for four years before moving to PARIS in July 1920 after a brief return to Trieste in Octo- ber 1919.
Joyce wrote steadily on his novel while in Zurich; however, both financial and health prob- lems interrupted his work during the time he spent there. Joyce managed to support his family by giv- ing language lessons and through public and pri- vate subsidies of his income. Through the efforts of Ezra POUND and William Butler YEATS, Joyce was awarded a grant in 1915 from the Royal Literary Fund, and, beginning in 1917, Harriet Shaw WEAVERstarted providing Joyce with financial sup- port on a regular basis that lasted throughout his life. Mrs. Harold McCormick (Edith Rockefeller) also provided financial assistance from early 1918 to the fall of 1919. Nonetheless, the Joyce family’s finances were at times precarious. Furthermore, while in Zurich, Joyce suffered serious eye troubles and in August 1917 underwent the first of his sev- eral eye operations, after which he and his family spent several months in Locarno, where the cli- mate was milder. Despite all this, Zurich stood as a pleasant and productive time.
Joyce’s original idea for a story called Ulysses goes back to 1906 (see Letters, II.190). It was to be included in Dubliners and to feature a Mr. (Alfred H.) HUNTER, an actual Dubliner who Joyce believed was Jewish (see Letters, II.168). But because of unfavorable circumstances in Joyce’s life at that time, the story, as he explained in 1907 to his brother Stanislaus, “never got any forrader than the title” (Letters, II.209). This initial idea, how- ever, remained with Joyce for eight or nine more years before it began to take shape in a radically new way, forming the foundation of the novel. By June 1915 Joyce had prepared an outline of Ulysses that contained 22 chapters (rather than its present 18) and had completed one chapter. On a postcard to Stanislaus, Joyce commented: “The first episode of my new novel Ulysses is written. The first part, the Telemachiad, consists of four episodes: the sec- ond of fifteen, that is, Ulysses’ wanderings: and the third, Ulysses’ return home, of three more episodes” (Selected Letters, 209). By 1918 Ulysses began to appear serially in the American journal the LITTLEREVIEW. A year earlier, Ezra POUND, the
journal’s European correspondent, had lent his assistance to Joyce, and the journal’s editor, Mar- garet ANDERSON, realized early on that Joyce’s work
would be the finest writing she would ever print. Fourteen installments of the novel—from the Telemachus episode (chapter 1) to the first part of the Oxen of the Sun episode (chapter 14)—were published in 23 successive issues from March 1918 through September–December 1920. Pound was also instrumental in getting portions of Ulysses pub- lished in Harriet Shaw WEAVER’s London periodi- cal, the EGOIST. But this journal printed only three
episodes and a portion of a fourth (Nestor, Proteus, Hades, and The Wandering Rocks), which appeared from its January–February 1919 through December 1919 issues. Publication of installments eventually ceased because Weaver could not find an English printer who was willing to risk prosecu- tion to set the type for any of the other chapters. (Printers in England were as liable as publishers and authors.)
As Joyce’s creative ideas matured over the eight- year period in which he composed the novel, both its form and its content changed considerably. Even after portions of Ulysses were serialized, Joyce’s composition process continued to evolve. He extensively expanded some sections of the work, revised others, and made overall structural and sty- listic alterations to suit his current thinking. But other modifications of the text also occurred. Dur- James Joyce after one of a series of operations
performed on his eyes (James Joyce Collection, Beinecke
ing the Little Review serialization, Ezra Pound and Margaret Anderson made unauthorized deletions. They believed that some passages, if published, would lead to legal problems. Their strategy, how- ever, did not work. Four issues of the Little Review were eventually seized and burned by the U.S. Post Office, causing Joyce to remark in a February 1920 letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver: “This is the second time I have had the pleasure of being burned while on earth so that I hope I shall pass through the fires of purgatory as quickly as my patron S. Aloysius” (Letters, I.137; Joyce’s confirmation name was Aloysius). In September 1920, the New York Soci- ety for the Suppression of Vice filed a legal com- plaint against the Nausikaa episode, which appeared in the July–August 1920 issue of the Little
Review. The case was brought to court and tried,
and in February 1921, Margaret Anderson and her coeditor, Jane HEAP, were found guilty of publishing obscenity, fined $50 each, and prohibited from pub- lishing any further episodes of Ulysses. Their attor- ney was John QUINN, a New York lawyer and patron of the arts who in 1917 had purchased from Joyce the manuscript of Exiles. He was also acquir- ing Ulysses manuscripts. Although Quinn disliked Anderson, Heap, and their magazine for, in his opinion, exploiting artistic talent, he nevertheless did his best to win the case, knowing that failure could prevent the book from being published alto- gether. Quinn’s defense attempted to demonstrate the novel’s virtual incomprehensibility. The tactic was straightforward but unconvincing to the three judges. The two defendants themselves were also upset with his strategy, and Joyce was bewildered. Quinn’s biographer, B. L. Reid, and others, how- ever, have suggested that Quinn actually laid the foundation for Judge John M. WOOLSEY’s 1933 court decision to lift the ban on the novel.
The decision rendered against the Little Review and its coeditors as well as the earlier reluctance of printers to set type for individual portions of Ulysses presaged the difficulties Joyce would face in pub- lishing the final version of the novel. As the work neared completion, he made a number of unsuc- cessful attempts to find a publisher and was on the point of giving up when in 1921 Sylvia BEACH offered to publish it under the imprint of her Paris
bookstore, SHAKESPEARE ANDCOMPANY. By aggres- sively pursuing subscribers for the first edition, Beach managed to secure sufficient capital to finance the project. She also found a printer in Dijon, Maurice DARANTIERE, who not only agreed to print the work as it stood but who willingly pro- vided Joyce with multiple galley proofs (sheets printed for checking and correcting purposes) so that he could carry on the process of revising and expanding his novel almost to the day of its publi- cation. In late June 1921, about eight months before the publication of Ulysses, Joyce estimated that he had spent approximately 20,000 hours in writing the novel (Letters, I.166). He often worked 16 hours a day on it (Letters, I.170).
Beach continued to bring out successive edi- tions of Ulysses throughout the 1920s, although commercially it does not seem to have been a very profitable enterprise. The EGOISTPRESSin London brought out the first British edition, printed in France in October 1922. In 1932, after difficult negotiations between Joyce and Beach, the Odyssey Press in Germany (with locations in Ham- burg, Paris, and Bologna) took over publication on the European continent. Odyssey issued four impressions between December 1932 and April 1939, and corrected typographical errors in the text, making its edition one of the most reliable. In 1934 RANDOM HOUSE, through the shrewd efforts of its cofounder Bennett CERFand his legal counsel Morris Ernst, brought out the first American edi- tion of Ulysses, about a month after Judge Woolsey’s decision on December 6, 1933, to lift the ban on its appearance in the United States (see the appendix on page 392). In 1936 the London pub- lisher John Lane published the BODLEY HEADedi- tion, the first British edition of Ulysses to be printed in Britain. In 1984 Hans Walter Gabler and a team of German editors produced the first major revision of the work, published as a “critical and synoptic” edition in three volumes by GARLANDPublishing in New York and London. Two years later a single-vol- ume trade edition of Ulysses based on Gabler’s revised text was published by Random House (see GABLER EDITION). Almost immediately after the lapse in European copyright protection in 1992, a number of publishing houses issued editions of
Ulysses. These, however, generally relied on previ-
ous editions for their texts, and, as of the date of this writing, while several scholars announced large-scale editing projects, none successfully published a full- scale revision of Ulysses equaling Gabler’s (see the appendix on page 381). Subsequently, between 1993 and 1996 the European Union extended copyright protection to 70 years after the author’s death. In 1998 the United States Congress enacted similar leg- islation. This means that any proposed new editions of Ulysses as of this writing can appear only with the permission of the literary executors of Joyce’s estate.
One finds ample evidence of Joyce’s process of composition of Ulysses in material held by various institutions in the United States and England. The final holograph manuscript of Ulysses is held by the Rosenbach Foundation of Philadelphia (see the ROSENBACH MUSEUM AND LIBRARY). Notebooks that Joyce used are at the British Library and at the University Library at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Other prepublication material is held by the Houghton Library at Harvard Univer- sity, the Cornell University Library, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Library, the Firestone Library at Princeton University, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, and the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University. The JAMESJOYCEARCHIVES, vols. 12–27,
published by Garland, contain most of the extant notes, drafts, typescripts, and proofs for Ulysses. In 2002, the NATIONALLIBRARY OFIRELANDacquired additional prepublication material for Ulysses.
STRUCTURE AND SYNOPSIS