Notes on the new Joyce manuscripts.

In May 2002, the Irish Government and the National Library of Ireland announced the purchase of an astonishing hoard of previously unknown Joyce manuscripts. The seller was Alexis Leon, son of Joyce's friend Paul Leon. (1) Coincidentally in Dublin on the day of the Irish Government announcement, I remembered that only months before her death in 1972, I'd interviewed Lucie Noel, Mrs. Paul Leon, in her Paris apartment (for a BBC Radio program about Joyce and the tenor John O'Sullivan). Possibly sitting within arm's length of what by 2002 would be worth 12 million [pounds sterling] (say $12 million), it didn't occur to me to ask if she owned any Joyce memorabilia. As she lived very modestly, I suppose that she didn't know that she had anything of such value as the manuscripts her son would discover thirty years later.

No new Joyce MSS had surfaced for decades when a working draft of "Eumaeus" was sold in 2000 (to an anonymous buyer) and one of "Circe" in 2001, bought for the NLI. (2) Reading the publicity attendant on its arrival in Dublin--for example, "ULYSSES IS COMING HOME"--you had to recall that the book was famously written in "Trieste-Zurich-Paris/1914-1921" by the author who chose not to set foot in Ireland after 1912. In 2001, a Dublin home for an additional (3) manuscript of "Circe"--the NLI then owned no other Ulysses manuscript--only seemed to contribute to the diaspora of pre-Rosenbach manuscripts. But the new purchase changed things utterly: Ireland had won the Sweeps.

To chart a path for scholarship, JSA2003 contains Michael Groden's article, "The National Library of ...