The New York James Joyce society.

As a married graduate teaching assistant with a child and working on a masters degree in English, my principal income in 1958 was only about twenty percent of what it had been in my former calling, the used car business. What psychic income there was in the automobile business died with my father the year after I got my B.A., and when I returned to graduate school, I needed even more urgently to continue working part time as a singer and producer of radio commercials until I could land a full-time teaching job. At Temple University I took Joyce with Mabel Worthington, who at the time was working on an index for her co-authored book with Matthew Hodgart, Song in the Works of James Joyce. Since I had access to a studio in the Temple University radio station on Tuesday nights (making singing commercials for the Clements agency), and to professional Philadelphia actors who could do Irish accents, I offered to make a demonstration tape of a chapter of Ulysses with the actual music referred to in the text as backgr ound for Bloom's thoughts. Mabel agreed to accept it in lieu of a term paper and I was on the way to a career glossing Joyce's musical references.

When I completed the M.A. at Temple I got a job at the State University of New York, College of Fredonia, and a scholarship to complete my Ph.D. at Buffalo, a major Joyce manuscript repository, where I was privileged to work with Tom Connolly. Fredonia's specialty in the New York State system was music, and many of its undergraduates were card-carrying members of either the musicians union or the American Guild of Variety Artists. The campus radio station was right next door to my office, and after I smoozed around for a month or so with the student staff and faculty director, I thought I might possibly have the means to expand the earlier tape of the segment from the "Lestrygonians" episode into a full-blown album of the entire chapter. I applied for a SUNY Research Grant my first semester at Fredonia, and was awarded enough for supplies and professional technicians to help with the project.

After five months of working weekends, the album was finished, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. I didn't know who might be interested besides my wife and the cast, but Mabel, who lived in New York while she went to Columbia, told me about a group of people who loved Joyce so much they met four times a year at the Gotham Book Mart to talk about him and pay homage. I took a chance and called Frances Steloff, the owner of the Gotham, to ask if at any time in years to come they might give me the opportunity to play segments of my tape and talk about Joyce and music. To my astonishment she said yes, and asked if I would like to come down for the Bloomsday meeting, then only a couple of weeks away. Short of the day I caught my first sailfish, and possibly the day my eldest son was born, nothing ever made me happier. I was to be sandwiched in between two other speakers, she said, but they wouldn't mind because they were regulars.

That was the beginning of a long association with what I think was the first on-going organization in the United States and possibly anywhere to devote itself entirely to the works and scholarship of James Joyce. The New York Joyce Society began in 1947 in the Gotham Book Mart, one of the most unique bookstores in the world. It was in a sense the American version of Shakespeare and Company. In the heart of Manhattan, at 41 West 47th Street, it was the center of the modernist literary movement in the United States, selling rare and out-of-print books as well as the avant garde literature of the era to the most sophisticated audience in this country, centered in New York. The clientele were principally book people and theatrical people who lived, worked, and visited in Manhattan, often attracted to the Gotham by its stock of the "little magazines" that were unavailable elsewhere in the country.

Frances Steloff had become the Sylvia Beach of New York, regularly hosting visiting foreign writers as well as Americans, publishers, artists, and academicians at the most prestigious literary gatherings on this side of the Atlantic. Establishing Joyce's reputation was one of Frances's principal passions. Having for years sold Joyce's "Work in Progress" as it appeared serially in transition, the Gotham was ready in 1939 for a major publication party for Finnegans Wake. Viking Press, the publisher, cooperated with subsidies for the event and John J. Slocum loaned his fine Joyce collection (now at Yale) for the event, in which scores of literary celebrities participated as mourners and Frances herself as the bereaved widow. W. G. Rogers tells us,

Eugene Jolas later brought back word from Paris that Joyce was amused at the unique wake and pleased with the photographs....

This party, the regular sale of transition, and the general Joyceana stacked on the little-magazine racks served to advertise the impression that Joyce headquarters in America was West Forty-seventh Street. ... Inquiries about the author, his life in Paris, and his baffling and challenging opus kept pouring in. Often an inquisitive admirer walked out of the shop minutes before an expert with all the answers walked in. Frances Steloff decided that for the good of letters they should be brought together. William York Tindall, Columbia's Joyce authority, and an assistant, James Gilvarry, agreed readily to receive students referred to them on a casual basis. (1)