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Subject: The Leons and Joyce Notebooks
Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 19:49:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
To: Nabokov <NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>
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In addition to the obvious interest that many on the list may have about
things Joycean, this has a connection to VN as well since he knew the
Leons. Alex Ponizovski, whom Nabokov befriended at Cambridge, was Lucie's
brother, and he was also friends with her and her husband Paul. The latter
volunteered to introduce VN to Joyce, and brought Joyce to VN's talk in
Paris in 1937. Lucie Leon also proofread Nabokov's THE REAL LIFE OF
SEBASTIAN KNIGHT for him and remembered later that they went through
Nabokov's ms on the same mahogany table where her husband Paul had worked
with Joyce on Finnegans Wake.
Galya Diment
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Ireland Buys a Trove of Joyce Notebooks
By BRIAN LAVERY
Dublin, May 30 In a sort of homecoming for this country's most famous
exile, the National Library of Ireland has acquired a sprawling collection
of manuscripts by James Joyce, including, in a total of some 700 pages in
six notebooks, 16 drafts from "Ulysses" and typescripts and proofs of
"Finnegans Wake." Discovered two years ago, they were kept secret until
today.
As officials announced the purchase today in the library's airy rotunda
frequented by a young Joyce as a student they still seemed stunned by the
scale and quality of the find. The acquisition, for $11.7 million through
Sotheby's in London, is the largest artistic purchase ever made by the
Irish state, and is "one of the most important cultural milestones for
Ireland in living memory," Sile de Valera, the government arts minister,
said. Prime Minister Bertie Ahern illustrated the significance of the
purchase, and how Ireland values its artists, by greeting the suitcase of
papers as it arrived at Dublin Airport yesterday. But in Joyce's time, the
writer felt so unappreciated here he felt compelled to leave Ireland.
The documents surfaced in December 2000 when Alexis Leon, a Frenchman whose
parents were close friends of Joyce, began cleaning out boxes left in his
family's Paris apartment since his mother's death in 1972. Mr. Leon's
parents, Paul and Lucie, preserved many documents that Joyce left in Paris
when he fled to Switzerland in 1940, following the German occupation of
France.
After Joyce's death in 1941, Paul Leon broke into the author's apartment in
Paris at night, with a handcart, to salvage documents that the landlord
would have confiscated because Joyce had not paid his rent. Some material
was returned to the Joyce family and then sold at auction, mostly to the
State University of New York at Buffalo.
Several years later, Paul Leon was arrested and sent to the concentration
camp at Auschwitz, where he died, and the Leons' apartment was raided three
times by the Gestapo, who were looking for first editions of Joyce's
books. Lucie Leon hid the manuscripts for the rest of the war, and many of
them remained hidden away in boxes decades later.
Upon finding the manuscripts in 2000 "I was completely flabbergasted,"
Alexis Leon said today in an interview in Dublin. "I didn't know what to
do." He began 18 months of negotiations with the National Library of
Ireland, which kept the news so secret that the minutes from its board
meetings only refer to an acquisition of material by "a significant Irish
author."
When he was a child, Alexis Leon met James Joyce, and he remembers him as a
gentle, polite man who would listen to adolescents as seriously as to
adults.
Joyce scholars thought that most of his major manuscripts around the world
had been discovered by the 1960's, but this is the third consecutive year
in which previously unknown Joyce manuscripts have come to light. A draft
of the "Circe" episode in "Ulysses" was purchased by the National Library
of Ireland in 2000, and a draft of the "Eumaeus" episode was purchased by
an anonymous American collector in 2001.
Among the manuscripts unveiled today are the only known drafts of the
"Ithaca" episode, the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode, which takes place in
the National Library, and the "Penelope" episode, which includes Molly
Bloom's soliloquy. The latter shows how Joyce dramatically altered the
novel's famous last line by crossing out the word "would" and replacing it
with "will": "and yes I said yes I will Yes."
One of the most colorful documents in the collection is a notebook filled
with words and phrases that Joyce stored up for later use. As he wrote
them into "Ulysses," he crossed them out with crayon to avoid repeating
himself, so the pages are a nearly indecipherable mess of green, red and
blue lines over black ink.
The notebooks "have come home to Ireland where they belong even though
Ireland and Joyce, long ago, were on different wavelengths," Mr. Leon said.