E. E. Cummings' copy
JOYCE, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company. 1922.
Small 4to. Original blue wrappers, titles to cover in white; pp. 732, uncut; hinges and extremities very expertly repaired; a very good copy, housed in a leather backed book-form box; early bookplate "Ex Libris Yester House" to front free endpaper.
First edition, number 442 of 750 copies on handmade paper numbered 251 to 1,000.
According to Sylvia Beach’s records, copy no. 442 was sold to the poet E. E. Cummings in February 1922.
"Ulysses is not a great novel in the sense of A la recherché du temps perdu. The characters do not develop. It has no consistent tragic grandeur and bogs down in several stylistic exercises which have nothing to do with the novel proper; yet the early Dedalus section, the middle parts of Bloom and the Nightown orgy and Molly's final reverie stand out like Gaudi's unfinished cathedral. The whole plan fails through Joyce's intellectual preference for language rather than people—yet somehow it does achieve greatness like a ruined temple soaring from a jungle-- and should be judged perhaps as a poem, a festival of the imagination". (Connolly, 100 Key Books of the Modern Movement).
Cyril Connolly's judgement stands as a fair summation of this astonishing novel - discursive, baffling, funny, moving, a unique mingling of highbrow allusion and quotidian detail. It is as dazzling a display of stylistic virtuosity as has ever been attempted in prose, to the extent that it might not even be prose any more, and it is all in the service of a narrative that does nothing more than illuminate one day in the life of an ordinary man. It is a celebration of the individual that expresses the deep richness of human existence by drawing the parallels between the feats of classical heroes and the deeds of everyday life.
It was also, famously, judged to be so obscene after excerpts of the work in progress were published in the American journal The Little Review between 1918-20 that no mainstream publisher would touch it. Indeed, British printers were forbidden from printing it. It would take Sylvia Beach, the visionary owner of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, to publish this, the first edition in book form, in a strictly limited run on Joyee's 40th birthday on 2nd February 1922. The first UK edition, published by The Egoist Press in the October of the same year, had to use Beach's printer in Dijon, Darantiere, and her plates to obviate the legal restrictions.
The very existence of this work in print, then, is due to the perseverance and commitment of Sylvia Beach. Beach met Joyce at a tea party in 1920 and got to know him and his work after he joined her lending library; from such low-key beginnings quickly grew a creative partnership that would shape literary history. Shakespeare and Company gained considerable fame from the publication of Ulysses but actually lost financially after Joyce signed with another publisher and left Beach in debt caused by bankrolling the printing and distribution of his masterpiece, the first book she had ever published. Nevertheless, she seems never to have seriously regretted her part in the production of this cultural behemoth, a book for which T.S. Eliot wrote in awestruck tones: “I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape”.
Slocum & Cahoon A17.
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