When James Joyce arrived in Paris on 8 July 1920, he intended staying for a week to arrange for translations of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In fact he remained for twenty years.
These were the most important years for Joyce. He finished writing Ulysses which was published in 1922, then started on Finnegans Wake which didn’t appear until 1939. He died in 1941 in Zurich.
The American poet Ezra Pound was the catalyst in all of this. It was he who invited Joyce, then living in Trieste, to come to Paris. Joyce was planning on going to London where he might finish writing Ulysses in ‘a quiet place.’ But Paris was en route and he thought he might do something about the translations while there. Pound put him up in a Left Bank hotel and introduced Joyce to other writers and literary people. Within three days he met Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Soon afterwards, when it became apparent that no publisher would touch Ulysses, she offered to bring out the book herself. It was an act of kindness that became a defining moment in literary history.
Ulysses was published on 2nd February 1922 – Joyce’s 40th birthday. The book sold well, despite its exorbitant price of 150 francs (equivalent to about 100 euros today). In the months leading up to publication day, Sylvia Beach sought subscriptions and Winston Churchill was one of the first to commit themselves. George Bernard Shaw declined but wished the book well and added: “If you can imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen.”
Ernest Hemingway, who was in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, helped Sylvia with the subscriptions. He even came up with a bizarre scheme for smuggling Ulysses into the United States where it was banned. He persuaded a former Toronto newspaper colleague, Barney Braverman, to take copies of the book (posted to him from Paris) across the Great Lakes to Detroit . Hemingway, who became friendly with Joyce, was among many expatriates who bought a copy of Ulysses because it had become fashionable to do so in Paris literary circles. After his death, it emerged that he had read little more than the Penelope section of the novel.
The big breakthrough for Ulysses and for Joyce came when the book was highly praised and promoted by the French writer Valery Larbaud. With the publication of a French translation of the book, James Joyce became not just an author but a celebrity.
You can buy A Little Circle of Kindred Minds: Joyce in Paris, at Amazon or by contacting the author at conorjosephfennell@gmail.com
Conor Fennell 