How the most
comprehensive Joyce collection came to be housed here has as much
to do with the foresight and vision of Charles D. Abbott and Oscar
A. Silverman, the first Directors of the Lockwood Memorial Library,
as it does with the dedication and friendship to the University
and to Sylvia Beach of a few Buffalo families.
The
materials that comprise the Joyce Collection at Buffalo were acquired
from four different sources. A donation to the Library made possible
the acquisition at auction of the majority of items from the 1949
exhibit of Joyce material entitled "James Joyce: Sa Vie,
Son Œuvre, Son Rayonnement" at the Librairie La Hune
in Paris. This exhibit had been organized by Bernard Gheerbrant,
Maria Jolas and Lucie Léon, among others, with the prospect
of selling the selected items that belonged to Joyce to benefit
his family (1). The materials arrived in
Buffalo in the autumn of 1950. Oscar Silverman, who viewed the
exhibit in the company of Maria Jolas, realized that such a relatively
complete manuscript record complemented the Poetry Project’s
aim of gathering "all the tangible sheets a poet uses in
making a poem" and augmented Buffalo’s already well-established
collection of manuscripts and variant printings (2).
This first
batch consisted of manuscripts representing all stages of most
of Joyce’s works. Beyond that, there were also many letters,
two decades of press clippings and journal articles of his works
from the world over (which are a major highlight of this exhibit)
(3), family portraits (on the walls above
the exhibit cases), as well as his personal library and effects
(4). These items were originally left by
Joyce in his Paris apartment after his flight from that city in
the winter of 1939 and were then recovered by Paul Léon,
who remained in Paris out of family obligation too long and died
at the hands of the Nazis. The story of Paul Léon’s
heroic trips back and forth through the occupied streets of Paris
with a workman and his wheelbarrow have been recounted often,
but were it not for his valiant and successful efforts in preserving
Joyce’s workshop, the breadth and scope of the Joyce scholarship
that has followed, whether textual or biographical, would not
have been possible (5).
Benjamin W.
Huebsch, Joyce’s first American publisher and long-time supporter,
donated the second batch in May 1951 and supplemented it with
another in December 1959. Both batches consisted of page proofs
of the front matter and two lists of errata for A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as his correspondence
with Joyce from 1915 to 1938.
The
third batch arrived in Buffalo in the winter of 1959. This comprised
a large portion of Sylvia Beach’s personal Joyce collection.
Some of these items had been loaned to the La Hune Exhibit and
were then part of the commemorative exhibit entitled "Les
Années Vingt. Les Écrivans Américans à
Paris et Leurs Amis. 1920—1930." This exhibit was organized
by the American Embassy’s Centre Culturel Américain
and opened in Paris in March 1959 (and in London the following
year). This acquisition brought many further manuscripts, printed
texts (mostly dedicated by the author to Beach, some of which
are on view in the exhibit), an extensive correspondence concerning
Joyce’s personal and business affairs and many photographs
that document Joyce’s life and the Paris literary scene of
the twenties and thirties. This batch augmented the Buffalo Joyce
Collection by providing, among other important material, twelve
further workbooks of Ulysses episodes, bringing to twenty
the number of drafts of this relatively early stage of the novel.
Sylvia Beach also sent over 1200 pages of typescript and 800 of
galley proofs, all with additions and corrections by Joyce (6).
Shortly after
Beach’s death in 1962 a further batch arrived in Buffalo.
This consisted of the remaining portion of her Joyce Collection.
As part of this batch came the 212 letters from Joyce to Beach,
further first editions signed by the author and dedicated to her,
translations, more photographs, as well as other significant manuscripts
and letters. Most of these items were not included in the first
edition of the collection’s catalog as that was published
before the arrival of this batch.
The final
major acquisition came from Maria Jolas in 1968. It consisted
of 31 pages of six different transition galley proofs of
Work in Progress printed and revised from 27 May 1927 to
June 1928 for transitions 4, 5, and 11—13 (7).
1) Bernard
Gheerbrant, James Joyce: Sa Vie, Son Œuvre, Son Rayonnement
(Paris: La Hune, 1949).
2) See Charles
D. Abbott, ed., Poets at Work: Essays Based on the Modern Poetry
Collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library, (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1948), 12; and Oscar A. Silverman’s own description
of his visits to the exhibition and the excitement with which
the collection was received at the University: "James Joyce:
Paris-Buffalo (The Joyce Collections at the Lockwood Memorial
Library)" in the Grosvenor Society Occasional Papers,
vol. 1, no. 1, February 1964.
3) Joyce’s
personal newspaper clippings collection was in fact the first
component of the Buffalo collection to be cataloged. (See the
unpublished M. A. thesis by Jean Gilbert, "A Card Index to
the Press Clippings in the Joyce Collection of the Lockwood Memorial
Library," University of Buffalo, 1952). This collection is
the single most comprehensive record of contemporary (1922-1941)
reviews, critiques, and the reception of Joyce’s work extant.
An electronic, revised index, A James Joyce Scrapbook: Joyce’s
Clippings Archive at The Poetry Collection at Buffalo,
compiled by Luca Crispi and Stacey Herbert, is forthcoming.
4) Although
scholars had made use of some of the individual items in the collection
prior to 1955, Thomas E. Connolly was the first to catalog and
publish any part of it in his The Personal Library of James
Joyce: A Descriptive Bibliography (Buffalo: University at
Buffalo, 1955).
5) The financial
assistance of Léon’s brother-in-law, Alex Ponisovsky,
was vital at that juncture.
6) As so much
of the novel was written for the first time directly on the typescripts
and proofs, these manuscripts are an invaluable source of insight
concerning the genetic development of the novel and the controversies
over a "corrected" text.
7) The collection
was previously cataloged by Peter Spielberg in his James Joyce’s
Manuscripts and Letters at the University of Buffalo (1962)
and is now being revised and augmented by Luca Crispi.