One Hundred Years Of James Joyce's "Ulysses," ed. by Colm Tóibín (review)

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Reviewed by:

• One Hundred Years Of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” ed. by Colm Tóibín
• Victor Luftig (bio)

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF JAMES JOYCE’S “ULYSSES,” edited by Colm Tóibín, with forewords by Michael D. Higgins and Colin B. Bailey. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. xiii + 167 pp. $45.00 cloth.

By calling this book a collector’s item, I mean to acknowledge both that it is gorgeous and that it is much about and maybe even mainly for collectors. The volume’s recurring question is “how do multiple and disparate elements become a meaningful whole?” a query that applies both to Ulysses and to collections of artifacts pertaining to it. The answers to that question in One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” honor both Joyce’s genius and the acumen of those who have highlighted his extraordinary talent by spending profusely on objects associated with it. The two topics together offer a distinctive suggestion as to what Ulysses is worth.

The volume looks like an exhibition catalogue and, in fact, memorializes a Ulysses centennial show that ran at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York from June to October 2022. In addition to dozens of vivid images and two forewords, by Irish President Michael D. Higgins and Morgan Director Colin B. Bailey, it comprises a rambling introduction by the book’s editor, the distinguished novelist Colm Tóibín; five essays by noted Joyce scholars; three more essays by a lawyer, a collector, and a curator; an interview with Sean Kelly, whose collection was essential to the exhibition; and an essay by the manuscripts dealer Rick Gekoski about Sean and Mary Kelly’s collection.

The book is not obviously organized for continuous cover-to-cover reading. If one does apprehend it that way, one cannot help noticing that multiple essays repeat the same facts. For instance, Maria DiBattista’s comment that Joyce found the Thom’s Official Directory “a particular fertile source” (79) echoes Anne Fogarty’s assertion that, “[m]ore than any other work, the 1904 Thom’s . . . furnished salient details” (29–30), and Derick Dreher’s observation that the Little Review editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were defended at their obscenity trial “by none other than John Quinn” (104) comes only ten pages after Joseph M. Hassett’s lambasting of Quinn for that “tawdry and cynical” defense (94). Even the Patrick Tuohy 1924 portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce appears both in color in the introduction (11) and at the center of a black-and-white collage of Joyce family portraits at the beginning of James Maynard’s account of how the University at Buffalo acquired its Joyce collection (112). [End Page 649]

I find it hard to imagine a reader who would be both interested to learn from Maynard of the contents of Buffalo’s Sylvia Beach-related holdings¹ and who would also need this, from Tóibín’s introduction:

the novel has characters and events that run from episode to episode. For much of it, for example, there is a bar of soap in Leopold Bloom’s pocket. . . . But while objects and events anchor the book, there is great emphasis on style itself—and often with [sic] parody of style.

(13)

Well, perhaps that would be a reader who did not know Ulysses particularly well but who was interested in objects associated with it.

We are not to think that characterizes Kelly as a collector. He comments to Tóibín and John Bidwell: “I first encountered [Ulysses] when I left home. . . . I was living on the streets of London. . . . Over the years my repeated readings of it have rewarded me so much and made me understand a lot about the human condition” (13, 14). It was not just such generic enthusiasm that led to his collection, according to Gekoski. “To amass such treasures,” says Gekoski,

you need a number of qualities, beyond manic acquisitiveness and an adequately stocked purse. You need, foremost, an eye for what are the best, the most essential objects that help to tell the story of James Joyce, to fill it out, to humanize and add texture to it.

(141...