by James Joyce
PARIS,
1922–1939.
Appendix 1
It was a seminal moment in the progress of relationships between the James Joyce Estate and Joyce scholarship – though ‘neither first nor last nor only nor alone’ but rather ‘the last … of a preceding series, even if the first … of a succeeding one’ (U 17, 2130; 2128-9) – when in 1975 a group of us sat together outside a café on Place Vendôme in Paris with Peter du Sautoy, then Trustee of the Estate, as well as a director of Faber & Faber, and in that office, as it so happens, a successor to T. S. Eliot, who in his turn was the Faber & Faber director presiding over the publication in 1939 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
The encounter in 1975 took place late one morning during the International James Joyce Symposium held that year in Paris, the city where between 1923 and 1939 James Joyce wrote ‘Work in Progress’, metamorphosed ultimately into Finnegans Wake. It followed a session where I had laid out the procedures I intended to adopt for editing Ulysses from scratch on the foundation of all surviving manuscript, typescript and proof materials. This editing would both elucidate Joyce’s writing processes and result in a thoroughly re-established text.