Irish Historical Mysteries: The Trade in Joyce Manuscripts
James
Joyce (1882-1941)
(Sculpture
by Jo Davidson, photograph by François
Kollar, © Mission de Patrimoine Photographique)
Part 1: The Léon Cache
Why
did he desist from
speculation?
Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other
more acceptable
phenomena in place of the less acceptable phenomena to
be removed.
James Joyce, Ulysses,
1922 Text, page 650.
James Joyce's Ulysses,
modelled on Homer's Odyssey
and describing the wanderings and encounters of Leopold Bloom and
assorted characters in Dublin on 16 June 1904, is perhaps the
most acclaimed, but not necessarily actually read, novel of our
time. While Joyce has a number of informed devotees among the
general reading public, there is a perception that his works have
in general been captured by an enclosed, academic elite or church
which spends its time jargonising and theologising over the
deeper significance of the author's every word. Consider for
example the following: 'In effect, Joyce's writing exacerbates
the question of materiality by reaching constantly beyond the
assumes limits of signifying probability, and by situating the
"nexus" of semio-linguistic structure in its
materiality and not in some form of anima or agency
"deposited in it"-as Frederic Jameson, among others,
suggests when he states that the "pure temporal movement of
signification itself, as it deposits itself in object or letter,
is retained, without any ultimate sense of the direction or
meaning of that movement."' (1) Come again?
Notwithstanding the excesses of
his
exegetists, the stock of James Joyce has never been higher, as
demonstrated by the huge sums fetched by manuscripts and first
editions of his works in recent years. Thus in December 2000 the
National Library of Ireland purchased from Christie's in New York
a 27-page draft of the Circe episode in Ulysses,
at a
cost of US$1.4 million. (2) The name of the vendor was not
released, but it was stated to be a relative of John Quinn, a
wealthy New York lawyer who had acquired material from Joyce.
There was a general welcome for the purchase of the Circe
manuscript, and it was clear that thanks to the 'Celtic Tiger'
economy, the National Library was no longer starved of the funds
necessary for such major purchases. Yet there was also some
surprise expressed that the Circe manuscript had surfaced, as it
had been considered that there was no longer any such material
remaining to be discovered.
Flushed with this success, the
National
Library took the opportunity in July 2001 to purchase from
Sotheby's of London for £55,000 what it thought was an
original
death mask of Joyce. Unfortunately, it was brought to the
attention of the National Library and its Director, Brendan O
Donoghue, that all surviving original Joyce death masks were
accounted for, and that the mask on offer was in fact a copy. The
Library immediately cancelled the sale, but the affair was a
considerable embarrassment and revealed a worrying deficiency of
expertise. (3) Another unexpected Joycean find, a notebook
relating to the Eumaeus episode in Ulysses,
was also
sold by Sotheby's at the same auction session for US$1.5 million,
but the National Library decided not to join the bidding for this
item.
It would later emerge that the
Library
was
in any case at this time engaged in top secret negotiations for
the purchase of a collection of Joyce manuscripts much larger
than any of those which had hitherto come to light. A
considerable international sensation was created when on 29 May
2002 the then Minister for Arts and Heritage, Síle de
Valera,
stepped from the Government jet at Dublin Airport carrying a
suitcase containing Joyce papers which had been acquired for
€12.6 million. The immediate charge to the public purse was
leavened by the fact that half the cost was to be paid by Allied
Irish Banks, taking advantage of the so-called Section 1003 tax relief
procedure. At a
press conference in the National Library on the day following, 30
May, the full extent of the acquisition was revealed: notebooks
from the author's early period, preparatory notebooks for and
drafts of episodes of Ulysses,
and proofs of Finnegans
Wake. (4)
The vendors of the material were
a Mr
and
Mrs Alexis Léon of Paris, with Sotheby's acting as their
agents.
Alexis Léon is the son of Paul Léon, a close
friend of
Joyce
who donated his own personal correspondence and papers to the
National Library as a free gift before his death at the hands of
the Nazis in 1942. (5) Joyce had left Paris with his family in
1939 and then moved to Switzerland, dying of a perforated ulcer
in Zurich on 13 January 1941. Despite the danger that Paul
Léon
faced from the Germans on account of his Jewish faith, he bravely
made several trips to Joyce's Paris flat to remove material for
safe keeping on the family's behalf. Characteristically, Joyce
had departed his flat hurriedly leaving rent arrears, so that the
landlord was planning to auction off his effects, and there was
also a danger that possessions would be looted by rapacious
Nazis.
The present writer was concerned
about
certain aspects of the May 2002 purchase, particularly how the
manuscripts sold by the Léons could be differentiated from
material Joyce had left behind in his flat. For example, a series
of Joyce's notebooks for Ulysses,
numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, 7
and 8 are in Buffalo University and can be acccounted for in that (as
the writer has been informed) 1, 2, 4 and 7 were sold on by Sylvia
Beach, while 6 and 8 were among material sold by Joyce's family to the
university after the war, which material had earlier been duly returned
to
its possession in accordance with Paul Léon's instructions. The missing
notebooks numbered 3, 5 and 9 are among the manuscripts acquired from
the Léons by
the
National Library, and the question arises as to whether these might
have somehow become detached from the material Paul Léon had rescued on
Joyce's behalf, or whether they could have been an earlier gift to him
from Joyce. (6) Alexis Léon was quoted at the time of
the
2002 sale as insisting that the manuscripts had nothing to do with
the documents which his father had rescued from Joyce's flat. Yet one
Internet commentator observed, 'The way this is
phrased suggests to me that Alexis Léon knows he's on shaky
ground in claiming ownership'. (7)
As a long-time user of the
institution,
the
present writer felt entitled to make a Freedom of Information Act
application to the National Library, and documents released in
October 2002 showed that the sale of the manuscripts had not in
fact gone entirely smoothly. It emerged that the Joyce Estate,
headed by Joyce's grandson Stephen James Joyce, had heard of the
planned sale on the grapevine. The Estate's solicitors, McCann
FitzGerald, made its own FOI application on 18 April 2002 to
Minister de Valera, in an effort to find out what was happening.
On 29 April National Library Director O Donoghue advised that the
solicitors' FOI application should be refused on the grounds that
it might compromise ongoing negotiations, and furthermore that
such refusal should be couched 'in terms which do not even
acknowledge that such a purchase is being contemplated'. The
Library's FOI release to the present writer was minus a
substantial proportion of documents relating to the sale,
including the sale contract. These documents were withheld on the
rather startling grounds that they could be used in a legal
challenge which could 'call into question the whole transaction
with possible significant exposure to the State and the National
Library'. (8
The first public airing of the
controversy
over the Joyce manuscripts was in the edition of Phoenix
magazine dated 17 January 2003. Stephen James Joyce went on the record
with his concerns in the Irish edition of the Sunday
Times
on 16 February 2003, challenging Alexis Léon to produce
proof
that the manuscripts were in fact his mother's property. Joyce
stated that the Estate did not have 'any strong wish to get
involved in litigation', but added ominously, 'If we feel we have
to take action, we will'. Also subject to criticism were the
National Library and the Government, on account of the secrecy
surrounding the purchase, and the failure to keep the Estate
informed, 'as it was in the past under similar circumstances'.
The writer understands that prior to the sales of the 'Circe' and
'Eumaeus' materials, the Joyce Estate was fully briefed, and it
is hard to understand why this courtesy was not observed in the
case of the Léon cache sale.
While Alexis Léon
resolutely
refuses to
comment further, National Library Director Brendan O Donoghue
merely repeated that 'the vendors asserted that they were the
legal and beneficial owners of the materials and were entitled to
sell them'. Alas, that does not constitute proof of ownership or
evidence of due diligence in establishing the provenance of the
disputed materials. Indeed courts internationally have been
taking a more critical view of secrecy and failure to inquire
before purchase in the case of assets whose ownership is in
dispute as a result of the dislocation of war. Appeals to the
Statute of Limitations and attempts to transfer the burden of
documentary proof to the plaintiffs are not being regarded in a
legally favourable light. Those who consider
that passage of time renders
restitution a moralistic irrelevance might ponder the case of a
collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt,
stolen by Nazis in 1938 and now valued at £170 million, which
by
court
order were restored by a Viennese gallery in March 2006 to an heiress
resident in California (Guardian, 21 March 2006).
The publicity concerning the
Joyce
manuscripts also led to the matter being the subject of
parliamentary questions in the Dáil. Fine Gael spokesman
Jimmy
Deenihan asked the present Arts, Sport and Tourism Minister John
O'Donoghue to state if the sellers Mr and Mrs Alexis Léon
had
'proper legal title' to the manuscripts. Minister O'Donoghue
replied on 13 February 2003, repeating the by now familiar line
that the vendors 'asserted that they were the legal and
beneficial owners of the materials', and that the 'contract for
sale entered into with the vendors reflects this position'. Emmet
Stagg for Labour followed up with a question about the 'potential
legal case' which may be taken against the State in connection
with the manuscripts purchase. In his reply on 26 February
Minister O'Donoghue merely referred back to his earlier answer.
(9)
Full colour digital images of the
Joyce
manuscripts in question have now been made available to scholars
on a high resolution computer screen in the National Library
Manuscripts Reading Room in Kildare Street, Dublin. (10)
Reflecting the fact that while ownership of the manuscripts may
lie with the Library, the copyright remains with the Joyce
Estate, it is necessary to sign a declaration agreeing to abide
by legal conditions of use. The speed with which copies of the
Joyce manuscripts have been made accessible is to be commended,
but there should be no question of access to the originals being
decided on the basis of grace and favour, as alas is the case
with certain uncatalogued Library manuscripts. (11) The writer
also cannot help drawing a contrast between these colour digital
facsimiles and the semi-legible half-century old microfilm and
scratched and indistinct microfiche via which some other records,
particularly of a genealogical nature, must still be viewed in
the Library.
In the Irish
Times of 30 April
2003 journalist and Joycean expert Terence Killeen wrote a fairly
lengthy and impassioned piece decrying attempts to unravel the
mystery of the provenance of the Joyce manuscripts. Accepting
that 'some of the manuscripts have clearly been separated from
others of which they once formed part', Killeen hypothesised
lyrically to the effect that 'Joyce's life was an odyssey without
an Ithaca', and that 'in the course of his many wanderings, items
might well have become separated from each other'. Killeen also
effectively justified the National Library's 'reticence' about
dispelling the cloak of secrecy enveloping the transaction, on
the grounds of threatened legal action.
Killeen's piece was overtaken by
events,
in
that in contrast to the National Library's refusal, the
Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism had decided on 29 April
2003 following a Freedom of Information appeal to release the
Joyce manuscripts sale contract, albeit with significant
deletions. The contract is dated 22 May 2002 and is between the
vendors Mr and Mrs Alexis Léon, their agents Sotheby's, and
the
purchaser, Minister de Valera, with the latter authorising
Library Director O Donoghue to sign on her behalf. Payment for
the manuscripts was scheduled in three instalments, due on 30 May
2002, 28 February 2003 and 28 February 2004, at which latter date
all the goods became the property of the purchaser. The contract
includes a clause allowing for the sale to be rescinded in the
event that evidence raising doubts as to the authenticity or
attribution of the items is presented, a sensible precaution in
the light of the earlier unfortunate Joyce death mask transaction
between the Library and Sotheby's. While the manuscripts were
closely scrutinised by Joycean literary experts, it does not appear that they were examined by a
qualified forensic documents expert with regard to handwriting, ink
and paper.
The contract states that the
vendors are
'the full legal and beneficial owners of the property', but
section 6, 'Warranties by the Vendors', has been subjected to
severe pruning. This is unfortunate, as this is the very portion
of the contract which might have been expected to allay doubts
about the vendors' title to the manuscripts. The Arts Department
justifies the deletions on the grounds that 'premature disclosure
of the contents of these clauses could reasonably be expected to
result in undue disturbance of the ordinary course of business,
and in this context could result in an unwarranted financial cost
to a person or persons and/or to a public body'. The withholding
of the vendors' warranties was again appealed to the Information
Commissioner, who ruled in favour of the Department in December
2003 on the somewhat enigmatic grounds that 'the disclosure of
the information would, of itself, be an unauthorised use of that
information to the detriment of the party communicating it'.
While a statement by Alexis
Léon dated 24
April 2001 had thus been withheld, certain documents appended to
it were released. Because Alexis Léon has consistently
refused
to make further comment, these documents provide the only
available clues as to the possible nature of his case for
ownership. The documents include firstly extracts from the
published memoir of Alexis's mother Lucie Léon (aka Noel),
in
which she describes how her husband Paul had rescued materials
from Joyce's Paris flat during World War II and arranged for them
to be held safely for the benefit of Joyce's family. Lucie
Léon's account also mentions 'a suitcase with important
Joyce
papers in our apartment', and there is an inference that this is the
collection now sold to the National Library. Yet
the context clearly raises questions concerning such a
connection, as Lucie also recorded that she had attempted to
deposit the suitcase with the Swiss Legation, on the grounds that
'Mr Joyce carried a British passport' and the Swiss were
protecting British interests, implying that the material was
being held in trust for the Joyce family and was not in fact her
property. (12)
Notice in Gazette Hôtel Drouot, 24 May 1941
Secondly,
the appended documents include
a
published notice in French concerning a sale on 30 May 1941 at
the Hôtel Drouot in Paris of goods of the deceased 'J. J.',
presumably James Joyce (see copy above). The sale is stated to be
at the request of the 'administrateur judiciaire', which would
indicate that it was legally authorised, although in the
confusion of war all the niceties may not have been observed.
Lucie Léon referred to an apparently earlier sale arranged
by
Joyce's landlord and held in the Hôtel Drouot on 7 March, but
the writer is informed that this is a misstatement as there was
only one sale. The goods on offer at the May sale included
furniture, miscellaneous items and books, with no apparent
mention of any manuscripts as such. Yet the inclusion of the sale
notice as an appendix to the 2002 contract might tend to suggest
that the Léons' title to at least some of the disputed
manuscripts may be based on a claim of specific purchase.
If this is the case, why continue
to
withhold the vendors' warranties, and why not produce more firm
evidence such as a bill of sale? Why the continuing secrecy, and
the frankly provocative decision to refuse the Joyce Estate
information which might allay its concerns? In short, why prolong
a controversy unnecessarily by refusing to be more transparent in
relation to the expenditure of a sum of public money as large as
€12.6 million? At a time when fiscal rectitude has resulted
in cuts in health and education, and inevitably also restrictions
in cultural spending, these questions take on an even greater
urgency.
The plot thickened further with
the
revelation that James Joyce's will was probated
belatedly in Ireland in September 2003. The
probate was taken out on behalf of the Joyce Estate, an action
obviously designed to protect its legal interests. (13) Meanwhile, the trade
in Joyceana continued, and Sotheby's concluded another spectacular sale
in July
2004, which included an explicit three-page letter sent by the
author to his wife Nora in 1909. This letter had supposedly lain
for the best part of a century 'hidden in the pages of an old
book' complete with its stamped envelope, and was purchased by an
anonymous bidder for the staggering sum of £240,800. A play had actually been written in 2001, entitled Her Song be Sung,
and performed in Dublin in 2004 before the sale, which imagined just
such a discovery of an erotic Joyce letter in an old book
(http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1196227.htm). It is
true that fact can be stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction
masquerades as fact . . .
The National Library and the
Irish State staked a lot on the 2002 purchase of Joyce manuscripts,
these forming the centrepiece of a Bloomsday Centenary
Exhibition which opened in the Library in June 2004. In order to
circumvent feared objections from the Joyce Estate to this
exhibition, the Government put through a special amendment to the
Copyright Act 2000 which allows for public display of artistic or
literary works without reference to the creators or rights
owners. (14) It would have been preferable if the Joyce Estate
and the Irish Government had arrived at a mutually acceptable
resolution of their differences before the Centenary of
Bloomsday, but the National Library and the Department of Arts
decided on a hardball approach which exacerbated rather than
eased tensions. The controversy over the Léon cache of Joyce
manuscripts has been in some respects akin to a game of high-stakes
poker, with the winning hand not fully shown. The Joycean community in
general appears not much
troubled by the doubts surrounding the origin of the manuscripts,
perhaps because it is considered that the successful capture of
such an important element of Joycean heritage for Ireland renders
ethical objections petty or irrelevant. The current position is
that some years after the purchase of the Léon cache of
Joyce
manuscripts, we are still pretty much stranded in the dark of
Nighttown, with outstanding questions concerning the collection's
provenance and ownership unanswered and likely to remain so
indefinitely.
Part 2: The Barnes Cache
Who can
say how many pseudostylic shamiana, how few or how many of the most
venerated
public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in
the first place by
this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen?
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake,
1939, Penguin Edition 1992, pages 181-82.
In the light of the various finds of
Joyce manuscripts
outlined above, it seemed to the present writer that it was a question
not of if but when the existence of a new cache would be revealed
to the world. I wondered to myself whether controversy
would again follow the announcement of a new find, and if this
time the materials might relate not to Ulysses,
but to Joyce's last and
most difficult work, Finnegans Wake.
So exactly it came to pass when in March 2006 the
National Library announced that
it had paid €1.17 million for more Joyce manuscripts,
consisting of six large sheets containing 1923
drafts of portions of the work which would become Finnegans Wake. (15)
The Library did not immediately release
the name of the individual
from whom it had purchased the Finnegans
Wake manuscripts, but
there were indications that he or she was based in France. However, in
response to questions, the Library eventually revealed that the vendor
was a certain
Laura Barnes. Following further enquiries, the Library confirmed that
this individual was also known as Laura Rosenfeld and Laura Weldon.
Under the latter name, she had been co-ordinator of the above mentioned
Bloomsday
centenary celebrations, ReJoyce 2004, and was very well known to the
Library. (16) A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Rosenfeld is her birth
name, but
in her professional work as a rare book dealer and proprietor of Araby
Books she generally uses the name Laura Barnes. In 2006 Ms Barnes was
appointed acting director of
the government-funded James Joyce Centre in North Great
George’s Street in Dublin.
Laura Barnes
Freedom of Information applications uncovered more detailed information concerning the background to the Finnegans Wake manuscripts deal. In particular, it appeared that in mid-2004 the National Library had an opportunity to acquire the manuscripts from a rare book dealer in Paris, Jean-Claude Vrain. The Library’s Joyce Research Fellow, Dr Luca Crispi, stated on 29 June 2004 that the Library would have ‘right of first refusal through July’. However, in a sequence of events which still remains obscure, Ms Barnes/Rosenfeld/Weldon managed to acquire the manuscripts from Vrain, and then moved to negotiate their resale to the Library via Sotheby’s of London. (17) The FOI releases contain no documentation whatsoever concerning the manuscripts between 29 June and 5 October 2004, in itself a remarkable hiatus, and making it difficult to explain how the opportunity to acquire the manuscripts from Vrain was lost. On 12 October 2004 Dr Crispi stated that nothing would happen until 'next year', but that everything was 'proceeding on course' and that Sotheby's would 'officially' offer the manuscripts to the Library 'via normal channels'. It is reasonable to ask whether Sotheby's was acting for Vrain or for Barnes at this point? Library Director Ó hAonghusa has been quoted as stating that Sotheby's could provide reliable warranties as to provenance and ownership which a small Parisian book-dealer could not. This overlooks two facts, firstly, that Sotheby's was mentioned as a potential agent as early as June 2004, and secondly that the fallibility of this firm's judgement was demonstrated during the affair of the Joyce death mask recounted above.
Extracts
from e-mails
from Dr Luca Crispi, 29 June and 12 October 2004
(National Library of Ireland FOI
releases)
How the Finnegans
Wake manuscripts slipped from the National Library's grasp in
2004 and into the hands of Laura Barnes remains therefore something of
an unresolved
mystery. While serious negotiations to purchase the manuscripts got
under way with Ms Barnes's agent Sotheby’s
in
December 2004, it was not until June 2005 that the Library was in a
position to sign a contract of sale, having secured funding support
from Allied Irish Banks via the Section 1003 tax relief provision. The
identity of the vendor Ms Barnes was stated not to have been revealed
to the Library until as late as May 2005, and in February 2006
Sotheby’s informed National Library Director Aongus
Ó hAonghusa that
‘she would obviously prefer it if her name did not come out
at all’.
The contract described the vendor of the manuscripts as
‘Laura
Rosenfeld (also known as Laura Barnes)’, but contained a
confidentiality clause stating that the details of the contract should
not be released, save as might be required legally or in response to an
FOI application. (18)
There was a further remarkable
revelation in May 2006, when
it was
reported that Ms Barnes had purchased the manuscripts
for €400,000, meaning that the Library may have paid in the
region of €700,000 more than it needed to, had it acted to
acquire the
material from its Paris owner. It was also claimed that a Finnegans
Wake notebook had been on
offer with the manuscripts, but that this
had been sold to a buyer whose identity remains unknown and therefore was lost to the Library.
(19)
The provenance of the Finnegans
Wake manuscripts is
problematic as well, arising from mystery over the fate of possessions
left in Joyce’s Paris flat when he departed it in 1939. As
outlined in the first section of the present article, it is
known
that some
assorted goods of Joyce were seized by his landlord in lieu of
outstanding rent and auctioned in the Hotel Drouot in 1941. No evidence
has been produced to confirm that any substantial manuscripts were
involved in this
auction, and indeed, as noted above, it is recorded that
Joyce’s friend, Paul
Léon, had
removed manuscripts from the flat for safe keeping and eventual return
to Joyce’s heirs. It is claimed that the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts
were purchased in 1945 or 1946 at an auction in the Hotel Drouot by a
book dealer, Maurice Bazy, from whose estate they were acquired by
Jean-Claude Vrain some years ago. However, Joyce Fellow Dr Crispi, one
of the world’s leading authorities on Joyce’s
manuscripts, advised
Director Ó hAonghusa in May 2005 that ‘there is no
way of knowing
precisely when these materials were bought’, adding nevertheless,
'I think we are on safe ground here'. (20) What is to be said therefore
about the provenance details supplied by Sotheby's?
The Finnegans Wake manuscripts acquired
by the National Library consist of 6 large large sheets containing 11
pages of text, written between April and August 1923, comprising drafts
of the sketches called 'Tristan and Isolde', 'Mamalujo' and 'St Kevin'.
These manuscripts appear to be the earliest surviving drafts of the
work which would be published sixteen years later as Finnegans Wake,
and are alleged to
have survived unnoticed for half a century, 'interleaved' in a book,
recalling the above mentioned mode in which Joyce's erotic letter of
1909 was discovered.
Two further remarkable features of the manuscripts are the fact that a
significant portion of the text was never published by Joyce and is therefore
unknown, and that 6 of the pages are in the handwriting
of Nora Barnacle at the author's dictation, demonstrating a
hitherto undocumented degree of collaboration between husband and wife.
The Joycean scholar Danis Rose
has claimed controversially that Joyce first
conceived Finnegans Wake as a
distinct work to be called Finn's
Hotel, which he did not complete, and at first sight this
new
manuscripts find seems to fall in with his theory.
As in the case of
the Léon cache of manuscripts, it does not appear that the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts were
double checked by a forensic documents examiner in addition to
examination by Joycean experts, and in view
particularly of the problematic provenance and quantity of hitherto
unknown
text, this would be a prudent precaution (which the present writer has
in fact recommended to the Director and Board of the National Library,
without receiving any response on the issue). Having several times
examined digital copies of the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts in the National Library the present writer retains a
distinct sense of unease concerning their authenticity, while
acknowledging that he is neither a Joycean specialist nor an expert in
forensic document examination (although his work in discovering
falsified documentation in the cases of the spurious chiefs Mac Carthy
Mór and Akins of That Ilk entitles him to claim some measure of skill in
regard to the latter). A running joke in Finnegans Wake
is the use of '1132' as an absurd catch-all date, for example, 'the
official landing of Lady Jales Casemate, in the year of the flood
1132', and an appearance 'round about the freebutter year of Notre Dame
1132' by 'Motham General Bonaboche' (Penguin Edition 1992, pages
387, 388). The Finnegans Wake drafts
feature recognisable versions of both these sequences, firstly,
'the capture of Sir Arthur Casement in the year 1132', and secondly,
'the dispersal of the French fleet under General Boche in the year
2002' (Joyce 2006 Papers, National Library of Ireland Manuscripts
Reading Room, on computer). I was admittedly pulled up short by the
sudden appearance of '2002' where '1132' might have been expected, and
wondered what Joyce (if it was he) was about in suddenly pointing to
the future rather than the past, and why '2002' does not feature in the
final edition of the Wake. Noted also was the fact that the computer on which I was viewing the Wake
manuscript also contained images of the Léon cache, titled 'Joyce
Papers 2002'. Perhaps, you may say, Joyce was clairvoyant as well as
mischievous, or possibly this is a matter of absolutely no import, or
perhaps again there is a more peculiar game in play . . . (The Joycean Sam Slote has now endeavoured to explain the dating differences between the draft and final versions of Finnegans Wake,
noting that 'additional dates were eliminated and 1132 became general
over Ireland, thereby imposing another lattice of intercorrespondence
and inter-connection between elements on the list', going on to suggest
a 'fungibility of historical events', asking 'what is the mish and what
the mash?' and identifying a 'realm where the onerous category of error
could well be erroneous'. Quite.)
The covert aspects of the Finnegans
Wake manuscripts deal and the slow release of information
resulted in the story remaining in the news in the months following the
National Library's announcement in March 2006. By early June 2006 it
had
emerged that close connections
existed
between Laura Barnes, Dr Crispi and his wife, Dr Stacey Herbert. (21) Barnes
has worked with Crispi and Herbert on Joycean projects in the United States.
Barnes and Herbert acted as curators
of a Beckett exhibition in the National
Library
in 2006, and
Herbert has also been associated with Barnes’s Araby
Books. Interestingly, the signatures of both Laura Rosenfeld and Luca
Crispi appear on the June 2005 contract of sale of the Finnegans Wake manuscripts.
Credits for Joyce Exhibition at Buffalo University 2000
In the light of all these circumstances, it seemed
reasonable
to
pose certain questions. Was Jean-Claude Vrain able to provide
documentary
evidence that the Finnegans Wake manuscripts were
purchased at
auction in Paris in the 1940s? Were the manuscripts subjected at any
stage to the
analysis of what they term in the USA a ‘questioned
documents’ expert?
On what date did Laura Barnes agree the purchase of the manuscripts
from Jean-Claude Vrain, and what became of the National
Library’s right
of first refusal? Is it true that the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts were resold to the National Library for a profit of about
€700,000? Were there formal or informal discussions
concerning the Finnegans
Wake manuscripts between
Laura Barnes, Dr Luca Crispi, Dr Stacey
Herbert and National Library Director Aongus Ó hAonghusa in
the period
January-December 2004? Unfortunately, no answers to these questions have been
forthcoming to date. (22)
While Laura Barnes has declined
to reply to any of the present writer's correspondence, she was the
subject of a pre-Bloomsday 2006 Irish
Times interview which touched on the Finnegans Wake manuscripts
controversy. (23) Ms Barnes declared that 'if you connect the dots in
an inappropriate way, you come out with an inappropriate picture'.
Unfortunately, far from answering questions already posed, this
interview raises further questions concerning the Finnegans
Wake material. For example, Ms
Barnes was quoted as follows in the Irish
Times of 15 June 2006: '. . . the
decision I made was that the
institution I wanted to approach first was the National Library of
Ireland, because I thought it belonged there'. In contrast, she was
quoted earlier in the Sunday
Times, Irish Edition, of 7 May
2006:
'There were multiple balls in the air. To suggest I knew the National
Library would buy it is a pipe dream. Nobody could know that.' Ms
Barnes is
also quoted in the Irish Times of 15 June 2006, 'I wasn't trying to
hide anything'. The Finnegans
Wake manuscripts sale contract of
June 2005
contains a confidentiality clause which prevented the National Library
from releasing her name unless legally obliged to do so, and as already noted, in
February 2006 her agent Sotheby’s informed National Library
Director Ó hAonghusa that ‘she would obviously prefer
it if
her name did
not come out at all’.
The affair unexpectedly came back
into public view in late 2006, arising from Dáil questions put
down by opposition Fine Gael Party representative Paul McGrath in
December. McGrath asked Arts Minister O'Donoghue about the purchase of
the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts, and sought details of consultancy payments to Laura
Barnes. Remarkably, and before the Minister had actually answered the
questions, McGrath received an early morning phone call from Ms Barnes,
who objected to what she claimed were personal questions, and
reportedly also threatened legal action. McGrath lodged a formal
complaint with the Ceann Comhairle of the Dáil, seeking to
establish if there has been any breach of protocol in relation to the
handling of his questions by the Arts Department. In mid-January 2007 a
Sunday newspaper raised further concerns over a possible conflict
of interest arising from Ms Barnes's personal relationship with an
Assistant Secretary General in the Arts Department, Niall Ó
Donnchú. The upshot is that Minister O'Donoghue ordered
a departmental enquiry into the purchase of the Finnegans Wake manuscripts, and
the affair was also referred to the Comptroller
and Auditor General and the Oireachtas Committee on Procedure and
Privilege. (24)
The Joyce Estate has been
embroiled in a major legal battle arising from an attempt by Professor
Carol Loeb Shloss, a biographer of Joyce's troubled daughter Lucia, to
reverse refusal of permission to cite certain manuscripts whose
copyright remains in the possession of the Estate. (25) In a settlement
agreed with the Estate in March 2007, Shloss 'won the right to publish
her scholarship on the literary work of James Joyce online and in
print'. (26) One may
sympathise with a scholar who wishes to cite sources without
restriction in order to support an argument, whether or not one agrees
with their conclusions. However, all the interests endeavouring to
wrest control of an extremely valuable commodity from the Joyce Estate
may not be entirely pure in their motivations. Certainly, the
mysterious not to say murky circumstances in which Joycean manuscripts
of doubtful provenance have been traded in recent years at inflated
prices continues to be a cause of concern. Having reviewed some recent
Joycean commentaries, the writer also wonders how intellectually
honest it is to give extensive coverage to the Shloss suit while
remaining mute about the ongoing controversy surrounding the Finnegans Wake manuscripts?
At this stage the writer admits
that it is just not possible to connect all the contradictory dots in
relation to the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts purchased in 2005
by the
National Library of Ireland
from Laura Barnes, aka
Rosenfeld, aka Weldon. Furthermore the picture remains blurred in regard to the earlier cache of Joycean
manuscripts acquired in 2002 from Alexis Léon. Since 2000 the
National Library has spent approximately €15 million of public funds acquiring manuscripts of James Joyce. Such a
large expenditure on literary manuscripts requires the highest levels
of transparency and accountability, and it is not acceptable that
questions should remain unanswered with regard to provenance
and cost, as well as relations between a vendor and National
Library staff.
As Bloomsday was officially
expanded to 'Bloomsweek' in June 2007, the Department of Arts enquiry into the Finnegans Wake manuscripts
acquisition was believed to have been largely completed although still to be
published, and there were increasing difficulties obtaining documents
under
the Freedom of Information Acts. However, one interesting document
which the writer did receive as a result of repeated FOI requests is an
invoice dated 3 August 2004, from Ms Laura Weldon, aka Barnes, to the
National Library of Ireland, in respect of a Joycean postcard purchased
on its behalf at a Sotheby's sale in London on 8 July 2004. It would be
reasonable to state that this document shows that Ms Barnes was acting
as an agent of the National Library during this period, and to ask
whether it might have been advisable for her to step aside from the
purchase of the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts, in order to allow the Library to acquire them under the
most advantageous and cost effective terms.
Invoice to National Library of Ireland 2004 (FOI release 2 July 2007)
In November 2007 the Department of Arts report into
the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts affair, compiled by former Secretary General Philip
Furlong, was at last released by Minister Séamus Brennan.
Furlong exonerated Laura Barnes (and Niall Ó Donnchú),
stating that all the available evidence 'offers overwhelming support
for the proposition that her acquisition of the Finnegan's (sic) Wake manuscripts was a genuinely
arms-length transaction'. Yet it was conceded that the phone call to
Paul McGrath constituted 'an unacceptable intrusion on the exercise of
a core responsibility of the Dáil Deputy'. Unfortunately,
there are certain serious flaws in the Furlong report.
For example, Mr Furlong did not interview the Joycean expert Danis Rose
in relation to his statement that he alerted Luca Crispi of the
National Library to the availability of the mansucripts at a lower
price early in 2004 (see copy of Rose's letter dated 27 March 2006 obtained via a Freedom of Information application). Mr Furlong rather glosses over Ms Barnes’s
status as an agent and advisor of the National Library, then overseen
by the Arts Department, when she acquired the Finnegans Wake manuscripts in
2004, and most surprisingly he omits to list the above illustrated
invoice in a table of payments to Ms Barnes appended to his report. The
Furlong report also includes a claim that Ms Barnes did not as hitherto
indicated acquire the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts in December 2004, when her Arts Department contract had
terminated, but rather that she entered into an agreement with Mr Vrain
to purchase the manuscripts as early as 28 April 2004, when her
contract was still very much operative. (27)
In April 2008 a further report on the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts affair was issued by the Comptroller and Auditor
General, the State's public expenditure overseer. The Comptroller
firstly reviewed the process by which the National Library came to
acquire the manuscripts in 2005, basing his account primarily on the
contents of the Furlong report. The Comptroller accepted that the
Library 'obtained the manuscripts at market value', but did indicate
that they may have originally have been on offer by their French owner
at considerably less cost. The Comptroller took account as well of
the fact that the vendor Ms Barnes had also acted as an agent of the
National Library, listing the above mentioned July 2004 transaction
overlooked by Furlong. While the Comptroller found that Ms Barnes's
purchase of the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts did not appear to 'explicitly contravene' the terms of
her contract with the Arts Department, nevertheless 'it would have been
clear to informed members of the Joycean community that the Library
would have been particularly interested in acquiring the manuscripts to
supplement its collection of Joycean material purchased for €13.5
million between 2000 and 2004, since those purchases had been widely
publicised'. The Comptroller
concluded by observing that while the State ultimately acquired the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts at market value, 'the circumstances surrounding the
sourcing of the material and the level of interaction that is
inevitable within a limited community of persons in a specialised field
strongly suggests that more robust contractual and ethical arrangements
may be required to protect the State's interests where such factors
come into play'. (28)
The
Comptroller's report was considered by the Public Accounts Committee on
9 October 2008, and was the subject of an Irish Times article the following day. Members of the Committee were reported to
have expressed concern that there had been 'collusion' between Arts
Department and National Library staff, and that the Finnegans Wake
purchase represented bad value for money, in that the collection had
been available for one-third the final price of €1.17 million a year
earlier. Committee Chairman Bernard Allen TD was quoted as stating that
there was evidence of a 'serious sting', while Tommy Broughan TD
referred to 'sharp practice', going on to identify for the record the
former National Library employee as Luca Crispi and the former Arts
Department employee as Laura Barnes. Jim O'Keeffe TD asked why 'the
price of a Rynair flight was not spent sending someone to check out if
the €400,000 price was correct'. National Library Director Aongus Ó
hAonghusa was in attendance as the committee deliberated, and defended
his institution's conduct of the deal, declining to make any apologies
and claiming 'our hands were already full . . . we didn't have the
staff resources'. (29)
Legal proceedings were commenced in the High Court against a blogger 'Ardmayle' who commented on the Finnegans Wake
manuscripts affair in 2007,
even though he removed the comments and apologised unreservedly.
(30) In January 2010 it was reported that 'Ardmayle' had agreed to pay
€100,000 damages in a settlement, and it was noted that the cost of
defending the case in a full court trial would be in the region of
€700,000-800,000, (31) coincidentally not far off the amount of profit
believed to have been made from the sale of the Finnegans Wake manuscripts. For his part the present writer feels obliged to reiterate that he has raised
issues of public concern and has put certain
questions to the principals involved in the Finnegans Wake manuscripts
transaction which they have declined to
answer. At all stages I am ready to correct any demonstrably
incorrect statements on my webpages, for the content of which I alone
am responsible.
However, it remains the case that of all the recent aquisitions of Joycean manuscripts, the Finnegans Wake
transaction remains the most troubling in terms of the provenance of
the material, the ethical blurring of the lines of private and public
interest in the case of contracted state employees, and the sheer size
of the €700,000 profit made by one individual at public expense. To put
the matter further in perspective, the said profit represents nearly 6%
of the
National Library's total allocation from public funds of €12 million in
2008, a matter rendered even more serious by the sudden collapse in
state revenues as Ireland's economic miracle proved to be based on
reckless banking practices and an unsustainable property bubble.
Finally,
it remains to be seen whether there are more discoveries of
lucrative caches of Joycean manuscripts of uncertain
provenance waiting to be discovered, will additional early Finnegans
Wake
material resurface, have the sources now
been
exhausted, or more pertinently, will the ending of the profligate
expenditure which characterised Celtic Tiger Ireland make the lucrative
Joycean transactions we have been describing a thing of the past?
Sean J Murphy
Commenced Bloomsday 2003, last revised 21 January 2012
References
(1) Louis Armand, 'From
Hypertext
to Vortext: Notes on Materiality and Language', Hypermedia
Joyce Studies, 4, Issue 2,
2003-4, http://www.geocities.com/hypermedia_joyce/armand4.html.
(2) Irish
Times, 15
December 2000.
(3) Same, 13 July 2001;
Phoenix, 31 August 2001.
(4) Irish
Times, 31 May
2002.
(5) Catherine Fahy, The
James
Joyce-Paul Léon Papers in the National Library of Ireland: A
Catalogue, Dublin 1992.
(6) Statement of
Professor Michael
Groden, 30 May 2002; National Library of Ireland, News
Extra,
Summer 2002.
(7) 'Genuinely thrilling
Joyce-news', posting to alt.books.james-joyce, rec.arts.books, 31
May 2002.
(8) FOI Request Manager,
National
Library of Ireland, to author, 17 October 2002.
(9) Phoenix,
14 March
2003.
(10) The National
Library has also
placed a detailed listing of the Joyce Papers 2002 on its website
at http://www.nli.ie/.
(11) Susan Hood, Royal
Roots,
Republican Inheritance: The Survival of the Office of Arms,
Dublin 2002, page vii.
(12) Lucie Noel, James
Joyce
and Paul Léon: The Story of a Friendship,
New York 1950,
pages 36-40, 52.
(13) Last Will and
Testament of
James Joyce, 5 August 1931, Probate Office copy 2004; Phoenix,
16 July 2004; Sunday Business
Post, 5 October 2003.
(14) Copyright and
Related Rights
(Amendment) Bill 2004, http://www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/bills28/bills/2004/2004/document1.htm.
(15) National
Library of Ireland, New
Joyce
manuscript accession
March 2006, http://www.nli.ie/new_news.htm
(press release). The
title of Joyce's novel,
although not in fact a great deal of its bewildering content, was
inspired
by an American music hall ballad written by one John F Poole (Jane S
Meehan, 'Tim Finigan's Wake', A Wake
Newslitter, 13, no 4, 1976, pages 69-73).
(16) Phoenix,
10 and
24 March 2006.
(17) Phoenix,
5 May 2006, and Sunday
Times, Irish Edition, 7
May 2006.
(18) National Library of
Ireland, Contract 28 June 2005 and other FOI releases in relation to Finnegans
Wake manuscripts acquisition.
(19) 'Rare Joyce papers
delay cost €800k', Sunday
Independent, 21 May 2006.
(20) Luca Crispi to Aongus
Ó hAonghusa, e-mail 5 May 2005, NLI FOI release.
(21) Phoenix,
2 June 2006.
(22) E-mails and letters to
Aongus Ó hAonghusa, Luca Crispi and Laura Barnes, April-June
2006, unacknowledged or refusal to reply to points raised.
(23) 'A business head on
Joyce shoulders', Irish Times,
15 June 2006.
(24) 'Conflict of Interest?', Irish
Mail on Sunday, 14 January 2007; Phoenix, 26 January 2007.
(25) D T Max, 'The Injustice Collector: Is James Joyce's grandson
suppressing scholarship?', New Yorker,
19 June 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060619fa_fact.
(26) 'Stanford Scholar Wins Right to Publish Joyce Material', http://www.law.stanford.edu/news/pr/55/.
(27) Phoenix, 14 December
2007.
(28) Comptroller and Auditor General, Special Report: General Matters Arising on Audits, April 2008, http://audgen.gov.ie/viewdoc.asp?DocID=1100.
(29) Irish Times, 10 October 2008; the full transcript of the Public Accounts Committee debate on 9 October 2008 can be read at http://debates.oireachtas.ie/DDebate.aspx?F=ACC20081009.xml&Node=H4&Page=3.
(30) 'Apology', 13 February 2007, http://ardmayle.blogspot.com/2007/02/apology.html;
'Blooming Joyceans', Phoenix,
15 July 2007.
(31) 'Blogger must pay €100,000 for libel', Sunday Times, Irish Edition, 1 February 2010, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7009820.ece.