Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian-born artist in Paris, created several portraits of Joyce. They were commissioned by the American expatriates Harry and Caresse Crosby for their limited edition of excerpts from Finnegans Wake. Rather than use a likeness for the frontispiece, Caresse Crosby chose a spiral design by Brancusi, who called it “Symbol of James Joyce.” It was identified in the Crosbys' book, however, as “Portrait of the Author.” Reportedly, when Joyce’s father saw Brancusi’s image, he remarked,“Jim has changed more than I thought.” Brancusi later explained the cryptic image to the painter Jacques Hérold, noting,“Joyce is like that: he departs from one point, and you’ll never meet him again.”

Joyce devoted seventeen years to writing Finnegans Wake—a novel about a single night, composed in a style he described as “gliding and unreal as is the way in dreams.” Despite the presence of characters and plot, the Wake defies all other conventions of narrative. It is an assemblage of puns, riddles, and myths—derived from more than sixty languages—that begins and ends in the middle of the same sentence. By 1936 Joyce said that the book had become “more real to [him] than reality, and everything has led to it.” The work’s serialization and stand-alone publications of excerpts often elicited perplexed or negative responses from critics. Joyce considered it his greatest work. The copy shown here is an advance copy of the novel, bound in printed paper-covered boards bearing the final dust jacket design–one of the few known to survive.

The first publication in a book by Samuel Beckett, future playwright of Waiting for Godot, was an essay in this anthology that Joyce supervised and designed. The collection, which also includes texts by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon, sought to interpret and defend Joyce’s work in progress Finnegans Wake. Beckett had met Joyce soon after moving from Dublin to Paris to teach at the École normale. Joyce welcomed him into the family and sometimes used him as a research assistant and secretary. Beckett later recalled that, when he was taking dictation for Finnegans Wake, he once mistakenly recorded Joyce’s response to a noise outside. When Beckett read the passage back to the author, Joyce noted the gaffe and said,“Let it stand.”

Joyce’s recording of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” episode from Finnegans Wake was commissioned by the linguistic psychologist C. K. Ogden, who was translating the text into his invented language, called Basic English. The record drew attention in the press; it aired on the BBC and was sold at a prestigious London music store. T. S. Eliot used it as a cross-promotion for the publication of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in his Criterion Miscellany pamphlet series. Due to the decline in Joyce’s eyesight, photographic enlargements of a printed edition were kept on hand in the recording studio. The letters were not big enough, however, and Ogden reportedly stood by Joyce, whispering into his ear the author’s own words.

When Joyce pressed Ezra Pound for his opinion of the verse Joyce had written since Chamber Music, Pound was dismissive: “They belong in the bible or in the family album with the portraits.” This luxurious publication, featuring ornate lettering by Lucia Joyce, to some extent follows Pound’s directive, as a father-daughter collaboration formatted like a scrapbook. Twenty-five copies were printed. The edition, which Joyce referred to simply as “Lucia’s book,” came about through his many attempts to interest publishers in Lucia’s work. Obelisk, the Paris publisher of Pomes, eventually brought out her illuminated Chaucer A.B.C. in 1936.

Limited editions of fragments from Finnegans Wake reflect Joyce’s increased attention to his books’ design. Often, before he had secured a contract, he had fully conceived the publication as an object: detailed instructions for the binding color, typography, and page design accompanied his manuscripts. Anticipating public resistance to the texts, he also requested room for contextual front matter. Delays to this fine-press edition of the “Storiella” fragment were caused by Joyce’s complex layout. In addition to his daughter's elaborate initial A, it includes medievalist rubrics, footnotes, diagrams, and marginal texts.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus breaks his glasses on the school’s cinder path. For this he is unfairly reprimanded, leaving him “burning with shame” in front of his classmates. Stephen’s fuzzy perception of the schoolyard without corrective lenses—“the fellows seemed to him smaller and farther away . . . and the soft grey sky so high up”—evokes Joyce’s lifelong issues with his eyesight. From 1907 Joyce experienced bouts of iritis and would eventually develop glaucoma, cataracts, and nebulae. He underwent a series of painful surgeries and by the end of his life was blind in one eye with greatly reduced vision in the other.

Joyce wrote this note to George Pelorson (the pseudonym for Georges Belmont [1909-2008]) on his calling card in Ulysses-blue ink. It was enclosed with a copy of the 1939 Official Dublin Guide. The book had just been sent anonymously to Joyce’s address and he assumed a friend of his schoolmate Constantine Curran was responsible. Pelorson, a good friend of Beckett’s, was a frequent companion of Joyce toward the end of the 1930s. When he received the note and enclosure, Pelorson was working on an article on Finnegans Wake for Revue de Paris. Explaining that the Dublin guide is à propos of nothing, Joyce asks him to look at two “curious” pages where, unsurprisingly, the author is mentioned. Among other references, the guide highlights number 41, Brighton Square, Rathgar, as the birthplace of the world-famous writer.