Ransom Center Magazine

James Joyce

Fellows Find: The Christine Brooke-Rose archive

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Stephanie Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in the English and Creative Writing Department at Aberystwyth University. At the Ransom Center, she analyzed the Christine Brooke-Rose papers for her dissertation, which is a single-author study on the writer, looking at the neglect of her work as a British author by the industry. Jones’s research was supported by a 2014–2015 Dissertation Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center, jointly funded by the Creekmore and Adele Fath Charitable Foundation and The University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies.

 

The subject of neglected British experimental authors has emerged as a poignant topic of critical discussion over the last few years. Writers of the 1960s and 1970s who had been influenced by the Second World War, as well as the highly reflexive, avant-garde literature produced bysuch modernist heavyweights as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett, are beginning to be reassessed as having something useful to offer to the current critical climate. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: The Christine Brooke-Rose archive

From the Outside In: Two portraits of James Joyce

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The atria on the first floor of the Ransom Center are surrounded by windows featuring etched reproductions of images from the collections. The windows offer visitors a hint of the cultural treasures to be discovered inside. From the Outside In is a series that highlights some of these images and their creators.

The windows of the Harry Ransom Center show two drawings of James Joyce, one by Desmond Harmsworth and one by Wyndham Lewis, depicting very different sides of the famous writer. The Lewis drawing, dated 1920, shows a portrait of Joyce from the outside: head down, identifiable by the thick eyeglasses and small beard. Lewis was one of Joyce’s Modernist contemporaries—a novelist, experimental artist, and founder of the abstract art movement Vorticism. He was also a well-known curmudgeon and critic, and his sketch hints at the distance from which he approached his fellow artist. Harmsworth, in contrast, was one of Joyce’s publishers and enjoyed long evenings talking and drinking with the writer. His drawing expresses more of Joyce’s personal character.

Modernist author James Joyce is known for his experiments with stream-of-consciousness writing, especially in his most controversial novel, Ulysses. Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1882, into a large and no longer prosperous family. His literary interests and abilities were recognized when he was young, and he was educated in Jesuit schools and at University College Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian. Joyce enjoyed learning languages, especially when they added to his perspective on art; for instance, he admired playwright Henrik Ibsen, so he learned Norwegian to read Ibsen’s original texts. At Joyce’s death, he knew more than 17 languages, including Arabic, Sanskrit, and Greek. Joyce left Ireland in 1904 and made only four return visits, the last in 1912. He taught English in Trieste for a number of years, moved to Zurich during World War I, and then went to Paris, from which he and his family fled the Nazis in 1940 to return to Zurich. Despite leaving Ireland as a young man, Dublin society continued to be the backdrop for all of Joyce’s work, including the story collection Dubliners and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

Ulysses provides an in-depth perspective on life in Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century, told through the thoughts and perceptions of a number of its citizens over one day, June 16, 1904, and in a kaleidoscope of styles. As Joyce commented to a friend, he wanted “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” This included aspects of life that until then had not been seen as fit for literature, from a trip to the outhouse to a voyeuristic encounter at the beach. The book was initially published in serial form in the journal The Little Review, but in 1921 it was banned in the United States for obscenity. Sylvia Beach published a complete edition of Ulysses in Paris in 1922, but it remained banned in the United States until 1933, although copies were smuggled in, and the book was widely known. When the American edition was published, the response was sometimes fierce. A reviewer in The New York Times commented that “the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it” and that its narrative fashion was “in parodies of classic prose and current slang, in perversions of sacred literature… in symbols so occult and mystic that only the initiated and profoundly versed can understand.” When Joyce died in January 1941, the Times obituary stated that his status as a writer “never could be determined in his lifetime” and quoted critics who held a range of views. One placed him among the “Unintelligibles,” with Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot; another argued that Ulysses was a novel “which only could have been written ‘in an advanced stage of psychic disintegration;'” and a third hailed Joyce as one of “the great innovators of literature… whose influence upon other writers of his time was incalculable.” Today, the latter assessment is the one that prevails.

The Harry Ransom Center has collected all of Joyce’s works in depth, including four of the first 100 signed copies of Ulysses. It also has Joyce’s own Trieste library, which was formed between 1900 and 1920, comprising 673 volumes and including many source books used in his writing.

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Decades later, current headlines echo controversies addressed in Morris Ernst collection

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Through a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a team of archivists and student interns has been working to organize and catalog the papers of attorney Morris Leopold Ernst since September 2009. The collection is now open for research, and a finding aid is available online.

Morris Leopold Ernst (1888–1976), who earned his law degree 100 years ago, may not yet be a household name, but his legal career has had a lasting impact on American society. Ernst dealt primarily with civil liberties cases in a variety of areas, including censorship, obscenity, and first amendment rights. In addition to his busy legal career, he was a prolific writer, authoring more than 30 books and hundreds of articles, essays, and short works on legal topics and other social issues like big business and divorce.

Ernst is probably best known for his work in literary censorship cases. His influential fights include the defense of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanova’s Homecoming, and most famously, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Though the majority of Ernst’s work took place in the early and mid-twentieth century, as our team of archivists sifted through his papers and processed the collection, we couldn’t help noticing how timely the collection seemed. Over and over again the subjects we read about in Ernst’s archive were echoed by stories in the recent news.

The case United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, which Ernst and his colleagues carefully orchestrated, won Ernst much fame and set a precedent for arguing and trying “objectionable” literature. Banned in the United States for more than a decade before Ernst won the case in 1933, Joyce’s masterpiece has had to overcome other more recent hurdles. In 2010 the work was in the news when Apple tried to censor a graphic novel version by Rob Berry and Josh Levitas. Before allowing the Ulysses comic to appear as an electronic book for the iPad, Apple requested that the illustrators remove all nudity from their images. Apple eventually rescinded its demand and allowed the original illustrations to appear.

In the 1930s, Ernst was also a prominent figure in the early birth control movement defending the Birth Control Federation of America and the Clinical Research Bureau, predecessors of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. As these organizations printed and distributed educational materials on reproduction and contraception, they were charged with obscenity. In cases such as United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, Ernst exonerated the movement’s leaders from indecency and in so doing, helped promote women’s rights and the freedom of choice. Contraception and women’s rights have continued to be newsworthy topics.

Ernst was also well known for his work with labor unions, famously defending first amendment rights in Hague, Mayor, et al. v. Committee for Industrial Organization et al. This conflict arose in the 1930s when Jersey City, N.J. mayor Frank Hague tried to suppress many of the Committee for Industrial Organization’s (CIO) activities and decreed by city ordinance that laborers could not assemble in public. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court where the workers’ rights were upheld. Though Ernst won that case in 1939, politicians and labor unions have often been at odds with each other. For example, beginning in February 2011 headlines were populated with reports about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempts to curtail union bargaining rights. The AFL-CIO represented workers in these disagreements as well.

Ernst published his book Too Big in 1940, one of the many books he wrote. The title is echoed by the phrase “too big to fail,” with which we all are familiar, as it has been frequently used in the media since the market crash in 2008. Monopolies and the danger of big business were of real concern to Ernst, and he wrote about it not only in that volume, but in numerous magazine articles.

Censorship, birth control, labor unions, and monopolies were only a few of Ernst’s many interests. As a tireless worker he involved himself in many other issues, such as reducing postage rates for books and promoting literacy around the world. His papers provide insight into his legal practice and writing career and could also provide a new perspective on issues in contemporary society.

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