Joyce, James.

"Dublin lies stretched out before the reader, the minute living incidents start out of the pages. Anybody who reads can hear the people talk and feel himself among them. At every turn of this, the longest day on record, there are things to give him pause..." (Stanislaus Joyce, letter to his brother, 7 August 1924, quoted by Ellmann, James Joyce, p.577)

no other copy of  the first edition of "ulysses", the greatest modernist novel in English, has been identified with an earlier presentation inscription. On the same day as Joyce gave this copy to his brother Stanislaus he presented another (no. 282) to Lewis Galantiere (see Glenn Horowitz, James Joyce Books & Manuscripts, New York City, 1996, item 52; subsequently sold as part of the Library of Roger Rechler, Christie's New York, 11 Oct 11 2002, lot 176). Both copies pre-date by three days the copy inscribed to Robert McAlmon (who helped prepare the final typescript), and by two days the copies presented to the publisher Sylvia Beach, Margaret Anderson (editor of The Little Review, which had serialized Ulysses) and Harriet Shaw Weaver (Joyce's English patron).

The first printing of Ulysses consisted of 1,000 copies, published in three issues: 1-100 printed on fine Dutch handmade paper signed by Joyce, 101-250 on vergé d'Arches, and 251-1,000 on vergé à barbes. The official date of publication was Joyce's birthday, 2nd February 1922, but difficulties with the cover meant that in fact only two copies were actually ready that day. Joyce received one of the two sent by the printer Darantière via the Dijon-Paris express, and the other went to Sylvia Beach, who met the train. Such was the excitement surrounding publication that Joyce was deluged with telegrams all day and Shakespeare and Company  was under siege by those wanting a glimpse of the copy on display. That evening, Joyce and his family celebrated publication with friends at the Italian Restaurant Ferrari's:

"Joyce sat at the head of the table, sideways...he wore a new ring, a reward he had promised himself years before. He already seemed melancholy, sighing now and then as he ordered dinner and ate nothing. He had brought with him a package containing his copy of Ulysses, and placed it under his chair. Nora remarked that he had thought about the book for sixteen years, and spent seven years writing it. Everyone asked to see it opened, but he seemed to shrink from producing it. After the dessert he as last untied the parcel and laid it on the table...There was a toast to the book and its author which left Joyce deeply moved..." (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce).

Joyce presented this first copy to Nora. Weighing it in her hand, and tilting towards the writer and artist Arthur Power, who was watching, she is said to have asked, "How much will you give me for this?" Somewhat notoriously, Nora never read Ulysses. Many commentators have speculated on the reasons for this. Did she want to distance herself from the character of Molly, or was it indifference, because she struggled with its form, found it obscene or shameful (would she have wanted Joyce to reveal so much in the brothel scene in which Bella Cohen humiliates Bloom?) or simply that she recognised too much of it? After all, many of the lines were her own. Whatever the case, Nora's copy has not survived and now appears to have been lost.

No further copies of any issue of Ulysses appeared from Darantière until 9 February (when the first batch of the 1/750 arrived), followed by the first copies of the 1/100 on 13 February, and the 1/50 series on 4 March. It is now thought that this reflects the order in which Ulysses was actually printed, giving the edition of 750--despite it lower numerical sequence--a kind of priority over the other issues (see the account of Sylvia Beach's Ulysses Notebook and census of the entire edition, printed as an appendix to James Joyce. Books & Manuscripts, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, New York City, 1996). Certainly the first batch of the presentation copies of the 1/100 were not inscribed or given by Joyce until 13 February, as recorded above.

As has been commented on elsewhere, the list of Ulysses recipients is magical: they included, for instance, not only the key members of Joyce's literary circle but luminaries such as T.E. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, André Gide and Valery Larbaud (as well as Michael Sadler, Graham Pollard and Bernard Quaritch Ltd). However, this copy, affectionately signed "Jim" (as Joyce signed himself only to the closest members of his family: see his letters to Stanislaus and Nora, lots 191--202), is the most intimate of all the presentation copies to "ulysses" which have survived (no-one knows, of course, how Joyce inscribed the first copy to Nora), in addition to being, with the copy inscribed to Galantiere, the earliest.

It would have been the present copy which Stanislaus acknowledged, with ambivalent feelings, in his letter to his brother of 26 February 1922:

"Dear Jim, I received `Ulysses' in good order...I suppose `Circe' will stand as the most horrible thing in literature, unless you have something on your chest still worse than this `Agony in the Kips'. Isn't your art in danger of becoming a sanitary science. I wish you would write verse again...I recognize, of course the almost unlimited adaptability of your style...In December last you promised to send me back the money I gave you as soon as the book was off your hands. So far I have got nothing..." 
(Selected Letters, III, pp.58-59).

Stanislaus may also have been responding to the line in Ulysses, that brothers are as easily forgotten as umbrellas.

Joyce had been, of course, extremely beholden to Stanislaus ever since his younger brother (at James's urging and insistence) joined the eloped lovers in Trieste. In the autumn of 1905 the thought of being the sole support of a woman and child was driving Joyce to distraction, and he was drinking heavily. "The steadiest infuence available was his brother. Stanislaus might be tedious but he was a rock. He could listen and understand, as his criticism [of the stories for Dubliners, among other things] had demonstrated" (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce).  Joyce had suggested in 1904 that Stanislaus come to the continent with him, and then in the summer of 1905 he had proposed living in Dublin with him. Now in the autumn of 1905 he returned to his original idea. Stanislaus should come to Trieste, and take up the vacancy at the Scuolo Berlitz.

Stanislaus Joyce (b.17 December 1884, James's younger brother by nearly three years) arrived in Trieste in late October 1905, and for the next fifteen years acted as a continual source of funds for his brother's family, as well as his protector, property-finder and, at times, literary secretary and curator. At times he despaired of his brother's drinking (he would often "sling his brother on his back and bring him home from the cafés of the port [of Trieste] and the Old City": Maddox, Nora), his financial recklessness (Stanislaus had to bail out  the family, saving them from starvation on many occasions) and his efforts generally to cause his own ruin. However, as Ellmann records, "nightmarish moments became less frequent as Stanislaus grew more vigilant". When Joyce accused Nora of betrayal with Vincent Cosgrave in 1909 Stanislaus defended her: this, together with John Francis Byrne's reassurance of Joyce in Dublin, could well have saved the marriage. During the Great War Stanislaus, who had stayed on in Trieste when James and Nora left for Zurich, was interned at Katzenau for four years, and had plenty of time to mull over his grievances. These included not only the ingratitude for his financial help, but his brother's unkept promise to dedicate Dubliners to him and the transformation of Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with the relegation of Maurice, Stephen's brother, into obscurity. In July 1920 Joyce and his family left Trieste for Paris, and the brothers were never as close again, although James would still often write to Stanislaus asking him to send on notebooks, drafts and other notes to enable him to complete Ulysses. Perhaps the most succinct summary of the brothers' relationship comes from Ellmann: "It is easy to see that James was a difficult older brother, yet Stanislaus was a difficult younger one. If James was casual and capricious, Stanislaus was punctilious and overbearing...The artist and his reformer made poor house-mates. Stanislaus remembered the many instances that he had been abused in Trieste. Yet he had also been lifted away from ignominy in Dublin and given a career and an intellectual life."

It was to Stanislaus that Joyce made the first recorded reference to a "Ulysses" story (or "Oolisays", as Joyce pronounced it)  on 30 September 1906, in a postcard from Rome discussing a fresh story for Dubliners (see Selected Letters, II, p.168). Although this short story was never written, Joyce always made it clear that his epic novel had its origins in Rome in the late summer/early autumn of 1906. After Joyce arrived in Paris in the summer of 1920 he had to make several almost desperate appeals to Stanislaus and his friend the writer Italo Svevo to retrieve cases of books and documents and other notes required in order to complete the work he had termed Ulysses or "your bitch of a mother".  Sometimes shipments would be held up or go astray. On 14 September 1920, for instance, Joyce wrote to Stanislaus desperately inquiring about a missing case of books, and confessing at the same time that he had written the episode Circe about five times  (see Selected Letters, III, p.21)

It is interesting to speculate whether Joyce ever intended that the December 1909 correspondence with Nora (see lot 201), left behind with the bulk of his archive with Stanislaus in Trieste, should have been sent on to him in Paris. Presumably, as Brenda Maddox notes, he thought the letters were safe from others' eyes. Nevertheless, "the sense of danger in leaving erotic letters lying around entered Joyce's writing about that time and also entered his dreams" (Nora, p.250).

Stanislaus died on Bloomsday, 16 June 1955. His memoir, My Brother's Keeper, was published posthumously by Faber & Faber in 1958. He had retained a huge archive relating to his brother's life and work, which included not only his own diaries covering the years in Dublin and Trieste and his brother's letters to him but also his own letters home to Dublin from Pola and Trieste, Joyce's letters to Aunt Josephine in Dublin (some concerning his disenchantment with Nora), all the letters that poured in from the family in Dublin and Rome and a large quantity of Joyce's manuscripts, early school essays, photographs and other documents. Richard Ellmann made great use of much of the archive for his biography James Joyce, first published in 1959. Stanislaus's widow Nelly subsequently sold the archive--which, it was found, contained additional material such as the erotic/obscene  James-Nora correspondence--to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in May 1957.  In approaching donors to raise the necessary purchase price the Dean at the College of Arts and Sciences commented that "this collection is to the English Department what a cyclotron is to the Physics Department" (quoted by Maddox, p. 516). When the Trieste papers reached Ithaca on 21 May 1957 "it did not take long for Cornell to realise it had bought not a cyclotron but a bomb" (op.cit., p.518).