Joyce, James

broadside printed on one side on white wove paper (289 x 221mm.), FIRST EDITION, (though an earlier edition was reputed to have been printed in Dublin, none are known to have survived), ONE OF PROBABLY LESS THAN 100 COPIES

Slocum & Cahoon A2

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"My spirit shall they they never have
Nor make my soul with theirs as one..." 

RARE. The earliest extant Joyce publication. No copy of Joyce's supposed first publication, Et Tu, Healy!, a poem written at the age of nine and printed by his father, has ever been located. 

Copies of this broadside written in the persona of "Katharsis-Purgative", a scabrous attack on members of the Irish Literary Revival and other literary compatriots, and a declaration of his own alternative aesthetic, was printed at Joyce's expense in Pola--then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire--between November 1904 and March 1905. Copies were then sent by the author to Russell, Gogarty and other targets of the piece in Dublin. The poem had been written in Dublin in the summer of 1904 before Joyce and Nora's elopement to the Continent. Joyce initially sent it to Constantine Curran, editor of the University College magazine St. Stephen's, but the editor returned the "unholy thing" to the author with a humorous letter on 8 August; Joyce then undertook to publish the broadside himself, but when the printer, at the end of the same month, asked him to pay for the broadsheets and to collect them, he could not find the money (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982, p. 167). 

The Holy Office was Joyce's "first overt, angry declaration that he would pursue candor while his contemporaries pursued beauty...with quick thrusts he disposes, more or less thoroughly, of his contemporaries. Yeats had allowed himself to be led by women; Synge writes of drinking but never drinks; Gogarty is a snob; Colum a chameleon, Roberts an idolator of Russell, Starkey a mouse, Russell a mystical ass...Joyce was determined to hold his mirror up to his friends' faces" (Ellmann, op.cit.).