Joyce, James

4to, fifth printing, unopened, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY JOYCE TO ARTHUR SYMONS, ("To Arthur Symons gratefully James Joyce Paris 29.5.1925"), original white wrappers printed in blue, glassine, morocco-backed slipcase and chemise, pages slightly browned, slight foxing to wrappers, slight chipping to extremities; [together with:] Symons, Arthur. The Symoblist Movement in Literature. William Heinemann, 1899, 8vo, first edition, PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR ON THE FRONT ENDPAPER IN 1902 WITH THE SECOND OF FOUR VERSES OF A POEM (“VERS DORÉS”) BY GÉRARD NERVAL, original black cloth, spine stamped in gilt, endpapers foxed [and:] Larbaud, Valery. Autograph note signed to Joyce, undated, asking him to thank Symons for his invitation but that he is unable to attend, saying he is travelling to Valbois to "work at Morel's translation"

Slocum & Cahoon A17

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A major presentation copy of "Ulysses" with accompanying items by Symons and Larbaud.The association with Symons is highly important, and the rare acknowledgement of gratitude in the inscription by Joyce is significant. Symons played a crucial role in Joyce’s formative period. As Ellmann writes, “Like everyone else in 1900, Joyce was eager to find a style, and he turned for this, perhaps as a result of Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, published the year before, to the French…. Symons was to play as central a part in the publication of Joyce's early work as Ezra Pound was to play later” (pp. 76, 115). The Symbolist Movement in Literature had led Joyce to the French imagists for stylistic inspiration, and when Joyce first met Symons in 1902, he stood as the principal literary “middleman between Paris and London” (Ellmann, p.111). Immediately struck by Joyce, who left him with the impression of a “curious mixture of sinister genius and uncertain talent” (quoted in Ellmann, p. 112), Symons helped place his poetry in journals, and was later instrumental in the publication of Chamber Music. The inscription coincides with Symons’s return to Europe after a significant absence. He had probably just begun a commentary on Joyce’s work, which appeared in Samuel Roth’s briefly reputable Two Worlds Monthly (I:1, July 1926); the following year he would sign the protest against Roth’s bowdlerized piracies of portions of Ulysses in the same.

This fifth printing of Ulysses was the third by Shakespeare and Company (the second and third printings of the first edition were published for the Egoist Press, London, and by John Rodker, Paris). The mistakes constituting the errata of the second and third printings are corrected, and a list of further typographical errors is included.

Larbaud's letter to Joyce probably dates from when the French writer was en route to Valbois for five weeks of work on the passages of Ulysses which the Breton poet and critic Auguste Morel was translating under his supervision. Larbaud ultimately oversaw the French translation of the entire work.