Launch

 

In late 1921 subscriptions were being placed for the forthcoming ‘Ulysses’. In Paris, excerpts were read aloud in public. The book was going to press. In this portentous climate, it was James Joyce himself who resolved that the launch be timed to occur on his 40^th birthday, the 2^nd of February 1922. That’s the day after the patronal day of St Brigid of Kildare. The Joyce family lived in Paris, a city that did not exist in the time of Homer and would have been vague information to Brigid of Kildare. Through December and January Joyce continued to send text updates to the printer Maurice Darantière, who worked in Dijon. The launch became the final deadline. Joyce was resigning to the idea the book was finally seeing the light of day, remarking, “The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.” Darantière promised to deliver three copies via the Dijon-Paris express on the morning in question, so it was all very tight. Sylvia Beach, publisher, went to the station at 7 am on the 2^nd to find that the printer had sent two of the promised three copies. Ten minutes by taxi she was able to present Joyce with his copy; the other she took to her shop Shakespeare & Co., where it was put on exhibit. As Richard Ellmann writes: “Everyone crowded in from nine o’clock until closing time to see it.” The other part of what we would call the launch occurred that night, when close Paris friends of the Joyces dined with them at the Italian restaurant Ferrari’s. Ellmann again: “Joyce sat at the head of the table, sideways, his legs crossed with the toe of one crossed again under the calf of the other. He wore a new ring, a reward he had promised himself years before. He seemed already 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 at last untied the parcel and laid the book on the table. It was bound in the Greek colors – white letters on a blue field – that he considered lucky for him, and suggested the myth of Greece and of Homer, the white island rising from the sea. There was a toast to the book and its author which left Joyce deeply moved.”  Later in the evening, at another café Joyce drew the attention of three of the women in attendance to their inclusion in ‘Ulysses’ as figures in the marriage of the forest: Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, and the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac. Joyce wished to party on, but his wife Nora “emphatically shepherded him towards a cab.”