from Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 22, Number 2

The Joyce Industrial Evolution, According to one European Amateur¹

Fritz Senn

Zürich James Joyce Foundation

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There was never one compact, professional, let alone efficient Joyce Industry, as it came to be called some decades ago. However it loomed into existence, it must have had many origins and numerous individual starting points. Something analogous would have emerged in any event, given the escalating absorption in Joyce that is due partly to the multiform enthusiasm of readers and also because at one time it looked like the obvious choice for an auspicious career. I can speak of one of the accidental starting points from my own vantage point: the synoptic memories from a twofold position of an outsider and, simultaneously, an extramural busybody. I am aware of (and Joyce shows us) what tricks our memories can play; the witnesses reduce events into a fixed narrative, which then takes on a life of its own. The result is "history." But then there are not so many around to recall even some of the earlier stories. In fact, there are only two persons left who have participated in everyone of the so far sixteen symposia.

This is inevitably personal. I first heard of this author James Joyce (other than from a brief paragraph in a history of literature) as a young and bashful student of English in Zürich. His picture, by Wilhelm Gimmi, was hanging in the seminar rooms, and I found out who it was through the professor of English, Heinrich Straumann, who had interviewed Joyce just weeks before his death and who often vividly told the story of that last meeting. In my year in England, I intended to take Ulysses on headway, that notorious and seemingly inaccessible novel or whatever it was. I was curious to find out whether my English was adequate; perhaps I felt a local obligation--after all, Zürich had buried the author; moreover the book was thought to be obscene (hardly any obscene books were available in 1951). Anyhow, I paid what was then about five percent of one month's meagre pay (for teaching at an English Grammar School) and bought the Bodley Head edition. The going was rough; my English was certainly not up to the challenge; Ulysses was not the kind of erotic book I had expected (dirty in a general way, yes, but emphatically not erotic); but there was a fascination. This has lingered, and so, like many others, I was caught in the ongoing process and kept groping my way through it by animated trial and inventive error.

So I persevered and plodded on, even after I had had to give up my studies to work for what is called a living, entirely on my own, as an autodidact, with all the drawbacks of having no one at hand to explain; the compensating advantage was not having to produce any premature testimony of simulated competence or, heaven forbid, to publish. Warming up to the obsession, I innocently graduated to Finnegans Wake and bravely attempted to make sense of it, sentence by sentence, as so many are still doing world-wide. Few studies could help one along, and books on Joyce as they came out slowly were eagerly awaited and avidly perused. Yes, we read them all. In Kain's and Magalaner's James Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation, I learned that a few scholars were researching in the virgin territory of FW. One of them, an Englishman, James S. Atherton, lived in Wigan, and so I wrote to him and received an answer. I was lucky to contact a real independent scholar (he never did get a university position). Atherton's first suggestion was to work out the Zürich references in the Wake (he had found many on his own). That pushed me over the edge, for I had never seen myself as actually contributing or even writing on Joyce. Still, I churned out, laboriously enough, my first piece, called something like Zürich Allusions, for the old Analyst. I have disowned this juvenile piece long ago, it was a typical sample of a neophyte's interpretive excess, forgivable perhaps in novice enthusiasts (you find them now on the e-mail circuits with equal abandon). I was drawn into a circle of correspondents, James Atherton, Adaline Glasheen, Thornton Wilder, Matthew Hodgart formed the core group, soon to be joined by a young Australian then in Cambridge, Clive Hart. We exchanged minute insights and general questions about the Wake, and in the days when you could turn out at best four legible carbon copies on your typewriter, it was not a very efficient procedure. One never remembered to whom one had written what. At one point, I indicated vaguely that a bulletin might be more effective, and Clive Hart, back at the other end of the world, translated this into what became A Wake Newslitter, a collection of Wake glosses, first in 1962 mimeographed and freely distributed, later on a little magazine of sixteen pages for subscription. There must have been a need for it; it caught on and attracted scholars and amateurs. (Later there was at least one imitation, Der Bargfelder Bote, focusing on Arno Schmidt's works.) In those pioneering days, I had the illusion that diligent philological advertence to the text of Finnegans Wake and patient source-tracing might eventually give me the sort of elementary grasp of the work that might enable me to pose as an expert. It took several years to become disillusioned.

A few months later, an unknown Thomas F. Staley, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, from his University there (wherever that was), launched his much more comprehensive James Joyce Quarterly. It was to succeed Edmund L. Epstein's James Joyce Review, which had run to six issues between 1957 and 1959. The Quarterly was probably the foundation stone for a Joyce industry. Tom Staley politely asked if it was all right to step on a territory that we never claimed as ours. So the editor of the Wake Newslitter, Clive Hart in New South Wales, the active one, and myself in Switzerland, more nominal, both young and inexperienced, became godparents of the new venture that has become so pivotal since those early days. It was odd for an outsider to become part of apparently academic structures.

Of course, Zürich has always been a Joyce city, an essential part of his biography. That was one reason for budding Joyce scholars and avid readers to stop for a visit (Zürich is also a good place to change planes or trains), and many of us had already been corresponding, so that quite a few passed through and often stayed with me. The circle of Joyce connections widened rapidly. So by 1966, when Joyce's old grave in Fluntern Cemetery twenty-five years after his death was removed to a new ("honorary") site, a group of Joyceans assembled for the occasion. Not alone Joyceans (I wonder when the label came to mean what it does now); the sculptor Milton Hebald and the donor of the statue, Lee Nordness from New York, were attending, but bona fide Joyces as well, the son, Giorgio, and the grandson, Stephen, both with their wives, were present. A memorable Bloomsday, but I regretted a wasted opportunity: while we had all kinds of celebrations, no use was made of the scholarly and biographical potential of the guests: Richard Ellmann, Thomas C. Connolly (who had been sent all the way from Buffalo), Jacques Aubert, Jean Schoonbroodt, Heinrich Straumann, Mogens Boisen, Joyce's dapper Danish translator, as well as a delegation from Dublin. After the Paris celebration on February 2 the same year, in which Maria Jolas, Stuart Gilbert, Moune Léon, A.J. Leventhal, and others participated, including a young spirited emerging French scholar by name of Hélène Berger, later Cixous--the Zurich one was my second encounter with international experts. Great occasions then.

In the autumn of 1966, Tom Staley, then teaching in Trieste, came to visit. (On the habitual Zürich Joyce tour, we stopped at the little guesthouse that had once been the Gasthaus Hoffhung, Joyce's first local touch down, in 1904, and were told that their guest-book had only recently been destroyed in a flood, so we will never know what Joyce and Nora Barnacle recorded in that October of 1904.) Talking late in the evening, comparing notes, we found out that both of us would be in Dublin the following June; others living or travelling nearby might be cajoled into joining, and before long we were envisaging a real, although small, international conference. Grandiloquently (well, it was late the next morning) we already referred to it as a "James Joyce Symposium." In the following weeks, the plan was set in motion from Zürich and Trieste, for the American side we enlisted one emerging scholar whom I had already met and corresponded with, Bernard Benstock. Benstock suggested that official stationery might come in useful; this was no problem as I was working at a printer's, and so I provided a letterhead with what would now be a logo, a Joyce signature, and our three addresses, all under the sumptuous heading of First International James Joyce Symposium. Those were the golden days of Academic Affluence in the States. It appeared that young assistant professors just walked into their dean's office and came out with the money for air fare and expenses. Not Europeans, though--they hardly even believed they were allowed to participate.

Fortunately, we had the help of some of my new friends in Dublin, but even under the best circumstances it is not easy to arrange even a small conference by remote control, and "control" is hardly the appropriate word here. Communication was a hazardous process, fraught with delays, misunderstandings, negligence, inefficiency. Not to forget that all had to be done by slow, uncertain air mail letters which on occasion got answered in time.

But it did come off. On 15 and 16 June 1967, the first Symposium took place; it had attracted some eighty-five participants from various countries, predominantly the States. It was, well, we all thought, successful, at least for us, most of it. Giorgio and Asta Joyce were guests of honor, and so were Frank and Francine Budgen, and it was really Budgen who made the first gathering such a memorable occasion. He played along like a good sport, patiently gave out information on demand, and never once preened himself as Joyce's Close Friend. A Bloomsday trip took us to the Joyce Tower in Sandycove and on to Davy Byrne's. There was an excursion to Glasnevin as well. We (already) had a final banquet with Speeches in the Gresham Hotel.

There were, of course, few sessions in those two days. The first afternoon we met in the old University College in Earlsfort Terrace. I had anticipated great enlightenment, as it was my first exposure to scholarly lectures on Joyce. Here were real professors who had studied the author and made a living of instructing others. My major disappointment was that no provisions were made for us to interact or exchange ideas, which in my naiveté I had assumed to be the main purpose. Everyone talked too long; in fact, the first speaker wanted to read all of thirty pages within the twenty minutes that were allotted to each of the five panelists in less than two hours, and had to be soft-shouldered off the pulpit. One scholar read a paper that was really all about Synge (but mentioned Joyce in its opening sentence). The high point was a presentation of a scholar from Hawaii, unfamiliar then to us all, Margaret Solomon, who the evening before had asked me if she should tone down her fairly outspoken paper; but naturally we did not want any censorship, not we. So she got up and in a dead pan voice with perfect poise expatiated upon the "Phallic Trees of Finnegans Wake." It turned out that most trees were very phallic indeed, although other items tended to be testicular or vaginal, as the case might be. But even though everything was expressed with Latinate academic distance, the commotion was considerable. Some of the audience left the room in protest: "Such words have never been heard in this building!" The event left its imprint on intellectual Dublin, and some thought locally the Symposium could never live down its pristine reputation in years to come.

The Dublin press, insofar as it took notice, was wittily sarcastic and offered scathing comments, not all of them unjustified. I suppose both sides were right, at any rate at the banquet a decision was taken to put future (as no doubt there would be) symposia on a firmer footing, and so the James Joyce Foundation was ceremoniously inaugurated. I dimly recall a seal that had been brought along for the purpose. We were Official.

More Symposia were to follow. By 1969, the second gathering could be announced much more thoroughly, but it still had to be set up from far away, Tulsa, Kent State, and Zürich. It was particularly hard to update matters that had not yet been settled, or that not everyone concerned knew if or how they had been settled-a vicious circle of non-communication. Some Dublin companies (Hely's, Arnott's, the Bailey) and British publishers (Bodley Head, Penguin: its Ulysses had just come out) were coaxed to put ads in our printed program. This time attendance exceeded two hundred; the meetings took place in Trinity College, and the ceremonies lasted for a whole week (but still in succession, it was possible to be present at all events serially). We had key speakers, Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan, another novelty. Performances necessarily varied; again there was little discussion and many of the usual paperish papers. On both occasions, as on many to follow, a volume with some of the gleanings came out years afterwards.

What I remember vividly was the nightmare of an evening sponsored by Guinness. We needed such an evening, not alone to give the symposium its etymological due, but we also knew that the press might be even more vitriolic (though amusing) if no free drinks were provided (not that it helped much when they were). The Guinness people generously offered an invitation for two hundred people, and I had incautiously put this on the program as an integral part of the conference. When we arrived in Dublin I was handed a box of personal invitations--each carouser needed his or her individual one (no "Mr. and Mrs.")--understandable since the news that Guinness was throwing open its gates would attract every bum within miles. But more than eighty of the promised invitations had already been given away to local dignitaries. So the first night Gerry O'Flaherty (without whom there might well not have been any Symposium) and I filled out cards and tried to distribute one hundred and ten of them among the two hundred and thirty-five registered participants. In the end, I think everybody did get in (including the legendary Jack P. Dalton)² and had a great time. One high Guinness official took a liking to Joyce's improvement of their slogan ("ghengis is ghoon for you") and noisily shared his enthusiasm with the assembled multitude. On Bloomsday at five o'clock, the Holy Door (imported from the ruins of 7 Eccles street, where some Joycean raiders also looted scraps of the wallpaper) was ceremoniously unveiled by Paddy Kavanagh ("I herewith declare this door closed"), who, rumor had it, fell afoul of Harry Pollock, who had been playing Bloom in some Toronto performances, and threw in a few anti-Semitic remarks (history, it appeared, repeating fiction after sixty-five years). Another well known Dubliner declared himself my enemy for life since we had not given him enough prominence on the program. So I felt accepted in Dublin.

From then on, with literally hundreds of scholars spreading the word and clamouring for fame, there was no stopping and events took their expected course. In 1971, Trieste was third in line (and the City actually seemed to welcome the occasion). As numbers had increased for the 1973 Symposium, the third to be held in Dublin, two series of sessions had to run simultaneously. The 1973 gathering was enlivened by the active presence of Maria Jolas and Carola GiedionWelcker. Two new topics were introduced, Feminism (Ruth Bauerle was setting it up) and Postmodernism (I remember Maria Jolas asking, "What are you going to call the next movement?") By 1975 at the Paris Symposium, concurrent sessions had become the norm. There we were also exposed to various French schools turning up in watertight cliques. The necessity to cram hundreds of scholars into a few days has occasionally caused ten or even a dozen simultaneous sessions to compete for attention.

After Paris 1975, we convened again in Dublin (1977, also again 1982), Zürich 1979. Having done the "Joyce cities," we branched out to Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Venice, Monte Carlo, Seville. By 1998, Rome was overdue. The biannual Symposium became a fixture, even part of the academic year and the cosmic order: it was to take place every two years. Other camps followed suit. In the 1970s, a transatlantic routine emerged almost by itself after a Joyce conference was held in Tulsa in 1972, in 1974 one in Honolulu, ³ followed by Buffalo 1976, Erie 1978, 1980 and 1983 in Provincetown, and so on, so that it became de rigueur that American or Canadian conferences filled the alternate summers. Human nature abhors a Bloomsday vacuum.

One beat was missed so as to get into step with the centenary Symposium of 1982, where, if accounts are reliable, more than 800 people showed up in one way or another and there were many municipal sideshows. The President of the Republic, Dr. Hilary, opened the proceedings, and such notable writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Anthony Burgess were invited by the city. I recall that when more than eight hundred invited guests--or for all I know gate-crashers--were crammed into the big hall of Dublin Castle, after we had all shaken hands with the Prime Minister and the Mayor of Dublin, I bumped into Tom Staley and looked around at the crowds and asked him, "Have we really succeeded?"

We have, and we have not.

We flattered ourselves that because of its non-academic structure the Symposia were open to everybody irrespective of rank or status, so that we always had a heterogeneous contingent of artists, amateurs, students, and, in particular, translators. No one, as far as I recollect, was ever refused from participating. This was a hazard, but of course having only approved academics is also not without its intrinsic perils. I could never quite understand how so many professionals, making a living (not too bad a living in those days) out of speaking in class, often had such a poor sense of an audience (if they noticed it at all) or had to read everything, monotonously, off their typescript, which was generally too long in any event. My irritation never quite subsided. We have all been excited by lively discussion that might arise anywhere, even in a classroom, and we have all been bored by lengthy lectures--so why do we perversely set up events that favor lectures (so aptly named "papers" after their least important aspect) and hardly devise lively debates? If we consider that Literature and Teaching are, whatever else, also forms of communication, it is surprising how poorly some of us communicate and are hardly aware of the oral medium as different from scholarly writing. Even on the acoustic level, by some perverse instinct, those who usually take a major part in the discussions tend to sit in the center of the front rows, so that when they get up and speak to the rostrum, all those sitting behind them cannot even hear what they have to say.

The conferences as they evolved would never have taken their particular form if it had not been for the American academic system. Automatically, almost, the patterns were based on it. Any academic in the American system simply knew how to proceed when the whistle was blown. Europeans, for whom generally Bloomsday was in the middle of their semesters, hardly got any support, often not even permission to leave. Some could hardly imagine that they might be accepted to participate without any preambles or credentials. So American dominance (apparent or real) was not just a matter of a latent imperialist instinct but was more due to administrative convenience and built-in reflexes. Even so, I found the one prototype to guard against, and into which many participants dropped by sheer force of habit, were the MLA conventions with their large numbers and ritualized operations. All kinds of experiments were tried to break away from the habitual five typescript panels; once a rule was imposed to make every panel international. I have since given up battling against the inert "janitorial chair," by which I mean a chair who does not even bother to find an adequate form for the topic at hand but merely introduces the panelists lengthily and, if time permits, at the end asks if there are any questions (without, of course, filtering the questions or stopping those in the audience who rise to launch into elaborate non-epiphanic rambles). Any janitor could do that.

The James Joyce Foundation, initiated on Bloomsday 1967, with the ostensible purpose of putting on future Symposia (we had no idea how many were to follow) was to put the organization on a firmer basis. It was legally anchored in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that is to say the offices of JJQ that were already handling most of the international traffic. Tom Staley reasonably became the first president, and an all-male board of trustees was set up, chosen from whatever representatives of various nations were at hand. The board in its first decades was never entrusted with any chores; in the early years the functions were mainly decorative. The original triad of the initiators followed in turn. After a few years, Bernard Benstock succeeded as the next president, in 1977 the office turned over to me. But none of us three ever did any serious administration, nor was it expected. At worst, a speech was called for on a public, usually final, occasion. As numbers increased, a more efficient way of handling affairs became necessary, and it was the fourth president, Morris Beja, who took over in 1982 and was the first active, directing president who also set up an efficient infrastructure with bylaws, business meetings, and real formal votes. Karen Lawrence followed suit and introduced more refinements, including a rotating board. The headquarters of the Foundation at some stage were transferred to Ohio State University and have since been in the competent hands of Murray Beja and his alert staff.

What would have happened, I often wonder, if Tom Staley had not planned to stop over in Dublin on his way home from Trieste? No doubt overzealous Joyce addicts and careerists would have initiated something equivalent, and it would have been institutionalized in some similar way, with conferences, speeches, factions, vanities, friendships, bickerings, banquets, song festivals, and an emerging hierarchy. What comforts me in rare moments is the notion that by different but inevitable evolutions it all might have become perhaps a bit more rigidly academic and a trifle less open than it did.

1 Fritz Senn, "The Joyce Industrial Evolution, According to One European Amateur," Journal of Modern Literature, XXII, 2 (Winter 1998-1999), pp. 191-97. © Foundation for Modern Literature, 1999.

2 Editor's Note: Among those admitted, thanks to Fritz Senn's concern, was the then-young Morton P. Levitt, participating in his first Joyce Symposium.

3 Both the Tulsa and Honolulu events were more courses than conferences, with several invited Joycean guests meeting with and talking to students and others over the course of several days.