The lost "Eumaeus" notebook of James Joyce's Ulysses, which is to be auctioned next month, could revolutionise the understanding of that great book.
The previously unknown draft will be auctioned at Sotheby's in London on July 10th. It is expected to realise £800,000 sterling (€1.3 million) to £1.2 million. The only other known working draft of Eumaeus is a later and less complete draft acquired by the State University of New York in 1959.
Since then, only two other draft versions of episodes of Ulysses have been discovered; an early draft of Nausicaa in the early 1960s and a draft of the Circe episode, sold by Christie's for $1.4 million (€1.6 million) last December. Mr Peter Selley, English literature specialist at Sotheby's, told The Irish Times that scholars are very interested in the newly discovered text, which has several different coloured inks.
"It would appear that Joyce kept returning to this manuscript and reworking it. In most of the other notebooks of Ulysses, he would tend to move from one notebook to another."
The draft condenses information in a way not seen in many other manuscripts.
"It's very densely worked, perhaps more densely than any other surviving notebook for Ulysses."
The draft of an episode near the end of Ulysses is more akin to some of the manuscripts of Finnegans Wake and fills in a missing link in the transition from Ulysses to Finnegans Wake.
In all published versions, the Eumaeus episode is "overlaid with the Bloomian style, the heavily cliched style of Leopold Bloom himself, who is an advertising salesman. But that style really isn't fully evolved in this manuscript. So it's an early draft. You can just see the beginnings of it in some of the insertions that Joyce has written."
All the main passages of dialogue are there and all the famous exchanges, like when Bloom asks Stephen, "why did you leave your father's house?" and he replies, "to seek misfortune".
Most of the other early drafts are at the State University of New York. A lot of the other notebooks do not contain complete episodes.
"But when we say this is complete, he did expand it; not only in his fair copy but also at proof stage. So it did grow beyond this. But it does have the beginning, a middle and an end. And it's a fairly continuous series so it's a complete draft at this stage, which he then expanded."
In fact, Ulysses grew by one third in proof. "The proofs would come back from the printer and he would annotate them," Mr Selley said.
The text has been authenticated by comparison with other notebooks, verified by scholars and there is no possibility of a forgery, he added.
There are big crosses in blue and red crayon through large chunks of the text. Indeed, almost everything in the draft has a cross or a line through it, although few of the lines are horizontal. That was Joyce's way of checking everything was copied into a later draft. The effect of the crossings-out and the use of different crayons renders the appearance of the draft beautiful.
"It's a striking visual item in addition to its importance in untangling the text of the novel itself."
It's astonishing that such a text has been completely unknown until now. However, during the composition of Ulys- ses, Joyce sent several manuscripts and typescripts to friends, patrons, critics and publisher, many of which were lost. This previously unknown notebook ended up in a private collection.
Joyce's death-mask is also being sold at the Sotheby's auction. It is estimated at £40,000 to £60,000.
Website: www.sothebys.com
jmarms@irish-times.ie
