Would Ulysses Ever Get Published These Days? Think About It . . .
One hundred years ago, in 1922, as you can see by this sepia-colored photo, James Joyce was standing in the doorway of Shakespeare and Company, a little bookshop owned by an eccentric American woman named Silvia Beach. The photo is remarkable for a number of reasons (I wish I knew who took it, so I could acknowledge the photographer in this blog post): Joyce is wearing a hat and jacket coat and what looks like a bowtie on a white shirt. He’s leaning on a cane and he’s got on his famous white, dirty tennis shoes (which Ezra Pound famously replaced with a good pair of brown shoes, as I described in an earlier blog posting and in a piece in Conclave magazine). Above the entry to the bookshop is a small boy peering over the edge. I’m not quite sure what he was doing there, who he is, or why he was captured by the photographer. And then there’s Silvia Beach herself, an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris and was a benefactor of many struggling artists living in exile. It was Silvia Beach who agreed to publish Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses on Joyce’s birthday, February 2, 1922. It had taken the author over seven long, agonizing years to compose and produce during his peregrinations through the backstreets and artist enclaves of Europe as an exile from Ireland. Most of that time he lived in poverty, half-blind and struggling to make ends meet as a teacher and translator in order to provide for his wife Nora and their young son and daughter. Ulysses had been rejected by all European and English-speaking publishers, doubtless being far too experimental for any conventional publisher to pick up on at the time, and probably even now, if you think about it.
Can you imagine an agent asking Joyce if she could see the first 10 pages of Ulysses, or even the first 40 pages before pitching it to a publisher, and then taking a deep breath and being completely baffled by the opening dialogue (with phrases in Latin — Introibo ad altare Dei.!) between Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan? What’s going on here? Why is it dragging? Where’s the action? And then days, weeks or months later comes the form letter rejection: Sorry, Mr. Joyce, but your project is not quite right for our list at this time. Perhaps you should consider taking a writing course because the opening pages of your novel are rather difficult for a reader to understand. That said, we wish you best of luck in finding another agent for your project who might be a better fit for their list. By the way, have you thought of self-publishing? You might find a readership of a few bored souls. Regards, and don’t bother us again!
So here we are, one hundred years later, despite the massive profusion of fiction being produced by tens of thousands of writers, and Ulysses is still at the top of the list, still considered the number one best book of the twentieth century! A masterpiece clearly without rival, I should add, encapsulating one day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin relived and reimagined through the expanding labyrinth of time and Homer’s Odyssey. As you iterate down the list of the best 100 books of the last century, nothing seems to come close.
As it happens, I read chunks of Ulysses every day, a little bit here and a little bit there, much like savoring a good shot of liquor or espresso in the morning. It’s fortifying to the soul. You’re better for it, and it helps you get through the twists and turns of the day, whether the day is routine or filled with sorrow and grief, whatever life throws at you.
All of this, the pyrotechnics of language and literature, we owe to Joyce’s good fortune in finding Ezra Pound in Paris and a French poet named Andre Spire who introduced him to Silvia Beach who decided with great courage she would take on the work of a genius and publish it—one of the greatest literary works in history.
Thank you, Silvia Beach. Or better yet, how can we ever thank you enough?
*. *. *.
Ulysses is now available as an ebook from the Gutenberg library of online books at
You can down it for free as it is in the public domain.
The ebook was produced by Col Choat.