This month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of author
James Joyce’s Dubliners. His collection of short stories depicting the everyday trials and
tribulations of the residents of his hometown was released with minimal fanfare
in June 1914, but—given the immense literary importance of his subsequent works
like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the
groundbreaking 1922 Modernist masterpiece Ulysses—has since
risen in significance.
But Dubliners didn’t just appear
out of nowhere. In fact, its author—and its would-be publishers—endured a
painful nine-year-long struggle before the book made it to print. The story of
how Dubliners finally came to be printed is a
fascinating tale of artistic frustration and persistence despite years of
dismissal.
A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR AS A TEACHER
In late 1904, Joyce was living abroad in self-imposed exile—partially
for political reasons, and partially because he eloped with his wife, Nora—when
he published three short stories (“The Sisters,” “Eveline,” and “After the
Race”) in a weekly publication called The Irish Homestead.The
author thought that he might publish a collection of stories in a book the
following year, and wrote nine more stories for it; while he was trying to make
a living teaching English at aBerlitz Language School in Trieste (now a part of Italy) in 1905, Joyce
sent the collection to noted London publisher Grant
Richards for consideration.
Richards eventually
accepted the book in early 1906, and in February, Joyce sent along a new story
called "Two Gallants" for the book. The publisher quickly drew up a
contract for the eager—and financially strapped—writer-in-exile to sign in
March of that year. And that’s when the trouble began.
A BIG “BLOODY” PROBLEM
Richards didn’t bother to read “Two Gallants”
before he sent it and the
other proofs of the collection off to the printer. At the time, English law
stated that a printer was just as guilty of any charges of obscenity as
the writer of the book, and not long after Richards sent in the
proofs, the printer informed the publisher that there was “obscenity” in the
stories. The objections were about risqué sections in the story “Counterparts,”
which described male and female anatomy and, in the story "Grace,"
there was specific disapproval of the word “bloody” in lines like “Then he has
a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big spoon
like a shovel."
Richards, who had just rebuilt his publishing company after rebounding
from bankruptcy, wanted to make sure there was no trouble with the law. The
publisher told Joyce that changes needed to be made. But upon hearing which
passages were troublesome, the author pointed out that the word “bloody”
appeared numerous times elsewhere in the collection—and in worse contexts, like
“Here’s this fellow come to the throne after his bloody owl’ mother keeping him
out of it till the man was grey” in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “If
any fellow tried that sort of game on with his sister he’d bloody well put his
teeth down his throat” in “The Boarding-House.”
“I have written my book
with considerable care," Joyce said in a letter to Richards, "in
spite of a hundred difficulties and in accordance with what I understand to be
the classical tradition of my art." Still, with much chagrin, he submitted
an entirely altered manuscript in July 1906. It included a new story called “A
Little Cloud,” and the allegedly questionable uses of “bloody,” as well as the
offensive the portions of “Counterparts,” had been removed. There was also a
note from the author to the publisher: “I think I have injured these stories by
these deletions but I sincerely trust you will recognize that I have tried to
meet your wishes and scruples fairly.”
The writer, thousands of miles away from the publisher, eagerly awaited
a response from London about his now-bastardized stories. In September, he
finally got one: Richards rejected the altered collection outright, but
cheekily implied interest in Joyce’s new autobiographical novel (eventually
published as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
with the potential to revisit the short stories later.
Tired of being strung along, Joyce promptly got a lawyer with the
intention of suing Richards for breach of contract, but was soon talked down.
Instead, Joyce focused on his first book of poems, Chamber Music, which was published in early 1907.
Any influence Joyce thought that little milestone might have had on
helping get Dubliners published didn’t; between
November 1907 and February 1908, the collection was swiftly rejected by at
least four different publishers, and while it drew initial interest from
Dublin-based Maunsel & Co., Joyce was so distraught over his failed efforts
that it took him a year to work up the courage to send the manuscript to
them—which he finally did in April 1909. A positive response from that
publishing house prompted an emotionally renewed Joyce to travel to Dublin to
meet with Maunsel & Co. co-founder George Roberts, which led to a new contract
the writer gladly signed on August 19. But more troubles were ahead.
A ROYAL SETBACK
After the contract was signed, Joyce returned to his teaching job in
Trieste. In October 1909, he came back to Dublin to oversee the opening of the
city’s first movie theater, the Volta Cinematograph—which he had helped
coordinate and gather investors for—and to review the galley proofs of Dubliners before they were sent off to be
published. The proofs, however, were delayed until the following year because
of a very familiar grievance: Roberts was afraid of potential trouble from what
he thought were “obscene” passages, particularly a part from “Ivy Day in the
Committee Room” that allegedly slandered the recently deceased King Edward VII.
Despite Joyce’s further
capitulation to making more changes, Roberts’ overwhelming objections forced
the publisher to announce that publication would be postponed indefinitely.
Joyce was understandably dejected by the decision. “[I] shall hope that what
they may publish may resemble that to the writing of which I gave thought and
time,” he wrote to Roberts. But at least he was busy with the Volta ... until
July 1910, when financial difficulties and management squabbles caused him to
cease his involvement in the cinema altogether.
So Joyce refocused on his old projects, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The writer and
Roberts made headway through the end of 1910, with Joyce making reluctant but
amicable changes to take out the alleged obscenities in the stories, and the
book finally had a proposed release date of January 20, 1911. But after Joyce
protested Roberts’ demand to take out all references to the King in “Ivy Day,”
the publisher postponed Dubliners yet
again.
Knowing how desperate Joyce
was, Roberts fell completely out of contact with the writer—who was still in
Trieste—in order to get him to accede to every single one of his demands. But
Joyce would not back down, and even attempted to match Roberts’ outrageous
behavior: He wrote a letter to King George V himself along with the marked
passages from “Ivy Day,” graciously asking His Majesty if they were offensive
to his dead father. Joyce requested that the King “inform me whether in his
view the passage (certain allusions made by a person of the story in the idiom
of his social class) should be withheld from publication as offensive.”
Surprisingly, Joyce
received a response—but not from the King himself. Instead, the reply came from
the King’s secretary, who said that “It is inconsistent with rule for His
Majesty to express his opinion in such cases.”
THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY
Left to hang out to dry by his publisher—not to mention the King of
England—Joyce decided to take out his frustration by writing an account of Dubliners’ troubled publication history to send to the
Irish press. He called it “A Curious History,” and it included the allegedly
scandalous passage from “Ivy Day” that Roberts objected to. If the broadsheets
printed it, Joyce thought, then why couldn’t Roberts?
It was a good idea, but it
didn’t have the effect that Joyce had hoped for. A few Irish papers printed the
account, but no real change came from it, forcing the perpetually downtrodden
writer to go to Dublin and confront his publisher face to face.
Upon seeing Joyce at the Maunsel & Co. offices, Roberts compared him
to massive stone cliffs in Northern Ireland, saying, “The
Giant’s Causeway is soft putty compared with you,” and
the publisher was forced to address the elephant in the room. Roberts explained
that he had slowly understood the book to be “anti-Irish,” and publishing such
a book would guarantee that the company would lose money. Further meetings bore
even more stringent demands from Roberts: He wanted Joyce to substitute
fictitious names for the real places included in “Counterparts,” and excise
whole stories completely, which Joyce—no doubt exhausted—agreed to. Roberts
also demanded a letter, drafted by a lawyer, that stated that the language
within “Ivy Day” wasn’t libelous.
Joyce’s lawyer complied, but in a move unlucky for the beleaguered
writer, the letter claimed that while the language in “Ivy Day” was harmless,
another story in the collection, “An Encounter,” could potentially be libelous.
It was later discovered—unbeknownst to Joyce and denied by Roberts—that one of
Maunsel & Co.’s biggest clients was Lady Aberdeen. As the wife of the head
of the Irish Vigilance
Committee, which could prosecute based on libel suits,
it was likely that she had put pressure on Roberts to suppress Joyce’s book.
Eventually, following more demands that diluted Joyce’s original vision,
the altered proofs of Dubliners made it all the way
to the printer. But before the book could be printed, the proofs were
surreptitiously destroyed—though not before Joyce managed to get a complete set
himself. The details of just how Joyce came by the proofs is still a mystery;
all he would say is that he obtained the copy "by ruse."
After this blow, Joyce decided to go back to Trieste—but not before
composing an autobiographical poem called “Gas from a Burner,” slamming Roberts as a
publisher and for all he had put him through. Joyce never went back to Dublin
again.
FINALLY
The next few years were dark times for Joyce, who struggled to support
his family financially and himself mentally while completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and
beginning the initial parts of Ulysses. Then, in
December 1913, a letter arrived from Grant Richards—the original publisher who
had ultimately rejected Dubliners—inquiring
about the collection. In the years in between, Joyce had caught the eye of
London literary magazine The Egoist—which was
overseen by Ezra Pound and eventually edited by Hilda Doolittle and T.S.
Eliot—and Richards, inspired by such literary clout, decided he wanted to
publish Dubliners after all.
Eight years after signing
his first contract with Richards, Joyce signed his second, which stipulated
Joyce wouldn’t receive royalties on the first 500 copies of the book and that
he had to personally buy 120 copies himself. He later approved proofs (which
were ultimately not to his liking because of small inconsistencies, including
using quotation marks instead of dashes) at the end of April.
Finally, after nine long years, Dubliners was
published on June
15, 1914, in a run of 1250 copies. Though it debuted
to generally positive reviews, in its first year, the book sold only 499
copies—one short of Joyce being able to contractually profit from it. Richards
eventually passed on publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man—he found it “quite hopeless”—but he would publish Joyce’s
play, Exiles, in 1918. Looking back on those frustrating
times, Joyce told author and poet William Butler Yeats, “I hope that now at
last matters may begin to go a little more smoothly for me for, to tell the
truth, it is very tiresome to wait and hope for so many years.”
And indeed, things would go a little more smoothly from there on out. Dubliners found an American publisher in 1916,
heightening Joyce's literary profile and pushing his notoriety worldwide. But
it was his monumental masterpiece Ulysses, published
in 1922, that made him one of the most renowned writers in history.
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