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JOYCE (JAMES) The Holy Office, BROADSIDE POEM, [Pola, 1904-1905] image 1
JOYCE (JAMES) The Holy Office, BROADSIDE POEM, [Pola, 1904-1905] image 2
The Library of a Deceased Irish Collector
Lot 195

JOYCE (JAMES)
The Holy Office, BROADSIDE POEM, [Pola, 1904-1905]

24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £14,375 inc. premium

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JOYCE (JAMES)

The Holy Office, BROADSIDE POEM, 96-lines printed on one side only, in 2 columns separated by a single rule border, printed on white wove paper watermarked '[spread eagle]/ L.P./Mercantil Eagle Paper', with printed signature ('James A. Joyce') in bold at foot, preserved in purpose-made red cloth portfolio, lettered in gilt on upper cover [Slocum & Cahoon A2], 284 x 220mm., [Pola, 1904-1905]

Footnotes

A FINE COPY OF JOYCE'S EARLIEST AND RAREST PUBLISHED WORK, preceded only by the supposed juvenile broadside Et Tu Healy, of which no copy is known. The number of copies of The Holy Office printed is thought to be "probably less than 100" (Slocum & Cahoon).

The poem had been written in Dublin in the summer of 1904 before Joyce and Nora's elopement to the Continent, but was rejected by Constantine Curran, editor of the University College magazine St. Stephen's. Joyce then undertook to publish the broadside himself, but when the Dublin printer asked him to pay for the broadsheets and to collect them, he could not find the money and by November 1904 the project had been abandoned (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982, p.167). Undeterred, Joyce had the poem printed at his own expense in Pola, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where he lived between November 1904 and March 1905; copies were distributed by mail, and through the efforts of Stanislaus and friends. No copies of the Dublin printing appear to have survived.

Written in the persona of "Katharsis-Purgative", the poem is a fierce attack on members of the Irish Literary Revival and other literary compatriots, and a declaration of his own alternative aesthetic. Richard Ellmann describes it as Joyce's "first overt, angry declaration that he would pursue candor while his contemporaries pursued beauty... with quick thrusts he disposes, more or less thoroughly, of his contemporaries. Yeats had allowed himself to be led by women; Synge writes of drinking but never drinks; Gogarty is a snob; Colum a chameleon, Roberts an idolator of Russell, Starkey a mouse, Russell a mystical ass... Joyce was determined to hold his mirror up to his friends' faces" (Ellmann, op.cit.). This did not prevent Joyce from sending copies to Russell, Gogarty and some of the others.

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