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The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar
Here is something for you to ponder over this Bloomsday that is coming up...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html
Some 16 years ago, The Boston Globe published an article about a jobless man who haunted Marsh Plaza, at the center of Boston University. The picture showed a curious figure in a long overcoat, hunched beneath a black fedora near the central sculpture. He spent his days talking with pigeons to whom he had given names: Checkers and Wingtip and Speckles. The article could have been just another human-interest story about our society’s failing commitment to mental health, except that the man crouched in conversation with the birds was John Kidd, once celebrated as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive.
Kidd had been the director of the James Joyce Research Center, a suite of offices on the campus of Boston University dedicated to the study of “Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over novel of the 20th century. Armed with generous endowments and cutting-edge technology, he led a team dedicated to a single goal: producing a perfect edition of the text. I saved the Boston Globe story on my computer and would occasionally open it and just stare. Long ago, I contacted Kidd about working on an article together, because I was fascinated by one of his other projects — he had produced a digital edition, one that used embedded hyperlinks to make the novel’s vast thicket of references and allusions, patterns and connections all available to the reader at a click.
Big snip-----
When I pressed him on real-world specifics, the manuscripts, the work that must have been on disks somewhere, he recalled that, yes, he had assembled a draft of an edition with a complete introduction. One of Kidd’s editors at Norton, Julia Reidhead, confirmed that both existed but said that one delay after another — “an infinite loop of revision” — ran into the legal wall of new copyright extensions, and so Norton “stopped the project.” One Joyce scholar remembers reading the introduction but no longer has a copy, and Kidd doesn’t have one either. Instead, we are left with bizarre relics of what could have been. Early on in the Joyce wars, in fact, Arion Press issued a new edition of “Ulysses” that included some of the preliminary Kidd edits. The book was luxurious, with prints by Robert Motherwell, and only 175 of them were printed. I found one for sale on Amazon. The seller wanted $25,678.75.
Some 16 years ago, The Boston Globe published an article about a jobless man who haunted Marsh Plaza, at the center of Boston University. The picture showed a curious figure in a long overcoat, hunched beneath a black fedora near the central sculpture. He spent his days talking with pigeons to whom he had given names: Checkers and Wingtip and Speckles. The article could have been just another human-interest story about our society’s failing commitment to mental health, except that the man crouched in conversation with the birds was John Kidd, once celebrated as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive.
Kidd had been the director of the James Joyce Research Center, a suite of offices on the campus of Boston University dedicated to the study of “Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over novel of the 20th century. Armed with generous endowments and cutting-edge technology, he led a team dedicated to a single goal: producing a perfect edition of the text. I saved the Boston Globe story on my computer and would occasionally open it and just stare. Long ago, I contacted Kidd about working on an article together, because I was fascinated by one of his other projects — he had produced a digital edition, one that used embedded hyperlinks to make the novel’s vast thicket of references and allusions, patterns and connections all available to the reader at a click.
Big snip-----
When I pressed him on real-world specifics, the manuscripts, the work that must have been on disks somewhere, he recalled that, yes, he had assembled a draft of an edition with a complete introduction. One of Kidd’s editors at Norton, Julia Reidhead, confirmed that both existed but said that one delay after another — “an infinite loop of revision” — ran into the legal wall of new copyright extensions, and so Norton “stopped the project.” One Joyce scholar remembers reading the introduction but no longer has a copy, and Kidd doesn’t have one either. Instead, we are left with bizarre relics of what could have been. Early on in the Joyce wars, in fact, Arion Press issued a new edition of “Ulysses” that included some of the preliminary Kidd edits. The book was luxurious, with prints by Robert Motherwell, and only 175 of them were printed. I found one for sale on Amazon. The seller wanted $25,678.75.
That damned Joyce was the reason behind two of my degrees. In 1994, one of my undergraduate professors told the story of Kidd pointing out the many errors in the famous Gabler edition. Like the author of this article, I had not heard another peep about the famous John Kidd since then.
Truly amazing how these things work (or don't work) out in the end!
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