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EVENT PREVIEW
James Joyce, man about town
By Christopher Schobert;
unless otherwise marked, photos courtesy of UB’s Poetry Collection
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Irish painter Patrick Tuohy’s portrait of Joyce;
Photo by kc kratt.
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Joyce standing beside greenhouse, Dublin (1904).
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Joyce seated on bench at Fécamp (July 1925).
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Syvlia Beach’s personally inscribed copy of Ulysses; Photo by kc kratt.
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James Joyce and Sylvia Beach outside Shakespeare & Co. (1920)
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Joyce with wife Nora seated on wall, Zurich.
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Portrait of Nora Joyce;
Photo by kc kratt.
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Portrait of James Joyce;
Photo by kc kratt.
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“Bring about it to be brought about and it will be, loke, our lake lemanted, that greyt lack, the citye of Is is issuant (atlanst!), urban and orbal, through sleep froms umber under wasseres of Eire.” —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Buffalo is an Irish city; everybody knows that. But not as many know it’s a James Joyce city, unless they are familiar with UB’s magnificent Joyce collection or happen to have celebrated our local version of Bloomsday. This year, “Bloomsmonth” is more accurate, because June is a monumental, groundbreaking month of Joycean celebration, information, and analysis throughout Buffalo.
“It’s a sort of four-legged event,” says University at Buffalo English professor Mark Shechner: an exhibition at UB’s Anderson Gallery, June’s annual Bloomsday, the North American James Joyce Conference, and appearances by celebrated Irish author Colum McCann. It all falls under the “Eire on the Erie” umbrella, and what’s truly startling, and downright wonderful, is how vast and orchestrated EOTE is. It’s a Western New York epiphany—an ambitious awakening of the mind and spirit to the genius of Ireland’s greatest author, and Buffalo’s place in Joyce-iana. But putting it all together has not been easy. Shechner and Buffalo State College professor Laurence Shine are the co-chairs, but many, many people have played an important role in making this idea a reality.
“Laurence Shine, Pat Martin, Connie Constantine, and I got together two years ago to talk about all this,” Shechner says, “and one of the things we decided we wanted to do was to make this a European-style event, rather than a standard North American conference. [UB Poetry Collection curator] Michael Basinski was part of the planning of this, too. And we decided it was going to be European-style. At most North American conferences, you typically go onto a university campus, you have a conference there, and you go home. Usually, it takes three to five days. I’ve been to conferences in Austin, Texas; Cornell; and UC Irvine, and they’re basically the same—they’re campus events. We decided ours would be about the place itself, and about the city.
“So we went about designing something that would be about Buffalo, and began to integrate all kinds of activities. Mike started to work on the exhibition—with a lot of help—which is going to be a knockout. It’s titled Discovering James Joyce: The University at Buffalo Collection. And then we decided, Buffalo has its Bloomsday Celebration every year, downtown on June 16, usually at the Irish Classical Theatre. The logistics are always difficult, but the idea was to integrate Buffalo’s Bloomsday with a North American James Joyce conference. The details as to how you do that are not simple, but we’re working on that.” Most of the conference will be held downtown at the Hyatt, but it will move for one day—Monday, June 15—to the Burchfield Penney Art Center, then across the street that evening for a cocktail reception for the Joyceans at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
“It looks like we will have some 185 scholars making presentations at the conference,” says Shechner. “They come from all over the US and Canada, and indeed, the world: Croatia, Serbia, Qatar, Iran, Korea, Lebanon, Serbia, Vietnam, and, of course, Ireland and England. And Buffalo. Some of these are Americans teaching abroad, but many are nationals of their own countries. Pretty amazing when you think about it.”
Laurence Shine is one of Buffalo’s true keepers of the Joyce flame. “Bloomsday, under Laurence’s guidance, has become Bloomsweek; last year it became a whole week,” Shechner says. Bloomsday— www.bloomsdaybuffalo.com has the details of what has become one of WNY’s signature events—takes place every June. “It’s nice to have an Irish event where you’re not freezing,” Shine jokes. He also hosts a Ulysses reading circle every Monday evening, visits local high schools to give lectures on Joyce, and is now exploring the writer’s connection with modern art and Dada. Bloomsweek will be bigger and better than ever before this year, yet will also retain its usual charms. “We’ll probably do Paddy Dignam’s funeral at Forest Lawn—the nicest funeral you ever saw,” Shine says. One of the cochairs—hint, hint—“shows up as ‘the man in the Macintosh,’” an unidentified Ulysses character and a favorite of the novel’s aficionados.
Basinski has been hard at work on the Discovering James Joyce exhibition. (See box for details.) “We’ve been planning for the exhibition for the last two years—there’s something like 700 days of consecutive planning involved. Since there are 10,000 pages of material, the considerations involved what to put in and what not to show. We need a building the size of Coca-Cola Field to show the entire Joyce Collection,” Basinski says. Students played an important role in putting the exhibition together, which Basinski says was a goal. “I am very excited. When I first imagined it all, I had not thought it would become such a Buffalo-oriented project. And it wouldn’t be occurring the way it is without this constellation of funders, colleges, and students. In these hard times, to see this group of Buffalonians come together to make this happen is amazing. I think it’s a model for all of our peers.”
Shechner affirms that the collaboration between the various groups has been staggering. Among these are the UB English department, UB’s College of Arts and Sciences, the NY State Council for the Humanities, the John R. Oishei Foundation, and Buffalo State College, which is putting up visiting graduate students. (Buffalo State, too, has become a Joyce campus; as BSC professor Shine says, “students at Buff State have been trained in Joyce, and going to Dublin.”)
As the accompanying boxes and images demonstrate, “Eire on the Erie” is an unsurpassed literary event. And, as Shechner stresses, “it’s all taking place in town, at various locations in Buffalo, and not on a campus.” Joyce is coming out of the classrooms, and out of the libraries, and into our lives. To quote Ulysses, “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”
For more “Eire on the Erie” infomation and updates, visit www.english.buffalo.edu/jamesjoyce.
Christopher Schobert’s first attempt at serious writing came in Mark Shechner’s journalism class at UB. It prompted his first bad review, from a fellow classmate. To quote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “Pull out his eyes, Apologize.”
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EIRE AT THE ANDERSON
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UB’s spacious and elegant Anderson Gallery will be a center for all things Joyce during the conference, as Discovering James Joyce: The University at Buffalo Collection comes to life, and events will run after the conference, as well. “We’ve extended it into the summer with various events, to demystify Joyce and pull in our community,” says Anderson’s curator of education, Ginny O’Brien Lohr. Sandra H. Olsen, director of the UB Art Galleries, explains that for much of the public, this will be an introduction to the university’s Joyce materials. “We’re really making this—for the first time—truly accessible to the public. It’s out of the Poetry Room, and out into the public. It will be wonderful that people can read and see this, and with docents and tour guides, we really will explain it. There will be a lot of educational learning about editing and self-editing. People seem to think that those things come easily, and this proves that not to be the case. It really shows the richness of some of these resources in Buffalo. And all of this was stimulated by the interdisciplinary research fund at the university, which supports research by faculty. Without this kind of support at the very beginning, it would make a really large project like this very difficult.”
The following lectures, tours, and workshops are confirmed; for late additions, keep checking www.ubartgalleries.org.
• Thursday, June 18, 5:30–7:30 p.m. Sponsored by Just Buffalo Literary Center (JBLC): A member event “preview” of the Joyce Collection prior to the June 27 public reception opening. UB Poetry Collection curator Michael Basinski will give a tour of the Anderson Gallery show to JBLC members, and JBLC poet and teaching artist Sherry Robbins will conduct a writing/art activity with guests.
• Saturday, June 27, 6–8 p.m.: Joyce exhibition public reception. (“We will also have some involvement with the Buffalo Homecoming city-wide event with various activities,” says Lohr, “which include tours of Buffalo museums and galleries.” The Anderson Gallery will be open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. on Sundays.)
• Monday, June 29, through Saturday, August 22: Docent-led tours to be held on Tuesday and Saturday afternoons at 1 p.m. (Private tours needed to be scheduled at other times and dates are available upon request.)
• Thursday, July 9, at 7 p.m.: Professor and Ulysses scholar Mike Groden presents a talk and presentation, “Demystifying Joyce.”(http://publish.uwo.ca/~mgroden/)
• Tuesday, September 8, through Sunday, September 13: The final week of the Joyce exhibition.
The Anderson Gallery is also planning an AP high school English summer project. Interested current AP English teachers with juniors enrolled in fall 2009 senior level advanced placement English courses will have the opportunity to include in their students’ required summer 2009 reading packets information on the Joyce exhibition, along with a project to complete based on a visit to the exhibition. Students may visit the gallery to tour and view the exhibition anytime during the month of July or August, during the gallery’s regularly scheduled hours. The gallery will provide for the students’ certificates of attendance for submission to their AP English teachers.
And conference cochair Laurence Shine’s Ulysses reading group Monday night session members have been invited to conduct their sessions at the gallery on selected Monday evenings, from June 29 through August 17; former members are also invited to participate. Here, says Shechner, “everything is demystified.”
—C.S. |
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Why Buffalo? And why Joyce?
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The UB Poetry Collection is an oft-forgotten jewel of the north campus, and its highlight is surely the Joyce archives. But how did they arrive here? Curator Michael Basinski explains:
“To meet living expenses, in 1949, Joyce’s family exhibited a large selection of Joyce-iana at the La Hune Gallery in Paris. Oscar Silverman, a member of UB’s English department, visited the exhibition and recognized the intellectual significance of the materials on display. Silverman realized that a Joyce archive in the Poetry Collection would generate scholarship for generations. Returning to Buffalo, he informed Charles D. Abbott, the first director of the university libraries, about the availability of the Joyce archive. Abbott founded the Poetry Collection in 1937, and was an early proponent of manuscript studies. Together, they paved the road for Joyce’s journey to Western New York. However, this interdepartmental liaison is only a facet of the story,” Basinski says.
“The James Joyce Collection came to the Poetry Collection, in no small measure, because of the foresight and generosity of friends of the University at Buffalo. In 1950, a gift from Margaretta F. Wickser, made in memory of her husband Philip J. Wickser, brought the La Hune consignment of Joyce materials to the Poetry Collection, including manuscripts, notebooks, letters, and Joyce’s private library, which included books inscribed to Joyce from William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Nancy Cunard, Ernest Hemingway, James Stevens, and T. S. Eliot. Among the fourteen paintings that arrived in this installment were portraits of Joyce and Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, by world-renowned Irish painter Patrick Tuohy, two portraits of his wife Nora Joyce, and five oils of Joyce’s distant relatives. Joyce’s famous walking sticks, glasses, and passports were also part of this consignment.
In 1959, thanks to Constance and Walter Stafford’s hands-on negotiations in Paris and their financial support, Joyce materials were purchased from Sylvia Beach, publisher of the first edition of Ulysses. The Beach consignment included Joyce’s first Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man notebook, inscribed photographs, letters that James Joyce wrote to her before and after the publication of Ulysses, and more. Sylvia Beach’s personal James Joyce book collection also came to UB. Among her treasures was her personally inscribed copy of Ulysses. Beach’s copy, number two of 100 printed on Dutch hand-made paper, is one of the most magnificent copies in the world. Among the other unique items is a stack of completed order forms from notables such as T. E. Lawrence, Samuel Roth, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, and Peggy Guggenheim. Another installment arrived after the death of Sylvia Beach in 1962, again through the support of the Staffords, the generosity of Mrs. Spencer Kittinger, and the Friends of the Lockwood Memorial Library. Finally, in 1968, an acquisition of Finnegans Wake uncut and heavily revised page proofs from [the collection of] Maria Jolas completed the manuscript collection. And in the last decade, a collection of translations of Joyce’s novels, short stories, and poems has been added.”
“If Buffalo is a Joyce hotbed, there are probably a few reasons,” adds Mark Shechner. “The collection is the main one, but you have to reckon with Buffalo as a town built [in part] by Irish labor and having a large Irish population. Add to that the efforts of people like Laurence Shine, Pat Martin, Vincent O’Neill, Josephine Hogan, James Warde, and others to develop a sense of Irish literary culture as a backbone of civic culture in Buffalo over a couple of decades now. They have built an infrastructure that has taken root here, and the Irish community in Buffalo has stepped up to support their efforts.”
Shechner’s personal introduction to the joys of Joyce came in college. “In Berkeley, I was a student of two avid Joyceans. One was John Henry Raleigh, who was at the time writing a book titled The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative. Raleigh was the first one to introduce me to Ulysses and to the pleasures of reading that book as though it was a real narrative of real people in a universe not unlike my own. He humanized, and Bloom-ized, Ulysses for me, and gave me a sense of a human connection to its characters. By the end of the semester I felt that I knew Bloom and Stephen and Molly. They were family.”
Shechner also praises the worldwide Joyce community. “You can’t stage conferences like this without the support of the professional Joyceans. They are unlike any other professional society I have ever been involved in. They all collaborate in each others’ plans and activities. They are endlessly ready with advice, counsel, and aid. They help each other out with plans and arrangements. I’ve leaned on them heavily to figure things out. The International James Joyce Foundation is unique in this way. Its past president, Margot Norris, is a graduate of UB’s Ph.D. program, and was my student a long time ago.”
As Laurence Shine observes, “Buffalo is a real Joyce city at this point.”
—C.S. |
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