Treasures: Dublin Comes to Delancey

But the two Philadelphians knew the true significance of the document, a horrific and false account of 15th-century Jews using human blood in Passover rituals. They agreed that Lessing Rosenwald should buy the document at any cost, with Rosenbach as his agent. During the auction, a woman bid against Rosenbach, and afterward loudly protested that she had won the book. The auctioneer turned her away, and according to Lessing Rosenwald, “Later investigation established the lady underbidder as a German agent who had been sent for the sole purpose of obtaining Lot 553.”

It’s unsurprising, in this light, that Rosenbach held the Ulysses manuscript so tight. Held it even when he sold his original Shakespeare folios. Even when he sold a Gutenberg Bible. Held it even when Joyce despised him. Held onto Ulysses.

Ulysses: the heroic story of a middle-aged, assimilated Jew in a city full of Irishmen. A story Rosenbach, in Philadelphia, might view as his own.

 

 

 MICHAEL BARSANTI REMEMBERS his first encounter with Ulysses, as a child outside of Boston. His father is Italian and British, and his mother was Irish.

James Joyce, a famous Irish character who raised his children in Trieste, appealed to him. Ulysses loomed like a challenge, a test of Irishness. “And,” Barsanti says, putting on a sharp Boston accent, “it was hard. Wicked hard.”

His parents sent him to Andover, a prestigious boarding school where Barsanti felt intimidated. So he held up Ulysses as a literary shield: See what I read? I’m smart, too.

The book wove itself into his dreams, and he continued to study it, eventually earning his doctorate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where some of the world’s finest Joyce scholars taught. Then he took a job at the Rosenbach Museum, knowing that somewhere in the three-story rowhome, the original manuscript awaited.

When he saw it, though, he felt disappointed. He’d expected something ornate and grand. But Joyce wrote his book on hundreds of slips of paper, and in ­grammar-school composition notebooks. It felt small, in a way. Common.

There’s something funny about a book, though. Each printing ripples like rings from the author’s hand; each edition is identical, but not the same. A first edition tells the same story as a 20th, but seems closer somehow to its source: Perhaps William Faulkner held this first edition himself. Maybe Charles Dickens touched that one. So in beholding the Ulysses manuscript, there is a sense of closeness to the great writer: This ink flowed from his pen; his hand shaped this peculiar capital S. Here, he hesitated; and here, he crossed out “hair uncombed” and replaced it with “Her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair uncombed.” Not a typesetter’s accident, but a purposeful attempt to capture a woman’s cascading hair with cascading letters. The painstaking revisions, crossed-out passages, insertions within insertions, tell us Joyce didn’t dash his masterwork off, but shaped it with care. He — 

“Be mindful of that pen,” Barsanti says, his voice rising. I look up from the manuscript, in a fog. “Your pen!” he says. I yank my pen — a Sharpie, no less — and its poisonous ink away from the pages, and we search for any of my blue scribbles among Joyce’s gray scribbles.

As relief washes over Barsanti’s face, I realize that Joyce has gotten his wish.

He once said the only thing he hoped for as a writer — his small request — was that the world’s scholars would devote their entire lives to his work.

---