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74 JOYCE, James – FLAUBERT, Gustave. L’Éducation sentimentale. Histoire d’un jeune homme. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1901 “Gustave Flaubert can rest having made me” The 19-year-old James Joyce’s copy of one of his idol’s most iconic works, with his dated ownership inscription, “Jas Joyce 1901”, on the front wrapper. This copy of the Bibliothèque-Charpentier’s “Édition définitive” is a landmark object in modernist literature, the work that furnished Joyce with the tools to create A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , and an inspiring possession of a fledgling writer. In a piece published in the antifascist journal Decision , the Irish critic and author Ernest Boyd recounts finding this copy, along with Joyce’s copy of Madame Bovary , “in the dusty piles of an old bookshop”; it was Boyd who commissioned the binding. He remarks with admiration that “the author of the ‘Dubliners’ had read his Flaubert’”, and that the young “Joyce who studied his Flaubert never forgot the lesson of the master”. It is difficult to overstate Flaubert’s influence on Joyce: it is well-trodden critical ground, and the structural affinities between L’Éducation and A Portrait have been painstakingly unpacked. Both are fictionalized autobiographies, charting the emotional development of self-deceiving youths who follow idealistic and illusory visions towards unclear goals, “moving from untenable position to untenable position through a half-perceived world” (Hayman, p. 161). Both plots drive their protagonists, adolescent boys with artistic pretensions, towards self-realization and fulfilment. Frederic and Stephen are both on the cusp of entering university; both experience beauty (one on a river, the other by the sea), encounter a solitary female figure who embodies some
transcendental aspect of their early visions, and undertake a rite of passage into adulthood. In 1901, Joyce was a student at University College Dublin, living with his parents, six sisters, and three brothers at Royal Terrace in Clontarf. It is unusual to find books signed by him while he was still in Ireland: he moved to Paris the following year. In 1904 he began work on A Portrait , initially intended as a 63-chapter novel. He abandoned this first project in 1907 and began reworking the novel into its final and much condensed form. A Portrait was Joyce’s first novel, originally serialized by Ezra Pound in The Egoist in 1914–15 and published in book form in 1916. A Portrait and Dubliners , his collection of short stories published in 1914, together established Joyce as a forerunner of literary modernism. Joyce claimed to have read every word of Flaubert, and in a notebook taken with him on a holiday through Flaubert’s native Normandy in 1925 (a holiday that could easily be mistaken for a pilgrimage), he acknowledges that “Gustave Flaubert can rest having made me” (ibid.). This copy is from the library of Alexander Neubauer, who had one of the greatest James Joyce collections in private hands, with his bookplate on the front pastedown. Octavo. Bound in red cloth, spine lettered and ruled in gilt. Original wrappers bound in. Spine and extremities a touch rubbed, tiny damp stain on front cover, a few marks to joints and rear cover, inner hinges reinforced with linen, binding square and firm, loss to front wrapper through “Ed” of title with tape repairs to verso, slight loss to foot of title page, not affecting text, two leaves excised after title page, book block toned, rear wrapper lightly foxed. A very good copy. ¶ Ernest Boyd, “James Joyce: Memories”, Decision , I, no. 2, February 1941, pp. 58–59; Peter Brooks, “Flaubert: The Tragic Historian”, The New York Review , 9 March 2017; David Hayman, “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and L’Education Sentimentale: The Structural Affinities ”, Orbis Litterarum , 19, 1964. £20,000 [157652]
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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