First separate edition. The Anglo-Irish writer James Stern (1904-1993) was born in Ireland to the scion of a wealthy banking family and was educated at Eton College and the Royal Military College Sandhurst. After working at the family’s banks in London and Frankfurt, the profound antipathy to banking that the experience engendered caused him to move to Paris in order to write. The publication of The Heartless Land (a collection of stories) in 1932 established him as a writer and in 1935 Stern married the German physical therapist and writer Tania Kurella, with whom he would undertake a number of English translations of works by Franz Kafka, Berthold Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig. Something Wrong, a second collection of stories, was published in 1938, and the following year the Sterns left Europe for New York. After World War II Stern published The Hidden Damage (1947, an account of his work studying the effects of Allied bombing on Germany) and The Man who was Loved (1951), his third collection of stories, before returning to England, where he and Tania settled at Hatch Manor in Wiltshire. ¶¶

James Joyce: A First Impression recounts a visit to the Joyce family home at rue Galilée in autumn 1934, while Stern was living in Paris. The visit was organised by the American author Robert McAlmon (a friend and collaborator of Joyce’s), who ‘looked upon Joyce not as a scholar or man of letters, but as a human being, a companion with whom, when the daylight over the city had begun to fade, he would sometimes start to celebrate – celebrations that [m]ight continue until or after the dawning of another day’ (p. 95). McAlmon knew of Stern’s admiration for Ulysses and its author, and, although Stern resisted his friend’s repeated suggestions that they should meet, McAlmon arranged a visit to the Joyce household with Stern and the American artist and colour theorist Hilaire Hiler. Despite Stern’s trepidation – ‘What, I kept wondering, could the author of Ulysses find to say to me, or I to him, over a cup of tea in the middle of a gloomy autumn afternoon?’ (p. 96) – Joyce welcomed the group into his apartment. In the sitting-room Stern noticed but one book on the grand piano: ‘The volume was large, of many pages, and clearly new, possibly unopened. Joyce leaned over it, touched it with his long fingers, lifted it as though it were beyond price, then laid it down. “Is that the American edition?” asked [McAlmon], getting up. Joyce said nothing, simply turned and handed the book to his friend with the faintest, merely perceptible sign of a smile’ (p. 98). ¶¶

McAlmon had told Joyce that Stern had been born in Ireland, and Joyce (who had left Ireland, never to return, in 1912 after the sheets of the first edition of Dubliners had been burned by the printer), quizzed Stern closely about his birthplace in County Meath and members of the local families, including one ‘Sir Francis F.’ (p. 99; in the present copy, Stern has apparently identified this person with a manuscript footnote ‘Dunsany’). Stern’s anecdotes of ‘Sir Francis F.’ both amused and entertained Joyce greatly, and were only interrupted by Norah Joyce – ‘tall, grey-haired, dignified’ (p. 101) – calling away her husband for a fitting with his tailor. While the fitting took place, Joyce’s visitors ‘thumbed through the American edition of Ulysses (Joyce pronounced the word “Oulyssays”)’ (pp. 101-102). ¶¶

Stern’s memoir of Joyce was first published in Marvin Magalaner (ed.), A Joyce Miscellany, Second Series (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959), and this first separate edition is an offprint from that volume, titled on the upper wrapper ‘Reprinted from / A Joyce Miscellany / Second Series / Edited by Marvin Magalaner’. This separate edition retains the volume’s original pagination and was apparently printed from the same type (the erroneous ‘night’ for ‘might’ at l. 23 of p. 95 is present in both the volume and offprint issues). It was later published in the periodicals The Listener (28 September 1961) and The Irish Digest (December 1961). ¶¶

This copy was inscribed by Stern to the bookseller, bibliographer, and writer Alan G. Thomas and his wife Ella, and Stern has also annotated the text with a second pen, adding a footnote on p. 99. After Alan G. Thomas’s death it was included in the sale of his private library by Sotheby’s, as part of lot 285 which contained twelve items. The lot was purchased by the antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros, and at least four of the items from the lot were later in the library of the noted bibliophile and collector Stephen Keynes, who was a member of the Roxburghe Club and a fellow of the Linnean Society. Since this offprint retains the Sotheby’s lot ticket (as did other items from the lot in Keynes’s collection), it is possible that it was bought on his behalf by Maggs. ¶¶

R.H. Deming, A Bibliography of James Joyce Studies. Second Edition, 591 (the individual contribution to A Joyce Miscellany, Second Series); T.J. Rice, James Joyce: A Guide to Research, F144 (the individual contribution to A Joyce Miscellany, Second Series). ¶¶¶