A Wide Circle of Helpers: The Odyssey of ULYSSES at the Sunwise Turn bookshop
In 2009 a pristine first edition copy of Ulysses by James Joyce sold at the Antiquarian book fair at Olympia, West London for £275,000. It was a record-setting sale — the highest price on record for a 20th century first edition.
The appeal of this particular copy, number 45 of the first 100 signed copies printed on Dutch handmade paper, was not only the fact of it being a remarkably well-preserved example of a rare and relatively fragile collector’s item. The book had a double-provenance of sorts — it was originally purchased from a legendary New York bookshop called The Sunwise Turn, and the shop’s small bookseller’s label still adorned the inner back cover. The Guardian reported the record-breaking sale on June 4, remarking both on the rarity and remarkably crisp condition of the book as well as the atmosphere of the shop where it was originally procured:
The dealer who made the sale, Pom Harrington, said the book was one of only four copies of that first edition print run, all signed by Joyce, which had been unaccounted for.
“In terms of collectability, Ulysses is considered to be the number one 20th-century book. This is such a find and it is in such fabulous, pristine condition. […]
This copy was sold at the subversive Manhattan bookshop Sunwise Turn, an eclectic shop where patrons could also pick up Peruvian fabrics or the mystic teachings of Gurdjieff. It was bought by a Mrs Hewitt Morgan and then passed down the family, stored in its original box, unopened and away from the light.”[1]
The strikingly designed Sunwise Turn bookseller’s sticker was considered so much a part of the appeal of this particular example of the literary classic that the sticker was reproduced and applied to the front and back inner covers of a batch of hand-customized copies of the 2009 Dover Books facsimile edition. Aside from offering a faithful reprint of the original 1922 cover design and text (as it was set prior to years of extensive author’s and editor’s revisions), the enterprising private seller had the clever idea to present the book as much as possible in context — complete with a reproduction blue paper “wrap,” the labels were a splendid graphic device to telegraph the excitement that must have accompanied the purchasing experience of 1922.
Clearly the shop in which the book was sold, when it was still a contraband item, illegal to send through the mail and hidden below the counter, was an important aspect of its story — how it came to be that “Mrs. Hewitt Morgan” was connected with James Joyce’s supposedly irredeemably obscene and subversive tome, and more generally how a book “as illegal as gin” was successfully distributed, if haphazardly, to the literary and artistic elites who frequented salon-bookshops such as The Sunwise Turn.
The respective backgrounds of The Sunwise Turn bookshop and its primary proprietor, Mary Mowbray-Clarke, and the experimental novel Ulysses and its author, James Joyce, make it seem almost fated, if not inevitable, that they would become enmeshed in the same story. Mary Mowbray-Clarke was born in the United States in 1874, the daughter of Scotch-Irish immigrants who, while not as wealthy or connected as many of those in the social circles she came to inhabit in her adulthood, encouraged their daughter’s wide-ranging interest in literature and the arts. The family’s eldest son, Stephen Horgan, twenty years Mary’s senior, had established himself as a photographer and is remembered by history as the inventor of the half-tone printing process. As a young girl Mary fell in love with the work of William Morris — both aesthetically and politically. She was an ardent and lifelong socialist and became adept at pen and ink illustration, attending classes at the Art Students’ League of New York beginning in 1890 when she was only 16 years old, through 1897. She was rare among the women alumnae of the League to find work as a commercial illustrator, turning out sketches of warships during the Spanish-American war for the Boston Herald, signed “M.H.B. Horgan.” During the early 20th century Mary organized art exhibits under the auspices of the “Art Workers’ Club for Women” while she taught at elite finishing schools for women in New York, where many of her students would become her lifelong friends and devotees, and, in ensuing decades, loyal volunteers and supporters of The Sunwise Turn.
In 1904 she was introduced to British-born sculptor John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke through some of her art-patron friends, who had commissioned him to create medallion portraits. The two bonded over shared interests in socialist and anarchist political theory and were married in 1908, settling at a rural retreat they called “The Brocken” when they were away from their studio in the City. Mary had an inclination to build communities by connecting people she found interesting to one another, and she introduced her husband to many of her artist friends, leading to his involvement in the organizing of the 1913 Armory Show, which is generally acknowledged as having introduced Modernist art-forms to the United States on a mass scale. The couple, along with Mary’s old League friend (and rumored lover) Arthur B. Davies, one of the primary organizers of the exhibit, would meet at the Brocken to draw up and revise the constitution for the “revolutionary” Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), the group responsible for the epoch-changing event.
All of the members of the AAPS were men, but many of the people responsible for funding the exhibit or working “behind the curtain” were women — one of the very first financial backers, for example, was one of Mary’s friends and former students, Alice Lewisohn. While some of these women’s contributions were acknowledged to various degrees at the time or in years to come, they largely worked in the shadows. Mary was a representative example of this — she coaxed her skeptical husband to get involved, and he became the Vice President of the AAPS, holding that title throughout the slow, anticlimactic dissolution of the group (they never mounted another exhibit or did much of anything aside from sell some leftover Armory Show postcards, really) during 1914–1920. Mary had several business partners over the course of the eleven year history of the bookshop, but the first and most well-remembered was Madge Jenison, a Chicago-born novelist and author of short stories who wrote a memoir based around her adventures in the shop in 1923, several years after she’d surrendered her stocks and left the venture in Mary’s hands.
Madge Jenison was a visitor to the Brocken as early 1908, and Mary and her husband were instrumental in convincing her to move East where she found work writing magazine articles that paid, although Mary found this work trite and believed Madge was underselling her potential for writing a timeless world-class novel. Madge had a background in the literary and theatre world — she had connections to the Chicago Little Theatre and the world of craft-puppetry, but not so much to the world of the visual arts. In this sense Mary and Madge made ideal partners for a shop that was to encompass the range of human expression. Despite the fact that they had some bitter fights regarding the “direction” of the shop, payment of back wages, and sundry details related to their business partnership, Mary and Madge remained lifelong friends, corresponding regularly into the 1960s. Part of their tension revolved around the fact that The Sunwise Turn was only partly a “literary” undertaking, in spite of being a bookshop.
It was a venture that included essentially the exact same cast of characters as those involved in the organizing of the Armory Show — Arthur B. Davies was one the shop’s most loyal and reliable customers — but this time the women were at the fore. The initial stockholders, with a lone exception, were all women, and several were involved in the funding/planning of the Armory Show. Armory Show artists were enlisted to decorate the shop in the proto-psychedelic synesthetic/Theosophic fashion of the era, which they helped popularize, where colors were meant to invoke not only musical chords or dance postures, but also to hypnotize browsers into buying — orange, it was said, was the “selling color.” The interior decoration scheme featured a blazing orange with a rainbow effect woven throughout the woodwork. It was hoped that the shop would include a garden out back which would showcase the work of sculptors. The shop hosted musical performances and author’s readings, hosting, among others, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, and Lola Ridge. The artistic career of Charles Burchfield was inaugurated when a series of his watercolors were displayed on the walls of the shop in 1916, and Mary became his de facto “manager,” hectoring “important” people to look at his work. Within the first year of operation, the shop branched out into publishing. Though the initial foray into publishing, which began with a series of five broadsides pairing a poet with an artist, was Madge Jenison’s idea, Mary took over from that point. With the exception of a series of further broadsides railing against capital punishment, publishing was Mary’s department. Sunwise Turn published almost a dozen books, spanning 1916–1923, including a monograph of Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke, a satirical book of illustrated poems by Witter Bynner, and Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Dance of Siva, which has remained in print continuously. Modernism had arrived in bookshop form.
The shop specialized in collectible high-priced books, specializing in both antique items and limited edition hand-bound works. They hoped to rely not on “mass sales” but on a sort of subscription model where fifty patrons would buy $500 annually. In reality the business model as such was not workable, but they relied on their well-connected and often wealthy social circles to buoy them along, with many instances where it seemed certain the shop couldn’t possibly survive. This didn’t prevent them from exploring every avenue they could imagine to promote the aesthetics and ideals dear to them, which tended toward the “anti-commercial bent.” They had their own in-store bindery, and they showcased artwork and textiles by their wide-ranging coterie of friends and fellow-travelers, with the place usually bedecked in batik textile hangings, representing the cutting edge in arts and crafts production at the time. Most reviews of the shop were enthusiastic, describing the independent spirit of “bookselling as a new profession for women” and their tastemaking influence. Women began opening bookshops inspired by Sunwise Turn all around the country, especially after Madge Jenison’s book was published. One in Reno NV was even named “The Likewise Turn,” referencing an in-joke among the Sunwise Turn staff!
Not every review was positive, of course, and the cynic’s view says much about how the shop was perceived among those not in the know in respect to the latest developments in art and literature:
There they are simply quiet and awfully Batik. Another art shop for art’s sake where the returns more than justify us in being artistic. “See this Batik dress, isn’t it expressive, why won’t people dress like that all the time?” Nobody but a Bahaist or a Rosicrucionist or a Greenacre disciple would be seen dead in it. Then there are books, lots of nice books by nice people and bought by nice people.
The room is decorated in the scheme of a musical chord. A rope would be more appropriate for those who are responsible for its decoration.[2]
In her notes for a lecture presented to a “class for Booksellers in the Public Library, January 27th. 1922” Mary Mowbray-Clarke offers a succinct statement summing up the mission of The Sunwise Turn and their attitude toward profitability –
We are a “Modern Book-Shop” because we conceive the term “modern” to apply to the 20th Century consciousness of all the factors in life itself — even those self-conscious ones the psychoanalyst is unearthing for us — and we believe that our own selling of books is our way of searching for those factors. We find them everywhere. We take them “off of” the Tammany politician who often surprisingly enough reads widely and intelligently, the jejune young anarchist just out of jail, the morose Scandanavian editor, the most sensitive of Italian diplomats, the burly English novelist, or the American writer of Middle Western stories. We follow every lead that connects with our work. […] “But do you make any money?” ask all the business friends, who think everything we do a little foolish […] “No, we do not,” we have to answer. We make everything but money.[3]
Bookshops with similar models sprang up not only in the US — the “likewise turn” was also taking place overseas, and Paris was a prime location for a place that was ostensibly a bookshop but was really a difficult to define barely-monetized hub of social activity centered around the arts.
American expatriate Sylvia Beach opened a bookshop called “Shakespeare and Company” in Paris in November 1919. Unlike Mary Mowbray-Clarke, whose family was generally skeptical at best of her forays beyond the world of the church (her father died during her first year at school, her mother apparently refused to attend her wedding which was presided over by liberal Presbyterian minister Henry Sloane Coffin, and her brother Stephen mocked the “modern art movement” in a magazine article obviously aimed at his younger sister) Sylvia’s family was supportive and well-to-do enough to help support some of her wilder ambitions. She’d originally intended to open a bookshop in London but when she found herself in Paris she famously telegrammed her mother: “Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money.”
Shakespeare and Company quickly became a Parisian analogue to The Sunwise Turn. Of course it had its own flavor, its own clientele, but the social circles were strikingly similar. The shop operated a lending library by paid subscription, an idea borrowed from Beach’s partner Adrienne Monnier who had herself opened a bookshop in 1915 — directly across the street from Beach’s shop, incidentally. The Sunwise Turn expanded on the concept in 1916, offering a sort of independent research service in which the shop would locate books on a topic provided by the customer, and a service for “building” customized libraries, which they did for several high-profile companies and individuals. Aside from the lending library idea, Shakespeare and Company also shared in common with Sunwise Turn the fact that they made anything but money — in fact, in 1921, the shop’s profit margin was significantly lower than that of Sunwise Turn, clearing just $100. But, just as at Sunwise Turn, it was a place for the exchange of ideas, for patrons to meet artists, and a cultural hub. Both shops featured author’s readings and displayed artwork. Sylvia Beach operated a maildrop at the shop, and there were some authors for whom it was their only stable address. The amount of mail was such that she employed a pigeonhole box for alphabetical sorting.
Ezra Pound had convinced James Joyce to make the move to Paris in the summer of 1920. Joyce’s health was wavering as he was afflicted with encroaching syphilis-induced loss of vision, for which he would endure horrific surgeries sans anesthesia and treatments in which leeches were placed around his eyes. He’d just completed the fourteenth installment of what would become Ulysses when Sylvia Beach was introduced to him at a dinner party arranged by Pound. She took a liking to him, with his imposing reputation as an author softened by his appearing shy and vulnerable. Joyce described his eye surgeries and his wife Nora Barnacle explained that he refused to dictate his writing, holding scraps of paper close to his eyes as he strained to compose Ulysses, which was growing into a tangled morass of notes and scribbled revisions that would consume the author — and his readers — for lifetimes.
Mary Mowbray-Clarke never met James Joyce. The extant material record doesn’t record so much as a postcard exchanged between the two. But their lives were intertwined in many ways long before The Sunwise Turn would become the sixth largest buyer of the first edition of Ulysses, and one of the first to distribute the book in the US. Their shared social circles notwithstanding, Joyce and Mowbray-Clarke had a shared provenance in William Morris. To whatever unknowable extent their common interest in socialist/anarchist political theory, seen as bound together with the creative imagination, was formed under the influence of Morris. Mary spills many words about her near-idolization of Morris in her own autobiographic writings. She wrote to Charles Burchfield in 1922 that I have always had the greatest hero, William Morris. In the one called “The Well at the World’s End” he has the symbolic handling of life’s quest for understanding.[4] This was in the context of Burchfield’s impending marriage and the fact that Mary had used a quote from this book for both a bookplate design and a plaque memorializing her marriage, designed by her husband-to-be. In Stephen Hero, an early draft of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce describes the titular character as being “at once captivated by the seeming eccentricities of the prose of Freeman and William Morris. He read them as one would read a thesaurus and made a garner of words.”[5]
Aside from any shared intellectual influences, there were personal connections. Irish literary revival author Padraic Colum was one of the first authors published by the Sunwise Turn’s small press, when one of his short poems was paired with a drawing by Mary’s friend Herbert Crowley in their broadside series. Crowley was an ever-adrift British-born artist, cartoonist and opera singer who had settled at the Brocken in 1908 along with Mary, her husband John and their new baby Bothwell, whom Crowley playfully nicknamed “Bumper.” The Mowbray-Clarkes felt crowded by Crowley, and helped him in building a small one-room shack on the property which was called “The Timp.” Padraic and his wife Mary (aka Molly), also an author, journalist and critic, were among the artists and authors who took up residence at The Timp after Herbert Crowley had vacated sometime around 1914. Padraic Colum wrote several books there, including a children’s book published in 1918 called The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said. He was in the habit of reading his newly composed chapters to ten year old Bumper Mowbray-Clarke, sitting on a big rock among the trees, and the book bears the dedication facing the title page: “To the Boy in the Brocken.” Lest there be any doubt as to Padraic and Mary Colum’s connection to James Joyce, they co-authored a book published in 1958 by Doubelday titled Our Friend James Joyce, which concerned, as the title states, their friend James Joyce. In it Padraic Colum, who had known Joyce since the early 1900s, describes how he introduced Joyce to Ezra Pound, who helped propel his literary career. Molly describes Joyce writing to the couple, desperate for money, during the time they were resident at The Timp in 1919. She writes that despite the fact that “My husband and I had no talent for raising money” her reading Joyce’s letter aloud to Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial, helped raise money for “the Joyce fund.” Joyce mentioned this in a letter of June 19: “Colum writes to me from New York that a sympathy movement for me has begun there and they are cabling me 11,000 francs in support of my ease and project.”[6] When Ulysses was finally published, Molly recalled that “My review was one of three that came out in America that Joyce liked.”[7] Padraic Colum was later invited to write an introduction to the Anna Livia Plurabelle volume of “Work in Progress” (Finnegans Wake). Joyce paid tribute to Padraic Colum and Shakespeare & Co. by weaving them into the text of Ulysses itself, as it was being serialized prior to publication in book form. The Sunwise Turn also gets a mention, if not the shop then at least the folk belief. In Episode IX, which was serialized in two parts in the April and May 1919 editions of Little Review, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter-ego, says “I like Colum’s Drover. Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. […] Yeats admired his line: As in wild earth a Grecian vase.” A passing reference is made to “Shakespeare and company, limited” in the second part of the episode. Episode XIV, the final installment to be serialized in the Little Review, in the Sept.- Dec. 1920 issue, begins with a chant: Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshile Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.This is disambiguated in a book of collected annotations to Ulysses: “ ‘Deshil’ after the Irish deasil, deisiol: turning to the right, clockwise, sunwise; a ritual gesture to attract good fortune, and an act of consecration when repeated three times.” [7b]
These are only a few of the more obvious connections between Joyce and Mary Mowbray-Clarke/The Sunwise Turn which existed prior to the publication of Ulysses. The long and tortured path leading to that publication would draw the strands tighter together, beginning with Ulysses in its in-progress form, as it was originally published in serialized fashion in a small-press independent magazine called Little Review, copies of which were, of course, available for sale at The Sunwise Turn. The publishers, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were at the center of an infamous trial, facing jail time for serializing Ulysses after a copy of Little Review had been purchased by an agent for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice at New York’s Washington Square Bookshop in April 1920. The “lesbian radicals” Anderson and Heap had drawn the attention and ire of the vice squad in earlier years for daring to publish explicitly anti-war material during WWI, and for their support of anarchist and socialist politics in the magazine. Anderson later had some falling out with the politically radical set after she concluded that their understanding of the arts was shallow, but she gave much space to radical activists such as Emma Goldman in the pages of Little Review. It bears mentioning that prior to Joyce’s inclusion in their pages, three issues of Little Review dating from 1919 and 1920 were destroyed by postal authorities or barred from being sent through the mail. The magazine was already on the censor’s watchlist when episodes of Ulysses began to appear in its pages. James Joyce, never an overtly political writer, was nevertheless sympathetic with the anarchist cause, and referred to himself as an anarchist as early as 1907. So while the actual content of Ulysses was surely as baffling to the vice agents as it was to most, it became a sort of bogeyman to sink the ship of radicalism generally, whether “avant-garde,” political, or both at once.
The Sunwise Turn bookshop was swimming in the exact same dangerous waters. While they would claim to be “neutral” agents simply disseminating information to any who wanted it, Mary and Madge were clearly on the “radical” side of the line, socialists who were sympathetic to at least philosophical anarchism. They weren’t complete radicals in every sense; both were horrified by the excesses of the Dada movement, for example, but they certainly were far afield of what would be considered passable in the eyes of the vice squad. Mary was brazenly outspoken against the war, for its duration and afterward, and the shop’s anti capital punishment broadsides would have marked them as suspect. Theodore Dreiser inaugurated the shop’s series of author’s readings, on April 30 1916. Dreiser was well known for espousing a socialist political viewpoint, and was a target of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, with his novel The Genius being essentially forced off the market by the NYSSV. Madge Jenison had known Dreiser from her time in Chicago and wrote that I fought Dreiser’s battles long before he became the figure of American letters […][8] Jenison also wrote in her memoir of one clear instance of the shop skirting legal trouble, as they were selling copies of a controversial book, “The Sexual Question” by Auguste Forel. Her description gives a good sense of the shop’s reputation, and their philosophy regarding contraband books:
People used to warn us that we would ruin our shop with our “principles.” […] A silly school teacher […] even put the government to the expense of opening our mail for two weeks. We often heard that we were the most dangerous headquarters of socialist ideas in the country and a center of dangerous British propaganda. […]
When the shop opened we began to sell Forel. We believed that everybody ought to read Forel and then stop fussing. During the summer Mr. Rebman, the publisher, was taken into Court by the Society for the Suppression of Vice for publishing the two dollar and a half edition. […] We had a bad half-hour when Mr. Rebman came in to tell us that he was indicted. We were then three weeks old. A twenty-five hundred dollar lawsuit and weeks of preparation, attendance in Court, and crude publicity, would have been suicidal to us in those breathless first weeks. We went out to luncheon, talked it over, washed our faces, and decided that as long as it was available, we would sell Forel. […] For weeks when anyone bought Forel I expected to see a special deputy’s badge flashed into my eyes from under a lapel, but it never was. When Mr. Rebman asked me to testify for him as a witness, I accepted with all the alacrity of the heroine asked to step forward and receive a necklace in a box, only to wait for six hours in the anteroom of the Star Chamber and be told that the case had been thrown out on its merits.[9]
Madge Jenison describes the threat of legal danger with her typical plucky spirit — it was another romance of the small bookshop;
There is nothing more wildly romantic than being dangerous, and we bore ourselves proudly after those reports came in […].[10]
Being romantically dangerous of course did come with some tinge of actual danger, and Madge mentions Mary’s Finch School devotee and life-long friend Alice Lewisohn offering to help them get a lawyer if they were to land in court. It’s not mentioned what lawyer she had in mind, but among the many points in the web of connections around Joyce and the Sunwise Turn was firebrand lawyer and collector John Quinn. Quinn was an important source of support for both artistic and literary figures at the time, and of those in the Sunwise Turn orbit, he maintained regular correspondence with Padraic and Molly Colum and Ananda Coomaraswamy. His introduction to Mary Mowbray-Clarke would have been in 1912 when he had served as the de facto lawyer for the Armory Show, lobbying to have a tariff repealed which made the importation of the foreign works so crucial to the show difficult. Quinn did succeed in defeating the tariff, though not in time for the Armoy Show’s purposes. He had a reputation in avant-garde artistic circles as a brilliant go-to legal expert whenever issues of censorship or other problems arose. While he was known for defending “radicals” in the realm of art and literature, Quinn differed sharply from Mary Mowbray-Clarke in his vehement support of the war. When Mary attempted to enlist his aid in putting “Sunwise Turn libraries” in military camps, his response was cool at best, probably owing to the fact that he objected to the planned inclusion of books critical of the war. Mary remembered Quinn during a visit to The Brocken as
[…] pounding the table & saying he’d tell any lie to get a man to enlist. Angry with us for putting Bertrand Russell’s “Why Men Fight” at Plattsburg.[11]
Despite these differences, Quinn had much common ground with Mary and Sunwiwse Turn. He was a loyal and regular customer and consigner at Sunwise Turn, harboring some at least temporary resentment of Mary after her apparent mis-handling of some Vorticist artworks he’d placed on commission at the shop in 1919. Quinn represented Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in court in the 1921 case of “The People of the State of New York v. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap,” following their arrest for the continued publication of episodes of Ulysses in Little Review.
Quinn mounted an erudite and clever defense, but savvy as he was, he couldn’t manage to sway the court. The publishers were found guilty of violating aspects of the 1873 Comstock Act, the namesake law of Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. They were ordered to cease publication of Ulysses in Little Review, and, in a sentence the judge described as “very lenient,” were offered either 10 days in jail or the payment of a $100 fine. They managed to avoid jail time when a wealthy sympathizer named Joanna Fortune, present in the courtroom, offered to pay the fine. Margaret Anderson indignantly insisted on turning the fingerprinting process into an ordeal, demanding that she be brought towels, soap and a nailbrush lest the ink spoil her fingers. Nevertheless, she was disheartened; the Little Review’s motto “Making no Compromise with the Public Taste” was summarily removed from the magazine’s cover.
The publishing prospects for Ulysses at this point seemed grim; how to publish a book for which there was certainly interest, but which was illegal to send through the mail? Joyce had labored on the book obsessively for years, thousands of hours, making reams of corrections in the text by hand, even as his eyesight was failing. The dense text takes on a multitude of voices and styles, offering layer upon layer of meaning with repeated readings, inviting readers to “study” rather than to read in the style of a “novel.” Even among those who found it incomprehensible, it could be fascinating… and yet another part of its appeal was that it was a book with a wide reputation that very few people had a chance to actually read.
Mary Mowbray-Clarke’s old friend Alice Lewisohn visited Joyce in Paris in 1924 prior to her small theatre, Neighborhood Playhouse, staging a production of his play Exiles. Lewisohn’s meeting with Joyce, as described in her memoir, gives some insight into his creative approach, and her own impressions of Ulysses;
He received me cordially with unfeigned surprise that his one and only play was to be produced in New York. Immediately, I confided my reactions to the play and asked him if he had intended to indicate the two men as different aspects of one man.[12]
Here Alice Lewisohn is offering Joyce a rather Jungian interpretation of the story — Alice, who had married Mary’s friend Herbert Crowley in 1924, had become a devoted Jungian and moved to Zurich to be part of Jung’s inner circle. Jung claimed he was repeatedly asked to assess Ulysses, and its author, from a psychological angle. Jung initially found the book tedious, but also rewarding and a positively brilliant and hellish monster-birth.[13] He further refined his opinion as he read, going as far as to call it “a spiritual exercise, and ascetic discipline” in which “the homunculus of a new, universal consciousness is distilled.”[14] As for Joyce, whose daughter Lucia would in fact be treated by Jung for schizophrenia in the 1930s, he sounds a bit cynical about psychoanalysis when he writes, in June 1921 that
A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad, and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr. Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.[15]
This helps contextualize Joyce’s reaction to Alice Lewisohn’s reading of Exiles:
He admitted that the idea had never occurred to him, but it was quite possible and an interesting angle. “But,” he continued, “the artist is not concerned with the interpretation of his work.”
Alice writes of Joyce being “imprisoned in partial darkness” — I asked myself if that was a provision of nature to hold him to those depths out of which his imagery grew? […] I wondered if Ulysses were not a form of whale from which, through the grace of his creative spirit, he might ultimately be disgorged. [16]
The notion that Joyce’s failing eyesight may be some “provision of nature” for the creation of Ulysses is obviously unmoored from reality; the real life issue preventing Joyce from being disgorged from this all-consuming work involved a very simple but perplexing issue: how to find anyone willing to somehow publish Ulysses.
Sylvia Beach knew exactly how important becoming the person to take on this task would be from the very moment it became available as a possibility. In the drafts and final version of her memoir she offers several varying accounts of how she and Shakespeare and Company came to be the publishers of the infamous first edition. It’s clear that she understood that the event would be part of literary legend, and wanted to craft the most compelling version. One day Joyce simply suggested it to her, or she suggested it to him, depending on which version of her account you read:
Joyce discussed the situation with me. Feeling as I did, that Ulysses was the most important and the most beautiful English work of my time, […] I accepted with enthusiasm Joyce’s suggestion that I publish his book. […] Now I had never imagined Shakespeare and Co. would be publishers of anything […] What I took in daily was barely sufficient to cover birdseed — and if my good sister Holly had not kept up her old habit of helping me out every month from her hard-earned salary, and there had not been cheques from my kind cousins in Overbrook […] I could never have kept the business afloat.[17]
In another version Joyce sounds defeated as he tells her “I’m afraid you’ll have to do it, Miss Beach.”[18]
Finally, on a fifth revision, she begins to settle into what would become the final version:
When Joyce came to tell me the sad news of The Little Review he was in utter despair. I asked him if he would let me have the honor of publishing Ulysses in France. He accepted at once […] So now, without a penny or any previous experience in publishing I was undertaking to bring out this great book Ulysses. And moreover, I didn’t doubt that I would succeed in doing it.[19] In the published version Joyce accepts the offer “immediately and joyfully.”[20]
Regardless of the order of events, what is clear is that James Joyce and Sylvia Beach arrived at a mutual realization that they needed each other in this moment. Their relationship was to be a bit one-sided, with the greater amount of power on Joyce’s side. Beach was eventually left furious, feeling used, when Joyce thoughtlessly abandoned their contract, but for the time being both parties were captive to circumstance. Joyce had found not only someone willing to take the risk of publishing Ulysses, but someone with enthusiasm for the monumental task. As for Sylvia Beach she correctly gauged an opportunity to make a permanent mark for herself and her bookshop. She wrote to her mother excitedly that soon you may hear of us as regular Publishers and of the most important book of the age . . . shhhhhh . . . it’s a secret, all to be revealed to you in my next letter and it’s going to make us famous rah rah![21]
Sylvia Beach borrowed an idea from John Quinn of publishing the book as a “private edition” offered to advance subscribers. In this way she hoped to circumvent the censors, but the book would still be considered contraband if sent through the mail. Copies would also be expensive — this was the furthest thing from a “trade edition,” and it’s certain that many, if not most, who subscribed for this pricey limited and illegal run did so not only as readers but as investors. The cheapest edition was 150 francs, $12, and a run of 150 copies on Dutch handmade paper would be 250 francs — $20. A limited set of 100 signed copies was planned at 350 francs, roughly $28. Adjusted for inflation this would be approximately $450 in “2021 dollars.” The book was an instant collectible, and its status in literary history was already assured at least by the tumultuous pre-history of its publication. Curiosity and expectations were high, and Joyce had a loyal readership. Much has been made of the book as a collectible object, but it should be remembered there were many — maybe the majority of purchasers, even, who were willing to pay the steep price of admission just to read it.
It’s not a shock that someone in Sylvia Beach’s position would have jumped at the chance to publish the book, or that she would have jumped at the chance to propose it to Joyce — even if it ended in disaster, her fame and that of her bookshop — if it survived — would be assured. But once committed, she faced the daunting task of navigating and creating avenues of distribution. For copies sent to America, smugglers would need to enlisted, as the postal service was one node of potential seizure and loss of precious books. She knew the project could sink her financially, especially if the bulk orders sent to bookshops were destroyed. The bookshops, in turn, knew there was some risk involved, but those that traded on a reputation for catering to collectors and intellectuals knew it was crucial to offer Ulysses. Unsurprisingly Beach received “subscriptions” from a veritable “who’s-who” of the artistic and literary scene of the era. Copies were also ordered by out-of-the-way bookshops well off the grid of the haunts of the “avant-garde,” proving there was some interest in the book even outside of centers of “high literature.”
In a letter of March 30, 1922, John Quinn advises Sylvia Beach on the wisest approach to enlisting the aid of a potential smuggler, a publisher named Mitchell Kennerly whom he’d defended against obscenity charges in 1913. Kennerly knew a ship captain who may be willing to cooperate with the scheme, but Beach would need to heed his advice carefully. Quinn ensures her that if the books are confiscated, it will likely be the smuggler who will take the fall. His tone is dripping with condescension as he tells Beach of this particular “distributor,” and how to deal with this person, noting that
I told you last summer, as you will recall, that your chief problem would be to get someone to act as your American agent. But that advice was free advice and therefore you probably did not follow it. I find that people generally, perhaps women a little more generally than men, follow medical and legal advice only if they are made to pay for it […] It is a business transaction […] There is no poetry in it.
The task would require “about the same amount of attention to details that would be involved, I should say, in having a dress fitted and made.”[22]
While methods of distribution were still being improvised, orders poured into Shakespeare and Company. Of course John Quinn ordered in an amount rivaling bookshops — 14 copies. The largest order was for 25 copies, from Washington Square Bookshop, the same shop whose owner had been arrested by the Society for the Suppression of Vice for distributing Little Review. Initially they had ordered five copies, in June 1921, but had increased the order. Interest was growing.
The Sunwise Turn sent their order for eighteen copies on February 8. It was accompanied by a warm note of solidarity from Mary Mowbray-Clarke:
My dear Miss Sylvia Beach,
I think we know you and you know us. I hear you have a nice little book-shop in Paris and I am giving the address to friends living there.
Meanwhile I enclose an order for copies of Ulysses. I hope you will allow us a discount on the books. We thought of publishing it here but didn’t have the money.
Should you be undersubscribed let us know.
Hoping for your best success,
Very cordially yours,
Mary Mowbray-Clarke
Pres.[23]
The letter was accompanied by a draft in the amount of 3,040 francs — a staggering amount of money for a bookshop whose profits were, as Sylvia Beach had described her own shop, “barely sufficient to cover birdseed.”
Bookshops, and especially ones who had boldly put up large sums of money in anticipation of receipt of the books, clearly knew there was a risk that the books would be seized and destroyed at the port, or that the proprietors would face fines or imprisonment. A period of anxious anticipation was followed by a test of patience. By March 16 Washington Square Bookshop was still waiting for copies to arrive. The book was being scandalously reviewed and copies were spotted in other New York locations — the distribution was, predictably, a quagmire. Worse, Sylvia Beach seems to have been very reticent in answering the panicked letters inquiring as to the whereabouts of books. A letter from Washington Square to Beach from March 16 sets the tone:
We sent you half payment on February 27 and cabled you on that day. We are anxiously awaiting for word from you as to your arrangements etc. for shipping and are expecting some books daily.[24]
Among the succession of business partners in Sunwise Turn after the departure of Madge Jenison in 1919 was Ruth McCall, who was elected Vice President in February 1921. McCall had a background in landscape architecture and was described as a “writer of note” although examples of her writing seem hard to come by. She shared in common with most of the women who were stock-holders and board members of Sunwise Turn, Inc. the fact of being “well placed” — she was the daughter of former Massachusetts Governor Samuel McCall. She was 37 in 1922 and “living at the new Smith Clubhouse on Stuyvesant Square.”[25] She shared in common with Madge Jenison a life-long friendship with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who wrote in her diary of July 27 1922 of receiving “a letter from Governor McCall asking me to make Ruth stay two weeks longer and would I telegraph.”[26] After a tumultuous period following Madge Jenison’s departure, McCall seems to have been a steady working partner, from all indications organized and reliable. This may be why she was tasked with articulating the Sunwise Turn’s fears and misgivings in regards to Ulysses in a letter to Sylvia Beach dated May 3. The tone is a shade more disconcerted than that of the Washington Square Bookshop, though still cordial:
Gentlemen:
On receiving information from you that James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was ready we sent, on February 8th, a draft payable to your order, for three thousand & forty francs. As yet we have neither received from you an acknowledgment of its receipt nor have the books come. We are rather disturbed. Will you kindly let us know as soon as possible when you shipped the books and in what manner. If they have not yet been sent I think that it would be wiser to ship them in very small lots at different times but please do send them as soon as possible. But if it is impossible to send them please refund. In any case please do let us understand the situation.
McCall then signs off, but adds an interesting postscript, a list of individuals — all women — who would be willing to act as middlemen for the receipt of these illicit books;
If it is better to send them to private individuals you could send several lots to the following:
MISS SHIRLEY PINSKI 57 East 115th St. New York City U.S.A.
MISS EDITH WILLARD, ELMWOOD FARM, LEXINGTON, MASSACUSETS. U.S.A.
MRS. J. KRAUZ, 1068 TELLER AVE. THE BRONX, NEW YORK. U.S.A.[27]
There’s no evidence that Sylvia Beach took advantage of this offer, but it’s an intriguing peek into the networks that were spontaneously being woven. There’s even a name (Genevieve Robinson, as best I could tell) that McCall struck through with her typewriter –“xxxxxxxxxxxx” — as if the woman in question had second thoughts as her address was being transcribed in the letter.
By late July, The Sunwise Turn was collectively running out of patience — some copies of Ulysses had arrived in New York, but Beach hadn’t yet worked out a reliable distribution system. For whatever reason Quinn’s friend didn’t end up being enlisted, and by August subscribers in New York were still waiting for the majority of shipments. Beach had been receiving irate letters since April. Mary Mowbray-Clarke sent a letter on July 22 which lacked any hint of the cordial tone in Ruth McCall’s earlier, pleading letter:
We cannot in any way of looking at it understand your treatment of us in regard to Ulysses. We must have been as early on the subscription list as most. Immediately in the early spring upon receipt of your announcement that the book was nearly ready we sent a draft for $300.00. We have since written twice and cabled once, yet never in any form has come word from you to us and no sign of a copy of the book. It has been such a difficult year here that the outlay counted considerably and surely one small book-shop should have some fellow feeling for another! Of the twenty-six copies of the book I know of as having reached New York, none came to subscribers apparently, but were bought in London by jobbers. Several of our customers subscribed direct and sent drafts and have received no copies.
The courtesy of an immediate reply will be appreciated.[28]
An immediate reply was not forthcoming.
Mary Mowbray-Clarke later wrote that the shop had received six copies in August, but the first piece of evidence in the extant material record noting sales of Ulysses at Sunwise Turn is a note in a ledger book for October 7–9, 1922. A sales record for one “Mohan, Herbert” in the amount of $27.75 has a small notation next to it — “Ulysses.” The entries through December 9th make note of the sale of eight copies, all priced at $25. Aside from magazine editor Arthur T. Vance, who purchased a copy on either October 10 or 11, the names are typically cryptic — “E.C. Richards” purchased a copy on Oct. 14/15, “Brown” purchased a copy in cash on December 6.[29] There were also sure to be transactions not recorded in the ledgers. Mary wrote in her diary of Thursday October 12 of a productive selling day: “I had so many good sales […] Sold four Ulysses and $80.00 worth of cash sales.”[30] It’s the first mention of Ulysses in her daily diary. Many of the Sunwise Turn’s regular and most loyal customers had subscribed direct themselves, so many of these sales were likely to those who had been talked into a sale by Mary or one of the other women working the till.
While the shop as a whole was breathing a sigh of relief at the arrival of some copies of the book, there had still been no word from Sylvia Beach.
It would be one of the women who was considered not competent to work the till, but who happily volunteered at the shop in earlier years in the hopes of absorbing the artistic and literary atmosphere, who would be pressed into service as a liaison — Peggy Guggenheim.
After the departure of Madge Jenison, and before Ruth McCall became Vice President, The Sunwise Turn had a period in which Mary’s primary business partners were author and editor Harold Loeb and his then-wife, who gained posthumous recognition as a photographer, Marjorie Content. Loeb had been a regular at the shop before signing on as a business partner. He had actually met Joyce in Paris in 1920 when Mary had sent him to Europe on a mission to procure rare books for the shop and work on a French translation of Coomaraswamy’s Dance of Siva. Loeb recalled meeting him “in a stuffy apartment near the Champs du Mars with a wife and two children. The room was dark, the conversation desultory. […] I told him that The Sunwise Turn had sold Chamber Music as well as Exiles, his one play. Joyce did not seem interested. […] I was glad when it was time to leave.
More satisfactory was our afternoon with Gertrude Stein, whom I had heard about from Mary Clarke.[31]
Harold Loeb and Mary Mowbray-Clarke sparred ferociously over the direction of the shop, both financial and aesthetic, but Loeb brought at least one person into the fold who would help ensure the legacy of The Sunwise Turn. Perhaps one of the bookshop’s greatest claims as an influence on art history came about through the impression the shop made on Loeb’s twenty-one-year-old cousin Peggy Guggenheim. Loeb described her in his memoir as one of the young people whom Mary Clarke affected.[32] He remembers Peggy’s introduction to Mary and Sunwise Turn being the turning point when his cousin began to take an interest in cultivating a role as a patron of the arts. A fascinating and under-explored thread in art history is the way in which Peggy’s 1940s art gallery Art of This Century mirrored Sunwise Turn in its sense of radical interior design, and a relaxed atmosphere that fostered “lounging” — the gallery even included a “lending library” of paintings!
Madge Jenison highlighted Peggy as a representative example among the Sunwise volunteer corps:
We never refused anybody who said that she or he would like to come and work with us. In the winter of 1919–20 we had eight unpaid apprentices — all women of a great deal of background. They sold thousands of dollars worth of books for us. They filed invoices. They swept floors. They ran on errands. Sometimes they did everything well. I have sometimes secreted a smile behind a monograph to see the daughter of the editor of the Kansas City Star, very big and handsome, sweeping off the sidewalk because Allen Street Minnie hated to do it; or Peggy Guggenheim, in a moleskin coat to her heels and lined with pink chiffon, going out for electric light-bulbs and tacks and pickup orders at the publishers, and returning with a package large enough to make any footman shudder and a careful statement of moneys disbursed.[33]
Peggy herself recounted her time at the shop in her memoir:
Though I was only a clerk, I swept into the bookshop daily, highly perfumed, and wearing little pearls and a magnificent taupe coat. My mother disapproved of me working and came often to see what I was up to and to bring me rubbers if it was raining. This was embarrassing. My rich aunts also came and literally bought books by the yard to fill their bookcases. We had to bring out a tape measure to be sure the measurements coincided with their bookshelves.
Although she received no salary, she was allowed a 10% discount on books, so in order to “have the illusion of receiving a big salary” she bought reams of modern literature, voraciously reading a wide range of material. She was also meeting a range of people whom she would never have otherwise encountered:
They were so real, so alive, so human. All their values were different from mine I loved Mary Mowbray Clark. She became a sort of goddess for me.[34]
She was also quick to remark on the impression Mary Mowbray-Clarke made on her in an interview conducted near the end of her life in the late 1970s:
Oh she was wonderful. I was very much impressed with her. I don’t know about her influence, but I was certainly impressed. She was sort of like a saint. She was so serious and so good and so wonderful about her work, idealistic, absolutely devoted to what she was doing.
She pauses to add a qualifying thought:
She was a very superior person. I suppose she thought she was educating the world.[35]
In all Peggy spent six months at the Sunwise Turn as an assistant, but her satellite involvement would persist for years to come. Consignment receipts show her deposit on Nov. 30 1923 of five copies of Vasily Shukhaev’s Dame de Pique, illustrated by Alexander Pushkin[36] and another slip dated March 1925 records the consignment of seven books published by the Contact Editions press in Paris, the imprint of author Robert McAlmon, of which Ezra Pound had been made editor as of 1920. The press published Ernest Hemingway’s first book Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1923, and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans in 1925. The batch received from Peggy Guggenheim included Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedecker and editions of poetry by Marsden Hartley and William Carlos Williams. The books sold soon after being received for $10.50, with a $3.50 commission going to the shop.[37] Sales ledgers also record purchases by Peggy under the monikers “Mrs. L. Vail” on April 2, 1923, and “Vail, Mrs. Laurence” on April 19–24, 1923, in the amounts of $97.35 and $20.45, respectively.[38]
Mary kept in touch with Peggy not as a close confidant, but in the way one would expect from a mentor to a student. For example, Mary noted in a diary entry of January 20, 1923 that
After an early supper I wrote to Miss Bliss and to Alice and Irene & Peggy Guggenheim–Vail about her baby.[39]
This was spurred by news of Peggy’s pregnancy — living in Paris, she’d married Dadaist sculptor and author Laurence Vail in 1922. Vail is often credited with introducing Peggy to the art world, but obviously she had a working knowledge of the avant-garde before her arrival in Paris through Sunwise Turn as well as Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. Their first child, Michael Cedric Sindbad Vail (1923–1986) would be born on May 15 1923.
Sylvia Beach recorded Peggy Guggenheim’s purchase at Shakespeare and Company — with “cash” — of number 339 of the first edition of Ulysses on February 15, 1922.[40] She’d made her appearance in Paris, and was in the process of figuring out what to do with the inspiration she’d gathered from her time at Sunwise Turn. A few weeks after her purchase of Ulysses Joyce confided in a letter that he was a little baffled at being invited to a celebration of her marriage to Laurence Vail: “I scarcely know him,” offering the possibility that someone in his family may have “met him or her somewhere.”[41]
Peggy Guggenheim was poised to be the ideal courier to secure a response from the elusive Sylvia Beach. A Sunwise Turn sales slip made out to “Mrs. Laurence Vail” dated October 23 1922 showing a balance of fifty cents “due on tapestry book” and $5 on Freud’s “General Introduction to Psychoanalysis” includes a note from Mrs. Laurence Vail:
Mrs. Clark
Please write me in detail what to tell Sylvia Beach for you.[42]
Mrs. Laurence Vail’s inquiry was successful, and on December 26 comes a reply at last:
Dear Madam,
The Laurence Vails have just called to tell me that you are utterly unable to comprehend the non arrival of the 18 copies of Ulysses which you ordered from me a year ago at least and for which I received your draft on February 21st for 3,040 francs. I know that you have lost all confidence in me and that you have serious doubts as to my business integrity. I can well understand as I have been guilty of leaving you without news all this time and it is natural that you should think the very worst of me. But I have encountered insurmountable difficulties in the attempt to get copies through to subscribers in New York. A great number have been confiscated among which one of yours at 250 francs and one of the signed copies at 350 francs. These I sent by port to a friend in Chicago who was to forward them to you from there and I think you must have received the 6 remaining copies (4 at 250 and 2 a t 350 frs) as my friend informed me that she had sent them on to you. The 10 copies at 150 francs were sent by me to Canada where another friend was to smuggle them over the border. I cannot understand why you have never received those 10 copies as I had a cable long ago informing me that all the copies had been finally passed in safely. All that had to be done after the books crossed the border was to stick on the labels I sent and post the parcels to you and the other subscribers in New York. I am cabling to Canada to find out why this was not done.
Meanwhile please do not have too low an opinion of me as I intend to deal in perfect fairness with you and have never had an idea of doing otherwise although it is only natural that you should be loosing [sic] patience and confidence by this time. The large sum of money with which you entrusted me will be refunded if you do not receive the books. I know the importance of that sum in bookshops such as ours, but had I foreseen such terrible difficulties in the distribution of Ulysses in New York State I should never have undertaken the matter at all. It was almost impossible to find anyone who would have anything to do with such a risky business and the friend in Canada who was finally persuaded to take charge of the 150 franc copies for New York has done the work very slowly and encountered great difficulties I fear. Even the experienced English agents have lost a great many copies of Ulysses — 300 were confiscated from one shipment — and although some copies got through it was only a small percentage. […]
I hope you will pardon me for causing you so much inconvenience and anxiety and that you will believe that I did the very best I could to fill your order.
Yours very truly
Sylvia Beach[43]
While not an illicit object under watch by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Beach’s letter apparently took some time to reach New York. It was Wednesday January 10, 1923, when Mary wrote in her diary that
Sylvia Beach wrote at last about the long delay in sending Ulysses.[44] It was a momentous occasion, only the second mention of Ulysses in Mary’s daily diary, in fact.
In a letter which she dated the next day, but which was postmarked January 10 from Grand Central Station — likely posted within hours of receipt of Beach’s letter — Mary Mowbray-Clarke brings her up to speed on The Sunwise Turn’s experiences in the saga of Ulysses:
My dear Miss Beach,
It is good indeed to hear from you after so long a period. I can fully understand how easily, as in our own work, the time slips by unnoticed, and one realizes little of how much longer it may seem to the other person. So many people have been anxious about Ulysses that wild stories of your unreliability flew about and it was rumoured [sic] that you had taken the subscriber’s money and then sold all of the first edition to a London jobber! Naturally we are overjoyed to hear that you are, after all, just the natural human small bookshop keeper with too much to do to write a letter about it.
We received our first six copies (nos. 19 & 45, 112–114–116–118) on different days last August, arriving like telephone books with the papers falling off them and quite exposed to the eyes of the post-man who little knew what he brought us. Then numbers 467–553 & 706 arrived Dec. 28th. and seven more — 442–453–456–458–471–582–464 — came Jan. 8.
As our original order was for seventeen copies, we seem to have lost only one [Mary initially wrote “eight” and corrected this with a strike-through], and thanks are due to all the clever ones who managed so well. We have only sold one of your edition since receiving them though we know that we can sell them at any time. It is necessary to be so careful about even mentioning them.
We could have gotten all the books through for you with ease I am sure, by way of a friend in New Orleans and another in Norfolk. Anytime we can tell you anything about business on this side we will be glad to do so. We have a good deal of importing experience and a wide circle of helpers.
I hope you are having a deservedly successful season. The accomplishment of Ulysses however arduous the undertaking, was a noble one, and you will be glad of it.
With the hope that Mrs. Vail did not convey too strong a reproof, although we were feeling rather down upon you when she was here.
Very Sincerely Yours,
Mary Mowbray-Clarke[45]
Mary’s careful record in this letter of the numbers of the copies leaves a fascinating archival trail to be traced. The first copy she mentions, number 19, would eventually be purchased by Irish poet Peter Golden sometime after December 1923, and its whereabouts are currently known. Number 45 was the copy purchased by “Mrs. Hewitt Morgan” which turned up at auction in 2009 in pristine condition, setting a sales record.
The copy headed to The Sunwsise Turn that had been intercepted by the NYSSV was apparently one of the 100 signed copies, an expensive loss. But most made it through. Beach’s lifelong friend Marion Mason Peter, an American whom she’d met in Paris in 1910, was entrusted with a batch of the more valuable copies. Peter was a Chicago-based music teacher and socialite who helped fund Shakespeare and Company, eventually naming her daughter Sylvia after Sylvia Beach. She wasn’t the sort of person who would normally be involved in smuggling operations, but her friendship and dedication to Beach’s cause meant she was a safe and reliable contact. Beach briefed her on the circumstances in a letter of August 7, 1922:
This is the situation — I got all the copies of “Ulysses” to the subscribers (in all states except New York) through the post without any trouble. But the subscribers in New York are still waiting for their copies as I haven’t dared send them openly from Paris right into the jaws of the Summer S.P.V. monster.[47] A friend in Canada is smuggling in most of the copies for New York — those in the 150 franc edition: that leaves 10 of the more expensive ones which I am entrusting to you. Would you be an angel Marion dear and when they reach you by registered post stick labels over your address and send them on by registered post to New York? […] sending them direct to you will prevent the authorities from knowing of their existence. You will receive 6 copies at 250 frs of which 1 is for Joseph Liepold, 318 West 20th Street, New York City, and 5 for The Sunwise Turn, 51 East 44th Street New York; and 4 copies at 350 frs of which 1 is for Joseph Liepold and 3 for The Sunrise [sic] Turn.
Beach advises her friend that there’s no need to inspect the packages to separate the signed copies from the others as the signed copies are somewhat smaller. The Sunwise Turn is to receive “5 larger packages” and “3 smaller.”
In further correspondence of September 19, Beach despairs of the trouble she is putting her friend to, after a potential snare arises when Marion is required to check two parcels with Customs:
O Marion I am distressed to think of so much trouble I am putting you to! With all you have to do at home taking care of babies and giving singing lessons besides — I know it is criminal to have asked it of you!
She reassures her it will all be worthwhile though — “The signed copies on Dutch paper will be worth a lot some day as there were only 100 of them made.” [48]
Marion Peter’s job carried risk, but the total number of parcels she was tasked with passing was relatively small. The bulk of the smuggling would be done through the other primary personality among the “clever ones who managed so well.” The “friend in Canada” mentioned in the August letter was an artist, editor and theatre/film critic who Sylvia Beach had connected with through Ernest Hemingway. Beach had befriended Hemingway at the bookshop and they had undergone various misadventures together, such as an instance when Beach organized a boxing match between Hemingway and a poet who also frequented the shop. Hemingway was a good deal more of a working-class personality than most of the literary luminaries who hung around Shakespeare and Company. Self-taught as an author, he’d arrived at the shop with an introductory letter from author Sherwood Anderson, but he didn’t need it after adequately impressing Beach by showing her the scars from wounds he’d sustained via mortar fire while serving in Italy during WWI. After apparently abandoning John Quinn’s suggestion for a smuggler, it occurred to her that Hemingway may know someone. He did. One day after asking him, he came back with the name of someone who could help smuggle books into the US from Canada: Barnet Braverman. Beach gave Braverman the nickname “Saint Bernard” “because of his rescue work.”[49]
Barnet Braverman had known Hemingway in Chicago, where Braverman was the editor of The Progressive Woman. As the title would suggest, Braverman was fiercely committed to the cause of social and financial independence for women. He was an outspoken socialist organizer and anti-capitalist who was writing fiery opinion pieces opposing “wage slavery” and in favor of worker’s rights and women’s suffrage in 1913, when Mary Mowbray-Clarke was involved behind-the-scenes in the organizing of the Armory Show. In 1922 Braverman was working as a copywriter for an ad agency, surely not a job he found particularly thrilling, and the suggestion that he could be of service in smuggling a contraband book banned by the postal service under control of the NYSSV must have been a bit of welcome excitement. He also happened to have the perfect working arrangement at the time — he was moving regularly between Curtis Company’s offices situated on opposite sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Braverman was eager, and honored to have been asked. The task wouldn’t be an easy one, with each book having to be taken across the river one-by-one, day after day. While the guards on the ferry to Detroit would overlook the book on the first trip, Braverman would only have to arouse their curiosity once for the whole operation to be shut down and for him to face arrest, and he was having to take the identical (and rather large) book through customs day after day after day. Near the end of the operation nervousness began to set in, and Braverman enlisted a friend to expedite the process, with the two of them actually stuffing the three-and-a-half pound copies of Ulysses down their pants. The operation became more efficient, but the bookleggers risked being mistaken for bootleggers in the era when it was common for smugglers to conceal flasks of Canadian whiskey in similarly baggy trousers. Luckily they were never stopped by the customs agents, and Braverman kept a perfect track record as a smuggler, with all forty copies entrusted to him crossing successfully into the US. Once on American soil, Braverman told Beach he knew “an art critic on a Detroit daily” and the “secretary of a Detroit advertising association” who would be “glad to help me expedite the transfer of the books.” He added a statement harkening to his roots as a radical, and one which gets to the core of his enthusiasm for the project — he told Beach he’d be proud to break the laws of “the hideous U.S.” and “put one over on the Republic and its Methodist smut-hounds.”[50]
Mary Mowbray-Clarke shared in common with Barnet Braverman a background in socialist politics, as well as a sense of pride in being unswayed by popular trends, even among the avant-garde. Mary considered British author Gilbert Cannan a genius and The Sunwise Turn published his mystical prose-poem/essay “Love is Less than God” in 1923, in a limited edition which featured a unique hand-bound cloth cover for each copy. Cannan is barely remembered today, and while a reassessment would turn up some inspired passages and an interesting biography, history was probably not wrong to remember Virginia Woolf more prominently. In notes for a Jan. 22 1922 library lecture Mary Mowbray-Clarke mentions the importance of stocking difficult-to-find importations, even if the quality of the writing isn’t of the caliber of an author such as Gilbert Cannan:
If English books of value are not brought out here or come out here and fail to take well […] we try to keep them for their chance. We did this notably for “South Wind” and Virginia Wolff [sic] and “The Pilgrim of a Smile” not great authors these, but contributors.[51]
Despite the fact that Mary and Madge Jenison apparently had talked to Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap about the possibility of Sunwise Turn publishing Ulysses, Mary had impressed Barnet Braverman with the fact that she was a fellow traveler in the notion that while it was vitally important to circumvent the censors, the work itself was likely overestimated. A letter from Braverman to Mary Mowbray-Clarke dated January 16 1923 chronicling the smuggling operation makes clear he was impressed by her attitudes and aesthetics:
Dear Mrs. Clarke
Many thanks for your pleasantly human letter.
As for the books, I sent you ten. Your letter mentions only seven. I made two shipments. The first one was made December 21st 1922 […]
Please check the above and let me know — — for I am very positive I forwarded ten copies to you. And kindly be sure to apprise Mrs. Beach accordingly. I don’t think enough of the book to want more than one copy of it, and I want Mrs. Beach to know that I made no mistakes.
And my dear Mrs. Clark, please allow me to ask you to make no mention of my name in connection with U. at this time. The reason I ask this of you is that publicity won’t do any good.[…]
I’m so glad you do not regard Joyce as Gawd’s understudy. So many of the intelligentsia do. It is amusing to watch these “moderns” kid themselves about form and color and feeling. The chances are they could not express themselves in any of these ways if they tried. But I notice they have a knack for creating publicity… and how some of them do hanker after lecture engagements.
Am I sounding verbose? I hope not. But I’m so glad you liked my New Year’s greetings. It has provoked nearly all my “modernist” and “conservative” friends and near-friends. The former thought it conservative and the latter considered it radical. Which shows that conservatives and radicals are pretty much alike in their impressions and emotions. That you like my greeting leads me to think that you may appreciate the eternal verities — and therefore, Mrs. Clarke, be you young or middle-aged, married or unmarried, or the mother of nine children — — I believe you’d be a refreshing person to know. May the pleasure be mine.
[…]
The envelope enclosure accompanying your letter is interesting. Is the little red house the home of your bookshop? I’m wondering what sort of place the Yale building can be, in that case. The artist who made the design has a fine decorative sense.
How do you find business? Is it better this winter than winter of last year? […] I smile at myself as I talk in such merchandising terms… for I am an artist by training and instinct. Two years ago I became tired of studio life in Chicago, tired of clubwomen, tea-parties, radicals, conservatives, communists (the American breed is absolutely devoid of integrity), and artists who talk art. So I shut up shop, took a flyer into the business world for a bracer, and have been planning advertising campaigns and solving sales difficulties for the biggest manufacturers in the U.S. and Canada. And in the Spring I bid adieu to capitalist industry for some real work in Vienna […]
Isn’t the preceding paragraphs a long one, though!
. . . . .
In the meanwhile, kindly check up on the books I sent. There were ten, I swear.
Sincerely,
Barnet Braverman
Braverman’s letter offers a fascinating view into the way that Ulysses was viewed by Mary Mowbray-Clarke, as well as by Braverman himself — as something that ought to be made available, but certainly not anything actually deserving of the outsized praise and excitement it was generating among the “literati.” In an unpublished essay about Charles Burchfield Mary remarked on the pretensions of some of the buyers of Ulysses, who were clearly exaggerating their abilities to comprehend it. In the course of describing the bookshop, whose patrons were comprised of “the most mixed possible public” Mary wrote that
A book-shop is more of a world than that of any art gallery. Here come those as widely separated as the man who wants a treatise on embalming is from him who wishes the Gulistan of Sa’di. She who cannot wait for the sequel to “The Head of the House of Coombe” follows the lady who wants a book of just the right value to balance evenly a week-end visit’s obligation. The man who wants as expensive-looking a gift book as possible for his typist (and who stipulates that it shall have no sentimental implications) and the several who are relieved to find that enquiries for certain erotic books are not here taken to denote total depravity. There comes the doting mother with the pale precious lad of twelve seeking the latest T.S. Eliot, who tells us aside that her son read “Ulysses” and “understood every word of it” — this, too, before the pages and pages of errata had been issued![52]
Despite any misgivings about the comprehensibility of Ulysses, and whether or not they thought of Joyce as “Gawd’s understudy,” Mary Mowbray-Clarke and Barnet Braverman both clearly found something admirable in, at least, the mere fact that the book had come to exist at all, given the efforts of censors to quash its chances. The first legal edition would not be published in America until 1934. Mary was surely proud of the fact that her shop was able to procure and distribute copies, and one will recall her statement to Beach that Sunwise Turn had even considered publishing it. As for Braverman, he eventually received an inscribed copy from Joyce,[53] which surely meant something to him as a keepsake representing an adventure, if not anything he would actually read.
During the early 1920s Mary was at the height of her powers as a networker, arranging exhibits by connecting artists with authors, introducing patrons to struggling poets, and on and on. It would make an interesting alternate history if Shakespeare & Company had taken her up on her offer of help in the illicit distribution of Ulysses. The closest she came apparently was her enlisting the aid of Louis R. Gottschalk (1899–1975), a historian who had married poet Laura Riding in 1920. Gottschalk was likely a patron of Sunwise Turn, connected to Mary through any number of artistic/literary webs. In Braverman’s letter he mentions Gottschalk when mentioning his fear of his own name being any “publicity” surrounding Ulysses:
Mr. Gottschalk has written that you referred him to me, and while it is a source of chagrin to me that “U.” and not Cassnova was brought over after some rather stiff ordeals, I cannot accommodate Mr. G. I can’t afford the time, of which I need every spare minute for creative effort.[54]
In any event, Gottschalk apparently was the one who delivered copies of the second edition printing of Ulysses to The Sunwise Turn. Two receipt slips — dated Nov. 7 and Nov. 22 1922, respectively, note that Sunwise Turn
“Received from Gottschalk the following:”
2nd copy of 2nd ed. Ulysses Pd. By MMC [Nov. 7] and 3 Ulysses Pd. [Nov. 22][55]
The Sunwise Turn continued to carry Ulysses until the shop’s sunset in 1927. When Mary was finally bought out by Doubeday, who opted to keep the name for several years, one of the most glaring signs that things had changed was the absence of such material. A franchise operation wasn’t going to take the risks associated with stocking smuggled books. The publishing arm of Doubleday had infamously refused to promote Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie. They had signed the contract but became frightened in the interim by the prospect that the plot may prove controversial. The complete blackout of any promotional material meant only 456 copies of the first printing of 1,000 were sold. By the time Doubleday was angling to buy out The Sunwise Turn, Ulysses had gone through several printings, but it was still as illegal as ever in the US. As late as 1928 the NYSSV raided New York’s Gotham Book Mart and seized not only a smuggled copy of Ulysses, but forty copies of Jordan Smith’s “A Key to the ULYSSES of James Joyce.” [56]John Sumner, the zealot bloodhound head of the NYSSV at this time, was not asleep at the wheel. The eclectic arts and crafts displayed on the walls and the “certain erotic books” were surely also missing from the Doubleday operation.
Ulysses was part of the hustle of the shop. It was a specialty item not bought regularly, but treated with a level of loving care meriting repair and rebinding. Sunwise Turn offered services not only for the purchase of books but for their upkeep; buyers could opt to have Sunwise Turn’s in-house artisans bind or re-bind, something likely necessary at times in the case of Ulysses as the original Aegean blue covers tended to be brittle, flaking at the spine, especially if the book was a reading copy and not treated as an art-object. The Sunwise Turn’s 1920 catalogue contains a lengthy section devoted specifically to their binding projects, with many books being described as “bound in Zoline paper,” likely a reference to their artist/craftsperson associate Esther Zoline, who evidently had designed some special namesake paper. Artists such as Charles Burchfield would stop by the shop for an evening and help select papers for artistically-designed bindings, and Madge Jenison tells an anecdote about a regular at the shop who’d been called up to the trenches of WWI:
He had an adoring maiden aunt who wanted to give him a Bible to take with him. She came to see us about it. He would take one, he said if he could have one that did not look “like a hearse or a coffin.” We engaged to do one that did not. […] We did an orange one as rich as we could find a dyer to mix the color, with a vine from Blake’s Heaven and Hell adapted for the tooling, and instead of a title the line from Jeremiah, “Thy Words Were Found and I Did Eat Them.” His aunt was so pleased that she had a prayer book done for him, and she was on the way to have the hymnal and concordance and Lives of the Saints when he sailed. We did these Bibles all through the war and they must have done their part to carry the memory that there was such a thing as beauty into the khaki-colored and regimented world into which men went.[57]
A 1920 Sunwise Turn catalogue, under the heading BOOKS IN SPECIAL BINDING lists, as item 191
HOLY BIBLE (The). ¾ vellum, orange cover, specially designed for The Sunwise Turn by Genevieve Coles.[58] $17.00
Item number 181 is
CROMWELL (Gladys) Poems. Bound for us Zoline[59] paper. New York, 1919. $6.00[60]
In the bookshop’s final years, as debts mounted and the business increasingly became untenable, Ulysses still lingered, sometimes awaiting a Sunwise Turn binding.
Adelaide S. Kuntz[61] writes from Paris on September 29, 1926:
Dear Madames
I am writing to you in regard to my valuable first edition copy of Ulysses (James Joyce) which I left with you over two years ago to be covered. I wrote my sister over a year ago to call for it and have seen her now in Paris and learned that she failed to do so. […] Naturally I am anxious to get information from you as the book is not only valuable but precious to me as I was one of the original subscribers to the edition. Please let me know at your earliest convenience what you have done with it. If you have it in safe keeping as I hope, hold it until you hear further from me. Also please tell me if I owe you anything and I will settle my account with you.[62]
The reply, dated October 19, offers reassurance that the valuable and precious book is indeed in safekeeping, and an offer for binding, apparently not the first:
Your copy of Ulysses is quite safe. We are still waiting for an answer to our several letters, quoting prices for binding. In the matter of your standing order for two books a month, we wrote several times and as we received no answer we stopped sending the lists. Are you still interested in receiving the two books each month? May we bind up your copy of Ulysses? The prices are as follows:
Three quarter Morocco………. $18.00
Full cloth…….. $10.00
As the cover has been torn off, we recommend binding, rather than a slip case.
Your early response will be appreciated. Thank you
Cordially
THE SUNWISE TURN, Inc.[63]
Shakespeare and Company managed to survive the Depression era with the financial support of its many friends, finally dying a noble death during the occupation of Paris in WWII, when Beach famously hid all of her books in an upstairs apartment and shuttered the shop within two days after a Nazi officer threatened to return to “seize her goods.” She had drawn his ire after refusing to sell him a copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — “the last copy in Paris,” according to her, that was displayed in the window.
The Sunwise Turn, meanwhile, was unable to survive the Depression, and its end was slow and inglorious. Mary could have likely mustered a cadre of wealthy patrons to save the shop, but finances had been in disarray for years, and it seems she never was able to recapture the magic of herself and Madge Jenison as a working team. While the founding business partners sparred on occasion, it’s telling that there are over a dozen photographs of Mary and Madge posing in the shop, many of them featuring the two women sitting or standing together. There are no extant photographs of Mary with any of the other Vice-Presidents of Sunwise Turn: Harold Loeb, Marjorie Content, Ruth McCall, and the last partner, Jessie Dwight are all absent. There are hints everywhere in Mary’s diaries and correspondence that the shop had become more than a financial burden, but was a cross to bear. Nonetheless, the shop continued to do interesting things until the very end, and Ulysses was still to be had. An R.L. Gilpatric writes from New Haven Connecticut on January 25, 1926, referencing an unknown Sunwise Turn catalogue of 1925:
Gentlemen:
In your December catalogue you have listed as item 211, “Ulysses” by James Joyce. If you still have the volume, I would be interested in purchasing it, providing it is available at once.[64]
Playwright and journalist Maxwell Anderson eventually settled down in a house near the Brocken, one of the myriad authors, poets, and artists drawn to the area by the magnetic pull of Mary Mowbray-Clarke and her extended social circles. He first mentions visiting the area, looking for a property, in spring of 1921,[65] after hearing indirectly about the gorgeous landscape and small artist’s community that was forming along South Mountain Road from Mary.[66] Anderson was a visitor to The Sunwise Turn, his name first appearing in a ledger book entry with a purchase of $8.80 on May 4/5 1922.[67] After purchasing his property in 1922 with the help of some of Mary’s other artist neighbors, he stayed there for the remainder of his life. His house was furnished and decorated with the handiwork of many of his talented neighbors. Thanks to The Sunwise Turn, he was also building an impressive book collection.
The Sunwise Turn limped on several months into 1928, with Mary writing in her diary of February 4 1928 of the “final meeting to dissolve Sunwise Turn corporation.” Cedric Crowell, general manager of the Doubleday bookshop chain, told her that they would not keep the name of the shop unless Mary remained on as a buyer,[68] but in the end she was informed they had no salaried position for her, and anyway she wouldn’t enjoy being involved with the way they managed the shop. Crowell explained that “our methods of selling books would be so at variance with your methods and your ideas that we would be constantly jarring your sensibilities. We shall try to commercialize your ideal, and in so doing, we should make you very unhappy.”[69] They kept the name.
During this time Mary was mulling over what her life would become — the shop had defined so much of her identity, how could she reinvent herself, or move on to a new vista? Her workaholic personality dictated that she couldn’t simply “retire” — she was 54 years old and despite some physical aches and pains, was still operating with the manic energy of someone in their 20s. She decided to write a book, throwing herself into it with everything she had, trying to sum up and connect everything she knew about philosophy, literature, art, botany, landscaping, architecture, and on and on. It was tentatively called “Print Proud: the Story of the Reader for Three Thousand Years.” From available evidence most publishers were as baffled by it as readers of Ulysses. Mary never found a loyal patron willing to go to any lengths for her book, however. It was impossibly ambitious in scope, and its prospects weren’t helped by the dismal economic conditions of the time. Most responses were polite, probably in deference to Mary’s reputation built during the history of The Sunwise Turn, but dismissive. She writes of a publisher telling her “that they like my book project enormously but can’t feel that they understand it sufficiently…”[70] Another publisher “writes with interest of my book but says they cannot invest any more just now. Thinks the second part more promising than the first.” The publisher who wrote with interest was B.W. Huebsch, who had published Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and had intended to publish Ulysses prior to the Little Review trial.[71] Mary worked on Print Proud […] for most of 1929, but it ultimately became one of her several books for which she would never find a publisher.
Without drawing her salary from the shop, and prior to the time when she began seriously taking on landscaping and gardening projects for the constellation of artists and authors she’d collected around her, she was left in dire straits. On April 5, 1928 she tells her diary that there is “very little to eat in the house and no money and a few bills, but the sun shines.”[72]
A first edition copy of Ulysses at this time was not fetching the prices it would someday command, but it was an expensive collectible book. In fact, one of Mary’s few material assets after the dissolving of the shop was her extensive library of rare books and first editions. In a move that must have been painful, she arranged a “sale at Valley Cottage Barn” in July 1927. A typed inventory list is titled “A FEW BOOKS FOR SALE From the library of MARY MOWBRAY-CLARKE” and notes that all are in “excellent condition.” The most difficult books to part with must have been the limited edition specially bound books published by The Sunwise Turn. It’s unknown if she found buyers for these, but they are the items she would have been most likely to want to retain as examples of her own work. The specially bound edition of Coomaraswamy’s Dance of Siva, limited to just 40 copies, the rare Arthur B. Davies catalogue, and a rare early pamphlet from William Morris were surely painful to offer up in a liquidation sale. Less so probably, aside from its value as a memento, was Ulysses, described in the inventory list as “Joyce, James. Ulysses. №464 of First Paris edition 1922.” The asking price was $50.00.
A second inventory listing, unusual inasmuch as it includes a handwritten note, describes it as “Sold to Max A.” Some very quickly scrawled notes confuse the issue of the price — “$50.00” is crossed out and “15.00” is written in the margin to the left. Did Maxwell Anderson receive a $15 discount, or was it placed on commission by him, with Mary receiving $15? Did Mary reduce the cost of the book to a shocking extent? In either event, Anderson was both buyer and seller of Ulysses via his new neighbor. A Sunwise Turn commission slip dated January 5 1927, some months before the sale of “books from the library of Mary Mowbray-Clarke” records Anderson placing a $50 copy on commission, receiving $45 “less comm[ission],” with $5 going to the shop. The buyer and edition number are unknown.
In the twilight months of the shop Ulysses was not the only familiar friend present. A ledger book entry records a sale to “Mrs. Peggy Vail” during August 27–30 1926[73] and another, dated February 10, 1927 notes a cash purchase of $8.82 from “Mrs. Laurence Vail,”[74] the liaison who had helped reassure The Sunwise Turn that Sylvia Beach hadn’t disappeared with their money in 1922.
None of Mary’s various book projects ever found publishers. She entertained the notion of resurrecting the publishing imprint as “The Sunwise Turn in the Brocken” to publish her multi-volume book about landscape gardening in the early 1930s, and went so far as to send out Ulysses-esque subscription forms. She received stacks of replies and there seemed to be interest, but for whatever reasons the project never came to pass.
Many people who live near the site of the Brocken today remember Mary Mowbray-Clarke primarily as the only known woman to have overseen a major WPA landscape architecture project, creating the Dutch Gardens Park, which features inventive and truly impressive brickwork design, on land adjoining the county courthouse in New City NY. The beginnings of life as a landscape architect and gardener for-hire who worked on many of the homes of artists who settled near the Brocken is reflected in the final Sunwise Turn ledger book. After a gap year of 1929, she begins financial record-keeping of sundry odd jobs. One of the most crowded pages is that of work completed for Maxwell Anderson.
In 1930 Mary was 57, and her son Bumper, who was still at the Brocken, was 22. Bumper took on much of the physical labor while Mary helped secure jobs and kept track of finances, though she also took on some gardening and landscaping projects herself. The record for Maxwell Anderson’s jobs includes “painting exterior of house,” in August of 1930, work on a bridge begun in April, “fish pond work” in June 1931, and, in 1931 and 1932 “lawn work.”[75] Anderson had found success in the theatre world and had money coming in. He became one of Mary Mowbray-Clarke’s many neighbor-patrons, ensuring that the person who was ultimately responsible for the little community which had formed on South Mountain Road would have at least something to cover birdseed.
The story of Ulysses as seen through the prism of Mary Mowbray-Clarke and The Sunwise Turn hems close to the themes of Mary’s life; the role she often played as a behind-the-scenes conduit of culture, and the ways in which her own involvement was eclipsed and largely forgotten in the intervening years. While she influenced the collecting tastes of Lizzie Bliss, whose collection largely formed the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art, she was passed over for a job as a librarian at the museum after Bliss’s death in the early 30s. She was also rejected for a Guggenheim fellowship, though she was instrumental in inspiring one of the namesake children to a role as one of the most renowned collectors of the 20th century.
As for Ulysses, she seems not have kept a copy for herself, though many passed through her hands, on their way to becoming impossibly valuable collector’s items. Mary never took much time for bitterness, though, always moving on to a new interest, drowning any sorrows in her work. A preface to The Sunwise Turn’s 1920 catalogue makes it clear that the experiment of the bookshop was a success — as borne out by the existence of both the “pristine” copy of Ulysses setting an auction record, as well as the fact of the book’s text being readily available on an open-source website and in cheap paperback form. As the catalogue states
“There being no infallible road-map for this way, we own to an occasional detour. But we trust that our direction has appeared, and that it needs not now to be stressed, to any who have thus far wintered it and summered it with us, that we exist not merely for the marketing of books, but — very definitely — to further the existence of the books themselves.
How may that be, but in the lives of readers?”
[1] Mark Brown, First edition of Ulysses sells for record £275,000. theguardian.com, originally published June 4, 2009. Retrieved 6/29/2021.
[2] Guido Bruno, The Sunwise Turn Bookshop in Snapshots in Art Galleries on Fifth Avenue (1919), collected in Adventures in American Bookshops, Antique Stores and Auction Rooms (Detroit: The Douglas Book Shop, 1922) p. 118 (This book was a collection of earlier criticism by the author, as explained in the preface: These sketches appeared originally in Pearson’s Magazine, Bruno’s Weekly and the Book Hunter, and I make grateful acknowledgement for permission to reprint.)
[3] Notes for “class for Booksellers in the Public Library, January 27th. 1922” The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Mary Mowbray-Clarke’s materials for history, 1907–1960, folder 1.1)
[4] Burchfield Penney Art Center, Charles Burchfield archive. Mary Mowbray-Clarke to Charles Burchfield, dated April 13 [1922].
[5] James Joyce, Stephen Hero (Jonathan Cape, London, 1944) pp. 19–20
[6] Richard Ellman (editor), Selected Letters of James Joyce (Viking Press, New York, 1975) p. 238
[7] Padraic and Mary Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1958) pp. 110–111
[7b] Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Second edition. (University of California Press, 1988) p. 408.
[8] Madge Jenison, Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1923). pp. 129–130
[9] Ibid. pp. 127–129
[10] Ibid. p. 128
[11] The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Loose sheaf of paper titled “quotes,” in Old House Notes, 1959–60 folder 15.7) Bertrand Russell wrote in “Why Men Fight,” which was published in 1917, that “To one who stands outside the cycle of beliefs and passions which make the war seem necessary, an isolation, an almost unbearable separation from the general activity, becomes unavoidable. […] The helpless longing to save men from the ruin towards which they are hastening makes it necessary to oppose the stream, to incur hostility, to be thought unfeeling, to lose for the moment the power of winning belief.” (Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel, The Century Co., New York; Jan. 1917 p. 4) This book being included in the Sunwise Turn library at the Plattsburg training camp is another example of the little ways in which Mary and Madge attempted to spur critical thought about the war, and the hostility incurred on the part of John Quinn was likely not an isolated instance.
[12] Alice Lewisohn Crowley, The Neighborhood Playhouse: Leaves from a Theatre Scrapbook (Theatre Arts Books 1959), p. 197
[13] C.G. Jung, The collected works of C. G. Jung : The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (Volume 15, Bolligen Series XX) Princeton University Press, 1966. “Ulysses: A Monologue,” p. 110
[14] Ibid. pp. 131–132.
[15] Richard Ellman (editor), Selected Letters of James Joyce (Viking Press, New York, 1975) p. 282
[16] Alice Lewisohn Crowley, The Neighborhood Playhouse: Leaves from a Theatre Scrapbook (Theatre Arts Books 1959), p. 197
[17] Sylvia Beach Papers (Princeton, Firestone Library. Box 168, folder 2.)
[18] Ibid. folder 3.
[19] Ibid. folder 6.
[20] Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, (Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1956) p. 87
[21] Quoted in Noel Riley Fitch. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. (W. W. Norton & Company, 1985) p. 78.
[22] John Quinn Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Letterbook “1921 August 29–1922 July 26”
[23] Sylvia Beach Papers, Princeton, Firestone Library.
[24] Ibid.
[25] The Smith Alumnae Quarterly, May 1921, p. 252
[26] Mary Mowbray-Clarke daily diary, 1922, collection of Jethro Nisson, scans on file with the author.
[27] University at Buffalo, James Joyce Collection. (XIII. Correspondence to Sylvia Beach & Shakespeare & Company)
[28] Ibid.
[29] Sunwise Turn Bookshop Records, Ohio State University Rare Books & Manuscripts Library. (Box 7, Sales Ledger, 1922–1923. Notations recording sales of Ulysses are found on pages 155, 156, 157, 159, 168 and 192.)
[30] Mary Mowbray-Clarke daily diary, 1922, collection of Jethro Nisson, scans on file with the author.
[31] Harold Loeb, The Way it Was. Criterion Books, 1959. pp. 61–62
[32] Ibid. p. 36
[33] Madge Jenison, Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1923). p. 46
[34] Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict. (Universe Books, New York, 1987. First edition pub. 1946.) p. 23
[35] Jacqueline Bogard Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim. (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1988) p. 40
[36] Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, John Frederick and Mary Mowbray-Clarke papers.
[37] The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Folder 1.3, Consignments — list of items, agreements, 1919–1927.)
[38] Sunwise Turn Bookshop Records, Ohio State University Rare Books & Manuscripts Library. (Box 7, Sales Ledger, 1922–1923. pp. 268 & 278)
[39] Diary entry, Sat. January 20 1923. Diary from collection of Jethro Nisson, scans on file with the author.
[40] Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture (Yale University Press, 1998) p. 68 Rainey cites Sylvia Beach Papers, Princeton University Firestone Library, box 63, Record Books, and notes “The copy number is registered in the ‘Calepin de vente d’Ulysses’ conserved in the Maurice Saillet Papers of the Carlton Lake Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Peggy Guggenheim’s subscription form is found in the Capen Library, Poetry Collection, Beach Papers, Folder ‘Ulysses Subscriptions: First Edition.’ “
[41] Richard Ellman (editor), Selected Letters of James Joyce (Viking Press, New York, 1975) p. 289
[42] The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (folder 8.1)
[43] James Joyce Vertical File Manuscript #1430, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
[44] Mary Mowbray-Clarke daily diary, 1922, collection of Jethro Nisson, scans on file with the author.
[45] University at Buffalo, James Joyce Collection. (XIII. Correspondence to Sylvia Beach & Shakespeare & Company)
[46] Sean O’Riordan, €350k Joyce first edition’s odyssey ends by being posted back to Cork (Irish Examiner, Thursday July 11, 2013)
[47] A misspelled reference to the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice at this time, John Sumner, who was doing his best to live up to the draconian reputation of his predecessor, legendary anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, who had died in 1915.
[48] Both letters from Sylvia Beach to Marion Peter: Keri Walsh (ed.) The Letters of Sylvia Beach (Columbia University Press, 2010) pp. 101–103 (Walsh cites the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton. These letters would be found in box 30, folder 7.)
[49] Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, (Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1956) p. 87
[50] Sylvia Beach Papers, Princeton, Firestone Library. (Box 123, folder 13.) Letter dated April 15 1922.
[51] Notes for “class for Booksellers in the Public Library, January 27th. 1922” The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Mary Mowbray-Clarke’s materials for history, 1907–1960, folder 1.1)
[52] Mary Mowbray-Clarke, unpublished manuscript titled “Charles Burchfield sees America First.” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, John and Mary Mowbray-Clarke papers. This article was likely written with the hopes of having it included in The Dial. A letter dated Jan. 18, 1923 from the offices of The Dial advises Mary that they will most likely not accept the article: […] I have only just been able to get at Dr. Watson, and he has suggested that if you have the article on Charles Burchfield already written, you might send it on to him. He does not, however, feel that he can ask you to write it especially for The Dial. Mr. Seldes, when he handed me the letter, asked me to say that in his opinion The Dial had not at all badly by Mr. Burchfield, since we ran more of his work in one number than ever of any one artist. (The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, folder 5.7)
[53] Ted Bishop, Riding With Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books (Viking Press, Canada, 2005) pp. 147–148
[54] James Joyce Vertical File Manuscript #1430, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Paul Venderham, James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses (New York University Press, New York, 2016) p. 58
[57] Madge Jenison, Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1923). p. 91
[58] This is almost certainly a typo, a reference to Genevieve Almeda Cowles (1871–1950.) Cowles and her twin sister Maude Alice were both artists who occasionally collaborated on book and magazine illustrations. They became active in prison reform, and Genevieve parlayed this work into exhibiting the work of prison inmates at Sunwise Turn after she became a stock holder and board member of the shop in the mid-1920s. Genevieve also worked as a “dazzle-camouflage” ship artist during WWI.
[59] Probably a reference to artist Esther N. Zoline (1874–1948), a “well known miniature painter on ivory” and watercolorist. Zoline attended the Art Institute of Chicago, moving to Los Angeles in 1908, but she was active in New York circa 1920–1930.
[60] The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Cataogs and price lists, 1920–1929, folder 2.4; A First and Most Curious Catalogue of Books Art-Objects and Activities from the Sunwise Turn Inc. Dated May 1920. p. 18)
[61] Adelaide “Annie” Shaffer Kuntz (1895–1966) was a close associate and patron of artist Marsden Hartley, especially after the death of her husband in 1928, an American modernist artist who never exhibited during his lifetime, Charles “Arlie” Kuntz.
[62] James Joyce Vertical File Manuscript #1430, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
[63] Ibid.
[64] James Joyce Vertical File Manuscript #1430, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
[65] Amy Murray, November Hereabout (Henry Holt and Company, 1940) Preface by Maxwell Anderson, p. xiii.
[66] “Reminiscences of Frank Ernest Hill,” pp. 264–265, an oral history transcription of a 1962 interview held at Columbia University. Hill mentions that “Max learned about this through a friend who was acquainted with Mrs. Mary Mowbray Clark, who had run the Sunrise [sic] Turn Bookshop, a bookshop that in those years was very smart and fashionable and emphasized new and unusual books. I attended a reading of Chistopher Morley of his poems […]”
[67] Sunwise Turn Bookshop Records, Ohio State University Rare Books & Manuscripts Library. (Box 7, Sales Ledger, 1922–1923. p. 283)
[68] Mary Mowbray-Clarke diary entry, dated February 23, 1927 — “Mr. Crowell came from Doubleday Page […] We offered him the lease, good will, lists, and stock for $5,000. He said he couldn’t run the shop as The Sunwise Turn unless I would remain as buyer.” (Diary in collection of Jethro Nisson, scans on file with the author.)
[69] The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Container 2.1, “Winding up the business, 1927–1929”). Letter dated March 30, 1927.
[70] Mary Mowbray-Clarke diary entry, dated January 19, 1928. (Diary in collection of Jethro Nisson, scans on file with the author.)
[71] Ibid. Dated February 2, 1928. The incoming letter from Huebsch that Mary references is held in the Ransom Center collection.
[72] Ibid.
[73] Sunwise Turn Bookshop Records, Ohio State University Rare Books & Manuscripts Library. (Box 6, Sales Ledger, 1926., p. 9)
[74] Ibid., Sales Ledger 1926–1936 (Box 5 item 1, p. 32)
[75] Ibid., p. 55
