The story has been told again and again, the fairy-tale encounter as she came upon him at a party in his tennis shoes and old jacket, standing somewhat aloof. She approached him and said, “Is this the great James Joyce?” “James Joyce,” he replied. When she handed him her card he had to cross to the window, on account of his poor eyesight, to read it. In keeping with his ever-superstitious nature he was pleased to find the word “Shakespeare” and took it to be a good omen. A year later he called on her to hear a proposal which she had been nurturing. Would she pay him the honor of allowing her to publish Ulysses? Joyce was incredulous. For all his burgeoning fame, he was living in an old flat with no electricity, no bathtub and a few cracked plates and here was a woman assuring him that she could find enough subscribers, and important ones at that, to bring Ulysses to the world. The printer she had already decided on, an intellectual in Dijon called Maurice Darantiere whom she knew through her companion Adrienne Monnier who also owned a bookshop. She proposed that they print 1,000 copies, 100 signed on Holland paper, 150 on de luxe paper and the remaining 750 on linen. She would give the author 66 percent of the net profits.
Neither Miss Beach nor M. Darantiere could have guessed the complication which lay ahead because neither of them knew James Joyce. In his possession there was only a carbon copy of Ulysses which did not carry the changes he had made from the various published version in serial form. As he set about embodying these changes from memory he added so much that the book expanded by one-third during that dizzying period. Moreover his correction were almost illegible, written in his cramped, weblike handwriting. His demands about paper, binding and typeface were inflexible. Typists were somehow procured—and lost—in this fever of work and revision. Joyace was in a state of “energetic prostration” but so were some of his helpmates. Some were so shocked by the material that they dismissed themselves. A Mrs. Harrison ran into trouble with her English husband who was so scandalized by what he read that he threw the pages into the fire. Another Vernonica to Joyce’s Jesus, this brave crusader rescued them but some particles were lost and the missing lines had to be retrieved from John Quinn in New York. Wherever Joyce went there was chaos. He was still writing to friends to borrow “bits” of them for his Jarvey or his sailor impersonations as well as finishing the last chapter which he called “his most secret conception.”
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