‘James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of a Friendship’ Revisited

Description

James Joyce spent the last decade of his life in Paris, struggling to finish his great final
work Finnegans Wake amidst personal and financial hardship and just as Europe was
being engulfed by the rising tide of fascism. Bringing together new archival discoveries
and personal accounts, this book explores one of the central relationships of his final
years: that with his friend, confidant and adviser Paul L. Léon.
Providing first-hand accounts of Joyce’s Paris circle – which included Samuel Beckett
and Vladimir Nabokov – the book makes available again the text of Lucie (Léon) Noel’s
personal memoir of the relationship between her husband and the Irish writer (published
as James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of Friendship in 1950), including his valiant
rescue of Joyce’s Paris archives from occupying Nazi forces. The book also collects for
the first time Leon’s clandestine letters to his wife from August to December 1941,
chronicling his desperate state of body and mind while interned in Drancy, France’s main
Nazi transit camp, and then in Compiègne, just before he was deported to Auschwitz-
Birkenau. Joyce died suddenly on 13 January 1941 in Zurich and Léon was murdered
by the Nazis on 4 April 1942 in Silesia.
Annotated throughout with contextual commentary by Luca Crispi and Mary Gallagher,
this is an essential resource for scholars of James Joyce and of the literary culture of
Paris in the 1930s and first years of World War II in France.

Luca Crispi is Associate Professor of James Joyce Studies and Modernism in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. He co-curated the ‘Ulysses at the National Library’ exhibition in 2004–5, where he first met the Léons. He has worked with Joyce’s archives in various collections around the world for over twenty years.
Alexis Leopold Léon was born in Paris, the son of refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1918. He was one of the last living members of James Joyce’s Paris circle in the author’s final decade.
Anna Maria Léon married Alexis Léon in Paris in 1979 and they were happy together for forty-three years. She is the Executor of the Estate of Paul L. Léon.

Preface
Anna Maria Léon
1. Contexts
Luca Crispi
2. ‘James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of a Friendship’
Lucie Noel
3. The Story of the Publication of The Story of a Friendship
Luca Crispi
4. On James Joyce
Paul Léon
5. Paul Léon’s ‘Letters from Hell’: Drancy and Compiègne (1941–2)
Transcribed, translated and annotated by Mary Gallagher
6. ‘Living Memories of James Joyce: Fifty Years On’: A Lecture at the James Joyce Society, 11 February 1998
Alexis Léon
Select Bibliography
Index

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