the times | Tuesday May 24 2022 17
News
The prudish literary editor may have
started with the sex, ripping out pages
of Molly Bloom’s explicit fantasies from
his copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He
would go on to order his secretary to
burn the remainder of the “filthy” book,
which had just been printed in its
entirety for the first time.
Unknown to the editor, however,
Joyce’s epic was too big to fit in the office
stove so the secretary hid it on the shelf
where years later it was found by the
new deputy editor.
A century after it was ordered to be
incinerated, the book is to be sold by the
deputy editor’s family for up to £50,
— even though much of the sex is miss-
ing. “It is the first Ulysses I have ever
come across that has been saved from
the fire,” Matthew Haley, head of books
and manuscripts at Bonhams, said.
The book is one of just over a dozen
review copies that were part of the origi-
nal 1,000 printed in Paris in 1922, after
publishers elsewhere refused to touch it.
While some were sent to literary giants
such as Ezra Pound and Ernest
Hemingway, this copy was sent to John
Squire, the editor of the magazine
London Mercury, who hated modern-
ists, such as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Squire ordered Joyce’s novel —
which was notorious in its day, in part,
because of the sexual fantasising of
Molly and Leopold Bloom — to be
burnt. Haley said: “The secretary tookBlooming heck! It’s
a Ulysses for prudes
David Sanderson Arts Correspondent one look at the little oven and the thick-
ness of the book and said ‘no, that’s not
going to work’.”
She hid the book from Squire’s eyes
until several years later it was discov-
ered by the magazine’s deputy editor,
Alan Pryce-Jones. The family of Pryce-
Jones, who would later edit the Times
Literary Supplement and died in 2000
aged 91, have decided to sell the copy.
The book, which is missing about a
quarter of its pages, has been given a
£30,000-£50,000 estimate for the sale
on June 22. Haley said that while it was
possible the copy — printed in sham-
bolic circumstances by Shakespeare
and Company in Paris as they kept run-
ning out of paper — had been incom-
plete from the beginning, the content of
the missing scenes raised suspicions.
“It is interesting that there is a large
chunk missing at the end, one of the
more sexually explicit parts of the book
which famously ends on Molly Bloom
saying ‘Yes I said yes I will yes’ and she
is talking about penises and having sex
and that kind of thing.
“And one idea is that Jack Squire was
so shocked and horrified by the sexual-
ly explicit parts of the book that he
pulled them out and threw them away.”
First editions of Ulysses, which is rec-
ognised as one of the 20th century’s
most influential works of art, are big
business. One well preserved edition
sold for £275,000 just over a decade ago
with many of the original print run now
being held by public institutions.TMS
[email protected] | @timesdiaryImpaled in
royal revenge
While others are engaged in feudal
forelock-tugging before the jubilee,
Stephen Fry, speaking on Sunday at
the Radio Times Television Festival,
recalled a painful encounter he once
had with a royal. At a party attended
by Princess Margaret, he casually
mentioned his ancestor John Fry, a
parliamentarian who signed Charles
I’s death warrant. Hearing this,
Margaret stabbed the actor’s leg
with a fork. As Fry yelped, the
princess said: “There, we’ve got
some of our own back.” It reminded
me of our late colleague Philip
Howard’s story about his father
captaining England against Ireland
at rugby and getting kicked in the
head at a ruck. “What was that for?”
he asked. “That was for Cromwell,”
his opponent replied.Fry, above, also spoke about the joy
he gets from narrating the Harry
Potter audiobooks, but one
compliment proved uncomfortable. It
was when someone shouted at him
across the street: “My children go to
bed with you every night.”divine recovery service
When they were appointing a newArchbishop of York two years ago it
may have helped Stephen Cottrell’s
cause that he had once acted as a
human pair of jump leads on the
Queen’s Bentley. As Bishop of
Chelmsford, Cottrell had been
invited to preach at Sandringham
and after the service the royals got
into their car but it twice failed to
start. “At this point,” Cottrell tells
Yorkshire Life, “I made a large sign
of the cross over the bonnet. The
Queen didn’t appear to be amused
[but] the driver tried the car a third
time and it started.” Her Majesty
told guests that the bishop had
“healed” her car and later informed
him that, if she ever had car trouble
again, she would call. Who needs
the AA when you have the AB?geldof’s kidney donation
Before breaking into the music
industry, Bob Geldof did many odd
jobs, some very odd. For instance, he
watched Neil Armstrong step on tothe moon from the comfort of a
Peterborough pea-canning factory,
he told a BFI event. He also worked
in an abattoir, which curiously
helped him to win back a girlfriend.
“I wanted to see if I could re-woo
my lost love with offal,” Geldof said.
“It worked. She loved kidneys.” A
fair exchange for a broken heart.The medic and comic Ben Goldacre
may have seemed ungrateful when he
was made professor of event-based
medicine at Oxford two months ago.
“I don’t like the title,” the 48-year-old
told the Royal Society of Medicine. “It
makes you sound old.” A colleague
said the opposite is usually the case.
Most academics complain they’ve
received the title three years too late.art imitating life...
The actress Jenny Seagrove says an
actor who forgets their lines has
two options: keep going, since most
of the audience won’t know better,
or hope that a colleague will rescue
you. Not all of them can be relied
on. She tells My Time Capsule that
she once got hopelessly lost in a
play with Tom Conti, who was
playing her lover. “Darling, what do
you think?” she finally said, hoping
he would nudge her back on track.
“I don’t know,” Conti replied. “I
haven’t been listening.”patrick kidd