Battling the Joyce Estate

I've been meaning to blog for a couple of days now about a piece I read in last week's Globe and Mail, about a James Joyce scholar from the University of Western Ontario who, with a group of like-minded colleagues, is taking on the estate of the Irish novelist James Joyce. Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, is notorious in academic circles for his overzealous defence of his grandfather's legacy. Researchers wanting access to Joyce's archival papers, and permission to quote from these, are routinely frustrated and intimidated by Stephen Joyce, who exercises dictatorial control over the copyright on all Joyce's works. At the slightest suggestion that the family honour might be impugned in any way, cooperation and permission is withdrawn from scholars, who as a result have spent decades obliging and tiptoeing around Stephen Joyce. His sense of personal power and entitlement must be staggering.

[As the Globe link above requires subscription now, there's also an excellent longer piece in The New Yorker.]

I remember first being struck by this in 2004, not too long before we left Ireland. I went to the National Library one day to see an exhibition of Joyce manuscripts they were displaying, as part of the centenary of Bloomsday (I've since found out that Stephen Joyce, on hearing of the plans for the exhibition, warned the Library that the display violated his copyright; the Irish Senate had to pass an emergency amendment to thwart him!). On going into the exhibition, I was told by the attendant of all the usual restrictions - no video or photographs, etc. But on noticing that I had a notebook and pen with me, he pointed out that at the insistence of the Joyce Estate, visitors were not allowed to do so much as take notes from the manuscripts, either. Needless to say, I was gobsmacked.