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

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.

Alexis Léon (1925-2018) was born in Paris, the son of refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He was one of the last living members of James Joyce’s Paris circle in the author’s final decade.

Anna MariaLéon married Alexis Léon in Paris in 1979 and they were happy together for forty-three years. She encouraged this project from the start and ensured that this book would be published as a fitting tribute to her late husband and his family.

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. He is the author of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in ’Ulysses’: Becoming the Blooms (Oxford University Press 2015) and is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Ulysses and Shakespeare and Company.