The works of James Joyce have finally (re-)entered the public domain:
On the last day of 2011, the 70th anniversary year of his death, James Joyce’s work finally passed out of copyright. It was the dawn of a new age for Joyce scholars, publishers and biographers who are now free to quote or publish him without the permission of the ferociously prohibitive Joyce estate.
Over the past 20 years the right to quote from or publish Joyce’s work has been a matter of increasingly heated debate. The estate’s most vocal trustee, Stephen Joyce, the author’s grandson, earned himself the reputation as the most intractable defender of any copyright in modern times. His truculence (often verbal and colourful) towards those wishing to quote or publish his grandfather’s words dated from the mid-1970s, when biographer Richard Ellmann published some of Joyce’s “pornographic” letters to his wife Nora and some suggestive ones to a clandestine lover in Zurich. On becoming a trustee, Stephen was determined to prevent any further such revelations.
He outraged a meeting of Joyce scholars in Venice in 1988 by announcing that he had destroyed around a thousand letters to Joyce from his troubled daughter Lucia, as well as some to her from Samuel Beckett, the love of her young life. The following year he forced Brenda Maddox to delete a postscript concerning Lucia from her biography Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom. However, in 1991, the 50th anniversary of his death, Joyce’s copyright lapsed and for a time he could be quoted freely without permission. But in 1995 copyright in Europe was extended to 70 years, so the rights reverted to the estate.
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The intention of the literary guardian is often not just to protect the reputation and prestige of an individual or family but also to safeguard the integrity of a work against experimentation, revision or trivialisation. Samuel Beckett, for example, refused to allow women to take the leading roles in Waiting for Godot, an indignant Orwell stopped his publisher publicising Nineteen Eighty-Four as a romantic thriller and the Joyce estate refused Kate Bush permission to include the final, seductive words of Molly Bloom from Ulysses in a song.
But there is also a certain power and prestige in being the literary executor of a famous writer. People pay heed to one’s words, come cap-in-hand to one’s door with requests, and the trustee of manuscripts is free to grant or deny favours with a lordly nod or dismissive gesture. It is a power jealously guarded and sometimes remorselessly implemented.
