Myths and Monuments: The Case of Alfred H. Hunter

The first intimation of the book we now know as Ulysses is contained in a postcard from James Joyce to his brother Stanislaus from Rome postmarked 30 September 1906: `I have a new story for Dubliners in my head. It deals with Mr Hunter’.1 The story was to be called ‘Ulysses’.2 On 13 November Joyce asked Stanislaus how he liked the title and on 3 December he requested him to write what he remembered of Hunter.3 But the pressures of Joyce’s life in Rome meant the story was never written: on 6 February 1907 he wrote to Stanislaus that ‘“Ulysses” never got any forrader than the title’.4 The idea then lay dormant until 1915, when Joyce informed Stanislaus in a postcard in German from Trieste, dated 16 June, that Ulysses (the novel) was begun.5 There has been much debate about the identity of ‘Mr Hunter’ and the nature of his involvement with Joyce. Richard Ellmann, who talked to Stanislaus Joyce about this, says in the first edition of his biography that Hunter was ‘a dark-complexioned Dublin Jew [...] who was rumoured to be a cuckold’.6 In the second edition, he declares ‘Hunter was rumoured to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife.’7 Some of the certainty of the first edition has wavered (Hunter is now only ‘rumoured to be Jewish’ and no statement as to his complexion is ventured). Again, in a later reference in the second edition, Hunter is described as a ̀ putatively Jewish Dubliner’.8 In fact, these are not the only differences between Ellmann’s account of Hunter in the first and second editions of his biography: some of the other disparities are even more significant and occasioned critical comment from another leading Joycean of Ellmann’s generation, Hugh Kenner. What happened between the two versions of Ellmann’s text was outlined by Kenner in his review of the second edition of the biography.9 The first edition of Ellmann’s biography appeared in 1959. In 1968, the first paperback edition of Ulysses was published.10 It contained at the end of the volume an afterword by Richard Ellmann in which he sets out some of the background to the book.11 It includes an account of a fracas in June 1904 after which, Ellmann states, Joyce ‘was dusted off and taken home by a man named