SOURCE: “The Misleading Mr. McAlmon and Joyce's Typescript,” in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2, Winter, 1970, pp. 143-47.

In the following essay, Card discusses McAlmon's editorial claims concerning James Joyce's Ulysses.

One apocryphal anecdote about Joyce and the making of Ulysses that seems to be generally believed is that Robert McAlmon, the typist of “Penelope,” rearranged parts of that chapter. McAlmon, a minor American writer who had become friendly with Joyce during 1921 in Paris, agreed to perform the typing chore late in that year since Joyce was anxious to find a typist he could trust.¹ According to McAlmon, however, trying to arrange words as Joyce wanted them proved tedious, and he described his improvement on Joyce's manuscript this way in his memoirs:

He gave me the handwritten script, and his handwriting is minute and hen-scrawly, very difficult to decipher. With the script he gave me some four notebooks and...