“Scissors and Paste”: Joyce’s Weak Ties with the Press-Cutting Bureau

Strong and Weak Ties: The Joyce Circle and the Press-Cutting Bureau

In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated December 18, 1937, James Joyce’s secretary Paul Léon described how Finnegans Wake (1939) in its final phase required multiple accomplices to reach completion:

it takes some five or six other people to check the corrections, verify the additions and read the proofs. Himself, he does the composing part quite alone and from what I hear of Mr. Joyce, he works daily to about five in the morning.[1]

In a rare extant account of Joyce’s compositional practice, Stuart Gilbert, a longtime member of Joyce’s circle in Paris, called Joyce a “slave driver,” who found ingenious ways to get “people to put their time—and sometimes money—completely at his disposal,” forcing them “to run errands for him, pull strings for him” and perform numerous unrewarding chores.[2] Joyce’s later years, marked by frequent eye surgeries and personal tragedies, perhaps necessitated his reliance on amanuenses. Indeed, the presence of Joyce’s collaborators is still visible in his compositional notebooks where multiple hands often appear.[3] But as Lawrence Rainey and others have shown, Joyce’s production method was also exogenetic and relied heavily on a network of patrons, booksellers, and subscribers.[4] For Tim Conley, the “Joyce industry” had already commenced when Joyce oversaw the publication of Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929) to introduce Finnegans Wake to the public, deploying friends and admirers to begin a “multifarious process in public relations, literary analysis, and canonisation.”[5] Joyce’s “public relations” can be seen in what Mark Granovetter would term as a string of both strong and weak ties, the first of which can be mapped analyzing the role of immediate friends and amanuenses, while the latter requires a broader indexing.[6] On the one hand, as Rod Rosenquist shows, Joyce’s “strong” ties could coerce a reluctant Ford Madox Ford to review Ulysses for the English Review or instruct T. S. Eliot to “use or coin some phrase, two or three words” to introduce the book to the public.[7] But other public relations or partnerships went well beyond his immediate circle of kindred minds. This paper is concerned with such less immediate, even distant networks. These include media monitoring agencies as intermediaries within the publishing industry that allowed Joyce, his publisher and his patron to surveil the reception of his work across the globe. This surveillance tool was a large print network made up of individual “press-cutting agencies” which were in turn connected to foreign correspondents. Conceived within the niche art world of 1870s Paris, press-cutting agencies were one of the earliest and more elaborate, private media monitoring networks in the world. Customers such as Joyce’s patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, his publisher Sylvia Beach or secretary Paul Léon subscribed to multiple such agencies based in London, Paris and New York to collect press clippings related to Joyce’s public reception and to news or gossip about him and his family. Around 3,500 “Joyce clippings” survive today as donations from Beach, Weaver, and Léon in collections in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland. Barring the Léon clippings, most of which postdate the publication of Finnegans Wake, they help show that Joyce’s work was “collaborative” for several reasons. Firstly, as with their publication, Joyce relied heavily on the three figures above to subscribe and collect press clippings. This allowed him to acquaint himself with readers’ opinion from all corners of the world, at a scale that was unimaginable before the conception of clipping agencies. The clipping agencies themselves relied on transnational collaborative networks of correspondents and “readers” who supplied news articles from around the world. The agencies served as important intermediaries between the author and the domestic/international reader. This is why a study of these clippings and an analysis of the functioning of press-cutting agencies can reconstruct the contours of the “communications circuit” (to echo Robert Darnton) involving the author, the reading public and the mediators in between.[8] What I propose to showcase here is an aspect of what can be called a Joycean “field” (after Bourdieu) of textual production which emanates from but is also centered outside of the Joycean circle of close associates.[9] In Paul Saint-Amour’s recent coinage this could be seen as a feature of multidirectional, decentered “weak modernism” one that functions through collaboration but where not all the units in the field of production are directly connected with each other:

[T]hat modernism is not a property of some self-identical cultural “content” that gets sent out through networks; that it is, rather, a temper or mode that arises largely by way of multi-directional networked exchanges, whether these take the shape of collaboration, translation, misprision, imitation, provocation, appropriation, or counter-appropriation.[10]

For Saint-Amour, a “strong” field is distinguished by “vitality, generativity, and populousness” and a consequent “weakness” of its central term. In Joyce’s case, while the clippings made their way to Joyce’s desk, that is to say to a “center,” they came via multiple subscribers and ultimately from multiple commercial agencies and their correspondents spread out across the world.

As I demonstrate here, an examination of the functioning of the clipping-agency allows us to rethink the question of the autonomous (male) artist and his compositional technique. From 1917 onwards, James Joyce’s closer associates Weaver, Beach, and Léon began subscribing to multiple clipping bureaus such as The Original Henry Romeike (New York), Durrant’s Press Cuttings (London), Le Courrier de la Presse (Paris) and several others to supply him with press reviews of his work. Until Joyce’s death, these agencies continued to mail back to him or his circle press clippings from newspapers and journals in over ten languages from five continents. Sitting in Paris, Joyce could hope to read news articles published in the Egyptian Mail (Cairo) or The Englishman published from Calcutta, which in October 1928 listed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as one of the “Six Best English Novels Published in the Last Twenty Years.”[11] These clippings were carefully sorted by Joyce, Beach, and Weaver and used to prepare press notices for forthcoming publications. At times they were directly mailed to friends or fellow critics for greater publicity. There are instances when Joyce preserved and then incorporated words and phrases from his press reviews into his own work, especially Finnegans Wake. In order to understand the process of production and even the source-texts of Joyce’s late texts it is important to analyze the role of clipping agencies in Joyce’s late writings.

The clipping agency closely parallels the growth and proliferation of modernist culture. It was conceived within the artistic milieu of 1870s Paris when a boom in the French newspaper industry introduced the cheap, bulky newspaper with mass producible content.[12] In Britain too, the introduction of tabloid journalism (with Alfred Harmsworth’s taking over of the Daily Mail for instance) ushered in a culture of celebrity which further forced celebrities to surveil their public image in the press (Rainey, Institutions, 2–3). Lastly, the clipping agency was a product of the “age of information,” which converted news into information as a commodity to be circulated, managed, and controlled for profit.[13] The bureaus emerged at a moment of consolidated corporate capitalism in the United States and elsewhere, marked by rapid progress in transportation and communication.[14] This paper will demonstrate how Joyce’s weak collaborative networks existed alongside this new culture of information.

“…a certain type of mechanically alert shopgirl”:

At the heart of the clipping agency were women who worked as “readers.” Like their more famous contemporary, the “typewriter-girl,” the readers at the clipping bureau were almost exclusively women, and subject to the same structures of exploitation that their roles often entailed. In one of the more memorable descriptions of a clipping agency, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), sixteen-year-old Francie Nolan joins Model Press Clipping Bureau in New York in 1916. Francie’s experience at the clipping bureau closely mirrors the ways in which typewriter-girl novels “epitomize the modern experience,” Lawrence Rainey writes, “situated (as they are) at the intersection of changing gender roles, new technology, metropolitan experience, and modern capital.”[15] Francie witnesses the strict division of labor that defined the bureaus with readers such as herself and other workers such as the printer, who helped date and catalog clippings:

The ten readers sat at long sloping desks. The newspapers of all the states were divided among them. The papers poured into the Bureau every hour of every day from every city in every state of the Union. The girls marked and boxed items sought and put down their total and their own identifying number on the top of the front page.[16]

Readers manually speed-read about sixty newspapers a day to look for keywords supplied by their clients. Not just newspapers, the International Press Clipping Bureau based in Chicago claimed in their advertising booklet (1913) to be able to access “dailies, weeklies, monthlies, trade papers, religious papers and publications covering every phase of human interest.”[17] Once the reader detected a keyword, the article was swiftly segregated, cut off with scissors and sent to the client with full bibliographical detail (fig.1). Francie notices a clear split between educated “readers” and members of “The Club” consisting of the cutter, the printer, the paster, the paper baler and lastly, the delivery boy (Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 324). Consequently, the whole process from distribution of newspapers to the readers to the final mail to the customer involved constant synchronized collaboration like in any other well-oiled clerical establishment.

The readers must be seen in the context of the revolution in managerial methods and technologies of communication that according to JoAnne Yates had already begun to transform the nineteenth-century workplace from a counting house to a modern, rationalized office (fig. 2).[18] As numerous studies, such as Graham Lowe’s Women in the Administrative Revolution: The Feminization of Clerical Work (1987) have shown, in North America and elsewhere from the late nineteenth-century till the outbreak of World War I, the clerical profession from that of the stenographer, the bank clerk or the secretary was beginning to get “feminized.”[19] As Leah Price puts it, the “movement of a hand or eye across the page is coming to be coded female.”[20] The fact was not unnoticed by bureau owners. In fact, as one manager put it in 1908 women were particularly suited as readers:

I’ll tell you the secret, They’re like ‘Blind Tom,’ the piano player, or other prodigies trained to one expert feat. This work doesn’t require much intelligence; school teachers fail at it because they think too much and get interested in the items. Men are not good. It takes a certain type of mechanically alert shopgirl. (quoted in Popp, “Clippings,” 439)

This dehumanized image of a “mechanical” reader could be an obvious expression of male anxiety over an emergent female labor force but the analogy also hints at the faceless, impersonal “professionalism” one associates with the modern corporate automated office. Ellen Garvey in Writing with Scissors (2012) describes the clipping agency as a “steampunk version of Google.”[21] But of course, as Garvey’s phrase also reveals, the clipping agency was emphatically not an automated space. Publicity booklets from International Press Clipping Bureau drew attention to “expert workers” which allowed them to “thoroughly read and clip this enormous mass of printed matter” while Hemstreet’s Clipping Bureau (New York) assured customers of employing “special readers” to look after specific needs (quoted in Popp, “Clippings,” 439). The smooth functioning of a clipping bureau depended not only on seamless harmonization between its workers but also on its ability to collaborate with its foreign correspondents.

An advertising booklet from 1902 shows that Henry Romeike Inc., one of the largest clipping agencies in the world had already opened branches in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Vienna, and Rome.[22] This was because with the rise of celebrity culture, a major faction of the clientele consisted of vanity orders from the Who’s Who anxious to keep an eye on their public image. Henry Romeike’s supplied clippings to Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and later to the American poet James Merrill. Argus de la Presse, arguably the earliest clipping bureau in the world, was based in Paris but at one point boasted of a customer base that included Marcel Proust, Anatole France, Sergei Diaghilev, the soon-to-be-immortalized Mata Hari, and a certain Charles de Gaulle.[23] Given the truly transnational reach of the bureau, it is not surprising that Joyce, a resident of Paris since 1920 with an increasingly prominent celebrity status would be enmeshed in the clipping bureau network.

“Noise about Joyce”

Despite Joyce’s massive and diverse collection of press clippings there is no evidence to suggest that Joyce himself invested to subscribe to press-cutting bureaus. Instead, true to Gilbert’s description as someone who could persuade others to “pull strings for him,” Joyce seems to have relied on others to subscribe to clipping agencies on his behalf. In fact, the first evidence of him showing any awareness of clipping bureaus hails from 1915 where he complains to his publisher Grant Richards that his “press clipping agency” may have overlooked two important press reviews of Dubliners in Freeman’s Journal and Sinn Fein.[24] Joyce’s obsessive pursuit of the “most effective” review compelled Weaver to send him regular press reviews of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from London to Zurich in 1916. But this exchange proved difficult soon. Weaver explained to B. W. Huebsch, Joyce’s American publisher in March 1917:

A little time ago I posted to you a press cutting of an appreciative review of Mr. Joyce’s novel written by Mr. H. G. Wells in the London Nation of February 24^th but it has been returned to me from our postal Censor’s office with a notice saying that newspaper cuttings as well as other printed matter can now only be sent to America through an agent having a permit.[25]

Weaver then goes on to note the importance of these reviews in increasing sales, the fact that they “have been of great service to us and our sales began to make a good start after they appeared” (Shaw to Huebsch, 391). By then the Chief Postal Censor had made it clear that press-cuttings from Britain to neutral or enemy countries could only be sent via “persons or firms who have received from the War Office or the Admiralty the official permission necessary for the purpose.”[26] Weaver discovered that clipping agencies had such permissions to send press-cuttings abroad. On April 29 she wrote that she had subscribed to “Messrs Durrant’s press cutting agency.”[27]

If Weaver was the first to subscribe to a clipping bureau for Joyce, she would soon be followed by Beach and Léon.[28] But both Weaver and Beach help us see the significance of Joyce’s “weak” network and its effect on the field of production. Joyce took recourse to the clipping service only when his immediate associates could no longer provide him with the information he needed. Private agencies like press-cutting bureaus got permits to bypass stringent censorship. In fact, the India Office records at the British Library show that the British government in the 1930s might have been subscribing to private clipping agencies themselves, for instance to Durrant’s Press-Cuttings between 1934 and 1935.[29]

Joyce too, seems to have found multiple uses for these clippings including recycling them into his own corpus. To give but one example, scholars of the Finnegans Wake notebooks have long insisted on how he made use of the hostile reviews of Ulysses for Finnegans Wake.[30] He read and utilized poet Alfred Noyes’s caustic review of Ulysses in The Sunday Chronicle (October 1922), entitled “Rottenness in Literature” where Noyes observed:

But—there is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages.[31] (fig. 4)

Joyce was well-aware of the potential of such a review, as he pointed out to Harriet Shaw Weaver on November 8, 1922:

I have also received the press-cuttings which might be called “Noise about Joyce”. I do not think that Mr. Noyes has read the book but you can take a few sentences from his article in the Sunday Chronicle to add to the press extracts.[32]

In Joyce indicates clearly that he received multiple reviews by Noyes in the form of “press-cuttings.” As it turns out, Noyes’s Sunday Chronicle piece exists in the form of a clipping from Durrant’s Press Cuttings at Buffalo (fig.4).

The frequently cited passage from Noyes’s text, especially his reference to the madman and the ape, becomes pivotal in Finnegans Wake. The description of Shem the Penman in the First Draft Version makes use of this last line from I.5:

the theory of the jabbering ape was abandoned hotly dropped and its place usurped by that odious & even now today insufficiently despised person notetaker, Jim the Penman.[33]

Joyce transformed it in the Wake as:

jabberjaw ape amok the showering jestnuts of Bruisanose was hotly dropped and his room taken up by that odious and still today insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher (kak, pfooi, bosh and fiety, much earny, Gus, poteen? Sez you!)[34]

Joyce indicates that he received multiple clippings on the subject of Noyes and his views on Joyce. This is also borne out by the series of clippings from newspapers in which the same news item was reprinted. They were all sent to Joyce himself by Durrant’s Press Cuttings.[35]

Moreover, he might have found some affinity between his own poetic practice and that of the clipping bureaus. As any reader of the Finnegans Wake notebooks would know, Joyce’s note-taking style was eclectic to say the least, incorporating phrases, sometimes single words from newspapers, journals, books, almanacs and for that, any printed matter he chanced upon. Dirk Van Hulle puts it succinctly:

Language only gradually became the main character of “Work in Progress” as Joyce detached his lexical material from its conventional referentiality. The more works he decontextualized, the more opportunities he created for their meanings, associations, and resonances to interact, causing an energetic effect of simultaneity. (Van Hulle, Manuscript Genetics, 83)

If, as Van Hulle implies, one of the components of Joyce’s poetic method was to actively “decontextualize” words from source texts, the clipping agency performed a similar function on a macro level. That is to say, instead of mere words and phrases, it decontextualized entire news items out of their context in the newspaper. Robert Luce, owner of the Boston-based Luce’s Press Clipping Bureau explained in an article in 1913:

It is worthwhile realizing that a newspaper or magazine is similarly a collection of unrelated bits of information or discussion, all printed at the same revolution of the press only because men find money profit in throwing them together. The cord on which they are strung deserves no reverence. And when you take them off the cord, assort, and restring them, they are not beads to make a pretty necklace, but— if I do not too much force the metaphor— dried apples to be eaten.[36]

If there seems to be an “invisible partnership” (not entirely unlike the spectral collaborators of George and W. B. Yeats explored by Adrian Paterson in this cluster) between the methods employed by Joyce and the clipping bureau, the common cord seems to be the context they were both operating in. In Control Revolution (1986) James Beniger evokes Weber’s thesis on bureaucracy to demonstrate the characteristics of a so-called post-industrial “information society.” For him, such a society is marked by a “rationalization” of information and commodification of news brought about by an “ignoring” of information through formalizing procedures in order to reduce the amount of information to be processed (Beniger, The Control Revolution, 15). As Beniger notes, rationalization logically evolves into computerization. The clipping bureau with its army of speed-readers were thus forming a mid-ground between the newly rationalized nineteenth-century office and today’s “automated” office which minimizes human input.

What the clipping agency unerringly did was to track down keywords, trace how far, how many times a particular news item had been covered in the press, and track down its progress. In late 1926 when Joyce was launching an international protest campaign against Samuel Roth’s unauthorized “reprinting” of segments of Ulysses in Two Worlds Monthly in the United States, the press was to play a crucial role in isolating Roth in the publishing world. Robert Spoo notes how this was a time-tested strategy:

The use of the press to spread negative gossip was a time-tested sanction derived from trade courtesy practices of the previous century. The aim of the gossipers was to multiply punishments exponentially by destroying Roth’s credibility with publishers, advertising departments, booksellers, newsstand owners, and readers, who would in turn refuse to deal with him and his magazine business.[37]

Joyce needed a wider network of newspaper columnists and publishers willing to circulate his “protest letter” to achieve this “exponential” effect. Joyce’s collection of press clippings at Buffalo tells us that the protest letter, cabled to 900 papers in the US with an ever-accumulating number of signatories, was reprinted and translated into French, German and Italian for newspapers and periodicals in Europe and the United States.[38] Clipping agencies with their constant supply of press cuttings allowed Joyce to tap its progress in the press.

To conclude, the clipping agency functioned by creating multiple collaborative networks. Betty Smith’s heroine Francie knew that despite hierarchies, like any other clerical establishment the press-cutting bureau operated in a rationalized space with each worker from the reader to the delivery boy collaborating to produce and disseminate news articles. Their popularity was a direct outcome of their expansive, even international reach, which was a result of further partnerships with foreign correspondents. While Joyce’s ties with clipping agencies were “weak”—he hardly subscribed himself but mostly through intermediaries—the clipping service made him part of a strong international print network where news items morselized (to quote Ellen Garvey) could travel many distances (Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 247). Finally, the press-clipping agency with its routinized technique of decontextualizing news items from their source functioned precisely by weakening ties and thereby increasing dispersal across the field of production. Perhaps Joyce the artist, who described himself as a “scissors and paste man,” would have found their working methods not entirely dissimilar to his own late style.[39]