I hope the memes were worth it, /lit/

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>Stephen and [his grandfather James] Joyce took regular walks along the Zürichsee. Joyce bought him a box of toy soldiers. Helen recalls in her memoir, “I do not think that Stephen will ever forget his famous grandfather and their relationship was a deep and lovely one.” Even now, when Stephen has to make important decisions about the estate, he goes to Joyce’s grave to consult with him. In 1948, he wrote an essay about his grandfather, titled “The Man Whom I Loved and Respected Most in This World.”

>Stephen, in his thirties, was angered by the way that academics were circumventing the wishes of the estate. When the estate registered its desire to keep Joyce’s erotic letters to Nora private, Ellmann maneuvered around it. His 1959 biography alluded to the correspondence; his 1966 volume of Joyce’s letters contained expurgated versions of the letters; and his 1975 “Selected Letters” contained every word. In 1909, Joyce had implored Nora to “be careful to keep my letters secret.” Stephen viewed the letters’ publication as a transgression against his family.

>[Then] Stephen announced that he had destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia had written to him and his wife. He added that he had done the same with postcards and a telegram sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship. “I have not destroyed any papers or letters in my grandfather’s hand, yet,” Stephen wrote at the time. But in the early nineties he persuaded the National Library of Ireland to give him some Joyce family correspondence that was scheduled to be unsealed. Scholars worry that these documents, too, have been destroyed.

>Stephen has also attempted to impede the publication of dozens of scholarly works on James Joyce. He rejects every request to quote from unpublished letters. Last year, he told a prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer granting permissions to quote from any of Joyce’s writings.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/06/19/the-injustice-collector