Paul Léon

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Paul Léopoldovitch Léon (born in 1893 in the Russian Empire ; died in early April 1942 in Auschwitz ) was a Polish-French sociologist and secretary to James Joyce .

Life

Paul Léon came from the Polish part of the Russian Empire. He studied sociology and philosophy and became a professor. He fled in 1918, went to London and came to France in 1921. He was of Jewish descent, spoke seven languages, and did research on Rousseau and Benjamin Constant . He married Lucie Noël and they moved into a bourgeois apartment on Rue Casimir-Périer in Paris in 1925 , shortly before the birth of their son Alex. Lucie was a sister of Alex Ponizovski, who was friends with Vladimir Nabokov . In 1938 Nabokov read with her the correction of his first English-language work The Real Life of Sebastian Knight . Lucie Noël wrote about fashion for the New York Herald Tribune and thus provided for the family.

Léon first met James Joyce in 1928 and was fascinated by his work. From 1930 he made himself available as an unpaid secretary to the writer, who was soon going to and from Léon's apartment. In the winter of 1930/31 they wrote a French translation by Anna Livia Plurabelle together with Philippe Soupault . At Léon, Joyce was more likely to do his correspondence, while he was doing the work on his “Work in progress” Finnegans Wake alone in his apartment. Léon's enormous language skills were also needed. When Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, Joyce gave him a copy with this dedication

"To the Eurasian knight, Paul Léon,
with a thousand and one thanks
from this most unfortunate writer,
James Joyce Paris, May 4th 1939"

After the Wehrmacht invaded France , Léon and his wife Lucie, like the Joyce family, fled to Saint-Gérand-le-Puy (in the canton of Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule ). With Joyce, he looked through the first edition of Finnegans Wake for printing errors. Since they had largely left their personal belongings in the apartment on Rue Casimir-Périer, Lucie, who still worked for the New York Herald Tribune, went back to Paris. When they ran out of money, Léon and Alex followed them back to Paris on September 4, 1940, in the part of France occupied by the Germans. He now took care of securing Joyce's personal effects from his apartment. He stuffed his own correspondence with Joyce in 19 brown envelopes and gave it to Gerald O'Kelly de Gallagh (1890-1968), the deputy charge d'affaires of the Embassy of Ireland. The envelopes remained there in (relative) security until 1946 and then ended up in the National Library of Ireland as intended . When on May 7, 1941 the landlord forced Joyce's apartment to auction off the furniture because of the rent debts, Léon was able to buy most of the family members' first editions and other important belongings with borrowed 20,000 francs. By the end of 1941, Lucie and Paul Léon managed to store most of the suitcases and parcels with Joyce books and papers with friends and lawyers. Her own apartment on Rue Casimir-Périer has now been searched repeatedly by the Gestapo and the Collaboration Police.

In August 1941, Samuel Beckett sought him out and urgently recommended him to flee, which he refused on the grounds that Alex was doing his baccalaureate . In the same month Paul Léon was imprisoned in the Drancy assembly camp and transferred to the Royallieu concentration camp in December . The Irish government refused intervention requested by Giorgio Joyce. On March 27, 1942, he was transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where he was murdered. Lucie Léon-Noel and Alex survived the persecution in Monaco , and they continued to live in the Paris apartment when Gisèle Freund visited them there in 1964 and took photos of the historical literary site.

The contents of the suitcases taken over from Maria Jolas after the war were to be auctioned off in October 1949 in the Galery La Hune for the benefit of Nora Joyce , but this did not succeed en bloc. Finally, in 1950, the University at Buffalo took over the entire portfolio for USD 10,000. Joyce's letters to Léon and Léon's carbon copies of the letters he typed for Joyce, for example to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, were now stored in the National Library of Ireland . In his will itself there was a provision that his estate should remain locked for 50 years, but that it could be opened for the use of the Joyce family before then. As a result , access was granted to Stephen Joyce, nephew of Joyce's daughter Lucia , who after Lucia's death in 1982 removed letters and burned them with other holdings. For her part, Lucie Léon-Noël had decided that Léon's estate should not be opened 50 years after her death (which was in 1972). The estate was opened in 1992 and made available to literary studies.

An edition of Ulysses signed for Paul Léon fetched USD 1,050 at auction in 1967. In 1998, a Paul Leon Exhibition Room was set up in Dublin's James Joyce Center with furniture from the Paris apartment, including the armchair Joyce sat in when he worked there.

Fonts

  • Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868-1918. Lettres de Nicholas II et de sa mère . Translation, introduction and notes by Paul L. Léon. Paris: S. Kra, 1928
  • Lettres de Madame de Staël à Benjamin Constant; publiées pour la première fois en original par Madame la Baronne de Nolde . Foreword by Gustave Rudler. Introduction and remarks by Paul L. Léon. Paris: S. Kra, 1928
  • Benjamin Constant . Paris: Rieder, 1930
  • Le Problème du contrat social chez Rousseau . Paris: Sirey, 1935
  • NS Timacheff: Introduction à la sociologie juridique . Translation from the English manuscript with the collaboration of Paul-L. Léon. Paris: A. Pedone, 1939
  • In memory of James Joyce , in: Poésie , 5, 1942, p. 35 [presumably in French ]; again in: Maria Jolas (Ed.): A James Joyce Yearbook , Paris: Transition Press, 1949, pp. 116–125

literature

  • Catherine Fahy: Foreword to The James Joyce Paul Léon Papers: a catalog . Dublin: National Library of Ireland (not viewed)
  • Lucie Noël: James Joyce and Paul L. Leon. The story of a friedship . A proceeding of the James Joyce Soc. delivered in part at the meeting of November 18, 1948. New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1950 (not viewed)
  • Carol Loeb Shloss: Lucia Joyce: to dance in the wake . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003 ISBN 0-374-19424-6
  • Robert H. Deming (Ed.): James Joyce: the critical heritage. 2. 1928 - 1941 London: Routledge & Paul, 1970 (not viewed)
  • Robert H. Deming: A bibliography of James Joyce studies . 2nd Edition. Boston, Mass. : Hall, 1977, ISBN 0-8161-7969-7
  • Seed cake for tea . Interview with Lucie Noël-Léon, in: Irish Independent , February 13, 1965 (not viewed)
  • Maria Jolas: The little known Paul Léon , in: Marvin Magalaner: A James Joyce miscellany , New York, 1959, pp. 225–233 (not viewed)
  • Joseph Prescott: Two manuscripts by Paul L. Léon concerning James Joyce , in: Modern fiction studies , Volume II, number 2 (May 1956), pp. 71-76
  • Jane Lidderdale & Mary Nicholson: Dear Miss Weaver: a life for Joyce . Translation Angela Praesent, Anneliese Strauss. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1974
  • Richard Ellmann : James Joyce . Volume 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1979

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b A. Nicholas Fargnoli; Michael Patrick Gillespie: James Joyce A to Z: the essential reference to the life and work . New York, NY: Facts On File, 1995, ISBN 0-7475-2409-2 , pp. 131f.
  2. ^ Richard Ellmann: James Joyce . Volume 2. 1979, pp. 947f.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g In memory of true friendship . Interview with Alex Leon, in: The Irish Times , October 29, 1998
  4. ↑ The maiden name of Moscow-born Lucie Léon is unclear, according to Ellmann, Lucie Noël was her pseudonym for press work
  5. ↑ Information on Paul Léon in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .
  6. ^ Philippe Soupault: A propos de la traduction d'Anna Livia Plurabelle , in: Nouvelle Revue Française , May 1931
  7. ^ Richard Ellmann: James Joyce . Volume 2. 1979, p. 1044
  8. ↑ James Joyce letter to Maria Jolas , September 7, 1940, in: Richard Ellmann : James Joyce. Selected letters . London: Faber and Faber, 1975 ISBN 0-571-09306-X pp. 406f.
  9. ^ Richard Ellmann: James Joyce . Volume 2. 1979, p. 1102, annotation
  10. ^ Gisèle Freund, VB Carleton: James Joyce in Paris: his final years . London: Cassell, 1966, pp. 102f.
  11. ↑ LUCIE NOEL, 72, FASHION WRITER , obituary in the New York Times , May 4, 1972
  12. ^ Robert H. Deming: A bibliography of James Joyce studies , 1977, No. 4158
  13. ^ Robert H. Deming: A bibliography of James Joyce studies , 1977, No. 1596
personal data
SURNAME Léon, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Léon, Paul Léopoldovitch (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-French sociologist and secretary to James Joyce
DATE OF BIRTH 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH April 1942
Place of death Auschwitz concentration camp