ALS, penned on an off-white 5.75 x 4 postal card, October 23, 1931. Handwritten letter from James Joyce to British polymath C. K. (Charles Kay) Ogden, addressed from the former’s Paris apartment at “2 Avenue Saint Philibert.” In part: “I did not register the note as it was after office hours but I hope you got them. There is a very good notice…in Spectator of 10 instant. You ought to see it and tell Henry…about it.” Joyce has addressed the reverse in his own hand. In fine condition, with a short tear to the bottom right edge, and a small postal cancellation touching Joyce's last name.
C. K. Ogden (1889–1957), an English linguistic psychologist best known for his invention of Basic English, was contacted by James Joyce in the summer of 1929 to write an introduction to his soon-to-be-published Tales Told of Shem and Shaun. Ogden accepted and, in turn, requested that Joyce meet him at the Orthological Institute in Cambridge for a recording. Joyce acquiesced in kind and, in August, read for a recording of Anna Livia Plurabelle, a ‘fragment’ published in 1925 as a part of Joyce’s 'Work in Progress,' which evolved into his monumental 1939 work Finnegans Wake.
Per Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, due to the writer’s failing eyesight, ‘the pages had been prepared for him in half-inch letters, but the light in the studio was so weak that Joyce still could not read them. He therefore had to be prompted in a whisper throughout, his achievement being, as Ogden said, all the more remarkable.’ The 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' section, which would appear as the eighth chapter in book one, is regarded as one of the most beautiful prose poems in the English language and has earned the most critical praise of any portion of Finnegans Wake.
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