August 9, 2018

The quotes below are all from the New York Times. We have rearranged the quotes about John Kidd, James Joyce scholar, as part of a celebration of National Booklover's Day.

'John Kidd’s early life .... [has elements of] fabulism. He grew up with a brother of the same name, just without the ‘h.’ John and Jon were the sons of Capt. John William Kidd, a naval officer known to the sailors on board as Starbuck.'

'As a young scholar, Kidd gained notice from professors, won prizes and quickly ascended the graduate-studies ladder. His love, though, was the big book, the grand epic — thinking through the theories and details of wide-ranging and all-encompassing narratives. He was drawn to Jungian theory, the one school of 20th-century psychoanalysis that theorized about the spiritual quest for completedness. The self, Jung wrote, “expresses the unity of the personality as a whole.” Then, in graduate school, Kidd proposed a project on Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which he had read in three days as a teenager.'

'But Kidd didn’t just study the novel; he went to Joyce’s tomb in Zurich and started to buy and collect every possible known, and many not-so-known, editions of the book. He compared every draft and every page. He became, in short, a kind of uber-Joycean. But he didn’t take the normal graduate route, luring someone famous to be his mentor (like the critic Hugh Kenner or the biographer Richard Ellmann). Instead, he became a self-directed scholar, holed up in his garret with scores of different versions of “Ulysses.”'

'Joyce once said about “Ulysses” — and it’s practically a requirement of any article about the novel to use this quote — “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” And that has always been part of how the novel works. For most of the book, what you are reading are the fractured bits of memory and observation kicking around in the head of a single schlub named Leopold Bloom as he wanders about Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904. It’s the sensation of putting these bits together and the pleasure, when it happens, of suddenly getting it — the joke, the story, the book — that compels you throughout.'

'So was Kidd one of Joyce’s prophesied professors, made so busy by the puzzles and enigmas that he was driven to literal madness?'

[This question makes sense when you realize that for some years, strange stories about a strange man, surrounded Kidd.]
'Kidd had been the director of the James Joyce Research Center, a suite of offices on the campus of Boston University dedicated to the study of “Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over novel of the 20th century. Armed with generous endowments and cutting-edge technology, he led a team dedicated to a single goal: producing a perfect edition of the text. ...[He also] had produced a digital edition, one that used embedded hyperlinks to make the novel’s vast thicket of references and allusions, patterns and connections all available to the reader at a click.'

'....[And yet, in 2002 the] Boston Globe published an article about a jobless man who haunted Marsh Plaza, at the center of Boston University. The picture showed a curious figure in a long overcoat, hunched beneath a black fedora near the central sculpture. He spent his days talking with pigeons to whom he had given names: Checkers and Wingtip and Speckles. The article could have been just another human-interest story about our society’s failing commitment to mental health, except that the man crouched in conversation with the birds was John Kidd, once celebrated as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive.

' ....[Not] long after that newspaper article was published, Kidd simply vanished. ' [People assumed he had died.]

'....[A] Romanian scholar, Mircea Mihaies, ...confirmed it. In fact, Mihaies wrote about the calamity in his history of “Ulysses.” In an interview for the release of the book, Mihaies explained: John Kidd “died under sordid circumstances in 2010, buried in debt, detested, insulted, alone, abandoned by everyone, communicating only with pigeons on a Boston campus.”'
'John Kidd, [though turned out to be] very much alive, .... in Rio de Janeiro.'

[His disappearance succeeded a scholarly debate, in 1988, regarding a new edition of Ulysses, one John Kidd derided.  The contentious arguments grew and involved issues that provoked people like]
'John Updike... to [write to] The New York Review of Books to complain bitterly about .... blasphemous choices regarding paragraph indentations [in this new edition].'

'As Kidd’s challenge gained a wider audience, another academic ....wrote in with some big news. He had discovered that the Joyce Estate, run by Stephen Joyce, the author’s notoriously prickly grandson, had authorized the ...[new] edition for the reason of creating enough “new” content to extend the copyright, which in Europe was expiring in 1992. This was not an inconsequential claim. At the time, “Ulysses” sold an estimated 100,000 copies a year. A renewal of the copyright would protect revenues for decades to come, for both the publisher and Stephen Joyce, who had to legally authorize this new edition.'

[Such were the scandals in academe that Kidd left behind. Now, 2018, we find]
John Kidd, ...65, ...[and] well above 6 feet tall ....comfortably carries the emerging evidence of many a fine dinner. He no longer has the tidy short blond hair of 30 years ago. It’s now grown out snowy white and halfway down his back, deep into Gandalf territory. He’s a devoted fan of loosefitting Hawaiian shirts, flip-flops and shorts.... and takes rapid tiny steps, ....'

'Right off, he wants to talk [to the writer of the article we are quoting] about that Boston Globe article with the pigeons. His outrage is still raw. He’s particularly miffed that he was called “broke.” He wants me to know he’s flush and always has been. He has, at the ready, a notarized letter from Fleet Bank in Brookline dated 14 years ago, stating: “six months avg balance in this checking account has been $15,618.00.”'

'I want to talk about how he left Boston University, but when the bitter memories of departmental fights at B.U. or old quarrels with students over grades come up, it’s as if he’s bitten a lemon and his entire face focuses darkly on a point just beyond his nose. Kidd told me he quit. And he did, but only after there were stories in The Boston Globe noting his temper, his treatment of students and his clashes with campus security over birds. He lingered on campus for a while, haunting Marsh Plaza, and then he disappeared.'

'He told me he [first] set off to Beijing. He had read “Dream of the Red Chamber,” China’s great epic novel, and become a “redologist,” an actual term for those who submerge themselves in the study of this one book. He later moved to Brazil and became fluent in Portuguese before plunging, as seemed inevitable, into that language’s own works of heroic fiction. He is obsessed now with a 19th-century book about a helpless young girl, “The Slave Isaura,” a popular work that in its early days helped end slavery (essentially, Brazil’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). Kidd’s compulsion to understand any culture’s big book is still what gets him out of bed in the morning.'

'....[It's] possible to dismiss Kidd as a man who found a handful of serious errors and then used his fussy mastery of minutiae to inflate a few hundred other flecks into a raging scandal. But it’s also true “Ulysses” is a book whose every detail matters. Joyce himself was consumed by his own compulsion for details, his love of coincidence and his obsession for superstition — he built the novel out of them. He once wrote to Harriet Weaver worrying about the year 1921, whose digits total 13. One outlying theory connects this arithmetic fear to Joyce’s decision to publish Ulysses on his birthday the following year, which had a sublime smoothness when written down on paper: 2/2/22.'

'It’s also fair to wonder about Kidd’s sanity. He is fairly manic when discussing these preciously irrelevant textual changes. They all get explained in the rushed, self-interrupting fervor of the zealot. But in his encyclopedic way of talking, of thinking, of seeing, an undeniable brilliance comes through. This quality was on vivid display the afternoon he welcomed me into his apartment, a unit in a high rise with a nice view of Rio. The place is neat and walled with books on shelves. There are lots of bureaus and built-in dressers, and at one point, when he went to retrieve a book, every drawer he opened was packed top to bottom, side to side, with even more books.'

“You really have to read Fernando Pessoa,” he said, handing me a collection of poems, in Portuguese, by this early-20th-century Lisbon writer, titled “A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe.” I cracked open Kidd’s copy to find a swarm of marginal notes on nearly every page, cataloging textual alternatives in the many other Portuguese editions he owns. This is how John Kidd reads everything — as a search for the perfected text.'

'It’s not just an aesthetic choice for Kidd but a kind of compulsion toward completedness, suffusing not just how he reads literature but also how he talks about it. ....'

'Theorists who study folk art sometimes describe those crowded, image-packed creations, like Howard Finster’s “Paradise Garden” or Grandma Moses’ “Country Fair,” not merely as a prominent theme but as a kind of mental illness common to the form. They argue that these artists’ works are expressions of a compulsion to fill an existential emptiness. This anxiety has its own Latin name, horror vacui, fear of the void — and Kidd brings this intensity to his understanding of every book he reads.'

' [In] the Brazilian Academy of Letters, where he works...Kidd keeps a permanent cubicle occupied by a big old PC and a few books. For years he has been working on the first English edition of the novel “The Slave Isaura.” Kidd is translating the 19th-century book with a few rules he felt compelled to devise. The work will be in two parts, and every word in Part 1 will have its lexicographic partner in Part 2. If “cat feet” appears in Part 1, expect “cattail” in Part 2. His sense of what pairs up can get quite intricate, but that’s part of the fun, he told me. So he maintains lists of all the possible pairings and where and whether he has used one: six foot, six foot under, footing, foothills, footloose, footprint. There is a logic to the work, and the part I read resounded with the baroque tone you might expect of a translation that will obey his other rule: It will use every word exactly once.'

It would be hard to surpass this portrait of a book lover for National Book Lovers Day. You should click the link above and read the whole article.