Letters of the writer who risked his life to save Joyce’s manuscripts in Nazi-occupied Paris

Paul Léon’s friendship with James Joyce, the work they did together on Finnegans Wake and the fact that Léon risked his life to save Joyce’s manuscripts in Nazi-occupied Paris have ensured Léon’s place in Irish literary history.

James Joyce and Paul L Léon: The Story of A Friendship Revisited, just published in Bloomsbury’s Modernist Archives series, also makes evident Léon’s stature as a writer and intellectual in his own right.

Léon was an expert on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Constant. He translated into French two sets of correspondence, between Czar Nicolas II and his mother Maria Federovna, and between Constant and the intellectual Madame de Stael.

Léon’s wife Lucie was, like him, from a wealthy Russian Jewish family who fled the Bolshevik revolution. His literary skill makes the letters he wrote to Lucie from Nazi internment camps outside Paris between August 1941 and March 1942 particularly haunting.

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In a sense, Léon wrote for millions of Holocaust victims who remain voiceless and forgotten as individuals. His previously unpublished letters comprise nearly half the new book.

“Were it not for the intersection of Léon’s life’s work with that of Joyce”, Léon would probably have remained unknown, admits Mary Gallagher, professor of French at University College Dublin, who translated the letters from French into English. “They were very difficult to read, because at the end he was writing on toilet paper and the ink was bleeding through.”

[ James Joyce and Paul Léon: Lara Marlowe on a friendship revisited ]

[ In memory of true friendship ]

[ The mystery of Joyce's manuscripts ]

Léon was arrested on August 21st, 1941, probably at the apartment at 27 rue Casimir Périer in Paris’s 7th district where he and Joyce worked together daily for a decade.

Léon’s first letter from the internment camp at Drancy is almost cheerful. He has been imprisioned with Jewish lawyers from the bar council, “mistakenly of course, for I’m neither a Frenchman nor a member of the Bar council”. There are “special perks” to being imprisoned with lawyers, he jokes. “We are sleeping on bare wooden planks, and I regret not being plumper, for my bones are suffering. But we’ve been promised that there is great luxury ahead – straw mattresses!”

Mortal danger

Léon has no idea of the mortal danger he faces. “He was a very impractical, idealistic man, an Enlightenment scholar who thought people should follow certain moral codes,” says Luca Crispi of the James Joyce Research Centre at UCD. Crispi coedited the book with Léon’s late son Alexis and daughter-in-law Anna Maria Léon.

Alexis Léon found the letters and Joyce manuscripts in storage in 2000. The manuscripts now belong to the National Library of Ireland.

To read the letters is to follow Paul Léon’s descent into hell. ‘In order to be saved I want to believe in God, but I am so close to despair,’ he writes on November 5th

Lucie Léon volunteered with the Red Cross to gain access to Drancy. Though she saw her husband only from a distance, the couple were able to smuggle letters to each other. Lucie sent packages of food and clothing, and paid middlemen outside the camp for favours from other prisoners or guards. These complex transactions were frequently the focus of their correspondence.

Léon was a non-practising Jew who regarded the Sermon on the Mount as one of the great philosophical tracts of history. In captivity, he drew closer to Orthodox Christianity. He writes to Lucie on September 30th asking her to ask Orthodox priests to pray for him, and for their son Alexis, then age 16, to buy extracts from the Gospels for him.

To read the letters is to follow Paul’s descent into hell. “In order to be saved I want to believe in God, but I am so close to despair,” he writes on November 5th. “Every day, every hour adds to my suffering. I feel myself disappearing into the void. I place my hope in you.”

Food is a constant obsession. Paul’s spirits lift slightly when Lucie’s care packages get through. “As for your own parcel, it was perfect,” he writes on November 8th. “But I too need bread. And regarding the chocolate, the chocolate, the chocolate, that was so delicious and that made thousands so happy, there is none left… If I get out, we will go to dine by ourselves like two lovebirds.”

It’s hard, my love, it’s hard… We go to bed with a head that is very heavy and empty of thought. Then little by little we awake, helped by the fleas, and the uncertainty regarding the amount of time we are going to have to spend here rises up within us like the stink of a galley ship

—  Paul Léon in a letter to his wife

Physical and mental hunger seem to meld. Paul alludes repeatedly to the projects he longs to complete: “The revision of [the French edition of] Ulysses with Beckett, the composition of my Recollections of Joyce, the Constant edition, the Rousseau edition, the completion of my study on Rousseau.” Joyce had died in Zurich on January 13th, 1941, and Paul Léon was determined to perpetuate his memory.

Concern for the French edition of Ulysses is interspersed with paragraphs about food parcels. “Hunger has become a burning psychological idea and is causing dysentery as well as muscle weakness,” Paul writes. “The thought of bread is never far from my mind… Please send what you can, anything, chocolate, for example, perhaps some spices and some honey. I know that I’m being selfish, that I’m tormenting you, but I am half crazy. And when I let myself go, I start to cry, I would so wish all this to be over by December 4th.”

‘Numbness takes over’

December 4th was Lucie Léon’s birthday. The prospect of not seeing his wife on her birthday assumes huge proportions in Paul’s mind. He refers to it repeatedly in letters.

“Here our intelligence weakens and crumbles and numbness takes over,” Paul writes on November 29th. “In the morning we awaken still capable of thinking but two hours later everything has vanished. We have lost our ability to reflect. It’s hard, my love, it’s hard… We go to bed with a head that is very heavy and empty of thought. Then little by little we awake, helped by the fleas, and the uncertainty regarding the amount of time we are going to have to spend here rises up within us like the stink of a galley ship… The idea that I love you, that I love you forever is my only succour, giving some nobility to my thoughts and my soul.”

Léon ends a letter with a quotation from Joyce. “Darling, I want to formulate a couple of sentences before losing at once my train of thought, before being beset by thoughts of the night that is going to fall, of the hunger that will start up again, of the image of the food parcel. In a word, thoughts of all that concerns my own small physical, physiological and nervous person. And yet I believe that my true ‘self’ is close to you, closer than it has perhaps ever been… My head is nodding, not with sleep but with torpor. ‘My, how his head falls’; this is from Anna Livia and it reverberates like a fall resounds in a vast void.”

Even in misery, Paul thinks of others. “Just in case I forget,” he writes on December 6th, “the 13th is Saint Lucie. Would you ask Beckett to send something to Lucia Joyce and give him 200-250 francs – in memory of her father?”

Paul is transferred to Compiègne, where conditions are even worse. In February he writes to Lucie complaining of cold and hunger, pleading for food and clothing, longing to see her.

Lucie Léon published a memoir under her pen name, Lucie Noel. It was out of print but comprises a chapter of the new book which complements Paul’s internment letters.

The only thing that is keeping me alive is the hope of seeing you. I am impatient to kiss your hands and your feet. I send my love to all those close to you

—  Paul Léon to his wife

In February 1942, while Paul is suffering in the prison camp at Compiègne, Lucie receives a visit from a French Vichy militiaman accompanied by a Gestapo officer. They ask for her husband.

“Don’t you know that you arrested him six months ago? Don’t you know they are starving him to death in Compiegne?” she asks angrily.

First train to Auschwitz

The security men prowl about the apartment and spot a photograph of James Joyce. The German cries triumphantly, “That is the man your husband worked for… That is why we have come. For first editions. We know you must have some.”

Lucie almost laughs. “They were starving and murdering men,” she writes, “but they wanted first editions.”

She promises to find some Joyce first editions for the Gestapo man if he helps free her husband. She never hears from him again.

Five days before Paul Léon is deported on the first train to Auschwitz, he writes to Lucie: “The only thing that is keeping me alive is the hope of seeing you. I am impatient to kiss your hands and your feet. I send my love to all those close to you. As ever, Paul. We don’t know what our fate is to be.”

Léon was among a group of prisoners marched from Auschwitz to nearby Birkenau on April 4th, 1942. He kept falling down, so a Nazi guard shot him dead.

In October 1941, when Paul Léon was still at Drancy, Swiss writers in Zurich asked the Irish government to raise Léon’s case with German authorities. The exchange of telegrams between Irish officials in Berne, Dublin and Berlin was quoted at the book launch in Paris last month (January). The Irish legation in Berlin argued that Léon was not Irish and the government risked damaging its good relations with Hitler’s administration. The file was annotated: “No action possible at present.”