James Joyce's indebtedness to a New York lawyer is not widely known, but came to public attention late last year when the National Library purchased part of the writer's Ulysses manuscript. The envelope carrying the "Circe" episode of the book was addressed to John Quinn, an Irish-American who over a period of some 20 years provided financial support, not just for Joyce, but many other authors and artists as well. Although a very fine biography of the lawyer was published in 1968, his reputation has faded since then, despite the assessment of one subsequent academic that "without Quinn the history of modern literature would not only have been different, it would have been poorer." John Quinn was born in Ohio in 1870, the oldest son of Irish immigrants; his mother was from Co Cork, his father, who ran a successful bakery business, from Co Limerick. From a precociously early age, Quinn was fascinated by literature: "I became a collector of books", he later wrote, "almost as soon as I ceased to be a collector of marbles".
As a teenager, he spent several hundred dollars on buying first editions of work by such authors as Pater, Hardy, Morris and Meredith, and these volumes formed the basis of a library which would later expand to hold tens of thousands of books. Moving to New York after taking degrees at both Washington's Georgetown University and Harvard, Quinn quickly established himself as an accomplished and affluent lawyer, but as his biographer B.L. Reid observed, "the driving, pragmatical, `successful' man of affairs" found his life unsatisfactory and yearned for something more.
That something proved to be the role Quinn created for himself as one of the greatest patrons of art of the 20th century. It was natural that Ireland should provide him with his first opportunities in this field. Quinn visited the country for the first time in the summer of 1902, shortly after the death of his mother. He had already been in correspondence with Jack B. Yeats and knew the work of the latter's brother W.B., so the two brothers acted as his guides in Dublin. Here he met their father John B. Yeats as well as Douglas Hyde, George Moore, Edward Martyn and Lady Gregory; the last of these invited Quinn to Coole Park, where he spent the final days of his visit. In the winter of 1911 Quinn and Lady Gregory would have a brief affair when she was in the United States touring with the Abbey Theatre company. The outcome of Quinn's 1902 trip to Ireland was that he not only bought a number of Jack Yeats's paintings but also commissioned work from John B. and arranged to handle the American copyrighting of W.B.'s play Where There Is Nothing.
This was the first of many such services to Irish writers over the coming decades. In addition, Quinn could take credit for introducing W.B. Yeats to the work of Nietzsche, later described by the poet as "that strong enchanter". In turn, Quinn held Yeats in exceptionally high esteem and although they were to fall out for a number of years, he would declare "Yeats is the one man of absolute genius I have known personally and well".
Looking over his career, what seems so remarkable about Quinn was his ability to juggle so many interests simultaneously, to manage running a very busy office while dealing with a dauntingly substantial correspondence - the bulk of it now held by the New York Public Library - and following his own enthusiasms for both literature and visual art. Following that first trip to Ireland, Quinn quickly became immersed in this country's cultural affairs. He helped to set up a short-lived Irish Literary Society in New York; this foundered after the city's Roman Catholic Archbishop. who had been invited to act as an honorary vice-president to the society. objected that W.B. Yeats - a Protestant with known anti-clerical views - had assumed the same position. But in 1903 Quinn organised a lecture tour in the United States for Yeats which earned the poet more than $3,000 and two years later arranged a similar tour for Douglas Hyde.
Another writer to whom he offered support was Synge, being an ardent champion of The Playboy of the Western World and offering to help arrange American copyright for the playwright. Quinn also offered to buy Synge's original manuscripts as he liked to acquire these documents from authors whose work he admired. Among the most famous beneficiaries of this arrangement was Joseph Conrad, who first sold manuscripts to the lawyer in 1911 and continued to do so for more than a decade. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot were also given financial assistance over many years by Quinn; and it was through the first of these that he came to know the work of Joyce.
Early in 1917 Pound wrote to Quinn that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was about to be published in the US and, in turn, was asked about Joyce's financial circumstances. Learning that these were straitened, Quinn arranged to buy the novel's manuscript for $100 and he also wrote an appreciative feature on the writer for Vanity Fair. Quinn would subsequently acquire from Joyce the manuscript of Ulysses, prior to the book's publication, in a series of instalments which cost the lawyer in total some $1,200. However, the document was sold, seemingly in its entirety, in January 1924 after Quinn, terminally ill with cancer, had decided to dispose of much of his library. Given the volume of the work being offered - more than 10,000 items, this sale, spread over several months, was a massive affair accompanied by a five-volume catalogue which would in turn become highly collectable.
The best-selling lots turned out to be the manuscripts Quinn had bought from Conrad; these were sold for more than 10 times their original price. On the other hand, the Joyce papers failed to perform well at auction, which may help to explain the author's irritation with the vendor after the event, despite being offered half the (modest) profits.
Quinn put a reserve of $2,000 on the Ulysses manuscript but in the end it was sold for just under that figure to a Philadelphia book dealer, Dr Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, whose own remarkable literary collection became, after his death, the Rosenbach Museum and Library. This is the document that was on temporary display last year at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Meanwhile, an early draft of the "Circe" section of Ulysses surfaced late last year in New York, where it was bought by the National Museum of Ireland for $1.4 million, considerably more than John Quinn had paid for the entire work. That Quinn's investment in the literature of his day would eventually reap rewards was never doubted by the man himself even if, as the sale of his library in 1923-24 sadly demonstrated, others had less confidence in his ability to spot talent.
This was shown to be the case again after Quinn's death in July 1924, when his equally extraordinary collection of modern art - more than 2,500 pieces including large bodies of work by Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat and Gris - was sold by his heirs, often for ludicrously low prices. For a clever lawyer, Quinn left an astonishingly ill-considered will because its principal outcome was to be that his generous and brave support of contemporary art would be quickly forgotten.