A significant collection of documents by and about James Joyce is being auctioned by Mealy's of Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny, in its book sale on December 5th and 6th. It includes two manuscript letters by Joyce to Thomas Keohler, a poet and friend of his in the early years of the last century.
Keohler was a member of the literary and theosophical circle around George Russell (AE) to which Joyce was temperamentally and aesthetically opposed. But he was on quite good terms with Keohler, even to the extent of permitting Keohler to lend him money when the need arose, as it often did. In Ulysses, Stephen remembers Keohler as one of his many creditors.
Thomas Goodwin Keohler (1874-1942) was a mystic, a poet and a would-be musician. He never seems to have had the confidence to develop his gifts and eventually, after the intellectual ferment of those early years receded, settled down to a career in the printing firm of Helys, itself mentioned prominently in Ulysses, where he became company secretary. The family were evidently of German origin, and Keohler subsequently changed his name to the more conventional Keller.
In February 1937, Keohler sent Joyce, "in memory of old days", as he put it, a slim, privately published pamphlet of verse, Timely Utterance, which he had just produced.
He received a friendly letter in response, and Joyce enclosed a copy of Keohler's Songs of a Devotee, published in 1906, mentioning that he had been carrying it around Europe for many years and asking Keohler to sign it for him.
The agreeably surprised Keohler made haste to do so, and the correspondence then lapsed until the following May, when Keohler received a copy of transition, where work by Joyce was then appearing, from Paris. He wrote to Joyce to thank him and this led to a chatty response, in which Joyce wrote about the recording he made of part of Finnegans Wake, and reminisced about some mutual Dublin friends.
Both of Joyce's letters have been published, the bulk of the second in Stuart Gilbert's edition of the letters and the first in Richard Ellmann's more comprehensive edition.
The part omitted by Gilbert merely concerns a request by Joyce that Keohler would talk to his then biographer, Herbert Gorman, who was due to visit Dublin. Keohler's verse, fey, anguished, yearning, and written in a determinedly traditional style and metre, might seem to be light years away from the boldly experimental work Joyce was producing.
The collection also includes a very rare copy of the first printing of Joyce's The Holy Office.
Only 50 copies of this poetic broadside were printed in Trieste before being distributed on Joyce's instructions to various targets in Dublin in 1905. Keohler was one of these recipients and the item for sale is his copy.
A sheet of Helys order paper, which contains Joyce's name and that of the Triestine paper, Piccolo della Sera, is included in the sale.
It seems likely that this is the prototype for the card which Joyce had printed on one of his Irish visits in order to present himself as a journalist for the Italian press.
A number of volumes of Keohler's own work, and that of his friend and contemporary James Cousins, will be included in the sale.
The collection is the property of Mr George Hetherington, Keohler's son-in-law.
Mr Hetherington is a former managing director of Helys and a former director of The Irish Times.
Mr Phonsie Mealy of Mealy's auctioneers estimates that the collection could fetch between £24,000 and £30,000.