On another there were the notes of the Tristan Chord from Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, and a note saying that Joyce connects Isolde with the character of Anna Livia Plurabelle and the dawn of a new day.
He therefore knows it took him 499 hours and 15 minutes to complete the book - 24 of those hours were just the initial re-reading of the book. Lord told me that he sets a stopwatch for every bit of research, sketch, drawing and draft he makes when working on a book.
On one page there were lists of dates and numbers. Filled with neat handwritten observations, quotes from the text and little sketches, they work like a code-breaker’s manual showing a way to get into that exclusive club. Whilst all illustrators have sketchbooks and rough drafts, these notebooks are frankly a wonder to behold. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Lord when he came into the Folio offices to see the edition’s binding and show us his notebooks. In his introduction for Folio’s edition, Lord writes that part of what drew him to Finnegans Wake was his desire to 'get to a closer understanding of it’, and his illustrations are a vivid exploration of the text, picking out repeated imagery and expressing the musicality of language. I am therefore filled with admiration for John Vernon Lord who was asked two years ago to not only re-read the book, but to illustrate it for a new fine edition for The Folio Society.
In fact I see it as something of a test, an entrance exam for a very exclusive club of readers - one which I have failed to gain entrance to a number of times. It reaches for something like a dream-state - a place beyond ordinary 'awake' literature.
It is a bold expedition into language, deliberately entangled and peppered with puns, portmanteaus and wordplay. The 1939 book which took 17 years complete is a novel without genre or even recognisable plot or clear cast of characters. 'I have put the language to sleep' is how James Joyce described Finnegans Wake. The Folio Society's edition of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake has just been published - discover John Vernon Lord's exceptional illustrations and look inside his fascinating notebooks.
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