I asked him that afternoon, one more time, about the perfect “Ulysses.” It always seems so close. Back in the 1960s, again in 1980s. What happened to his work in Boston? Why can’t we just publish the thing? A few errors — how hard can it be?

He told me a story, a parable, really. “There are the gauchos and the gauleiters,” he explained. It’s a mixed metaphor, but one that nicely captures his view of the world and of Joyce scholars too. Gauchos, I knew, were Argentine cowboys, but gauleiters (pronounced gow-lieders), I learned, were municipal bureaucrats in the early Nazi government; in other words, menacing apparatchiks.

Across the great landscape of understanding are the gauchos, at once both rugged and audacious. “They roam the pampas,” he told me, taking care of the vast terrain by knowing its vastness intimately. Meanwhile back at the edge of the pampas, in civilization, are the gauleiters. They are everywhere, they are busy, they are overwhelming. The gauchos are few — iconoclasts like himself, or the occasional Joyce fanatic like Jorn Barger, a polymath who in the earliest days of the internet wrote a lot of brilliant Joyce analysis on his weblog (a word he also coined). But, Kidd said, it doesn’t matter. In the end, the victory always goes to the gauleiters because of their peevish concern for “administrative efficiency.”

When I pressed him on real-world specifics, the manuscripts, the work that must have been on disks somewhere, he recalled that, yes, he had assembled a draft of an edition with a complete introduction. One of Kidd’s editors at Norton, Julia Reidhead, confirmed that both existed but said that one delay after another — “an infinite loop of revision” — ran into the legal wall of new copyright extensions, and so Norton “stopped the project.” One Joyce scholar remembers reading the introduction but no longer has a copy, and Kidd doesn’t have one either. Instead, we are left with bizarre relics of what could have been. Early on in the Joyce wars, in fact, Arion Press issued a new edition of “Ulysses” that included some of the preliminary Kidd edits. The book was luxurious, with prints by Robert Motherwell, and only 175 of them were printed. I found one for sale on Amazon. The seller wanted $25,678.75.

In the years after Kidd’s disappearance, an uncanny thing happened. The very book Kidd had tried to shame into disrepute was embraced by the world of scholarship. In 1993, the “Gabler Edition” of “Ulysses,” a bright red tome, appeared on the bookshelves. There are various printings of this book now, and many have no dot at all at the end of the Bloom chapter. No period of any size, which Gabler has said is a printing error — making this nondot an error miscorrected so many times that it is now perfectly invisible.

Gabler’s book thrives because it now has its own captive audience: academics. “Scholars have quietly gone back to Gabler,” said Robert Spoo, a former editor of The James Joyce Quarterly. “By not publishing his own edition, Kidd never completed the argument against Gabler,” he said, adding that the Gabler edition “has one great advantage, you can cite it by line numbers; that is very handy for scholars.” That whole “ ’80s and ’90s thing,” as Spoo called it, receded long ago. “Scholars have made peace with the Gabler.”

In that stretch when the original edition fell out of copyright in the mid-1990s, a lot of editors rushed to publish their own editions. Some have dots, some don’t. Some with “love,” some not. Some editors reversed a selection of Gabler’s changes, some didn’t. Other editions have gone off the rails, as the Joyce scholar Sam Slote told me: One “Ulysses,” currently available online, has a long, weird riff inserted on Page 160, announcing that you will now be reading “The Secret Confessions of a Conservative,” where the anonymous writer explains that his pro-life, pro-death-penalty positions are so consistent that “if an embryo or fetus commits murder, then he should be aborted.”

Out in the distant pampas, meanwhile, the perfect edition remains always close at hand and just out of reach. “I am almosting it,” Stephen Dedalus muttered early on in the novel. The thing is, on Amazon alone, there are nearly a dozen slightly different versions of the novel “as James Joyce wrote it.” None of them are absolutely perfect, but each of them, nevertheless, is “Ulysses.” It’s almost too pat an ending for an author who was asked about all those errors nearly a century ago. “These are not misprints,” he said, “but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”