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EZRA POUND 119
of his agreement. Like most writers, particularly those of integrity,
Joyce was plagued throughout his life by difficulties with publishers.
The most fortunate writer is one who has a Jekyll and
Hyde personality, and who, after doing his work, can slip into another
personality, in order to deal with publishers on their own terms.
Ulysses was issued in a pirated and botched edition in New
York by Samuel Roth, who has been a guest of the government
at Lewisburg Prison. He was prosecuted unsuccessfully for his
robbery of Joyce, but he has lost several other cases, the charge
being one of sending "pornography" through the mails. In defense
of Roth, it is worthwhile to point out that the material that got
him his latest prison sentence, a tale from the classics, is not so
obscene as the periodicals that can be purchased on any newsstand.
Pound began the serialization of Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man in the February 2, 1914 number of The Egoist. In
the July 15, 1914 issue, he commented in a review of Dubliners,
"Mr. Joyce writes a clear, hard prose . . . these stories and
the novel now appearing in serial form are such as to win for
Mr. Joyce a very definite place among contemporary English
writers."
Just as Pound's "Henry James" number of The Little Review
provided first serious recognition of that writer, and the basis for
the development of the "James cult", so Pound's review of Dubliners
constituted the first public recognition of Joyce, and the means
for launching his career.
Whenever Pound began a campaign to promote a new writer,
it was much like the advance of a medieval army, with colorful
banners, salvoes of rockets, and great beating of drums. Despite
the continuous fusillades, casualties were few, but the spectacle was
enormously diverting. Pound employed devious strategies as well
as frontal assaults in his endeavours to "put over" his candidates.
Among the beneficiaries of such campaigns have been T. S. Eliot,
Robert Frost, George Antheil, and many others.
In March, 1914, Pound wrote to Miss Amy Lowell that D. H.
Lawrence and James Joyce were "the two strongest prose writers
among les jeunes." 1
In his introduction to The Letters of James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert
writes, ". . . There is no question of the importance of the