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122 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
States, leaving shattered lives and homes in their wake. The inevitable
profiteers moved in to take advantage of the publicity, and
smuggled or pirated copies of Ulysses brought prices of two hundred
dollars and three hundred dollars. One enthusiast paid a top
price of five hundred dollars.
The basis of this inflation was the book's supposed pornography.
Neither Joyce nor Pound received any profits in this trade. Despite
the million dollars worth of free advertising (surpassed in American
publishing history only by the artificial furor over a dull novel
by Bore-us Pasternak), there were not many copies of the book
available. When Roth published a hastily-edited and botched
version of Ulysses, Joyce was unable to obtain satisfaction in the
courts.
The New York Times Book Review refused to mention the
book, and Burton Rascoe, editor of the New York Herald Tribune
Book Review, later tried to squirm out of his guilt in banning
mention of Ulysses by saying that he had understood that Margaret
Anderson had printed an early version, and that he was waiting for
the final draft to appear before criticizing it. As Margaret Anderson
says in her autobiography, this is bosh.
England's dean of literary critics, the eminent Sir Edmund Gosse,
now entered the lists against Joyce, perhaps in remembered anger
that he had been "had" by Pound when he was persuaded to
sponsor the grant from the Royal Literary Fund. On June 7, 1924,
he wrote to Louis Gillet, editor of the influential Parisian journal
Revue des Deux Mondes,
"I should very much regret you paying Mr. Joyce the compliment
of an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes. You could only
express the worthlessness and impudence of his writing and surely
it would be a mistake to give him this prominence. I have difficulty
in describing to you, in writing, the character of Mr. Joyce's morality.
. . . he is a literary charlatan of the extremest order. His principal
book, Ulysses, has no parallel that I know of in France. It is
an anarchical production, infamous in taste, in style, in everything.
. . . He is a sort of M. de Sade, but does not write so well. . . .
There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider
Mr. Joyce an author of any importance." 6