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124 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
most every one of Joyce's published letters. He wrote to Yeats on
September 14, 1916, "I can never thank you enough for having
brought me into relations with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed
a wonder worker." 8
Pound often compared Joyce's use of language with the talent
of Flaubert, one of his lasting enthusiasms. In the Mercure de
France, of June, 1922, Pound sustained this comparison in a
lengthy article, which did much to establish Joyce's reputation in
France and to make it possible for him to live there.
Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver on April 10, 1922, "Mr. Larbaud's
article has caused a great deal of stir here and there will
be another by Mr. Pound in the Mercure on the 15th instant. Mr.
Pound has been engaged in a long wordy war with Mr. Shaw over
Ulysses. They exchanged about a dozen letters in all. Mr. Shaw has
now closed the correspondence by writing, 'I take care of the pence
because the pounds won't take care of themselves.' " 9
In addition to Harriet Weaver, whom Oliver St. John Gogarty
credits with having established a one hundred and fifty thousand
dollar trust fund for Joyce's grandchild, Pound also put Joyce in
touch with John Quinn, a New York lawyer who assisted many
writers of the period. In 1917, Pound persuaded Quinn to buy the
corrected proof sheets of Ulysses for twenty pounds. Quinn also
represented The Little Review in the court action brought by the
Society for Suppression of Vice. He purchased the manuscript of
Ulysses from Joyce for two hundred dollars, and later sold it to the
book dealer, Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, for nineteen hundred and
seventy-five dollars.
Apparently he intended to turn over part of this windfall to
Joyce, but he suffered financial reverses. At Joyce's instigation, he
was trying to buy the manuscript back at the time of his death.
Gogarty says that Quinn had given the two hundred dollars to
Joyce to pay for a desperately needed operation on his eyes, and
that Joyce had let him have the manuscript as security. In one
of his letters, Joyce quips that "Dr. Rosybrook bought a weatherbeaten
timetable for $150,000 in London." 10
Samuel Roth's pirated edition of Ulysses sold an estimated forty
thousand copies in the United States, and he announced that he