Pound-Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce With Pound's Critical Essays and Articles About Joyce in James Joyce Reading Group

Jan 13, 2025 Bob R Bogle rated it really liked it

Shelves: all-things-joyce

The four published volumes of James Joyce’s correspondence are legendary among men (and women) of letters. First published in 1970, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, closes the circle on Joyce’s vital exchanges with Ezra Pound. Edited by Forrest Read, Pound/Joyce also contains Pound’s critical essays and articles written about Joyce in the early years of the latter’s rise as a literary legend. Pound was an early champion of Joyce, and in no small part he is personally respon The four published volumes of James Joyce’s correspondence are legendary among men (and women) of letters. First published in 1970, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, closes the circle on Joyce’s vital exchanges with Ezra Pound. Edited by Forrest Read, Pound/Joyce also contains Pound’s critical essays and articles written about Joyce in the early years of the latter’s rise as a literary legend. Pound was an early champion of Joyce, and in no small part he is personally responsible for Joyce’s rise to prominence. Joyce’s other most important boosters include Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach. By serendipity, all three individuals entered Joyce’s life at just the right time to keep him afloat financially and, especially in Pound’s case, to sustain the conversation about Joyce’s artistic importance in the public arena.

Emerging from this subset of Pound’s letters alone, one soon discerns that he was an eccentric and energetic powerhouse of a man. Terminally dissatisfied with what he viewed as the cultural wasteland of America, Pound was living in London and ardently trying to build up a new artistic movement at precisely the moment that WB Yeats called his attention to young James Joyce. The year was 1913. Because of the timing of the beginning of their correspondence, Joyce was able to send Pound a typescript of Dubliners, an early chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and word that he was finishing a play. In Joyce’s prose Pound identified the power of an author whom he wanted in the coterie which he was trying to assemble.

As in so many aspects of life, timing is everything or, if not everything, as much as 90% of everything. The Great War forestalled the meeting of the two trailblazers until June 1920, yet a vast tide of information and support nevertheless flowed between the two in their letters. Pound became Joyce’s conduit: Joyce would send new work first to Pound, who would pass it on to a series of editors for serialization. This meant Pound was an early reader of all the chapters of Portrait, of the play Exiles, and of Ulysses. Pound thus was able to provide feedback to Joyce about all of these in near real time. (How Joyce took this feedback is another matter.) This continuing reading and reflection and consolidation of coherent criticism was an aid in Pound’s evolving analysis of Joyce’s work and its importance, much in the same way all first-time readers experience Joyce’s work if read (as it usually is) in chronological order. This germinating and flowering criticism also entered the public forum by way of Pound’s many essays about Joyce and his works. Pound was the greatest promo man Joyce could ever have dreamed of.

This is peculiar because the personalities of the two men could scarcely have been more at odds. Pound was a bewildering, dynamic, overwhelming American expatriate, while Joyce was a disaffected Irishman sheltering on the continent, in possession of an intricate and obsessively orderly medieval mind. In his time Pound became maybe the greatest champion Modernism ever had, avidly promoting artists while striving to create poetry of his own to meet the moment. Joyce did not disparage Pound’s own artistic efforts, but then Joyce never praised Pound’s poetry, either. It is impossible to imagine that it could have moved Joyce.

Pound outlived Joyce, who died in Zurich in January 1941. The Blitz was still on in England at the time. The first bombing had struck Dublin eleven days earlier; Franklin D Roosevelt had made his Four Freedoms speech a week before Joyce’s death. The Great War had revealed that 19th Century culture and traditions were unsustainable in 20th Century realities, and at the time of Joyce’s death World War II was still in its initial stages of driving the point home definitively and wiping much of the slate clean. As Pound later pointed out, Joyce’s Ulysses was a bookend for the 19th Century: not the novel to end all novels, but to allow for new kinds of expression to follow.

Unfortunately for Pound, either he had spiraled into a form of actual madness, or a lifetime’s theorizing about economics and artistry and American backwardness had led him down dark alleyways toward a fascist nightmare. Maybe both were true. The end of his life is not well-documented in this book about his correspondence with Joyce but, having peeked over his shoulder as he wrote his letters, we readers must feel at least a little saddened about Pound’s decline. ...more

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