Lejeune on Halasz

trait as “very clever but too naughty for me to publish,” or the reviewer who felt that Mr. Joyce “would really be at his best in a treatise on drains.” No one could locate the book, because no one could “place” its author.

Pound’s strategy was to recruit what he called “the party of the intelligence,” the party to which we all like to feel we belong nowadays, and locate with reference to that party an idealized Joyce. This Joyce, defined by extrapolation from the books, he conceived as a disinterested, “European” intelligence. In 1920, in Sirmio, in the same room for the first time, he was to meet another Joyce, the pére de famille, and his mail brought him emanations from yet a third, the one we meet in the three volumes of Joyce letters, whose interminable, exquisitely modulated complainings assailed continually everyone whose address Joyce possessed. Pound took the complaints seriously and beat on doors for money, but his answer to one of those ululating letters (“My Dear Job: You will establish an immortal record . . .”) shows him discounting the personality they delineated. And rightly; it was irrelevant to the books.

AL

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Anthony Lejeune

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trait as “very clever but too naughty for me to publish,” or the reviewer who felt that Mr. Joyce “would really be at his best in a treatise on drains.” No one could locate the book, because no one could “place” its author.

Pound’s strategy was to recruit what he called “the party of the intelligence,” the party to which we all like to feel we belong nowadays, and locate with reference to that party an idealized Joyce. This Joyce, defined by extrapolation from the books, he conceived as a disinterested, “European” intelligence. In 1920, in Sirmio, in the same room for the first time, he was to meet another Joyce, the pére de famille, and his mail brought him emanations from yet a third, the one we meet in the three volumes of Joyce letters, whose interminable, exquisitely modulated complainings assailed continually everyone whose address Joyce possessed. Pound took the complaints seriously and beat on doors for money, but his answer to one of those ululating letters (“My Dear Job: You will establish an immortal record . . .”) shows him discounting the personality they delineated. And rightly; it was irrelevant to the books.