University of Virginia Library

21.

Your manuscript is presumably the only one with which you are dealing at the present moment; it is one of several dozen with which we are dealing and about which we are corresponding, and although when I started

writing to you I remembered perfectly well the different points, some of them now are less clear in my memory. However, I have looked again at that part of the manuscript that we have here and at your letters, and it seems to me that the best course will be for you to make the alterations to the extent that you are willing to make them and in the sense suggested by me, and return the manuscript to me, when, if I understand your concessions aright, the book will no doubt be able to go to the printer. With this object I am sending back to you to-day by registered post the balance of the manuscript.

In "Counterparts" you say you are disposed to modify the passage to which I specially drew attention, but you will not omit it. Of course I do not know how far your modification will go; in any case, I should not care to take the responsibility of cancelling any passage with my own pen.

As to "The Two Gallants", you say that I knew it to be in preparation. But I had no idea of its character. Return it, however, with the omission that you volunteer to make and I will see whether, in the hoped for event of the book going to the printer, it can be included, as I should certainly prefer, knowing your views.

In brief: when I get your stories back I will re-read the whole manuscript and will judge it then afresh. Perhaps, too, with your modifications and read in their proper context, the passages may seem to me less likely to attract undesirable attention.

You speak of the spectre of the printer, which you thought you had laid, rising again in my letter of the 14th. This is unjust. I referred to the printer in answer to a passage in your letter of June 10th, in which you spoke of the transit of the manuscript to his care having been delayed by copious and futile correspondence, in order to show you that the manuscript had been to the printer. You speak of his combining the duties of an author with his own honorable calling, and ask how he comes to be the representative of the public mind, and how he happened to alight magically on the particular passages that he did; and proceed to say that the printer is simply a workman hired by the day or by the job for a certain sum. That he should have alighted on that particular passage is a pure coincidence; your other points in this connection will be answered possibly by suggesting that you look inside any book, where you will find a printer's imprint. This im [sic] necessary. If a book is attacked as indecent the printer suffers also from the attack; and if it is sufficiently indecent he also is prosecuted.

There is, I believe, one further story which you design for inclusion in "Dubliners", but which, when this trouble arose, you kept back. Please send that also with the others. I hope there may be no question about that! Believe me, dear Mr. Joyce, Sincerely yours, [initialled "EPH."—by Miss Hemmerde, Richards's secretary.]