1354
December 10th 1919
Dear Mr. Joyce
I have sent you for Christmas, in case it should interest you to see
them some photographs of myself, two new ones and an old one. The new
ones are said to be good likenesses of what I am now; but they are
deceptive in a way — though not, I believe, so very much more than
I
am myself and have been at all ages — for in reality I am old. To
be
precise, I was forty three on September 1st and am therefore just five years
and five months older than yourself. I fancy that Mr. Pound and the rest of
them except Miss Marsden imagine me to be several years younger than I
am and I do not disillusion them, for, though not to bear the traces of all
one's years upon one's face is scarcely a fact to be proud of, I am so weak
as to allow myself the pleasure of being credited still with something of
youth. In connection with this matter of age I may say that I saw your
verses in the August number of the Anglo-French Review and find them
very apt for myself in certain moods, especially in
moods in which the thought of my great age weighs upon me and depresses
me.[1] But to be more cheerful
—
I enclose (with this letter) an old snapshot which may perhaps amuse you.
The figures are: my youngest brother, my eldest niece and myself.
I hope the things I sent you last month reached you safely, in
particular Mr. Quinn's splendid defence of Ulysses, of which
I have no copy. If the various things that I have sent you have reached you
and if you have found the posts in other ways satisfactory, perhaps you
might venture soon to send me the manuscript of your book A
Portrait
of the Artist as a Young
Man.
[2] I think I have
expressed very little appreciation of the gift of it that you are making me:
please understand that I shall value it very highly indeed.
To judge from accounts there have been recently in English papers
of strikes and disturbances in many Italian towns I fear the situation in
Trieste can have improved little, if at all, since you wrote soon after your
return there. I hope, however, that you have met with some success in your
weary search for a flat. I hope too that your eyes are better now you are
away from Zurich and that you have no threatening of illness this winter.
| With good wishes for Christmas and kind regards | Yours
sincerely
