1355
January 28th 1920
Dear Mr. Joyce
I telegraphed to you last week informing you that three parcels had
arrived and thanking you for them. These three followed one another
closely and I waited several days in the hope that the fourth would also
arrive. However, I am very glad to say that it came last night. I notice that
the postmark is the 14th and presume the delay was due to the Italian postal
and railway disorganization. I am doubly glad that the whole manuscript has
arrived intact because, though I am touched that you should suggest copying
out for me any or all of it that might fail to reach me, I should have been
very sorry for you to waste your time in such a way and strain your eyes
unnecessarily on my account. In view of what happened to the "original"
original[1] it is fortunate that the
chapters of Ulysses are typed out as soon as they are written
and the typescript dispatched to safer keeping in England and
America!
I should certainly like to have any photographs you can send me other
than those I have already: these being the one you sent me last summer (at
what date it was taken I do not know, but I imagine it must have been soon
after an illness for you look very pale) and one (a profile) you sent for
The Egoist about three years ago at the time when you sent
Mr.
Huebsch the photograph with what Mr. Pound called the pathological eyes
which
Mr. Huebsch used for the cover of his edition of your book
Chamber
Music of which he sent me a copy.
I do not come from any so fascinating spot as St. Ives[2] (where I have merely stayed twice)
but
from Cheshire — an overgrown village, Frodsham, on a flat stretch
of
land at the foot of a ridge of hills halfway between Chester and Warrington.
My father was the doctor of the district and I lived there till I was fifteen;
afterwards at Hampstead, a north London suburb, till 1914. I am afraid I
am hopelessly English, unadulterated Saxon. My mother was from
Lancashire — her father a cotton mill owner in the Manchester
district
— my father from Chester where his father had been a doctor before
him. I have, by the way, cousins in Belfast (one of my father's sisters
having married a Presbyterian minister there) who are violent Orangemen!
But you will be bored with all this.
You mention that copies of your novel reached a firm, Messrs
Bemporad, but not Messrs Schimsoff.[3] But you had not asked me to send
copies
to either of these firms; or if you had, the letter or card was lost in the
post. I can only suppose that the former firm obtained the books through an
export agent: possibly through a French firm, Messrs Hachette, who, for
the first time, sent for two copies of the book a few weeks ago. They sent
for two more copies this morning and I inquired whether these were by any
chance for Messrs Schimsoff but the messenger did not know. Please let me
know if I am to send any copies, and the address.
With very grateful thanks and with best wishes for your birthday |
Yours sincerely
