James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism

THE EGOIST AND THE KING

The second issue of The Egoist dated January 15, 1914 mentions James Joyce for the first time through the pen of Ezra Pound, who was more or less officially its literary editor. Pound and Joyce had started corresponding just one year earlier, when following Yeats's suggestion, Pound had requested texts, any text the Irish exile would deem fit to send for publication. His first letter reveals that Pound may have been slightly ironical about the magazine's gender politics (it begins with the declaration: “I am informally connected with a couple of new and impecunious papers [‘The Egoist’ which has coursed under the unsuitable name of ‘The New Freewoman’ ‘guère que d'hommes y collaborent’ as the Mercure remarked of it”]) but not sanguinely opposed to its ideology. However, the first text sent by Joyce for The Egoist was not literary (he had immediately replied to Pound's offer by mailing his poem “I hear an army” which duly found its way into the Imagistes anthology) but a political tract, a pamphlet on censorship. Under the title of “A Curious History,” Pound echoes Joyce's recapitulation of the incredible series of hardships he endured when attempting to publish Dubliners. Pound quotes a letter by Joyce (already published in two newspapers only: Sinn Fein [Dublin] and The Northern Whig [Belfast]) detailing the harrowing incidents that prevented the publication.