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[Aetat. 37-38] J O Y C E 4 7 9buy clothing there at a low price exemplifies his power to read into hisown inclinations the imperatives of cruel necessity. By the end of theletter he was detached enough for it to add the embarrassed postscript-This is a very poetical epistle. Do not imagine that it is a subtly wordedrequest for secondhand clothing. It should be read in the evening whenthe lakewater is lapping and very rhythmically. 35Pound read the letter with his accustomed sympathy. He wrote fromSirmione that they had waited until eight o'clock before sitting down todinner, and that he had prepared an elaborate opening speech to offerJoyce either food or an invitation to the comely laundress up the road.There had been a storm so furious that night that he had hoped it mightyet portend the arrival of Vulcan-Dedalus. 36A second letter written thesame day suggested Joyce try living in Sirmione, and buy clothes in Verona,where they could be had more cheaply than in London. Ordinarilythe information about storms would have prevented Joyce from stoppingeven temporarily at Sirmione, but he abruptly recognized that the meetingwith Pound was essential, in spite of my dread of thunderstorms anddetestation of travelling,' he wrote Miss Weaver, i went there bringingmy son with me to act as a lightning conductor.' 37Pound greeted him warmly, and, when he arrived on June 8, 38askedhim almost at once about the identity of his mysterious patron. 'Was itJohn Quinn, then?' 39Joyce was sure it was not; he did not considerQuinn especially generous. Pound pondered deeply and came up withthe name of Lady Cunard, and this suggestion Joyce, having no othercandidate, accepted. They then discussed Joyce's situation at length, andagreed that he should go for a few days to Paris to survey that city andmake arrangements if possible, for the French translation of A Portrait ofthe Artist, and perhaps of Dubliners as well. Pound would go before andprepare the way for him. There was also a transfer of clothing, whichJoyce memorialized in a limerick:A bard once in lakelapped SermioneLived in peace, eating locusts and honeyTill a son of a bitchLeft him dry on the beachWithout clothes, boots, time, quiet or money. 40(The clothes and boots were too small, but Joyce wore the suit in Parisanyway.) Pound summarized the occasion, too, in a letter to John Quinn:Joyce—pleasing; after the firstshell of cantankerous Irishman, I got theimpression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive.The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament,the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration andabsorption passing Yeats'—Yeats has never taken on anything requiringthe condensation of Ulysses.