4 - ‘Parasitic publishers’? Tauchnitz, Albatross and the Continental Diffusion of Anglophone Modernism

Summary

In May 1933, Ezra Pound's article ‘Past History’ appeared in the English Journal, the publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. Writing for this audience of American professors, Pound reflected on James Joyce's career – at the time when the publisher Bennett Cerf was preparing to challenge the ban on Ulysses. In his article, Pound told a story that would become the conventional narrative on the early days of modernism. Joyce's struggles against philistine publishers, hostile censors and prudish readers eventually leads to his triumphant entry into the literary canon. As Pound put it, ‘anyone who has not read these three books [Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses] is unfit to teach literature in any high school or college.’ For Pound, this recognition had attracted the wrong kind of publishers:

The Portrait and Ulysses were serialized by small honest magazines, created to aid communication of living work; after a lapse of years, these vols. arrived at such a state of acceptance that parasitic publishers issued them. The Tauchnitz which cares only for money but pretends to other aims, issued The Portrait and the Albatross issued Dubliners and Ulysses in continental cheap editions, indicating that the books had passed out of the exclusive circle of people who think and want to know what is being thought, and into the general mass of people who read because an author has a ‘name,’ etc.

There are several interesting things here. First, Pound compares reprint publishers such as Tauchnitz and Albatross to parasites, who obtain nutrients at the expense of the host organism (the little magazines). This parasitic behaviour is presented as harmful, since the reprint publishers have primarily commercial motivations. Second, Pound notes that the wide diffusion of Joyce's work in cheap continental editions has led to a changing readership, from an ‘exclusive circle’ of autonomous readers to the ‘general mass of people’ attracted by an author's reputation.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Joyce and other modernist writers certainly had a well-known ‘name’. But what Pound does not mention is that reprint publishers had in part contributed to this increasing recognisability. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the Travellers’ Library in Britain and the Modern Library in the United States had made Dubliners available to a large audience as early as 1926.