The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (2 page)

Lust defiles

the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul. It unnerves the arm, and steals away the elastic step. It robs the soul of manly virtues and imprints upon the mind of the youth visions that throughout life curse the man or woman.

Comstock saw human nature as a withering thing, a form of purity corrupted by the fallen world. His mechanism for rolling back the tide of lust was the United States Post Office, and his authority over the content of the letters, newspapers and magazines sent through the mail derived from a law that bears his name.

The 1873 Comstock Act made the distribution or advertisement of any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print or other publication of an indecent character” through the U.S. mail punishable by up to ten years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine, and state laws throughout the country—“little Comstock Acts”—extended the ban to obscenity’s publication and sale. Armed with the power of the law, sworn in as a special agent of the Post Office and named the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), Comstock destroyed books by the ton and imprisoned thousands of pornographers. By the 1910s, his bushy muttonchops served a dual purpose: they hearkened back to the values of an older era, and they concealed the scar left by a pornographer’s knife. “You must hunt these men as you hunt rats,” Comstock said, “without mercy.”

Comstock was an instrument of God and the State, a guardian protecting vulnerable citizens from exotic influences, a defender of rigid principles over base impulses, of resolve over experimentation. He and his Society, in other words, represented much of what modernism opposed. By the time Comstock’s successor, John Sumner, took over the NYSSV in 1915, publishers big and small were voluntarily submitting manuscripts for the Society’s approval. Its power was so well established by World War I that Sumner was compelled to file criminal charges only in exceptional cases.
Ulysses
was one of them.

Joyce and his literary allies had to wage a battle against vigilantes, moralists, literary pirates, protective fathers, outraged husbands and a host of law enforcement officials—postal inspectors, customs agents, district attorneys, detectives, constables and crown prosecutors. The fight against charges of obscenity (which is still a crime) was about more than the right to publish sexually explicit material. It was a dimension of the larger struggle between state power and individual freedom that intensified in the early twentieth century, when more people began to challenge governmental control over whatever speech the state considered harmful. State control and moral control reinforced each other. Comstock’s era of moral surveillance contributed to the rise of the federal government (the Post Office was its cornerstone), and the government’s crackdown on subversive speech during and after World War I in turn helped the NYSSV expand its campaign against obscenity in the 1920s. Joyce, whether he liked it or not, was affiliated with anarchists, highbrows and the Irish—all suspect populations after 1917.

For the outspoken writers of the era, the battle lines were not drawn on the margins of art. They were central to it. When Joyce’s unseemly candor left him unable to find anyone willing to publish or print his first novel,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, Ezra Pound ranted in
The Egoist
, “If we can’t write plays, novels, poems or any other conceivable form of literature with the scientist’s freedom and privilege, with at least the chance of at least the scientist’s verity, then where in the world have we got to, and what is the use of anything,
anything?
”

Pound was still railing against the Comstock Act in the late 1920s, when he wrote to Supreme Court Chief Justice Taft to ask for help overturning a statute enacted, he insisted, by “an assembly of baboons and imbeciles.” Part of what made the Comstock Act so loathsome was that it underscored the fact that renegades and iconoclasts like Pound depended on the Post Office for their survival. For while modernism drew upon the turbulence surrounding World War I, when empires crumbled and millions moved across borders to exchange new ideas and radical styles, it was precisely its iconoclastic nature that made modernism beholden to the largest, most mundane government bureaucracy there was.

Modernists used mass cultural resources and marketing strategies even as they shunned the large audiences that inhibited controversy and experimentation. Rather than writing a novel for a million readers, Joyce said, he preferred to write novels that one person would read a million times. Modernists courted small numbers of avid, idiosyncratic readers scattered across countries and time zones, and one way to foster such a dedicated community was through boisterous magazines that could generate an ongoing creative exchange among far-flung readers and writers. But because modernist magazine readerships were too small for most bookshops and newsstands to carry, artists like Joyce needed an extensive, government-subsidized distribution system to bring subscribers together. It was the Post Office that made it possible for avant-garde texts to circulate cheaply and openly to wherever their kindred readers lived. The Post Office was also the institution that could inspect, seize and burn those texts.

—

THE DISPUTES OVER the astonishing content of Joyce’s writing began years before
Ulysses
was published. We think of
Ulysses
as a mighty tome, but its public life began as a series of installments in a New York modernist magazine called
The Little Review
, the unlikely product of Wall Street money and Greenwich Village bohemia.
The Little Review
was the brainchild of an extravagant Chicagoan named Margaret Anderson who moved with her partner, Jane Heap, to Greenwich Village and cultivated a magazine devoted to art and anarchism, ecstasy and rebellion. Their taste for conflict and publicity, however, infuriated their principal patron, Ezra Pound’s friend John Quinn. Quinn was an irascible Wall Street lawyer, a resolute bachelor and probably the most important American collector of modern art during the 1910s and early twenties. He bankrolled
The Little Review
and became its overworked legal counsel despite his misgivings about the magazine’s “editrixes.” Quinn initially pegged Anderson and Heap as “willful women” before deciding that they were, even worse, typical Washington Squareites (“stupid charlatans and silly fakers”), and his opinion only deteriorated from there.

While this uneasy partnership of money and willfulness lasted,
The Little Review
managed to serialize about half of
Ulysses
from the spring of 1918 to the end of 1920. Installments of Joyce’s book (sometimes less than ten pages) appeared alongside Sherwood Anderson stories, squabbles with other magazines, drawings and woodcuts of varying skill, Dadaist poetry (“skoom / vi so boo / rlez”) and advertisements for chocolates and typewriters. Serialization exposed Joyce to strident responses from the magazine’s readers. One subscriber praised him as “beyond doubt the most sensitive stylist writing in English” while another claimed he was helping to turn
The
Little Review
into a “freak magazine” by “throwing chunks of filth into the midst of incoherent maunderings.” Some readers found the filth powerful. The way Joyce “slings ‘obscenities’” at readers inspired one Dadaist poet’s rapturous praise (“vulgar!”), which probably didn’t help when that particular issue of the magazine landed in court. The most ominous and influential reactions to
Ulysses
came from U.S. state and federal governments. The Post Office repeatedly banned
The
Little Review
from mail circulation because of its chunks of Joycean filth, and in 1920 the New York district attorney—spurred by John Sumner and the NYSSV—brought obscenity charges against Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap.

“There is hell in New York about ‘Nausikaa,’” Joyce wrote to a friend after hearing about the trial against his indicted episode. And yet in the aftermath of the New York troubles, he decided to make the episode filthier—and two subsequent episodes were filthier still. To casual readers, the long evolution of
Ulysses
made Joyce seem like either an uncompromising artist or a petulant provocateur stoking outrage by freighting his work with difficulty and offensiveness. “Each month he’s worse than the last,” one
Little Review
reader complained, to which Jane Heap aptly replied: Joyce “has no concern with audiences and their demands.”

It was Joyce’s independence from everyone’s demands but his own that drew many people to
Ulysses
. Simone de Beauvoir remembered not only her “utter amazement” when she read the novel but also the auspicious moment when she actually saw James Joyce, “the most remote and inaccessible” of writers, “materialize before me in flesh and blood” at a bookshop in Paris. Since 1918, when
Ulysses
began to appear, Joyce had become an icon of individuality for the new century. He was a stateless wanderer living in self-imposed exile from Ireland. He had spent over a decade writing in obscurity and near poverty. He refused to yield to the demands of burgeoning governments and markets, to the laws that restricted the circulation of literature and to the readers that made literature a professional option in the first place.

And yet he was also an icon of individuality because he was so palpably a man of “flesh and blood.” The body was central to Joyce’s work because he was a captive of both its erotic pleasures and its intense pains. From as early as 1907 and into the 1930s, Joyce suffered from an illness that caused bouts of iritis (a swelling of his iris), which in turn brought about episodes of acute glaucoma and other complications that withered his eyesight almost to the point of blindness. He collapsed on city streets and rolled on the floor in pain during years of recurrent “eye attacks,” and the agony of his illness was as traumatizing as the eye surgeries he underwent to save his vision—all of them performed without general anesthetic. When Joyce was not bracing himself before having his eye “slit open,” as he described it, he endured a battery of injections, narcotics, disinfectants and dental extractions (seventeen, in fact, just in case his teeth were the cause) as well as applications of tonics, electrodes and leeches. From 1917 onward, Joyce had to wonder if the next attack—or the next surgery—would end his career.

Joyce’s grievous health and feeble eyesight made him heroic and pitiable, inaccessible and deeply human. The images of Joyce wearing eye patches and postsurgical bandages or reading with thick spectacles and a magnifying glass gave him the aura of a blind seer, a twentieth-century Homer or Milton. Illness was taking away the visible world only to give him an experience whose intensity was too deep for others to fathom. Ernest Hemingway once wrote to Joyce after his son’s fingernail lightly scratched his eye. It “hurt like hell,” Hemingway said. “For ten days I had a very little taste of how things might be with you.”

Joyce’s life would become every bit as ravaged as Anthony Comstock would have expected, and yet Joyce’s resilience encouraged even those unfamiliar with his work to see modern individuality as a sort of durable ruin persevering against uncontrollable forces.
Ulysses
turned that resilience into art. It reads like a desperate, beloved labor, a work of uncanny insight behind thick spectacles, a procession of desires and memories interspersed with spells of suffering and boredom. It is a work of ardor and arduousness, something fragile and yet indomitable. It is the book of a man who, even in a hospital bed—even with both eyes bandaged—would reach for a notebook under his pillow and trace phrases blindly with his pencil so that he could insert them into his manuscript when he could see again. It’s no wonder that Joyce’s fiction explored the interior world. Beyond his family, it was all he had.

Over time, Joyce’s unstinting devotion to his craft established him as modernism’s consummate artist rather than a mere provocateur—one does not write through so much suffering only to provoke. But the provocations were inevitable. Something about James Joyce and
Ulysses
inspired irrational hostility. Just before
Ulysses
was published, a man brushed past him as he was walking in Paris and muttered—in Latin no less—“You are an abominable writer!” The bile did not subside. In 1931, the French ambassador to the United States, the poet Paul Claudel, refused to help stop the piracy of
Ulysses
and declared Joyce’s novel “full of the filthiest blasphemies where one senses all the hatred of an apostate—also afflicted with a truly diabolical lack of talent.” Rebecca West complained that “the excrementitious and sexual passages have a non-aesthetic gusto about them,” and the surest sign of their inadequacy was the “spurt of satisfaction” one got while reading them. Yet Joyce’s writing wreaked havoc on the opinions of careful readers. West was “overcome by fury at Mr. James Joyce’s extraordinary incompetence” though she was nevertheless convinced that he was “a writer of majestic genius.”

The fury
Ulysses
provoked was a part of Joyce’s majesty. His fight against censorship shaped the novel’s public reception and enhanced the devotion of kindred spirits (especially those who thought of themselves as besieged individualists), but it did much more than that. The legal battles surrounding
Ulysses
—in a New York City Police Court in 1921, in a U.S. District Court in 1933 and in a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934—effectively turned the standard bearer of an avant-garde movement into a representative of art as a whole, a symbol of creativity fighting against the authority that would constrain it.
Ulysses
removed all of the barriers to art. It demanded unfettered freedom of artistic form, style and content—literary freedoms that were as political as any speech protected by the First Amendment. Freedom, after all, can have no real meaning if it is taken away as soon as we tell the stories about who we are. If we can’t publish and read
Ulysses
, then what is the use of
anything
?