The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (3 page)

Joyce’s demand for absolute freedom gave him a special place in the arts community, even among those who had torn opinions about his work. When Sylvia Beach launched an official protest against the piracy of
Ulysses
in 1927, 167 writers from around the world signed it. W. B. Yeats helped Joyce obtain grants during the war. T. S. Eliot promoted him throughout literary London. Hemingway helped Sylvia Beach smuggle copies of
Ulysses
into the United States. Samuel Beckett took dictation from Joyce when he couldn’t see, and F. Scott Fitzgerald offered to fling himself out of a window for him (the offer, thankfully, was declined).

Several donors, including a Rockefeller, helped Joyce when times were bleak. John Quinn purchased Joyce’s manuscripts, and his devotion tethered him to
The Little Review
and its legal misadventures long after he swore to abandon its Washington Squareite editors. Joyce’s most important patron was a prim London spinster named Harriet Shaw Weaver, whose dedication to Joyce puzzled Londoners as well as her devout family. Miss Weaver, as she was known to everyone, subsidized Joyce during the years he wrote
Ulysses
and continued to support him until he died. And Sylvia Beach, as Joyce belatedly acknowledged, devoted the best years of her life to Joyce and his novel. One of the ironies of
Ulysses
is that while it was banned to protect the delicate sensibilities of female readers, the book owes its existence to several women. It was inspired, in part, by one woman, funded by another, serialized by two more and published by yet another.

Sylvia Beach’s eleven printings of
Ulysses
throughout the 1920s helped make Shakespeare and Company a nexus for Lost Generation expatriates, and it was only a matter of time before the book’s enduring appeal enticed larger U.S. publishers to mount a legal battle. In 1931, an ambitious New York publisher named Bennett Cerf became eager to acquire a risky, high-profile book that could jump-start his young company, Random House. Cerf teamed up with an idealistic lawyer named Morris Ernst, a founder of the ACLU, to defend
Ulysses
in front of patrician federal judges like Learned Hand, who reshaped modern law, and John Woolsey, who reshaped obscenity law.

It took a transformation of all of this—artists, readers, patrons, the publishing industry and the law—to make modernism mainstream. Publishers like Random House marketed modernism as a collection of treasures accessible to everyone, regardless of educational background—affordable books were supposed to be a democratic form of acculturation. But the marketing strategy for
Ulysses
was a federal court case. Its accessibility became secondary to its legality, and that was the impression of modernism that stuck: Joyce’s novel represented not a finished monument of high culture but an ongoing fight for freedom. When the
Ulysses
case came before Judge Woolsey in the fall of 1933, Nazi book burnings had taken place only four months earlier, which is why owning
Ulysses
without ever reading it was not an idle gesture. In the ominous climate of the 1930s, Woolsey’s decision did more than legalize a book. It turned a cultural insurgency into a civic virtue of a free and open society. The renovation of
Ulysses
from literary dynamite to a “modern classic” is a microhistory of the way modernism was Americanized.

—

THE PUBLICATION HISTORY of
Ulysses
reminds us that what makes Joyce’s book difficult is a facet of what makes it liberating.
Ulysses
declared its ascendancy over stylistic conventions and government censors alike—the freedom of form was the counterpart to the freedom of content. The way people actually spoke and what people actually thought and did during a typical day became the stuff of art. This seems unremarkable until we remember that a full account of our lives had been illegal to put on paper for distribution. Novelists before Joyce took it for granted that a veil of decorum separated the fictional world from the actual world. To write was to accept that entire categories of human experience were unspeakable. Joyce left nothing unspoken, and by the time
Ulysses
was legalized and published in the United States in 1934, it seemed as if art had no limitations. It seemed as if the dynamite stacked in Shakespeare and Company exploded unspeakability itself.

The story of the fight to publish
Ulysses
has never been told in its entirety, though several scholars (including Jackson Bryer, Rachel Potter, David Weir, Carmelo Casado and Marisa Anne Pagnattaro) have examined some of the more infamous moments, and I am indebted to their important work. Joseph Kelly, for example, includes an illuminating chapter on the
Ulysses
trials in
Our Joyce
. Paul Vanderham’s
James Joyce and Censorship
is the only full-length study of the subject, though Vanderham’s book is an argument rather than a history—the events surrounding
Ulysses
, and the people shaping those events, are secondary to Vanderham’s theory about Joyce’s late revisions of the text and the critical strategies that followed. Several scholarly articles and book chapters examine the role of the
Ulysses
censorship within Joyce’s career, the history of obscenity and the development of modernism, but the remarkable story about the book itself has always come to us in sidelong glances.

Four important biographies cover portions of Joyce’s censorship saga from differing perspectives. Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson wrote the definitive biography of Harriet Weaver,
Dear Miss Weaver
, which chronicles Weaver’s involvement in Joyce’s censorship troubles in London. Noël Riley Fitch’s
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation
recounts Beach’s arduous task of publishing
Ulysses
and her efforts to deal with its exacting author. B. L. Reid’s biography of John Quinn,
The Man from New York
, documents Joyce’s legal troubles in New York as well as Quinn’s struggle to find a publisher for Joyce’s book. Detailed as these biographies are, they necessarily offer limited insight into the story of Joyce’s book. Quinn and Beach, for example, had little or nothing to do with the second trial, and Weaver had little to do with the first. The elaborate publication history gets lost even in Richard Ellmann’s celebrated biography,
James Joyce
, which discusses the trials only in passing—Ellmann devotes two pages to the New York trial and only one page to the federal trial.

The disputes surrounding
Ulysses
encapsulated the dual rise of print culture and modern governmental power. They involved the history of censorship law, the pervasive fears of radicals, and the turbulent mixture of the smugglers, the vice societies, the artists and the cultures of some remarkable modern cities: Dublin, Trieste, London, Paris, Zurich and New York. If we want to see how a culture changes, we must examine how localities reimagine themselves through the creation and reception of their most enduring works. The biography of
Ulysses
gives us insight into the lives of all books, into the roots of our contemporary culture, into modernism and its most talked-about novelist.

There are at least eight Joyce biographies of varying seriousness. The first was published in 1924, when Joyce was only forty-two years old, and the most recent in 2012. One of the hallmarks of Joyce’s genius was his ability to fold his hardships into elaborate designs, and yet nine decades of biographies have failed to capture the degree to which adversity (and persecution) inspired Joyce—it was probably not a coincidence that the idea for
Ulysses
came to him immediately after he received Grant Richards’s rejection letter for
Dubliners
. Joyce wrote
Ulysses
through a world war, financial uncertainty, the threat of censorship and a serious, recurrent illness. A life in pain shaped the novel that Joyce called “the epic of the human body,” and the nature of that pain has never been fully explored.

This book is the result of years of research involving hundreds of books, articles and newspaper accounts. It incorporates unpublished material in twenty-five archives housed in seventeen different institutions from London to New York to Milwaukee. The archives contain troves of manuscripts, legal documents, unpublished memoirs, official reports and countless letters. Several Woolsey family documents, photographs and home movies reveal a portrait of Judge Woolsey that we have never before seen, and his library in Petersham, Massachusetts, remains nearly unchanged since 1933.

The biography of
Ulysses
is more than the story of a defiant genius. Joyce’s persistence and sacrifice, his talent and painstaking work, inspired the devotion of those around him, and he needed that devotion desperately—even the most individualist endeavor requires a community. Of all the people who made
Ulysses
possible, the most important is Nora Barnacle, the woman who fled Ireland with Joyce when he decided to become an artist, the woman whose letters inspired some of his most beautiful and obscene writing and the woman whose first evening with Joyce in 1904 hovers over everything that happens in
Ulysses
. The story surrounding the novel shows us how high modernism emerged from the low regions of the body and the mind. It shows us how artworks containing the extremities of experience—rapture and pain—went from being contraband to being canonical. It’s a snapshot of a cultural revolution.

The battles over
Ulysses
didn’t end literary censorship. They didn’t usher in an era of untrammeled freedom or pervasive avant-garde aesthetics. But they did force us to recognize that beauty is deeper than pleasure and that art is larger than beauty. The biography of
Ulysses
revisits a time when novelists tested the limits of the law and when novels were dangerous enough to be burned. You do not worry about your words being banned partly because of what happened to
Ulysses
. The freedom it won shapes more than our idea of art. It shapes the way we make it.

—JAMES JOYCE

1.

Dublin wasn’t always like this. In the eighteenth century, aristocrats walked the paths of St. Stephen’s Green and the spacious new avenues on the city’s north side. Mansions and town houses with terrace gardens lined Rutland and Mountjoy Squares, and the clubhouses and ballrooms radiating out from the squares hosted salons and masquerades. Dublin had its share of elegance. It was, after all, a seat of power—the second city of the British Empire and the fifth largest city in all of Europe. Four hundred members of the Irish Parliament and their families supported fashionable shops, a professional class and a proud enclave of civilization.

But the Irish Parliament had become a nuisance, and after thousands of rebels and British soldiers died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, a new law from London simply dissolved the Irish assembly to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. On January 1, 1801, the aristocrats and power brokers departed, followed by the professionals and the shops and the masquerades. Dublin’s Georgian grandeur evaporated from all but a few streets lining the squares, and even there the remaining wealthy families seemed more like stubborn survivors with roots too deep to be removed. The larger properties became hotels, offices and almshouses, and the rest were divided up into tenements that were left to molder and decay. By 1828, a third of Dublin’s houses were worth less than £20.

The city’s population swelled in the nineteenth century as people from around the country came looking for jobs. Then the famine struck, and the refugees who escaped mass starvation in the countryside found themselves crammed in a squalid city and still hungry. Slaughterhouses were scattered among tenements sheltering dozens of people in airless rooms that bred dysentery, typhoid and cholera. The sewers, where they existed, emptied directly into the River Liffey, and the tides washed the waste back through the city so that the stench blended with the rich smells from brewery chimneys, streetside manure and waste heaped in tiny backyards. In some neighborhoods, children were more likely to die than see their fifth birthday, and still-rotting bodies were dug up from graveyards to make more room for the dead. Ireland’s industries—shipbuilding, ironworks and textiles—were channeled northward to Anglo-Irish Belfast while Catholic Dublin remained stagnant longer than anyone could remember. By 1901, as Europe crossed the threshold of the twentieth century, Dublin stood as the overflowing wreckage of a bygone era.

In 1901, James Joyce was nineteen years old and ready to declare his antipathy toward his country. He wrote an essay for the Royal University’s literary magazine attacking the Irish Literary Theatre for refusing to stage the best European drama. The Theatre was the primary institution of the Irish Renaissance, which had emerged in the 1880s as an expression of nostalgia for the days before the famine, when agrarian life dominated Irish culture. After the famine, one in four people were either dead or gone, and for Ireland’s reeling survivors, the revival of Celtic folklore, countryside life and the Irish language became a form of nationalism without bloodshed. And yet Joyce considered Irish nationalism a provincial fantasy. The writers of the Irish Renaissance themselves (Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats, John Synge, Sean O’Casey, George Russell, George Moore) were all wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestants mining Irish peasant themes.

Joyce’s essay “The Day of the Rabblement” insisted that a century of decline made Ireland hostile to artists, so instead of Tolstoy and Strindberg, the Theatre produced mediocre plays that flattered the Irish public—it was, as Joyce put it, a “surrender to the trolls.” For Joyce, being an artist meant storming the barricades of an entire society built on lies—no one had the courage to write what life in Dublin was actually like—but attacking the Irish Literary Theatre was possibly the most ill-advised thing an aspiring Dublin writer could do. The Theatre dominated Ireland’s small literary ecosystem, and alienating it meant alienating the people who could help him the most.