The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (49 page)

Where Sam Coleman had finessed the government’s case, Conboy was blunt. “This is an obscene book,” he told the judges. “It begins with blasphemy, runs the whole gamut of sexual perversion, and ends in inexpressible filth and obscenity.” He noted that Morris Ernst’s book about obscenity,
To the Pure
, was as appalling as Joyce’s—Ernst argued that obscenity didn’t even
exist
.
It was absurd enough to disqualify the defense counsel altogether. Conboy asserted the lasting importance of the Hicklin Rule and argued that literary merit, Random House’s motives and James Joyce’s genius were all irrelevant. Joyce’s honesty and sincerity and the detailed accuracy of his Dublin mosaic were also irrelevant. “A book that is obscene is not rendered less so by reason of the fact that the matter complained of is in fact truthful.” Judge Woolsey’s opinion was incontestably wrong. “No reasonable man,” Conboy argued, “applying the proper rule of law could come to any conclusion other than that
Ulysses
is obscene.”

Conboy compiled a list of fifty-three “unchaste and lustful” pages and read all of them in the courtroom, stammering and red-faced. The judges followed along in their own copies, heads down and pencils poised. After ten minutes, a woman gasped and walked out. The other woman in the courtroom was determined to stay.

“Are you going to read the whole book?” Learned Hand asked.

“Well, I’ll give you a generous sampling.” After lunch, he read for another forty minutes. He continued to read the following day.

It was the most publicized obscenity case in U.S. history. Augustus and Learned Hand were annoyed that Woolsey’s decision exacerbated the media circus. Woolsey thought of himself as “literary,” Learned Hand said later, and “that’s a very dangerous thing for a judge to be.” The Hands wanted their decision to be bland and unquotable (to “give the book a minimum of advertising”), but the case made quotability inevitable. In preliminary memos, the judges unanimously agreed that Molly Bloom’s monologue was “erotic.” Learned Hand went so far as to say that several passages “could excite lustful feelings” in both young people and normal adults—it seemed to violate even his own liberal ruling in 1913. Judge Manton railed against
Ulysses
. “Who can doubt the obscenity of this book,” he wrote, “after a reading of the pages referred to, which are too indecent to add as a footnote to this opinion?” Manton argued that literature exists “to refresh the weary, to console the sad, to hearten the dull and downcast, to increase man’s interest in the world, his joy of living.”
Ulysses
had none of literature’s ennobling moral aims. Masterpieces, Judge Manton reminded the court, are never produced by “men who have no Master.” (A few years later, Manton would go to prison for taking bribes.)

Manton’s opinion was a dissent. Learned and Augustus Hand joined together to legalize
Ulysses
in the United States. Though they balked at Woolsey’s style, they agreed with his substance. “I cannot say that
Ulysses
deals in smut for smut’s sake,” Augustus wrote in a preliminary memo, and Learned Hand agreed, but they could come to that conclusion only by stepping away from the obscene passages. Learned wanted to terminate the policy of evaluating excerpts. Judges, he thought, should weigh the danger of debauching readers’ minds against the freedom of artistic expression, which could only be determined by judging an entire book. He believed that the “relevance” of filth, not its mere presence, should be the legal standard for obscenity.

The Circuit Court declared portions of
Ulysses
“coarse, blasphemous, and obscene,” but it was more than that. “The erotic passages are submerged in the book as a whole and have little resultant effect.” Augustus Hand’s opinion for the court offered a cautious restatement of Woolsey’s praise: Joyce was “an excellent craftsman of a sort.” He predicted that “
Ulysses
will not last as a substantial contribution to literature,” though “it has become a sort of contemporary classic.” Joyce’s novel was sincere and artful. It captured men and women who were at turns “bewildered and keenly apprehensive, sordid and aspiring, ugly and beautiful, hateful and loving.” The Hands and Manton agreed about one thing: the reader of
Ulysses
was left not with consolation but with a panorama of humanity’s “confusion, misery and degradation.” And yet while corrupting an innocent mind was forbidden, misery and degradation were perfectly legal.

In London, the director of public prosecutions (Sir Archibald’s successor, Edward Atkinson) read the Circuit Court decision and a
New York Tribune
article covering it. He was interested, he said, both in the arguments and “the admirable way in which they are expressed.” When Martin Conboy decided not to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, one half of the English-speaking world surrendered at last. The other half did nothing until the fall of 1936, when Scotland Yard informed the British secretary of state that a gentleman named Stephen Winkworth had received a letter from a London bookseller announcing a forthcoming U.K. edition of
Ulysses
.

Winkworth was aghast. He forwarded the circular to London’s police commissioner and wanted to know “whether you are able to make your prohibition effective.” Stories about the edition began appearing in the press, and angry letters to customs officials followed. “If I can purchase a copy of this book anywhere in London,” one man wrote, “on what grounds do you tell me that it is forbidden in this country . . . Surely, there is a fallacy somewhere?” The press indicated that the publisher, John Lane, had consulted the Home Office, but no one had any record of it. The new edition was an unwanted surprise, and the government no longer had the privilege of stalling.

Undersecretary of State Henderson conferred with Director Atkinson and anticipated defense attorneys’ arguments. The “Penelope” episode would be defended as “Freud in novel form,” and, following Morris Ernst, they would argue that the Hicklin Rule was untenable, that the nation’s reading standards couldn’t be dictated by children. John Lane’s expensive edition had a good case because it was unlikely to fall into the hands of corruptible readers, and Henderson warned the director that “if this limited edition goes well, it will be followed by a cheaper edition.” The government would either have to accept the widespread circulation of
Ulysses
or prosecute the publisher immediately.

So on November 6, 1936, the undersecretary of state met with the director of public prosecutions and the attorney general. At the meeting, the attorney general declared the Hicklin Rule “inadequate.” Obscenity was not as simple as identifying a book’s tendency to deprave and corrupt. The government must consider intent and context—the character of a book was all contingent. The principle was that there was no principle. So the officials decided “to take no further action” regarding
Ulysses
, and they duly informed customs and postal officials to also do nothing. That’s how the fifteen-year battle ended. Not with a whimper, but with a shrug.

—

“IS THERE ONE WHO UNDERSTANDS ME?” The question James Joyce had asked Nora Barnacle before they left Ireland together was more difficult to answer in his old age. One afternoon in the fall of 1930, Joyce was walking quietly in Paris with the help of his assistant, Paul Léon, when a young woman on the Boulevard Raspail summoned the courage to approach the Irish writer and compliment him on his work. By then, Joyce’s eyesight was abysmal. He had cataracts in both eyes. A Swiss surgeon had recently opened up an artificial pupil in his left eye, and he was expecting more operations. For months, he could not fully see what he was writing. Joyce turned from the woman and looked up at the sky—the sun’s light was barely visible—and then at the boulevard’s trees with cages around their growing trunks. “You would do better,” he told her, “to admire the sky or even those poor trees.” Transparency had its own beauty.

Joyce’s belated victory revealed more about us than it did about Joyce. The legalization of
Ulysses
announced the transformation of a culture. A book that the American and British governments had burned en masse a few years earlier was now a modern classic, part of the heritage of Western civilization. Official approval of
Ulysses
, in prominent federal decisions and behind closed doors, indicated that the culture of the 1910s and 1920s—a culture of experimentation and radicalism, Dada and warfare, little magazines and birth control—was not an aberration. It had taken root. Or, more accurately, it indicated that rootedness itself was a fiction.

For beyond the fact that
Ulysses
had turned so quickly from contraband to classic was the more unsettling idea that no obscenity was fundamental. Everything could be transformed by a context. By sanctioning
Ulysses
, British and American authorities had, to some small but important degree, become philosophical anarchists. They accepted that there were no immutable abstractions in culture, no permanent values, no indelible markers between “classic” and “filth,” tradition and depravity. There was no absolute authority, no singular vision for our society, no monolithic ideas towering over us. For the most elaborate designs and the most dangerous books are subsumed by a torrent of details, mistakes and revisions, insertions in notebooks, blind spots in the vision, bacteria in the veins, fleeting moments between people in tiny backyards peering out into the universe at night, and the universe is humid nightblue fruit, and the word that shakes it all down is
yes.

—ULYSSES

Obscenity is as illegal today as it was in 1873. What changed is the way we define it. The legal transformation began in earnest the moment Judge Woolsey (and the Circuit Court following him) measured vices against virtues, when they shifted from hunting for corruption to weighing corruption against beauty. Once art became a state interest, the scales of justice gradually tilted toward art’s favor so that by the mid-twentieth century the U.S. Supreme Court defined obscenity as “prurient” material deemed “utterly without redeeming social importance”—an ounce of virtue can legalize a pound of vice.

In the world before
Ulysses
, a filthy word or a salacious episode seemed like a contaminant—no matter how small it was, it could poison the whole. Joyce’s book altered our understanding of obscenity partly by exploring the sustaining qualities of filth, but it also altered obscenity by altering our understanding of ourselves. We are not, according to
Ulysses
, blank slates corrupted by the world. We are born into patterns and stories thousands of years old, and indecency seems less dangerous when people seem less pristine. After
Ulysses
, books seemed less likely to “deprave and corrupt” us. If anything, they convinced us that the most dangerous fiction was our innocence.

The dramatic reduction of obscenity as a legal category—the expansion of the types of speech protected by the First Amendment—involves more than the freedom to print dirty words. It confirms the power of all words to hash out the truth. Obscenity rulings presented themselves as sensible bans on worthless speech, as judgments beyond the realm of debate. When Judge Manton refused to quote
Ulysses
in his dissenting opinion, he was not being bombastic. His decree absolved him from naming the content he wanted to banish—silence is both the way we judge obscenity and the way we solve it. To legalize what was once patently unspeakable, however, is to replace silence with both debate and debatability. It is to invite deep—even systemic—uncertainty. For to change moral standards is to upset what we assumed was natural (nothing serves systems of power more than the conviction that things cannot change), and few modes of expression seem more natural—more instinctive and indisputable, less amenable to logic or academic study—than what we find offensive or obscene. If obscenity can change, anything can change. The advent of
Ulysses
showed us how arbitrary even the presumably natural categories can be. Edith Wharton called Joyce’s book “a turgid welter of pornography” despite the fact that only a small sliver of the text is offensive to anyone. While many readers see the unprecedented complexity of Joyce’s characters as the book’s hallmark, E. M. Forster saw in
Ulysses
“a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud . . . a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.”

Younger writers like Hart Crane took it as a revelation. “I feel like shouting EUREKA! . . . Easily the epic of the age.” The truths contained within it were so jarring that he thought “some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in
Ulysses
.” Whether or not he wrote in the interests of Hell, Joyce paved the way for authors that followed. Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
, for example, would not have been possible without
Ulysses
. “Oh, yes,” Nabokov said, “let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce’s champion game.” Henry Miller, whose
Tropic of Cancer
was part of the 1960s legal battles that ended U.S. prosecutions against literary obscenity, compared the end of
Ulysses
to the end of the Book of Revelation. “And there shall be no more curse!” Miller wrote. “Henceforth no sin, no guilt, no fear, no repression, no longing, no pain of separation. The end is accomplished—man returns to the womb.”

—

IN ONLY A FEW DECADES,
Ulysses
transformed from an insurgency to an institution. The academic Joyce industry boomed in the 1960s and has only increased with time. There are roughly three hundred books and more than three thousand scholarly articles devoted, partly or entirely, to
Ulysses
, and about fifty of those books have been written in the past ten years. The mountain of research is at turns enlightening and obsessive—in 1989 two Joyceans attempted to reconstruct the contents of a
Ulysses
manuscript notebook that no one can find. Even the literal content of the published text has been a site of controversy. Joyce’s endless revisions, his idiosyncratic writing and the error-filled 1922 edition have led scholars to fight—with a ferocity only PhDs can muster—over which edition of
Ulysses
is definitive. Battles over competing editions led to heated debates about prepositions, transposed letters and missing accent marks. In the 1980s the disputes snowballed into accusations of stolen and unacknowledged work followed by aspersions cast about qualifications and broken editorial protocols, all of which culminated in conference panel betrayals and smear campaigns. To this day, Random House publishes two rival editions of
Ulysses
in an effort to bypass the academic melee. Many Joyceans are dissatisfied with both.