The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses

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First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Birmingham

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Birmingham, Kevin.

The most dangerous book : the battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses / Kevin Birmingham.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-58564-1

1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses. 2. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses—Criticism, Textual. 3. Authors and publishers—History—20th century. 4. Law and literature—History—20th century. 5. Trials (Obscenity)—History—20th century. I. Title.

PR6019.O9U6257 2014

823'.912—dc23

2013039967

Version_1

PART I

1. Nighttown

2. Nora Barnacle

3. The Vortex

4. Trieste

5. Smithy of Souls

6. Little Modernisms

7. The Medici of Modernism

8. Zurich

PART II

9. Power and Postage

10. The Woolfs

11. Brutal Madness

12. Shakespeare and Company

13. Hell in New York

14. The Ghost of Comstock

15. Elijah Is Coming

16.
The People of the State of New York v. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap

17. Circe Burning

PART III

18. The Bible of the Outcasts

19. The Booklegger

20. The King’s Chimney

21. The Pharmacopeia

22. Glamour of the Clandestine

23. Modern Classics

24. Treponema

25. Search and Seizure

26.
The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses”

27. The Tables of the Law

Much of the source material for this book derives from personal letters. I have made small changes to punctuation and capitalization where necessary. The occasional typo has been corrected from original documents, and abbreviations are spelled out. For example, Ezra Pound’s references to “L.R.” or “M.C.A.” in various letters are changed to “
The Little Review
” and “Margaret Anderson.” All italics are in the original sources unless otherwise noted in the endnotes. On the rare occasions where I speculate based on available documents, I indicate that in the endnotes. Please see my website for more extensive endnotes and a complete bibliography.

When you open a book, you are already at the end of a long journey. It began with an author whose first challenge was to imagine the readers who would turn the unwritten pages. The author wanted to meet the audience’s expectations and draw the reader in. The book would have a voice, a perspective and a consistent style. It would be accessible. If the book has characters—be they simple or complex, sympathetic or repugnant—the author would make them believable. They would stay in character and speak in a consistent idiom. The spoken words would be in quotation marks. The characters’ thoughts and the story’s action would be clearly distinguishable, and when the author began writing, the story’s elements were sharpened. Clear boundaries staked out the pathways for the journey.

A publisher signed a contract with the author. The publisher researched the marketplace and weighed costs and risks against potential profits and demand. The publisher knew the trade. The publisher had published books before. The book had an editor who pruned and revised, who offered perspective and who sometimes said no. The book was probably advertised in various markets. The first copies were printed and bound months before publication day, and they were delivered without incident by the post office or private carriers. They were displayed openly in stores.

Whether the book is careless or thoughtful, disposable or durable, chances are the sales will dwindle. The printers will stop printing it, and the remaining copies will be sold off at a steep discount and left to languish in used bookstores. It will not change the way books are written, nor will it change the way you see yourself or the world around you. It will be swept up by the rising tide of culture and washed away. It will probably be forgotten.

If it is not forgotten—if it does change the way people see the world—reviewers and critics will be able to quote from its pages freely. Radio hosts will be able to mention the title on the air. Students will be able to check the book out of a library. Professors will be able to assign the book and deliver lectures on it without the fear of being demoted or dismissed. If you purchase the book, you will not be afraid to travel with it. No one will be arrested for printing it. No one will be monitored for distributing it. No one will go to prison for selling it. Wherever you live, your government probably protects this book against piracy. Your government has never issued a warrant for this book. Your government has never confiscated this book. Your government has never burned this book.

When you open James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, none of these things are true.

—

SO MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about what’s exceptional within the pages of Joyce’s epic that we have lost sight of what happened to
Ulysses
itself. Scholars have examined the novel’s dense network of allusions, its museum of styles and its insight into the human mind so thoroughly that the scholarship buries what made
Ulysses
so scandalous: nothing, in
Ulysses
, is unspeakable. The book that many regard as the greatest novel in the English language—and possibly any language—was banned as obscene, officially or unofficially, throughout most of the English-speaking world for over a decade. Being forbidden is part of what made Joyce’s novel so transformative.
Ulysses
changed not only the course of literature in the century that followed, but the very definition of literature in the eyes of the law.

This is the biography of a book. It charts the development of
Ulysses
from the first tug of inspiration in 1906, when it was just an idea for a short story—a Homeric name appended to someone Joyce met in Dublin one drunken night—to the novel’s astounding growth during and after World War I as Joyce wrote out its 732 pages in notebooks, on loose-leaf sheets and on scraps of paper in more than a dozen apartments in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. And yet the years that Joyce spent writing his novel are just a portion of its story.
Ulysses
was serialized in a New York magazine, monitored as it passed through the mails and censored even by its most vocal advocate, modernism’s unstinting ringleader, Ezra Pound.

The transgressions of
Ulysses
were the first thing most people knew about it. A portion was burned in Paris while it was still only a manuscript draft, and it was convicted of obscenity in New York before it was even a book. Joyce’s woes inspired Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate running a small bookstore in Paris, to publish
Ulysses
when everyone else (including Virginia Woolf) refused. When it appeared in 1922, dozens of critics praised and vilified Joyce’s long-anticipated novel in unambiguous terms. Government authorities on both sides of the Atlantic confiscated and burned more than a thousand copies of
Ulysses
(the exact number will never be known) because Joyce’s big blue book was banned on British and American shores almost immediately. Other countries soon followed. Over the course of a decade,
Ulysses
became an underground sensation. It was literary contraband, a novel you could read only if you found a copy counterfeited by literary pirates or if you smuggled it past customs agents. Most copies came from Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore, where, as one writer remembered, “
Ulysses
lay stacked like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar.” It was the archetype of a modernist revolution—it is, in fact, the primary reason why we think of modernism as revolutionary at all.

Modernism’s discordant, contrarian and sometimes violent aspects weren’t entirely new. What was new was that this cultural discord became a sustained movement, and it was Joyce who had taken modernism’s assorted experiments and turned them into a masterpiece. After
Ulysses
, modernist experimentation was no longer marginal. It was essential. Turmoil became the substance of beauty rather than the seed of chaos, and this peculiar aesthetic emerging from a more versatile sense of order seemed to usher in a new era. For what modernism rebelled against was entrenched empiricism, a century of all-too-confident belief in perpetual technocratic progress, in the ever-expanding limits of power and commerce, and in the order of things as tidy, sanitized and always available for public examination.

The enemy of the empirical is not the illogical. The enemy of the empirical is the secretive. All of the things empirical culture couldn’t utilize, didn’t want or refused to acknowledge were sequestered from the public sphere and classified as hazardous categories: the hidden, the uselessly subjective, the unspoken and the unspeakable. The apex of the secretive is the obscene. Obscenity is deeply, uselessly private—a category of thoughts, words and images so private, in fact, that to make it public is illegal. To claim that obscenity had some empirical, public value would have been absurd. It would have violated the confidence that supposedly built civilization.
Ulysses
was dangerous because it accepted no hierarchy between the empirical and the obscene, between our exterior and interior lives. It was dangerous because it demonstrated how a book could abolish secrecy’s power. It showed us that secrecy is the tool of doomed regimes and that secrets themselves are, as Joyce wrote, “tyrants, willing to be dethroned.”
Ulysses
dethroned them all.

For modernist writers, literature was a battle against an obsolete civilization, and nothing illustrated the stakes of modernism’s battle more clearly than the fact that its masterpiece was being burned. Censorship was the tyranny of established cultural standards. In the United States and Britain, the censorship regime was a diffuse enforcement network empowered by mid-nineteenth-century moral statutes. Laws against vices like obscenity were designed to control urban populations, and the primary enforcers of those laws were quasi-official vigilante organizations that flourished because urban centers were growing faster than governments could handle. Cities like London and New York maintained their tenuous order largely through societies for the “suppression” of various blights: beggars, prostitutes, vagrants, opium and cruelty to children and animals.

One of the most successful organizations was the London Society for the Suppression of Vice, which helped write the anti-obscenity laws it enforced. The problem with volunteer-based censorship regimes, however, was that their power would ebb and flow with moral fads. Fluctuations in vice-society membership and finances ensured that they were never as effective as they wanted to be—pornographers simply adapted to a boom-and-bust business cycle. British vice societies were spearheaded by aristocrats who funded legal proceedings and publicity campaigns that were orchestrated by a revolving door of volunteers who weren’t willing to do the unseemly work that stopping an illicit business required. They weren’t on the streets nabbing pornographers. They didn’t entrap suspects. They didn’t carry guns. They didn’t threaten or hound or rough anyone up.

Things were different in the United States, where the fight against obscenity could be brutal. From 1872 until his death in 1915, the single most important arbiter of what was and was not obscene was a man named Anthony Comstock. His forty-year dominance over artistic standards made him an icon, the personification of a cultural order that rejected the base impulses threatening both our salvation and our civilization. And lust, as Comstock explained, was the most destructive impulse.