Why ‘Ulysses’ became the best banned in the land
YES. Yes. Yes... it has earned its literary plaudits, but when it came to smashing cultural taboos, ‘Ulysses’ was also a sensational sexual battering ram. Littered throughout its 18 chapters with fornication, adultery, voyeurism, self-stimulation and dirty talk, the classic tome published 100 years ago had every illicit act in spades, and delivered in a rude, racy romp across Dublin on June 16, 1904.
A tale of love and lust set around a diverse group of the capital’s ‘Normal People’, it laid a literary foundation that continues to baffle, confound and amuse a century later.
Starting its 720 pages two months ago as my pandemic experiment, I was glad more than once to heed the advice of Joycean scholar, David Norris: “Read it as far as you can with your ears. If you’re bored or confused, forget about it, skip a bit – there are plenty of wonderfully funny jokes.”
That Joyce was a clever wordsmith, there’s no doubt, and ‘Ulysses’ clearly lives up to his admitted ambition: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
Decades before the ‘Mad Men’ of 1960s New York realised that sex would sell everything from cars to kitchens, Joyce surely knew that his cornucopia of copulation and kinkiness set around the wanderings of Leopold Bloom would garner him headlines and notoriety across the world. “Bloom is an outsider,” explains Norris, “but he is an insider to readers because his mind flows in the same way ours do.”
Pushing the boundaries of permissible erotica added to an exhaustive exploration of lavatory habits went on to make Joyce a household name, thus realising the ambition of every debut writer. Little wonder when a fan once asked: “May I kiss the hand that wrote ‘Ulysses’?”, Joyce replied, “No, it did lots of other things too.”
Though voted a work of genius by everyone from Hemingway to TS Elliot, ‘Ulysses’ encountered the heavy hand of jurisprudence when a US court decided it was “obscene, lewd and lascivious”. The judge was particularly incensed by the infamous 13th chapter where Gerty MacDowell slowly reveals her undergarments on the beach as Bloom masturbates beneath exploding fireworks. “It sounds to me like the ravings of a disordered mind,” the magistrate opined. The British DPP, Sir Archibald Bodkin, took a similar view, labelling ‘Ulysses’ “unmitigated filth and obscenity”, ordering 500 copies seized by customs to be burnt.
The novel was eventually printed in the UK in 1936. Ironically, it was never officially released in Ireland, with the publishers realising its chances of survival in an archly Catholic state were nil. One publication claimed it was a sin against the Holy Ghost to even read ‘Ulysses’, the only sin said to be beyond God’s mercy.
While authorities often underlined their banning decisions to protect “the delicate sensibilities of female readers”, Kevin Birmingham, author of ‘The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses’, points out that women were at the heart of its creation.
It was inspired by Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle, funded by philanthropist Harriet Shaw Weaver, initially serialised by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, joint editors of the ‘Little Review’, and eventually published by Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare & Co in Paris. Edna O’Brien, whose 1960 debut novel, ‘The Country Girls’, was burnt in the grounds of the local church, well understood the trials of literary suppression: “It is no accident that almost all Irish writers leave the country. Ireland, as Joyce said, eats her writers the way a sow eats her farrow.”
A generation of literary icons, ranging from Seán O’Casey and Liam O’Flaherty on to Seán Ó Faoláin, Frank O’Connor, Kate O’Brien and John McGahern, found their works outlawed by a regime of censorship dedicated to eradicating all ‘evil literature contaminants’.
Brian Moore and Benedict Kiely also suffered the Republic’s literary prohibitions, with the latter observing: “If you weren’t banned, it meant you were no bloody good.”
When the 1958 novel ‘Borstal Boy’
was banned, its author was prompted to coin a ditty to the tune of ‘McNamara’s Band: “My name is Brendan Behan, I’m the latest of the banned/ Although we’re small in numbers, we’re the best banned in the land.” Even Nobel Prize winners did not escape Ireland’s ire, including Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
The chains of literary conservatism were finally broken in 1967 when justice minister Brian Lenihan brought in a new Censorship of Publications Act, releasing over 5,000 titles from their bondage of the banned, including classics like ‘Catcher in the Rye’, ‘Brave New World’, ‘The Ginger Man’ and ‘The Dark’. A quote of Joyce’s on that day of liberation would have been appropriate: “This race and this country and this life produced me, and I shall express myself as I am.”