The epic tale of publishing Ulysses
Joyce expert pens a gripping page-turner
The most dangerous book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses
Kevin Birmingham, (Head of Zeus Publishing )
Can there ever have been a book with a more dramatic publishing history than James Joyce’s Ulysses? Joyce wrote his groundbreaking novel in abject poverty and over a period of seven years during and just after the First World War. It was printed in Paris (at first, just two copies); vilified as obscene; burned and impounded at British and U.S. docks; and smuggled like forbidden hooch. (Amusing to read here of Ernest Hemingway’s part in the smuggling.)
Kevin Birmingham has a deep love of the novel, and knows everything about Joyce. His learned book is a gripping page-turner. Ulysses might have been indecent — if graphic language and an obsession with lavatorial and sexual functions is rightly so described. But, whether or not the book is indecent, the sheer decency of its early defenders will be what strikes the reader of this story.
There was demure English heiress Harriet Weaver — who published early extracts from the book in an avant-garde journal, The Egoist, and gave Joyce money enough to live on. There were Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in New York, whose Little Review published the first half of the novel in episodic pamphlets — until authorities impounded the notorious “Circe” episode.
There was the famous Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, who published the first edition of Ulysses in book form. There was Arnold Bennett — a novelist of such a different complexion from Joyce’s — who could see, in an early review, that Joyce was “dazzlingly original. If he does not see life whole he sees it piercingly.”
And there were the legal good guys themselves — above all, Morris Ernst, who defended the book in the landmark New York trial in 1933, and Judge Woolsey, whose summing-up was one of the best pieces of literary criticism ever delivered from the bench. Joyce, he pointed out, “has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about. … In many places it seems to me disgusting, but although it contains many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake.” Joyce was, the judge concluded, “a great artist in words.”
Who would gainsay the judgment? The answer is given in a narrative as exciting as a thriller and as fantastical as a satire by Joyce’s fellow countryman Dean Swift. The first prize for idiocy must be awarded to John Sumner, boss of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who was given legal power to impound Ulysses at the ports. He was still burning books deep into the 1930s.
Almost equally idiotic were the British authorities. Sir Archibald Bodkin, director of public prosecutions, considered bringing criminal proceedings against the entire University of Cambridge when F.R. Leavis ordered one copy of Ulysses from Galloway & Porter, the Cambridge bookshop. When Harold Nicolson tried to include a mention of Joyce in a 1931 radio broadcast titled This Changing World, John Reith, director-general of the BBC, asked him — with unintentional comedy — to substitute the name of John Galsworthy for Joyce. When Nicolson persisted in considering Joyce worth a mention, Reith backed down, but only on condition that Ulysses, still a banned book in Britain, not be named on air.
Perhaps the most painful reaction Joyce encountered to his masterpiece came from his common-law wife, Nora Barnacle. She could not get beyond 30 pages, and concluded, “I guess the man’s a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn’t he?” Birmingham considers that the masturbatory correspondence the Joyces conducted when they were separated contributed to the great final passage of the novel, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.
Ulysses is a great book, no doubt of that. If I had a criticism of Birmingham’s excellent narrative it is that he is (understandably) so hostile to the censors that he does not enter into the question of why two countries that had inherited the creed of liberty from Locke and Mill could have persecuted literature so mercilessly. Copies of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, arguably as great a book as Ulysses, were seized from the warehouses of Methuen in 1913 because the book was seen as “a monstrous wilderness of phallicism.” Whence came the late-Victorian obsession with “purity”? Joyce wrote, “My book is the epic of the human body,” and so it is.
But is it possible to distinguish between smut in art and simple smut? Birmingham is a bit senti mental when he writes that the Ulysses trial was “a fight for the freedom of genius.” Jane Heap, one of the brave New York publishers who brought Joyce to the public, yelled back at a heckling crowd in Greenwich Village, “Is it a crime to be disgusting?” That question is central to the story — more central, perhaps, than Birmingham allows.