The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (14 page)

Anderson and Heap enjoyed Quinn’s irascibility, but he was more prone to diatribe than dialogue, and he had a crude art vocabulary. The “pictures” he admired the most were “kicking” and “full of radium.” He was the type of man who kept his art stacked like piles of money. Quinn, for his part, thought Miss Anderson was beautiful. Her buoyant hair and lustrous blue eyes were alluring. She was buxom and refined—“a damned attractive young woman,” he wrote to Pound, “one of the handsomest I have ever seen.” Miss Heap, on the other hand, had a broad body and a mannish haircut—“a typical Washington Squareite.” Quinn examined back issues of
The
Little Review
and found swarming misprints, ecstatic articles about mediocre artists and tasteless announcements about financial problems. To save money, one of the issues was printed on butcher’s paper, and they turned their office into a small bookshop where, he informed Pound, people “could come in and
have
tea
.”

Quinn wanted Kuhn and Davies to take over a portion of the magazine for art criticism and reproductions—but art editing was Jane’s territory, and the editors had no intention of relinquishing it. When Quinn told Anderson to “go ahead” with the magazine anyway, he received not a word of gratitude. He warned Pound about Miss Anderson: “a firm hand with a willful lady is, it seems to me, what she requires.”

Pound tried to stage-manage the partnership from across the Atlantic. Quinn might not have the ability to talk fluently about art, he told Anderson, but he had instinctive taste. Besides, “he expresses approval and says you are intelligent.” He encouraged her to visit him every once in a while and to “be a comfort to Quinn. He is about the best thing in America,” and he wrote the same conciliatory letters to Quinn. She has an “amiable spirit,” he wrote, and she wasn’t deferential because “she hadn’t any real idea who you are when she met you.” That was a lie, but it was necessary. For the first time in his literary career, Ezra Pound was a peacemaker.

Despite Quinn’s misgivings, he helped secure advertisements from his publishing friends. He offered to pay their rent if they were in trouble, and, he wrote to Anderson, “I shall, of course, be glad to give you the benefit of my expert advice re any question of censorship.” Word of Quinn’s association with
The
Little Review
eventually got around to Mitchell Kennerley, a publisher Quinn had defended against obscenity charges. Kennerley asked him, “Will you defend
The
Little Review
if it is attacked?”

Quinn didn’t hesitate. “I certainly will.”

8.

In June 1915, Joyce was unemployed, two months’ salary in debt and a British citizen residing in enemy territory. He put up his furniture as collateral to purchase train fare from Trieste to neutral Switzerland for himself, his wife and his two children, ten-year-old Giorgio and eight-year-old Lucia. The circuitous route through the Austrian war zone took three nerve-racking days before they arrived in Zurich, which had become a haven for smugglers and spies, forgers and deserters, propagandists and black market tycoons. Food was scarce, especially in winter, when the corn and potatoes planted along the lake were dormant. When meat wasn’t available, people ate boiled chestnuts and frog legs. Instead of sugar cubes, cafés served coffee with saccharine pills.

The war gave Zurich a surreal atmosphere. In July 1916, Hugo Ball read out the Dada Manifesto in a Zurich guild house: “How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness.” Dadaists wearing masks and outlandish costumes performed dances bordering on madness in the Cabaret Voltaire. They recited poems of nonsense words, hiccups, whistles, moos and meows. Dadaism was Futurism with buffoonery instead of violence. What the two movements shared was a desire to start from scratch. In the midst of a war of unprecedented scale, they wanted to begin civilization anew.

The Swiss did not approve. Cavalrymen with swords and plumed hats rode through the streets to maintain order, and the police eyed the hordes of refugees (nearly half of the city’s population) for signs of suspicious activity. Saboteurs traded troop movements, discreet gentlemen bartered forged documents for milk and butter, and Lenin played chess at the Café Odéon before boarding a sealed train back to Moscow to start a revolution. Everyone was potentially a spy, and James Joyce, a skinny Irishman from Trieste, was no different.

The Austrian government suspected that Joyce was relaying letters from Austria to Italy for a man named Adolf Mordo, and they believed Mordo, who fled Trieste, was aiding an underground Italian resistance. Joyce was indeed relaying correspondence between enemy countries, but the letters were not coded communications to Mordo. They were love letters written to Mordo’s daughter from one of Joyce’s former students. Nevertheless, when the police in Graz discovered the communications, they wanted information about Joyce, and the subsequent government report from Trieste stated, “As a foreigner and as far as his political opinions were concerned, he had a doubtful reputation. While he was a resident in Trieste, however, he never gave cause for any suspicions.” But after the official thought about it, he crossed out the second sentence. A later report indicated that Joyce and his creative associates in Zurich were “most undesirable people.”

In 1916, the Austrian government sent an undercover agent to pose as a student wishing to take English lessons from Joyce in order to ascertain his allegiances and activities. Was he plotting against the Central Powers? Joyce apparently knew what was happening because he told the spy what he wanted to hear: he was an ardent Irish nationalist—a member of Sinn Fein—bent on the destruction of Britain. He wrote anti-British articles in a London magazine called
The
Egoist
and was under British surveillance. It wasn’t true, but it was convincing. The spy reported to his superiors at the Royal Defense Headquarters that “Professor Joice” could be quite helpful to the Austrian war effort: “the pen of this man could be used by us.”

But Joyce wanted nothing to do with the war. For years, he avoided the pestering British Consulate’s requests to return to the United Kingdom, to enlist or to report to their doctor to verify his medical exemptions. “As an artist I am against every state,” he told a friend. “The state is concentric, man is eccentric. Thence arises an eternal struggle. The monk, the bachelor, and the anarchist are in the same category.” He didn’t approve of revolutionaries throwing bombs in theaters, and yet, he said, “have those states behaved any better which drowned the world in a bloodbath?”

In Zurich, Joyce was in exile from his exile. He walked through the streets with an ill-fitting brown overcoat and a scraggly beard cut to a point. A friend’s Bavarian landlady was afraid of him, and the Stadttheater’s chorus girls called him “Herr Satan.” Joyce lived in Zurich without much of the ballast of his life: his books, his manuscripts, and the cherished family portraits all stayed in Trieste (no one imagined the war would last very long). Per usual, the Joyces inhabited a series of apartments, the most comfortable and expensive of which was a two-room segment of a five-room flat they shared with strangers. Lucia slept in a bedroom with her parents while Giorgio had a cot in the living room. The Joyces, according to the Austrian spy, appeared to be surviving on the breadline.

And yet Joyce was beginning to make a name for himself in the literary world.
The Egoist
completed serialization of
A Portrait
in 1915, and he found avid supporters among influential writers like H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken. Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats helped secure him small institutional grants—seventy-five pounds from the Royal Literary Fund, fifty-two pounds from the Society of Authors and one hundred pounds from the Civil List, a gift endorsed by Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, though he had his reservations. The grants gave Joyce time to write
Ulysses
and to frequent Zurich’s cafés and restaurants, where he drank regularly with a small group of international refugees who called themselves the “Club des Étrangers.”

Nora frequented the cafés as well, even if leaving the children home alone disturbed middle-class Zurich sensibilities, but Joyce’s revels were difficult to match. During late-night festivities he would break into his signature dance, an inspired approximation of a jig that he honed, it seems, over the course of the next decade (every art form requires patience). Joyce’s jumps, whirling arms and rubber-legged kicks somehow managed to appear both clownish and graceful to delighted onlookers. Sooner or later, Nora would coax him homeward, though he displayed the same tireless enthusiasm at the parties they hosted over the years. Joyce would sing Irish ballads and accompany himself on the piano in impromptu recitals that went far too late into the evening. One guest remembered the rich brogue in Nora’s exasperation as Joyce began another song. “Ther-r-r-re he goes again!” she exclaimed, plugging her ears with her fingers, “and will the man never learn?”

Whatever else happened, the Joyces always ate dinner as a family. Mother and father spoke Triestino with Giorgio and Lucia at various restaurants as if sharing a secret argot, a verbal performance of a shared life far from Zurich. And yet Joyce was able to offer his family little more than this tendril of intimacy during the war. Among Lucia’s few enduring memories of her father in Zurich was the sight of him writing on the floor of their flat—notebooks, pens, crayons and papers arranged out around him like obstacles, and the words on all the pages slashed through in red.

Joyce was working with a scaffold, a schematic understanding of his novel’s events loosely tied to episodes from Homer’s
Odyssey
, so that his writing had become a painstaking process of fitting details into a broad schema. “I write and think and write and think all day and part of the night,” Joyce wrote to Pound. “But the ingredients will not fuse until they have reached a certain temperature.” By 1917, nearly three years after beginning
Ulysses
, Joyce was still not quite finished with a single episode, but when plans to serialize
Ulysses
in
The
Little Review
solidified in 1917, he focused on finishing publishable drafts chronologically. Publication, after all, would break the cycle of writing and thinking, and an audience might help fuse the melding ingredients.

—

THE WRITING WAS GOING reasonably well until Joyce collapsed on the sidewalk in February 1917. A spasm of pain shot through his right eye—it felt like it was going to burst open—and a wave of agony left him unable to move for twenty minutes. Joyce’s iris, the blue part of his eye, was swollen from iritis, and the swelling pushed his iris forward, perhaps less than a millimeter, which blocked the drainage of ocular fluid. When the pressure spiked inside his eye, Joyce found himself in the throes of his first attack of glaucoma. The episode was, more than financial troubles and world war, the gravest threat to the book Joyce had barely begun to write. If untreated, glaucomatic pressure would slowly kill his optic nerve cells until the eye went blind, and Joyce had every reason to think that both eyes would suffer before long. After giving up a settled life to be a writer, glaucoma threatened to take away something he had not anticipated losing. Joyce had guarded himself carefully against the national, imperial and religious enemies of his artistic independence only to discover that his iconoclastic masterpiece might be at the mercy of periodic inflammations within his own eyes.

Joyce had suffered from iritis several times before. In 1907, his eyes became so inflamed that he couldn’t read, write or teach. A doctor repeatedly disinfected them with silver nitrate, but even if the treatment had helped (it didn’t), Joyce had other symptoms to contend with. He had inexplicable pains in his back and stomach. He was bedridden by the end of the first week, and when he walked he shuffled around like an old man. He suffered from mild panics and had difficulty breathing. Something was wrong with his skin—Stannie rubbed his brother’s body down with a noxious lotion mixed with salt. His right arm had become, as Stannie put it in his diary, “disabled” for weeks. The illness dragged on for over two months. While Nora was giving birth to Lucia in the pauper’s ward of the Triestine hospital, Joyce was undergoing electrotherapy treatment, which, like everything else, didn’t help. Stannie thought it was a particularly nasty case of rheumatic fever. Joyce suffered twelve more acute bouts of iritis over the next fifteen years, and the development of each “eye attack,” as he called them, was maddeningly unpredictable. Sometimes the pressure built slowly, beginning with a nagging discomfort creeping into either or both of his eyes in the middle of the night. The pain could subside spontaneously or intensify in a matter of days, hours or minutes.

Once his iritis became glaucomatic, the only effective treatment was an iridectomy: a surgeon cuts away a small piece of the iris to help drain the eye and reduce its pressure. Needless to say, Joyce resisted surgery and convinced himself that the best cure was a warmer climate. He wore black glasses whenever he went outside to make the sunlight bearable and begged Dr. Sidler, the director of the Augenklinik at the University of Zurich, not to operate. The doctor consented, but Joyce’s condition was deteriorating.

A sticky fluid of fibrin and pus was accumulating inside his eye, and it glued a portion of his iris down to the lens capsule behind it, forming a synechia. The adhesion was a serious problem. It warped the pupil’s contractions and dilations and further impeded the drainage of intraocular fluid, which increased the chances of another attack of glaucoma.

Cases like Joyce’s presented doctors with two bad options. Surgically separating the synechia could tear away pieces of Joyce’s iris and damage his vision permanently, but if the synechia wasn’t removed, the entire margin of the iris might stick to the lens, making Joyce’s pupil immovable and his right eye blind. The most appealing treatment for synechia at the time was a drug called atropine. With luck, atropine would separate the synechia, paralyze Joyce’s strained ciliary muscles, sedate his irritated nerve endings and relieve his dilated blood vessels—all without surgery. The problem with atropine, however, was that it increased intraocular pressure, risking an “eye attack” yet again. Joyce could take the risk of surgically damaged vision or medically induced glaucoma.