The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (17 page)

—

WORLD WAR I exacerbated the resentment of the government’s growing authority, for nothing represents authority quite like military conscription. On draft registration day in 1917, Emma Goldman held protest rallies in New York. A few days later, eight policemen raided the office of her magazine,
Mother Earth
, on 125th Street. They searched for the names and addresses of anti-conscription supporters, radicals and anarchists. Goldman and her partner, Alexander Berkman, were arrested for conspiring to prevent registration and for advocating violent resistance to the U.S. government.

The
Little Review
was one of their most vocal defenders. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap circulated an open protest letter claiming that the anarchists faced imprisonment and deportation “for the hideous crime of free speech,” and they listed the addresses of the judge and the U.S. district attorney so that sympathizers could demand a fair trial. The judge and prosecutor received scores of letters and telegrams. Some of them, apparently, were threatening, and six officers were detailed to protect the judge’s life. The press reprinted the protest letter and quoted old issues of
The
Little Review
featuring Anderson’s praise of Goldman, and federal authorities took note.

The trial of Goldman and Berkman was the first high-profile prosecution of anarchists in decades. By the end, Anderson and Heap were among Goldman’s only friends who weren’t thrown out of the courtroom (standing for “The Star-Spangled Banner” was mandatory), and they were sitting at the defendants’ table when the jury found them guilty. Goldman and Berkman received ten-thousand-dollar fines and two years in prison.

—

THE CLIMATE OF SUPPRESSION had a chilling effect throughout the publishing industry. To avoid an Espionage Act prosecution, Ezra Pound made sure
The
Little Review
didn’t talk about the war, but the editors felt a wartime backlash anyway. In September 1917, a longtime reader protested the “Ezraized
Little Review
,” and a reader from Chicago was blunt: “I wish you didn’t have such a craze for foreigners and self-exiled Americans. I think you have missed your chance right here in your own country . . . I am tired of these floods of Russian, French, Scandanavian [sic], Irish and Hindoo stuff that have swept the country.” Subscriptions dwindled, and
The
Little Review’
s support of Emma Goldman got the editors evicted from their Fourteenth Street office. They scrounged for money and subsisted on potatoes for days. Nevertheless, Margaret Anderson, determined to live beautifully, dressed for their potato and biscuit dinners in a crepe de chine chemise and a fur scarf.

Then the legal problems started. The October 1917 issue of
The
Little Review
included a short story by Wyndham Lewis about a British soldier who impregnates a woman and ignores her letters while he’s off fighting in the trenches. “And when he beat a German’s brains out, it was with the same impartial malignity that he had displayed in the English night with his Spring-mate.” Comstock Act or Espionage Act—you could take your pick. Three thousand copies of the October 1917
Little Review
were halted in the weighing room of the Post Office while the New York postmaster sent a copy to Washington for inspection. The issue circulated to Postmaster General Burleson, the attorney general’s office and, finally, to the solicitor general of the Post Office, William H. Lamar.

In 1918, the law codified what had already been standard procedure: the solicitor general held the final authority to judge dangerous words, ban publications and begin criminal prosecutions over anything obscene or treasonous sent through the mail. The solicitor’s purview was massive and uncontested. When William Lamar took the job, the volume of publications circulating through the mail was increasing at a rate of thirty-five million pounds per year, and even liberal courts considered his censorship decisions “conclusive” unless they were “clearly wrong.”

Lamar did not take his responsibilities lightly. He had been a preacher from Alabama before he turned to the law in the 1880s, and he believed in the power of words. “Words are the first and last weapon of all fakers,” he told
The
Boston Globe
, “big words, extravagant words, mysterious words.” Dealing with mysterious words was simply a matter of “reading between the lines,” he said, and he knew what radicalism looked like. “You know I am not working in the dark on this censorship thing,” he wrote to a journalist. “I am after three things and only three things—pro germanism, pacifism, and high browism.”

John Quinn wrote a legal brief defending
The Little Review
, and he appended a letter to William Lamar. “The foreign editor is Ezra Pound, Esq., who is a very distinguished writer and poet and is a personal friend of mine.” He informed Lamar that he was quite familiar with obscenity law and had a proven track record: when Anthony Comstock brought charges against another friend of his, Mitchell Kennerley, he won the case easily, and in his professional opinion the short story in question “does not come within gunshot of violating the statute or any Federal statute. I know the writer, Wyndham Lewis, personally.” Quinn kindly asked Lamar to cable his authorization for the magazine’s circulation to the New York postmaster and to do so quickly. Quinn was going to Washington to meet with the attorney general and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and after that he planned to speak with Lamar in person.

Quinn’s influence didn’t work. Lamar declared the October issue of
The
Little Review
obscene under Section 211 of the U.S. Criminal Code, an updated version of the Comstock Act. Quinn filed a motion to restrain the Post Office, but Judge Augustus Hand ruled against it. There was more detail than necessary in Lewis’s story, and while there were legal books more salacious than this magazine, Judge Hand argued, they escaped government bans “because they come within the term ‘classics,’” which were justifiable exceptions “because they have the sanction of age and fame and usually appeal to a comparatively limited number of readers.” In other words, salacious classics were legal because they were old and most people didn’t read them.

The defeat was an embarrassment to Quinn. The postal ban associated him and
The
Little Review
with radical magazines like
Mother Earth
and
The
Masses
, and he kept news of the decision out of the papers
.
When the embarrassment subsided, he suspected something was amiss. Lewis’s story wasn’t particularly obscene, his direct appeals to Lamar hadn’t worked and his brief’s argument about the story’s moral lesson for unwed women had fallen on deaf ears. Quinn concluded that someone must have put pressure on the postmaster general. Then it suddenly made sense.

“Alas!” he wrote to Pound. “Here’s the fact, as I believe it: Miss Anderson broke into the papers last spring over that lousy old anarchist Berkman and that old slut Emma Goldman; in court every day; greatly excited and all ‘hot up’; thought Goldman a ‘great woman’—ad nauseam.”
The
Little Review
’s antics attracted the attention of federal officials, Quinn wrote to Pound, and Anderson was now known as a pacifist, which was barely distinguishable from a traitor. “So there you are!! Attention centered on her! The country going through a spasm of spy-hunting and a greater spasm of ‘virtue.’” That’s why the magazine was confiscated. And he was right. The Bureau of Investigation opened a file on Margaret Anderson, and Lewis’s short story was just an excuse to harass a radical magazine. Lamar declared the October 1917 issue unmailable not for being obscene but for being a “Publication of Anarchistic tendency.” The Post Office banned its circulation under the auspices of the Espionage Act.

—

POUND WAS ALARMED. His literary renaissance, only months old, was already in jeopardy. He was worried not just because Quinn’s displeasure threatened the magazine’s finances, but also because he had recently received the first chapters of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. And they were magnificent. Given the news from New York, however, he wasn’t sure it would survive the spasms of spy-hunting and virtue. He wrote to Joyce in mid-December 1917:

Pound sent the typescripts to Margaret Anderson in February 1918, though he warned Anderson, in Chaucerian English, that “Joyce has run wode” in the third chapter—it was madness, even if different from the Comstock-in-loincloth variety. The chapter was, he said, “magnificent in spots, and mostly incomprehensible” (he later changed his mind). Stephen’s thoughts morph and proliferate without any gloss or mediation—Joyce did not adjust his content or style to assuage the inherent difficulty of overhearing someone’s mind. In the “Proteus” episode, Stephen walks alone on the beach, and as the exterior action falls away, his thoughts touch upon his family’s dissolution, the conversations he had earlier in the day, his silly childhood prayers,
Hamlet
and Shelley and Aristotle, his own pretentiousness, arias and nursery rhymes, last night’s dream about Baghdad, a newspaper report of a murder, the murderer’s imagined thoughts and the possibility of walking out into eternity from the shore.

As conceptual as the episode is, Stephen’s thoughts begin with (and return to) the visible world: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.” The reader doesn’t know it yet, but Stephen broke his glasses the day before—he can barely
see
the rusty boot. He thinks about seeing because it helps him cope with blindness. For Joyce, writing Stephen’s stream of consciousness was partly a way to go beyond the visible world by thinking about it.

Margaret Anderson had always wanted to peer into the mind of the artist. She and Jane Heap spent hours exploring relevant questions.
“
By what touch
does one immortalize objects? By what power does one create in one’s own image?”
Anderson wanted to weigh the content of a person’s mind, to examine “the poignant human being” and distill the secrets of creativity. Here at last she had a key to the artist’s laboratory. Anderson read the manuscript straight through to the opening of “Proteus,” and when she came to the rusty boot, she stopped reading, looked up at Jane and said, “This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have. We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.”

Pound had no idea how the law would apply to
Ulysses
. He suggested they mail only three hundred copies of each Joyce issue. If the Post Office didn’t confiscate them, they could send out the rest. He asked Quinn if mentioning urination was illegal. What about mocking transubstantiation? Were there any statutes prohibiting blasphemy? He wanted to know where the line was so they wouldn’t cross it again. “When dealing with religious maniacs, one NEVER can tell.” Pound refused to let
The
Little Review
fall apart before
Ulysses
was in print. “For God’s sake,” he wrote to Anderson, “do something to cheer Quinn. He is the best and most effective friend I have in America.” Since Quinn’s faith in the magazine was shattered, he tried to salvage his faith in
Ulysses
. All their troubles, he wrote to Quinn, would be worthwhile “even if we go bust and die in a blaze of suppression over Joyce’s new novel.”

For Pound, the fight for
Ulysses
was fueled by his outrage that a government capable of banning a writer like James Joyce even existed. When he saw the text of the Comstock Act, he wanted to reprint the statute in every issue as an example of the institutional mediocrity that their renaissance should vanquish. Pound tried to convince Quinn that their aristocracy of taste required a new law: “I think the statute which lumps literature and instruments for abortion into one clause is so fine a piece of propaganda for the Germans that it would be disloyal to publish it here till after the war” The law encapsulated the country’s ignorance. It was “grotesque, barbarous, ridiculous, risible, Gargantuan, idiotic, wilsonian, american, Concordia Emersonian, VanDykian, Hamilton-Mabiean, pissian, pharrrtian, monstrous, aborted, contorted, distorted, merdicious, stinkiferous, pestilent and marasmic.” Never had adjectives seemed so weak.

Pound wrote a letter to William Lamar “man to man” (“I trust you are proud of your handiwork,” he wrote) and asked Quinn to forward it (he didn’t). He wrote a
Little Review
article denouncing the legal system that could treat art like “the inventions of the late Dr. Condom,” and he skewered the judge’s argument that the “classics” escaped censorship because so few people read them. Pound thought that the reasoning thwarted literature’s development. Any contemporary writer who wanted to write a classic that violated social conventions would have to endure being outlawed—and therefore impoverished—until official approval arrived decades or centuries later. Until then, writers were at the mercy of an unaccountable authority like Lamar with no literary training.

Quinn wanted to drop the matter entirely. What seemed charmingly cavalier about Pound’s rants when his subject was art or poetry became petulant when he talked about the law, and
The
Little Review
had enough problems without encouraging more scrutiny from federal officials. Quinn informed Pound that his intemperate article against the Comstock Law “might be the last straw”—his quip about “the inventions of the late Dr. Condom” was itself potentially illegal. Pound didn’t seem to grasp how quixotic his protest was in the middle of a war. The only way the government would change the law, he told Pound, would be to make it stronger.