The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (18 page)

“There is nothing in the anti-Comstock business. People are sick and tired of it,” and he warned Pound not to ruin his own reputation just as he was making a name for himself in the United States. “In the minds of nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand your campaign for free literature would be lumped in at once with pro-Sanger, pro-Washington Square, pro-free love, pro-anti-Comstock propaganda, pro-birth control propaganda, pro-socialist propaganda.” Once you were assigned to a group like that, it was impossible to get out.

—

THE GROWING SCHISM between the two men was fundamental: Quinn was practical, and Pound was an ideologue trying to turn art into power. Imagism and Vorticism were his attempts to remove the barriers between the word and the world. Pound’s renaissance in art was trying to colonize the world of politics, and yet his reaction to the Comstock Act proved he was trapped inside the art world no matter what—he was reading the statute as if it were a
poem
. Pound was horrified not so much by the fact that immoral books and condoms were outlawed as that they were “lumped” into the same clause, as if the meanings of the listed items shaped one another like couplets in a stanza. Quinn didn’t want to change society or international relations through his patronage. He just wanted to change art. And it unnerved him to think that Pound’s creative spirit, his pugnacious honesty and his freedom to flee to China or Alaska were inseparable from his incompetence.

But he still had faith in Pound’s opinions about art, and Joyce’s work confirmed it. Quinn declared
Dubliners
“one of the most sincere and realistic books ever written.” When
A Portrait
was published in 1917, the U.S. publisher, Ben Huebsch, sent Quinn a copy and referred to it as a novel that “very nearly approaches genius.” Quinn no longer needed convincing. He bought about thirty copies of
A Portrait
for his friends and wrote an article praising James Joyce in
Vanity Fair
: “A new star has appeared in the firmament of Irish letters, a star of the first magnitude.” Quinn’s Joyce was Pound’s Joyce. His article praised the Irish writer’s newness and honesty, his rejection of ornament, rhetoric and compromise—he went so far as to copy portions of Pound’s letters verbatim.

National ties turned his appreciation for Joyce into devotion. Quinn was the son of Irish immigrants. His mother, whom he adored, was an orphan from Cork who had arrived on U.S. shores when she was fourteen, and Quinn visited Ireland for the first time only weeks after she died in 1902. The Irish became an extended family for a man who had lost his parents and whose closest ties were to a couple of siblings and a bevy of mistresses. With no children of his own, John Quinn began to think of his patronage of great Irish writers as a part of both his heritage and his legacy.

Quinn, in fact, suspected he was dying. He discovered that he had a malignant tumor in his large intestine and needed surgery to remove a section of his colon. For months, Quinn’s assistant was the only one who knew, but the reality was setting in. He was only forty-eight years old. “I am still interested in life,” he wrote to Pound, “still feel its sap, the world seems good to me, and I don’t want to go for a long, long time yet.” He prepared his will and squared away unfinished business before checking into the hospital. In March 1918, he sent Pound the remaining $750 he promised for his work for
The Little Review
, and he gathered an additional subsidy of $1,600 from himself and three of his friends. He did not intend to help the magazine any further.

So when Quinn’s assistant delivered his mail to his hospital room and Quinn, recovering from surgery, flipped through the March 1918 issue of
The
Little Review
containing the debut installment of James Joyce’s new novel,
Ulysses
—the long-awaited masterpiece guaranteed to make all their troubles worthwhile—the references to “snotgreen” noserags and “the scrotumtightening sea” disgusted him. There was a joking ballad that included a line about Jesus urinating. The burden of Quinn’s sickness likely made every unpleasant detail unbearable, and he dictated an angry letter from his hospital bed. “That is what I call toilet-room literature, pissoir art. It doesn’t even rise to the dignity of boudoir art or whorehouse art or cabaret art.” He could have
The
Little Review
convicted in thirty seconds before any judge or jury in the country.

—

THE FIRST PERSON to censor
Ulysses
was Ezra Pound. Joyce sent the fourth chapter while Quinn was in the hospital, and the text was substantially worse than “snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening.” Leopold Bloom takes his morning trip to the outhouse in the small back garden of his Eccles Street flat. “He felt heavy, full: then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood up, undoing the waistband of his trousers. The cat mewed to him.” Ezra Pound took out his blue pencil and struck a line through the phrase “of his bowels” and another through “undoing the waistband of his trousers.” He cut about thirty lines before sending it to Anderson and Heap.

Pound told Joyce they could print the unexpurgated text in a Greek or Bulgarian translation someday, but Joyce was not amused. “I shall see that the few passages excised are restored if it costs me another ten years,” he vowed. Pound justified his deletions on artistic grounds. It was bad writing, he told Joyce in a letter. “Bad because you waste the violence. You use a stronger word than you need, and this is bad art, just as any needless superlative is bad art.” Pound didn’t want Quinn agitated any more than was absolutely necessary, and if
The Little Review
were suppressed too often it would be suppressed permanently. “I can’t have our august editress jailed, NOT at any rate for a passage which I do not think written with utter maestria.”

Pound sensed that
The
Little Review
was falling apart just as
Ulysses
was starting to see the light of day. He went months without hearing from Anderson and Heap, and the situation in New York was worse than he knew. They were behind on rent, malnourished and sick. Jane wrote to a friend back in Kansas about their squalid apartment. “It is so dirty—and everything is broken or scuffed or bent and useless—and a perfect pest of mice—hordes of them. I can’t bear to look at my room, or put it in order.” Jane lost fifteen pounds from dysentery and had fever blisters on her face. Anderson caught the Spanish flu and began seeing someone else. She would lock herself in a room to proofread upcoming issues while Jane ensconced herself in some far corner of the apartment to avoid catching a glimpse of the other woman, half-naked, darting to and from the bathroom. Jane alternately entertained and avoided the advances of her own love interest, Djuna Barnes, but she was heartbroken and, eventually, suicidal. And
The
Little Review
’s troubles were just beginning.

—

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S censorship of
Ulysses
began with an offhand note about the novel’s unusual style. In March 1919, a copy of
The
Little Review
landed in the Translation Bureau of the Post Office Department because the magazine contained pages of French prose. The Translation Bureau was tasked with sifting through foreign-language texts for wartime crimes, and it was still operating in 1919. The official inspecting
The
Little Review
read the five-page installment of
Ulysses
, in which Leopold Bloom helps a blind man cross the street and wonders what it would be like not to see. The Translation Bureau official wrote to his supervisor, “The Creature who writes this
Ulysses
stuff should be put under a glass jar for examination. He’d make a lovely exhibit!”

The issue was perfectly legal, but the supervisor decided to examine the Creature more closely, and he discovered that the January issue of
The
Little Review
was more offensive than peculiar. Leopold Bloom orders a gorgonzola sandwich for lunch at Davy Byrne’s pub and sips a glass of burgundy. The taste makes him think of the grapes in the Burgundy sun, which reminds him of a bright day on a hillside outside of Dublin. Molly kissed him with seedcake in her mouth, and he began to chew it.

High on Ben Howth

rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warm folded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

The Post Office notified
The
Little Review
that the January 1919 issue was henceforth forbidden from the U.S. mail—the censorship of
Ulysses
began with the novel’s central scene of affection.

Since the issues had already been sent to subscribers, the ban was effectively a warning. The second ban was more punctual. The Post Office notified Anderson that the May 1919 issue was being inspected in Washington, D.C., to determine whether Episode IX of
Ulysses
was obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy, and therefore in violation of the Comstock Act. John Quinn was the only person who could help, and his appreciation for Joyce—despite some of his nauseating details—made him feel as if he had no other option. Quinn spent nearly an hour and a half dictating a legal brief defending
Ulysses
, and Lamar gave him the courtesy of making his decision over the weekend. By Tuesday morning, Quinn heard that the issue was banned.

Quinn prepared to catalog the offenses to Ezra Pound, but he couldn’t bear to dictate the magazine’s illegal passages to his young female stenographer, so he dismissed her and composed the letter himself. There was an assortment of small objections. Stephen Dedalus mentions the “incests and bestialities” that stain “the criminal annals of the world[.]” He declares, “It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.” Buck Mulligan jokes about visiting Stephen “at his summer residence” in Nighttown, where he was “deep in the study of the
Summa contra Gentiles
in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay whore.” Buck shares a title for a masturbatory play: “
Everyman His own Wife (a national immorality in three orgasms) by Ballocky Mulligan.
” All of this, mind you, was happening in the course of a discussion of Shakespeare—at one point, Buck cheerfully brings up “the charge of pederasty brought against the bard.” Quinn wondered if Pound had even read the banned issue.

As with previous episodes, Pound had not only read it, he had censored it—he simply hadn’t gone far enough. Anderson informed her readers that the magazine “ruined” Joyce’s writing by “omitting certain passages in which he mentions natural facts known to everyone.” Whether pederasty, masturbation and incest were known to everyone was beside the point, Quinn wrote to Pound. “The fact of s—t—g being a common practice every day and hence must be ‘a natural fact known to everyone’ is no reason why it should be put upon a printed page of a magazine.” Perhaps Joyce’s conversations had been acceptable among students and librarians in the National Library of Ireland in 1904. They were not acceptable for a magazine sent through the U.S. mail system in 1919.

Pound resorted to flattery. He told Quinn that his legal brief was one of the most brilliant defenses of realist literature he had ever read, and he was sending it to T. S. Eliot (
The
Egoist
’s current literary editor) for publication. Eliot wrote to Quinn from London a few days later to say that the suppression of
Ulysses
was “a national scandal . . . The part of
Ulysses
in question struck me as almost the finest I have read: I have lived on it ever since I read it.” Eliot pledged to do everything he could for Joyce in England, but he felt like a lone evangelist in a particularly hostile country. In London, he wrote to Quinn, “the forces of conservatism and obstruction are more intelligent, better educated, and more formidable.”

10.

In the spring of 1918, before
Ulysses
caught the eye of the U.S. Post Office Department, Miss Weaver was trying to serialize Joyce’s novel in
The
Egoist
. She sat at Virginia Woolf’s tea table and placed her gray woolen gloves neatly beside her plate. She wore a buttoned mauve suit and habitually tugged her collar more closely around her neck. The sun arrived briefly that day, streaming through the windows of Hogarth House, in southwest London, but it was still unseasonably cold for April. Miss Weaver looked directly at her hostess’s large eyes and answered questions scrupulously, “Yes, Mrs. Woolf.”

Virginia Woolf was born into the world of arts and letters. She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a well-known writer and editor, and Julia Prinsep Stephen, who had served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters. Her half brother was Gerald Duckworth, one of the many publishers who rejected Joyce’s
Portrait
. Woolf was a core member of the Bloomsbury Group, a collection of London artists and intellectuals that included E. M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the painter and art critic Roger Fry, whose infamous 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition gave the group sudden prominence. Woolf’s Bloomsbury affiliation was, at the time, more influential than her fiction, which was just beginning to appear, but she had been writing reviews for the
Times Literary Supplement
for over a decade, and by 1918 her bold pronouncements on novelists old and new were appearing nearly every week. She declared H. G. Wells (immensely popular at the time) “curiously disappointing” while the Victorian Charlotte Brontë was a renegade: “Every one of her books seems to be a superb gesture of defiance.” When Woolf declared that “on or about December 1910, human character changed” her longtime readers may have found it arch, but they could not dismiss it.

Virginia Woolf had only heard of Harriet Weaver, and though she ventured helpful questions at tea, her guest seemed incapable of maintaining a conversation. Miss Weaver was an enigma. The daring editor of
The
Egoist
—the eccentric successor to
The
Freewoman
, an organ of social rebellion—was rather like a “well-bred hen,” as she described her in her diary, a woman who comes to tea wearing woolen gloves.