The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (21 page)

Nora’s acceptance and encouragement were exactly what he needed after those first few years of lonely struggle with his writing, and to magnify her encouragement Joyce made her the face of all women. She was a schoolgirl, a mother, a queen, a mistress and a muse. When Joyce first imagined a woman’s love releasing “the central torrents of life” within him, he had it backwards. The torrents within him were compressed into Nora. She was the sublime and the obscene, an angel and a whore. She was, in fact, the first one to say dirty things. In the middle of the night, not long after they left Ireland, she “tore off” her chemise, as he reminded her, climbed on top of him, slid him inside of her, and when the thrust of her hips down onto him was not enough, she bent closer and pleaded, “Fuck up, love! Fuck up, love!”

Nora’s letters were similarly unabashed. One was written with such abandon that Joyce called it “disjointed.” Another letter described something she would do with her tongue, something she had never done before. Joyce wrote carefully in his tiny script—very few words are changed or crossed out—with her letter open in front of him. He fixated on one particular word she wrote. He contemplated the curves of the letters, the shapes they must have compelled her mouth to make, the ink sinking into the paper as she wrote them, the sound of the letters as brutal as the act they named. The word was bigger than the others, and she underlined it. The thin arcs of the cursive
f
soared above her writing’s gentler slopes and plunged down below them. It had the symmetry of a bow on her blue chemise with one of the ribbon ends pulled toward the upturned vowel. Joyce lifted her letter to his lips, and he kissed the word. He wanted pages more.

For someone who fussed and toiled over the smallest lines and passages of his poetry and fiction, the unbridled excesses of their letters felt triumphant. The achievement lay not just in their letters’ seamy details but also in their torrential violence, in the waves of “wild brutal madness” Joyce felt sweeping over him when he sat down to write, a madness forceful enough to wrench language out of its self-enclosed world. Obscene words became indistinguishable from obscene acts in his mind. The paradigmatic scene of Joyce’s sexual imagination (and a point of origin for the literary imagination of his greatest years) was the thought of hearing Nora uttering dirty things, watching her mouth forming the words, while, he wrote, he could simultaneously “hear and smell the dirty fat girlish farts going pop pop out of your pretty bare girlish bum and
fuck fuck fuck fuck
my naughty little hot fuckbird’s cunt for ever.”

—

JOYCE’S RECORD of foul language began when he was seven years old. His parents sent him to a boarding school twenty miles from Dublin, and the Jesuit institution’s punishment book notes that one of the priests paddled him four times on the hands for “vulgar language.” Joyce was the youngest boy in the school. He proudly announced his age as “half past six,” and the other boys turned it into his first nickname, another kind of punishment. Words were integral to the architecture of power before Joyce could understand it. They had erotic strength not because they were filthy, but because filthy words weren’t very different from moral words. The alphabet that described his depravity also spelled out laws and commandments—the same fabric had innocent frills and shameful stains. What made their letters so thrilling for Joyce was the way they careened between innocence and guilt, the sublime and the obscene.

Passion, shame, love and jealousy roiled painfully in him throughout his most reckless letters to Nora. When he wasn’t declaring his love, he demanded to know her every transgression. When Cosgrave had his hand under her dress did his fingers go inside of her? If so, how far? And for how long? Did he make her come? And what did she do? What did he ask her to do? Joyce was trying to master the past by possessing all of its details. “When you were with him in the dark at night did your fingers
never
,
never
unbutton his trousers and slip inside like mice?” The undertow of guilt was never far behind. “I love you, Nora, and it seems that this too is part of my love. Forgive me! forgive me!”

Joyce was turning his moral outrage against himself. Letters to Nora functioned as confessions of his depravity and pleas for the punishment he deserved: he wanted her to whip him with a cane. He imagined what it would be like to have done something bad, to see her summoning him with a flushed angry face, an ample bosom, her massive thighs spread open, and, he wrote, “to feel you bending down (like an angry nurse whipping a child’s bottom) until your big full bubbies almost touched me and to feel you flog, flog, flog me viciously on my naked quivering flesh!!” To detail his punishment was to degrade himself further and thus to require yet more ruthless punishment—Joyce enjoyed breaking the rules because he honored them. And yet the brutal repetition of his words, which conjured the most depraved masochism, all resolved, in the end, into his letters’ more comforting and sonorous refrains: “Nora, Nora mia, Norina, Noretta, Norella, Noruccia . . .” Any words—all words—seemed more powerful and real because of her. What he wanted, he wrote to her, beyond the fucking and flogging, was to go back to her in Trieste and to sit for hours, “
talking, talking, talking, talking
to you.” If only such fleeting moments could go on endlessly.

Ulysses
was for Nora. The book he was writing—the novel that tried to say everything—was a monument to their first evening together. The day Joyce was immortalizing in
Ulysses
was the day he walked with Nora beyond the docks, where they were alone for the first time. June 16, 1904. The ink of each word in his manuscript made those fugitive moments incrementally more indelible.
Ulysses
was his final love letter.

The erotic letters between James Joyce and Nora Barnacle are one of the secret headwaters of modern literature. For it was here that Joyce had an epiphany about language itself: the souls of the commonest words illuminated the fact that the ultimate power of writing is its ability, like love, to render the writer helpless. His most intrepid letters dissolved into abject pleas (“Forgive me!”) and feeble iterations of Nora’s name. Joyce was discovering the paradox of words when he was most apt to benefit from it—he had left Dublin to become a writer only to return five years later as an agent for a short-lived cinema. He had spent those years belaboring a novel that no one had read—that perhaps no one would ever read. But with Nora, Joyce had an audience. She was not a scholar or an aesthete, not a patron or a literary critic, but she was devoted, and she read his letters carefully. It was in their secret exchanges in 1909 that Joyce, who spent so much time gaining mastery over words, abruptly found himself mastered by them. That helplessness gave his diligent craftsmanship a dimension of awe, a fear and a thrilling freedom, a recklessness and an openness that must have felt like endless talking.

An intellectual gulf separated the Galway girl from the artist, and yet in some ways she became a model for every reader he ever wanted. The “ideal reader,” Joyce would write years later, suffers from “an ideal insomnia.” He wanted people to read novels as carefully, as ardently and as sleeplessly as they would read dirty letters sent from abroad. It was one of modernism’s great insights. James Joyce treated readers as if they were lovers.

12.

The candle flame burned closer to Sylvia Beach’s hand as she searched for hours through the piles of books. By the mid-1920s, Sylvia Beach was, as one writer called her, “probably the best known woman in Paris,” and her career had begun in the unlit cellar beneath the Boiveau and Chevillet bookshop. She had filled two trunks with poetry in London and scoured the bookstalls along the Seine for any English or American book she could find, but her biggest discoveries were in the shadows of M. Chevillet’s cluttered cellar, where she salvaged a Twain, an Austen, a Whitman and a family of Henry Jameses with sturdy bindings. Abandoned Kiplings and Dickinsons peeked out like survivors in the paper rubble.

The idea of her own bookstore had taken shape in Belgrade. In the winter of 1919, Sylvia Beach was trudging through Belgrade’s snowy streets in the aftermath of World War I. Serbia’s capital was a linchpin of the Balkans, Europe’s most vexing tangle of ethnicities. The war that began when a Serbian nationalist walked up to the archduke’s motorcade in Sarajevo ended five years later with more than seven hundred thousand Serbs dead, most of them civilians. Nearly a fifth of the Serbian population was gone (the war’s highest casualty rate), and Belgrade was still in ruins. Victorious survivors wandered along the trenches collecting shrapnel and battlefield souvenirs. Independence still felt new. Serbia had endured centuries of alternating control by the Ottomans and Austrians, and each conquest had destroyed Belgrade all over again. Buildings over two stories high were rare.

When Sylvia Beach arrived with the American Red Cross, she saw the skeletons of horses strewn along the roadside—she couldn’t tell if they had been killed or euthanized or if they had starved to death. Serbia was stagnant. There was no electricity or running water. There were no schools, factories, airports or bridges, and she navigated around mortar shell craters on her way to the market. She struggled with the language, but she learned three important phrases: “Please,” “How many” and “Cream puffs.”

The market vendors hailed from all around the Balkans. Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians and Bosnians came to town in their national clothing, and so to walk through the Belgrade marketplace was to wade through turbans, headdresses, fezzes and Astrakhan hats. Gypsy women in colorful layers smoked pipes as they traveled through town. Women carried egg-filled baskets dangling from both ends of a pole resting on a shoulder. People kept warm with a drink called
salep
that was made from the dried tubers of orchids and boiled in tin cans over bits of charcoal. There was little else to buy.

Beach’s sister Holly was a Red Cross translator, and she got Sylvia a job as an administrator. She handed out
pajamas, blankets and condensed milk to underweight Serbs standing barefoot in the snow—she didn’t know why they didn’t bring shoes. The Red Cross funneled columns of German and Austrian prisoners into Belgrade’s delousing plant, where their tattered uniforms were baked and their bodies scrubbed clean. The Red Cross opened hospitals and orphanages, and the nurses went from house to house documenting inhabitants, medical conditions and primary needs. Beach produced the survey forms on a groaning mimeograph machine and filed them when the nurses returned each day.

Despite all the work they did, the women controlled nothing in postwar Belgrade. Beach found it nettlesome at first, but it soon became infuriating. “The Red Cross has made a regular feminist of me,” she wrote to her mother in New Jersey. “It’s seeing men doing all the managing and helping themselves to all the pleasant things that come along.” The women, she said, “rank as buck privates—are ordered hither & thither, forced to obey unquestioningly.” Their treatment was especially galling for a woman who had grown up in Princeton and Paris. Beach’s father was a Presbyterian pastor (President Woodrow Wilson’s pastor, actually), and the last of nine generations of clergymen. Sylvester Beach was a community leader, a women’s suffrage advocate and a firm believer in the independence of his wife and three daughters. His second daughter changed her name from Nancy to Sylvia in his honor.

Sylvia Beach settled in Europe permanently in 1914, and in 1917 she volunteered to work twelve hours a day on a farm in Touraine while the men fought in the trenches. She was proud of her khaki uniform, though the women picking grapes and bundling wheat alongside her disapproved of her bobbed hair and trousers. It could have been worse. When she was in Spain in 1915, villagers threw rocks at her and her sister Cyprian because they were wearing riding pants. But the desolation of postwar Belgrade deepened her perspective as nothing else had. The low mountains surrounding Belgrade trapped the cold Black Sea wind as it carried storms into the city. Snow collected in the crevices between the low-roofed houses and melted down the sloping streets to the muddy Sava River, which curved below the city to meet the brown Danube.

Postwar Belgrade’s dreadful beauty gave Sylvia Beach a new resolve. For years, she imagined running a bookshop that would be more than a business or a showroom for books. She imagined an alcove for a literary community, a place where readers and books could find one another, where writers lifted off the page and became real people walking through the door to greet their readers. The money she had been saving wasn’t sufficient, but she was willing to write to her mother for help. “I’m sure you would approve of my wanting to make a supreme effort to take something interesting and worthwhile for a life work instead of working under someone at an uninspiring task—with ideas and art taboo and you might as well be a squirrel in a wheel.” Her mother was skeptical. It “would be such hard indoor work,” she reminded her daughter. Sylvia was small, and her parents always thought of her as delicate.

Nevertheless, she telegrammed her mother when she returned to France: “Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money.” Until then, her prospective bookstore was to be in London, but a trip to England convinced her that the rents were too high and the market already saturated. More important, Sylvia had fallen in love. In March 1917, before leaving Paris for volunteer work, she visited La
Maison des Amis des Livres. It was, strangely, both a bookshop and a lending library. She walked in to find the friendly round face of Adrienne Monnier. Her eyes, she remembered, were alive like William Blake’s.

After the war, Monnier suggested that Beach open an English bookshop in Paris so they could have sister shops on the Left Bank. Adrienne would lend and sell French books, and Sylvia would lend and sell English books. Monnier could teach her about the book trade in Paris, and without good advice a bookshop in any city would be daunting. By the time Monnier found a vacant storefront in a former laundry around the corner from her shop, Beach was convinced. A few days after her pleading telegram, her mother sent three thousand dollars over the Reverend Beach’s objections.