The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (24 page)

And she saw

a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw.

The way the girl encourages the man, leaning back to reveal her undergarments, was appalling—and that was only part of it. The scene was blasphemous. To imagine such things happening within earshot of a church service, to say nothing of the children playing in the distance, made the story gratuitously offensive. It simultaneously desecrated the young woman, the Catholic mass and childhood itself. Sumner read the rest of the episode carefully.

And then a rocket

sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O so soft, sweet, soft!

It was, it seemed, an entirely new species of smut. What completed Joyce’s disturbing tableau on the beach was the unsettling way that the girl’s “innocent” thoughts (“a man of honour to his fingertips”) coincided with the man’s lascivious thoughts (“Swell of her calf. Transparent stockings, stretched to breaking point”). If Sumner wanted a rendering of how easy moral corruption was—a portrait of lust’s slippery slope from mawkish romance to pornography and promiscuity—this was it. Young ladies didn’t just need to be protected from Bloom. They needed to be protected from
Gerty
.

Sumner must have pieced it all together when he began his investigation.
The Little Review
was a Washington Square magazine repeatedly banned from the mails for sedition and obscenity. As he pored over previous issues, he would have noticed ads for the Washington Square Book Shop, which had been so closely aligned to the radical Liberal Club next door that the two establishments had cut through their shared wall to create a doorway. A little bit of digging revealed that Josephine Bell was the bookshop’s proprietor, the same woman indicted for wartime conspiracy in
The Masses
case for writing a poem honoring Emma Goldman.

And that’s when it dawned on him, how he’d heard of
The
Little Review
. The editors had been among Emma Goldman’s supporters during her 1917 espionage trial. A glance at their magazine was enough to indicate that Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were feminists of the most radical kind. Far beyond legitimizing the children of unwed mothers, they openly supported anarchism and homosexual rights. They eschewed marriage. And they lived together. The magazine was loaded with foreign contributors. The July–August issue that the DA gave him featured several un-American names: Ben Hecht, Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. And there, just inside the cover, adoringly pasted in, was a picture of the writer James Joyce—the glasses, the slicked-back hair, the mustache and pointed beard. His heavy coat was pulled up at the neck as he gazed off, unsmiling, into the distance, like some sort of Irish Trotsky. You could tell a radical just by looking at him.

A criminal conviction against
The
Little Review
, the Washington Square Book Shop and James Joyce would be a moral trifecta: a single conviction could be a victory against the immorality, radicalism and foreign ideas beleaguering the country in 1920. Hours after the Wall Street bombing in September, hundreds of men worked through the night to clear away the wreckage and replace shattered windowpanes twenty stories high so the financial district could open for business the next day. When morning came, a crowd of more than one hundred thousand people flocked downtown to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” near the Wall Street statue of George Washington, and John Sumner walked into the Washington Square Book Shop to purchase incriminating copies of
The
Little Review
.

—

TWO WEEKS LATER, John Quinn received a telegram from Margaret Anderson informing him that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Josephine Bell of the Washington Square Book Shop for selling
The
Little Review
to an undercover agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The sale, according to the warrant, violated New York State law, and the offensive material was the latest installment of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Quinn heard the news while working on a case challenging the constitutionality of the government’s wartime seizure powers. His fee was $174,000, and the case was headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

So one can imagine how much patience Quinn had when the
Little Review
“editrix” and her assistant showed up at his austere office with Josephine Bell and her lawyer. Something about Washington Square bohemianism triggered Quinn’s disgust of bodies, the smell of immigrants, sexualities and death.
The
Little Review
suited the square perfectly, he told Pound. It was devoted “to urine and feces and sweat and armpits and piss and orgasms and masturbations and buggeries and Lesbianisms and God knows what.” Anderson and Heap, he thought, would use the trial to promote themselves while he took on all the work pro bono.

“What did I tell you?” Quinn told them. “You’re damned fools trying to get away with such a thing as
Ulysses
in this puritan-ridden country.” Knowing that Quinn’s allegiances were with Pound and Joyce, they tried to pacify him by reminding him of their larger goals—publishing
Ulysses
was part of the reason why he financed
The
Little Review
in the first place, and Pound and Joyce had insisted on printing the installment. Quinn responded that their job was to exercise editorial judgment, not to follow directions from Pound and Joyce. “An artist might paint a picture of two women doing the Lesbian business,” Quinn said, “but the owner of a gallery would be an idiot if he hung it.” Anderson and Heap thought publishing
Ulysses
was worth any trouble they might encounter, and they insisted on the importance of broadening the public mind. Quinn fired back, “You’ll be broadening the matron at Blackwell’s Island one of these days, and serve you damn well right.”

Quinn got the judge to transfer the charges from the bookstore to Anderson and Heap. The case was adjourned for two weeks, and as they left the Jefferson Market Courthouse, Anderson and Heap began arguing with Sumner. They were not ashamed of publishing
Ulysses
. “We glory in it,” Anderson said. “This trial will be the making of
The Little Review
.” To their surprise, Sumner was happy to carry the argument down Eighth Street, and when they entered the Washington Square Book Shop, the scene of the crime, Sumner followed them inside.

As eager as he was to debate the vice society’s principles, Anderson thought he was amenable to her vision, that he would be converted to the cause of Beauty if only she could sit down to tea with him every day for a month. She could not have been more mistaken. Quinn, like Anderson, did everything he could to persuade Sumner over a lunch meeting; he gave Sumner a sense of who he was (in case he didn’t know) and furnished him with a glowing review of Joyce’s work in
The
Dial
. “I don’t give a damn for these women,” he told Sumner, “but I do want to save James Joyce from the stigma of indecent writings if I can.” He asked the NYSSV to drop the charges, and in exchange Quinn would halt the publication of
Ulysses
in
The
Little Review
.

Sumner listened patiently before informing Quinn that the case hadn’t originated with the vice society. It originated with the New York district attorney’s office. That summer, a businessman named Ogden Brower had flipped through one of his teenage daughter’s magazines and found the passage where Gerty MacDowell reveals her nainsook knickers,

and she was trembling

in every limb from being bent so far back that he could see high up above her knee where no-one ever and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking.

When Brower asked his daughter how she had heard about
The
Little Review
, she said that she hadn’t heard about it, and she certainly hadn’t ordered the magazine—it was an unsolicited package sent like an explosive through the mail. Her father was outraged. He marked four of the dirty pages and wrote a letter to the district attorney.

A complaint like this from a prominent businessman was an embarrassment, for surely there
were
means of suppressing the magazine, and the DA’s office asked the secretary of the NYSSV for his opinion.

Sumner wasn’t going to drop the charges. He doubted that Quinn could end the serialization of
Ulysses
altogether, and Anderson’s “defiant” attitude suggested that Quinn’s clients were more unruly than he realized. But Quinn insisted that Joyce was nothing like the editors. He was an artist, whereas Anderson and Heap were “sheer self-exploiters. Too damn fresh.” And he would see to it that Joyce himself canceled further publication.

When the meeting was over, Quinn dictated a letter to Pound in a flourishing attempt to unburden himself from years of aggravation.

experience

He went on for sixteen more pages.

Quinn knew the magazine would be convicted if the DA didn’t drop the charges himself, and a conviction against a portion of
Ulysses
would criminalize the entire book. As soon as the press caught wind of the charges, Sumner’s attack upon
The
Little Review
would link James Joyce to Bolsheviks and bomb throwers and birth controllers. Joyce would lose everything for a Washington Square rag. It infuriated Quinn that the editrixes’ ineptitude could topple Joyce’s genius, that a snippet—a mere sixteen pages—might end the publication of a book that Joyce had been working on for six years.

Ezra Pound was taken aback by the news. As willing as he was to turn aesthetic disagreements into angry screeds against the Post Office and the Comstock Act, he wasn’t prepared for arrests, indictments and potential prison sentences. “‘Nausikaa’ has been pinched by the PO-lice,” he wrote to Joyce. “Only way to get
Ulysses
printed in book form will be to agree not to print any more of it in
The Little Review
 . . . the only thing to be done now is to give Quinn an absolutely free hand.”

When Pound first told Quinn about “Nausicaa,” he had been enthusiastic: “Perhaps everything ought to be said ONCE in the English language.” After the arrest, however, even he began to distance himself from its excesses. He told Quinn he deleted a few risqué passages, and he suspected Anderson and Heap ignored his deletions (they hadn’t). Pound insisted that the two women were, as Quinn knew, willful, if not reckless. And so was Joyce. When Pound suggested changes to the manuscript, Joyce sent him an intemperate letter that Pound attributed to Joyce’s persistent illness and “overwrought nerves,” but Pound offered Quinn, in strict confidence, his general estimation of Joyce: “He is not a particularly reasonable person.”

—

ON OCTOBER 21, 1920, the front two rows of the Jefferson Market Courthouse were filled with fashionable women who came to protest the obscenity charges against
The
Little Review
. John Quinn walked in wearing a three-piece suit with a gold watch chain dangling from his vest. He looked around at the burglars and vagrants corralled by police officers with glinting buttons and stars. Two days before, he had been in Washington, D.C., preparing his Supreme Court case, and now he was beset by immigrants, Negroes and Italians in a judicial factory.

Quinn never intended to be there. It was just a preliminary hearing, but the young lawyer handling it had telephoned Quinn’s office when he gathered that the judge, Joseph Corrigan, had a personal animus against Sumner. Judge Corrigan already had several exasperating exchanges with vice societies, and he was unwilling to uphold charges based on nothing more than Sumner’s word, which was exactly what Sumner was asking him to do. His deposition claimed that
Ulysses
was “so obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting, that a minute description of the same would be offensive to the Court and improper to be placed upon the record thereof.”