The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (28 page)

Quinn rushed to the DA’s office, found the prosecutor in charge of the case, Assistant DA Joseph Forrester, and introduced himself in a half whisper. For the past week, Quinn had been suffering from laryngitis, and his doctor forbade him to speak. He asked for another adjournment, and Forrester actually told John Quinn that there would be no more delays unless Sumner agreed to it. Quinn had the ear of U.S. Attorney General Palmer, testified regularly before congressional committees, changed the nation’s copyright and tariff laws, was almost single-handedly defending the federal government in the U.S. Supreme Court, and now an assistant New York DA was telling him that he couldn’t get an adjournment in the Jefferson Market Courthouse unless some functionary from the vice society would allow it.

And Sumner refused. There had been at least six adjournments already, and he appeared in court for each one of them. The case should have been heard back in October, and now that it was February, he had run out of patience. Besides, Sumner told him, it was an open-and-shut case—it would be over as soon as the judges read the magazine. So Quinn was, more or less, forced to get a note from his doctor. He drew up an affidavit certifying his laryngitis in order to request an adjournment directly from the judge, and the court granted him ten more days.

Quinn told Anderson and Heap to start thinking about character witnesses, people who could vouch for their motives in order to limit the penalty. They were definitely going to be found guilty—“There isn’t the slightest shade of a doubt of that,” he told Anderson—and because they had a history of violations, they would be treated like “old and callous offenders.” They were lucky to be prosecuted under the state law, where the maximum penalty at the time was only a thousand-dollar fine and a year in prison. If they were luckier, their punishment might be a permanent postal ban. But if they were defiant in court, he said, they might go to prison.

Sumner’s prosecutions routinely put people behind bars, even when the offenders were more important than the
Little Review
editors. When he prosecuted the president of Harper & Brothers for publishing an obscene book earlier that year, the company’s president was ordered to pay a thousand dollars or spend three months in prison. Quinn might post fifty dollars in bail for Anderson and Heap, but he was not about to give them two thousand dollars for their freedom.

—

T
HE
L
ITTLE
R
EVIEW
was inundated with angry letters about
Ulysses
. The editors generally ignored them, but one envelope featured such beautiful handwriting that Margaret Anderson opened it. A woman in Chicago wished to share her thoughts about Mr. Bloom’s encounter with Gerty on the beach:

Anderson stayed awake all night trying to write an answer large enough to encompass her indignation over the writer’s “profound ignorance of all branches of art, science, life,” though in the end she could only be dismissive: “It is not important that you dislike James Joyce,” she wrote back. “He is not writing for you. He is writing for himself.”

Anderson courted hardship and ostracism partly, as Quinn suspected, for self-advertisement, but mostly because she saw it as the key to independence. Anderson broke away from her family only to find that she had shifted her dependence to contributors, advertisers, patrons and foreign editors. She envied the fact that people like James Joyce and Emma Goldman were in exile or in prison for something bigger than themselves. The image of Joyce toiling through war, illness and penury to follow his own vision—publishers, readers and puritanical policemen be damned—was, for Anderson, the essence of art. Now that she had criminal charges against her, she shared Joyce’s defiance and with it, she hoped, his independence. In the belated
The
Little Review
issue following the charges, Anderson insisted that genuine art rested upon two principles: “
First, the artist
has no responsibility to the public whatever.
” The public, in fact, was responsible to the artist.
“
Second,
” she emphasized,
“the position of the great artist is impregnable
 . . . You can no more limit his expression, patronizingly suggest that his genius present itself in channels personally pleasing to you, than you can eat the stars.”

The
Little Review
existed for genius—that was why Anderson and Heap “fought like devils” for every issue. Anderson wanted, as she later wrote to a friend, to be “the arranger of life, the killer of the philistine,
the favorite enemy of the bourgeoisie
.” Whereas Ezra Pound wanted an aristocracy of taste, Margaret Anderson wanted an autocracy, a society in which the exceptional would rule over the unexceptional. “Anything else,” she wrote, “means that the exceptional people must suffer with the average people—from the average people.” For Anderson, the obscenity trial against
Ulysses
and
The
Little Review
was not a fight for the freedom of speech. It was a fight for the freedom of genius.

16.

The courtroom was packed with spectators drawn by Margaret Anderson’s refined looks and reporters eager to get the scoop on the “Greenwich Girl Editors.” The previous week, a judge threatened another Village editor with psychiatric observation at Bellevue, and this week’s show was even more promising. Anderson and Heap were defending a book rumored to be radical Freudianism, impenetrable madness and what one reporter called “ultra-violet sex fiction.” But Quinn was determined that there wouldn’t be a scene. He told Anderson and Heap that they had two responsibilities: to shut their mouths and to surround themselves with “window trimmings.” Any Washington Squareites they brought to court were to dress like demure, tasteful ladies rather than the women who showed up at the preliminary hearing looking, he said, like they were rustled into court after a whorehouse raid. Anderson was determined to follow his advice, but it only made her more contemptuous of the proceedings.

“Everyone stands up as the three judges enter,” she recounted in
The
Little Review
. “Why must I stand up as a tribute to three men who wouldn’t understand my simplest remark?” When she wasn’t outraged by the proceedings, she tried not to be bored by them. “Perhaps one can be enlivened by speculating as to whether they will swerve the fraction of an inch from their predestined stupidity.”

The men overseeing the stupidity were Special Sessions Chief Justice Frederic Kernochan and two white-haired judges, John J. McInerney and Joseph Moss. Assistant DA Forrester called only one witness, John Sumner. All Sumner had to do was explain the circumstances of the suppression—the troubled daughter, the outraged father and the undercover purchase in the bookstore on Eighth Street, where any young woman might find it—and James Joyce’s obscenity would speak for itself.

It occurred to Quinn that the trial was a demoralizing squabble among Irishmen. Two of the three judges were Irish. The indictment was handed down by Corrigan, an Irishman, against James Joyce, another Irishman, and in the middle of it all was John Quinn squaring off against an assistant DA who presented himself, Quinn thought, as “a one hundred and thirty percent Irish Republican” defending Ireland’s dignity against betrayers like Quinn and Joyce.

Quinn argued that Joyce was an artist matching the caliber of Shakespeare, Dante, Fielding and Blake. He was a satirist like Swift and Oscar Wilde, and there was less “filth” in
Ulysses
than there was in Broadway performances and Fifth Avenue window displays. Quinn initially thought the case was so hopeless that he wouldn’t even bother calling witnesses to defend
Ulysses’
literary merits, but as the trial approached, the desire to win (or to mitigate sentencing) got the better of him, and he convinced the judges to hear expert testimony. One witness, a British lecturer named John Cowper Powys, testified that Joyce’s fusion of dialogue and narrative, thought and action, made his style too obscure to deprave and corrupt the public—the average reader would find it repellent.
Ulysses,
Powys testified, was “in no way capable of corrupting the minds of young girls.” He used to teach at a girls’ school, so he knew.

When Quinn’s second witness took the stand, the judges grew impatient with so-called experts. Philip Moeller was one of the founders of New York’s Theatre Guild, and he asked the judges if he might use technical terminology to explain how Joyce applied Freudian psychology. The scene between Gerty and Bloom on the beach was really “an unveiling of the subconscious mind.” Joyce’s chapter, he testified, “most emphatically is not aphrodisiac.”

“What’s this!” Judge Kernochan interrupted. “What’s that?”

Quinn tried to help, “Well, if I may explain your honor, an aphrodisiac is an adjective derived from the noun Aphrodite, supposed to be the goddess of beauty or love—”

“I understand that,” said Kernochan, “but I don’t understand what this man is talking about. He might as well be talking in Russian.”

When the judges proceeded without hearing from the rest of Quinn’s experts, it occurred to Anderson and Heap that
Ulysses
was trapped in a foreign country where beauty and craftsmanship were meaningless. One of the judges declared (without shame, apparently), “We don’t care who James Joyce is or whether he has written the finest books in the world.”

And yet the trial was going better than it seemed. The fact that there were witnesses at all was a victory. Courts typically ignored literary merit in obscenity cases, but Quinn cited an obscure 1913 ruling by Judge Learned Hand to secure an exception. Hand was a cousin of the judge who had ruled against
The Little Review
in 1917, but he was no friend of Anthony Comstock (“When I wish to hear from you,” he once told the bullying crusader in his courtroom, “I will let you know!”), nor did he approve of the Hicklin Rule. Hand was suspicious of judicial hunts for hidden tendencies in books, especially when they focused on anyone “into whose hands” a book “may fall.” The Hicklin Rule requires us, the judge wrote in 1913, “to reduce our treatment of sex to the standard of a child’s library.” The government had an interest in protecting valuable literature, he argued, and artists needed freedom to portray the full scope of human nature because “truth and beauty are too precious to society at large to be mutilated.” The Hicklin Rule’s tendency to tether modern society to Victorian values made it an instrument of immorality.

Learned Hand proposed his own definition of obscenity—it was the first time in over forty years that a federal judge questioned the reigning standards: “Should not the word ‘obscene’ be allowed to indicate the present critical point in the compromise between candor and shame at which the community may have arrived here and now?” The meanings of
obscene
and
lewd
and
lascivious
weren’t set in stone. They were fluid and local, hashed out by communities from year to year.

Though this seems like a small point to make, it was radical. To suggest that what corrupts a reader’s mind changes over time is to imply that what is natural about a mind—its uncorrupted state—also changes. If you read it carefully, Learned Hand’s ruling didn’t just make obscenity malleable. It made human nature malleable. But no one read it carefully, and Hand’s decision fell into obscurity. It was, after all, only a preliminary ruling on a savvy defense attorney’s motion to bypass a jury trial. John Quinn was the only person who paid attention to Hand’s argument—he quoted it at length in his memorandum—because Quinn himself was the savvy defense attorney.

—

THE COURT ADJOURNED for a week so that the judges could read
The Little Review
themselves. When the proceedings resumed, the Assistant DA Forrester prepared to read some of the offensive passages out loud, but one of the white-haired judges stopped him. There were ladies in the courtroom. Everyone turned to the statuesque woman in the high-collared coat, her clear eyes gazing steadily from behind heavy lids. Margaret Anderson’s virtuously dressed supporters were clustered behind her. Quinn turned back to the judge and smiled. The attentive women in the front rows didn’t need to be protected from the filth of
The Little Review
, he explained, and the woman who had caught his eye was the magazine’s
editor
.

The judge couldn’t believe it. “I am sure she didn’t know the significance of what she was publishing,” he said. “I myself do not understand
Ulysses
—I think Joyce has carried his method too far in this experiment.”

“Yes,” Judge McInerney said, “it sounds to me like the ravings of a disordered mind—I can’t see why anyone would want to publish it.”

The courtroom exercise infuriated Anderson. Even if the judges
could
understand Joyce, they would insist on applying incommensurable standards. It was like having your outfit for the day judged by a trio of weathermen. Anderson was on the verge of shouting out to the judges. “Let me tell you
why
I regard it as the prose masterpiece of my generation,” she wanted to say, “and why you have no right to pit the dullness of your brains against the fineness of mine.” Jane, eager to avoid prison, was poking Anderson in the ribs, whispering, “Don’t try to talk. Don’t put yourself into their hands.”

Quinn was pleased with the judges’ bewilderment—it was the cornerstone of his argument. So long as Joyce’s writing was unintelligible it couldn’t be obscene.
Ulysses
was “cubism in literature,” he said, trying to balance its seriousness with its obscurity, and he read a passage of Bloom’s thoughts to illustrate his point: