The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (33 page)

—

NEARLY A CENTURY LATER, the reactions to
Ulysses
can feel overblown—like hype from like-minded friends and bombast from journalists trying to sell papers. These days,
Ulysses
may seem more eccentric than epoch changing, and it can be difficult to see how Joyce’s novel (how any novel, perhaps) could have been revolutionary. This is because all revolutions look tame from the other side. They change our perspectives so thoroughly that their innovations become platitudes. We forget what the old world was like, forget even that things could have been another way. And yet they were. To understand how thoroughly Joyce broke conventions, it helps to remember how stringent they were. Molly Bloom lies awake at night and thinks about getting “fucked yes and well fucked too up to my neck nearly” by Blazes Boylan. Ten years earlier, Joyce couldn’t publish
Dubliners
in part because he used the word
bloody
.

The world
Pre Scriptum Ulysses
was beset by restrictions on the printed word that seem quaint only because we no longer live with them. Print was the way an idea entered the culture’s bloodstream, and literary bans ensured that the culture would never absorb dangerous subjects and concepts. Because bans were nebulous (censorship was never as simple as a list of unmentionable words), the influence they had over the culture became chillingly wide. The memory of publishers like Henry Vizetelly sitting in prison for publishing Émile Zola and the prospect of the censor bearing down on authors as they write can stifle books before they become books.

What made
Ulysses
revolutionary was that it was more than a bid for marginally wider freedom. It demanded complete freedom. It swept away all silences. An angry soldier’s threats in Nighttown (“I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe”), Molly’s imaginary demands (“lick my shit”) and Bloom’s appalling image of the Dead Sea (“the grey sunken cunt of the world”) are declarations that henceforth there would be no more unspeakable thoughts, no restrictions on the expression of ideas. This is why printing the word
fuck
was more than schoolboy mischief. “He says everything—everything,” Arnold Bennett marveled. “The code is smashed to bits.”
Ulysses
made everything possible.

Dirty words were only part of the code-smashing liberation (
Mrs. Dalloway
, after all, didn’t need to be dirty to need
Ulysses
). The code that
Ulysses
smashed was conceptual. For beyond liberation from silence,
Ulysses
offered liberation from what we might call the tyranny of style: from the manners, conventions and forms that govern texts almost without our realizing it. The novel as an art form had long been about breaking the tyranny of style, but
Ulysses
removed narrative elements no one had considered removable. A single narrator guiding the reader through the story was gone. The contextual armature that helps a reader make sense of events was gone. Clear distinctions between thoughts and the exterior world were gone. Quotation marks were gone. Sentences were gone. In the place of style we are left with borrowed voices and provisional modes, all of which are fleeting, all of which, as Eliot told Woolf, reduce style to “futility.”

But why should it matter? The end of style seems a long way from Fenian bombs and the collapse of civilization, yet the critics’ comparisons were trying to capture the novel’s apparent recklessness. To turn style into futility, it seemed, was to lay waste to all foundations. When a well-known poet named Alfred Noyes delivered a lecture in front of the Royal Society of Literature in October 1922, he launched into a familiar diatribe about the unprecedented obscenity of
Ulysses
. But what infuriated Noyes most was that Joyce’s emergence signaled the degradation of the United Kingdom’s foundational values. Literary critics were casting aside the best of English literary tradition for madmen calling themselves modernists. It was as if an entire civilization were in the process of forgetting itself.

To be oblivious of English values did not strike Noyes as a matter of losing the past. It struck him as a matter of losing grasp of reality. “The lack of any conviction that there are realities, standards, and enduring foundations in literature has had a deadly effect,” he told the Royal Society. Groundless literary criticism was introducing “elements of chaos” into the minds of the younger generation.

He had a point. Narratives are the way we make sense of the world. We parcel existence into events and string them into cause-and-effect sequences. The chemist comparing controls and variables and the child scalded by a hot stove are both understanding the world through narrative. Novels are important because they turn that basic conceptual framework into an art form. A beautiful narrative arc reassures us that the baffling events around us are meaningful—and this is why
Ulysses
appeared to be an instrument of chaos, an anarchist bomb. To disrupt the narrative method was to disrupt the order of things. Joyce, it seemed, wasn’t devoted to reality. He appeared to be sweeping it away.

If you were a modernist—if you believed the order of things was already gone—you thought differently. T. S. Eliot defended
Ulysses
by objecting to its critics’ premise. Life in the age of world war was no longer amenable to the narrative method, and yet
Ulysses
showed us that narratives weren’t the only way to create order. Existence could be layered. Instead of a sequence, the world was an epiphany. Instead of a tradition, civilization was a day. The chaos of modernity demanded a new conceptual method to make sense of the contemporary world, to make life possible for art. And that is what
Ulysses
gave us.

19.

After nearly eight years of writing,
Ulysses
was finally navigating the world, and no one knew what would happen next. It had been convicted of obscenity in New York the previous year, and its publication in Paris led to cries of scandal on the front pages of British newspapers. While it was possible that U.S. authorities would turn a blind eye to Gerty MacDowell once she was bound in an expensive book rather than a cheap magazine, Molly Bloom and the outrageous spectacles of the “Circe” episode pushed Joyce’s novel beyond the pale. Obscenity laws were enforced so inconsistently that it was impossible to tell if the safe delivery of the first copies meant that
Ulysses
was tacitly sanctioned or if authorities simply didn’t notice it. And if authorities
were
inclined to sanction Joyce’s book, it was anyone’s guess when, where or how they would respond. Officials could notify readers of a book’s seizure and, in the absence of a legal challenge, its destruction, or they could press criminal charges against an unlucky bookseller. Copies could sell freely in the spring only to be seized in the fall. British authorities could object even if U.S. authorities did not, and an enforcement action anywhere—by a customs agent in Ireland, a police officer in Ohio or a postal inspector in London—could trigger bans in countries around the globe. Neither Sylvia Beach nor Joyce had the resources to fight for
Ulysses
in court, and Miss Weaver did not have the will.

Nevertheless, in the spring of 1922 copies of James Joyce’s big blue book made their way into the United States as parcels from Paris marked
UN LIVRE
. John Quinn saw his first copy of
Ulysses
in March at Drake’s Book Shop on Fortieth Street. Quinn, who had been receiving the manuscript in batches for months, felt the gentle striations of the handmade pages and admitted, begrudgingly, that Sylvia Beach had managed to publish a beautiful book. The demand for
Ulysses
was unprecedented. Drake sold Shakespeare and Company’s twelve-dollar copies for twenty dollars, and that was nothing. Brentano’s, one of New York’s major bookstores, was selling them for thirty-five dollars. Near the end of March, Quinn heard that a copy sold for fifty, and by October the rumored prices for the more expensive versions were as high as one hundred dollars in New York and an astonishing forty pounds in London. Everyone was talking about
Ulysses
.

And that was the problem. John Sumner and the NYSSV would soon discover that copies of
Ulysses
were landing on American shores. Anderson and Heap printed a full-page advertisement for
Ulysses
in
The
Little Review
, and since Sumner and the Post Office Department were almost certainly keeping their eye on the magazine, the announcement must have sounded like a taunt. The NYSSV was extending its aggressive campaign against the wave of obscenity sweeping the nation—especially the “high filth” imported from overseas—and Sumner would be on the phone with postal inspectors and customs officials in every major port in the United States, urging them to seize any copies they could find. Quinn admired the fact that someone like Sylvia Beach could publish
Ulysses
. “She has tackled, with the audacity, if not the ignorance of amateurs, a really tough job,” he wrote to Joyce. “That is the job of beating the United States Federal and State laws.” But publishing Joyce’s novel was only the first obstacle. The fight to get
Ulysses
into the hands of readers had just begun.

John Quinn contacted Mitchell Kennerley, the publisher he had defended against obscenity charges in 1913, because Kennerley knew the captain of an Atlantic transport liner who would smuggle books into the country. But if his smuggler were going to take on a job like
Ulysses
, they would have to send the books slowly—twenty or thirty a month—to avoid detection. The idea was that Shakespeare and Company would ship the books in bulk from Paris to London while Kennerley would collect money from buyers, ship the copies to readers by private carrier (never touching a postman’s hands) and send the proceeds to Beach. Remaining inconspicuous was challenging, considering the book’s size. The key to the plan was importing the books by freight, where it was easier for customs agents to overlook them. If they were found, Kennerley said, they would probably be returned to London instead of being burned. He would do the job for only 10 percent of the retail value—as a favor to Quinn.

Under normal circumstances, Quinn wouldn’t consider such a scheme, but the
Little Review
trial and the book’s publication had received so much press that there was little choice. Quinn wrote to persuade Sylvia Beach by emphasizing the plan’s irresistible benefit: Kennerley was willing to break federal and state laws and risk arrest so that she wouldn’t have to, and if he were arrested, “there wouldn’t be a ghost of a shade of a shadow of a chance of acquitting Kennerley.” In fact, Quinn told her not to send his fourteen copies of
Ulysses
until he could devise his own smuggling plan.

Quinn tried to explain the complexities of distributing an illegal book in terms he thought Miss Beach would understand. Smuggling, he wrote, requires “about the same amount of attention that would be involved, I should say, in having a dress fitted and made.” As illuminating as Quinn’s tailoring analogy might have been, Beach was already aware of the challenges. By August 1922 she had safely shipped copies of
Ulysses
to all destinations except New York, where, as she put it, “the jaws of the Sumner S.P.V. monster” were waiting (she mistook “Suppression” as “Prevention”). But she hadn’t figured out how to ship the remaining copies, and she had been getting angry letters from New Yorkers since April.

One midtown bookshop was waiting for seventeen copies. The Sunwise Turn was a high-end shop below the Yale Club with an elaborate woodwork interior designed by Armory Show artists. It specialized in collector’s items—old and rare books presented to customers in wrappings also designed by artists—and its business model depended upon fifty reliable patrons spending five hundred dollars on books every year. Supplying a marquee title like
Ulysses
was crucial both to the bookstore’s survival and to its reputation. By May, the Sunwise Turn sent a letter reminding Shakespeare and Company that it had paid over three thousand francs in February and received neither a receipt nor the books. “We are rather disturbed.” In case it helped, they included the names of individuals willing to act as middlemen to receive the merchandise. They were all women.

By the end of July, the Sunwise Turn sent two more letters and a telegram to Shakespeare and Company. They received no response. Mary Mowbray-Clarke, one of the shop’s co-owners, was exasperated. “We cannot in any way of looking at it understand your treatment of us in regard to
Ulysses
.” Dozens of copies had been in New York for months, but her bookshop was empty-handed. There were rumors that Sylvia Beach had pocketed the money from subscribers and sold the entire first edition to a middleman in London. The Sunwise Turn hoped the wild stories weren’t true.

Sylvia Beach had known that publishing Joyce’s book might involve illicit activity sooner or later, and she went so far as to contact Mitchell Kennerley, but for some reason (possibly his fee), she searched for other options. In August, she entrusted ten of the most expensive copies to a longtime friend in Illinois, where customs authorities were presumably less vigilant, and at the end of the month six copies for the Sunwise Turn bookshop arrived from Illinois. Mowbray-Clark said the twice-mailed packages arrived “like telephone books with papers falling off them and quite exposed to the eyes of the postman.”

But the eyes of the postmen were no longer the primary problem: customs agents seized two of the ten copies. By the end of the summer, officials around the United States were looking for
Ulysses
, and there were still forty copies destined for New York. That’s when Sylvia Beach decided to contact Hemingway’s shadowy associate.

—

ERNEST HEMINGWAY WAS twenty-two years old when he arrived in Paris at the end of 1921. He didn’t speak French, though his new wife, Hadley, gave him lessons on the steamship across the Atlantic, and he kept a rabbit’s foot in his right pocket. He told everyone in Chicago that he was going to be a writer, and Paris was the best place to do it. Hemingway churned out articles for the
Toronto Star
and saved his best material for his fiction. He added up the prices in Paris. Their hotel room cost about a dollar a day (their rent would cost half that much). He knew a restaurant that served a steak and potatoes meal for 2.40 francs (about 20 cents), and he could find a bottle of wine for 60
centimes
—a nickel. He calculated that one thousand dollars could sustain a person in Paris for a full year. For Hemingway, though, the bargain hunts were more of a sport than a necessity. The newspaper paid him decently, and Hadley had a trust fund of about three thousand dollars a year. The maid who cooked them dinner and their ski vacations in the Swiss Alps were not exactly bohemian, but Hemingway believed that hardship made him a better artist. He thought he understood Cézanne on an empty stomach and that abstaining from sex improved his writing.