The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (34 page)

In case the rabbit’s foot wasn’t enough, Hemingway had letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson to help him get established with the right people in Paris. One letter was addressed to Miss Sylvia Beach. Within a week of arriving, Hemingway walked from the Jardin Luxembourg up the narrow rue Férou. He circled around the stone church and passed the statue of John the Baptist pointing skyward beside the wooden doors. When he turned right on rue de l’Odéon, he could see the signboard with the bard’s picture halfway down the street. It was suspended above a newly painted storefront among shoemakers, a music shop and a nasal spray manufacturer. Shakespeare and Company had moved to 12 rue de l’Odéon the previous summer. The English bookstore and lending library was now across the street from its French counterpart, Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres. There was more foot traffic on rue de l’Odéon, and Sylvia Beach had more space for her growing library.

Walking into Shakespeare and Company felt like walking into someone’s living room. There were odd rugs, mismatched pieces of furniture and goldfish. A small cluster of Larbaud’s toy soldiers stood at arms in a cabinet by the front door, and the pictures of writers on the walls looked like snapshots lifted from the family album. It made Hemingway shy. So did Sylvia Beach’s attractiveness. Her hair ran in waves down to the collar of her velvet jacket, and she wore a rigidly tailored skirt that allowed Hemingway to admire her lower legs.

Conversations with Hemingway opened up naturally, and before long he started talking about the war (a favorite subject) and what it was like to recover in an Italian hospital (another favorite subject). A bomb had exploded next to Hemingway while he was handing out chocolate in the trenches. It spewed more than two hundred pieces of shrapnel into the lower half of his body and left him with scars all over his right leg and foot. “Would you like to see it?” Hemingway took off his right shoe and sock and rolled up his pants to the knee. Miss Beach saw the barely healed marbled skin. She was quite impressed.

People think of 1922 as the year modernism came of age because it was the year
Ulysses
and T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
appeared. It was also the year Ernest Hemingway came of age. Posterity focuses on his fraught tutelage under Gertrude Stein, whom he met in February, but Shakespeare and Company did more to usher him into the literary world than Stein did. Hemingway met Ezra Pound by chance, also in February, at Beach’s bookshop, and within a week Pound was reading his manuscripts and spreading the word about him around Paris and the States. Over the course of the year Pound sent six of Hemingway’s prose vignettes to
The
Little Review
, where they were published in the spring of 1923. Later that year, Beach encouraged Robert McAlmon to publish Hemingway’s first book.

Hemingway met Joyce within weeks of meeting Pound, and before long the admiring young American began drinking with the great Irish novelist. Hemingway probably told stories about driving an ambulance during the war, and he listened skeptically as Joyce complained about his financial troubles. One night, Joyce became outraged by someone’s egregious barroom offense, and when the scrawny novelist realized he was arguing with a man he could hardly
see
, he turned to his barrel-chested companion and shouted, “Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!” Hemingway decided to deal with Joyce by carrying him home to Nora. “Well, here comes James Joyce the writer,” she said in the doorway, “drunk again with Ernest Hemingway.”

He met the pantheon of modernists just as
Ulysses
was published. Hemingway likely witnessed the scramble to fill orders at Shakespeare and Company, and the enthusiasm radiating through the Left Bank fueled his own ambitions. He ordered several copies of
Ulysses
and wrote to Sherwood Anderson, “Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book.” He purchased
Dubliners
,
possibly during his first visit to Shakespeare and Company, and Joyce’s short stories influenced him deeply.
Dubliners
taught him economy and how to leave the most important things unspoken. When
A Farewell to Arms
was published in 1929, Hemingway gave Joyce a copy with the censored expletives lovingly handwritten in. “Jim Joyce was the only alive writer that I ever respected,” Hemingway said later. “He had his problems, but he could write better than anyone I knew.”

Hemingway had a genius for learning. He didn’t have a college degree, so he pursued his higher education through Shakespeare and Company, where he learned more about writing in a few months than most students learn in four years. His first selections from the library were D. H. Lawrence and Ivan Turgenev, and though borrowers had a two-book limit, Beach let him take more. He chose Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
and Dostoyevsky’s
The Gambler and Other Stories
. A few years earlier, Hemingway’s favorite authors had been Rudyard Kipling and O. Henry. As a Shakespeare and Company member, he discovered Flaubert and Stendhal. Hemingway probably hadn’t even heard of James Joyce and Ezra Pound before he left for Paris. Two months after he walked into Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach made them his mentors.

Kindness made Hemingway an even better student. While Gertrude Stein offered him gnomic advice (“Begin over again and concentrate”), Sylvia Beach offered him food. As with so many others, her bookshop became his post office and primary source for advice and gossip. She listened to his problems and lent him money. “No one that I ever knew was nicer to me,” he later claimed. Pound was similarly generous. Hemingway thought that he contained dangerous stores of energy (“He would live much longer if he did not eat so fast,” Hemingway wrote), but what struck him most was Pound’s kindness toward writers he believed in. “He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them.” The list went on. Pound was selfless and principled and angry like a saint. With his wild mane of hair and his staunch proclamations, he was a voice in the wilderness, a John the Baptist.

Pound taught Hemingway to distrust adjectives, and Joyce taught him how to be elliptical. He repaid Joyce by drinking with him and Pound by teaching him how to box. Wyndham Lewis recalled seeing Hemingway stripped down to the waist in Pound’s studio, his pale torso gleaming with sweat. Hemingway blocked Pound’s left jabs with a calm open glove, wasting as little energy as possible, moving instead of countering, nimbly avoiding the homemade furniture and Japanese paintings. The poet who taught W. B. Yeats how to fence in an English cottage was not afraid to learn how to box from a young Ernest Hemingway in a Left Bank studio. Pound needed to widen his stance and practice his left. He lunged, swung wildly and threw scattershot combinations—Hemingway had to shadowbox between rounds to keep up a sweat, which soon became a habit of his. He would bounce around on the sidewalks of Paris, jabbing and dodging, his lips moving as he goaded an invisible opponent.

Hemingway was younger and less educated than nearly everyone around him, and machismo was a way to compensate. Knowing he would never learn Latin or Greek (he would barely learn French), he cultivated streetside
afición
. Once, he took Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier to a boxing match in a rough neighborhood on the city’s outskirts. Hemingway led them through someone’s backyard to get to the ring where two fighters kept slugging each other as the blood dripped down their chests. It was his way of giving back. He went to Switzerland for the slopes and to Spain for the bullfights. He went fishing, lugeing and bobsledding. As a journalist, he covered nightlife, political conferences and the grim aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war. He interviewed Mussolini twice. When he wasn’t writing articles for the
Toronto Star
, he wrote short stories in cafés and talked about the war with disfigured men wearing Croix de Guerre ribbons. He drank. He changed his son’s diapers. He gambled on horses and bicycle races. He seemed to be involved in everything.

—

IT OCCURRED TO SYLVIA BEACH that Hemingway might know something about smuggling. John Quinn mentioned the possibility of smuggling
Ulysses
in bulk from Canada to Detroit or Buffalo, far from Sumner’s agents. Did Hemingway know anyone in Chicago who could smuggle contraband from Canada? He did.

“Give me twenty-four hours,” he told her. When he returned, he said he had a friend back in Chicago with Canadian connections, and he was exactly the type of person who could help. Hemingway gave her the man’s name and address so they could work out the details directly—he wanted his name kept out of the matter altogether. Beach wrote to the smuggler, Barnet Braverman, and said they had a mutual friend from Chicago. She had dozens of copies of a new novel by James Joyce that she wanted to move across the Canadian border. They were bound for important American readers like Alfred Knopf and Ben Huebsch, publishers who didn’t have the nerve to publish and distribute the book themselves. Braverman would also be responsible for fulfilling the largest single order: twenty-five copies destined for the Washington Square Book Shop, where the book’s criminal history began.

Braverman wasn’t as easy to contact as Hemingway thought. Beach waited nearly two months before receiving a curt telegram (“Shoot books prepaid your responsibility”) and a Canadian address. She did not respond. Braverman wrote a few weeks later to clarify his plans. He was now living in Detroit, where he regularly crossed the border into Windsor, Ontario, on business. She should ship the books in bulk to the Canadian address. Since storing them where he worked was out of the question, he would rent a small room in Windsor for a month and take the books across the river to Detroit one by one so that way the border agents on either side would be less likely to notice. The method was laborious, but Braverman knew people who could “expedite” the process. Once the books were in the United States, Braverman would bundle them in packages and send them by a private express company to avoid the Post Office. She would pay for the shipping, the customs duty and the rent on the room. He would offer his services for free.

Sylvia Beach waited over four months to respond, but after the first customs seizures in Chicago she decided that trusting a stranger to sneak
Ulysses
across the border was her best option. So she agreed. But if he got caught, she wrote back, he was on his own—she couldn’t pay to defend him against state or federal charges. And his chances of being arrested was substantial, for while Braverman’s plan minimized the risk of burned books (a border agent could only confiscate the copy he carried on any given day), it required him to break the law every time he crossed the border with a copy of
Ulysses
, possessed a copy for distribution in Michigan and shipped the book across state lines. He risked a five-thousand-dollar fine and five years in prison, but he would do it anyway. He found a room in Windsor for thirty-five dollars and told the landlord something vague about being involved in the publishing business.

Canadian customs agents were Braverman’s first challenge. He wasn’t worried about a seizure (it would take a couple of years before Canada banned the book, though it would maintain that ban until 1949), but he was worried about the steep import duty. The tariff on imported books was 25 percent of their retail price, which Sylvia Beach couldn’t afford. The duty he owed for the shipment was three hundred dollars, but whatever retail price the inspecting officials estimated for the books, Braverman began talking his way out of it—never mind the size or the handmade paper, the books were more or less worthless.

Bargaining meant risking added scrutiny of the book itself, and though there wasn’t a Canadian ban on
Ulysses
, censorship often began with routine inspections like this. But Braverman’s gamble worked. Canadian customs agreed that the mighty tomes from Paris sold in the United States for sixty-five cents. Rather than hundreds of dollars, Braverman paid an import duty of $6.50. With the shipment from Shakespeare and Company in hand, he hauled the books away by truck and stacked them in the otherwise empty room, where the contraband would be stored before crossing the border.

A few days later, Braverman opened the door to the room in Windsor and saw the stacks of books he had agreed to smuggle. The sheer bulk of the contraband began to sink in when he was faced with the prospect of carrying just one of them. Why was
Ulysses
, which he had never read, worth the risk of being arrested day after day for over a month?

The century’s changing tides drew people like Braverman to books like
Ulysses
. As the political protests of the nineteen-teens subsided into the cultural protests of the 1920s, prewar rebels found inspiration in Joyce’s iconoclasm, blasphemy and sexual transgressions.
Ulysses
tapped into a feeling of ebbing revolt. Smuggling a work of art into a supposedly free country that refused to tolerate its sale or distribution was a cultural jab when a political coup no longer seemed possible, and the opportunity would have been irresistible to someone like Braverman. He wasn’t a smuggler or a bootlegger or a criminal. He was a copywriter and salesman for an advertising agency. He was an artist in his spare time, and he was a radical.

—

BACK IN CHICAGO, where he had known Hemingway, Braverman was an editor of a magazine called
The Progressive Woman
. He delivered Socialist recruiting lectures and issued urgent pamphlets (“Suffragists, Watch Out for the Wolf!”). He denounced poverty and the wage slavery of women toiling in factories for as little as six dollars a week—“Womanhood,” he wrote, “is the cheapest commodity in the industrial mart.” He railed against the imprisonment and force-feeding of suffragist hunger strikers in England and condemned the assaults upon suffrage marchers at President Wilson’s inauguration. The brutal attacks, he believed, were public manifestations of the abuse that wives and daughters faced in homes throughout the country. He denounced capitalism and the warped government it produced. “The United States Constitution,” he wrote, “was framed and adopted by a horde of merchants, bankers, lawyers, smugglers and other cultured crooks, who had no use for popular institutions.”