The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (36 page)

Rodker discovered his first problem immediately: the high prices of
Ulysses
attracted literary pirates. He heard rumors that someone was planning a counterfeit version of the original Shakespeare and Company edition. It would be printed on cheap paper, circulated to booksellers eager to peddle a rare commodity like
Ulysses
, legitimate or not, and the criminals would pocket the profits. John Quinn heard the same rumors in New York. He wrote to Miss Weaver to warn her that “a gang” was about to print a thousand copies in a press somewhere near the city and sell the pirated version for thirty dollars. Getting an injunction against the pirates would be expensive, he told Weaver, and ultimately futile. If an injunction were issued against one gang, they’d simply pass the printing plates and remaining copies to someone else in another state. They’d have to track down literary pirates all over the country, issuing injunction after injunction. It wouldn’t end.

There was a more effective option, Quinn explained, but it made him cringe: he could ask John Sumner for help. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice would happily track down and arrest anyone mailing advertisements for
Ulysses
. It was, of course, a violation of the Comstock Act, and Sumner might be able to stop the pirates before their copies hit the streets. He wrote to Miss Weaver, “It would be somewhat ironical, wouldn’t it?—if I, who defended
Ulysses
in court against the charge brought by Sumner that it was obscene, should induce Sumner to suppress this new pirated edition because it was obscene.” Ironic or not, Quinn wouldn’t hesitate to use criminal law to stop pirates.

The worst part of the piracy was its timing. If it came out before the Egoist Press edition went on sale, buyers would evaporate. Rodker would have to sell the edition as quickly as possible, which meant that they no longer had time to correct the text’s misprints. So the Egoist Press edition was really a second printing of the Shakespeare and Company edition with a list of errata appended. The rush also meant that Rodker needed someone to ship the copies while he received payments. As luck would have it, Miss Weaver found help from another erstwhile attendee of Ezra Pound’s dinners. Iris Barry was twenty-two and already a former suffragette when she endured air raids to join the conversations. She was an avid
Egoist
reader growing up on a farm near Birmingham, and she moved to London in 1915, partly at Ezra Pound’s urging. In 1922, Barry lost her job as a secretary on Bond Street, and Miss Weaver was giving her weekly baths and wholesome meals. When Miss Weaver and Rodker asked her to help with the first U.K. publication of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, she happily agreed.

Rodker arranged everything in less than a month. He borrowed the back room of a friend’s bookshop to send out circulars and receive orders, and he rented a basement room in a shabby Left Bank hotel where Iris Barry could receive, store and ship copies of
Ulysses
. Rodker and Barry sailed for Paris, and on October 12, 1922, Darantière’s shipment arrived. Rodker sent out word that
Ulysses
was available for two guineas each, about the same price as the cheapest Shakespeare and Company edition. The copies were sold out in four days. While Rodker handled the orders, Iris Barry sat in a small room with vaulted ceilings in the basement of the Hotel Verneuil. The table was covered with sheets of brown parcel paper and hundreds of mailing labels. All around her were piles of the blue inventory to be wrapped, tied and addressed, one book at a time. She carried them in fours or fives to the nearest post office.

With rumors of pirated editions and the jaws of Sumner’s monster waiting for
Ulysses
in New York, the copies bound for the United States had to be shipped before officials realized another printing was circulating. Barry rushed the first lot of one hundred American orders into the mail, but the risk of detection by customs agents on the lookout for books with Paris postmarks increased with each book’s passage. There were so many American orders that Miss Weaver refused some of them lest they be seized. She kept dozens with her in London.

The largest orders came from American middlemen planning to resell copies to bookstores clamoring for
Ulysses
. Those orders couldn’t be refused, nor could they be shipped individually. Hundreds of copies certainly couldn’t be shipped in bulk, where they would catch the eye of any customs officials who weren’t bribed or incompetent. They would have to be smuggled—but the job was far too big for someone like Braverman. Rodker had a more ambitious plan. He shipped the books from Paris to London, where a wholesaler unstitched the bindings of each copy of
Ulysses
and pulled them apart. They tucked the dismembered sections of the books inside newspapers and stacked them for shipment. The first mate of an American merchant ship agreed to smuggle hundreds of copies disguised as a large consignment of British newspapers, filling, ostensibly, the New York area’s sudden demand for rugby scores and parliamentary political cartoons. It worked, and by hiding them in newspapers, the U.K.
Ulysses
arrived on American shores duty-free.

While Rodker’s first mate navigated copies through the North Atlantic and Iris Barry sent copies to individuals in the United States, France and beyond, Miss Weaver handled the London orders herself. Rodker sent copies to a private mailing agency, and when bookshops discreetly requested
Ulysses
from the Egoist Press, she withdrew them from the agency and delivered them herself. Miss Weaver would appear like any other reader in bookshops across London until she asked to see the shop’s proprietor by name and it dawned upon the clerk that the nervous woman with the bow on her hat was the Egoist Press representative they had been expecting, and the package she clutched under her arm contained
that
book, the book they quickly hid behind the counter.

Miss Weaver kept some copies at her office despite her solicitor’s advice. And while it meant putting herself in even more legal danger, she brought several copies to her apartment and hid them at the back of her large Victorian wardrobe—she wanted to protect as many books as possible from a potential police raid. They stayed there for months, and for months she waited for the constables to present themselves at her door and ransack her apartment while she would sit patiently and see if they would be brazen enough to rifle through a lady’s belongings to confiscate a work of art.

Her family noticed her anxiety, though they said nothing. They had grown accustomed to her silence regarding her literary endeavors, especially with Joyce, and so much the better. The suffragist screeds and the birth control advocacy of
The Egoist
were tolerable to her siblings for their principled courage, yet her involvement with Joyce was another matter. Some family members had gone so far as to read parts of
Ulysses
only to be baffled that Harriet not only subsidized such filth but that she actually published it. Her brother-in-law reacted with a mixture of outrage and dismay. “How could she? How could she? An enigma! An enigma!”

—

THE SECOND EDITION seemed to be going well. Hundreds of disassembled copies hidden in newspapers slipped by New York customs agents, and wholesalers rebound them to be sold. But near the end of 1922, reports of missing copies began to accumulate, both from the Egoist Press edition and from the Shakespeare and Company edition still being smuggled through Canada. There was no official word from any government department on either side of the Atlantic. There were no notices of confiscations. No news of burnings. No packages sent back to Paris or London. No smugglers or first mates arrested. Not even a warning from the U.S. Post Office or customs. Every now and then, copies of
Ulysses
simply disappeared. There was only one unmistakable sign of trouble. In early November, after Miss Weaver began distributing
Ulysses
in twos and threes across London, she noticed a detective, alone, watching her outside her window. Miss Harriet Weaver was under police surveillance.

By December 1922, it was clear that U.S. authorities were seizing every copy of
Ulysses
they could find, though the details are hazy. Either the U.S. government never kept the records, or they disappeared. In any case, copies of
Ulysses
that had apparently vanished were in fact falling into the hands of law enforcement officials. A raid in Boston in November turned up some of the imported copies. Others were accumulating in New York’s General Post Office Building on Thirty-fourth Street, where they awaited a decision from Washington. No one knew if it was John Sumner and the scathing press reviews that prodded officials to act or if they didn’t need to be prodded at all. Either way, New York customs officials forwarded the matter to the solicitor of the Post Office Department for a ruling. When the solicitor leafed through the heavy book, pausing over the passages marked by the customs officials, he discovered that
Ulysses
didn’t have to do with Greek mythology
at all
. It was about the Irish. The solicitor declared
Ulysses
“plainly obscene” and kept a copy in his office for his records.

When the solicitor’s judgment was handed down, officials in Boston and at the General Post Office Building gathered up nearly five hundred copies of
Ulysses
they had been collecting through the fall, wheeled them down the basement’s dim corridors and unloaded them in the furnace room. The piles of books sat before the furnace’s black doors and a row of lower chambers, narrow like catacombs. The men opened the round cast-iron hatches and began tossing James Joyce’s
Ulysses
into the chambers. Paper burns brighter than coal. Seven years of writing, months of revisions and typesetting, weeks of printing and hours of packaging and shipping were incinerated in seconds.

—

BURNING
U
LYSSES
could not have been a difficult decision. A conviction against a portion of the book in New York would be enough to persuade even a lenient official that
Ulysses
was illegal throughout the country. It’s unclear how Miss Weaver heard news of the seizure and destruction. Federal law required notification of a government seizure and an opportunity to challenge the decision in court, but if such notices were sent to any of the individuals or wholesalers waiting for
Ulysses
, none have ever been found. What we do know is that when the books were burned, Miss Weaver did not contact John Quinn or ask her own solicitor to intervene. She didn’t remove the copies hidden in her apartment. She didn’t lament or inquire after the burned books. Instead, she printed more. Within days, Miss Weaver ordered five hundred more copies from Darantière in Dijon—a third edition to replace the copies destroyed. Rodker would ship them to England, where they would smuggle the copies the same way they had before, by pulling them apart and shipping them to hostile American shores disguised as newspapers. Yet
Ulysses,
as everyone would soon discover, was no longer permissible on British shores, either.

The decision to ban
Ulysses
in the United Kingdom began in March 1922, when a concerned citizen sent the first book review to the Home Office. “Obscenity?” the London
Observer
asked. “Yes. This is undoubtedly an obscene book.” The Home Office was the principal branch of His Majesty’s government, and it was responsible for all law enforcement matters. Following the complaint, a Home Office official contacted the undersecretary of state and requested the name and address of any bookseller selling
Ulysses
—the detective observing Miss Weaver may have been carrying out the undersecretary’s orders and following her as she delivered copies to London bookshops.

There was official silence regarding
Ulysses
until the end of November 1922, when the undersecretary obtained the sixteen-page
Quarterly Review
screed that compared
Ulysses
to a Fenian bomb blowing up the castle of English literature. Paraphrasing the review, the undersecretary called the book “unreadable, unquotable, and unreviewable.” Two days later, he issued instructions: any copy of
Ulysses
found in the post should be detained. The decision was provisional—it was, after all, based on nothing more than a citizen’s complaint and a couple of reviews (one of them favorable). The undersecretary did not so much as glance at the text itself. And how could he?
Ulysses
wasn’t easy to obtain, and the price was prohibitively high. Given the nature of the case, the undersecretary requested the official opinion of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin.

As the director of public prosecutions, Sir Archibald was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service. The office had been malleable when Sir Archibald first took the position in 1920, but by the time he left in 1930 he had established precedent for future practices. He prosecuted all capital crimes and advised central government departments, the police and all Crown prosecutors. He initiated and oversaw proceedings against an array of high crimes, including sedition, counterfeit, obstruction of justice, public corruption and obscenity. He gave instructions on twenty-three hundred cases every year.

The undersecretary’s report on
Ulysses
may not have captured such a busy man’s attention, but as it was making its way up the chain of command, officials seized a single copy of
Ulysses
at Croydon Airport in London. In December, a customs officer noticed an oversized book that a passenger was bringing back from Paris. He flipped through the final pages teeming with unpunctuated text, and his eyes fixated on page 704.

yes I think he made them

a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf