The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (37 page)

The officer told the passenger that H.M. Customs and Excise was confiscating
Ulysses
as obscene under Section 42 of the Customs Consolidations Act of 1876. The owner objected to the confiscation and insisted that
Ulysses
was an important work of art by a reputable author. It was on sale in bookshops around London and reviewed by several esteemed periodicals, including
The
Nation
,
The English Review
and the October issue of
The Quarterly Review
.

Given the citizen’s protest, customs forwarded the book to the Home Office and requested a quick decision about its legality. The matter came before Assistant Undersecretary of State Sydney Harris, who was thorough enough to read page 705: “he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all[.]” Harris retrieved the growing Home Office file on
Ulysses
. Even if there were some doubt that such passages were obscene, they could be swept away by the fact that the citizen defended
Ulysses
by citing the very same
Quarterly Review
article that the Home Office was keeping as evidence that the book
was
obscene. Harris discussed the matter with the director of public prosecutions himself.

Sir Archibald was a ruthless barrister who came to prominence by prosecuting suffragettes before the war. “He’s a beast,” one of them said after a high-profile conviction. Suffragettes pelted him with rotten fruit in the courtroom, and when he received kidnapping and arson threats, Scotland Yard assigned officers to guard him and his chambers. But Sir Archibald was unfazed. He was a man of unwavering Victorian sensibilities (cars were anathema to him even in the 1950s), and he worked so tirelessly that his complexion became sallow and bags developed under his eyes. On the rare occasions when he told a bawdy joke, he drained away the humor by delivering the punch line with a disapproving glare.

Sir Archibald read the final chapter of
Ulysses
, and on December 29, 1922, he submitted his opinion about its legality under British law:

As might be supposed

, I have not had the time nor, I may add, the inclination to read through this book. I have, however, read pages 690 to 732. I am entirely unable to appreciate how those pages are relevant to the rest of the book, or, indeed, what the book itself is about. I can discover no story, there is no introduction which might give a key to its purpose, and the pages above mentioned, written as they are as if composed by a more or less illiterate vulgar woman, form an entirely detached part of this production. In my opinion, there is more, and a

great deal more than mere vulgarity or coarseness, there is a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity.

He declared that customs authorities had every right to confiscate and burn
Ulysses.
And in the event that there was a public protest against such burnings, he advised, “the answer will be that it is filthy and filthy books are not allowed to be imported into this country.”

On January 1, 1923, Sir Archibald Bodkin’s opinion became the official position of the United Kingdom, and Harris forwarded Bodkin’s recommendation to the Home Secretary to make sure the decision was enforced. What if
Ulysses
started a trend? The Home Office was afraid that, in Harris’s words, “other morbid writers with a love of notoriety will attempt to write in the same vein.” They could not have books like this flooding British ports. They had to end it before it began.

In January, only days after Sir Archibald’s decision, five hundred copies of
Ulysses
were on their way to London to be disassembled and smuggled to replace the books burned in New York. By the time the cargo ship carrying the books crossed the English Channel, customs officers at the port of Folkestone were waiting for it. H.M. Customs and Excise officers duly informed the Egoist Press that its property had been seized pursuant to Section 42 of the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876 because the Home Office deemed the material prima facie obscene. The Egoist Press had the opportunity to appeal the government’s decision, but Miss Weaver couldn’t bear the public scrutiny—and her solicitor almost certainly advised against it. Winning an appeal in court was doubtful, and even if the Egoist Press could recover its books, the chances that they could be successfully smuggled into the Port of New York were thinner than ever. When the window for the appeal passed, customs officials burned them in “the King’s Chimney.” Then they burned the records of the burning.

21.

The 1920s were brutal to Joyce. For those who admired his work, the burnings in England and the United States solidified his status as the twentieth century’s heretical victim, someone persecuted by righteous authorities for speaking the unvarnished truth. Other modernists suffered the fate of censored or bowdlerized books, but none had devoted themselves so singularly to such a doomed work of art. The burnings eliminated even the slight possibility of an American edition and assured that no other U.K. publisher would follow Harriet Weaver’s lead. The stunning act of destroying an entire edition of a book, rather than merely halting its distribution or fining its publisher, sent a clear message to publishers, authors and booksellers. A book burning—even as an order executed in secrecy—was enough to throttle the book’s circulation. A motivated reader could still find
Ulysses
, but the high prices and the relative scarcity meant that it would reach only a fraction of its potential audience.

The most brutal aspect of the burnings was that they deepened Joyce’s isolation. Censorship may have enhanced his aura among his devotees, but the added fame made him reticent and cagey. He posed for photographs but never granted interviews and warily eased himself into conversations with a progressively tighter circle of friends—the days of boisterous dancing were ending. Joyce’s social and literary isolation buttressed the more fundamental isolation he endured through the twenties: his rapidly deteriorating eyesight.

A painful procession of glaucoma, cataracts, nebulae and eye surgeries, which might have drawn people empathetically closer to him, became an ineffable ordeal that opened up a chasm between himself and everyone else. Encroaching blindness augmented the celebrity status that he dealt with so poorly. Reporters called regularly for updates on the status of Mr. Joyce’s eyes, and he became famous for the postoperative black eye patches he wore like a broken-down pirate marooned in Paris. The spectacle of his own blindness became another way for him to conceal himself. Joyce donned his first eye patch in November 1922 not because of surgery but to hide the offensive nebula in his pupil. He was censored in more ways than one.

In April 1923, after months of sudden improvements and relapses, Joyce submitted himself to a long-overdue surgery. Over the next few years, he would become familiar with the surgical routine. Nurse Puard, Dr. Borsch’s assistant, would pull his lower eyelid away from his eye, exposing the network of turgid blood vessels. She would douse it with cocaine, wait until the eye was numb and instill a couple of drops of scopolamine, a more potent relative of atropine. She would close his eye and wipe the eyelash dry with a cotton swab. In fifteen minutes, the muscle that contracts the pupil would dilate. In a couple of hours, his eyes would lose focus. When the patient was ready, Dr. Borsch’s bulky fingers would grasp the shank of the lance knife and press the blade through Joyce’s cornea. He would withdraw it quickly to prevent the iris from sticking to the metal and following the blade out through the wound. The incision would be about three to four millimeters.

Dr. Borsch asked for the back-toothed iris forceps and slid them into the incision. The tiny teeth bit into the iris near the edge of Joyce’s occluded pupil, and the doctor tugged the inner circular margin outward. Nurse Puard gave him the iris scissors. He sidled the closed blades alongside the forceps and inserted them into the incision, trying not to let the moving instruments open it wider. With two snips, he cut away a small piece of the iris’s inner edge and pulled it out. The space that remained was Joyce’s new pupil. Dr. Borsch then inserted a hooked instrument into the posterior chamber and slowly, painstakingly, separated the iris wherever it was sticking to the lens behind it. Sometimes the tissue reattached immediately.

Iridectomies were the most difficult procedures to perform in any surgical field, and Joyce’s case was more complicated than most. Dr. Borsch performed his first surgery on Joyce in April 1923, after he suffered his ninth attack of iritis in his left eye. In 1924, he performed two more surgeries: a complete iridectomy in June and a cataract extraction in November. In 1930, Joyce was scheduled for his twelfth surgery.

Decades of iritis triggered an array of secondary eye problems: glaucoma, synechiae, cataracts, conjunctivitis, episcleritis and blepharitis. His retina atrophied. His eyes hemorrhaged and lost vitreous fluid. In 1924, when Joyce told Sylvia Beach that he could feel his eyesight “slowly nearing extinction,” he was not being dramatic. Most people who wear corrective lenses are familiar with prescriptions for plus or minus two or three diopters. In 1917, Joyce’s prescription was +6.5. In 1932, it was +17. Joyce wasn’t nearsighted. He was farsighted—reading and writing strained his eyes the most.

As severe as his hyperopia was, it was only a component of his failing eyesight. His bigger problem was that the shape of his hyperopic eyes increased the chances of closed-angle glaucoma, and each attack reduced his vision to a narrower, darker tunnel, and the nebulae forming from the hardening exudate made the people and objects at the end of that tunnel look like they were passing through a milky haze. Surgeries to assuage nebulae, cataractal and glaucomatic blindness (cutting away pieces of iris, making an artificial pupil, removing lenses) reduced his vision in other ways. No matter what surgery he endured, no matter how powerful his corrective lenses were, his vision was becoming hazy, spotted and dim. In 1930, Joyce’s right eye had 1/30th its normal seeing power. His left eye was effectively blind: it was functioning between 1/800 to 1/1000 its capacity. Joyce reassured himself after surgery by trying to read the large print in children’s books. Under the circumstances, it’s remarkable he could see anything at all.

Joyce’s life was a rhythm of pain and palliation, and everyone had a theory about the cause of his recurrent iritis. Miss Weaver, following her doctor’s suggestion, blamed his “mode of life,” especially his drinking. Sylvia Beach thought he needed good food, outdoor exercise and time away from his family. The newspapers reported that Joyce was going blind because of the strain of writing
Ulysses
. Joyce himself said he was going blind because of the weather. He blamed the climate, the rain and winds of every season in Paris, Nice, Zurich, London and Trieste—the weather all over Europe was conspiratorially bad.

There were as many treatments as there were suspected causes. Joyce endured steam baths, mud baths, sweating powders, cold compresses and hot compresses. He received a month of iodine injections. He had his temples massaged with a French tonic called synthol. One of Ezra Pound’s friends gave him “endocrine treatment” by stimulating his thyroid. He received electrotherapy on multiple occasions—probably by having electrodes attached to his eyelids. They put multiple leeches around his eyes.

Joyce tried multiple medications—the variety of eyedrops alone was astounding. He took dionine to dissipate his nebulae as well as salicylic acid and boric acid to disinfect his eyes. He took cocaine to numb the pain from the disinfectants and the glaucoma. He took atropine and scopolamine to dilate his pupils and break up synechiae. He took pilocarpine to counteract the atropine and scopolamine, both of which induced delirium and hallucinations over the years. In 1924 he wrote to Miss Weaver that his room was haunted—objects around him kept slipping and tumbling about. He took scopolamine orally to calm his nerves, though excessive doses have the opposite effect, causing euphoria and anxiety. He reported at least one “attack of giddiness” in 1928, and one night, when Nora tried hailing a taxi home from a bistro, Joyce ran out into the empty street, threw up his arms and shouted, “No—I’m free, free!” before dancing down the shadowy road like a wildly handled puppet. In 1933, after a panic attack on a train and a night of hallucinations, he ran out into the snowy street early in the morning to inform neighboring friends that he was in danger. Joyce drank and took sleeping pills as a final refuge from the pharmacopeia.

In the early 1920s doctors agreed that the trouble with Joyce’s eyes had something to do with his teeth. A common theory of infection at the time asserted that microbes migrate from one infected body part to another. The oral cavity was thought to be a common source of infection, and Joyce’s mouth was indeed catastrophic. No amount of ophthalmic attention, presumably, would help his eyes unless a dentist stanched the flow of bacteria from his mouth. John Quinn was certain of it. As he explained to Miss Weaver, Joyce paid more attention to the weather than his teeth because “a great many Irish are wholly lacking in a scientific turn of mind.” Quinn’s opinion became the consensus (regarding the teeth, not the Irish), and in April 1923 a doctor extracted ten of Joyce’s teeth, seven abscesses and a cyst. A few days later, he removed seven more teeth.

It’s difficult to overestimate how a life of pain and weakening vision must have altered Joyce’s understanding of consciousness. Pain collapses the world. It concentrates one’s mind on one’s own suffering body. And instead of visual distractions to carry him away from his agony, Joyce opened his eyes to a constant reminder of it, an obscured field of vision. His thoughts were the only life raft in the rising tide of pain, and the pressure pushing out from the inside of Joyce’s eyes expanded the seconds. To read
Ulysses
is to feel time’s dilation. We go so slowly through the characters’ thoughts because even the most painstaking mental contours were something to hold on to. Joyce wrote an epic of the human body partly because it was so challenging for him to get beyond his own body. And yet he did.