The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (43 page)

Joyce and Nora kept it a secret, but he wanted people to discover the truth, like guessing the title of
Finnegans Wake
. His complaints to Miss Weaver and Sylvia Beach—the array of symptoms he described in detail, the impending blindness, the boils, abscesses, nebulae, aches and pains, the eye attacks and the surgery he sketched the first day he visited Shakespeare and Company—seemed like appeals for sympathy, and to some degree they were. He needed their help, after all, and sympathy helped to ensure it. Joyce’s grievances were his way of scattering clues.

“I deserve all this on account of my many iniquities”—it was the truth masquerading as hyperbole. If you had run out of patience with Joyce, it sounded melodramatic, but he was prodding Miss Weaver to piece together the details from years of letters. He dropped another hint when he told her that he was getting three weeks of arsenic and phosphorus injections. Galyl, after all, is the
only
drug that fits that description, and syphilis is the only disease galyl treats.
Phosphorus
would have meant nothing to her, but
arsenic
would have been revealing to anyone who was reasonably knowledgeable about current treatments for venereal disease. Miss Weaver, alas, was too sheltered for that. While Joyce was divulging the intricacies of his case, she was looking up
glaucoma
in
Black’s Medical Dictionary
and reading pamphlets about the effects of drinking alcohol.

Joyce finally mentioned the word in 1930. “A young French ophthalmologist,” he wrote to Miss Weaver, “said the only possible solution of the case was that my eye trouble proceeded from congenital syphilis, which being curable, he said the proper thing for me was to undergo a cure of I have forgotten what”—a rare moment of forgetfulness for Joyce. He then wrote that Dr. Borsch’s assistant “dissuaded me strongly from undergoing it” and that the assistant and the doctor “had discussed the possibility and that Borsch had excluded it categorically on account of the nature of the attacks, the way in which they were cured and the general reaction of the eye[.]”

The crucial question for Miss Weaver, who could not have been reading casually at this point, was: what possibility did the doctors discuss and exclude? Or, to put a finer point on it—to make the letter a bit more of a grammatical puzzle—what is the antecedent of
it
in that sentence involving Dr. Borsch? Did the doctors categorically exclude the diagnosis or the treatment—“congenital syphilis” or “a cure”? Miss Weaver might have dismissed the graver option as an embarrassing misreading, for as soon as Joyce revealed the innocent version of his diagnosis (his syphilis was acquired, not congenital—the pathologies are entirely different), he buried it with a joke ridiculing the supposed French preoccupation with syphilis.

But it was not a joke. Lying on any number of sickbeds, sometimes with both eyes bandaged, Joyce had to contend with the memories of a lifetime of pain, surgery, medication, eyedrops, electrotherapy and leeches. The abscesses that ravaged his mouth and the large “boil” on his shoulder were probably syphilitic. Syphilis “disabled” his right arm in 1907, when Stannie rubbed his brother’s body with reeking lotions mixed with salt, presumably to treat syphilitic lesions. Joyce didn’t have neurosyphilis, but his treatments and the disease’s psychological toll likely caused Joyce’s periodic fainting spells, his insomnia and his “nervous collapses.”

Throughout all of this, Joyce must have wondered: why me? Nora was apparently spared. Perhaps he was so malnourished in Dublin and Trieste that colonies of
Treponema pallidum
had nearly free rein over his weakened body after he became infected, likely by a woman in Nighttown. Joyce knew he contracted gonorrhea in 1904, and he may have acquired syphilis simultaneously, in which case he probably mistook his disappearing symptoms as a cure when it was really an early syphilitic dormant period. He met Nora that summer, left Ireland with her in the fall, and when his symptoms recurred—and worsened—reality must have set in. No matter when he contracted it, the truth was clear by the time of his extended illness in 1907. In Dublin, Joyce preferred to think of diseases like syphilis as “venereal ill-luck” rather than God’s judgment, but when he looked back on his life in the 1930s, it must have been difficult to imagine that decades of pain and blindness could derive from a single unfortunate night with the wrong prostitute, that the life of an artist who could “pierce the significant heart of everything” was at the mercy of bacteria. Even God’s judgment might have seemed more plausible.

However odious Catholicism seemed to Joyce, it had enviable explanatory power. Syphilis could have been God’s punishment for iniquities that went beyond excursions into Nighttown. It could have been punishment for refusing to marry Nora, for infecting her with syphilis, for his unspeakable sexual proclivities, for blasphemy, for celebrating heretics as heroes and for refusing to pray at his mother’s deathbed. And it would have been appropriate for his punishment to deepen with his intransigence, his lifelong refusal to repent, his eagerness not only to speak against God but to emblazon his blasphemies and obscenities in
Ulysses
. The countless hours of pain and the slow, encroaching blindness could have had at least some overarching moral significance.

But Joyce did not accept a punishing God, and rejecting the possibility of divine wrath must have forced him to face a more crushing reality: that his disease had merely happened. If such monumental suffering were not part of the moral order of the universe, it was inanely banal. Damnation was the only alternative to the pointlessness of bacteria. Joyce spent his life coming to terms with that pointlessness, reconciling egoism with the empire of microbes—a lesson, perhaps, too deep for epiphanies. While he would never accept an angry God, he would never entirely lose that God, either, for the foibles and ugly truths about Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom were, to some degree, personal confessions in fantastic guises, words of contrition written with the hope of finding absolution. The individualism that defined Joyce’s career never escaped the shadow of Catholicism, the most rigid, hierarchical power structure he knew. After years of writing
Ulysses
, the word that Joyce rushed to Darantière in a telegram just days before publication was
atonement.

25.

The First Amendment could not protect
Ulysses
, nor could it protect any other book the U.S. government had burned before it. Freedom of speech, the right that Americans consider fundamental to democracy, did not emerge as a freedom in any real sense until well into the twentieth century. When the Bill of Rights was passed, the First Amendment was understood to protect citizens from “prior restraint”—it prohibited the federal government from interfering with a publication before it was printed. The government therefore retained the authority to halt the circulation of any words that had a “bad tendency” upon general readers, and a troublesome idea (including a statement of fact) could be outlawed if it was printed or spoken in public. Even if the speech wasn’t troublesome, a state like New York or Ohio could ban it because judges believed that the First Amendment pertained only to the federal government. The idea that the Constitution protects free speech rights from both federal and state interference didn’t start to develop until 1925.

First Amendment law began to shift in response to the Espionage Act. In a pair of 1919 Supreme Court decisions regarding pamphlets protesting the war, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes indirectly expanded the First Amendment’s scope. That is, he whittled down unprotected speech from utterances that have a vague “bad tendency” to speech that amounts to a “clear and present danger” to the public. Holmes’s more forceful opinion came out as a dissent in
Abrams v. United States
.

When men have realized

that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

Free speech was a constitutional freedom because it created the conditions for discovering truth—namely, a free marketplace of ideas. But Holmes didn’t think the marketplace included all ideas. The trade that concerned the First Amendment was overtly political speech involving society’s ultimate good. Free speech was the best way for a society to find stability when turbulent times upset fighting faiths, and yet free speech was not itself a fighting faith. Rather, it was a way to cope with political doubt. To invoke the First Amendment to defend a novel like
Ulysses
—even if it
wasn’t
obscene—would have been absurd.

One of the only people who thought
Ulysses
could be legalized in the United States was a civil liberties lawyer named Morris Ernst. Without the help of the First Amendment, however, Ernst believed that he would have to do more than convince the federal government that
Ulysses
had some nominal value in the marketplace of ideas. He would have to convince the government to declare
Ulysses
a modern classic.

Ernst was the son of a Jewish Czech immigrant who arrived in the United States with a label around his neck—the address of a relative. The Ernst family had erratic fortunes. Morris spent part of his childhood on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, when the neighborhood was at its roughest, before the family moved to Harlem and then the Upper East Side. Ernst prepared for college at Horace Mann during prosperous years, and he attended Williams after flunking Harvard’s entrance exams (he kept the rejection letter for inspiration). After graduation, he took night classes at New York Law School on a whim while selling furniture to make ends meet. Ernst started a small law firm, also on a whim, with two friends, and the partnership flourished for decades.

Ernst was more intuitive than bookish. The other partners did most of the legal research while Ernst was their brilliant litigator. He was quick on his feet, persuasive and driven by idealism. Justice Brandeis bequeathed his Supreme Court lamp to Ernst, and he imagined that it spoke to him as he worked by its light. In the 1920s, he became the co-general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union and took on civil liberties cases pro bono. When he received an invitation to join the American Bar Association, Ernst wanted to know if they admitted African American lawyers. The Association wrote back and apologized for not realizing that Mr. Ernst was a Negro.

Ernst’s topsy-turvy formative years shaped his legal philosophy. He believed that the unruly mixture of people and ideas in a Holmesian marketplace was the country’s greatest asset. Yet while Holmes thought of free speech as a source of stability, Ernst thought of it as a way to keep the culture roiling. Censorship was a tactic used by entrenched powers to quell democracy’s inherent turbulence, and groups like the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Ernst thought, were their moral instruments. Censorship was what happens when power brokers who benefit from the status quo team up with moralists who believe society is perpetually on the brink of collapse.

To fight for the freedom of books was to fight for the principle of self-governance that had inspired the American Revolution. For Ernst, there was no strict separation between political and sexual ideas—burning books sent a chill across the entire culture. Censorship, he wrote, had “a pervading influence on the subconscious recesses of individual minds.” It altered the way the country approached science, public health, psychology and history. Only a blinkered Victorian mentality, Ernst thought, could think that the Roman Empire fell because of its moral decadence.

The worst part about the censorship regime was that it was maddeningly arbitrary. Books that circulated for years might be banned without warning. Customs officials might declare a book legal only to have the Post Office issue its own ban. A judge or jury could acquit a book one day and condemn it the next, and the wording of the statutes themselves stoked confusion. The New York law described criminal literature with what Ernst called the “six deadly adjectives”:
obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent
and
disgusting
—lawmakers kept adding words when they updated the law. Multiplying the number of adjectives was a way of papering over the elusiveness of any given designation. What was the difference between
obscene
and
lascivious
? If a judge seemed reluctant to find something
lewd,
a prosecutor could argue that it was
disgusting
—and every one of those adjectives was subjective. Unpredictable standards amplified the power of obscenity laws far beyond the way they were enforced because writers and publishers who couldn’t risk prosecution stayed well within objectionable bounds. The marketplace of ideas was being crushed under the tyranny of uncertainty.

Ernst started fighting that tyranny by defending birth control advocates. In 1928, he defended an educational manual by Mary Ware Dennett called
The Sex Side of Life
, which had a remarkable nationwide demand. Dennett got mail orders from schools, public health departments and the YMCA.
The Sex Side of Life
had been in circulation for nearly a decade before the Post Office banned it under the Comstock Act in 1926. Dennett suspected that the ban was retribution for her outspoken criticism of the postal authority, and she approached the ACLU’s co-general counsel, Arthur Garfield Hays, to intervene. Hays was eager to expand the judiciary’s First Amendment readings, but World War I–era decisions made it clear that the courts wouldn’t overturn a postal ban.

Two years later, the only other ACLU board member willing to fight for “nonpolitical” speech took up Dennett’s cause pro bono. Morris Ernst wanted people to see Mary Ware Dennett as a victim of bullying censors, and the government made his job easier. Shortly after Ernst took the case, a Post Office inspector sent Dennett a decoy letter requesting
The Sex Side of Life
. When it arrived in the mail, the government brought criminal obscenity charges against her. An outcry followed her conviction in federal court, and by the time Ernst won the case in a 1930 appeal, the public had been so roused that the ACLU opened a new front in the fight for free speech, and Morris Ernst was one of its leaders.