The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (47 page)

Sam Coleman was unusually flustered, and he approached Ernst just before they were called to order.

“The government can’t win this case,” Coleman said.

“Why?”

“The only way to win the case is to refer to the great number of vulgar four-letter words used by Joyce. This will shock the judge and he will suppress the book. But I can’t do it.”

“Why?”

“Because there is a lady in the courtroom.”

Ernst turned around, and among the reporters near the front row he saw his wife, Maggie. She had taken the day off from school to hear the arguments her husband had been rehearsing for months. Ernst told Coleman he didn’t need to worry about offending his wife’s sensibilities. She saw the “Anglo-Saxon” expressions scribbled by her students on the school’s bathroom walls every day. In fact, Maggie had helped him parse the etymology of the words Coleman wouldn’t speak in her presence.

When the proceedings began, Judge Woolsey made it clear that he was skeptical about
Ulysses
. “Suppose that a girl of eighteen or twenty read the soliloquy of Molly Bloom,” he asked Ernst, “wouldn’t it be apt to corrupt her?”

“I don’t think that is the standard we should go by,” Ernst replied. “The law does not require that adult literature be reduced to mush for infants.”

Ernst’s argument depended upon discarding the Hicklin Rule. He wanted a definition of obscenity that protected Molly Bloom from phantom young readers rather than the other way around. To do so, he plucked Judge Learned Hand’s 1913 definition from obscurity: the word
obscene
should indicate “the present critical point in the compromise between candor and shame at which the community may have arrived here and now.” Judge Hand had made obscenity a “living standard,” as Ernst put it, a judgment that communities revise continually. Even if
Ulysses
had been obscene in 1922, it could still be legal in 1933. After all, Ernst noted, the signs of changing standards were all around them. Women once wore sleeves and long skirts at the beach. Twenty years ago, they began baring their knees—and he hardly needed to explain to the court how the so-called sunsuits of the 1930s left little to the imagination.

In case Woolsey didn’t like these mutable standards, Ernst also invoked steadfast principles. Judge Hand’s declaration that “truth and beauty are too precious” to be sacrificed to unsophisticated readers suggested a government interest in literary merit. If
Ulysses
was what the Treasury Department said it was—if it was a modern classic, if it rendered truth and beauty—then it was worthy of protection in the marketplace of ideas. Ernst didn’t dare bring up the First Amendment, but the crux of his argument echoed Oliver Wendell Holmes: books leading society toward the truth are essential.

Yet it would be enough if Woolsey accepted that literature couldn’t be obscene. Ernst cited the definition of
classic
in
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
and reasoned that obscenity, which depraves and corrupts, cannot also be a work “of acknowledged excellence.” The judge was forced to choose.

Judge Woolsey had been listening patiently. “Mr. Coleman,” he asked the prosecutor, “what do you think constitutes obscenity?”

“I should say a thing is obscene by the ordinary language used and by what it does to the average reader.” Obscenity could be measured by community standards rather than corruptible children, if Morris Ernst wished. In fact, Coleman made Ernst’s argument for him—he praised
Ulysses
. The style was “new and startling.”
Ulysses
offered “a new system of presenting people to themselves.” Joyce’s book was as scientific as it was poetic. “We know that it is an encyclopedia,” the government said in its brief, “thorough and classified, of the very substance of two beings, both physical and psychological, external and internal. We realize that it is a deep character study, that even the remotest characters in the book are limned with unmistakable distinctness upon its huge canvas.” The government defended
Ulysses
more eloquently than the defense.

Sam Coleman wasn’t a fool. He knew how much Ernst’s argument depended upon establishing the literary merit of Joyce’s book. He knew Ernst and Lindey would come trotting into court with piles of statements gathered from professors, clergymen, librarians and writers from around the country. They would juxtapose tributes to
Ulysses
from Paris art dealers (“almost perfect”) and well-known writers (“majestic genius”) with words of praise from female librarians in Texas (“superb”) and North Dakota (“classically exquisite”). He knew Ernst would piece together a “whole book” standard from an esoteric case history. He also knew that Ernst would take advantage of his admittedly ingenious tactics, from the seized copy loaded down with critical praise to the U.S. Treasury’s designation of the book as a “classic.” Section III, Subheading A of Ernst’s legal brief trumpeted the Treasury secretary’s approval: “THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS OFFICIALLY PAID TRIBUTE TO THE GREATNESS OF ULYSSES.” Ernst had outdone himself, and Judge Woolsey would be sympathetic. So instead of disputing the literary merit of
Ulysses
, the government simply agreed.

“No one would dare attack the literary value of the book,” Coleman said. But after praising
Ulysses
he began to zero in on the book’s unprintable words—he alluded to them indirectly, of course, for the sake of the lady present. Not even the most liberal judge thought an author’s artistry could legalize
unlimited
filth. All the government had to do was point out what Judge Woolsey already knew: that the filth in
Ulysses
went far beyond what any American court had ever allowed.

Sam Coleman and his assistant, Nicholas Atlas, pored over all of the books recently exonerated of obscenity charges and found their language far less colorful than Molly Bloom’s. Neither
Mademoiselle de Maupin
nor
Casanova’s Homecoming
contained bawdy words.
Female
wasn’t bad, either. “An occasional word is offensive to the general taste,” they found, but it wasn’t obscene by current standards.
Woman and Puppet
didn’t have a single dirty word. Clement Wood’s
Flesh
was the most obscene book they examined, and yet it didn’t have any dirty words either.
Ulysses
, on the other hand, was teeming with both obscenity and, they added, “endless blasphemy.” No other book contained what
Ulysses
contained.

Obscenity could be a “living standard” if Morris Ernst and Judge Woolsey felt so inclined. Coleman’s rebuttal was that the nation’s standards—shocking sunsuits notwithstanding—hadn’t changed enough to legalize Molly Bloom’s thoughts. The text made his case for him: “Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head[.]” To answer the judge’s earlier question, Coleman said, “I do not think that obscenity necessarily should be limited to exciting sexual feeling.” A book could be banned if its language were coarse or disgusting, and if the judge went back to his
Oxford English Dictionary,
he would find that it agreed. The case against
Ulysses
wasn’t just about isolated obscenities. Coleman granted that the book was a modern classic, a cohesive work of art to be judged as a whole, so that he could turn Ernst’s argument on its head.
Ulysses
had to be banned, he said, precisely
because
it was so skillfully integrated: it was both obscene and a masterpiece through and through.

—

THE GOVERNMENT’S STRATEGY WAS, for Ernst, both frustrating and exhilarating. Coleman sidestepped the brunt of his case with the same argument he had made on the phone the previous year. Though Coleman wouldn’t say the dirty words in front of the lady in the courtroom, he mounted more of a case than Ernst anticipated, possibly because Coleman resented his Treasury Department gambit. The DA’s office had began dragging its feet in the final months—Ernst had to contact Woolsey personally to get a court date. Now that Random House had its hearing, Ernst was forced to address the government’s argument about “bawdy words,” and he wasn’t going to tiptoe around it.

“Judge, as to the word
fuck
, one etymological dictionary gives a possible derivation from ‘to plant,’ an Anglo-Saxon agricultural usage—the farmer fucked the seed into the soil.” Ernst wanted to demystify the word by saying it out loud, and he wanted to make it less threatening by giving it a history (even if that history was wrong). Ernst said he rather liked the word. He was careful about when he used it—it didn’t win him many friends, he admitted—but that single syllable was freighted with power and honesty. “This, your honor, has more integrity than a euphemism used every day in every modern novel to describe precisely the same event.”

“For example, Mr. Ernst?”

“Oh—‘They slept together.’ It means the same thing.”

Woolsey found the turn of phrase amusing. “Counselor, that isn’t even usually the truth!”

Ernst made his case to Judge Woolsey for nearly an hour, largely by extolling Joyce’s merits. James Joyce, he argued, “led a monastic existence” away from fans and reporters like “an austere Olympian.” His text was painstakingly structured. Not only did each chapter have its own distinctive style and correspondence with Homer’s
Odyssey
, it had its own color, its own symbol, and its own bodily organ. The novel didn’t pander to base instincts—the first sexually suggestive scene was several chapters into the book, by which point any reader looking for smut would have stopped reading.
Ulysses
as a whole didn’t even resemble pornography, he argued. It didn’t have a suggestive title. The book was too long. There wasn’t a single illustration. And Random House wasn’t in the pornography business—it published Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Brontë and Robert Frost. And if all of that wasn’t enough, Ernst produced a map of the United States with a red pin marking every city where a librarian expressed interest in obtaining
Ulysses
. The “community” that accepted
Ulysses
was nothing less than the entire nation. The argument was, in the end, about a gut reaction. People knew pornography when they saw it, and this wasn’t it.

Ulysses
, after all, was bewildering. For every filthy word, how many inscrutable ones were there? Ernst and Lindey listed dozens of puzzling words in the book.
Quadrireme. Entelechy. Epicene
.
Hebdomadary.
For all they knew, some of
those
were obscene—and that was the point. If they were dirty, it wouldn’t matter. Obscenity, by definition, must deprave and corrupt. “It is axiomatic that only what is understandable can corrupt,” Ernst argued. “The worst Chinese obscenity is innocuous to anyone not acquainted with the language.”
Ulysses
was high art to the sophisticates who could understand it and gibberish to the morally vulnerable. They quoted incomprehensible passages (including Stephen’s “ineluctable modality”) to bewilder Judge Woolsey. If John Quinn had been alive to hear it, he would have been proud.

At first, Woolsey agreed with Ernst. He described what it had been like to read
Ulysses
in Petersham. “Some of it was so obscure and unintelligible that it was difficult to understand it at all. It was like walking around without your feet on the ground.” He sat back and, taking advantage of the setting, lit a cigarette lodged in a long, ivory holder. “This isn’t an easy case to decide,” he said. “I think things ought to take their chances in the marketplace. My own feeling is against censorship. I know that as soon as you suppress anything the bootlegger goes to work. Still . . .”

He broke off for a moment, remembering some of the passages the DA underlined—
Ill let him know
if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up in my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times
—“Still, there is that soliloquy in the last chapter. I don’t know about that.”

The judge was curious about Mr. Ernst’s grasp of the novel. “Did you really read this entire book? It’s tough going, isn’t it?”

Ernst had tried to read it ten years ago, but he couldn’t get through it until the previous summer, when, in preparation for the case, he had an epiphany about Joyce’s technique. Ernst described it not as a stream of consciousness but as a
double
stream of consciousness that shaped our mental lives every day without our fully realizing it.

“Your honor, while arguing to win this case I thought I was intent only on this book, but frankly, while pleading before you, I’ve also been thinking about that ring around your tie, how your gown does not fit too well on your shoulders and the picture of John Marshall behind your bench.”

The judge smiled and rapped lightly on the bench in front of him. “I’ve been worried about the last part of the book, and I have listened as intently as I know how, but I must confess that while listening to you I’ve been thinking about the Hepplewhite chair behind you.”

Ernst smiled. “That, Judge, is the essence of
Ulysses
.”

As the thin, bespectacled lawyer continued, talking about “a weird epitome of what is going on in a human mind,” Woolsey began to wonder if that simultaneity really was the source of the book’s peculiar power. For in the same way that a pair of hornrimmed glasses reminds Leopold Bloom of his father who poisoned himself when Leopold was still a boy, the arching curve of the Hepplewhite chair might have reminded Woolsey of his mother sitting at home in South Carolina, where the rickety cotton pickers’ shacks were visible through the windows. A few years after they left that house, John Woolsey’s mother, having left his father, threw herself from a window in Brooklyn.

Something about
Ulysses
, Woolsey said, left him “bothered, stirred and troubled.” Even now, some of the passages moved him in unexpected ways. Molly Bloom’s final words—the novel’s final words—stayed with him.