The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (8 page)

When he didn’t return home one night, Francini searched the Cittavecchia and found Joyce’s limp body lying in the gutter. It was usually Stannie’s job to find him. He would drag his older brother back home from a bar, and the Francinis would listen to the Irish brothers insulting each other in a lilting, Dante-esque Italian they had learned in school. Stannie once scolded him, “Do you want to go blind? Do you want to go about with a little dog?” Nora’s barbs were sharper: “Faith I tell you I’ll have the children baptized tomorrow.” But no threat was effective. Joyce asked the Berlitz director for advances on his wages whenever the money ran out. He drank to evade the burden of fatherhood, and the expenses of drinking increased his burden, which compelled him to drink more. One night, when Joyce came home insensibly drunk after squandering money they hadn’t yet earned, Stannie began beating him. Francini could hear the awful sounds from his room. He got out of bed, despite his wife’s objections, and told Stannie, “It’s no use.”

—

JOYCE TAUGHT ENGLISH by giving his students evocative, idiosyncratic passages to recite and copy down.

Ireland is

a great country. They call it the Emerald Isle. The Metropolitan Government, after so many centuries of having it by the throat, has reduced it to a specter. Now it is a briar patch. They sowed it with famine, syphilis, superstition, and alcoholism. Up sprouted Puritans, Jesuits, and bigots.

They were, at times, like epiphanies, commonplace observations leading to deep insight.

The tax collector is an idiot who is always annoying me. He has filled my desk with little sheets marked “Warning,” “Warning,” “Warning.” I told him that if he didn’t stop it, I would send him to be f . . . ound out by that swindler, his master. Today, the swindler is the government of

Vienna. Tomorrow it could be the one in Rome. But whether in Vienna or Rome or London, to me governments are all the same, pirates.

His students, bewildered as they must have been, would not forget the word
swindler
.

Joyce thought governments were swindlers and pirates because their authority was nonnegotiable. To be a citizen of a state was to be its servant, which Joyce considered an affront to his individuality, the quality that made him an artist. “
Non serviam
” is the creed Stephen Dedalus, the budding artist of
A Portrait
, adopts, and it was simultaneously a political and artistic motto: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.”

Joyce’s individualism derived partly from anarchism. He acquired books about anarchy in Trieste and began calling himself an anarchist as early as 1907, though he was a “philosophical” anarchist rather than a political one—and his stomach, he said, was an incorrigible capitalist. His interest in anarchism stemmed from the tenet that all authority—governmental or religious—boiled down to control without consent. To govern is to violate an individual’s sovereignty.

We associate anarchists with chaos and bomb throwers, but their fervor derived from a rigid logic: if an agreement isn’t voluntary, it’s coercive. If you have not explicitly consented to an authority, then it is your master. Because all governments are compulsory, they are all oppressive. To overthrow a monarchy and create a democracy is merely to trade the tyranny of the king for the tyranny of the majority—if you happen to be in the minority, the distinction is irrelevant. Anarchists saw no real difference between limited and absolute authorities. Whether a law instituted traffic lights or a secret police, the violation of individuality was essentially the same.

For philosophical anarchists like Joyce, rejecting authority meant rejecting the entire conceptual category to which “authority” belonged: abstractions and foundational assumptions. Anarchists believed that states and churches rested upon phantom concepts (like legitimacy or moral obligation) masquerading as fundamental truths when they were really just inventions helping tyrants wield power. The philosophical core of anarchism was thus a skepticism of the ostensibly self-evident concepts that held sway over people. It was the conviction that big ideas could enslave, whether they be duty, rights or God; your home, your fatherland or your church.

Anarchism emerged as a response to the rapid growth of the modern state, and, more particularly, to the growth of one of the nineteenth century’s biggest ideas: the police. When the British Parliament created the Metropolitan Police in 1829, it invented a form of state power that was diffused throughout the city. Ten years later, Parliament empowered the police to arrest loiterers, “riotous” drunkards and anyone committing a misdemeanor whose name and residence couldn’t be verified. The act banned cockfighting and shooting firearms within three hundred yards of homes. It banned driving “furiously,” wantonly ringing doorbells and flying annoying kites. It banned the sale and distribution of “profane, indecent, or obscene” books, and the laws would only get stronger over time. By 1878, the British government had passed more than one hundred laws expanding police powers, and Britain set the example for police expansion all around the world.

For people suspicious of authority, the multiplying laws were self-perpetuating: more ordinances created more criminals and, thus, the need for more police officers and an ever-exploding government. The professionalization of law enforcement made patrolmen seem like foot soldiers in an increasingly centralized apparatus staffed with detectives, jailers and bureaucrats who thought of state power as job security. To artists like Joyce, who considered free expression sacrosanct, censorship epitomized the tyranny of state power, for the state not only banned obscenity, it decided what obscenity was. Unlike firearms or kites, the violation was arbitrary—the law hemmed the government in with limits of the government’s choosing—and the fact that censors acted as if indecency were self-evident only made the arbitrariness more blatant. To publish a gratuitously obscene text—to deny “obscenity” as a legitimate category altogether—was a way to expose and reject the arbitrary basis of all state power. It was a form of literary anarchy.

—

TRIESTE WAS FERTILE ground for anarchist ideas. The city’s predominantly Italian population had been under Austrian rule for hundreds of years, but after the unification of Italy in 1861, Italian Triestines demanded inclusion in the new Italian state, and the divisions between Italians and Austrians became more palpable as the city became more prosperous. Italians resented the cultural infiltration of their city—a Germanic street name here, an Austrian monument there. Political plums and administrative favors all went to Austrians. When a fight broke out between German and Italian students at Trieste’s law school in 1904, the 137 students arrested were all Italian. Whether the authorities were Italian or Austrian, some portion of the city would be governed against its wishes. To be an Irishman in Trieste was to see your own country’s problems refracted through another empire. For Joyce, leaving home meant seeing global principles beneath local problems, seeing one collectivity pitted against another—Italianness and Austrianness, nationalism and empire. Individuals were crushed by big ideas.

Italy declared war on the Austrian Empire in May 1915. By June, the steamers and ships’ masts in the Grand Canal dwindled. Wartime trade plummeted and mines were planted in the Adriatic to help starve Vienna into defeat, and Trieste was empty. The trams were gone—their cables commandeered by the military—the coaches and oxcarts were gone, and the multilingual shouts from the bars were replaced by the shouts of soldiers demanding documents. The last of those soldiers to be called up for duty patrolled the streets with rifles from the Franco-Prussian War dangling from their shoulders on knotted pieces of string. The sounds of their boots echoed off the shuttered shop fronts in the Cittavecchia. High up on a hill on the old city, the San Giusto Cathedral cast an afternoon shadow over the nearby streets, and in a small apartment on one of those streets, with books crammed into the bedroom and empty chairs in the drawing room where students used to sit, James Joyce was busy writing something new.

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” In the opening chapter of
Ulysses
, Joyce recalled his days with Oliver Gogarty (Buck Mulligan) at the Martello tower in Sandycove before leaving Ireland with Nora. Joyce finished the first chapter on June 16, 1915, and it could not have been easy. The Berlitz School where he was teaching closed indefinitely that same day. Most of the teachers were conscripted, and the students had either enlisted or fled. And yet as the cannonades and air raids came closer to his apartment in Trieste, Joyce tunneled deeper into his novel. He composed the young men’s dialogue on the tower’s parapet while small crowds gathered on Trieste’s waterfront and listened to the gunfire coming from a town a few miles away. Austrian Triestines mocked the Italian battle cry by shouting, “
Avanti, Cagoia
!
”—“Forward, snails!” The cheers grew louder with each explosion.

As an Austrian port with an Italian population and a mostly Slavic police force, the city began to tear itself apart. When news of Italy’s declaration spread, Austrian mobs roamed through the streets attacking Italian nationalists and destroying Italian restaurants and cafés. Sailors vandalized the statue of Verdi in one of the piazzas, and when they burned the offices of pro-Italian newspapers, the police simply watched. The Joyce family was placed on a list of enemy aliens, and Stannie, who made his Italian sympathies clear, was arrested and placed in an internment camp. By the end of May, the Triestine authorities dissolved the municipal council, censored the press and the mails, deported Italians en masse and declared a state of siege. When the last train for Italy left, Trieste felt like an open-air prison. Shops were shuttered. Lines formed all night in front of the last open bakery, and food prices skyrocketed. “Whoever has the last sack of flour,” Joyce said, “will win the war.”

—

JOYCE WAS HARDLY in a position to embark upon a new novel, much less a novel as ambitious as
Ulysses
. In 1915, he was unemployed, perched on the edge of a battlefront with a wife and two children and as poor as he had ever been.
A Portrait
was unpublished, and
Dubliners
had appeared in bookstores two weeks before the archduke’s assassination. At the end of 1914 only 499 copies had been sold (120 of which Joyce was required to purchase himself), and the sales were crawling to a standstill. In the first six months of 1915, twenty-six copies of
Dubliners
were sold. In the last six months, only seven.

Ulysses
began as a whim. It was originally an idea for a short story to tag along in
Dubliners
. Alfred H. Hunter—the lonely, benevolent Jew in Dublin who had lifted Joyce from the dirt in St. Stephen’s Green—was a hero of the Trojan War, the protagonist of Homer’s greatest epic, the king of Ithaca, Ulysses. The Hunter-as-Ulysses equation was well suited for a short story, but the concept had undergone some unforeseeable growth in Joyce’s mind. In 1914, he began gathering his ideas. Joyce mapped the events of the ancient tale of the
Odyssey
onto Dublin: a funeral in Glasnevin cemetery was a descent into Hades. His friend Byrne’s little flat on Eccles Street was Ulysses’ palace in Ithaca, and the barmaids at the Ormond Hotel were the Sirens. He had a name for his Ulysses: Leopold Bloom. Stephen Dedalus was Telemachus, Ulysses’ son. Stephen was a son whose father was lost, and Bloom was a father finding his way back to his son. His wife, Molly, was Penelope patiently waiting for her husband’s return from the Trojan War.

By the early twentieth century, the very idea of an epic seemed antiquated. The
Odyssey
represented the essence of a cohesive civilization, and if the war demonstrated anything, it was that Europe was fragmentary. An Irish
Odyssey
would be a mock epic, a tale that invoked classical comparisons to deride what civilization had become. For Joyce, there was a mischievous thrill in reimagining the epic stage as dowdy, dirty Dublin. Dublin’s Ulysses is not a king but an ad canvasser for a newspaper, and he returns home not to a faithful queen but to a wife who cheated on him earlier that day. To see the life of Leopold Bloom through the adventures of Ulysses was to peer into the twentieth century through the cracked looking glass of antiquity.

But the other side of Joyce’s thrill was transubstantiating the modern city’s quotidian surroundings. Joyce slipped across centuries from the mundane to the mythical and back. For years, he thought of an epiphany’s flash of insight as a moment revealing “the soul of the commonest object,” as Stephen Dedalus puts it. But in
Ulysses,
Stephen tells us that the “intense instant of imagination” is an insight across and into time. “So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.” Everything we are, everything we do, acquires its more durable meaning in belated recognitions, which will themselves be fodder for more distant moments. The epiphany belongs to the future. Joyce could see himself as a young man in Dublin now that the bombs were falling around Trieste. And so it is with civilizations telling their stories. Dublin, crossing the threshold of the twentieth century, could gaze back to see itself on the Homeric stage at last.

And Joyce added yet another level of complexity—something that fused the modern world’s disparate orders of magnitude. Instead of an epic unfolding over the course of years,
Ulysses
would take place on one day. In the twenty-first century, a circadian novel seems natural. We are accustomed to the tick-tock of live reports, RSS feeds, status updates, and twenty-four-hour news cycles feeding us the perception that global events turn on single days. Yet in 1915, the notion that a single day was an appropriate time frame for an extended novel, or that in the limits of smallness we could find a culture’s grand pattern, was, to say the least, exotic. A few writers had written single-day novels before
Ulysses
, but none on the scale that Joyce imagined—no one thought of a day as an epic. Joyce was planning to turn a single day into a recursive unit of dazzling complexity in which the circadian part was simultaneously the epochal whole. A June day in Dublin would be a fractal of Western civilization.