The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (12 page)

—

IN 1916, Anderson met Jane Heap. She seemed intimidating at first, and she was husky, owned a revolver, looked squarely at everyone she spoke to, had short hair she swept across her broad forehead and full lips that reminded Anderson of Oscar Wilde. Jane Heap was from Topeka, Kansas. She grew up next door to a mental institution, which, to Jane, was Topeka’s only point of interest. She responded to the isolation of Kansas by being more exotic. She imagined her ancestral home as the Arctic Circle, where her mother’s Norwegian family once lived. She and her friends wore trousers and neckties and called one another by masculine names such as “Richard” and “James.” After high school, she left Kansas, studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, affiliated herself with Chicago’s Little Theatre and devoted her life to the beautiful. “I know that if everyone felt Beauty strongly,” she wrote to a woman she met in Chicago, “felt that everything beautiful was god and all things not beautiful not God, that woman was the nearest Symbol for Beauty, if one could see this—there would be no sin, or squalor, or unhappiness in the whole world.”

Margaret Anderson recognized herself in Jane’s lonely idealism, and she had never heard anyone talk the way she did. Emma Goldman delivered spine-tingling speeches, but Jane had a knack for conversation. Anderson used to think of speaking as a stage performance—as a lecture to her family assembled on the couch—so she went browsing for wisdom. She recited poetry and quoted philosophers, but Jane never quoted anyone. Everything she said seemed like a revelation in progress. Martie, as Jane called her, jotted down their conversations and begged her to write for
The
Little Review
. Jane resisted at first, but before long she became the de facto art editor. She transformed the magazine’s design, altered the page headers and discarded the bland tan covers for striking colors and better layouts.
The
Little Review
was no longer just Margaret Anderson’s.

Jane reminded Anderson that revolution was subservient to art, not the other way around, and when Anderson saw Goldman in July, it became clear that Anderson had been pulled into a different orbit. Jane thought Goldman’s ideas were vague and illogical, and the Queen of the Anarchists thought Jane was too aggressive. “I felt as if she were pushing me against a wall,” Goldman said later. When Goldman’s friends began praising “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Oscar Wilde’s sentimental lament drawing from his imprisonment, Anderson scoffed at their ideologically driven appraisal of a bad poem. The anarchists thought Anderson was corrupted by bourgeois aestheticism, and Anderson thought they were trapped by radical kitsch. Each thought the other insulted individualism.

Anderson’s initial enthusiasm for Goldman had masked the differences between them. She didn’t share Goldman’s unshakable faith in the individual. Goldman thought the public’s resistance to individualism was a by-product of a conformist power structure, but Anderson thought it was endemic. “Our culture—or what little we have of such a thing—is clogged by masses of dead people who have no conscious inner life,” she wrote in 1914, and her contempt deepened into disgust. “‘People’ has become to me a word that—crawls,” she wrote in 1915. “
Peo-pul
.” She saw the public as “a cosmic squirming mass of black caterpillars” writhing in protest against the rare butterfly. Whenever Goldman praised the individual, Anderson imagined the artist, a person not just incidentally exceptional—not someone who summoned the virtues everyone possesses—but fundamentally, almost biologically exceptional.

Anderson folded Goldman’s defiant politics into an expansive conception of artistic genius, the purest form of individualism. “The ultimate reason for life is Art,” Anderson declared in the August 1916 issue. “And revolution? Revolution is Art.” By then,
The
Little Review
seemed feeble, so feeble, in fact, that Anderson threatened to leave the pages blank—an empty magazine was better than a bad magazine. She threw down the gauntlet before the public: “Now we shall have Art in this magazine or we shall stop publishing it. I don’t care where it comes from—America or the South Sea Islands. I don’t care whether it is brought by youth or age. I only want the miracle!

“Where are the artists?”

—

THE DISPUTE BETWEEN Emma Goldman and Margaret Anderson dramatized tensions that rippled through the various modernist insurgencies and began to influence Joyce’s new book. It was not clear how the exceptional and the mundane—the artist and the ad man—could interact, or how individuals could be revolutionary when revolutions were almost by definition the work of collectives. One solution was to change the understanding of revolution altogether. For modernists like Anderson and Joyce, the greatest individualist triumph was to bypass the political struggles Goldman ceaselessly fought, to sweep away conformity and subservience with mighty works of art. The dispute about individualism arose from precisely the thing that made individualism captivating: an overweening faith in the individual’s power.

Part of what made the tension so fraught was that both political and artistic individualists drew much of their faith from the same source, an 1844 treatise by Max Stirner called
The Ego and His Own
. Stirner maintained that the individual was the only source of virtue and the only reality—everything else was an abstraction, and all abstractions were “spooks,” ghosts vexing the ego. Anti-individual forces—corporations, bureaucracies, churches, states—were not merely unjust. They were
unreal
. Such sweeping skepticism generated sweeping dismissals of higher causes and concepts like God, truth and freedom. Stirner concluded his book with the declaration, “All things are nothing to me.”

The Ego and His Own
went through forty-nine printings from 1900 to 1929, and its ideas united an array of modernists. Joyce read Stirner. So did Emma Goldman. So did Nietzsche. So did Miss Weaver. Ezra Pound and Margaret Anderson encountered his ideas through other writers, and Dora Marsden called
The Ego and His Own
the “most powerful work that has ever emerged from a single human mind.” It inspired her choice to rechristen
The New Freewoman
as
The Egoist
. Shrinking the world down to the ego made the twentieth century manageable. It fueled Goldman’s optimism and Joyce’s dogged determination.

Egoism appealed to modernists who found politics hopeless. In what seemed to be a permanent era of corporations and jostling empires, egoism provided anarchism with a way to retreat into culture while making that retreat seem like a more principled defiance. The individual would defeat collectivism not through protests and dynamite but through philosophy, art and literature. Turn-of-the-century individualist anarchists rejected political violence, deemphasized communal associations and celebrated a tradition of anarchist ideas already in circulation, from Wordsworth, Whitman and Zola to Thomas Paine, Rousseau, Nietzsche and Ibsen. It suited Joyce perfectly.

Joyce was steeped in individualist modernism in his formative years—
A Portrait
depicts the development of his egoism in Stephen’s defiance of home, fatherland and Church—and yet in 1914 he began to alter the entire tradition.
Ulysses
swerves from Stephen’s heady defiance toward Leopold Bloom’s humbler individualism. The novel opens with Stephen back in Dublin where he started, but Bloom never tries to leave. His individuality resides resolutely within a mental and municipal matrix. Bloom’s qualms and jokes, his fears and memories, his errors, insights and half-pursued speculations help him navigate the delicate spaces that separate him from the Dubliners around him and, crucially, from himself.

When Bloom gazes out of a carriage window on his way to a funeral and sees Stephen, skinny and alone and in the garb of someone in mourning, it is Joyce looking at himself. Stephen and Bloom, the young Joyce and the older Joyce, wander through Dublin, obliquely aware of each other, and cross paths briefly before moving onward.
Ulysses
split the ego that
A Portrait
built, and that split is the fission through which the world bursts forth. Joyce began to write
Ulysses
thinking that a person is more than a singularity sweeping away a world of abstractions. The individual is something fraught, multiple, contradictory, something deceptively small, something already marbled with abstractions. In
Ulysses
, Joyce was exploring what egoism always was: a way to find God in atoms. It was one of modernism’s greatest insurgencies.

7.

The modernist milieu was small enough to be shaped by the haphazard connections that place an old book in a new reader’s hands or bring a bright-eyed editor to an unforgettable lecture. One of the small connections that brought cultural and political individualists together—and put the first pages of
Ulysses
in to print—came in the form of a personal response to an offensive magazine article. In 1915, Ezra Pound received a letter from a piqued subscriber to
The
New Age
who happened to be a prominent New York art collector. John Quinn was a finance lawyer with connections to Wall Street, Tammany Hall and Washington, D.C. He started his own law firm when he was thirty-six, and he worked tirelessly. He dictated letters and memoranda to stenographers arranged around his desk in his Nassau Street office, and at the end of the day an assistant would lug a leather briefcase filled with unfinished business to Quinn’s apartment overlooking Central Park so he could work through the evening. In the morning, another stenographer would arrive and take dictation while Quinn dressed and shaved.

John Quinn used his clout for modernism. He spent his precious spare time collecting art and manuscripts, sometimes at above-market prices. In 1912, Quinn legally incorporated a group of dissident New York artists who split from the fusty National Academy of Design and helped them secure a space for the most ambitious art show anyone had seen in decades. The exhibition was housed in the new armory of the New York National Guard’s 69th Regiment (Quinn liked the fact that the regiment was known as “The Fighting Irish”). They divided up the cavernous space into eighteen rooms, covered the partitions in burlap and squeezed in as many artworks as they could. Next to established masters like Monet and Renoir they hung the work of radical artists like Kandinsky, Matisse, Munch, Duchamp and two young artists who called themselves Cubists, Braque and Picasso.

It became known as the Armory Show, and John Quinn was its biggest single contributor. He loaned seventy-seven artworks from his collection, including a Gauguin, a Van Gogh self-portrait, and one of Cézanne’s portraits of his wife. At the unveiling, Quinn declared the show “epoch making in the history of American art . . . the most complete art exhibition that has been held in the world during the last quarter century.” It was probably an understatement. The Post-Impressionist show that rocked London in 1910 included fewer than 250 artworks from twenty-five artists. The Armory Show displayed about 1,300 artworks from more than three hundred artists, and its sheer size was enough to grab headlines. Four thousand people saw the show on opening night, and by the time it finished touring Boston and Chicago (where Matisse and Brancusi were burned in effigy), three hundred thousand people beheld the monumental survey of established and experimental art.

Teddy Roosevelt, John Quinn’s friend, said he detected “a lunatic fringe” in the exhibition and worried that the country was being infiltrated by “European extremists.” Nevertheless, the Armory Show marked the New York art world’s coming of age, and it changed the American art market forever. Before 1913, Quinn had had somewhat conservative tastes, but the show fired his enthusiasm for more audacious artwork, and his purchases were substantial enough to create a ripple effect in the market. When one Chicago collector heard about Quinn’s early buying spree, he rushed to New York and nearly matched his expenditures. In 1914, Quinn bought more art than anyone else in the United States, and he moved to a larger apartment on Central Park West just to store it all (displaying it all was impossible).

So when Quinn read an article by Ezra Pound in 1915 that mocked American art collectors who were buying outdated artworks and manuscripts, Quinn suspected Pound was referring to him, and he defended himself in a letter to Pound as a patron of “live” artists. “If there is a ‘liver’ collector of vital contemporary art in this country, for a man of moderate means,” he wrote, “I should like to meet him.” No one helped artists more than he did, he said. He testified before Congress, called in favors with politicians, and mounted a press campaign to change the prohibitive tariff law on art imports—in fact, he
wrote
the new tariff law. Instead of paying a 15 percent duty, collectors in United States who bought work directly from artists could now import it without charge.

Ezra Pound quickly understood the type of man he was dealing with. Quinn not only cared about art, he had the means and connections to make art happen. Pound wrote back to offer his apologies. “If there were more like you we should get on with our renaissance,” he said, roping him in with
our
. After a couple of letters, Pound was more direct. If he were an editor of a literary magazine that published writers no one would print, what kind of support would he have from New York? “Are there any damd female tea parties who will committeeize themselves and try to sell the paper?” Wartime London was muzzling him, and the only solution was complete financial and editorial control of his own magazine. Of course, Pound wasn’t interested in the help of tea party committees. He was asking for a patron, and he approached John Quinn with measured compliments and competitive swagger: “I don’t want or need a popular success, I need say a thousand or two new subscribers. Who is there in New York (with the sole exception of a certain J.Q.) who has any gutttts?”

London was not enough. Without an “official organ” in New York, Pound’s renaissance would be just another parochial experiment, a lively footnote in the history of Western culture, and he intended to make a permanent mark on global centers of power. Pound imagined a magazine that would gather far-flung writers in a single location and deliver them regularly to an elite audience—“The rest are sheep,” Pound insisted. The magazine wouldn’t help the Vortex. It would
be
the Vortex. He told Quinn that they would have all of James Joyce’s work, D. H. Lawrence’s novels, Wyndham Lewis’s stories and the poetry of “a young chap named Eliot . . . I have more or less discovered him.” And “Joyce,” Pound assured him, “is probably the most significant prose writer of my generation.” Quinn probably hadn’t read anything by Joyce, and the name itself would have meant little to anyone beyond the small
Egoist
readership—he was the most significant prose writer no one had ever heard of—but Quinn remembered hearing Yeats and George Russell talking about a young man named Joyce back when he visited Dublin in 1904, and whatever they said had left an impression on the wealthy American.