The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (19 page)

On the other side of Miss Weaver’s plate sat the parcel Virginia Woolf was expecting. The neat brown paper wrapping contained the first portion of Mr. Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Miss Weaver explained that she was having difficulty finding someone in London willing to print it. A few weeks earlier, the printer for
The
Egoist
set up the type for the first episode, but as they reconsidered a few of the more colorful words (“snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening”) and remembered what type of material they could expect from Joyce, they refused to print it even with deletions. By 1918, Miss Weaver was acquainted with nearly every printer in the London area, and she wasn’t willing to go through the frustrating round of acceptances and retractions again. But T. S. Eliot told Miss Weaver that the Woolfs had started their own press. On a whim, they had purchased a small handpress along with letters and chases and a sixteen-page pamphlet explaining the basics of printing. They operated it out of their home and called it Hogarth Press.

Miss Weaver wanted Hogarth Press to print
Ulysses
, chapter by chapter, in a series of booklets. It would be, she said, a “supplement” to
The
Egoist
,
for the magazine had become too small for
Ulysses
, the format having dwindled from sixteen pages down to twelve or fourteen. Joyce was not yet finished with his novel, she told the Woolfs, but she estimated the full text would be around three hundred pages. They could examine the first four episodes she brought with her, and she would forward the following episodes as soon as Joyce produced them.

It occurred to Woolf that Miss Weaver was an incompetent
businesswoman—her supplement plan was bizarre and the arrangements hazy or nonexistent. She puzzled over the woman before her, with her hair pulled back in a bun and her spine keeping its distance from the back of the chair. “How did she ever come in contact with Joyce & the rest?” she wrote in her diary. “Why does their filth seek exit from her mouth?” Virginia and Leonard Woolf agreed, skeptical as they were, to consider Mr. Joyce’s manuscript.

A few days later, Desmond MacCarthy, another Bloomsbury member—a literary critic serving in the navy during the war—visited Hogarth House after dinner. As they grew listless, MacCarthy happened to pick up Joyce’s manuscript lying about, and he read the beginning of the fourth episode.

Mr Leopold Bloom ate

with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

It was
highly
amusing. MacCarthy began reading aloud with dramatic flourishes.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere.

MacCarthy took particular delight in imitating Mr. Leopold Bloom’s cat as she circled the legs of the breakfast table. “Mkgnao!” He gave it his best effort, and there were subtle changes, a veritable feline vocabulary. “Mrkgnao!” said MacCarthy. Virginia Woolf found the performance quite satisfying.

MacCarthy wasn’t the only guest to ridicule. The Woolfs had recently befriended Katherine Mansfield, a twenty-nine-year-old writer from New Zealand, and when she noticed that they had a portion of Joyce’s forthcoming book, she couldn’t help but begin reading. It didn’t take her long to decide that
Ulysses
was disgusting, unhealthy and too repellent to read. “I can’t get over
the feeling of wet linoleum and unemptied pails and far worse horrors in the house of his mind,” she later wrote to a friend. Yet she turned to Virginia Woolf and said, “But there’s something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature.” It was difficult to name that something.

For several reasons, Hogarth Press, like so many other London printers, refused to print
Ulysses
. There were obvious practical problems. The Woolfs’ longest publication at the time was a pair of short stories (one by Virginia, the other by Leonard) that amounted to thirty-one pages. Leonard’s hands trembled so much that Woolf had to set every page herself, letter by letter. A few days before Miss Weaver’s visit, she set a personal record when she completed a single page in an hour and fifteen minutes. They started their press in 1917 to give themselves freedom from editorial constraints, and when their work began, Virginia Woolf was, as she wrote in her diary, “the only woman in England free to write what I like.” They published authors that trade publishers didn’t find remunerative (like Joyce, perhaps), but Hogarth Press was not meant to be a printer for someone else’s imprint.

The Woolfs were also afraid to print
Ulysses
. Leonard Woolf showed the episodes to a couple of printers he knew, and both insisted that no reputable printer would touch it. The publisher and the printer, he was told, would face certain prosecution. To be free, apparently, one needed more than a press of one’s own.

Virginia Woolf cited only the practical reasons when she typed her cordial letter to Miss Weaver: “We have read the chapters of Mr Joyce’s novel with great interest, and we wish that we could offer to print it. But the length is an insuperable difficulty to us at present.” A novel of three hundred pages would take them at least two years to produce, she said, because they had a small handpress and no help. They regretted the decision very much, and she instructed her servants to return the manuscript quickly.

And there was yet another reason for the rejection, something more elemental: Virginia Woolf did not like
Ulysses
. A year later, she wrote a review in
The Times Literary Supplement
that initially praised Joyce as a writer who wished “to reveal the flickerings of that inmost flame which flashes its myriad messages through the brain.” He was, she wrote, admirably willing to disregard “coherence or any other of the handrails” that readers crave, and her backhanded praise led to a direct strike:
Ulysses
“fails, one might say simply, because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind.” She didn’t mean to disparage Joyce’s intellect. Rather, she meant that his imagination had gotten away from him—the magnitude of
Ulysses
outstripped the capacity of his mind to harness it.

Virginia Woolf didn’t know it yet, but her own mind was just beginning to work through Joyce’s project. Over a year later, after she had stopped paying attention to the installments in
The
Little Review
, T. S. Eliot dined with the Woolfs and couldn’t stop raving about
Ulysses
. It was after that meeting that she confessed in her diary, “what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce.” She then began to wonder exactly what it was she was trying to do.

—

READERS FAR LESS DISCERNING than Virginia Woolf have a right to feel alienated. At times,
Ulysses
reads like a book that wants
not
to communicate. A government official told Ezra Pound that British war censors were convinced the
Ulysses
installments were an elaborate spy code, and a reporter in Chicago said some of the episodes were so outlandish that, as Pound put it, they “had bitched the American market” for Joyce’s work.

The whole project of Homeric correspondences—embedding references to the
Odyssey
in modern Dublin—seems indulgent, and Joyce executes it so subtly that the novel can become a scavenger hunt for pedants. Leopold Bloom does not sail an Irish Aegean or vanquish cycloptic tyrants in Sandycove. Rather, glimmers of the
Odyssey
shine through in everyday gestures—a secondhand reference to Bloom’s “knockmedown cigar” is the burning pike that blinds the Cyclops, who is now the unnamed “Citizen” (“broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed”). A newspaper editor who speeds Bloom on his way to pick up an order for an ad is Aeolus, the god of the winds. The deafening sound of the presses churning out copy for the
Evening Telegraph
and the
Freeman’s Journal
, the endless rhetorical devices and the bloviating newspaper headlines throughout the chapter allude to Aeolus’s windbag foolishly opened by Ulysses’ men. But even astute readers wouldn’t necessarily know to look for windiness (metaphorical or literal) in the “Aeolus” episode because Joyce refused to have the Homeric chapter titles printed. As an added challenge, Joyce’s chapters aren’t even in the epic’s original order. The only Homeric handrail is the title of the book itself.

Some allusions are so obscure that their pleasure seems to reside in their remaining hidden. How were readers supposed to know that the directions Bloom and Stephen travel across Dublin to the
Evening Telegraph
offices correspond to the directions Ulysses and the Phoenician sailors travel as they approach the Aeolian Islands? Even beyond the Homeric parallels,
Ulysses
was bewildering. Each chapter was different. Month after month, another experiment appeared like a bizarre new creature from an unknown country. In 1919, Miss Weaver read the manuscript of the eleventh episode, “Sirens,” which begins:

Bronze by gold

heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.

Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Horrid! And gold flushed more.

A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is on the

Goldpinnacled hair.

A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.

Trilling, trilling: Idolores.

Peep! Who’s in the. . . . peepofgold?

Tink cried to bronze in pity.

And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.

Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping answer.

O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking.

Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.

Coin rang. Clock clacked.

It continues like that for two vertiginous pages. Miss Weaver began to worry about Joyce, and her response was delicate. “I think I can see that your writing has been affected to some extent by your worries,” and she repeated her hope that his health would improve as soon as he was able to leave Zurich’s poor climate. Pound was less delicate. He wrote to ask if he had “got knocked on the head or bit by a wild dog and gone dotty”—as soon as Joyce sent him something brilliant, he got rabid prose like this. Then it occurred to him. “
Caro mio
,” Pound wrote, “are you sending this chapter because you feel bound to send in copy on time?” He urged Joyce to take as much time as he needed.

But Joyce wasn’t rushing. In fact, he had begun working on the “Sirens” episode as early as 1915. Lydia Douce (with her bronze hair) and Mina Kennedy (with her golden hair) are barmaids at the Ormond Hotel, and Joyce imagined them as Sirens singing out to Ulysses as his ship passes their island. The chapter itself was a song: it was modeled after the eight-part structure of a fugue, and in those first pages Joyce adds an overture, an introduction to the musical sounds and phrases that would be repeated, contextualized and vested with meaning over the course of the chapter. In the opening of “Sirens,” the pure sound of the words is what matters. As the episode unfolds, those sounds find their locations in a narrative: the ringing steel of the horse’s hoofs carrying the viceroy past the hotel, the “long in dying” resonance of the blind man’s tuning fork, the jingle of coins in Blazes Boylan’s pocket as he leaves to see Molly Bloom in her bedroom at four o’clock—a meeting Bloom knows about. The overture requires readers to read in bewilderment as the meanings of words dissolve into their sounds. It requires readers to abandon, for a moment, their expectations of what words are supposed to do. They would have meaning in retrospect.

Ulysses
was changing radically in 1919. In the second half of the novel, Joyce began to move beyond Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. In “Wandering Rocks,” the tenth episode, an all-seeing eye follows twenty-seven characters over an hour and five minutes (Joyce calculated the actions precisely) in nineteen imbricated sections. Each moment includes a flashing glance at another event happening simultaneously somewhere else in Dublin. A one-legged sailor looking for alms passes two of the Dedalus sisters on their way home. Five sandwichmen plod down the street advertising a stationery store called Hely’s (each man bears a scarlet letter) while Blazes Boylan’s secretary wonders if a character in the novel she reads is in love with a woman named Marion. The undertaker closes his daybook while an arm on Eccles Street (Molly’s) tosses a coin to the one-legged sailor. Young Patrick Dignam, with his collar sticking up, carries pork steaks home for a wake and remembers the last time he saw his father, heading back to the pub. He hopes he’s now in purgatory.

“Wandering Rocks” is a montage of the city, and Bloom and Stephen become background figures caught in the frame as the camera pans across Dublin. Bloom is a “darkbacked figure” looking for a book for Molly in a hawker’s cart as Boylan buys a basket of fruit for her, coins already jingling in his pocket. At home, eleven minutes later, the Dedalus sisters eat yellow pea soup donated by a nun while a crumpled YMCA pamphlet declaring “Elijah is coming” floats down the Liffey, where Bloom threw it two chapters earlier. Joyce’s tendency to shift seamlessly from one perspective to another began with his long-standing objection to quotation marks. He thought they were unnatural—“perverted commas”—because they barricaded voices from narrative text, and he wanted words to flow through and around characters like water.
Ulysses
was becoming a river of voices.

—

ONE OF THE NEW
VOICES was Gerty MacDowell’s. In the late fall and winter of 1919, Joyce was writing the “Nausicaa” episode in small purple notebooks bound with string while harvesting inserts from various note sheets. In “Nausicaa,” Gerty MacDowell, perhaps seventeen years old, sits on a beachside rock near a church. It is eight in the evening, and Gerty is aware that a man (Leopold Bloom) is watching her from a distance. She fantasizes that he is a gentleman in one of the sentimental novels or magazine romances she reads. Joyce wrote Gerty’s thoughts: