The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (25 page)

In other words, Sumner refused to list any of the offensive passages. The New York Comstock Act criminalized anyone “who writes, prints, publishes, or utters, or causes to be written . . . any obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy disgusting or indecent book, picture, writing, paper.” This meant that if passages in
Ulysses
were obscene, it would be illegal to utter those obscenities in court or cause a stenographer to record them. The vice society thought that upholding the law meant not examining any of the material the law condemned—the accusation was the evidence. Sumner’s argument was not eccentric. In 1895 the Supreme Court ruled, “It is unnecessary to spread the obscene matter in all its filthiness upon the record.” It was enough to describe the matter’s “obnoxious character” in order to ascertain “the gist of the offense.”

Judge Corrigan had heard it before (it was the Society’s habitual gambit), but he insisted on examining the magazine himself. Quinn rushed to the courthouse while the judge read
The
Little Review
in his chambers, and when Corrigan emerged, he greeted the lawyer with a smile—they happened to be old friends.

Hearings like this were usually formalities, but Joyce’s legal problems might all end here if Judge Corrigan would simply dismiss the charges—though he could do that only if he deemed
Ulysses
patently innocent, and only a personal favor could inspire such an unlikely judgment. If Quinn were more pessimistic, he might have concluded that his loyalty to Joyce had shackled him to a sinking ship. Ezra Pound had resigned from
The Little Review
in frustration the previous year (the resignation didn’t last long), but the serialization of
Ulysses
continued. Quinn might have thought it fitting that Joyce and
The Little Review
could go down together because
Ulysses
and Margaret Anderson filled him with the same volatile mixture of disgust and attraction.

They forced him to think of the human body as something simultaneously teeming and thwarted. The image of Gerty MacDowell straining against the fabric of her clothing resembled what Quinn imagined was Anderson’s frustrated fertility. He wrote to Pound that her virginity, if she were a virgin, was “over-ripe, the thing that burst itself.” The “Lesbianisms” of Greenwich Village, the scrotumtightening sea of Manhattan’s immigrants and James Joyce’s epic of the human body all reminded Quinn of his own failing body and the lethal rupture to come. Joyce seemed to be making an art form out of the many ways death and decay could bloom within the living. Quinn’s mortality pursued him no matter how many artworks he purchased or how many cases he won.

A stirring courtroom argument did nevertheless stave off the feeling of death, and a defense of Joyce against obscenity charges required the sophisticated legal creativity he found envigorating. Quinn had to base his courtroom argument on mid-nineteenth-century British law, for the definition of obscenity that guided Anglo-American jurisprudence in 1920 was articulated by a British judge in 1868: “I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” This definition of obscenity became known as the Hicklin Rule, and it transformed obscenity law. Instead of targeting pornographers profiting from books that were offensive to “any well-regulated mind,” as the author of the Obscene Publications Act put it, the Hicklin Rule defined obscenity by a book’s effects on society’s most susceptible readers—anyone with a mind “open” to “immoral influences.” The purview of the law shifted from protecting well-regulated minds to sheltering ill-regulated minds. Lecherous readers and excitable teenage daughters could deprave and corrupt the most sophisticated literary intent.

The Hicklin Rule inspired Quinn to argue that a book couldn’t be filthy if it was unintelligible or disgusting or private. “You could not take a piece of literature up in an aeroplane fifteen thousand feet into the blue sky, where there would be no spectator, and let the pilot of the machine read it out and have it denounced as ‘filthy,’ within the meaning of the law.” It had to “corrupt” or “deprave” a mind, and judges generally read “corruption” as a synonym for “arousal.” What this implied was that if Gerty were ugly—if she were entirely unarousing—she would be legal. Quinn continued: “If a young man is in love with a woman and his mother should write to him saying: ‘My boy, the woman you are infatuated with is not a beautiful woman . . . She sweats, she stinks, she is flatulent. Her flesh is discolored, her breath is bad. She makes ugly noises when she eats and discharges other natural functions’”—the mother would be writing ugly truths for her son’s moral benefit. Gerty MacDowell, Quinn argued, similarly sends men running toward virtue. He insisted that Joyce was like Swift or Rabelais: he was not an artist of corrupting beauty. He was an artist of ugly truths.

It was not clear what, precisely, Quinn found so disgusting about Gerty MacDowell.

She leaned back far

to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart his hoarse breathing.

Were readers supposed to be disgusted by Gerty because she is mawkish or because, as we discover later in the chapter, she is lame? One of the Joycean touches is that reality topples Bloom’s fantasy when Gerty limps away pages after her beautifully shaped legs appear. If that’s what makes her unappealing, surely Joyce’s story was at least plausibly filthy under the law.

A single word in the Hicklin Rule—a word that Quinn studiously ignored—dramatically expanded judges’ authority by making censorship a preemptive activity. Publishers, booksellers, printers and writers were liable not just for corrupted readers but for a publication’s “
tendency
” to corrupt. By focusing on a book’s hypothetical effects on hypothetical readers, the Hicklin Rule made an obscenity judgment a feat of the imagination—for certainly the judge himself was above such “immoral influences.” Rather, it was his task to determine whether the book would deprave someone entirely unlike him. Judge Corrigan would have to peer into the mind of Ogden Brower’s young daughter (herself peering into the mind of Gerty MacDowell) and imagine her potential reactions. The law required the judge to be a bit like Joyce.

Quinn could be right about Joyce’s moral lessons and ugly truths, and it still wouldn’t matter. So long as there was some measure—any measure—of potentially corrupting beauty, Joyce’s episode was illegal. Gerty’s charms got
Ulysses
indicted for obscenity as Judge Corrigan decided to hold the editors of
The
Little Review
for trial. Quinn retorted that his decision proved he had a dirty mind. It was a sly comment—almost a jab. Was Corrigan
aroused
when he read the magazine in his chambers? Corrigan merely smiled as he made out the warrant for the imprisonment of Anderson and Heap and set their bail at twenty-five dollars each, which Quinn reluctantly paid.

Quinn didn’t even entertain the possibility of an acquittal. He had warned Joyce about the cultural climate: “There have been a good many arrests and prosecutions of publishers of books in New York recently. There was a perfect orgy of sex stuff published,” and if Joyce tried publishing
Ulysses
without deletions, the copies and plates would be seized and destroyed, the book would be banned from both the mail system and the private express companies, and the publisher would face a heavy fine and jail sentence. No American publisher would touch Joyce’s book once the “Nausicaa” episode was convicted. And Sumner was determined to convict it.

14.

John Sumner patrolled the streets of New York City, and if he found indecent artworks or window displays, he ordered proprietors to remove them. He wasn’t a special agent of the Post Office like Comstock, but he assumed quasi-official powers anyway. He unlocked and searched mailboxes for felonious packages. He accompanied officers on raids and stakeouts. He gathered evidence, obtained warrants, seized materials, arrested suspects and served as the complaining witness in court when the DA prosecuted. And when books were deemed obscene, he supervised the burnings himself. Sumner cast a wide net. He would threaten fourteen-year-olds with jail time in order to find out exactly where they got the dirty books and pictures hidden in their desks. In 1919, one of his men teamed up with an officer to eject six male cross-dressers and several scantily clad women from an indecent party. It was Tammany Hall’s Halloween Ball.

Sumner operated like a single-minded intelligence officer piecing together a network of urban vice, and the biggest trove of information came from letters, phone calls and anonymous tips about nuisances ranging from immoral neighbors and exhibitionists to obscene bathroom drawings and garden statuary. People asked the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to track down unfaithful spouses, eloping teenagers and perverts harassing innocent sailors on shore leave. Sumner watched countless plays, musicals, movies and burlesque performances. He bought every questionable book and magazine issue he could find. He served as a conduit of information for smaller vice societies and law enforcement officials around the country, and he lobbied senators, governors and mayors for stronger laws.

John Sumner’s great virtue was that he professionalized Anthony Comstock’s belligerence. “Years ago fighting methods had to be used,” Sumner said when he assumed his office. “Now it is brains.” The NYSSV hired Sumner as an assistant secretary in 1913 because they thought his mild demeanor would moderate Comstock’s excesses. Soon after Sumner joined the Society, he found himself breaking up fights between Comstock and his own men—their accountant used to peek through his keyhole to avoid his boss lumbering down the hallway. When Sumner took charge of the Society in 1915, he was still contending with the forty-year legacy of a single man—with the specter of Comstock himself.

In 1872, Anthony Comstock was a barrel-chested, small-town upstart with extravagant muttonchops and a tense upper lip. He was twenty-eight years old, going bald before his time, and he brought down New York’s pornography industry single-handedly. He waded through basement shops in the Lower East Side, asked for items behind counters and in back rooms, feigned interest with every peddler and crony who approached him and rummaged through desultory stacks of magazines and novels in newsstands. Comstock declared 165 different books indisputably obscene and began escorting police officers to pornographers to ensure their arrest. He interrogated suspects and traced the supply chain back to middlemen, publishers, printers and bookbinders in order to find the criminals and destroy the inventory. He once hijacked a wagon filled with steel and copper printing plates and took them to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where a professor destroyed them with acid. In eight months, Comstock had forty-five people arrested. Two months after the Comstock Act was signed in 1873, the YMCA’s financial backers founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and Anthony Comstock became the head of what would soon be the most powerful vice society in the United States. He was, as he put it, “a weeder in the garden of the Lord.”

Moral reformers like Comstock took matters into their own hands because the New York City police were corrupt, ineffective and barely professionalized. New York didn’t even have a police department until 1845, partly because New Yorkers were afraid of what a mayoral despot could do with a club-wielding army. The qualms subsided by the 1870s. Before long, Comstock could arrest pornographers as either a special agent of the Post Office or as a deputy sheriff, and by the end of his career he claimed more than three thousand convictions totaling 565 years, eleven months and twenty days of prison time. Comstock enjoyed measuring the dimensions of his righteousness. He counted 2,948,168 obscene pictures burned. 28,428 pounds of stereotype printing plates destroyed. 318,336 “obscene rubber articles” confiscated. Sixteen dead bodies. He measured the books he destroyed by the ton: fifty.

But stamping out obscenity was surprisingly dangerous. NYSSV agents received death threats. Packages addressed to Comstock contained poisons, infected bandages and collections of smallpox scabs. One day, while opening a heavy box, he heard an ominous click. The box contained shards of glass packed tightly between canisters of rifle powder and sulfuric acid. A piece of emery swung across match ends by a rubber band was supposed to ignite a fuse when the box was opened. The explosion would launch the shards of glass into his chest and face. Then the sulfuric acid would eat away at the wounds.

In 1874, Comstock apprehended a one-handed man named Charles Conroy for the third time, and when the carriage halted at the jailhouse gates, Conroy pulled a three-inch blade from his coat pocket and swung for Comstock’s head, cutting through his hat and grazing his scalp. Comstock had a badge, but he didn’t know how to search a prisoner properly. As he fumbled for the door latch, Conroy plunged the knife into his face, severing an artery and opening the flesh to the bone. Comstock threw open the carriage door, and as the prisoner emerged behind him, he drew his revolver and placed it against Conroy’s head. Blood was still spurting from the gash in Comstock’s face when the jailer ran out to assist him.

—

TO VICE HUNTERS like Comstock and Sumner, violence was a manifestation of the chaos that obscenity created. Censorship was preemptive—judges and juries banned books based on their tendencies rather than their consequences—because governments saw pornography as a threat to civil society. The basis of the Hicklin Rule was an eighteenth-century legal treatise declaring that banning words with “a pernicious tendency is necessary for the preservation of peace and good order, of government and religion—the only solid foundation of civil liberty.” Censorship wasn’t just about sex. It was about preserving a tenuous public order.