The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (26 page)

The absence of strong law enforcement made obscenity seem more alarming because officials relied on moral rectitude to help regulate the excesses of urban life. Explicitly sexual material—whether it was written by James Joyce or a knife-wielding smut peddler—threatened that moral order. A character like Gerty MacDowell, it seemed, would lure young women to unwed motherhood, where they would raise morally stunted children. To broadcast Gerty’s behavior in a magazine would create more young women just like her, and a generation of Gerty MacDowells was enough to honeycomb the foundations of society. Moral reformers like Comstock had always seen the fight against obscene literature as more than a moral crusade. They saw it as an essential civic duty.

In fact, the Anglo-American definition of obscenity was so strict because it was written not to contain an outbreak of lustful readers but to quell widespread civil disorder in Victorian England. After British Parliament passed the Obscene Publications Act in 1857, British courts still had to decide what obscenity was, and the opportunity came in an 1868 case against an anti-Catholic pamphlet entitled
The Confessional Unmasked
. The pamphlet was a series of excerpts from theological tracts designed to prepare Catholic priests for questions they might receive from parishioners confessing their sins. Are looks or filthy words between married couples sinful? (Sometimes.) Does a husband sin mortally if he does not spend his seed after commencing copulation? (Not if both parties consent.) Was it a sin to think about your deceased wife while having intercourse with your second wife? (Yes.) Does a widow sin by deriving pleasure from memories of intercourse? (Yes, grievously.) Is it
always
a mortal sin if a husband “introduces his ———— into the mouth of the wife?” (Opinions vary.)

It’s doubtful anyone would have bothered to read the legalistic prose had
The Confessional Unmasked
been about anything other than illicit sex: “It is asked, 2ndly, whether, and in what manner, married parties sin by copulating in an unnatural posture?” The answer was that “an unnatural position is, if coition takes place in a different manner, viz., by sitting, standing, lying on the side, or from behind, after the manner of cattle; or if the man lies under the woman.” All of these positions were sinful.

The Confessional Unmasked
was an exposé of Catholicism’s lecherous sacraments, and it was incontestably obscene. To Victorians, any discussion of unnatural sexual practices (even in the most unarousing terms) was more than depraved. For some of the pamphlet’s readers, it was a revelation of depravity—it would conjure thoughts that people would not have otherwise imagined.

When the case came before the Queen’s Bench, the justices of the high court summarily outlawed the pamphlet. And while they were at it, the Lord Chief Justice of England, Alexander Cockburn, crafted the stringent Hicklin Rule, though he was by no means a prude. In fact, Cockburn earned a reputation as a mediocre judge, a social gadabout and a philanderer (he once climbed through the window of Rougemont Castle’s robing room to escape being caught in a tryst). Though he never married, he fathered two illegitimate children, and when the prime minister offered him a peerage in 1864, Queen Victoria refused him the honor, citing his “notoriously bad moral character.” Yet the disquieting circumstances surrounding
The Confessional Unmasked
turned even Lord Cockburn into a moralist. During the trial, the defense attorney avoided discussing the pamphlet’s consequences as much as possible, but it didn’t matter because everyone in the courtroom already knew: the consequence of
The Confessional Unmasked
was widespread rioting.

The case began when a police officer in the midland city of Wolverhampton seized 252 copies of the pamphlet from a metal broker who was selling them for a shilling. The seller was a member of the Protestant Electoral Union, whose goal was to elect members of Parliament who would “maintain the Protestantism of the Bible and the LIBERTY OF BRITAIN.” The Union specialized in incendiary propaganda, and its most notorious speaker was an Irishman named William Murphy, who railed against Catholic depredations and incited angry Irish mobs wherever he went. It wasn’t until his visit to Wolverhampton in 1867 that the authorities and the British press began paying closer attention. During Murphy’s first lecture, Irishmen hurled stones through the lecture hall’s windows, injuring several people, and Murphy was able to lecture on
The Confessional Unmasked
only by turning the lecture hall into a citadel surrounded by hundreds of police officers, military cavalrymen and recently sworn-in constables. The sectarian tension was intolerable, so when local authorities discovered who was selling
The Confessional Unmasked
, they searched his house and seized his copies.

While the Union appealed the obscenity charges, Catholic-Protestant tensions worsened. Murphy promised to prove to the people of Birmingham that “every Popish priest is a murderer, a cannibal, a liar and a pickpocket.” When his lecture was over, Catholics invaded Protestant houses and broke apart the furniture. Protestants retaliated by vandalizing a Catholic church, marching to Birmingham’s Irish district with staves, breaking into houses and carrying off furniture while singing “Glory, Glory Hallelujah.” During the week of rioting, the Union sold roughly thirty thousand copies of
The Confessional Unmasked
. Purchasing the pamphlet became an act of solidarity.

By the time the case came before the Queen’s Bench,
The Confessional Unmasked
was indeed a threat to peace and good order throughout the midlands. Murphy’s lectures in Ashton-under-Lyne spurred Protestant uprisings that left twenty Irish houses ransacked and one Irishman dead, and the sectarian anger became fodder for a group of Irish nationalists called the Fenians, who, in 1867, attacked Chester Castle, shot a police sergeant dead and bombed Clerkenwell Prison, killing twelve and wounding fifty. The riots and bombs made the pamphlet’s political intentions irrelevant. What mattered were its consequences.

The fact that a sexually explicit pamphlet could cause such mayhem drove Cockburn to a conclusion about all texts in a literate society: words were dangerous, and the law had to guard against their damaging effects before the public suffered from them. But what would happen when the effects of a book weren’t so clear—when there weren’t riots in the streets? Everything that made the Hicklin case compelling also made it difficult for Lord Cockburn to craft a broad legal principle. It was easy, in the wake of the Murphy Riots, to forget that a “pernicious tendency” was difficult to spot. It was easy to insist that a book should be burned before it had a chance to be read.

—

JUDGE COCKBURN’S rule of preemptive censorship dovetailed perfectly with a religious zealot’s anxieties about purity in a world of sin. Anthony Comstock and John Sumner fought so ardently to eliminate immoral books and images because they believed the most effective way to serve God was to attack the seeds of sin before they could be sown—to quash a book’s pernicious tendencies before they could destroy families and communities. Lust was the most pernicious of sins. It was the first stumble that could drag a sinner into a life of evil. Lust led to the brothel, and the brothel led to disease. Lust weakened both the body and the mind. It ruined marriages. It compelled deceit. It promoted indolence and reckless behavior. It blinded its victims to consequences and sapped the sense of responsibility that kept society from anarchy.

Comstock’s understanding of lust’s destructiveness was a more colorful version of the beliefs written into the British and American legal traditions: “There is,” Comstock wrote, “no other force at work in the community more insidious, more constant in its demands, or more powerful and far-reaching than lust.” It was, he wrote, “
the boon companion of all other crimes
.” Lust’s influence was strongest on the young. Comstock imagined it as a vulture plunging into children’s entrails, or a terrifying monster standing over the beds of sleeping children and waiting to slip into their minds as soon as they awoke. It was advertised everywhere, and society’s most precious citizens were the most vulnerable to the lures of the imagination.

The fear of pornography was neither ignorant nor blindly dogmatic. In fact, Comstock was applying the wisdom of the past two centuries. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers emphasized the importance of education and exterior influences on who we are. Our minds and moral habits arose from our responses to the outside world. Consciousness was like a blanket of snow waiting to receive the slightest impressions. We weren’t born as the people we are today. We were, for the most part, made. Comstock quoted the philosopher John Locke to underscore the consequences of the smallest impressions on “our tender infancies.” Locke thought people resembled rivers in the way that slight adjustments at their origins could lead them to vastly different destinations. “I imagine the minds of children as easily turned this way or that, as water itself,” Locke wrote. His insight wasn’t liberating. It was terrifying. When virtue and vice do not arise exclusively from within—when the influences of an entire community play a role in each individual’s struggle of conscience—then one was not merely responsible for oneself. One was responsible for everyone. This was Anthony Comstock’s moral burden, and the load would never lighten.

The most diabolical aspect of pornography was that it exploited the mind’s gifts. Memory and imagination tormented the lust-ridden individual. Years after a sinner embarked upon a virtuous life, the smallest cue—a gesture, a name, a song—could unleash words and images planted in the mind like time bombs. A drunk could sober up. A glutton could fast. An infidel could find God. But one could never be free from the impression that an obscene image or story made—a book read once will stay with you forever.

In 1915, Comstock was dying of pneumonia. His hacking cough brought up blood, and though he found it difficult to breathe, let alone speak, he requested a stenographer to come to his bedside so he could dictate his last instructions to his successor. John Sumner was appointed to lead the NYSSV the following morning, September 22 (his birthday), and regardless of the instructions he was given, he abandoned Comstock’s policy of prosecuting contraceptive manufacturers and returned the NYSSV to its original mission: the pursuit of dirty books, magazines and pictures. Any vice society leader had to be as dogged as the pornographers he pursued, but Sumner would do it with more finesse than brutality. He emphasized public outreach by writing open letters to newspapers and engaging in high-profile debates with people like Clarence Darrow in the hopes of winning approval through the force of reason. And yet Sumner’s sensible veneer covered an intensity that made him more akin to Comstock than he would ever admit. As John Sumner patrolled New York, threatening high school students, raiding parties and burning books, Anthony Comstock loomed over his shoulder like a ghost.

15.

I am working like a galley-slave, an ass, a brute,” James Joyce wrote in a letter. “I cannot even sleep. The episode of
Circe
has changed me too into an animal.” By December 1920, he was suffering from another episode of iritis in a dark apartment on rue Raspail. His eyes had gotten worse since his surgery, and the heat from the gas stove, he thought, was the only thing warding off a full-blown attack of glaucoma. Joyce was so cold in their last residential hotel that he wrote with blankets over his shoulders and a shawl wrapped around his head. He wrote whenever he wasn’t bedridden with fits of pain, and he thought about writing whenever he was. He started “Circe” in April 1920 and estimated it would take three months to complete. By December, he was on his ninth draft, and “Circe” was still expanding, insert by insert, as he drove his pen late into the night, his pupils gaping in the room’s meager light.

Joyce finally reached the midnight of his book. In the “Circe” episode, Leopold Bloom follows Stephen Dedalus into Nighttown, where an elaborate fantasy unfolds in Bella Cohen’s brothel on Tyrone Street before Bloom rescues Stephen from a fight with British soldiers, brushes the dirt off his shoulders and walks him home. Nothing was interior now—there were no thoughts, no fears, no memories or nightmares that were not acted out for the people in the brothel to see, and the brothel contained everyone.

The presiding spirit was the enchantress in Homer’s epic who turns Ulysses’ men into swine. Before wily Ulysses approaches Circe’s hall to rescue his men, the god Hermes gives him an herb that will protect him from her spell. The herb that saves Ulysses is called Moly (things like this were no coincidence). Joyce wondered if the word
syphilis
had its origins in Circe—perhaps it was Greek:
. Su
+
philis
. “Swine love,” the spell that drove men to brute madness. After Ulysses compels Circe to transform his men back into humans, she regales them with a celebration that lasts a full year. Joyce toiled on “Circe” months longer than he planned. The episode became at turns a carnival, a nightmare, a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Miracles are performed and humiliations enacted. Genders change. Hours dance. Moths speak.

Nearly everything and everyone the reader has seen through the day returns as a nightmare. Gerty MacDowell reproaches Bloom (“Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.”). Blazes Boylan tosses him a coin and hangs his hat on Bloom’s antlered head (“I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?”). Bloom shakes hands with the blind stripling (“My more than brother!”). “Bronze by gold,” the prostitutes whisper. The nanny goat, dropping currants, ambles by. Father Dolan emerges to upbraid Stephen for the glasses he broke in
A Portrait
when he was six years old (“lazy idle little schemer”). The ghost of Stephen’s mother, like Joyce’s mother, appears with green bile trickling from her mouth (he asks her to tell him that she loves him). Bloom’s father, who committed suicide years ago, touches Bloom’s face with “vulture talons.” The long-awaited Elijah finally arrives and begins to dispense judgment (“No yapping, if you please . . . ”). Rudy, Bloom’s son, appears as he would have if he had survived infancy.