The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (27 page)

—

JOYCE TOOK NEARLY
A MONTH to respond to Quinn’s urgent letter about the charges against the “Nausicaa” episode, and when he did, he sent a coded telegram.

Quinn’s office clerk, Mr. Watson, obtained a copy of the Scott’s code manual and translated Joyce’s message. “I have not received the telegram you mention. You will be receiving a letter upon this subject in a few days giving information and my views pretty fully. I think a little delay will not be disadvantageous.”

Quinn cabled back and insisted that Joyce cease serial publication immediately. If they were lucky, the DA might drop the charges. If they were unlucky, he would add more counts to the indictment. But Joyce wanted to keep his
Little Review
audience, and if he was unwilling to compromise for editors and printers, he was even more unwilling to compromise for law enforcement officials, no matter what his lawyer’s advice. Quinn received another telegram from Paris.

Watson decoded it: “Private and reliable information received. Number in dispute has been issued. Pending receipt of your letter matter will remain over.”

But the matter was far from over, and Quinn had to come up with a plan. The case was scheduled to go before a panel of three judges in December, and he decided he would file a motion for a jury trial instead, which would slow the process down. The transfer motion would have to be filed and scheduled for a hearing before an overworked grand jury could get around to issuing an indictment. By the time a jury of twelve was selected and the magazine convicted after a full trial, it would be the autumn of 1921, and as long as the legal proceedings were grinding forward, they could publish a private edition of
Ulysses
. That is, instead of selling the novel in bookstores, a publisher would print around one thousand high-quality copies and mail them directly to readers placing orders in advance.

Technically, the book would be legal before the ruling against
The
Little Review
was handed down, and Quinn figured Sumner and the DA were less likely to prosecute a book circulating privately than a magazine available to unsuspecting young women. A deluxe private publication could sell for as much as eight to ten dollars per copy, about four times more than the average book. At 15 to 20 percent royalties, Joyce could earn as much as two thousand dollars. All he would have to do is finish his novel before the legal clock ran out.

Quinn was trying to convince Ben Huebsch to publish a private edition of
Ulysses
, but the impending trial was making him leery. Huebsch was the obvious option for Joyce. He had published
Dubliners
and
A Portrait
, and he admired Joyce’s new book. Quinn urged him to sign a contract even before
The
Little Review
landed in court, and by December 1920 he decided that he and Huebsch needed to have “a showdown.” He wanted Huebsch to make an offer for
Ulysses
while the risks appeared as minimal as possible—the last thing Huebsch needed was to see the details of the trial in the newspapers.

The showdown was at Quinn’s apartment, and Quinn drew first: Joyce would never agree to any cuts or alterations, he told Huebsch, and it was a “practical certainty that if
Ulysses
were published here without any alteration of the text, it would be suppressed, involving your arrest and trial.” Quinn was starting, apparently, with the bad news. Huebsch already knew the good news. Boni & Liveright sold private editions of several daring books, and they escaped prosecution every time. While none of their books had indicted excerpts, Quinn assured Huebsch that magazines and books were judged by different legal standards: the more discreetly something circulated, the more likely it would escape prosecution. And a conviction against
The
Little Review
could be a
good
thing. It would end the serialization of
Ulysses
, and the demand would be higher if a few chapters hadn’t seen the light of day.

Quinn wanted fifteen hundred copies printed on high-quality paper and priced somewhere around ten dollars so that Joyce could get a royalty of two dollars per copy. That would give him three thousand dollars for
Ulysses
, more than Quinn mentioned to Joyce. But Huebsch was nervous, and when Quinn sensed that he wanted to see how the trial played out, he planned to approach Boni & Liveright for a quick contract. But without Joyce’s approval, he had to keep stalling.

—

QUINN FILED THE MOTION for a jury trial in January 1921, and in a concluding flourish he argued that the charges caused
The
Little Review
“serious financial loss.” The longer the ban continued, he claimed, the more it would damage their finances.
The
Little Review
struggled through 1920, and it went into a tailspin after Sumner walked into the Washington Square Book Shop. Quinn and his friends had withdrawn their financial support, leaving Anderson and Heap desperate for subscribers and benefactors. Over dinner with Anderson one night, a patron demanded sexual favors for his continued support. She was furious.
The Little Review
also needed content.
Ulysses
was, more or less, keeping the magazine afloat.

Jane Heap wrote to Joyce for the first time: “We cannot apologize for the recent deletions,” she wrote in green ink. “We can only suffer with you. Our entire May issue
was
burned by the Postal department and we were told brutally that we would be put out of business altogether if we didn’t stop ‘pulling that stuff.’” Then she turned to the pressing issue: the
Ulysses
installments were coming too slowly. They were parceling out the text in smaller chunks, but it wasn’t enough. Could he send short stories or poems? “We cannot pay well at present,” she confided. “We live only because we are able to fight like devils.”

Following the obscenity charges, Anderson and Heap halted publication for three months. In December 1920, they interrupted a performance of Eugene O’Neill’s
The Emperor Jones
at Washington Square’s Provincetown Playhouse and asked the audience for contributions to defend
Ulysses
and save the magazine from bankruptcy. Whatever they gathered at the theater, it was just enough to publish a December issue. The editors announced that the charges forced them to raise subscription prices from $2.50 to $4.00.

Meanwhile, Quinn pressed Joyce to finish
Ulysses
quickly. Sumner and the DA were increasingly impatient with procedural delays, and Huebsch, still inching toward an agreement, needed to publish it by the fall to avoid censorship. Joyce answered with another coded telegram saying that the finished manuscript was only a few months off, but he wanted more than two dollars per copy. “Make following counter proposal: $3 $3.50. Withdraw offer unless accepted immediately.”

Joyce reasoned that a limited edition of
Ulysses
—already longer than most private editions—could retail for more than ten dollars. But nobody made agreements like this “immediately”—even when the book
didn’t
have legal problems. Whether Joyce was too far removed from the situation in New York or too absorbed in his own writing, he simply wasn’t worried. He cabled again five days later in code: “In financial difficulties. Remit by telegraph as soon as possible two hundred dollars pending completion of contract.”

Quinn was astonished. Here was an impoverished author—barely able to afford a telegram—with criminal charges against a portion of what was already a long and difficult manuscript. The editors publishing his fiction were facing jail time for it, and instead of seizing any publication offer he could get—instead of thanking Quinn for trying to strong-arm a publisher into offering a contract for what would probably be a financial loss even if it
wasn’t
a legal mess—Joyce demanded nearly double the royalties and a two-hundred-dollar advance on a contract that didn’t even exist. Pound was right. James Joyce was completely unreasonable.

—

THE
L
ITTLE
R
EVIEW
TRIAL could not have happened at a worse time. Not only was Quinn shuttling back and forth to Washington, D.C., to prepare for the most important case of his life, but the country had fallen into an economic depression. Throughout 1920, wholesale prices were plunging due to a sudden drop in demand for U.S. products after the war. European agriculture recovered faster than anyone expected, and American farmers were left with large surpluses and crushing debt that ravaged both the farmers and the banks that financed them. Commodity prices dropped 46 percent in less than a year, and by 1921 Quinn found himself in the middle of a disaster. One of his biggest clients, the National Bank of Commerce, had holdings in hundreds of agriculture companies, all on the brink of collapse. Quinn himself lost thirty thousand dollars in securities that year, and there was no end in sight. “Clients, banks, corporations have lost money right and left. Soft spots developed where the surface seemed to be clean and hard. Failures, failures, failures!” Bankruptcies multiplied till corporate officers became hysterical. It was the third financial panic he had been through, and it was by far the worst—“a financial reign of terror.”

Quinn’s employees were at their wits’ end. One of his junior partners quit, and the other couldn’t handle his work because he was having domestic problems, spending late nights in Washington Square and, like Joyce, suffering acute attacks of iritis. Quinn worked on Sundays, Christmas and New Year’s Eve. He worked nights, canceled all private engagements and gave up daytime smoking breaks. The time he took to defend
The
Little Review
was costing him his sanity, not to mention thousands of dollars in lost fees from other cases, but he was unable to say no to an artist like Joyce. “The trouble with me,” he wrote to J. B. Yeats, the poet’s father, “is that I am too damned good-natured.”

But it was Miss Weaver’s good nature, above all, that allowed Joyce to write
Ulysses
amid war and recession, and she tried desperately to insulate him from the financial difficulties he created for himself. Miss Weaver had begun her patronage modestly. In 1916 she sent Joyce fifty pounds, ostensibly for serializing
A Portrait
in
The Egoist
, though it was nearly as much money as the magazine grossed in a year. In February 1917, the Egoist Press published
A Portrait
with Huebsch’s sheets, but circumstances dulled the occasion’s triumph. Joyce’s letters over the previous three months detailed his ongoing affliction, including several collapses he said were due to a nervous breakdown, and she got her first glimpse of Joyce’s likeness when he sent her the photograph that Pound had called “terrifying,” though the sight of Joyce’s eyes moved her to compassion rather than terror.

By 1919, Miss Weaver was collecting every press clipping about Joyce she could find and losing sleep over the draft episodes of
Ulysses
, but Joyce was still struggling. The Egoist Press’s second edition of
A Portrait
sold only 314 copies in over a year, and Joyce suffered multiple eye attacks in 1918 followed by yet another in February 1919. So at the end of that month, Miss Weaver became Joyce’s anonymous donor by giving him a £5,000 war bond yielding £250 in income annually. When Nora received the letter from Miss Weaver’s law firm, she rushed to meet Joyce in Zurich and danced a jig on the steps of the tram. Two months later, Miss Weaver revealed herself as the donor and begged him to forgive her lack of “delicacy and self-effacement.”

From that point forward, Miss Weaver’s patronage was candid. In August 1920 she bestowed another capital gift of £2,000. During the late stages of drafts and revisions on
Ulysses
, Joyce was earning £350 per year (equivalent to more than £11,000 today) from Miss Weaver’s two capital donations, and she padded this with several small gifts over the years. She wanted to repay Joyce for the freedom she felt when she read
A Portrait
by giving him the freedom to write a book unfettered by marketplace constraints. And she was not disappointed, for the new novel he was writing appeared to be constrained by nothing, to be the most ambitious novel anyone had ever written. Her investment also would have granted Joyce peace of mind if he were capable of living within his means, but the apartment he rented in Paris in December 1920 cost £300 per year, nearly everything she gave him, and a high rent was not the only indulgence. Nora dressed the family in fashionable clothes. Joyce was fond of fine restaurants, taxicabs and, of course, considerable drinking. He tipped everyone extravagantly—five-franc tips for one-franc drinks, as if he distrusted the money. Add Joyce’s medical bills and it’s easy to see how he was desperate for an advance on
Ulysses
by the beginning of 1921.

Years of patronage attenuated Joyce’s already weak sense of practicality, which is part of the reason he thought
The Little Review
should continue serializing
Ulysses
while John Quinn fought criminal charges. Ezra Pound was less concerned about
The
Little Review
charges now that Joyce had a patron—that, in Pound’s opinion, only made severing his connection with the magazine easier. Quinn, in fact, was the only person who understood the gravity of Joyce’s immediate legal problems, and the situation in New York became worse when Quinn’s motion for a jury trial was denied in February 1921. The judge sympathized with Quinn’s claims about the magazine’s finances, but the argument was a bit too clever. The judge sympathized so much that he decided to do the editors a favor: by denying a jury trial and holding the trial before the three judges of Special Sessions, the editors would get an earlier judgment and be back in business much sooner. Quinn received two days’ notice:
The
Little Review
was scheduled for trial on Friday, February 4.