The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (29 page)

A monkey puzzle rocket burst, spluttering in darting crackles. Zrads and zrads, zrads, zrads. And Cissy and Tommy ran out to see and Edy after with the pushcar and then Gerty beyond the curve of the rocks. Will she? Watch! Watch! See! Looked round. She smelt an onion. Darling, I saw your. I saw all.

Joyce baffled. The text didn’t even have proper punctuation, which, Quinn suggested, was the unfortunate result of Joyce’s poor eyesight. The DA became so outraged at this insult to the court’s intelligence that he launched into a red-faced invective, at which point Quinn broke in and pointed to the prosecutor, “This is my best exhibit! There is proof
Ulysses
does not corrupt or fill people full of lascivious thoughts. Look at him!” Almost involuntarily, they looked. “Does a reading of that chapter want to send him to the arms of a whore? Is he filled with sexual desire? Not at all. He wants to murder somebody! He wants to send Joyce to jail. He wants to send those two women to prison. He would like to disbar me. He is full of hatred, venom, anger and uncharitableness. But lust? There is not a drop of lust or an ounce of sex passion in his whole body.  . . . .
He
is my chief exhibit as to the effect of
Ulysses
.”

In his concluding statements, Quinn tried to put the prosecution in a logical bind. Readers would either understand the episode from
Ulysses
or they wouldn’t. The readers who couldn’t understand
Ulysses
would, by definition, not be corrupted by it. And the few readers who could understand it would either be captivated by its “experimental, tentative, revolutionary” style or else they would be repulsed or bored. Either way, the vulnerable young women of New York were protected from corruption by their own naïveté. Joyce’s chapter was inscrutable to all but the most sophisticated readers, readers that the state of New York did not need to worry about.

“It’s just the story of a lady’s lingerie,” Quinn said.

“The lady is
in
the lingerie,” a judge responded.

Quinn had the two older judges exactly where he wanted them—befuddled and amenable to his authority, but Judge Kernochan was different. “He is an ass without the slightest glimmer of culture, but he knows the meaning of words,” Quinn later wrote to Joyce.

After the judges conferred, Kernochan pronounced Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap guilty of violating the New York state law against obscenity. To keep the editors out of prison, Quinn certified that “Nausicaa” was the most offensive chapter in the book, but the judges still weren’t sure how seriously the women should be punished. One of them asked Sumner if there were any prior complaints regarding the magazine. Sumner glanced at Margaret Anderson, her full lips heavily rouged. Sensing the stakes of the question, he gallantly pushed the other suppressed issues under the pile of papers in front of him. “Not at all,” he said.

Whether it was because it was their first time in court or because the judges pitied their ignorance, Judge McInerney announced a penalty he considered “very lenient.” The judges ordered Anderson and Heap to serve ten days in prison or pay a fine of one hundred dollars, an amount they almost certainly didn’t have. Luckily, one of the ladies gathered in the courtroom, a wealthy Chicagoan named Joanna Fortune, kept Anderson and Heap out of jail by paying the fine herself.

Newspaper reporters and Greenwich Villagers crowded around as the Girl Editors were hauled off to be fingerprinted. Somewhere in the bustle of the crowd a young man called out, “That chapter was a bit disgusting.”

Jane Heap shouted back, “Is it a crime to be disgusting?”

Now that the proceedings were over, they were eager to break their silence. The question of obscenity “should be left to us experts,” Anderson told the newsmen, rather than to smut hounds like Sumner. “Give an artist a moral and he will lose his art.” And then she gave a plug: “
The
Little Review
is the only medium through which the artist may enjoy his place in the sun.”

Anderson decided that if the law insisted on treating her like a delicate creature, then the men would have to take a delicate creature’s fingerprints. She examined the inkpad. She wanted more towels, she said, and one of the men hastened to retrieve them. She wanted better soap, she said, and they managed to find something more suitable. She wanted a nail brush, she said, and by some feat of resourcefulness they supplied even that. Miss Margaret C. Anderson reluctantly submitted her hands to the pad while the men assured her that the ink wouldn’t stain.

The prospects for the publication of
Ulysses
in the United States were bleak, and Quinn felt genuine remorse. He wrote to Anderson, “I thought of Joyce and of his need for the money and that he was abroad and out of touch with things here, and perhaps not in the best of health. And I remembered how hard it was for serious writers to live in these years and months and days . . . I have done the best I could, and I failed.” Word spread that the Post Office had sent the seized copies of
The
Little Review
to the Salvation Army, where fallen women in reform programs were instructed to tear them apart.

—

ANDERSON AND HEAP were lucky. No one at the
Little Review
trial noticed the most scandalous aspect of “Nausicaa,” the obscurity at the heart of the episode: while Gerty MacDowell is leaning back on the rocks, Leopold Bloom is masturbating. The judges, the reporters, the innocent girl’s father and John Sumner himself missed it, which is understandable. Even if one were looking for something so improbably, outlandishly offensive, it wasn’t easy to find. When Gerty limps away, Bloom “recomposed his wet shirt,” but Pound had cut the word
wet.
A few pages later, the manuscript read, “O sweety. All your little white up I saw. Dirty girl. Made me do love sticky.” Pound crossed out “up I saw. Dirty girl” and, prudently, “love sticky” so that
The Little Review
’s version was more discreet though less coherent: “O sweety all your little white I made me do we too naughty darling.” An especially astute reader might connect Bloom’s “hoarse breathing” and his face’s “whitehot passion” several pages earlier, but the blue garters and nainsook knickers tend to steal the show.

If Anderson and Heap knew, they pretended not to, and Quinn himself may not have noticed if Pound hadn’t clued him in. Joyce, he told Quinn, was bent on mentioning “every possible physical secretion.” One of the only people who detected it was Judge Corrigan at the preliminary hearing. He held the editors for trial, despite knowing Quinn, because, he said, of “the episode where the man went off in his pants,” which was illegal beyond all doubt. When Quinn mocked Corrigan for having a dirty mind, what he meant was that an innocent judge wouldn’t have seen it—after all, it took a lascivious mind to find an orgasm in those bursting Roman candles.

So in the wake of the “Nausicaa” conviction, Joyce decided to make the tableau a bit more explicit. He restored “love sticky” and the wetness to Bloom’s shirt, of course, and he added a new insert as Gerty leans back: “His hands and face were working and a tremour went over her.” As with all of his revisions, Joyce was recalibrating: he wanted the details of his story to be just obscure enough to be found. He had a childlike desire to be searched for and discovered behind the couch or in a cupboard. When people couldn’t see the Homeric correspondences in
Ulysses
, Joyce tabulated them in a handy chart. And when the key he provided threatened to become too public, he forbade publishers from printing it.

The question Joyce had asked Nora before they left Ireland remained with him his entire life: “Is there one who understands me?” The coins jingling in Boylan’s pocket, Gerty’s fantasy about Bloom’s foreign name, the knock-medown cigar hinting at the blinded Cyclops and Bloom’s hoarse breathing are secrets waiting to be understood. Meanings in
Ulysses
are coy thrills. They are only partially revealed so as to draw people closer.
Ulysses
is difficult because Joyce was lonely. He was sentimental, prone to fantasy as well as rumination, and he beckoned readers onward through teases written into his book inch by inch. If Joyce resembles someone on that beach, it is not Leopold Bloom. Joyce is Gerty.

17.

One night in April 1921, Joyce heard a frantic knocking at his door. The unexpected guest was Mrs. Harrison, the “Circe” episode’s ninth typist. The last time a typist rang his doorbell, she had thrown the manuscript at his feet and fled before he could say a word. Typists expected to work from a fair copy, a neatly rewritten draft, but Joyce sent the “Circe” fair copy to John Quinn as soon as it was finished. Quinn was purchasing the manuscript bit by bit, and Joyce needed the money, so the remaining manuscript was nearly one hundred pages of sclerotic handwriting with arrows and inserts loaded onto the pages. Four typists flatly refused the job when they saw it. Joyce told Sylvia Beach that another typist “threatened in despair to throw herself out of the window.”

Beach took this as Joyce’s way of asking for help, so she gave the manuscript to her sister Cyprian, a silent-film actress. Cyprian would wake up before dawn and decipher Joyce’s writing line by line before going to the movie studio. When her film took her to other locations, she gave the manuscript to Raymonde Linossier, one of the only female barristers in Paris. Linossier’s father, a famous physician, forbade her from consorting with Left Bank artists, and to evade her father’s control she became secretive with her talents. She enrolled in law school partly to use studying as an alibi for literary trysts at La Maison des Amis des Livres and Shakespeare and Company. When
The
Little Review
published Linossier’s five-page “novel” under a pseudonym, she kept her copies hidden and never wrote again. Nevertheless, when Cyprian Beach gave her the “Circe” manuscript she typed out the eccentric brothel scenes while her suddenly ill father convalesced in the next room. She admired
Ulysses
, but after forty-five pages, even she had to quit.

The wandering manuscript then fell into the hands of Mrs. Harrison, Linossier’s friend and the wife of a gentleman employed at the British embassy. When Mr. Harrison found portions of Joyce’s manuscript on his wife’s desk he began reading what appeared to be a delusional play in Dublin’s redlight district. The characters included “A Whore,” “Biddy the Clap” and “Cunty Kate.” Lord Tennyson appears out of nowhere wearing a Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels. King Edward VII shows up sucking on a red date and officiates a fight. Moments later, he’s levitating. A soldier tugs at his belt and threatens, “I’ll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.”

A few pages later, Dublin is on fire. Amid the pandemonium (warfare, mortal shrieks, brimstone fires), Father Malachi O’Flynn celebrates a black mass.

FATHER O’FLYNN

THE REVEREND MR LOVE

To the devil which hath made glad my youth.

FATHER O’FLYNN

Corpus meum.

THE REVEREND MR LOVE

My body.

The soldier shouts out again, “I’ll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!”

Harrison flew into a rage. He began tearing up the manuscript, throwing pages into the fire. His wife heard the commotion, rushed into the room to stop him and hid what was left of “Circe” before he could burn any more of it. “Hysterical scenes followed,” Joyce explained to Quinn, “in the house and in the street.” Joyce begged Mrs. Harrison to retrieve the rest of the manuscript as quickly as possible. When she returned the next morning with the remnants, Joyce discovered that the husband had burned several pages of material from both his wife’s typescript
and
the original manuscript. The only complete copy of “Circe” was on a steamship bound for New York.

John Quinn was in the midst of his last-ditch efforts to get a contract for
Ulysses
with Ben Huebsch, who, despite the
Little Review
conviction, did not want to relinquish his rights. When Quinn forced a decision, Huebsch finally refused to publish
Ulysses
in any edition, public or private, unless Joyce agreed to deletions. Quinn thought it was a wise decision. As remarkable as Joyce’s book was, Quinn wrote to Huebsch, “it is better to lose twenty
Ulysses
than spend thirty days in Blackwell’s Island for one.” Joyce was not the only one who took pleasure in searing honesty.

Quinn called up Horace Liveright to secure an immediate deal for a private edition of
Ulysses
, and he was not disappointed. On April 21, Boni & Liveright made the offer that Quinn had been trying to pull off for the better part of a year. But the deal fell apart in a few hours. That same day, a package from Paris arrived at Quinn’s office containing the long-awaited manuscript of “Circe,” and Quinn was aghast. One scene details Bloom’s masochistic punishment, in which the prostitutes in Bella Cohen’s brothel hold him down (the cook comes out to help) while Bella, who transformed into a man a few pages earlier, squats over Bloom, smothers him with her/his buttocks and farts in his face. Bloom is then commanded to empty the brothel’s piss pots or else “lap it up like champagne” shortly before he turns into a woman and is auctioned off as a sex slave. Anyone who published it—publicly, privately, in an aeroplane at fifteen thousand feet—would be convicted. He called Liveright back and told him to forget about
Ulysses
. The book was a legal nightmare. Liveright was disappointed, “but I guess you’re right,” he wrote to Quinn. “We’d all go to jail in a hurry if we published it except in a horribly castrated edition.”