The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (30 page)

Days later, when Quinn read Joyce’s distressed letter informing him that the original “Circe” manuscript had been burned, he was pleased. He hoped the hysteria in the Harrison household would bring Joyce to his senses. “I rather admire that husband,” he wrote to Joyce. “He was playing the game right, shielding her, protecting her, guarding her, and learning what she was doing, and disapproving where disapproval was due.” If an obscenity conviction in a New York court didn’t halt
Ulysses’
prospects, the spell of Circe did. With Huebsch and Liveright out of the picture, and London printers unwilling to set even the “decorous” episodes, the novel had no viable publishing options in the United States or Britain. And the worst of
Ulysses
was yet to come.

—

SYLVIA BEACH’S OFFER happened casually, as if she and Joyce had been preparing themselves since they shook hands in André Spire’s library and now all they needed to do to launch the ship was break the bottle. Joyce, disconsolate, went to Shakespeare and Company and told Miss Beach about the “Nausicaa” conviction in New York. “My book will never come out now,” he said. Her question, when she asked it, was an answer to Joyce’s unspoken proposal. “Would you like me to publish
Ulysses
?”

“I would.”

Sylvia Beach had never published so much as a pamphlet. She had no experience marketing or publicizing a new book, no background with distributors or printers, no familiarity with plates or proofs or galleys. She had no capital, and she could only guess about costs and financing. Advertising would have to be based on circulars, charitable press and word of mouth. She knew almost nothing about the legal complications of the publishing industry, in France or anywhere else, to say nothing of the complications facing a book convicted of obscenity before it was even a book. She knew the “Circe” episode was more offensive than anything in
The
Little Review
, and she knew it would get worse.

Despite all of this, she decided that Shakespeare and Company—a company of one, after all, of a thirty-four-year-old American expatriate who was, until recently, sleeping on a cot in the back room of a diminutive bookshop on a street nobody could find—would issue the single most difficult book anyone had published in decades. It would be monstrously large, prohibitively expensive and impossible to proofread. It was a book without a home, an Irish novel written in Trieste, Zurich and Paris to be published in France in riddling English by a bookseller from New Jersey. Joyce’s readership was scattered. The book was at turns obscure and outrageous, its beauty and pleasures were so coy, its tenderness so hidden by erudition, that when it did not estrange its readers it provoked them.
Ulysses
was not even finished
,
and already it had been declared obscene in New York and burned in anger in Paris.

None of this mattered. Sylvia Beach wanted to be closer to Joyce and to the center of contemporary literature. She wanted to be successful and to repay the money her mother had given her. She wanted to give the world something more than pajamas and condensed milk. Beach and Joyce worked through the details themselves. Shakespeare and Company would publish a high-quality private edition of one thousand copies. She would send out announcements and gather orders by mail before publication and pay the printer in installments as the money came in. When the book was ready, she would mail copies by registered post to readers around the world.

She borrowed Quinn’s idea of a private publication, but her prices were more ambitious. Instead of a ten-dollar edition, Shakespeare and Company would offer three versions of varying quality. The cheapest would be 150 francs, or $12. Another set of 150 copies printed on higher-quality paper would sell for 250 francs each—$20. The premium copies would be a set of one hundred books printed on Dutch handmade paper and signed by Joyce for 350 francs—$28. Even for an oversized, deluxe, private first edition, it was an extraordinary amount, the equivalent of about $400 today. The entire edition would earn $14,800, and Joyce would receive 66 percent of the profits. Neither of them thought about signing a contract.

Sylvia Beach was facing extraordinary problems. Six months before the announced publication date, the manuscript was far from complete, portions had been burned and she was having difficulty retrieving the only surviving copy. She wrote letters and sent cables to John Quinn in New York. Would he send the missing pages to Joyce? No. Would he let someone come to his office to copy the pages by hand? No. Sylvia’s mother called him from Princeton. She was sailing for Paris in May and asked Mr. Quinn if she might please take the missing pages with her—her daughter would send them back as quickly as possible. Mr. Quinn refused. On the day her ship set off, she called him several times, nearly in tears, and the answer was still no. “He will get the missing pages,” Quinn wrote to a friend, “but at my convenience.” That was the gist of his message, anyway. Beach recalled that he “used language unfit for a lady like my mother.”

As frustrating as it was (it took Quinn six weeks to send copies of the pages), Sylvia Beach was almost too busy advertising
Ulysses
to be preoccupied with the text itself. She drew up a circular announcing the plans.

ULYSSES suppressed four times

during serial publication in ‘The Little Review’ will be published by ‘SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY’ complete as written.

The circular said Joyce’s book would be six hundred pages long and appear in the autumn of 1921. Beach’s sisters and friends drummed up buyers in the States. The regular patrons of Shakespeare and Company subscribed immediately and submitted the names and addresses of other likely buyers. Robert McAlmon, an American writer newly arrived in Paris, gathered orders from patrons in Paris nightclubs and dropped the order forms off on his way home in the early morning. Beach could barely make out the handwriting on some of them. Joyce showed up at Shakespeare and Company to wait for orders to arrive, and Beach recorded the names in a green notebook. Hart Crane. W. B. Yeats. Ivor Winters. William Carlos Williams. Wallace Stevens. Winston Churchill. John Quinn ordered fourteen copies. And despite Josephine Bell’s arrest, the Washington Square Book Shop ordered twenty-five—the largest single order.

The news spread quickly. Shakespeare and Company was mobbed with people, and the shop more than doubled its normal revenues. Sylvia boasted to her mother that less than two years after opening her shop, she was publishing “the most important book of the age . . . it’s going to make us famous rah rah!” Articles about Beach and Shakespeare and Company began to appear in the press. “American Girl Conducts Novel Bookstore Here,”
The Paris Tribune
announced. The article included a picture of the American Girl and reported rumors that the publication of
Ulysses
“may mean that Miss Beach will not be allowed to return to America.”

Some people were not pleased to hear the news. George Bernard Shaw responded to the announcement by saying that he had already read portions of
Ulysses
. “It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization,” he wrote, “but it is a truthful one.” Shaw was one of Anthony Comstock’s old victims—when his play
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
was produced in New York in 1905, the cast and crew were arrested (Mrs. Warren is a brothel madam)—so one would think that a truthful record, disgusting or otherwise, had a lot to recommend it. Not enough, apparently. Shaw speculated that Sylvia Beach was “a young barbarian beglamoured by the excitements and enthusiasms that art stirs up in passionate material, but to me,” Shaw wrote, “it is all hideously real.” He had, thankfully, escaped that hideous island for the sweetness and light of England, where his play had also been banned. Shaw wanted to force young Dublin men to read
Ulysses
as a sort of immersive punishment, though this did not mean that he was going to purchase a copy. “I am an elderly Irish gentleman,” he reminded Beach, and “if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen.” When Ezra Pound read the letter, he called Shaw “a ninth rate coward” in
The
Dial
—he was too afraid to look the truth in the face.

—

JOYCE’S FEVERISH WRITING PACE increased in 1921, but the end of
Ulysses
kept receding like a horizon. In 1917 he had planned to finish in 1918. In 1918 he had planned to finish in the summer of 1919. By the time he was writing “Circe,” with a shawl wrapped around his head, he planned to finish in early 1921. In January 1921 he planned to finish in April or May. In October he needed only three more weeks. By the end of November, just fifty or sixty more hours. Despite the circulars and newspaper reports,
Ulysses
would not appear in the autumn. Joyce was, nevertheless, rushing to have it published on his fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922.

Joyce was writing the final two episodes, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” simultaneously in the spring and summer of 1921.
By then, the novel’s perspectives and voices had multiplied, the Homeric correspondences were more elaborate, Dublin’s June day was becoming a map of civilization and his characters’ flesh and blood were being subsumed into a mythology. By the time Leopold Bloom wends his way home at two in the morning, events unfold as a series of questions and answers, cold and distant, as if spoken by gods looking down upon Dublin from Olympus. In “Ithaca,” Bloom brings a weary Stephen Dedalus to his Eccles Street home after their adventure in Nighttown.

What act did Bloom

make on their arrival at their destination?

At the housesteps of the 4th of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number 7 Eccles street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket of his trousers to obtain his latchkey.

Was it there?

It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on the day but one preceding.

Why was he doubly irritated?

Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget.

What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly (respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple?

To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.

The secrets were no longer in the inches. The chapter’s impersonal style hides its sentimental content. A fatherless son and a sonless father, crossing paths throughout the day, arrive together at the father’s home and finagle their way inside without the key. They discuss Paris, friendship and Stephen’s prospective careers. Bloom makes Stephen cocoa and encourages him to sing quietly, which he does. Bloom recalls that once, when Stephen was ten, he invited Mr. Bloom to his house for dinner, which he politely declined. Now, after their long day, Bloom invites Stephen to spend the night at his house, which Stephen politely declines. And as the young man departs, the touch of Stephen’s hand and the diminishing sound of his footsteps makes Bloom, for a brief moment, feel terribly alone. Yet all of this is told as if echoing off the walls of a white empty room.

The final chapter was the opposite. “Penelope” was lyrical and fluid. Joyce planned to end
Ulysses
with a series of letters from Molly, and he asked a friend in Trieste to deliver a briefcase he needed in order to write it. The briefcase, held closed by a rubber band, arrived in March 1921, and it contained the letters he and Nora had written to each other in 1909 (she had not yet burned hers). The sight of them—a large, red express stamp affixed sideways on an envelope, the thick, twice-folded pages filled on both sides, her neat handwriting without punctuation—would have been enough to remind him of the nights they spent apart.

She told him how much she liked being “fucked arseways.” She described one particular night they shared, and she told him to pull himself off as he thought about it. “Yes,” Joyce wrote back, “now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes.” He detailed the variety of Nora’s farts that night and declared how thrilling it was “to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her.”

To read their letters twelve years later was to encounter more than an archive of their abandonment. It was to return to a moment when he had risked far more than government censorship. Joyce had risked Nora’s rejection by writing letters that were at once more visceral and more permanent than they had any right to be. It occurred to Joyce, in one of his letters, that their bodies would be gone someday and that perhaps the only thing left of them would be their words. As a 1909 Christmas gift, he sent Nora a bound manuscript of his poems and imagined their grandchildren turning the pages. Perhaps their words were more durable than anything else about them.

Whatever else dirty words may do, they turn words into bodies. The word
fuck
offends for what it denotes, but it also offends as an assembly of four particular letters on a page. This is why
f**k
is more printable than the unobscured expletive. We insist that the sight of the word’s letters is more transgressive than a coy gesture to them because the word is important purely as a word.
Fuck
does more than transmit an idea.
It is a sign whose very shape becomes a spectacle, a nude figure to be clothed in asterisks. Nora’s words were sacred because they were so shamelessly physical. “Write the dirty words big,” he instructed her “and underline them and kiss them and hold them for a moment to your sweet hot cunt, darling, and also pull up your dress a moment and hold them in under your dear little farting bum.”

The final words of
Ulysses
would be Molly Bloom’s unbroken stream of thoughts. At three in the morning, as Bloom falls asleep next to her, his head at her feet, Molly lies awake. Unlike the clipped interior monologues elsewhere in the novel, Molly’s consciousness unspools without punctuation in eight grand movements. Joyce thought of her voice as full, relentless and indifferent, more geological than human—not only physical but an icon of physicality. Her body was spread out over the cardinal directions like some Vitruvian Woman looming in his mind, and her thoughts and memories swelled like tides. Since the bombs began falling around Trieste in 1915, the perspectives of his story had multiplied and expanded until now, nearing the end in Paris, “Penelope” completed what Joyce imagined to be his novel’s cosmic dyad. After “Ithaca” tells the story from the edge of the galaxy, “Penelope” turns back to Molly as if to the warm earth revolving in the interstellar freeze.