The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (31 page)

Molly’s thoughts about Stephen Dedalus entering her house after midnight merge with memories of years-old conversations with her husband.

Id confuse him a little

alone with him if we were Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn red looking at him seduce him I know what boys feel with that down on their cheek doing that frigging

drawing out the thing by the hour question and answer would you do this that and the other with the coalman yes with a bishop yes I would because I told him about some dean or bishop was sitting beside me in the jews temples gardens when I was knitting that woollen thing a stranger to Dublin what place was it and so on about the monuments and he tired me out with statues encouraging him making him worse than he is who is in your mind now tell me who are you thinking of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the german Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to make a whore of me what he never will he ought to give it up now at this age of his life simply ruination for any woman and no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway

If words can be bodies, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy enters Joyce’s novel like a gathering crowd.

—

THE PRESSURE OF WRITING enhanced Joyce’s superstitions. Opening an umbrella inside, placing a man’s hat on a bed and two nuns walking down the street were all bad luck. Black cats and Greeks were good luck. He wore certain colors to ward off blindness. A whole minefield of numbers and dates were good or bad. Once, while the Joyces were hosting dinner, two people unexpectedly called to say that they were on their way, bringing the dinner party to thirteen, so Joyce frantically tried to find another last-minute guest while imploring someone to leave. “Nausicaa,” unsurprisingly, was the thirteenth episode, and Joyce took note of the ill-omened sum of the year’s digits: 1+9+2+1.

Superstitions gave Joyce the feeling of control, the illusion that he could place a finger on the tiller of fortune to help steer a life that seemed blown by chance—money arriving just when the cupboards were bare, an apartment found days before homelessness, fortuitous details gathered on scraps of paper despite eye attacks that came and went without warning. It was comforting to think that all the world’s details were like the details of a novel, that they had meaning and that they could be altered by marginal revisions like replacing a hat or adding a fourteenth dinner guest.

Valery Larbaud was one of the lucky turns. Larbaud was a prominent French novelist and a friend of Shakespeare and Company. In February 1921, Sylvia Beach sent him the
Little Review
issues containing
Ulysses
. He stayed up entire nights reading it. “I am raving mad over
Ulysses
,” he told her. “I cannot read anything else, cannot even think of anything else.” When Larbaud left Paris for the summer, he offered Joyce his Left Bank apartment, rent free, so that he could have a more comfortable place to write. Joyce, Nora and the children moved into Larbaud’s luxurious apartment complete with a leafy courtyard, a servant and polished floors. It was the twenty-second address to host Joyce’s growing manuscript, and the nicest port on the voyage. Among Larbaud’s rare objects and leather-bound books, there were thousands of soldiers—troops, divisions, battalions of hand-painted toy soldiers from all over the world.

Robert McAlmon was another lucky turn. He was a regular at Shakespeare and Company, and he did more than gather orders for
Ulysses
at nightclubs. He started giving Joyce money (about $150 a month) to carry him through the last stages of his manuscript. Joyce drank much of it, often with McAlmon himself at bars haunted by prostitutes and mediocre jazz until they were thrown out in the morning. McAlmon recalled Nora’s disapproval. “Jim, what is it all ye find to jabber about the nights you’re brought home drunk for me to look after? You’re dumb as an oyster now, so God help me.”

One night at a brasserie, Joyce was particularly nervous, and he saw omens in everything—the way his knife and fork were arranged on the table, the way McAlmon poured wine into his glass. A rat scampered down the stairs, which was extraordinarily bad luck. McAlmon shrugged it off as a Joycean quirk until Joyce’s body went limp at the table—he had fainted. Joyce had an eye attack the following day. The pressure inside his eye mounted in a matter of hours, and he was rolling on the floor in pain. A week later, McAlmon went to his bedside, and as he looked down at Joyce’s face, a mask of skin stretched over a skull, the sight of his suffering terrified him. He vowed never to drink with Joyce again.

Joyce’s 1921 bout of iritis lasted more than a month. His eyes were bandaged (light itself was painful) and writing was out of the question. As he lay in bed, Larbaud’s maid whispered to Joyce’s daughter in the next room. “How is he now?” “What is he doing?” “What does he say?” “Is he going to get up?” “Is he ever hungry?” “Does he suffer?” Joyce could hear it all.

Blindness may also have been good luck. It forced Joyce away from the minutiae of his manuscript and into his imagination, where he could survey his novel from a distance. The larger structure became more apparent in his blindness. He discerned faint motifs and larger themes as he lay in a darkened room among Larbaud’s tiny soldiers charging toward cabinet edges, bayonets like toothpicks fixed in the air. In August, when the pain was bearable, Joyce began revising ten different episodes simultaneously. He expanded “Hades.” He seeded the book with Stephen’s phrase “Agenbite of inwit” (Middle English for “Remorse of conscience”) so that it became one of the book’s refrains. He suspected his twelve-hour days were making his eyes worse, but he couldn’t help himself.

Joyce wrote an elaborate new scene in “Circe.” Bloom transforms into a king wearing a crimson mantle trimmed with ermine and becomes the object of anger and admiration for all—even Margaret Anderson appears. Joyce had noticed her defiant boast in John Sumner’s deposition against
The
Little Review
and decided to adapt it: “I’m a Bloomite and I glory in it,” a Veiled Sibyl declares as she stabs herself and dies. Her death prompts a wave of devotional suicides by drowning, arsenic and starvation. Beautiful women throw themselves under steamrollers and hang themselves with “stylish garters.” When someone suggests that Bloom is the messiah, he performs miracles for the crowd’s delight. He “passes through several walls, climbs Nelson’s Pillar, hangs from the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included)[.]” He contorts his face to resemble Moses, Lord Byron, Rip van Winkle and Sherlock Holmes. A few lines later, Leopold Bloom is defiled by dogs and set on fire.

“

May I kiss

the hand that wrote

18.

Maurice Darantière, master printer of Dijon, was a relic of the past. His old machinery sat in a small vine-covered printing house that had changed little, if at all, since his father’s days as a master printer. On Sunday afternoons, Darantière darned socks in an antique chair while his printing companion and housemate prepared afternoon meals that stretched into the evening with pastries, coffee and liqueurs. In the fall of 1921, Darantière worked through many of those meals. Sylvia Beach warned him about the unique challenges of printing
Ulysses
, but he could not have been prepared. For decades, printers had been using linotype machines to cast entire lines of text at once, but the typesetters at Imprimerie Darantière spent hours plucking tiny metal blocks out of large pigeonhole cases. They were assembling
Ulysses
by hand, one letter at a time.

The typescripts they received from Paris appeared rushed. Some of the lines were repeated, others ran off the pages, and still others were illegible because the typists had doubled over the words. The typesetters were forced to leave blank spaces wherever the text was inscrutable, and that was just the beginning. In June 1921, Darantière began sending Joyce the galleys of the first episodes. The galleys were large sheets of what would eventually be eight pages of text with wide margins for corrections. They were unpaged and easier to alter than page proofs, which would come later. Printers expected a few changes in the galleys, but Joyce filled them with arrows and inserts, new clauses and sentences. Joyce wasn’t proofreading. He was still writing. Darantière repeatedly warned Sylvia Beach that Joyce’s additions would be expensive because they were so time consuming. If a writer wished to insert a sentence, several lines or pages beneath it might have to move. One addition could cause an avalanche of changes.

Darantière began sending back more galleys instead of committing to page proofs, which meant that one galley revision turned into a rondo of three or four iterations—Beach told Darantière to give Joyce all the galleys he wanted. Joyce complicated matters by asking for multiple copies simultaneously and marking different additions to each one. To stay one step ahead, the typesetters began inserting blank pieces of type between lines or at the bottoms of paragraphs so that Joyce’s additions would fill the space built into a galley instead of spilling over to another page, which would compound the work.

Then Darantière began sending page proofs, where an author corrects small errors like a missing comma or transposed letters. When Joyce returned them, Darantière was flabbergasted by “
le
très grand nombre
de corrections”
scrawled all over the pages. Joyce, even then, was still writing. Galley revisions in one episode inspired proof revisions in earlier episodes—printing
Ulysses
was like trying to cast a moving object. And yet Darantière’s small printing house was beleaguered by more than onerous revisions to the most experimental prose in literary history. The typesetters piecing together
Ulysses
could not even speak English.

The mounting costs made Darantière anxious. He initially agreed to wait for payment until the book’s subscriptions came in. The generous terms were based partly on his friendship with Adrienne Monnier and partly on the book’s unusual back story—the years of work, the trial in New York, the protests of printers and angry husbands. Darantière was intrigued almost as much by the book’s troubled circumstances as by the American woman’s devotion to it. He was not, however, prepared to be a part of the creative process.

Darantière demanded five thousand francs in December, which was more than Shakespeare and Company’s typical monthly revenue, but with the help of Miss Weaver, Beach paid it. Joyce went through as many as four galleys and five page proofs for every page of
Ulysses
. He wrote almost a third of his novel, including nearly half of “Penelope,” on the galleys and proofs, and by the end of the year the alterations alone cost about four thousand francs.
Ulysses
exists as it does today partly because of Sylvia Beach’s willingness to grant Joyce’s wishes. She didn’t just publish his book. She gave it room to grow.

Nora complained to friends about the revisions. “It’s the great fanaticism is on him, and it is coming to no end.” Joyce’s demands were increasingly unreasonable. He requested a solid blue cover with white letters, but he wanted the blue to match the Greek flag. Darantière had to go to Germany to find the precise shade. Joyce didn’t send the book’s final page proofs until January 31, 1922. To keep his promise to Sylvia Beach, Darantière had to reset and print portions of the last two episodes in less than two days. And as the most laborious job that Imprimerie Darantière ever attempted was coming to a close, Darantière received a telegram from Paris. Monsieur Joyce wished to add just one more word.

—

ON THE MORNING of February 2, 1922, Sylvia Beach went to Gare de Lyons and waited for the Dijon-Paris express train to pull into the station. After the doors opened, she saw the conductor making his way through the harried morning travelers with a bulky parcel. Later that morning, when Joyce opened the door to his flat, Sylvia Beach stood proudly in front of him with his birthday present, the first two copies of
Ulysses
.

Beach placed one of the copies in the window of Shakespeare and Company. Primed by newspaper reports about the impending publication, the news spread overnight that James Joyce’s
Ulysses
had arrived at last. The following morning, a crowd formed to gaze at the mighty tome in the front window. It was an imposing book: a bold blue cover, 732 pages, three inches thick and nearly three and a half pounds. People could only speculate about the rumored scenes in the final chapters. When Beach opened the shop for business, the crowd rushed in to receive its long-awaited copies. But
Ulysses
, she tried to explain, was not yet published—only two copies had been printed, but that only led everyone to claim the display copy. As they became more insistent, Beach grew afraid they were going to tear the book from its binding and divide the sections amongst themselves, so she grabbed Joyce’s novel and hid it in the back room.

As copies trickled in from Dijon in February and March, Joyce signed the one hundred deluxe copies and helped Beach and others address and wrap the packages. He wanted copies mailed to his Irish readers as quickly as possible—before authorities realized they were circulating—because, he wrote to Beach, with the moralistic Vigilance Committee in Dublin and a new postmaster general “you never know from one day to the next what may occur.” In the rush, he managed to slather glue on the labels, the table, the floor and in his hair.

On Sunday, March 5, 1922, the first review of
Ulysses
appeared in the London
Observer
. “Mr. James Joyce is a man of genius,” Sisley Huddleston declared. The book was “the vilest, according to ordinary standards, in all literature. And yet its very obscenity is somehow beautiful and wrings the soul to pity.” Six weeks of silence followed (Joyce thought there was a boycott against him) before a review appeared in
The Nation and Athenaeum
that called Joyce’s quest for freedom herculean, though the reviewer had misgivings.
Ulysses
is “a prodigious self-laceration, the tearing-away from himself, by a half-demented man of genius,” J. Middleton Murry wrote. Joyce was sensitive to earthly and spiritual beauty, but the book contained
too much
. “Mr. Joyce has made the superhuman effort to empty the whole of his consciousness into it.”
Ulysses
had every thought a human being could have. It was bursting at the seams. Its content ravaged its form. After the tight prose of
Dubliners
and
A Portrait
, Joyce had become “the victim of his own anarchy.”