The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (32 page)

Arnold Bennett’s review the following week declared Joyce “dazzlingly original. If he does not see life whole he sees it piercingly.” The final chapter was unmatched by anything else he had ever read.
Ulysses
is not pornographic, Bennett emphasized, and yet “it is more indecent, obscene, scatological, and licentious than the majority of professedly pornographical books.” A consensus began to form as Bennett agreed that
Ulysses
was a work of genius written by an artist whose talents had gotten beyond his control. If only Joyce had harnessed his powers, Bennett lamented, “he would have stood a chance of being one of the greatest novelists that ever lived.”

The reviews could not have been better. The week after the first critic weighed in, Beach received nearly three hundred new orders, including 136 orders in one day. By the end of March, the twelve-dollar version of
Ulysses
was sold out, and the rest were purchased in the next two months. Paris bookshops, all of which balked at Sylvia Beach’s prices, were desperate to get copies, but they were too late, and the scarcity of Joyce’s novel solidified its legendary status. Perhaps you didn’t own
Ulysses
, but you knew someone who did, and maybe you read portions of it, or maybe you only saw it high atop someone’s bookcase like some cerulean bird alighting from a canopy—and even that, over drinks with a friend, would be something to talk about. James Joyce had become Paris’s newest literary celebrity. He avoided dining at his regular restaurants because people would gawk.

The backlash wasn’t far behind. A headline splashed across the entire front page of London’s
Sporting Times
: “
THE SCANDAL OF ULYSSES
.” Even D. H. Lawrence, who would later write his own unprintably obscene novel,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, said that the final chapter was “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written.” Reporters wanted to know just what Miss Beach’s father thought about it (she never asked). One paper labeled
Ulysses
“a freak production.” Another called Joyce’s rendition of Molly Bloom’s consciousness a feat of “diabolic clairvoyance, black magic.” Yet another declared
Ulysses
“the maddest, muddiest, most loathsome book issued in our own or any other time—inartistic, incoherent, unquotably nasty—a book that one would have thought could only emanate from a criminal lunatic asylum.” The asylum image became a staple of Joyce reviews.

For the people most disturbed by
Ulysses
, the scandal had nothing to do with an isolated madman. In May, James Douglas, the well-known editor of
The Sunday Express
in London, wrote as scathing a diatribe as he could muster.

I say deliberately

that it is the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature . . . All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And

its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ—blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.

Douglas claimed to have evidence that
Ulysses
“is already the Bible of beings who are exiles and outcasts in this and every other civilized country,” and it was galvanizing them all.

What made Joyce so appalling was that so-called men of letters in respectable journals were praising him as a genius. “Our critics are apologising for his anarchy,” Douglas said. They were shirking their social responsibilities by flinging readers “to the hyenas and werewolves of literature.” For people like Douglas, the arrival of
Ulysses
crystallized an elemental struggle in Western civilization, a struggle in which satanic anarchy was arrayed against God’s civilizing influence.

We must make our choice between the devil’s disciples and the disciples of God, between Satanism and Christianity, between the sanctions of morality and the anarchy of art. The artist must be treated like any lesser criminal who tries to break the Christian code. For this is a battle that must be fought out to a clean finish: we cannot trust the soul of Europe to the guardianship of the police and the Post Office.

The sum of
Ulysses’
objectionable parts amounted to a transgression that the word
obscene
did not nearly cover, and it was difficult to find a word that did. Two critics resorted to calling Joyce’s novel “literary Bolshevism,” but several readers, perhaps intuitively, thought of it as anarchism. The editor of London’s
Daily Express
referred to Joyce as “the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky . . . His intention, so far as he has any social intention, is completely anarchic.” Edmund Gosse, who had helped Joyce financially through the war, considered the Irish writer an extremist after
Ulysses
. It was, he said, “an anarchical production, infamous in taste, in style, in everything.”

The reaction in Ireland was no better.
The Dublin Review
lambasted the novel’s “devilish drench” and urged the government to destroy the book and asked the Vatican to place it on the Index Expurgatorius—merely reading
Ulysses
amounted to sinning against the Holy Ghost, the only sin beyond the reach of God’s mercy. A former Irish diplomat claimed in
The Quarterly Review
that
Ulysses
would compel Irish writers to resent the English language. Some of those writers, he predicted, would plot the literary equivalent of the Clerkenwell prison bombing (the Victorian era’s iconic Fenian assault) and blow a hole through “the well-guarded, well-built, classical prison of English literature.” But those literary terrorists could consider themselves too late, for with the publication of
Ulysses
, he announced, “the bomb has exploded.”

Even Joyce’s family was unsupportive. His aunt Josephine hid her copy when she received it and told her daughters it wasn’t fit to read. She eventually gave it away so that it wouldn’t pollute her house. Stannie, who hadn’t seen his older brother in years, predicted that “Circe” would be remembered as the most horrible moment in literary history (it seems he had not yet read “Penelope”), and he advised his brother to return to writing poetry. “I should think you would need something to restore your self respect after this last inspection of the stinkpots.”

The most painful reaction was Nora’s indifference. As a tribute to her importance, Joyce inscribed copy number 1,000 and presented it to her at a dinner party. She immediately offered to sell it. In November, Joyce lamented that she had still read only twenty-seven pages “counting the cover.” When a revised edition appeared, he cut the pages for her, hoping that the added convenience would encourage her to open the book. At some point, she read the final chapter, which elicited her signature contribution to Joyce literary criticism: “I guess the man’s a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn’t he?”

—

THE MOST IMPORTANT RESPONSES to
Ulysses
came from other writers. William Faulkner, whose novel
The Sound and the Fury
was, to some degree, an American rendition of Joyce’s techniques, advised, “You should approach Joyce’s
Ulysses
as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” F. Scott Fitzgerald agreed. He gave Sylvia Beach a copy of
The Great Gatsby
when he met her, and inside the front cover he drew a picture of himself kneeling beside Joyce, who was rendered as a pair of oversized spectacles beneath a halo. Fitzgerald got his copy of
Ulysses
signed when he finally met Joyce in 1928, and to prove his devotion he offered to jump out of a window if Joyce would only ask. “That young man must be mad,” Joyce said. “I’m afraid he’ll do himself some injury.”

Djuna Barnes was overwhelmed by
Ulysses
. “I shall never write another line,” she declared. “Who has the nerve to after that?” It was as if the era of the novel were over. Ezra Pound thought an era of civilization was over. Pound declared in
The
Little Review
that “the Christian era came definitely to an END” when Joyce finished the drafts of the last two chapters around midnight at the end of October 1921. He celebrated the epochal change by rewriting the Julian calendar. Year One P.S.U. (
Post Scriptum Ulysses)
began on November first, which was now Hephaistos. December was now Zeus, January was Hermes, and so on—the index of time shifted from the Roman politicians to the Roman gods. He told Margaret Anderson to reprint the calendar in every autumn issue from 1922 onward.

The magnitude of
Ulysses
was enough to force Pound to take stock of his life. Since the winter of 1914, when Yeats first mentioned the name of James Joyce as a kindred Imagist, Joyce had written an epoch-changing novel—a novel, Pound said, that lanced “the whole boil of the European mind”—and Pound had barely started his long series of poems,
The Cantos
. As selfless as he may have been, helping other writers was also a way to avoid his own writing. So Pound decided to fake his own death. Anderson and Heap received a letter ostensibly written by Pound’s wife informing
The
Little Review
that he was no longer among the living. The letter included a picture of his death mask and a request that they print it in the magazine. Pound sent the letter on Good Friday as a gesture to his second coming. He wanted the era
Post Scriptum
Ulysses
to be the Pound Era.

T. S. Eliot also spoke of a new era. He wrote in
The Dial
that
Ulysses
was “a step toward making the modern world possible for art” (not, importantly, the other way around) because it gave an order, “a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Where others found
Ulysses
incomprehensible, Eliot saw a new mode of comprehension. The narrative method was obsolete, and Joyce replaced it with “the mythical method.”

Virginia Woolf marveled at T. S. Eliot’s rapturous praise on his visits to her house—she had never seen him that way before. “How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?” he said. Eliot had been trying to convince her about the importance of
Ulysses
for years. “It destroyed the whole of the 19th Century,” he told her. “It left Joyce himself with nothing to write another book on. It showed up the futility of all the English styles.” Though
Ulysses
made modernity coherent, Eliot considered its influence as daunting as it was liberating. It is, he wrote, “a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape.”

Virginia Woolf was not as impressed. It had been four years since she refused to print the first few chapters of
Ulysses
for Harriet Weaver, and she remained skeptical. Nevertheless, near the end of the summer of 1922, she decided to find out for herself. Woolf put aside the second volume of Proust and began reading the copy of
Ulysses
she had purchased for the remarkable sum of four pounds. In August, after reading two hundred pages, she wrote in her diary that she was “amused, stimulated, charmed” at first “& then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” Her repulsion went beyond aesthetic distaste or visceral shock. It was personal. “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.” As if he were unaware of the etiquette between readers and writers, Mr. Joyce came to the table and ate with his fingers. She felt sorry for him.

Joyce’s experiment had gone wrong. “I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one & spatter one,” Woolf wrote privately, “but one does not get one deadly wound straight in the face.” Yet something about
Ulysses
worked upon the mind slowly, as if the thousands of stalwart particles began to organize themselves in her sleep. Woolf found herself thinking about
Ulysses
long after she thought she was through with it. It was, as Katherine Mansfield said, “as though one’s mind goes on quivering afterwards.” W. B. Yeats had been reading
Ulysses
in
The
Little Review
in 1918, and his first thought was “A mad book!” Later he confessed to a friend, “I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius.” Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychologist, experienced the same reversal. When he first read portions of
Ulysses
, he thought Joyce was schizophrenic, but after rereading it years later he exclaimed that it was an alchemical laboratory in which “a new, universal consciousness is distilled!”

Virginia Woolf’s opinions also changed. The day after she finished
Ulysses
, Leonard showed her a review describing the book as a burlesque of the
Odyssey
woven out of the consciousnesses of three radically different characters. “I must read some of the chapters again,” she wrote in her diary. Perhaps modern literature was not a fatal wound to the face. Perhaps those tiny bullets were the point. She had, in fact, said so herself after reading Joyce a few years earlier: the mind, she wrote, receives impressions like “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” that fall upon us with “the sharpness of steel.” But by 1922, after reading all of
Ulysses
, those steely atoms felt too innumerable to amount to anything cohesive. To stand at last in the mind’s shower of atoms was to lose sight of any principle that could encompass either the mind or modern fiction.

Like Eliot and Pound, Woolf was working through the ramifications of
Ulysses
. Months later, she returned to a short story she had been writing when she read Joyce, and she began turning it into a novel. She realized that she could be more ambitious, that she could approach the “cheapness” of reality and the “central things” in life even if those things could not be made beautiful. Two years later, in 1924, she finished a novel that delves into the consciousnesses of three characters during a single day in London. She thought of calling it
The Hours
. Eventually, she named it
Mrs. Dalloway
. Joyce’s tiny bullets had entered Virginia Woolf’s bloodstream and felled her from the inside out.