The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (35 page)

For Braverman, vice societies were paragons of capitalist hypocrisy. They were the agents of a system selectively punishing the vices of society’s weakest members. Even when they had legitimate targets, they were fighting vices whose true cause was poverty. The country, according to Braverman, had three hundred thousand licensed prostitutes and more than a million unlicensed ones. If moralists really wanted people to lead virtuous lives, they’d focus less on the young women reading smut and more on helping the young women driven by hunger and exploitation to sell their bodies. “Behold the anti-vice crusaders! The dear things!” Braverman wrote. Comstock and Sumner couldn’t see the economic basis of vice, either because their vision was so blinkered by capitalist ideology that they remained blithely unaware of it or because the wealthy financiers backing them—J. P. Morgan and Samuel Colgate, Vanderbilts and Carnegies—
told
them to ignore it. Businessmen wanted to stop lust and yet refused to pay their female employees living wages.

Braverman’s articles sprang from the heady days of the 1910s. By 1922, with suffragists pacified by the Nineteenth Amendment, and the labor movement hobbled by the Red Raids, Braverman’s life had become ordinary. He devolved from the editor of a radical magazine to a capitalist functionary—scripting slogans for an ad agency, no less. He shuttled back and forth between Curtis Company’s two offices straddling the U.S.-Canadian border while the fervor of the 1910s slipped further into the distance. So when a letter arrived from a woman in Paris asking him to smuggle a book that capitalist society couldn’t countenance, he told Miss Beach that he was eager to break the law of “the hideous U.S.” He was ready, he said, to “put one over on the Republic and its Methodist smut hounds.”

Braverman took a copy of
Ulysses
from the rented room, walked down to the wooden dock at the end of Ouellette Avenue and boarded the ferry for Detroit just as he did every weekday after work. The smokestacks on the Detroit skyline inched closer during the longest ten-minute ferry ride of his life. After being funneled through the customs pens, he stood in front of a uniformed agent who told Braverman to unwrap the package he was carrying. The guard glanced at the book, handed it back to Braverman and motioned him through. It was easy. But the next day, he would have to do it all again. And then the next day, and the next. The steady repetition was unnerving, and the low-grade anxiety increased as the same rotation of Detroit border guards glanced yet again at the conspicuously large book he carried. Wouldn’t they get curious about James Joyce’s
Ulysses
? Braverman thought they were beginning to eye him suspiciously, which made him more nervous, and nothing alerted border guards as much as nervousness.

The guards were especially vigilant in 1922, for these were the days of bootleggers smuggling whiskey and gin across the Detroit River. The newest Windsor-Detroit ferry, the
La Salle
, would have been a prime Prohibition-era bootlegging vessel. With a capacity of three thousand passengers, it was much larger than the older ferries, and a rumrunner could get lost in the crowd. The
La Salle
could carry seventy-five cars belowdecks, which multiplied smugglers’ opportunities. They built compartments for liquor inside fuel tanks. They constructed false bottoms to everything—car seats, animal cages and lunch boxes. People smuggled alcohol in hot water bottles strapped to their bodies or sewn inside the linings of coats.

Braverman started to feel a bout of bad luck coming on, and when the rent on the storage room in Windsor was good for only a few more days, he recruited a friend to help him smuggle the last few copies as quickly as possible. They stuffed two copies of
Ulysses
down their pants, cinched their belts tightly on unused notches and shuffled casually on and off the ferry’s gangplanks. The late autumn weather made their bulky jackets plausible. The smuggling went faster, though Braverman and his friend were trading one risk for another. Guards couldn’t inspect books they couldn’t find, but if those jackets and baggy trousers could conceal a copy of
Ulysses
, then surely they could conceal a bottle or two of alcohol. And how could they explain it, exactly, if an agent searched one of them and found that the bulge in his waistband was a three-and-a-half-pound
book
?

Luckily, the border guards never stopped them. Braverman, with his shy demeanor and his hair brushed back from his boyish face, simply didn’t look like a bootlegger. He didn’t look like a radical, either. But he was. He was the first
Ulysses
booklegger, and he successfully smuggled every copy entrusted to him. The following year, he went to Paris and got his own copy of
Ulysses
signed by James Joyce.

20.

Joyce’s life had become a shambles after
Ulysses
. In April 1922, Nora took the children to see her family in Galway. She didn’t say when she would return, and they left Paris just as Ireland was descending into civil war. A 1921 treaty between the Irish and British Parliaments established Ireland as a Free State within the United Kingdom (the Irish Parliament would swear allegiance to the Crown). The treaty split the Irish Republican Army into factions, those who supported the Free State agreement and those who demanded full Irish sovereignty, and Nora and the children were caught in the middle of escalating violence. Free State troops commandeered their hotel room and mounted machine guns in the windows, forcing Nora, Giorgio and Lucia to dash through Galway and board the next train for Dublin.

Joyce felt helpless and abandoned in Paris. Nora seemed to be thinking of staying in Ireland, and he wrote desperate letters hoping to win her back. Was she leaving him? Did she need money? “O my dearest,” he wrote, “if you would only turn to me even now and read that terrible book which has now broken the heart in my breast and take me to yourself alone to do with me what you will!” Nora felt that a part of Jim was moored to 1904 while she and their children pressed onward. Going to Ireland was her way of pulling him out of the terrible book that had colonized his life. Nora was reminding him that she was more than the voice of Molly Bloom.

Joyce did not fare well alone. He slept and ate poorly. He fainted in Shakespeare and Company. He had multiple tooth abscesses, and his iritis became worse than ever. Less than a week after Nora and the children returned (she would never leave him), Joyce developed glaucoma in his left eye. When the pain became unbearable, Joyce’s oculist sent his assistant to Joyce’s room in a small Left Bank residential hotel. The young man opened the door to find the famous Irish writer wrapped in a blanket and squatting on the floor in front of a stewpan containing the picked-over remains of a chicken. Nora was squatting across from him, and the entire place was in disarray. There were two rooms filled with mismatched furniture and half-empty bottles of wine. Clothes and toiletries were strewn over the tables, the mantelpiece and their chairs. Well-used trunks were gaping open, still half unpacked from the family’s recent return. Joyce turned from the chicken carcass to the visitor.

The doctor’s assistant told Joyce he needed surgery, and Joyce told the doctor never to send him again. A few days later, the doctor examined Joyce’s left eye and confirmed that he needed an immediate iridectomy. The longer he waited, the worse his vision would be. The prospect was terrifying. Joyce’s left eye was his “good” one—the one that hadn’t been operated on, the one he needed to read and write. Even a successful iridectomy would impair his vision, and a failed operation could render his left eye blind. Joyce remained so traumatized by his eye surgery in Zurich five years earlier that he was determined to find a doctor with less zeal for the knife. He sent a panicked telegram to Miss Weaver. Could she possibly help? Would her doctor fly to Paris? He believed the operation would end his literary career. The telegram begged: “Urgent reply every minute important.”

Sylvia Beach rushed over to find Nora renewing cold compresses on Joyce’s eyes to reduce the swelling. She had been doing it for hours, she said. “When the pain is unbearable he gets up and walks the floor.” So Beach decided to take Joyce to Dr. Louis Borsch, an American doctor who kept an inexpensive clinic on the corner of rue du Cherche-Midi and rue du Regard. The location, no doubt, was a good omen, but the clinic itself wasn’t reassuring. It had a drab exterior, a waiting room filled with wooden benches and the back office was barely large enough for the portly doctor to turn around. Joyce was amused by his Yankee drawl. “Too bad ye got that kickup in your eye,” he said, peering into the catastrophe. Nevertheless, Dr. Borsch thought he could diminish Joyce’s stubborn case of iritis “by eliminating the poison from the system.” Instead of surgery, he prescribed eyedrops (apparently cocaine), more cold compresses, a narcotic to help him sleep and a medication that would “purify the blood.” Dr. Borsch urged Joyce to improve his general health and adopt “a more comfortable and wholesome mode of living,” as Sylvia Beach described it to Miss Weaver.

—

IN 1922, Joyce decided to meet the other woman who had made
Ulysses
possible. Miss Weaver waited months for his illness to subside, and Dr. Borsch’s treatment appeared to help. By August, Joyce believed he was well enough to make the trip across the channel, but like so many other recoveries, it ended with a sharp relapse. He doused his eye with countless eyedrops and fought off London doctors who were as determined to perform surgery as their Parisian counterparts. The doctors seemed to agree in all particulars. “Mr. Joyce’s mode of life in Paris is very unhealthy,” Miss Weaver’s physician told her. He spent his nights in pain, sweating profusely and unable to sleep. Each morning at their hotel, Nora soaked cold compresses in a bucket of ice water and applied them to his eyes with cotton wads as big as small pillows. When the compresses were removed, Joyce stared at the brass knobs at the foot of his bed, their weak glimmer among the only things piercing the perpetual darkness.

But the writer and his patron finally met. Miss Weaver’s flowers were freshly cut and arranged for Mr. Joyce’s afternoon arrival at her flat. For seven years, Joyce had been an avid correspondent, a troubled figure in photos, a sensitive boy coming of age in
A Portrait
and the author of a city of voices in
Ulysses
. Now he was a man of full substance, of neat attire, impeccable manners and powerful spectacles. But what lay behind those spectacles jarred Miss Weaver, and it made her reluctant to look directly at her guest—not out of shyness but out of embarrassment. James Joyce’s left eye had no pupil. The dark window at the center of his eye and the reticulations of his iris were swept over by a fog. The natural blue pigment soured to a bluish green. Simply listening to him speak challenged Miss Weaver’s concentration, for even as he made jokes and pleasantries designed to put her at ease, Joyce looked back at her with something like a dull marble lodged in his head.

After years of imagining Joyce’s affliction through his letters, she was now confronted with its awful presence. Whatever was causing Joyce’s recurrent iritis had dilated his ocular blood vessels until they ruptured. The blood seeped into the intraocular fluid and mixed with dead cells and pus, all of which floated around inside his eye for months. The mixture of blood and exudate had persisted for so long that it started to “organize”—the viscous fluid was congealing into a solid membrane covering his pupil. To look at Mr. Joyce was to feel the dread of advancing blindness, to understand the delicacy of an eye and the terrible complexity of seeing.

—

MISS WEAVER DECIDED that the Egoist Press would publish the first U.K. edition of
Ulysses
. She was determined to correct Darantière’s misprints and bolster Joyce’s income—he would receive 90 percent of all profits after expenses. The edition would be two thousand copies, and like Shakespeare and Company, the Egoist Press would try to circumvent the authorities by selling directly to readers rather than bookshops. Sylvia Beach helped compile and distribute promotional materials, but there was only so much she could do from Paris. Miss Weaver approached only one London printer, the Pelican Press, who informally agreed to print
Ulysses
after seeing the first ten episodes. They changed their minds when they examined the rest.

Miss Weaver knew little about the legal risks she was taking. Her solicitor informed her that copies of a book deemed obscene could be seized anywhere (in a bookstore, in her office or in her home) if they were kept for sale or distribution, and, despite her inventive suggestion, distributing copies through an agent or dividing them among various distributors made no difference. A private edition’s only legal advantage was that it would demonstrate to judges that the publisher wanted to limit the book’s availability, or, in the words of the Hicklin Rule, that the publisher restricted the type of people “into whose hands” the book “may fall.”

But this was not much of an advantage, for if the Shakespeare and Company edition was any indication, bookstores would start reselling the book anyway, and legal action against a single copy nabbed in a police raid would affect all copies. And “private” or not,
Ulysses
was now a known quantity. The full text was in print, outraged reviews were circulating throughout Britain, and the cloak of privacy was stripped away. Weaver and Beach weighed the possibility that a hostile reader would order a copy and send it to the police. The editor of
The
Sunday Express
, for one, seemed determined to have “The Bible of the Outcasts” burned.

Miss Weaver found another solution. An old contributor to
The
Egoist
named John Rodker was publishing limited-edition books under the name Ovid Press. She remembered Rodker from Ezra Pound’s dinner meetings during the war—he had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector and joined the meetings after his hunger strike set him free. Rodker remained in Pound’s orbit, and he was, clearly, willing to break the law for his principles. Miss Weaver asked Rodker if he would act as her Paris agent: the Egoist Press would publish and finance the edition, but it would be advertised, sold and distributed from Paris. Rodker would have to collect two thousand copies from Darantière in Dijon, send out circulars announcing the publication, collect orders and finally wrap and ship the copies to readers around the world. Miss Weaver would pay him two hundred pounds for his work. It was simple.