The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (38 page)

Lying in bed with one or both eyes bandaged, Joyce conjured memories out of the medicinal haze. He habitually walked past the shop fronts on Dublin’s O’Connell Street as they were in 1904. “I dream about my eye nearly every night performing feats of vision,” he wrote to Miss Weaver. Even when he couldn’t see—even when doctors told him that writing was making his vision worse—he began drawing large letters with a charcoal pencil on an oversized sheet of paper like a child. It was the beginning of
Finnegans Wake
. To convince himself that he wasn’t going blind, he counted stripes on wallpaper and the lights along the Place de la Concorde. He memorized hundreds of lines of poetry. Sylvia Beach would bring Walter Scott’s
Lady of the Lake
to his bedside, read a random line and look up as Joyce recited the next two pages without a mistake. Like superstitions, rote tasks made him feel in control of his life. But he wasn’t in control. When Frank Budgen visited Joyce in Paris in 1923, he found his wartime friend pale and breathless. He was holding on to himself as if to keep his body from falling apart.

After his 1923 surgery, Joyce recovered in a small room above Dr. Borsch’s clinic. It had rippled windows and warped walls meeting at unlikely angles. Cloves of garlic grew in a sponge on the windowsill. Nurse Puard gave him more scopolamine throughout the day and cooked his meals in the small kitchen across the hall. Nora stayed in the room next to Joyce’s and helped put leeches around his eye. The nurse would hold one of the writhing bodies in the folds of a napkin and place its mouth on Joyce’s canthus, the corner of skin where the eyelids meet. There were several leeches in the jar, and each of them would loll and hang off his face until they filled up with blood from the anterior chamber of his eye. Nora helped retrieve “the creatures,” as she called them, when they fell on the floor around his bed. In the evening, through the night and well past dawn, James Joyce lay awake screaming.

22.

Despite confiscations and burnings in the United States and England, Sylvia Beach published eight more editions of
Ulysses
. Joyce’s book was officially or unofficially outlawed in nearly every English-speaking country in the world, allowing Shakespeare and Company to sell only twenty-four thousand copies in nine years. Even for a literary book, this was small. When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
sold nearly twenty-four thousand copies in its first year, it was a crushing disappointment.

Joyce’s fans were few, but they were ardent. Shakespeare and Company became a pilgrimage destination for budding Joyceans, several of whom asked Miss Beach if they could move to Paris and work for her. One day on her way home she found a drunk young man sitting on the doorstep of her bookshop with his head buried in his folded arms. He was searching for James Joyce, and when he found Shakespeare and Company closed, he tried to find where Sylvia Beach lived. The concierges all along rue de l’Odéon had to force him out and bolt the doors behind him (he apparently urinated in a stairway). Beach sat down next to the young American and saw that he was crying. He had been kicked out of his midwestern high school when someone discovered a copy of
Ulysses
in his desk, and he felt ostracized from his town. He had come to Paris to be Joyce’s assistant, but once he arrived, he was overwhelmed by the prospect of meeting him, and he drank to calm his nerves.

Ulysses
had an intense attraction for certain people. Reading it said something about who you were. It was a mark of aesthetic, philosophical and sexual audacity. It initiated you into modernism’s new era, and if it was a Bible of the outcasts, reading it made you part of an outcast community spanning the globe. Sylvia Beach filled orders from South America, India, the Balkans, South Africa and Borneo. A library in Peking ordered ten. For many people, including the American high school student, simply possessing
Ulysses
was a rebellion. Bringing it through customs was a crime. Printing, selling and distributing it was punishable by prison. Officials who aided the importation of even a single copy of
Ulysses
could receive a five-thousand-dollar fine and up to ten years in prison. Risk generated devotion—your relationship to a book changes when you have to hide it from the government.

Readers smuggled copies by binding Joyce’s novel inside decoy covers of books like
Merry Tales for Little Folks
,
Shakespeare’s Complete Works
or
The Holy Bible
. One was disguised as a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Legal qualms discouraged Sylvia Beach from sending copies to the United States herself, but when her sister Holly in California wanted a copy for a friend, she reluctantly agreed. She wrote back, “Tell Mrs. Bullis to keep her mouth shut about where and how she got
Ulysses
if she gets it.” She never got it. What she got instead a was a curt letter:

COLLECTOR OF CUSTOMS

U.S. TREASURY DEPARTMENT

John Quinn thought for months about how to smuggle his fourteen copies into the country, and in May 1922 he decided that instead of hiding the books he would draw attention to them. A Paris art dealer wrapped each book individually, put them in a custom-made case, screwed it shut and placed the case in a larger shipment of artworks. The shipment’s invoice, when it arrived in New York, included a vague entry, “14 books, 3400 francs,” and Quinn requested that a customs inspector examine the shipment in his apartment. The inspector, whom Quinn knew personally (he seemed to know everyone personally), unsealed the cases to find wrapped books among several paintings: a pensive clown, a mother and child, three women painted as if they were chiseled from stone and a mountain landscape shading a village’s geometry. Quinn’s copies of
Ulysses
were smuggled with three Picassos and a Cézanne—the peculiar paintings were a diversion from the literary contraband. The ploy was one of John Quinn’s last victories, for he succumbed to liver cancer two years later.

—

THE CRIMINAL AURA surrounding
Ulysses
was real. In England, the Home Office did everything in its power to stop the circulation of
Ulysses
short of a criminal prosecution, which it avoided only because a trial would give the book more publicity. Customs officials in British ports were told to confiscate all copies of
Ulysses
entering the country. The chief constables of major British cities were ordered to trace any copy sold in their districts, and the secretary of state issued warrants for copies going through the mail as late as 1933. The warrants were, in fact, instances of official restraint. A 1908 law gave the British government the authority to open suspicious packages without a warrant—all officials had to do was give the addressee the opportunity to watch.

Surveillance went beyond the post and ports. When a well-known book catalog called
The Clique
included
Ulysses
in its list, the Home Office told it to remove the title and issue a warning to subscribers in future editions. Sir Archibald Bodkin once requested that University College London strike Joyce’s
name
from documents distributed by its School of Librarianship. In 1926 the town clerk of Stepney, a working-class district in London’s East End, wrote to the Home Office requesting permission to place a copy of
Ulysses
in Stepney’s library. The assistant commissioner of the London police assigned an inspector to investigate, and, after a covert inquiry, tracked down the name and address of the Joyce fanatic in Stepney who had initiated the request. It turned out he was “a red hot Socialist.”

Britain’s public media was similarly hostile. In 1931 a former British diplomat named Harold Nicolson planned a radio program for the BBC called
This Changing World,
which examined emerging twentieth-century literary techniques. The BBC’s director general urged Nicolson to turn an upcoming broadcast about Joyce into a broadcast about John Galsworthy, who was not exactly an icon of the changing world. A few days later, the director of programs informed Nicolson that he could discuss Joyce only if he didn’t mention
Ulysses
. To get around the BBC’s ban, he planned to refer to a book
about
Joyce’s novel. On the morning of the broadcast, the BBC chairman refused to allow Nicolson on the air. When he threatened to discontinue the series altogether, the chairman let him discuss Joyce briefly, though, as Nicolson informed his listeners, “I am not permitted by the BBC to mention the name of Mr. Joyce’s most important work.”

What’s uncanny about censorship in a liberal society is that sooner or later the government’s goal is not just to ban objectionable books. It is to act as if they don’t exist. The bans themselves should, whenever possible, remain secret, which is to say that the ideal censorship is a recursion of silence. Harold Nicolson was no longer welcome in BBC studios.

The Home Office considered a young Cambridge University lecturer named F. R. Leavis one of the gravest threats to the silence of censorship. Leavis would become one of the twentieth century’s most prominent literary critics. By midcentury he would spawn an entire school of scholars calling themselves Leavisites, but he was a newly minted PhD when he walked into Galloway & Porter in the summer of 1926 and asked the bookstore to obtain a copy of
Ulysses
for his new lecture course, “Modern Problems of Criticism.” He wanted to place the copy on reserve at a university library for student reference. Leavis was certain the shop would have no problems obtaining the book from Paris. Porter thought otherwise. When Leavis left, the bookseller contacted the secretary of state to see if the Home Office would allow a copy into the country.

Five days later, Porter got a visit from a Cambridge police officer asking for the name of the individual making the request. When Chief Constable Pearson shared Leavis’s name and asked the Home Office how to proceed, the undersecretary of state claimed the book was unsuitable for “boy and girl undergraduates” and suggested that the Home Office “take active steps to prevent the lectures from taking place.”

He forwarded the matter to Assistant Undersecretary of State Harris, who remembered the
Ulysses
investigation a few years earlier. “This is an amazing proposition,” he wrote in the file. “A lecturer at Cambridge who proposes to make the book a textbook for a mixed class of undergraduates must be a dangerous crank.” To be safe, the Home Office again sought the advice of the director of public prosecutions, and Sir Archibald agreed: “If the last forty pages of this book can be called ‘literature’ there is a whole lot of it running to waste every day in the airing courts at Broadmoor” (that is, the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum). Could a professor really be planning lectures on
Ulysses
? Surely, Sir Archibald wrote, the poor bookseller had been the victim of a hoax. He informed the chief constable of Cambridge that the ban would by no means be removed and, furthermore, that all lectures about Joyce must be stopped. Sir Archibald asked the Cambridge police to investigate and report back to the Home Office “as to who and what Dr. F. R. Leavis of Emmanuel College is.”

A few days later, the vice chancellor of Cambridge University called Leavis into his office. Vice Chancellor Seward sat at his desk at the master’s lodge of Downing College and handed Leavis a typescript several pages long. The document was an evaluation of Joyce’s book along with information about Leavis himself. The Home Office knew where Dr. Frank Raymond Leavis lived and provided details about his rooms at the college. It included incriminating evidence: a copy of the course catalog announcing “Modern Problems of Criticism,” a notice that the course “will be open to both men and women” and the bookseller’s request to import
Ulysses
on his behalf. The Cambridge police were spying on Leavis, and they discovered that his request was not a hoax at all.

Sir Archibald wrote a delicate letter to the vice chancellor. “I don’t pretend to be a scrutineer”—he crossed out
scrutineer
.

Sir Archibald assumed that the vice chancellor was unfamiliar with the book (he specialized in Jurassic flora, after all), so he offered to loan his well-marked copy seized at Croydon Airport.

Sir Archibald then threatened Cambridge University with “prompt criminal proceedings” if it were to find
Ulysses
available to anyone in Cambridge. Booksellers were warned once again not to sell Joyce’s book, and the local police were on alert. But Sir Archibald wanted the vice chancellor to do more than stop the circulation of
Ulysses
. He wanted the university to cancel any lectures about the book—he was offended that the book’s existence might even be
mentioned
to undergraduates, which would only tempt curious students to obtain it.

Leavis told the vice chancellor that he thought students should be free to read it if they chose, and the director of public prosecutions was mistaken if he thought he was gallantly protecting the purity of women’s colleges at Cambridge. “I happen to know,” Leavis said, “that there are copies circulating at both Girton and Newnham.” Leavis was in fact doing both literature and morality a service—he wanted to eliminate “the glamour of the clandestine attending the cult” among the university’s students, “for there
was
a cult,” Leavis later insisted. He noted that he could have obtained a copy of
Ulysses
by contacting any number of shady book agents. “I’m glad you didn’t do that,” the vice chancellor said, a bit more ominously than Leavis would have wanted. “Letters get intercepted.”