The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (45 page)

“Aha!” Ernst exclaimed, thinking the gears of the state were now in motion. A copy of
Ulysses
by James Joyce! Thank goodness we checked! But the customs inspector was unimpressed.

“Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in. We don’t pay attention to it.”

Ernst became frantic. “I
demand
that you seize this book!”

This was too much. The inspector waved over his supervisor. “This fellow wants me to seize this book.” The supervisor looked over at the sweating man in his slightly wrinkled suit and glanced down at the book in question. It was bulging with papers. There were pamphlets and articles in English, French and German. There were circulars and the international Roth protest with columns of signatures. Pages were brusquely folded in or sticking out from the sides, and all of it was attached inside the front and back covers with multiple strips of Scotch tape, like some hasty vacation scrapbook. The supervising inspector decided to seize the man’s book, papers and all.

Bennett Cerf and Morris Ernst had their federal court case.

—

THE ASSISTANT CUSTOMS COLLECTOR knew that he didn’t want to read the confiscated book when it came across his desk a few days later. Luckily, he didn’t have to. When he looked through Treasury Department records for relevant information, he found that in 1928 customs officials in Minneapolis had seized a shipment of forty-three books, including
The Vice of Women
,
Aphrodite
and seven copies of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. The Custom Court’s ruling was unambiguous: “Only a casual glance through the books in evidence is sufficient to satisfy us that they are filled with obscenity of the rottenest and vilest character.” The matter had been decided for him. The collector duly forwarded the obscene book to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York so that the federal government could begin proceedings for the book’s “forfeiture, confiscation and destruction” in accordance with Section 305(a) of the Tariff Act of 1930. Once it was deemed obscene, the law stated, “it shall be ordered destroyed and shall be destroyed.”

Sam Coleman wasn’t yearning to read the book, either. He was the chief assistant DA in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Sam was intelligent, even-tempered and, at thirty-eight, one of the younger prosecutors in the office. It was up to him to decide if the government was going to take James Joyce’s
Ulysses
to court or drop the case altogether. After a month, Coleman had read less than half of it. When he told Ernst and Lindey that he was having a difficult time, they offered to send scholarly books that could help, but Coleman preferred to trudge through
Ulysses
on his own. Nearly six weeks later, he came to the final chapter.

they want everything

in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a woman I can feel his mouth O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only not to look ugly or those lines from the strain who knows the way hed take it you want to feel your way with a man theyre not all like him thank God some of them want you to be so nice about it I noticed the contrast he does it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look with my hair a bit loose from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday

Molly Bloom was having an affair. Coleman called up Lindey and told him that he thought
Ulysses
was “a literary masterpiece.” He passed the book around his office and joked that it was “the only way my staff could get a literary education.” He also concluded that
Ulysses
was obscene under federal law. Because of the book’s literary importance, he thought prosecution was too big a decision for him to make alone. He wanted his superior, U.S. District Attorney George Medalie, to make the final decision.

At the time, Medalie was preparing to be the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in New York. He burnished his reputation among voters by pursuing racketeers and smugglers. But initiating obscenity proceedings against a celebrated book before an election was a tougher call, and Ernst’s involvement made him even more cautious. The ACLU lawyer had made Medalie’s office look foolish the previous year when he defended Dr. Stopes’s
Contraception
against federal censorship. Eager to avoid another embarrassment, Medalie decided to stall until after the election. Random House had been sending out questionnaires and collecting hundreds of opinions about the merits of
Ulysses
from libraries, bookstores, writers, journalists and professors, and Medalie said he needed to see them all before he could decide. In mid-November, after Medalie lost the Senate race in a nationwide Democratic landslide, the DA’s office informed Morris Ernst that the U.S. government was taking
Ulysses
to court. Medalie agreed with Sam Coleman:
Ulysses
was important, but the government was going to bring legal action against it anyway.

Bennett Cerf wanted a trial as soon as possible. He sent out nine hundred questionnaires in an attempt to gauge public opinion about
Ulysses
, and the mailings to libraries and bookstores conveniently doubled as a publicity campaign. As word spread about an impending
Ulysses
obscenity trial, Random House was flooded with questions about the publication date. Even movie studios perked up—Warner Brothers contacted Joyce about acquiring the film rights to
Ulysses
. The anticipation was exactly what Cerf wanted. When the confiscated copy of
Ulysses
was sailing over on the
Bremen
in early May, Cerf had expected to go to press with their edition at some point that summer. But by November 1932 they still didn’t have a trial date, and Ernst’s predictions were frustratingly vague. The case would go to court “some time between now and March,” he said. Cerf warned Ernst that public interest would wane by then.

But if they didn’t win the case, there wouldn’t be any sales at all. Ernst didn’t want to rush the DA’s office because, for the moment, Sam Coleman was sympathetic to their cause, and he wanted to keep it that way. If Ernst pressed them for an early trial, Coleman might insist on exercising the government’s right to read entire chapters to the jury. Ernst didn’t want a jury to read a single word of
Ulysses
. In fact, he didn’t want a jury at all. In his experience, jury rooms encouraged the performance of purity. A man who used dirty words freely in the street would pretend to be offended by them as soon as he was impaneled with a group of twelve strangers. Perceptions of other people’s virtues affected obscenity juries through and through. Because jurors were instructed to judge the book’s effect on the average person, not on themselves, they were left to imagine the book’s influence on a hypothetical person who was always somehow more corruptible than anyone in the jury box.

Ernst wanted a judge to decide the case, and he was determined to find a favorable one. The quest for the perfect judge became a months-long series of delays as they dodged hostile judges on the ever-changing calendar for the Southern District Court of New York. Judge Bondy was too conservative. Judge Caffey wasn’t any good either. Adverse judges were presiding throughout January and February, and Ernst was willing to wait for someone favorable—Judge Patterson, perhaps, or Judge Knox.

But the man Ernst really wanted was Judge Woolsey, who had a track record of liberal obscenity rulings. In fact, it was Woolsey who had legalized Dr. Marie Stopes’s
Married Love
and
Contraception
. After the first decision, Ernst, eager to make a new friend, gave Judge Woolsey a signed copy of his book about obscenity law—it was a book-length brief disguised as a gift, though if the judge read it he was not entirely persuaded. Woolsey flatly rejected Ernst’s First Amendment arguments—twice—but he was a man of culture, a reader, someone who valued literature and loved words. When he considered the meaning of
obscenity
in his
Married Love
decision, Ernst noticed that he didn’t bother with the Hicklin Rule. The judge went straight for his
Oxford English Dictionary
.

But the judicial calendar wasn’t cooperating. In March 1933 the DA’s office told Ernst that Woolsey and Knox were both “out of the question for months.” The judges presiding through April and May were generally unfavorable, and at the end of May, Judge Coxe declined to hear the case for unspecified “technical reasons.” Stalling through months of bad luck required more than patience. It required Sam Coleman’s cooperation. This wasn’t the first time they had faced each other in the courtroom. Coleman had presented the government’s case when Ernst defended
Enduring Passion
, Stopes’s sequel to
Married Love
, and Coleman seemed satisfied with Ernst’s victory. By 1933, Coleman and Ernst had almost become friends, and Ernst was about to test that friendship.

One day in early June, Coleman came across a
New York Times
headline, “Ban upon ‘Ulysses’ to Be Fought Again.” It rehashed basic information about the case, Random House and Bennett Cerf—all of the promotional material disguised as news that Coleman expected Random House to plant before the trial. But deep in the article he found a nugget of genuine news: “It was learned yesterday that [Cerf] had won a preliminary victory by obtaining the admittance of one copy of the book. This was made possible by an exception in the 1930 Tariff Act.”

Coleman was furious. The law contained a provision allowing the importation of banned books if the U.S. Treasury Department recognized the book as a classic. The classics exemption tucked into the Tariff Act was part of the reason why Ernst was focusing on the literary value of
Ulysses
. Ernst was convinced that literary praise mattered in obscenity decisions because the newly revised Tariff Act said it did. And how did Ernst know about the new revision? Because he had written it himself, it helps to have connections.

Back in February, Ernst and Lindey shipped a second copy of
Ulysses
to New York and petitioned the secretary of the Treasury to admit it under the exemption. “We have come to realize that there can be
modern
classics as well as ancient ones. If there is any book in any language today genuinely entitled to be called a ‘modern classic’ it is
Ulysses
.” The secretary of the Treasury agreed, which added a government voice to the laudatory opinions stuffed inside the books’ covers. Coleman felt ambushed. Ernst and Lindey filed the petition behind his back while his office spent months helping the defense team stall their way past judge after judge. Without stepping foot in a courtroom, Ernst managed to make the DA’s office look foolish again.

Three days later, Coleman’s office called Ernst’s office to say he wanted another adjournment until late June, and he was evasive about the reasons why. Ernst and Lindey found that Judge Coleman (no relation to Sam) was presiding then, but neither of them knew who he was, and whoever heard the preliminary motion would preside over the trial. When they asked around, they discovered that Judge Coleman was a “strait-laced Catholic” and probably the single worst judge the defense team could face.

When Lindey reported to the federal courthouse, he found an impatient Judge Coleman waiting to hear preliminary motions for a case that had been bouncing around their calendar for months, and he flatly refused to grant a two-week adjournment. Judge Coxe would be presiding then, Judge Coleman explained, and after declining for “technical reasons” two months earlier, Coxe had specifically told the other judges that he didn’t want the
Ulysses
case. The DA’s office politely suggested the following week. The judge looked at the calendar and said he didn’t want to do that, either. Judge Patterson would be presiding that week, and the case would be a burden for him—Patterson was recovering from pneumonia, and one of his children was very ill. So Judge Coleman took it upon himself to postpone the hearing until the next open date, August 22. And who would be presiding then, Lindey asked? Judge Woolsey.

After eight months of delays, Morris Ernst had his man. The government agreed to waive its right to a jury, so the government’s case against the legality of
Ulysses
in the United States would be decided upon direct arguments before the judge. Woolsey would determine the fate of
Ulysses
himself.

With another crucial moment approaching, it was again time to search for omens. Sylvia Beach had recently heard that the Pope had inadvertently blessed a copy of
Ulysses
concealed beneath a prayer book. It wasn’t clear if that was a good omen or a bad one. Random House was getting bad omens. Cerf and Klopfer heard rumors that “a notorious pirate” on Fifth Avenue was about to exploit the publicity of the trial to produce a quick and cheap edition that would be on the streets the day
Ulysses
was legalized, if not before. Cerf asked Ernst, “Can we write him some kind of a letter threatening to clap an injunction upon him, and seize any copies of
Ulysses
that he prints as soon as they come off the press?” And if the threat of piracy wasn’t unsettling enough, Random House began to receive suspicious letters.

It was like an inartful version of one of Comstock’s decoy letters. It read so much like a smut hound’s trap, in fact, that it couldn’t be a smut hound. Was it a joke? A legal ambush? To respond with a list of titles fulfilling Mr. Black’s request would be tantamount to admitting that Random House was a publisher of obscene materials, which would strengthen the government’s case against
Ulysses
. It may have seemed paranoid, but it was difficult to escape the impression that someone was trying to set them up. Bennett Cerf wrote back immediately.