The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (46 page)

by Nietzsche

by Lewis Carroll

by Charles Dickens

Whoever it was, the joke either didn’t register, or it didn’t deter him. He wrote back thanking Random House for their list of obscene books and asked if they could send one for his inspection. This time, Cerf responded without humor. “There is a growing suspicion in the minds of the board of directors of the Modern Library that we are being kidded by an expert. If this correspondence is to go any further, you will have to send us a picture of yourself with your next letter.” Mr. Black wrote back that he did not have a picture to send them. Collecting obscenity was simply a hobby of his, and he wanted to keep it secret. “Also I can assure you they are for me personally and no one else is involved.” Random House stopped answering Mr. Black’s letters.

26.

Judge Woolsey liked to lumber up to his library on the hill behind his summer home while huffing a cigar or a pipe. In 1933 he stayed long enough in Petersham, Massachusetts, to see the leaves beginning to turn at the end of a particularly lively season. Woolsey played tennis with his wife for recreation (he wore a tie to their matches), and lawyers scattered over the fields picking blueberries during lunch recesses. The judge’s hilltop library doubled as a courtroom—there was a bench at the far end of the spacious hall and tables for counsel.

In the hot months, Woolsey liked to get out of Manhattan and convene his federal cases in Petersham, where he could hear the summer birds during arguments and where his gavel, carved from the original hull of the USS
Constitution
, could remain mostly ornamental. The library used to be the town hall of Prescott. The Woolseys transported the entire building to Petersham, set it down at the top of the hill behind their house and refurbished it with colonial paneling. When the judge was not hearing cases or writing decisions, he read in one of the upholstered armchairs by the fireplace. The wide floorboards creaked under his heavy legs, and he plumped himself down.

Judge Woolsey probably wanted a drink. It had been over a decade since he had one because he considered it hypocritical to put men behind bars for selling liquor if he was going to drink it. A century-old bottle of sherry had tempted him in his Manhattan apartment since Prohibition began, but even a convicted bootlegger might not have begrudged the man a glass after the year he had endured. Woolsey had presided over a fraud trial of a corporation that had scammed hundreds of Catholic priests out of three million dollars, purportedly to finance morally uplifting Hollywood talkies. It turned into the longest criminal court case in U.S. history. The testimony of ninety-eight witnesses produced a fifteen-thousand-page transcript. The trial began before Christmas 1932 and didn’t end until after the Fourth of July, and when it was over, Judge Woolsey told the jurors they should form an alumni association.

His trip to Petersham in the fall of 1933 was supposed to be his vacation, and he planned to spend a few leisurely weeks preparing to hear arguments regarding
Ulysses
. By then, Woolsey was comfortable with obscenity cases, so it would be rather enjoyable to apply the law to a book that was presumed to be a modern classic. Sitting in his library, with his legs crossed and an open novel resting on his outmoded knickerbockers, several pleasures in life would coalesce. But that was before he knew what he was getting into. Reading
Ulysses
, he said later, was “just about the hardest two months of my life.” After several weeks, he had barely gotten through the first few chapters, and he postponed the case for another month. Morris Ernst sent him a trove of supplementary materials to help him make sense of it, including Paul Jordan Smith’s
The Key to the Ulysses
of James Joyce
and Herbert Gorman’s
James Joyce: His First Forty Years
. Ernst planned to send Stuart Gilbert’s book,
James Joyce’s Ulysses
, but Judge Woolsey already owned a copy.

Woolsey owned thousands of books. There were, of course, entire walls filled with legal titles—
Patent Essentials, Maritime Cases
,
The Law of Unfair Competition and Trade-Marks
—but he also devoured poetry and fiction. Browning and Tennyson, Thackeray and Fielding. He had a limited edition of
The Odyssey of Homer
signed by the translator and illustrator. He acquired every first edition of Samuel Johnson he could find, and he loved Anthony Trollope’s novels.
Phineas Finn. Kept in the Dark. Can You Forgive Her?
The judge planned to read them all.

Woolsey was a promiscuous connoisseur. He collected colonial furniture and pewter, old clocks and maps, pipes and blended tobaccos. Filling his life with the trappings of culture was a way of living up to his name, like stuffing your grandfather’s shoes in order to walk in them. John Munro Woolsey’s first New World ancestor had arrived in New Amsterdam in 1623 and ran an alehouse on the East River. Woolseys had attended Yale since 1705, and the judge was no exception. He was the descendant of a Yale founder, Yale presidents and Jonathan Edwards, the preacher who reminded sinners of their depravity. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you.”

Woolsey had received a growing pile of letters ever since the newspapers reported that he was presiding over the case. One man said
Ulysses
“seared his soul.” Another called Joyce’s book “the most precious thing in [my] life.” Legally, the judge could ignore it all—the letters, the books about
Ulysses
and the opinions pasted into the seized copy’s covers. In fact, he wasn’t even obliged to read
Ulysses
itself beyond the passages that the DA had marked as obscene. Judges were free to limit their evaluations to a book’s objectionable portions instead of bothering with the whole text. Judging excerpts wasn’t laziness. It was the logical consequence of the legal definition of obscenity. The Hicklin Rule was formulated to protect the people most susceptible to a text’s corrupting influence and, as even the liberal Learned Hand pointed out, “it would be just those who would be most likely to concern themselves with those parts alone, forgetting their setting and their relevancy to the book as a whole.” Judges and juries read books the way children did.

Yet judges and juries didn’t need the Hicklin Rule to have their readings blinkered by an obscenity charge. The very nature of obscenity encourages a piecemeal approach to books. Obscenity offends. It reads as a singular, jarring moment, something ripped out of the larger context of the book—blinding us to mitigating contexts is what offenses do. The word
cunt
or
fuck
stands out in relief against a page. Offended readers don’t contemplate their function in the narrative’s grand scheme or the role they play in the development of the characters. They become fixated on the words themselves. Judges of obscenity are the closest of close readers.

Woolsey was determined to read
Ulysses
cover to cover. It began like any other novel: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” An Englishman is visiting two Irishmen in an abandoned military tower on the shore overlooking the Irish Sea. The stage is suitably set. The first chapter has punchy dialogue mixed with a few mental impressions. There are dashes instead of quotation marks, though one gets used to that easily enough. But then the story begins to slip away from you. Instead of a voice breaking in to limn the characters and provide background and perspective, it inches forward with clipped impressions mixing seamlessly with details from the city of Dublin—streetside advertisements, a blind stripling tapping a cane, hungry seagulls by the river. Nothing is cordoned off from anything else. You begin to miss quotation marks.

Hundreds of characters pass through the pages. Who are you supposed to pay attention to? What is important? What isn’t? There is a funeral with a stranger in a macintosh whose name nobody knew. There are idle conversations, acrobatic theories about Hamlet and arcane political disputes. Most readers stop around page eighty, but it gets easier once you settle in and allow yourself not to know everything. There is a chapter in a newspaper office riven with headlines. Another chapter parodies dozens of writers, including Samuel Johnson, which Woolsey must have enjoyed. Then the bizarre drama in the brothel bursts forth. How many ways are there to tell a story? An entire chapter is a volley of questions and answers passed between two bodiless spectators as if they were conducting a deposition or an inquest. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus walk out into Bloom’s tiny backyard in the middle of the night.

What did each do

at the door of egress?

Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.

For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

For a cat.

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

This wasn’t Trollope. When the judge turned to the final chapter, he found an unbroken block of text. Molly Bloom’s voice was unfastened from all punctuation. The thoughts were presumably liquid, but the absence of commas and periods had the opposite effect. It slowed Judge Woolsey down and forced him to focus on words he would otherwise glide past. The text compels readers to imagine the shapes of her phrases, to supply her pauses and breaths, to mouth her words.

yes when I lit

the lamp because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me

The obscenity came when you weren’t expecting it and departed briskly. You stopped, as if you didn’t quite catch it, and went back to read it again. The judge took pride in acknowledging the perspectives and desires of women. That was why, in his opinion,
Married Love
was an important marital guide. But even after reading Dr. Stopes, a woman’s perspective was rather abstractly important, a matter of fairness, something to consider for the sake of a healthy marriage. Molly Bloom’s thoughts were not abstract, nor, it seemed, was her marriage healthy.

Ill put on my best

shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress

There were dark X’s like targets all along the margins. Passages like this were only a fraction of the book, but when you finally finished
Ulysses
and thought about it as a whole, as Woolsey intended to do, it was her voice that stayed with you. He read the marked passages several times. If they weren’t obscene, what was obscene? Parts of
Ulysses
, he felt, were artful, even brilliant. Others were inscrutable or downright boring. He knew how to judge something like
Married Love
(not guilty) or
Fanny Hill
(guilty), but this was a conundrum. Most of the book had nothing to do with sex, but when it did it was far worse than anything he had encountered in print.

Judge Woolsey skimmed through the supplementary books and the reviews taped into the covers of
Ulysses
. He was determined to be thorough both because he cared about literature and because he didn’t want to be duped. It would have been a nightmare, he said later, to discover, through some journalistic exposé, that James Joyce was indeed a pornographer, that
Ulysses
was little more than smut cloaked in opaque prose. Woolsey risked throwing his weight—his judgment, his name—behind something that might be a pornographic hoax or else banning a work of genius in a country that prided itself on fighting for freedom. He was beleaguered by two grim prospects: the dishonor of Woolseys preceding him and the derision of generations to come. He needed something stronger than sherry.

—

ON NOVEMBER 25, 1933, the small oval courtroom on the sixth floor of the Bar Association Building on Forty-fourth Street was filled to capacity. If Judge Woolsey had convened the hearing on a Saturday morning to avoid a crowd, he was disappointed. Nevertheless, a weekend morning allowed them to take their time. Woolsey had been convening cases at the Bar Building for weeks (he was, for a judge, surprisingly dissatisfied with courtrooms), and the well-appointed space suited his taste. A white-haired African American bailiff welcomed the judge at the door (he was also Woolsey’s chauffeur), and the crowd began to hush as he made his way toward the bench. A gold ring around his cravat was visible over his black robe’s neckline. No witnesses would be called, and each side would put forth arguments on competing motions. When the judge sat down, he looked over the documents pertaining to the case:
The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses
.
”