The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (48 page)

O that awful deepdown torrent

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down

to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Judge Woolsey interrupted the counselor again. “There are passages of moving literary beauty, passages of worth and power. I tell you,” he continued. “Reading parts of that book almost drove me frantic. That last part, that soliloquy, it may represent the moods of a woman of that sort. That is what disturbs me. I seem to understand it.”

—

BY THE TIME JUDGE WOOLSEY began to consider the legality of
Ulysses
, there were a few federal rulings, scattershot and little known, that could have laid the groundwork for a lenient judgment. Learned Hand’s 1913 ruling was the most ambitious, but not a single federal opinion had cited it in the intervening twenty years. It was easy for Hand to reject the Hicklin Rule and defend truth and beauty when the stakes were so low. He didn’t have to apply his standard to a particular book, and he certainly didn’t have to decide whether Molly Bloom’s nighttime thoughts struck the proper “compromise between candor and shame”—the very notion of a compromise must have seemed quaint to Woolsey. In
Ulysses
, the relationship between candor and shame felt more like a battle. Since the government acknowledged the book’s literary merit only to contend that it did nothing to mitigate its filth, Woolsey had to pit the virtue of literature against the vice of obscenity and declare a victor. He had no intention of categorically legalizing Molly’s coarse language. If
Ulysses
was going to be permissible in the United States, he would have to assert that the novel was transcendent, that it turned filth into art.

After the
Ulysses
hearing, Judge Woolsey walked to the Century Association around the corner, where he had his customary Saturday lunch. He might have felt alone as he left the Bar Building. The types of cases he knew best—patent, copyright and admiralty law—had clearer precedents. And yet even with decades of obscenity case law, it was difficult to escape the notion that a judge had to make it up as he went along. How could a person know whether a book stirred sexual impulses in the average person? Would he have to commission a poll?

It occurred to Woolsey that he might ask the Centurions what they thought about Joyce’s book, so he approached two members of the Century Association’s Literature Committee: Charles E. Merrill, Jr., a publisher, and Henry Seidel Canby, a former Yale English professor and a founding editor of the
Saturday Review of Literature
. It was not an “average” community, perhaps, but it would provide some semblance of objectivity. Woolsey wanted them to be as objective as possible, so he took each of them aside separately, into an alcove of the club’s reading room perhaps. Did James Joyce’s
Ulysses
incite sexual or lustful thoughts in them? (He was asking, of course, for legal purposes.)

Canby was no fan of literary modernism, and he remained one of the only nationally renowned critics who used the phrase “puritanic censorship” approvingly. In the 1920s, Canby had written that Joyce’s “obsession with inflamed or perverted sex” made
Ulysses
incoherent. The fact that Joyce finished his book, he noted in another essay, was the only real indication that he was sane. And yet Canby, like so many others, had changed his mind about Joyce’s novel. Both he and Merrill independently told Woolsey that the overarching effect of
Ulysses
wasn’t sexual at all—if anything, it was “somewhat tragic” and a “powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.”

At eight o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, Judge Woolsey was still thinking about the
Ulysses
case as he shaved. There was a vanity to his decisions. Like Joyce, he drafted in longhand and revised repeatedly. By the time he began sketching his
Ulysses
verdict he was trying to establish his own legal tradition. Woolsey wasn’t going to cite Judge Hand’s definition of obscenity (the two judges didn’t get along), and he made only passing references to a handful of other decisions. “The practice followed in this case,” Woolsey stated in his overview, “is in accordance with the suggestion made by me in the case of
United States
v.
One Book, Entitled ‘Contraception
.’” And Woolsey’s
Contraception
decree declared that Dr. Stopes’s birth control manual “does not fall within the test of obscenity or immorality laid down by me in the case of
United States
v
.
One Obscene Book, Entitled ‘Married Love
.’ ” It was Woolsey all the way through.

The clocks in Judge Woolsey’s Lexington Avenue apartment (wall-mounted timepieces, nine-foot mahogany monuments) chimed on the hour with precision. The rugs and upholstery throughout the corner duplex softened the peals, and the bathroom door muffled them a bit more. When Woolsey glanced above his lathered face in the mirror, he could see the reflection of the clear blue sky. He often thought about a dreary Thanksgiving in New Hampshire decades earlier. The rain had kept him inside his friend’s house all day, and they explored the attic after dinner. Among the boxes of castoffs archived in crumpled newspaper, he found an old poetry anthology. Fipping through the pages, he came across a stanza from an eighteenth-century poem that inspired him enough to jot down a paraphrase. “I fear, Sir, that you may consider these protestations unmaidenly, but by the laws of Nature we are bound to love, although the Rules of Modesty oftentimes compel us to conceal it.”

Woolsey imagined the woman in the poem struggling against Rules of Modesty she had no part in creating, against customs whose power derived primarily from habit. It was, to Woolsey, an epiphany about the law itself, an insight he recited repeatedly over the years, an insight that was more compelling because he had rescued it from an attic: the law was really just a collection of rules pitted against the immutable laws of Nature, and the rules would have to bend lest they snap. Perhaps the law needed sincere, immodest women to bend the rules. He scraped away the unmaidenly stubble from his face and glanced from the lathered razor back to the blue sky. It was a kaleidoscope of impressions.

Judge Woolsey rushed to his desk, grabbed his pen and began writing his decision with a dripping razor in his left hand.

Joyce has attempted

—it seems to me, with astonishing success—to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions,

some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.

The decision stemmed from Joyce’s sincerity. Judge Woolsey peered into the text and imagined James Joyce, a half-blind artist, compelled by nature to say everything, and everything, including decorum, was subservient to his design. Joyce had been attacked and misunderstood, Woolsey wrote, because he “has been loyal to his technique” and “has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about,” no matter the consequences. Some of those thoughts were sexual, but, he pointed out, “it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.”

Woolsey did more than legalize Joyce’s book. He became an advocate. “
Ulysses
is an amazing tour de force when one considers the success which has been in the main achieved with such a difficult objective as Joyce set for himself.” He acknowledged the persuasiveness of Sam Coleman’s argument before casting it aside.

In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains, as I have mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake. Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers . . . when such a great artist in words, as Joyce undoubtedly is, seeks to draw a true picture of the lower middle class in a European city, ought it to be impossible for the American public legally to see that picture?

“
Ulysses,
” he concluded, “may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.”

—

THE KEY PHRASE in the decision’s heading—“the government’s motion for a decree of forfeiture and destruction is denied”—did not quite capture how sweepingly successful Ernst’s argument was. Legal protection for literary value was more than granted. It was urged.

Time
magazine declared Woolsey’s opinion “historic for its authority, its eloquence, its future influence on U.S. book publishing.” When the book was published, the magazine put Joyce on the cover, eye patch and all.

Watchers of the U.S. skies

last week reported no comet or other celestial portent. In Manhattan no showers of ticker-tape blossomed from Broadway office windows, no welcoming committee packed the steps of City Hall. . . . Yet many a wide-awake modern-minded citizen knew he had seen literary history pass another milestone. For last week a much-enduring traveler, world-famed but long an outcast, landed safe and sound on U.S. shores. His name was

.

In Paris, the Joyces’ telephone was ringing constantly with the news. “Thus one half of the English speaking world surrenders,” Joyce said. “The other half will follow.” As calls of congratulations kept coming in, Lucia cut the telephone wires.

At 10:15 in the morning on December 7, 1933, just minutes after the decision was filed, Donald Klopfer called up Ernst Reichl and said, “Go ahead.” Random House had commissioned Reichl to design the Random House edition of
Ulysses,
while Judge Woolsey was still reading the book in Petersham, so that production could begin the moment it was legalized. Reichl, a PhD in art history, had designed everything himself—the binding, the cover, the jacket, the interior—to ensure that every aspect of
Ulysses
would be cohesive. It had taken him two months to test a variety of fonts and formats before he produced a sample copy set in Baskerville.

It was just what Random House wanted: bold, clean and jarringly modern. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” began with a monumental
S
on a page all to itself. Five minutes after Reichl got the call from Random House, his team began printing the first chapters. They included the full text of Judge Woolsey’s decision so that if the government brought charges again, Woolsey’s praise would be entered into evidence. It remained in the Random House edition for decades, making it possibly the most widely read legal decision in U.S. history.

Ulysses
was bound and delivered to the publisher five weeks later. Random House planned an initial printing of ten thousand copies, but by the time publication day arrived (January 25, 1934) advance sales topped twelve thousand—“a really phenomenal figure for a $3.50 book in times like these,” Cerf said, a figure they had thought was months away. By April, sales climbed to thirty-three thousand copies, and Cerf went to Paris and gave Joyce a check for $7,500.
Ulysses
sold more in three months than it had in twelve years. In 1950, it was the Modern Library’s fifth highest-selling book. There was only one problem. The book that Random House gave Reichl to print wasn’t the latest Shakespeare and Company edition. It was Samuel Roth’s edition. The first legal edition of
Ulysses
in the United States was the corrupted text of a literary pirate.

27.

The Home Office in London kept a close eye on the developments overseas. For years, British citizens had been requesting permission to import personal copies of
Ulysses
from France, and after the Woolsey decision the requests were difficult to refuse. In January 1934, T. S. Eliot, by then a director at Faber and Faber, approached the Home Office about publishing a British edition of
Ulysses
, at which point officials decided “to arrest developments” as long as possible.

That same month, a literary critic named Desmond MacCarthy—the man who had ridiculed
Ulysses
in Virginia Woolf’s drawing room nearly twenty years before—requested a copy for a lecture he was giving on Joyce at the Royal Institute. The Home Office granted MacCarthy’s request but worried that people attending the lecture would ask how he obtained his copy, which would lead to more requests. Officials were bound to get questions about how the Home Office made its decisions, including, as one official put it, “whether we regarded the book as obscene or not according to its recipient”—which was exactly how they regarded it.

But the Home Office wanted to apply a uniform principle for
Ulysses,
and it hoped the U.S. rulings would help. British officials examined Woolsey’s decision thoroughly and waited to see if the U.S. government would file an appeal. Sure enough, it did. One week after Woolsey’s decision, Franklin D. Roosevelt unexpectedly replaced George Medalie with a man named Martin Conboy, a close friend of the president’s. Conboy was both a graduate and a regent of Georgetown University as well as an erstwhile president of the Catholic Club of New York. Pope Pius XI made him a knight commander of the order of St. Gregory the Great. Conboy also happened to be a former lawyer for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and he convinced Roosevelt’s new attorney general to take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, one step before the Supreme Court. In May 1934 the
Ulysses
case appeared before Judge Martin Manton, Judge Learned Hand and Judge Augustus Hand (Learned’s cousin).