The Most Dangerous Book, The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, should be understood as broader than you might think. Yes, it’s about the legal struggles to prevent the book from being suppressed, censored or destroyed. The early twentieth century was an era when offensive books were burned. It wasn’t just the Nazis who did that in the thirties, Americans were doing it in the teens and 20’s.
But it’s also a book where Kevin Birmingham tells of the battle Joyce had to write the novel, the battles its early readers had to make sense of the most radical book of its era, and the struggles of its early reviewers, some of them distinguished writers themselves, to come to terms with Ulysses.
Did you know that Joyce wrote almost one third of Ulysses after the book was first produced in galley? I should write the word “book” in italics. Ulysses was protean, being expanded, revised, redacted and restored …sometimes to save its publishers and early supporters from jail time and to save the book from the flames. This was an era when the head of Harper could be sent to jail for publishing a book.
No wonder there have been so many controversies about what constitutes an accurate edition. Today, Random House publishes two different editions of Ulysses and scholars have problems with both of them.
An example: the character Leopold Bloom is depicted masturbating. But Joyce’s language is a complex of mytho-poetic erudition and gutter talk. The less careful reader might miss it. Many of those who had to read passages of the novel during an early litigation did miss it, as its intrepid defense lawyer hoped they would.
He knew that a masturbating character would put the book beyond the pale. What would that mean? Jail time for anyone who published and distributed it and Ulysses to the flames.
Whether you picked up on the sex scene or not might depend on what version of the passage you read. In order to save chapters that were being printed in serial form in The Little Review…the first radical publication in which any of Ulysses appeared in print, Joyce partisans deleted provocative words to the point of rendering the text almost incoherent.
Censors knew that there were classics of world literature that contained “dangerous passages”. Young people and women had to be protected. But if those books were dangerous and allowed, how could you with consistency censor contemporary books? You’d have to ban classics as well.
But the classics were rendered venerable by the passage of generations and few people read them anyway. So they were safe. This was a standard argument in defense of a censorship that seemed arbitrary. It was a position that was excoriated by Ezra Pound.
One of the key arguments that Birmingham makes about censorship is that it is characteristically arbitrary. A book could have been on a bookstore or library shelf for years without incident. Suddenly, an almost random confluence of local politics results in pressure for its removal.
Another remarkable argument from the teens and 20’s had to do with procedure in the courtroom. The Most Dangerous Book sometimes reads like a legal thriller. The evolution of judicial wrangles over how you judge a book is fascinating.
If you were prosecuting an obscene book or magazine, you would have to introduce evidence that the material was obscene. But you couldn’t make public what you regarded as pornographic. Especially if there were ladies present in the courtroom.
The content of dangerous books couldn’t be presented, even to be judged. In early court procedure, you would have to take the word of a recognized expert on vice that the material was too offensive to print or be made public.
Birmingham is an astute psychologist, sketching personalities in a few deft, memorable lines. We have Sylvia Beach sleeping on a cot in the back room of Shakespeare and Company while rats scurried past the window she had her back against.
Braverman’s business was based in Canada. So he had a pretext for smuggling forbidden copies of the massive Ulysses into the United States. In some cases he stuffed several copies at a time under his clothes. If he had been caught the result would have been prison.
We have Ezra Pound, admired for all the wrong reasons, for his editing skills and his polemics rather than his poetry, faking the report of his death so he could reinvent himself.
We have a 22 year old Hemingway in Paris, determined to be a writer, taking his friends on hunting trips and other manly pursuits as a way to pay them back for the kindnesses they had done him. Hemingway, who lived comfortably in Paris with his family and maid service but who deprived himself deliberately because he felt that writers, for the sake of their art, shouldn’t have it easy.
We have the “radical” George Bernard Shaw backing away from Ulysses, Virginia Woolf supporting it reluctantly and her circle making fun of it. We have T.S. Eliot fighting for it from the start. E. M. Forster thought it was hellish. Hart Crane loved it.
We have Joyce as a young man in Dublin, having the balls to assure a famous 36 year-old W. B. Yeats on his first encounter with him that he is in decline. That Joyce, about ten years his junior, has come too late to influence him for the better.
Joyce and his partner, Nora. He wouldn’t marry her and the children wouldn’t be baptized. He wouldn’t confer any authority on the church. It’s part of the early 20th century’s anarchist spirit that Birmingham outlines so ably. Emma Goldman infuses The Most Dangerous Book with her fiery presence. Terrorists threw bombs.
Joyce took extensive notes for Ulysses. Individual words, passages were written down. Joyce kept a notebook with him. His notes were so extensive that he even took notes on his notes. Joyce conquered his text chapter by chapter as he paralleled events in Homer. Some chapters took years to write while he was living on handouts and going blind from syphilis in a succession of dumps mostly, in Trieste, Zürich and Paris.
Joyce didn’t choose the easiest life he could have had. But he didn’t want an easy life. And he didn’t choose to be a writer. He was a writer. Despite the tremendous physical pain he was in. He spent some nights screaming. And Birmingham outlines Joyce’s many eye operations in surgical detail.
If you can take it, it’s one of the most absorbing features of the book. Joyce died a year before the penicillin was invented that could have provided an effective treatment for his syphilis. Nora had it too, only in a less virulent form.
Joyce thought he should be able to write anything he wanted. It’s not only a question of revealing his characters’ subconscious thoughts. Joyce, mindful of Freud’s work on the subconscious, thought attention should also be paid to what was conscious.
Here’s a quote from Birmingham from a Joyce letter to Nora. These aren’t hidden thoughts. They are out in the open:
…your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt.
The tendency of society to protect itself from outliers is still with us: Attempts to punish museums for showing disagreeable art, the idea that free expression must be suppressed in order to protect families, that art mustn’t be blasphemous, that women must be shielded, that sex is dirty, that certain books are dangerous and should have their access restricted.
I couldn’t read The Most Dangerous Book by Kevin Birmingham without becoming agitated. I think the best reaction to any work of art is another work of art. You’re offended by the perceived blasphemy and obscenity in Ulysses? Fine…write a novel that you think is better. “The marketplace of ideas” will sort things out. That’s one of the evolving judicial notions that comes up in The Most Dangerous Book.
The reader, led by Birmingham’s sweeping history of the censorship of Ulysses, is provided with some hints of the collapse of the judicial prosecution of literature in the sixties with the trial on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, among other cases.
Birmingham is doing scholarship, not advocacy in The Most Dangerous Game. But he does point out with a modest eloquence the slowly dawning recognition by the courts that standards of obscenity are socially conditioned and change with the times. A judgement that obscenity cannot be an absolute and eternal judgement removed from any social and literary context is decisive for creating an environment of greater tolerance.
In no book of the early twentieth century, save Ulysses, is the creative process of the struggling individual resisting control from the church, the state or any other exterior authority, so close to the page…absent the irony that distances the reader in Thomas Mann or the sheen of aestheticism that hypnotizes the reader in Proust.
Reading The Most Dangerous Book by Kevin Birmingham allowed me to decide among early twentieth century masterpieces that it should be Joyce’s Ulysses that is put in first place. The love, the humor and the intellect, the Irish and the grand sense of a boy’s adventure, the self-invention of language, the revolutionary depth of character, are bare on the page.
