Literary setbacks

In ‘The Most Dangerous Book...’ Kevin Birmingham explores censorship and nails a bedrock truth  about ‘Ulysses’, writes  Dwight Garner .

Kevin Birmingham’s new book about the long censorship fight over James Joyce’s Ulysses braids eight or nine good stories into one mighty strand. It’s about women’s rights and heroic female editors, about World War I, about anarchism and modernism, about tenderness and syphilis, about how literature can bend an era’s consciousness, about moral panic and about the Lost Generation and the tent it pitched at Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore. 

The best story that’s told in Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, however, may be that of the arrival of a significant young non-fiction writer. Birmingham, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, appears fully formed in this, his first book. Here he is on what it was like for Harriet Shaw Weaver, an early Joyce patron from a religious family, to confront his vertiginous prose: “To read Joyce was to escape from family prayers, to climb the highest tree and to behold the disquieting panorama across the bluff and the river Weaver coursing below it.”

He nails a bedrock truth about Ulysses, to wit: “For all its obscurities, Joyce’s book is more sentimental than erudite, more elemental than cerebral.” Those erotic letters between Joyce and Barnacle? Birmingham correctly singles them out as “one of the secret headwaters of modern literature” before pushing further to note about them, and about Joyce: “He wanted people to read novels as carefully, as ardently and as sleeplessly as they would read dirty letters sent from abroad. It was one of modernism’s great insights. James Joyce treated readers as if they were lovers.”

When Joyce embarked upon Ulysses in 1915, he was in his early 30s, impoverished, unemployed, married with two children and living in Trieste, Italy. The war’s battlefront was nearby. His literary career was a shambles. His novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was unpublished. Dubliners, his story collection, had the bad luck to be issued a few days before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the start of World War I. It sold only a few hundred copies.

Things were about to get worse. He had devastating eye problems brought on, Birmingham convincingly argues, by syphilis. He endured more than a dozen surgeries, several of which are recounted in excruciating, tear-popping detail. As excerpts from Ulysses started appearing in the Chicago magazine The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson, the magazine began to be harassed by censors, partly because of its supposed links to radicals and anarchists.

Birmingham is excellent on how, while anti-vice crusaders wanted to ban Ulysses to protect what they considered to be tender female sensibilities, many of the book’s most important champions were women. Upon reading Joyce’s prose, Anderson said to Heap: “This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have. We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.” Both women would end up in court.

Sylvia Beach, the owner of the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris, published the first edition of Joyce’s novel in 1922 and worked to smuggle the book into the United States, despite the watchful eyes of the Postal Service. One of her greatest gifts to Joyce was allowing him to make costly revision upon revision at the last minute, though the book had already been typeset, frustrating her printer but securing the novel’s brilliance.

There are many more heroes in The Most Dangerous Book. In his magisterial biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann devotes only a few pages to the book’s trials, including the landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933 that finally allowed the novel to be published by Random House in the United States. These other heroes include Ezra Pound, one of Joyce’s earliest champions, who once explained that he couldn’t help Joyce get his poems published in England because he’d burned all his bridges: “There is no editor who I wouldn’t cheerfully fry in oil, and none who wouldn’t as cheerfully do the same by me.” They also include Ernest Hemingway, who helped Beach smuggle copies of Ulysses into the United States, and John Quinn and Morris Ernst, who each defended Joyce’s writing in court.

Birmingham performs a service in so thoroughly reanimating this material. He understands how Joyce’s novel was “a new rendering of the way people think. Thoughts don’t flow like the luxuriant sentences of Henry James. Consciousness is not a stream. It is a brief assembly of fragments on the margins of the deep, a rusty boot briefly washed ashore before the tide reclaims it.”

Along the way, he explains not just why Joyce matters, but also why good history matters. “Nearly a century later, the reactions to Ulysses can feel overblown,” he writes. “These days, Ulysses may seem more eccentric than epoch changing, and it can be difficult to see how Joyce’s novel  could have been revolutionary. This is because all revolutions look tame from the other side. They change our perspectives so thoroughly that their innovations become platitudes.”

He adds: “We forget what the old world was like, forget even that things could have been any other way.”