The Darkening Age

 Catherine Nixey

Celsus professes himself baffled by the extent to which Jesus’s teachings seem to contradict many of those laid down in the Old Testament. Have the rules of an allegedly omniscient god changed over time? If so, then “who is wrong? Moses or Jesus? Or when the Father sent Jesus had he forgotten what commands he gave to Moses?” Or maybe God knew he was changing his mind, and Jesus was a legal messenger, sent to give notice that God wished to “condemn his own laws and change his mind.” 

Celsus cannot understand, either, why there was such a ‘reat gap between the creation of mankind and the sending of Jesus. If all who don’t believe are damned, why wait so long to enable them to be saved? “Is it only now after such a long age that God has remembered to judge the life of men? Did he not care before?”* Moreover, why not send Jesus somewhere a bit more populous? If God “woke up out of his long slumber and wanted to deliver the human race from evils, why on earth did he send this spirit that you mention into one corner” of the world — and, Celsus implies, a backwater at that?” He also queries why an omniscient, omnipotent God would need to send someone at all. “What is the purpose of such a descent on the part of God?” he asks. “Was it in order to learn what was going on among men? . . . Does not he know everything?’” 

Jesus’s logistical abilities are, like God’s, called into question. Celsus attacks the tendency for some of his most miraculous moments to be witnessed by the fewest number of people. “When he was punished he was seen by all; but by only one person after he rose again; whereas the opposite ought to have happened.”** What witnesses the Bible did offer were, for Celsus, rarely reliable. Of the Resurrection he says: “Who saw this? A hysterical female, as you say” —and one other person who then went on to invent this “cock-and-bull story.” The Resurrection was therefore either “wishful thinking” or perhaps “a hallucination.”” 

The claim that Christ was divine seems to Celsus a logical impossibility: “How can a dead man be immortal?”* The idea that Jesus came to save sinners also comes in for short shrift. “Why on earth this preference for sinners?” he asks. “Why was he not sent to those without sin? What evil is it not to have sinned?””? 

The arguments go on, hammering at Christianity’s central beliefs. The Creation story itself takes a particular bashing, Celsus disdains the idea of an omnipotent being needing ta piece out his work like a builder, to make so much on one day, so much more on a second, third, fourth and so on—and particularly the idea that, after all this work, “God, exactly like a bad workman, was worn out and needed a holiday to have rest.” 

To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of , “Creation myth” was not only implausible but redundant During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philo. sophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory—an Epicurean one — stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own struc. ture and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos“the uncuttable thing”: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space “in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that.”” Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing more than “a haphazard union of elements.”* The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism. As the Roman poet and atomist Lucretius wrote, nature put forth many species. Those that had useful characteristics —the fox and its cunning, say, or the dog and its intelligencesurvived, thrived and reproduced. Those creatures that lacked these “lay at the mercy of others for prey and profit... unt! nature brought that race to destruction.” 

The intellectual consequences of this powerful theory weré summarized succinctly by the Christian apologist Minucius Fe jix. If everything in the universe has been “formed by a fort jtous concourse of atoms, what God is the architect?” The obvious answer is: no god at all. No god magicked up mankind out of nothing, no divinity breathed life into us; and, when we die, our atoms are simply reabsorbed into this great sea of stuff. “No thing is ever by divine power produced from noth: ing,” wrote Lucretius in his great poem On the Nature of Things, and “no single thing returns to nothing.”* Atomic theory thus neatly did away with the need for and possibility of Creation, Resurrection, the Last Judgment, hell, heaven and the Creator God himself. 

As indeed was its intention. Thinkers in the classical world frequently lamented the mortal fear of divine beings. Superstition, wrote the Greek biographer Plutarch, was a terrible affliction that “humbles and crushes a man.”* People saw earthquakes and floods and storms and lightning and assumed, in the absence of any other explanation, that they are “done by divine power.’*” The consequence of this was that people tried to propitiate these temperamental gods. Writers such as Lucretius argued that atomism, correctly applied, could blast this fear into tiny pieces. If there was no Creator—if lightning, earthquakes and storms were not the actions of irate deities but simply of moving particles of matter—then there was nothing to fear, nothing to propitiate and nothing to worship.* Including no Christian God. 

In the ensuing centuries, texts that contained such dangerous ideas paid a heavy price for their “heresy.” As has been lucidly argued by Dirk Rohmann, an academic who has produced a comprehensive and powerful account of the effect of Christianity on books, some of the greatest figures in the early Church rounded on the atomists.” Augustine disliked atomism for precisely the same reason that atomists liked it: it weakened mankind’s terror of divine punishment and hell. Texts by philosophical schools that championed atomic theory suffered. 

The Greek philosopher Democritus had perhaps done more than anyone to popularize this theory — though not only this one. Democritus was an astonishing polymath who had written works on a breathless array of other topics. A far from complete list of his titles includes On History, etc etc. Today Democritus’s most famous theory is his atomism. What did the other theories state? We have no idea: every single one of his works was lost in the ensuing centuries. As the eminent physicist Carlo Rovelli recently wrote, after citing an even longer list of the philosopher’s titles: “the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation.’ 

Democritus’s atomic theory did, however, come down to us —pbut on a very slender thread: it was contained in one single volume of Lucretius’s great poem, which was held in one single German library, which one single intrepid book hunter would eventually find and save from extinction. That single volume would have an astonishing afterlife: it became a literary sensation, returned atomism to European thought, created what Stephen Greenblatt has called “an explosion of interest in pagan antiquity” and influenced Newton, Galileo and later Einstein. 

In the Renaissance, Lucretius and his atomic theories were revolutionary. In Celsus’s time they were utterly unremarkable. It wasn’t just the fact that Christians were ignorant about philosophical theories that annoyed Celsus; it was that Christians actually reveled in their ignorance. Celsus accuses them of actively targeting idiocy in their recruitment. “Their injunctions are like this,” he wrote. “Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils.” 

He went on: Christians “are able to convince only the fool ish, dishonourable and stupid, and only slaves, women and little children.”“? They made overtures to children, cobblers, jaundry-workers and yokels, then dripped honeyed intelleccual poison into uneducated ears, claiming “that they alone... know the right way to live, and if the children would believe ghem, they would become happy.’ Christianity’s lack of inv gellectual rigor worried Celsus for the same reasons that it had  Bothered gaylen. Christian's Celsius wrote do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe and use such expressions as do not ask questions just believe. To men as educated as Celsius and gaylen this was unfathomable in Greek philosophy faith was the lowest form of cognition.

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Celsus, however, implied that if people were better educated they would be more resistant to such hucksters as Peregrinus — or indeed to Jesus, whom Celsus considered little more than a “sorcerer. ” The “miracles” that Jesus performed were, he felt, no better than the sort of thing that was constantly being peddled by tricksters to the gullible across the Roman Empire. Ina world in which medical provision was rare, many laid claim to magical powers. Travel in the east and you would come across any number of men who “for a few obols make known their sacred lore in the middle of the market-place and drive daemons out of men and blow away diseases,” and display “dining-tables and cakes and dishes which are non-existent.” Even Jesus himself, observes Celsus, admits the presence of such people when he talks about men who can perform similar wonders to his own. Modern scholarship supports Celsus’s accusations: ancient papyri tell of sorcerers who had the power to achieve such biblical-sounding feats as stilling storms and miraculously providing food.” 

Celsus touches on a sore point here. Early Christianity would have to spend a considerable amount of time and effort policing the boundaries between sanctity and sorcery. A large amount of ink was spilled on the subject of Simon Magus (the Magician). A quick summary of Simon’s life makes it clear why he was so threatening: Simon performed various miracles, gathered a following of people who thought he was a god ~including a former prostitute — and one of Simon’s disciples “persuaded those who adhered to him that they should never die.”® His followers even honored him with a statue inscribed with the words “To Simon, the Holy God” — in Latin, Simoni Deo Sancto. Interestingly, it is not Simon’s supernatural abilities that are denied by Christian accounts —the texts admit he can perform amazing feats — merely his divine right to do so. The criticism seems to be not one of religious fakery but of rel. gious fuel: Simon gains his power not from God but “by virtue of the art of the devils operating in him.” 

Christians debunked pretenders. The ancient world debunked everyone else. Stories of witty atheists were treasured, told and retold. When one man asked a Greek philosopher to go with him to a shrine to pray, the friend replied that he must think the god was very deaf if he couldn’t hear them from where they were.” 

Some Romans had so little patience for Roman religious rites that they discarded them entirely. One moonlit night in the third century Bc, a Roman consul called Publius Claudius Pulcher decided to launch a surprise attack against an enemy fleet. Before he moved, he took the usual auspices required before military action. In accordance with these rites, the sacred chickens were released from their cage. They refused to eat —a terrible omen and a clear sign to all that the gods did not favor this attempt and that it should be abandoned. It was not clear to Publius Claudius Pulcher. Throwing the chickens into the sea he scoffed: “Let them drink, since they don’t wish to eat,” and sailed into what would be a disastrous battle.

There was a strong strain of skepticism in Greek and Roman thought. As Pliny the Elder put it: “I deem it a mark of human stupidity to seek to discover the shape and form of God. Whoever God isprovided there is a God—. . . he consists wholly of sense, sight and hearing, wholly of soul, wholly of mind, wholly of himself.”® Pliny suggested that what divinity there was, was to be found in humanity itself: “God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.” Rome was not an empire of atheists—-emperors were even deified after their death, and their “genius” (divine spirit) then worshipped. Nevertheless, even the emperors themselves didn’t always take this too seriously. The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: “Gah I seem to be turning into a god.”

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So influential were such tales that, as the academic Robin Lane Fox has pointed out, when a group of Christians were martyred by the Muslim authorities in Cordoba in the ninth century, the accounts of their trials set them before a “consul,” as if this was all taking place in ancient Rome.” Walk around any great European art gallery today and the walls will be peopled by the most agonizing deaths depicted in lovingly — and often alarmingly — graphic detail. 

Martyrs became art. And not always good art. While the earliest—and most reliable martyr tales were often affecting in their simplicity and their honesty, many of the later and more fictional ones suffered from crass characterization, barely sublimated sexuality and lashings of gore. The Victorians, naturally, adored them. In the nineteenth century, hymns flowed from pious pens. “Bright the stones which bruise thee gleam,” ran one verse on St. Stephen, who had been stoned to death, “Sprinkled with thy life blood’s stream.” Another hymned the saints who “met the tyrant’s brandished steel / the lion’s gory mane.”

Four centuries after Caxton, these lurid stories could stil sell copies. In 1895 the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz published a novel that became an international bestseller and contributed to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for litera ture. This seventy-three-chapter behemoth told the story of the Christian martyrs who were put to death by the emperof Nero. It concluded with the observation that “Nero passed on, as a whirlwind, as a storm, as a fire, as war or death passes, but the Basilica of Peter still stands on the Vatican Hill and rules over the city and the world.”” Today, the book has been all but forgotten but its title, Quo Vadis, has not. Hollywood went on to make numerous film and television series by this name. The most famous was the 1951 swords-and-sandals epic in which a rotund Peter Ustinov as Nero smirkingly looks on while Christians, wearing white and looking pious, are pursued by lions in the arena, managing to sing hymns up to the very moment of mauling.” 

But although martyr stories have often made for arresting and compelling drama, very few, if any, of these tales are based on historical fact. There were simply not that many years of jmperially ordered persecution in the Roman Empire. Fewer than thirteen —in three whole centuries of Roman rule. These years may have loomed understandably large in Christian accounts but to allow them to dominate the narrative in the way that they have—and still do—is at best misleading and at worst a gross misrepresentation. During these first centuries of the new religion, local persecutions of Christians occurred. But we know of no government-led persecution for the first 250 years of Christianity with the exception of Nero’s —and Nero, with even-handed lunacy, persecuted everyone. For two and a half centuries the Roman imperial government left Christianity alone. 

The idea, therefore, of a line of satanically inspired emperors, panting for the blood of the faithful, is another Christian myth. As the modern historian Keith Hopkins wrote, “the traditional question: “Why were the Christians persecuted?’ with all its implications of unjust repression and eventual triumph, should be re-phrased: “Why were the Christians persecuted so little and so late?” 

Nevertheless, martyr tales have been hugely influential, not least on Christianity’s image of itself. The academic Candida Moss has argued that in the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there faster, martyrs enjoyed preferential terms in paradise, getting to wear the much-desire, martyr’s crown. Tempting celestial terms were offered: it wa, said that the scripture promised “multiplication, even to a hyp, dred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homesx Precisely how this celestial sum had been calculated is not clea, but the general principle was: those who died early, public and painfully would be best rewarded. 

In many of the martyr tales the driving force is less thy the Romans want to kill—and more that the Christians wan to die. Why wouldn't they? Paradoxically, martyrdom hel considerable benefits for those willing to take it on. One was its egalitarian entry qualifications. As George Bernard Shaw ac. idly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way aman can become famous without ability. More than that, in a socially and sexually unequal era it was a way in which women and even slaves might shine. Unlike most positions of power in the highly socially stratified late Roman Empire, this was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex. The sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out that — provided you believe in its promised rewards — martyrdom is a perfectly rational choice. A martyr could begin the day of their death as one of the lowliest people in the empire and end it as one of the most exalted in heaven. So tempting were these rewards that pious Christians born outside times of persecution were wont to express disappointment at being denied the opportunity of an agonizing death. When the later emperor Julian pointedly avoided executing Christians in his reign, one Christian writer, far from being grateful, sourly recorded that Julian had “begrudged the honour of martyrdom to our combatants. 

There were incitements for Christians not only to die but to die as painful a death as possible. As one soon-to-be martyred Christian irritably explained, the greater the pain, the greatef the gain: “Those whose victory is slower and with greater dif ficulty, these receive the more glorious crown.” As martyr literature developed the descriptions of the deaths became graphic to the point of prurient.

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The Most Dangerous Book

 Kevin Birmingham

—_ . a 4 

Fatherhood was a burden for Joyce. At twenty-three, he was unprepared for the responsibility, and the prospect of dragging children from one impoverished household to another, as his own father had done, haunted him. The passionate life with Nora was fading, and she was indifferent to his work, which was more vexing than if she had despised it. When she saw him copying small scenes into his manuscript from loose sheets, she asked, “Will all that paper be wasted?” 

Joyce’s brother Stannie joined them in Trieste a couple of months after Giorgio’s birth. He took a job at Berlitz, and together they made eighty-five crowns a week. It was on the lower end of the average Triestine salary, but it would have been sufficient for a thrifty lifestyle. To save money, they shared a flat on the outskirts of town with the school’s other English teacher, Alessandro Francini, and his wife. But Joyce was bad with money. Instead of saving the few spare crowns they had, he insisted that they dine out at restaurants, preferably the one with electric lighting. Later in the evenings, he would venture into the Cittavecchia, the old city, passing small wineshops and trundling oxcarts—some of the streets were too steep and narrow for carriages. He was drawn to working-class trattorias and grungy osterte where men shouted at one another in Czech or Hungarian. Joyce drank absinthe and sang songs with the wharf porters before making his way to the brothels. 

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Weaver approached printer after printer only to have each one refuse, sometimes brusquely. “We could not for one moment entertain any idea of printing such a production,” Billing & Sons wrote to her. “We are convinced that you would run very great risk in putting such a book on the market,” and they advised her to scour the text and cut any objectionable passages. Over the next few months, thirteen printers refused to print A Portrait in its entirety. Every time a printer suggested an expurgated version, Miss Weaver declined. 

Pound, who was nothing if not resourceful, came up with an idea: they could leave large blank spaces in the text wherever a printer wished to cut words or passages. Then they could type out all of the deleted portions on quality paper and paste the omitted words into every single copy—“‘And damn the censors.” Joyce thought it was ingenious. The printers, unfortunately, thought it was madcap. 

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In June 1915, Joyce was unemployed, two months’ salary in debt and a Britie citizen residing in enemy territory. He put up his furniture as collateral to purchase train fare from Trieste to neutral Switzerland for himself, his wife and his two children, ten-year-old Giorgio and eight-year-old Lucia. The circuitous route through the Austrian war zone took three nerve-racking days before they arrived in Zurich, which had become a haven for smugglers and spies, forgers and deserters, propagandists and black market tycoons. Food was scarce, especially in winter, when the corn and potatoes planted along the lake were dormant. When meat wasn’t available, people ate boiled chestnuts and frog legs. Instead of sugar cubes, cafés served coffee with saccharine pills. 

The war gave Zurich a surreal atmosphere. In July 1916, Hugo Ball read out the Dada Manifesto in a Zurich guild house: “How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness.” Dadaists wearing masks and outlandish costumes performed dances bordering on madness in the Cabaret Voltaire. They recited poems of nonsense words, hiccups, whistles, moos and meows. Dadaism was Futurism with buffoonery instead of violence. What the two movements shared was a desire to start from scratch. In the midst of a war of unprecedented scale, they wanted to begin civilization anew. The Swiss did not approve. 

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docks, where they were alone for the first time. June 16, 1904. The ink of each word in his manuscript made those fugitive moments incrementally more indelible. Ulysses was his final love letter. 

The erotic letters between James Joyce and Nora Barnacle are one of the secret headwaters of modern literature. For it was here that Joyce had an epiphany about language itself: the souls of the commonest words illuminated the fact that the ultimate power of writing is its ability, like love, to render the writer helpless. His most intrepid letters dissolved into abject pleas (“Forgive me!”) and feeble iterations of Nora’s name. Joyce was discovering the paradox of words when he was most apt to benefit from it—he had left Dublin to become a writer only to return five years later as an agent for a short-lived cinema. He had spent those years belaboring a novel that no one had read—that perhaps no one would ever read. But with Nora, Joyce had an audience. She was not a scholar or an aesthete, not a patron or a literary critic, but she was devoted, and she read his letters carefully. It was in their secret exchanges in 1909 that Joyce, who spent so much time gaining mastery over words, abruptly found himself mastered by them. That helplessness gave his diligent craftsmanship a dimension of awe, a fear and a thrilling freedom, a recklessness and an openness that must have felt like endless talking. 

An intellectual gulf separated the Galway girl from the artist, and yet in some ways she became a model for every reader he ever wanted. The “ideal reader,” Joyce would write years later, suffers from “an ideal insomnia.” 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. 

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premises and asked Miss Beach if there was anything he could fix for her, He applied his expertise to a cigarette box from Sarajevo and a wobbly chair. 

Sytvia Beach had impeccable timing. The First World War had created a generation of transnationalists. Young men and women who never thought of leaving their hometowns found themselves serving 1n allied or enemy countries and imagining cosmopolitan lives. The booming American and British economies and the plummeting franc made Paris the perfect cosmopolis. Between 1915 and 1920, the franc lost nearly two-thirds of its value against the dollar, and Paris’s affordability made its charms irresistible. Only fifteen thousand Americans had visited France annually before the war. In 1925, American tourists numbered four hundred thousand, and many of them stayed. There were eight thousand American permanent residents in Paris in 1920. Three years later, there were thirty-two thousand. The influx made Paris’s changes seem like Americanizations. One-way streets and electric signs appeared along with English-language newspapers. There were American churches and grocery stores, Masonic lodges and basketball leagues. Cabarets and café concerts were supplanted by large music halls where expatriates listened to jazz while sipping bright jumbles of alcohol they called “cocktails” without having to worry about federal raids. 

Shakespeare and Company transformed an Anglophone convergence into a community. It was, in fact, a thinly monetized social center. Library membership fees barely covered expenses, and the shop made only one hundred dollars in profit in 1921. The importance of Shakespeare and Company had nothing to do with money. By the end of the year, it was a place where readers and writers could talk to one another, where older and younger people exchanged ideas and where Sylvia Beach introduced writers to editors and publishers. If you wrote or read literature and found yourselfin Paris fora week, amonth oradecade you knew where to go. Shakespeare and Company became a literary node ina cultural metropolis, 

Culture needs locations. It is not a seamless backdrop so much as a patchwork of local phenomena. Cultures have centers, specific arenas where artists join institutions, where people influence and repel one another, where active ties change because of planned and unplanned events and where one can be exposed to people and ideas from Japan, Moscow, West Africa and Dublin all in the same day—cultural centers exist because they are hubs for the peripheries. If modernism had a preeminent location, it was Paris: atop Montmartre before the war and then, when prices became too high, the Left Bank, less than two square miles of narrow streets and wide boulevards south of the arcing River Seine. 

Left Bank neighborhoods were diverse, inexpensive and saturated with cafés, This was especially true of Montparnasse, a Left Bank neighborhood where working-class people, immigrants and political refugees mixed with artists and the bourgeoisie as well as students from the adjacent Latin Quarter. Artists like Chagall and Brancusi drank with butchers at the Café Dantzig because Montparnasse’s major artist colony was next to a slaughterhouse. 

Cafés were more than just the accoutrements of Paris’s cultural life. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were more drinking establishments in Paris than in any other city in the world—one for about every three hundred people. That was three times as many per capita as in New York and more than ten times as many as in London. The sheer number of Parisian cafés facilitated the formation of small groups in uncrowded spaces, which allowed people to talk, plan and argue freely. If the arguments became fierce, the café culture helped with that, too—there was always another one down the street, and their sidewalk access facilitated the chance encounters that allow groups to form, dissolve and reconfigure. Though fluid, café interactions were far from frivolous. They thrived in France partly because they were havens from stringent nineteenth-century assembly laws. Uprisings from 1848 to the Paris Commune to 1919 arose seemingly spontaneously because workers organized in cafés rather than through unions. Left Bank cafés were at once intimate and ephemeral, playful and consequential, semipublic proving grounds for ideas and semiprivate sanctuaries from the state. They were the perfect spaces for modernism and for a book as urban as Ulysses. 

Shakespeare and Company was a hybrid space, something between an open café and an ensconced literary salon, which suited Anglophone patrons for whom café culture was always adoptive. Sylvia Beach’s bookshop gave British and American travelers a dose of the stability that cafés didn’t provide. Several members had their mail sent to Shakespeare and Company (for some writers it was their only reliable address), and Beach used a pigeonhole box to sort their mail alphabetically. The Lost Generation had a home. 

ON a HOT SUNDAY AFTERNOON in July 1920, Adrienne invited Sylvia Beach to an early dinner party at the home of a French poet named André Spire. Beach didn’t want to go. She admired Spire’s poetry, but she didn’t know him personally, and he hadn’t invited her. Adrienne nevertheless insisted and, aS usual, she had her way. Spire’s warm welcome put his American guest at ease, but as they entered, he pulled her aside and whispered something that terrified her. “The Irish writer James Joyce is here.” 

....his r’s trilled upward. The novel he was writing was “Oolissays.” Joyce’s skin was fair and flushed. He had a small goatee, and there were lines etched into his forehead. She thought about how handsome he must have been asa young man. But there was something abnormal about his right eye, something mag. nified or distorted by his thick glasses. It was nearly grotesque. 

The name Shakespeare and Company made him smile, almost as much, perhaps. as “Sylvia Beach.” He was looking for signs of luck in Paris, and these were auspicious names. As she told him about her bookstore, he pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and held it close to his eyes so he could write down the address. It was heartbreaking. Just then, Joyce jumped at the sound of barking from across the road. She went to the window and saw Spire’s tiny dog bounding after a ball. 

“Is it coming in? Is it feerrce?” 

She assured Mr. Joyce that the dog did not look at all fierce, and he was certainly not charging toward the library. He had been bitten by a dog on the chin when he was a boy, he explained, and they had terrified him ever since. The great James Joyce was a blushing, trembling man with weak eyes and a fear of dogs. He was adorable. 

The next day, Joyce walked into Shakespeare and Company wearing a dark blue serge suit and a black felt hat. He had a slender cane and a regal bearing undercut by dirty canvas shoes. He ambled over to the photographs of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, and if she wondered in those brief moments what he thought about her small bookshop, her anxiety was relieved as he sat down in an armchair and asked to join Miss Beach’s lending library. He could afford a subscription for one month. 

Sylvia Beach saw Joyce as sensitive and vulnerable. His list of fears included the ocean, heights, horses, machinery and, above all, thunderstorms. As a child, he hid in the cupboard at the sound of thunder, and the tempests seemed to pursue him all his life. Beach remembered him cowering in his hallway during thunderstorms, which he blamed on the preponderance of Parisian radio broadcasts. Beach encouraged Joyce to talk about his troubles, and he had a few to discuss. The apartment that Pound got for Joyce and his family was a small, fifth-floor servants’ flat in Passy. It had one double bed, no bath

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“over-ripe, the thing that burst itself” The “Lesbianisms” of Greenwich Vil. lage, the scrotumtightening sea of Manhattan’s immigrants and James Joyce’s epic of the human body all reminded Quinn of his own failing body and the lethal rupture to come. Joyce seemed to be making an art form out of the many ways death and decay could bloom within the living. Quinn’s mortality pursued him no matter how many artworks he purchased or how many cases ‘won. 

A stirring courtroom argument did nevertheless stave off the feeling of death, and a defense of Joyce against obscenity charges required the sophisticated legal creativity he found envigorating. Quinn had to base his courtroom argument on mid-nineteenth-century British law, for the definition of obscenity that guided Anglo-American jurisprudence in 1920 was articulated by a British judge in 1868: “I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” This definition of obscenity became known as the Hicklin Rule, and it transformed obscenity law. Instead of targeting pornographers profiting from books that were offensive to “any well-regulated mind,” as the author of the Obscene Publications Act put it, the Hicklin Rule defined obscenity by a book’s effects on society’s most susceptible readersanyone with a mind “open” to “immoral influences.” The purview of the law shifted from protecting well-regulated minds to sheltering ill-regulated minds. Lecherous readers and excitable teenage daughters could deprave and corrupt the most sophisticated literary intent. The Hicklin Rule inspired Quinn to argue that a book couldn’t be filthy if it was unintelligible or disgusting or private. “You could not take a piece of jiterature up in an aeroplane fifteen thousand feet into the blue sky, where there would be no spectator, and let the pilot of the machine read it out and have it denounced as ‘filthy, within the meaning of the law.” It had to “corrupt” or “deprave” a mind, and judges generally read “corruption” as a synonym for “arousal.” What this implied was that if Gerty were ugly—if she were entirely unarousing—she would be legal. Quinn continued: “Ifa young man is in love with a woman and his mother should write to him saying: ‘My boy, the woman you are infatuated with is not a beautiful woman . . . She sweats, she stinks, she is flatulent. Her flesh is discolored, her breath is bad. She makes ugly noises when she eats and discharges other natural functions’”—the mother would be writing ugly truths for her son’s moral benefit. Gerty MacDowell, Quinn argued, similarly sends men running toward virtue. He insisted that Joyce was like Swift or Rabelais: he was not an artist of corrupting beauty. He was an artist of ugly truths. 

It was not clear what, precisely, Quinn found so disgusting about Gerty MacDowell. 

She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart his hoarse breathing. 

Were readers supposed to be disgusted by Gerty because she is mawkish or because, as we discover later in the chapter, she is lame? One of the Joycean touches is that reality topples Bloom’s fantasy when Gerty limps away pages after her beautifully shaped legs appear. If that’s what makes her unappealing, surely Joyce’s story was at least plausibly filthy under the law. 

A single word in the Hicklin Rule—a word that Quinn studiously ignoreddramatically expanded judges’ authority by making censorship a preemptive activity. Publishers, booksellers, printers and writers were liable not just for corrupted readers but for a publication’s “tendency” to corrupt. By focusing on a book’s hypothetical effects on hypothetical readers, the Hicklin Rule made an obscenity judgment a feat of the imagination—for certainly the judge himself was above such “immoral influences.” Rather, it was his task to determine whether the book would deprave someone entirely unlike him. Judge Corrigan would have to peer into the mind of Ogden Brower’s young daughter (herself peering into the mind of Gerty MacDowell) and imagine her potential reactions. The law required the judge to be a bit like Joyce. 

Quinn could be right about Joyce’s moral lessons and ugly truths, and it still wouldn’t matter. So long as there was some measure—any measure—of potentially corrupting beauty, Joyce’s episode was illegal. Gerty’s charms got Ulysses indicted for obscenity as Judge Corrigan decided to hold the editors of The Little Review for trial. Quinn retorted that his decision proved he had a dirty mind. It was a sly comment—almost a Jab. Was Corrigan aroused when he read the magazine in his chambers? Corrigan merely smiled as he made out the warrant for the imprisonment of Anderson and Heap and set their bail at twenty-five dollars each, which Quinn reluctantly paid. 

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...the god Hermes gives him an herb that will protect him from her spell. The herb that saves Ulysses is called Moly (things like this were no coincidence), Joyce wondered if the word sypAilis had its origins in Circe—perhaps it was Greek: ovgtAta, Su + philis. “Swine love,” the spell that drove men to brute madness. After Ulysses compels Circe to transform his men back into humans, she regales them with a celebration that lasts a full year. Joyce toiled on “Circe” months longer than he planned. The episode became at turns a carnival, a nightmare, a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Miracles are performed and humiliations enacted. Genders change. Hours dance. Moths speak. Nearly everything and everyone the reader has seen through the day returns as a nightmare. Gerty MacDowell reproaches Bloom (“Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.”). Blazes Boylan tosses him a coin and hangs his hat on Bloom’s antlered head (“I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?”). Bloom shakes hands with the blind stripling (“My more than brother!”). “Bronze by gold,” the prostitutes whisper. The nanny goat, dropping currants, ambles by. Father Dolan emerges to uphraid Stephen for the glasses he broke in A Portrazt when he was six years old (“lazy idle little schemer”). The ghost of Stephen’s mother, like Joyce’s mother, appears with green bile trickling from her mouth (he asks her to tell him that she loves him). Bloom’s father, who committed suicide years ago, touches Bloom’s face with “vulture talons.” The long-awaited Elyah finally arrives and begins to dispense judgment (“No yapping, if you please .. . ”). Rudy, Bloom’s son, appears as he would have if he had survived infancy.

The prospects for the publication of Ulysses in the United States were bleak, and Quinn felt genuine remorse. He wrote to Anderson, “I thought of Joyce and of his need for the money and that he was abroad and out of touch with things here, and perhaps not in the best of health. And I remembered how hard it was for serious writers to live in these years and months and days .. . [have done the best I could, and I failed.” Word spread that the Post Office had sent the seized copies of The Little Review to the Salvation Army, where fallen women in reform programs were instructed to tear them apart. 

ANDERSON AND Heap were lucky. No one at the Little Review trial noticed the most scandalous aspect of “Nausicaa,” the obscurity at the heart of the episode: while Gerty MacDowell is leaning back on the rocks, Leopold Bloom is masturbating. The judges, the reporters, the innocent girl’s father and John Sumner himself missed it, which is understandable. Even if one were looking for something so improbably, outlandishly offensive, it wasn’t easy to find. When Gerty limps away, Bloom “recomposed his wet shirt,” but Pound had cut the word wet. A few pages later, the manuscript read, “O sweety. All your little white up I saw. Dirty girl. Made me do love sticky.” Pound crossed out “up I saw. Dirty girl” and, prudently, “love sticky” so that The Little Review’s version was more discreet though less coherent: “O sweety all your little white 

I made me do we too naughty darling.” An especially astute reader might con

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But why should it matter? The end of style seems a long way from FeALAR bombs and the collapse of civilization, yet the critics’ comparisons were trying to capture the novel’s apparent recklessness. To turn style into futility, it seemed, was to lay waste to all foundations. When a well-known poet named Alfred Noyes delivered a lecture in front of the Royal Society of Literature in October 1922, he launched into a familiar diatribe about the unprecedented obscenity of Ulysses. But what infuriated Noyes most was that Joyce’s emergence signaled the degradation of the United Kingdom’s foundational values. Literary critics were casting aside the best of English literary tradition for madmen calling themselves modernists. It was as if an entire civilization were in the process of forgetting itself. 

To be oblivious of English values did not strike Noyes as a matter of losing the past. It struck him as a matter of losing grasp of reality. “The lack of any conviction that there are realities, standards, and enduring foundations in literature has had a deadly effect,” he told the Royal Society. Groundless literary criticism was introducing “elements of chaos” into the minds of the younger generation. 

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He had a point. Narratives are the way we make sense of the world. We parcel existence into events and string them into cause-and-effect sequences. The chemist comparing controls and variables and the child scalded by a hot stove are both understanding the world through narrative. Novels are important because they turn that basic conceptual framework into an art form. A beautiful narrative arc reassures us that the baffling events around us are meaningful—and this is why Ulysses appeared to be an instrument of chaos, an anarchist bomb. To disrupt the narrative method was to disrupt the order of things. Joyce, it seemed, wasn’t devoted to reality. He appeared to be sweeping it away. 

If you were a modernist—if you believed the order of things was already gone—you thought differently. T. S. Eliot defended Ulysses by objecting to its critics’ premise. Life in the age of world war was no longer amenable to the narrative method, and yet Ulysses showed us that narratives weren’t the only way to create order. Existence could be layered. Instead of a sequence, the world was an epiphany. Instead of a tradition, civilization was a day. The chaos of modernity demanded a new conceptual method to make sense of the contemporary world, to make life possible for art. And that is what Ulysses gave us. 

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Joyce spent the years after Ulysses tunneling into a denser, more obscure novel. Finnegans Wake is written in the weltering language of dreams, Words spill out of definitions and syntax like a river breaking the banks, and puns are as destructive as they are playful. Joyce felt as if he had arrived at the end of the English language. 

All the world’s in want and is writing a letters. A letters from a person to a place about a thing. And all the world’s on wish to be carrying a letters. A letters to a king about a treasure from a cat. When men want to write a letters. Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men, wont to rise a ladder. And den men, dun men, fen men, fun men, hen men, hun men wend to raze a leader. 

This is one of the more lucid passages. Finnegans Wake kept Nora up at night. “Jim is writing at his book,” she told a friend. “I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing.” She would get out of bed and pound on the door, “Now, Jim, stop writing or stop laughing.” 

Almost no one liked Finnegans Wake. When Ezra Pound first read a por tion in 1926, he replied, “I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization."

Dubliners

 From my favorite story

It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles, He and his fat young brother Leo, the idler, held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs. Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling: 

“Yal yaka, yaka, yaka!”’ 

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true. 

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A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of cuiture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to ume by un. kempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel. 

“This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up! ‘Hardly had the day’ . . . Goon! What day? ‘Hardly had the day dawned’ . . . Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?” 

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning. 

‘What is this rubbish?” he said. “The Apache Chief! Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched fellow who writes these things for a drink. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were . » - National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or...” 

This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when th restraining influence of the school was at a distance  I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those Chronicles of disorder alone seem to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures I reflected do not happen to people who were made at home they must be sought abroad.