Kevin Birmingham
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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."
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