August 07, 2008
‘Ulysses’ Reaches A Safe Harbor (1934)
In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with Judge John M. Woolsey's ruling eight months before that James Joyce's "Ulysses" was not obscene because it didn't give him a woody.If you think I'm joking, stick around while I set up the punchline with some background.
The court's decision ended a 14-year struggle over the novel. It began in 1920 when Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were convicted of obscenity and fined a hundred dollars each for serializing the novel in "The Little Review," a small magazine that showcased avant-garde and experimental works. Two years later, an edition published by Sylvia Beach through her Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare & Co., turned "Ulysses" into an underground best-seller. While U.S. customs agents succeeded in seizing and burning a shipment of 500 copies, visitors to Paris during the ‘20s used ingenious methods to bring home brought home copies smuggled at the bottom of hatboxes, inside their waistcoats and rebound in a Bible.
In one case, playwright John Boyd smuggled his copy into Ireland by placing it in a box and marking it "sanitary towels," assuming correctly that customs agents would be too squeamish to inspect it. That copy was donated to the Joyce Centre in Dublin by Boyd's descendants.
Beach brought out eleven editions of "Ulysses," turning it into the must-have or must-talk-about book of the ‘20s. The opinions of the literati were all over the place:* Gertrude Stein combined praise with self-promotion: "People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce?"
* Ernest Hemingway ordered several copies, loved the book ("Joyce has a most god-damn wonderful book") and spiked it with gossip: "Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week. ... The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other, but you never heard of an Irishman starving."
* Virginia Woolf looked down her nose and remarked, "A queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." In her diary, she added "The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense."
One of the few reviews that appeared in the press was from James Douglas of the Sunday-Express in England. Calling it "the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature," warned the authorities that "Ulysses" should not be welcomed into the British Empire. The rest of Douglas' rant is presented, if only to marvel at his choice of invective:
The obscenity of Rabelais is innocent compared with its leprous and scabrous horrors. All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pronographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the holy name of Christ — blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass."Small wonder New York couldn't wait to publish it.
All right, that's overstating it. What happened boils down to family connections. Joyce's son, George, was married to the daughter of New York financier Robert Kastor, who talked Bennett Cerf into offering Joyce a publishing contract. Cerf, who co-launched Random House only five years before, low-balled Joyce with a $200 advance. Kastor put a stop to that, and Joyce received $1,000 with another $1,500 upon publication.
Of course, there was the small matter of a possible obscenity conviction to get around. Cerf and his lawyers decided not to wait for an indictment, but sued first. This allowed them to time the case so it would be heard before the liberal Judge Woolsey. Next, they arranged to get a copy of "Ulysses" seized with testimony from notable writers and critics that it was a work of art critics pasted inside. This allowed their statements to be admissible in court under the rules in effect at that time.
The stratagem worked. In his decision, Woolsey declared that "Ulysses" was not obscene. He did this the Bill Clinton way, saying, in effect, "It depends on what obscene means." Obscene material, Woolsey wrote, tends "to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts."
So as Leopold Bloom looked up a girl's skirt during a fireworks display, you can tell yourself ‘nope, nothing erotic here,' just a couple of innocent kids watching rockets rising up and exploding:
... as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn't ashamed and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way ...And you could read Molly Bloom's memories about her lover as she drifted off to sleep and not feel a thing:
I loved rousing that dog in the hotel rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it ...To make doubly sure about the lack of eroticism in "Ulysses," Woolsey asked two of his friends if they felt their trouser snake jump while reading it:
I was interested to find that they both agreed with my opinion: that reading "Ulysses" in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts ...Random House was ready. Within days after Woolsy denied finding "the leer of the sensualist," the company was setting the book into type. Only a month later, the first 500 copies were put on sale, with more to follow. Joyce's perceived inability to get a rise out of his readers — a talent that's not supported on the evidence of the very filthy letters he wrote to his wife — enabled "Ulysses" to find a home in America.
(Author's note: While I try to draw from a number of sources for these essays, I relied heavily this time on one, the excellent "Girls Lean Back Everywhere
" by Edward de Grazia. It's an awesome book.)Born: Louis Leakey, anthropologist, memoirist, Kabete, Kenya, 1903; Stan Freberg, satirist, composer, Pasadena, Calif, 1926; Betsy Byars, children's author, Charlotte, N.C., 1928; Jerry Pournelle, sci-fi novelist, short-story writer, Shreveport, La., 1933; Garrison Keillor, author, poet, songwriter, radio personality, Anoka, Minn., 1942; Anne Fadiman, editor, author, New York City, 1953.
Died: Francis Underwood, Atlantic Monthly founder, Edinburg, Scotland, 1894; Rabindranath Tagore, poet, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, painter, Calcutta, India, 1941.
Quote for the Day: "People will miss that it once meant something to be Southern or Midwestern. It doesn't mean much now, except for the climate. The question, 'Where are you from?' doesn't lead to anything odd or interesting. They live somewhere near a Gap store, and what else do you need to know?" — Garrison Keillor, who was born today in 1942
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