The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (10 page)

—

THE BRITISH CENSORSHIP
REGIME had grown more powerful during the war years. In 1915, the London police seized a thousand copies of D. H. Lawrence’s
The Rainbow
(“a monotonous wilderness of phallicism,” as the
London Daily News
put it) from the warehouse of a reputable publisher, Methuen, and burned them. And yet seizures and burnings were not the gravest threat: British authorities demonstrated that they were willing put people in prison for distributing immoral material, and they would not be deterred by publishers or printers who insisted that their obscenity was “art.”

Obscenity had long been a common law offense, but explicit statutes banning immoral books didn’t appear in the United States and the United Kingdom until the nineteenth century, when rising literacy rates met with urbanization and a burgeoning market of publications that were affordable to the youth and the urban poor. Salacious literature was widespread enough in the mid-nineteenth century to start a moral panic that culminated in the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Lord Campbell, the chief justice of the Queen’s Bench, drafted a bill that empowered the police, with proper warrants, to enter private homes and businesses (by force, if necessary), search for and seize immoral literature. If the seized material was intended for sale or distribution, magistrates could imprison the owner and burn the obscenity. The law expanded police powers in a way that few English people could have imagined twenty years earlier. Search and seizure authority was generally reserved for customs officials and the military, but London’s growing police force—which didn’t even exist before 1829—suddenly found itself vested with the same powers.

Before 1857, police search and seizure authority was limited to illegal gambling dens and ships carrying arms down the Thames. The Obscene Publications Act, however, allowed the police to rifle through books and papers in any home, shop or private office based on little more than a citizen’s complaint. The government had shifted its focus from criminals to words themselves. It was not enough to put offenders behind bars. The books had to be tracked down and burned, and the law made no distinctions among printers, publishers and booksellers—that’s why Miss Weaver’s printers cut every off-color word they found.

And yet the Obscene Publications Act didn’t give magistrates and policemen any guidelines regarding what to search for, seize and destroy, which meant that obscenity was whatever the most motivated enforcers thought it was. This did not seem problematic in mid-Victorian England. During the parliamentary debate over the Obscene Publications Act, Lord Campbell waved a copy of Alexandre Dumas’s
Lady of the Camellias
as an example of a dirty book that nevertheless would not be banned. The law, he said, would target books with “no artistic merit or aspiration at all,” and the public had good reasons to think it would remain that way. Literary London didn’t object to the anti-obscenity law because no one could think of an English novel that would unjustly fall under the ban. At midcentury, English writing was so circumspect that mentioning sex seemed contrary to artistic intentions almost by definition—it just wasn’t something a legitimate novelist portrayed. There were respectable English novels from the likes of Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray and then there was pornography.

And the qualms about the Obscene Publications Act were misdirected, for the real power behind Britain’s censorship regime was not the police. It was the London Society for the Suppression of Vice, which began fighting obscene and blasphemous texts in 1802. Two years later, the Society had nearly nine hundred members, and by midcentury they more or less controlled the enforcement of obscenity laws. The SSV shaped public opinion and cowed publishers through shame and potential boycotts. Salaried agents performed undercover investigations, and when they discovered particularly offensive books (the works of Thomas Paine, for example), they pressed charges and put offenders behind bars. The Society helped Lord Campbell draft the Obscene Publications Act and wasted no time implementing it. In 1817 the Society had brought a few dozen pornographers to trial. The year the law passed, they prosecuted 159, and in nearly every case they won convictions resulting in fines, seizures, prison sentences and hard labor.

By the late nineteenth century, Britain’s growing literary life found itself tethered to standards carved out by the SSV in the 1850s. When a widening spectrum of books began to address sexuality as a subject of art, science, psychology and public health, the law began to reach beyond the underground pornography market. In the 1880s, a vogue for French realist novelists like Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola swept Britain, and their candid depictions of everyday working-class life went well beyond Britain’s decorous fiction. One infamous passage from Émile Zola’s
La Terre
describes a girl bringing her cow to mate with a bull on a neighboring farm: “She had to reach right across with her arm as she grasped the bull’s penis firmly in her hand and lifted it up. And when the bull felt that he was near the edge, he gathered his strength and, with one simple thrust of his loins, pushed his penis right in.”

An English publisher named Henry Vizetelly specialized in producing U.K. editions of realist fiction. Vizetelly & Company published translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and several of Zola’s novels, including
La Terre
. In 1884, the Irish novelist George Moore, who was having trouble getting his first novel circulated, turned to Vizetelly & Company to publish his next novel in a two-shilling edition, less than one-tenth of the inflated industry-standard price. Vizetelly boasted in the press that he had sold more than a million copies of French novels, including a thousand copies of Zola’s books every week. When Lord Tennyson, England’s poet laureate, condemned “the troughs of Zolaism” in verse, the outlines of a cultural divide were clear: Vizetelly’s cheap foreign books were arrayed against standardized three-volume novels, whose high prices bought cultural legitimacy.

The Vigilance Association, the successor to the SSV, organized a boycott against Vizetelly, mounted a publicity campaign that reached the floor of Parliament, and, in 1888, it pressed obscenity charges against him repeatedly for publishing Zola. Vizetelly pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months in prison. His stock of Zola novels was destroyed, and his publishing house—thriving only a year before—went bankrupt.

When Zola died in 1902, London’s literary journals remembered the novelist as a towering figure of nineteenth-century literature, but what printers and publishers remembered was the power of the vice societies and their willingness to crack down on risqué material even if it called itself art. It was Vizetelly’s prison sentence that was in the back of the publishers’ and printers’ minds when they began poring over everything Joyce wrote, from
Dubliners
to
Portrait
to
Ulysses
. Joyce could only have made things worse when he told George Roberts that the worst outcome of publishing
Dubliners
was that “some critic will allude to me as the ‘Irish Zola’!” No one wanted to be another Vizetelly.

—

MISS WEAVER, prim, fastidious, repeatedly mistaken for a Quaker, was willing to risk jail time. She was one of eight children in a devout Church of England family, and when she was not quietly listening to her father’s twice-daily prayers, she drove him frantic by climbing the trees, walls and cliffs around their Cheshire estate. The Weavers forbade dancing, shunned unnecessary luxuries, banished exotic vegetables like asparagus from their table and considered novels an idle pleasure to be avoided as much as possible. Miss Weaver openly devoured books from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Stuart Mill while concealing the novels from her parents and the servants. When she was nineteen, her mother caught her reading George Eliot’s
Adam Bede
. Jane Austen and the Brontës were irksome enough, so far as her mother was concerned, but Eliot was worse. George Eliot was, in fact, a woman who had been living openly with a married man, and
Adam Bede
is about a young woman who gives birth to an illegitimate child and leaves it in a field to die.

Mrs. Weaver told her daughter to go to her room and remain there until she was summoned. She must have anticipated a stern talk from her father, but when they finally called her downstairs, the man waiting to speak to her was the vicar of Hampstead. The reprimand from the Church of England was supposed to drive home a lesson about the hazards of novels, but instead it made reading a rebellion. And some writers were worth fighting for.

The first thing Miss Weaver heard about Mr. James Joyce was that the entire first printing of
Dubliners
had been destroyed for being unprintably obscene. He had exiled himself from Ireland for over a decade and had, as Dora Marsden later wrote to Miss Weaver, a “reputation for quarrelling with all the world.” That was part of the allure. By the time Miss Weaver began reading
A Portrait
in
The
Egoist
, he was a man with an aura gathering around him, and the idea of the artist as an individual defying empires, churches and conventions developed in the monthly installments.

The opening scenes depicted a sensitive boy with feeble eyes hiding under a table and pasting inside his boarding school desk the number of days left until Christmas vacation. Dora Marsden’s writing was idealistic and yet prone to the abstractions it railed against. Joyce’s writing, on the other hand, had a quality Miss Weaver could not fully articulate, something she described vaguely as “a searching, piercing spirit,” a capacity for “scorching truth” and “startling penetration.” By the time she read about Stephen Dedalus’s struggle with his faith, his excursions into Nighttown and his flight from Ireland “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” as Stephen puts it, she was captivated. Despite his vulnerabilities, he would never ensconce himself in the upholstery. 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.

Joyce’s publishing woes only enhanced his appeal, for one of the only emotions more powerful to Miss Weaver than her awe of artistic talent was her unbounded empathy for hardship. When Miss Weaver and Ezra Pound began searching for a publisher for Joyce’s
Portrait
, they got a stream of rejections—from Secker, from Jenkins, from Duckworth. Herbert Cape said he hoped Joyce would abandon the novel and start something new. Grant Richards sent the manuscript back to Miss Weaver without so much as commenting (privately, he called the manuscript “hopeless”). Pound sent it to Werner Laurie, Ltd., who he thought could tolerate frankness, but Laurie wrote back that publishing Joyce’s book in wartime London was “quite impossible”—he was so sure it would be banned that he wouldn’t even recommend other publishers. In January 1916, Pound prevailed upon Duckworth to reconsider, and the publisher sent back a withering evaluation of James Joyce’s first novel:

Pound was disgusted. “These vermin crawl over and be-slime our literature with their pulings,” he told Joyce’s agent. For Pound, the rejection of a writer like Joyce was the latest evidence that the Allies were fighting the wrong enemies. “You English will get no prose till you exterminate this breed . . . Why can’t you send the publishers’ readers to the Serbian front and get some good out of the war.”

Pound advocated for Joyce as if he were protecting someone who belonged to him. Joyce was a long-lost Imagist, a blessed Vorticist, a kindred spirit writing fiction just as Pound himself would have written it. His keen eye penetrated the people and objects around him and extracted, as Pound put it, “the universal element” inside them all.
A Portrait
gave him the feeling that he was reading something “absolutely permanent,” something that would never die, and finding that immortality in a manuscript before it was published—before anyone even
wanted
to publish it—summoned Pound’s thrill of discovery and his missionary zeal. For what Joyce really gave Pound was a galvanized sense of confidence, a reassurance strong enough to overcome any nagging doubts about his highest literary ambitions: if an artist could write such prose in the middle of a brutal war, then Pound’s plans for a twentieth-century renaissance were not as fanciful as they seemed. And if
A Portrait
couldn’t find a publisher, then it was clear beyond all doubt that his primary obstacle was not talent or vision or even money but the rank stupidity of the vermin infesting the publishing industry.

Miss Weaver’s reaction was more temperate. When she exhausted publishing options in England, she raised one last possibility with Joyce: “I have been wondering whether
The Egoist
could do it.” The Egoist Press had published only the magazine and a pamphlet of poems, and Miss Weaver emphasized that their edition could not approach anything produced by an actual book publisher. Since that possibility seemed closed, she ventured that the Egoist Press might risk publishing Joyce’s book, assuming she was granted the authority from “the other members of our staff and the directors of our small publishing company”—namely, Dora Marsden.

It was a bold plan. But even Miss Weaver’s fortitude could only go so far, for while
The
Egoist
could take care of financing, advertising and distribution, someone needed to print it. 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.