The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (7 page)

That cultural destruction became literal when suffragettes began slashing paintings in museums across London. In 1914, a woman named Freda Graham walked into the Royal Academy, pulled out a hatchet concealed in her muff and sliced up a portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Another woman punched holes into Venetian paintings at the National Gallery with a loaded cane. Yet another slashed John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James with a butcher’s cleaver. There would be no peace in England until women had the right to vote. It made sense, in the heady years before World War I, to wage war through art. To the radicals, high art was largely a political invention, a propaganda tool justifying empire, so to attack museum culture was to attack imperial power.

—

NO ONE EXEMPLIFIED the interchange between radical politics and art more than Dora Marsden, a renegade suffragette who would radicalize Ezra Pound and publish James Joyce’s first novel. In 1909, Marsden led a march of thirty women to Parliament and was charged with assaulting a police officer by hitting him with her banner (she claimed it was an accident). After spending a month in jail, Marsden broke up a Liberal Party meeting by throwing iron balls through a glass partition. That earned her two more months in prison, where she went on a hunger strike, smashed her cell windows and tore off her prison clothes to protest naked. When the guards forced her into a straitjacket, Dora Marsden, at four foot ten, squirmed her way out.

Liberal Party meetings routinely became suffragist protest sites. When a young Winston Churchill addressed an audience in Southport in 1909, police officers surrounded the hall so that Churchill could rally support for a budget bill that the House of Lords vetoed. When he argued that the Lords should acquiesce to the House of Commons because it represented the will of the electorate, a voice shouted out from a ceiling porthole, “But it does not represent the women, Mr. Churchill!” The audience flew in an uproar. Dora Marsden had eluded the tight security by hiding in the hall’s attic space the previous day and waiting through a night of rain and freezing temperatures. After haranguing Churchill for several minutes, Marsden and two accomplices were dragged off the roof and arrested.

In 1911, Marsden resigned from England’s radical suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union, because it was trying to steer her toward nonjailable activities. Because her ambitions were far larger than organizing cake sales and plastering Votes for Women signs on boats, she decided to expand the feminist movement beyond politics altogether by starting a magazine called
The Freewoman
. A suitably radical magazine, she believed, would foment “a vast revolution in the entire field of human affairs, intellectual, sexual, domestic, economic, legal and political.” In the pages of her magazine and in Freewoman Discussion Circles, suffragists encountered socialists and anarchists for debates about taboo subjects like divorce, venereal disease, same-sex relationships, birth control and free love.

Marsden opposed everything that threatened individual freedom, including governments, churches and collectivist concepts like class, gender and race. The “centre of the Universe,” she declared, “lies in the desire of the individual.” Marsden drifted from suffragism to individualist anarchism—expanding the vote merely expanded the government’s myth of legitimacy. Before long, she rejected all movement politics (the goal was to “destroy Causes” rather than join them) as well as all abstractions, which meant fighting language itself. The word
woman
“should be banished from the language,” she declared. “Our war is with words.” Her search for precise language, for a way to change the world through writing, led Dora Marsden to Ezra Pound and James Joyce.

Marsden embraced literature as a weapon against abstraction. Only “poets and creative thinkers” reveal the individual’s nature—poetry gives us access to the center of the universe.
The
Freewoman
was not particularly literary until 1913, when Rebecca West, who helped edit the magazine, put Marsden in touch with Ezra Pound. Marsden pressed him on his philosophy before she would work with him, and Pound’s response was uncharacteristically tentative. “I suppose I’m individualist,” he wrote to Marsden. “I suppose I believe in the arts as the most effective propaganda for a sort of individual liberty.” Marsden’s sharp questions stayed with him, and a couple of months later he wrote a defense of poetry that followed Marsden’s lead. In “The Serious Artist,” Pound claimed that the artist “presents the image of his desire, of his hate, of his indifference as precisely that,” and only a report on individual desires could illuminate human nature. Marsden published his essay in 1913, and a tense but fruitful partnership began. When Marsden changed the magazine’s name to
The Egoist
, Ezra Pound approved.

—

MARSDEN’S ABILITY to connect clear poetry to radical politics helped instigate a new phase in Pound’s career. His essay for Marsden marked the genesis of that phase, for it was here that Pound began to see that what mattered most about art was its peculiar energy. Images like “petals on a wet, black bough” were clear and immediate, but their stillness didn’t capture the twentieth century’s vitality. A couple of months later, he found a word for art’s energy: “a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” Vorticism was Imagism with the verbs put back in.

The key to the Vortex was that its energy was collective. It drew its power not from individual genius but from a gathering swirl of talent, and a frenetic style would, ideally, begin to draw the movement together. In June 1914, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis published an oversized, 160-page Vorticist magazine with the title thrown diagonally across the magenta cover in a screaming font:
BLAST.
“
WE ONLY WANT
THE WORLD TO LIVE
,” the Vorticists proclaimed, “and to feel its crude energy flowing through us.” Vorticism combined Marinetti’s belligerent triumphalism, suffragette radicalism and Dora Marsden’s individualist anarchism.
Blast
was dedicated “
TO THE INDIVIDUAL
” and praised the suffragettes:

Oversized type named everything the Vorticists would destroy. Blast the British Academy. Blast Henri Bergson, the Post Office and cod-liver oil. Blast every year between 1837 and 1900 (Queen Victoria’s reign). After the blasted, the manifesto named the blessed. Bless England’s great ports. Bless the hairdresser (“He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee”). Bless French pornography (“great enemy of progress”). Bless Oliver Cromwell and castor oil. Bless James Joyce.

Joyce had responded to Pound’s letter in January 1914. He was in Trieste, the Austrian Empire’s Mediterranean seaport, and he sent Pound a typescript of
Dubliners
, a detailed account of his publishing woes and the first chapter of his first novel,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. He had spent the previous decade writing the thinly veiled autobiography, and the process was unforeseeably frustrating—at one point he threw his one-thousand-page manuscript into the fire (only half of the hastily rescued pages survive), and he wrote
Dubliners
partly as a diversion. But Joyce pared back the manuscript so that the artist’s epiphanies studded Dublin’s squalor, and when Pound read it he knew immediately that Joyce was among the blessed.

He sent chapters of
A Portrait
to
The Egoist
as soon as he received them, and he began thinking of ways to have Joyce paid for his work so that he wouldn’t waste his time teaching English. He reached across Europe to pull Joyce into the Vortex. “I’m not supposed to know much about prose,” Pound responded, “but I think your novel is damn fine stuff.” And it would get better. The end of
A Portrait
is a series of diary entries from the artist, Stephen Dedalus, before he flees Dublin for Paris. The final pages were a stepping-stone toward the vast, unvarnished interior monologues that Joyce was just beginning to imagine. They were the first auspicious glimmers of a much larger novel gathering in the vortex of Joyce’s mind.

4.

James Joyce began writing
Ulysses
at the edge of a war that changed people’s understanding of scale. In June 1914, a Serbian assassin walked up to Archduke Ferdinand’s motorcade in Sarajevo with a semiautomatic pistol, and by the end of the summer bombs were rumbling across Europe. The benchmark for a destructive European conflict was the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. In the summer of 1914, that war’s 250,000 dead soldiers seemed like victims of antiquated tactics. Modern weapons were so powerful that all anyone had to do was attack first to win—an invader would conquer in a matter of weeks. Everyone thought the same thing, and everyone was wrong by orders of magnitude. The Great War would last years. It would kill seven million civilians and ten million soldiers. And that was only part of it. The troop movements, the overflowing field hospitals and the miles of trenches laid the groundwork for the devastation of 1918, the Spanish flu. More than fifty million people were killed by particles too small for any existing microscope to see. The world was decimated by machine guns, fragmentation grenades and coiled packets of viral RNA.

Joyce never imagined the looming destruction when he left Ireland with Nora in 1904. They planned an unexceptional life in Paris’s Left Bank, where he would write and teach English and she would become a laundress, perhaps, or a seamstress. Joyce contacted the Berlitz School for a job opening and spent weeks scraping together money from anyone who would help, but he never told his father he was leaving with Nora Barnacle. When they departed from Dublin, Nora watched Joyce take leave of his family from a distance before she went striding up the ferry’s gangplank to start a life with a man she had known for less than four months. Joyce endured three years of silence before his father unburdened himself of his disappointment: “I saw a life of promise crossed and a future that might have been brilliant blasted in one breath.” Nora had no one to be disappointed in her. Neither of them would ever live in Ireland again.

But they never made it to Paris. After taking a temporary job in Pula, a small outpost on the Istrian peninsula, Berlitz found Joyce a long-term position in Trieste, the Austrian Empire’s only merchant seaport. Trieste was a gateway to Vienna, Ljubljana and Milan, and it was the second-largest port in the Mediterranean. Twelve thousand ships carrying 2.5 million tons of cargo passed through Trieste every year, and the city’s population grew by over a third in the first decade of the twentieth century. By the time Joyce and Nora arrived in 1905, there was a large demand for foreign language instruction—one trip to the market indicated how polyglot the city was. Italian dialects clashed with German, Czech and Greek. Albanians and Serbs haggled over prices while Croatians and Slovenians half-guessed their way through conversations. If Joyce had wanted to escape Ireland’s provinciality, he had found the perfect place.

Merchant ships from far-flung ports wedged themselves into the Grand Canal bringing fruits, spices, barrels of Arabian coffee and olive oil from around the Mediterranean. Steamships arrived with rubber and timber to build an empire, and Trieste’s wealth accentuated the young Irish couple’s poverty. They watched men in bowler hats tapping canes with handles made of ivory or gold rather than Joyce’s humble ashplant. Women wore ample Viennese gowns with ostrich feathers soaring above their hats. They would nudge each other and laugh at Nora’s cheap skirt, whispering words that, thankfully, she couldn’t understand.

Nora was pregnant when they arrived in Trieste, and landladies balked when she began to show. There was no ring on her finger, and the backlash was nearly as bad in Trieste as it would have been in Dublin. Nevertheless, Joyce remained adamant: asking a priest or a lawyer to ratify their relationship was out of the question. Joyce believed that marriage was the first step toward foisting upon their children the same nightmares of history and belief that they had traveled so far to escape. It was a coercive institution of property and power, and Nora’s pregnancy made that coercion clear—the couple was forced to leave three different flats.

In late July 1905, Nora gave birth to a boy. The baby came a month earlier than expected (the new parents had miscalculated), and Joyce named his son Giorgio in honor of his deceased brother George. About a year later, Nora was pregnant again. When Lucia was born in the hospital’s pauper’s ward in June 1907, the nurses gave Nora twenty crowns. The Irish couple had officially become a charity case.

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
osterie
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.