The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (9 page)

Joyce continued the story of Stephen Dedalus in the opening chapters of
Ulysses
. Stephen is twenty-two years old and swimming in his ideas. He walks along the shore in Sandycove, and he thinks not so much about what he sees as the fact that he is seeing it.

Ineluctable modality

of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane.

It was not the type of prose that flew off the shelves. It was, however, a new rendering of the way people think. Thoughts don’t flow like the luxuriant sentences of Henry James. Consciousness is not a stream. It is a brief assembly of fragments on the margins of the deep, a rusty boot briefly washed ashore before the tide reclaims it. Joyce wanted Stephen’s thoughts to be clipped and prismatic. He wanted to strip thoughts and emotions down to their essentials. He wanted density, the bones of communication, the sharp utterance, the urgent telegram, the MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER.

5.

In 1913, Miss Harriet Weaver was just another
Freewoman
subscriber. Like Dora Marsden, she was a disaffected member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Britain’s radical suffrage organization, and when she found Marsden’s audacious magazine she knew she had discovered something vital.
The
Freewoman
embraced unmentionable subjects, which, predictably, got the magazine in trouble. Newsstand sales plummeted in 1912 when the company that controlled train station bookstalls throughout England removed
The
Freewoman
from its kiosks. Articles about divorce reform, contraception and free love were, according to the company, “unsuitable to be exposed on the bookstalls for general sale.” Shortly thereafter, an anarchist publisher withdrew his offer to continue the magazine’s publication because he feared being prosecuted for libel and sedition.

Miss Weaver was less daunted. When she read Marsden’s appeal in
The
Freewoman
’s final issue, she offered Marsden, whom she had never met, two hundred pounds to revive the magazine as
The
New Freewoman
. The money was a pledge of support rather than a bid for control.
The
Freewoman
already sounded to Miss Weaver as if it were “edited on a mountaintop.” She merely wanted Marsden to continue her work. But Marsden began retreating into her own book, a sweeping philosophical treatise she hoped would synthesize philosophy, theology, mathematics and physics. To keep the magazine going, Miss Weaver found herself donating more money, leasing a new office and hiring London printers to consolidate operations. In June 1914, after Ezra Pound allied with Marsden and
The
New Freewoman
morphed into
The
Egoist
, she reluctantly became the magazine’s editor.

Miss Weaver was not one to quarrel. She preferred the harmonious order of her three-room flat in Marylebone, London, where she regularly arranged fresh flowers to balance the dark woods of her furniture. Miss Weaver was thirty-nine and an heir to her maternal grandfather’s cotton fortune. She led a staid life. Miss Weaver waited until her mother died before she saw her first (and last) stage production. Her sitting room doubled as a dining room when she had company, and it became her study when she had extra work. At her Victorian desk, beside a wall of books, a Georgian dining table and chairs upholstered in blue and muted gold, Miss Weaver edited the most daring magazine in England. And if printers cut portions of the text she gave them, she fired them.

She took over
The
Egoist
in trying circumstances. A reliable staff member resigned, as if jumping ship, as soon as Marsden stepped down, which left Weaver with a staff of one, Richard Aldington, to run a struggling magazine. The first
Egoist
print run in January 1914 was an optimistic two thousand copies. By September 1914, three months after Miss Weaver took over, they were printing half that number. She reduced issues from twenty pages to sixteen, and the biweekly became a monthly. The finances were abysmal.
The
Egoist
earned £37 in revenue in the last six months of 1914, and the costs totaled £337. Miss Weaver paid the difference. Part of the problem was the war. Printers were difficult to obtain, contributors were enlisting in the military, wholesale prices more than doubled and no one wanted to advertise in an eccentric literary magazine in the middle of a national crisis.

In 1915, zeppelins began crossing the North Sea to drop bombs on houses, theaters and city buses. Thousands of Londoners rushed to catch a glimpse of the silver airships as they drifted eastward with the wind on moonless nights. London had not been attacked in centuries, and the city was not prepared. British pilots couldn’t even see their targets, let alone fire at them. It took hours to prepare the antiaircraft batteries, and the falling artillery shrapnel caused more damage to the city than the zeppelins. The Great War was waged on armies and civilians alike, and the violence opened up like some monstrous epiphany in the European imagination. One of the zeppelin captains looked down at the explosions lighting up like a garland of flowers across the city. It was, he said, “indescribably beautiful.”

After the fifth zeppelin raid, Dora Marsden wrote from England’s northwest coast and begged Miss Weaver to flee London for the countryside—“Can’t you? Won’t you??” She would not. Even Ezra Pound suggested that she suspend
The
Egoist
during the war. She did not. Miss Weaver would carry on with the magazine if for no other reason than to serialize James Joyce’s
Portrait
. Her biggest threat was London’s printers.

One of the paradoxes of the war was that while Londoners bravely faced the possibility of being burned alive by thermite every time they went to the pub, they were less willing than ever to risk moral offense. When
The
Egoist
’s printer received chapter three of
A Portrait
, the manager refused to print an unseemly paragraph describing Stephen Dedalus’s daydreams about Nighttown and soon began cutting small passages without so much as informing Miss Weaver. Her forbearance reached its limit when they cut two sentences from Joyce’s fifth chapter, one of which described a girl standing in the middle of a rivulet near the ocean: “Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down.” Miss Weaver gave the printers a well-mannered dismissal: “we have decided to leave you,” she wrote, “and are very sorry to have to leave.”

A few months later, the replacement printers deleted two words (
fart
and
ballocks
) whose meanings Miss Weaver did not happen to know, which was, of course, beside the point. She fired them as well. Joyce’s text forced
The
Egoist
to go through four printers in Miss Weaver’s first two years. She wrote to apologize to him for the “stupid censoring” of his novel, and she made it clear that, though there were only so many printers in London, she was determined to try them all.

—

MISS WEAVER
KNEW she was courting danger by publishing James Joyce’s work. After all, the entire first printing of his debut book of fiction had been destroyed. In November 1905, when Joyce was twenty-three, he sent the manuscript of
Dubliners
to a London publisher named Grant Richards. Richards responded nearly three months later to say that
Dubliners
had many problems. It was about Ireland, and no one wanted to buy a book about Ireland. It was a collection of short stories, and no one wanted to buy a collection of short stories. But he admired it so much that he was willing to publish it under modest terms. Joyce would get no advance and no royalties from the first five hundred copies sold. He would receive 10 percent from the sales on the first one thousand copies after that, though he would omit every thirteenth copy from the total. Several weeks later, however, Richards returned his manuscript and demanded changes.

The printer cut several passages and refused to print the story “Two Gallants” altogether. Richards himself objected to the word
bloody
in one of the stories (“she did not wish to seem bloody-minded”), and the offensive word appeared several more times in
Dubliners
: “if any fellow tried that sort of game on with
his
sister he’d bloody well put his teeth down his throat, so he would.” Joyce did his publisher the favor of listing every objectionable instance and, for good measure, pointing out the implicit danger of his story “An Encounter.” The man by the docks with the gaps between his yellow teeth and the “bottle-green eyes” is entertaining immoral impulses as he talks to one of the two truants about whipping boys who misbehave. It was, a lawyer friend later told Joyce, “beyond anything in its outspokenness” he had ever read.

Joyce wrote to Richards that if they eliminated every offensive detail they’d be left with nothing but the title. He was writing hard truths about moral decay for the advancement of Irish civilization only to have his work weakened by a semiliterate London machinist armed with a blue pencil. “I cannot write without offending people,” he concluded, and if he were forced to write his stories another way, he would not have written them at all.

Richards insisted that no legitimate publisher would touch Joyce’s book without changes, and an illegitimate publisher would “do no good to your pocket.” Joyce, impoverished as he was, fired back, “The appeal to my pocket has not much weight with me.” He would be happy to make money from
Dubliners
, he wrote, but “I have very little intention of prostituting whatever talent I may have to the public.” Richards presented himself as an editor challenging Joyce’s versatility rather than an exploiter pimping his talent. “Remember,” he wrote to Joyce, “it is only words and sentences that have to be altered; and it seems to me that the man who cannot convey his meaning by more than one set of words and sentences has not yet realized the possibilities of the English language.” Joyce was unimpressed.

In September 1906, Richards informed Mr. Joyce that after “the very careful re-reading” of his manuscript, they could not publish
Dubliners
. The stories would not only damage the publisher’s reputation, Richards wrote, they would impede Joyce’s success for the rest of his career. Joyce, undeterred, sent
Dubliners
to several other publishers—John Long, Elkin Mathews, Alston Rivers, Edward Arnold, William Heinemann and Hutchinson & Company. They all rejected it.

Dubliners
didn’t find another publisher until 1909. George Roberts was a stocky Protestant from Belfast who set up a publishing house in Dublin called Maunsel & Company. Roberts favored younger Irish writers, so Joyce’s story collection was a natural fit, but the same objections about
Dubliners
soon resurfaced. In “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” an Irish nationalist mentions Prince Edward’s late ascension to the throne after the death of his long-lived mother, Queen Victoria: “Here’s this fellow come to the throne after his bloody owl’ mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey.” After Richards had withdrawn his offer, Joyce embellished the Queen Victoria reference from “bloody owl’ mother” to (and why not?) “bloody old bitch of a mother.”

When Roberts demanded changes, Joyce became defiant. He sent a public letter to Irish newspapers airing his grievances. He threatened to sue Maunsel & Company for breach of contract. He wrote to King George V asking for His Majesty’s official permission to print the stories (the king’s secretary declined to comment). He returned to Ireland from Trieste (a five-day journey) to settle the dispute in person. When Roberts worried about libel suits from people and establishments mentioned in
Dubliners
by their real names, Joyce offered to secure written authorization from every individual, publican and restaurateur himself. Dublin booksellers, unfortunately, hesitated when Joyce asked if they would sell his book. One manager said that a couple of young men had recently told him to remove a risqué French novel from his window display and that if he didn’t, he’d find his windows smashed.

In August 1912, after three years of haggling, Roberts wrote the most forceful rejection letter of his career: “the publication of the book by Maunsel & Co. is out of the question . . . even if the objectionable parts were struck out, there would still remain the risk of some of them having been overlooked.” And even if they were to consider publishing his stories, which they would not, Joyce would have to deposit one thousand pounds (an exorbitant amount) as insurance against lawsuits. But that wasn’t all. Roberts claimed Joyce had breached their contract by submitting a “clearly libelous” manuscript and threatened to sue
him
for the printing costs of a book he refused to publish. So Joyce, hoping to have the pages bound and published in London, went to the printer’s shop on O’Connell Street, where an elderly, ruddy-faced man named Falconer gave Joyce a sample copy of his book but refused to hand over the printed sheets for any price. After Joyce left, Falconer and his Scottish foreman destroyed every page of
Dubliners
they had printed. They weren’t burned. They were “guillotined.”

Joyce’s nine-year struggle to publish
Dubliners
was his first lesson in the way governments controlled words. Sometimes it was about policemen barging through doors and burning books, but more often it was about coercion and intimidation. The mere threat of lawsuits and criminal charges against publishers, printers or booksellers—they were all liable—was enough to halt the sale of a book. Even if there were no criminal charges, small publishers like Richards and Roberts had to worry that critics, reporters and clergymen scouring their books for obscenity would sound a moral alarm and provoke protests and boycotts that would bankrupt them.