From The New York Times
Publish
and Cherish
“O,
rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.” So goes Molly Bloom’s plea to Leopold
to explain metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls.
I thought of this line
often while reading Kevin Birmingham’s “The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for
James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ ” a rich, detailed, mostly wise account of how the
novel’s decade-long ban inspired the modernizing of the legal definition of
obscenity and extended the categories of speech covered by the First Amendment.
Telling any story about
“Ulysses” “in plain words” is no small feat. Today the enormous tome, which the
board of the Modern Library named the best English-language novel of the 20th
century, is not so much widely read as it is known for Bloomsday, the holiday
commemorating June 16, 1904, the day Joyce and Nora Barnacle, his future wife,
had their first date and the day the book’s action takes place.
Why less read? As
Birmingham writes in one of his many terrific summaries of the book’s
challenges: “The story begins to slip away from you, . . . clipped impressions
mixing seamlessly with details. . . . There are idle conversations, acrobatic
theories about Hamlet and arcane political disputes.”
So it is all the more
impressive that this young Harvard Ph.D. in English has written a grand,
readable adventure story about the novel’s legal troubles. Hollywood-ready,
“The Most Dangerous Book” traces an important shift that “Ulysses” ushered in:
from a world in which a dirty sentence could get a book banned and a publisher
imprisoned to one in which literary merit actually had legal standing. (Brad
Pitt as Joyce?)
It’s guilty fun, since
you always know which side you’re on.
In the grip of his story,
Birmingham plays down the fact that many other “dangerous” works (movies,
plays, burlesque shows) were testing legal and moral boundaries during this
period. Also, that the publication of “Ulysses” in 1934, while significant, did
not totally end Victorian-era censorship. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (originally
published in 1928) was declared legal in the United States only in 1959.
Still, there are many
virtues here. Birmingham spent years sifting through archives. It shows. He has
read “Ulysses” deeply, borrowing its organizing principles, telescoping some
moments, amplifying others, jumping from character to character, continent to
continent, subject to subject, text analysis to literary history. This all
makes “The Most Dangerous Book” dynamic.
Part 1 flits from Dublin
to a close-up of Nora; from a profile of Joyce’s influential early supporter
Ezra Pound to the rise of radical politics in London; from Trieste, where Joyce
began writing “Ulysses” in 1914, to the role of suffrage and Joyce’s eccentric
British patron Harriet Weaver; from a history of censorship to his brash
American benefactor, the Wall Street lawyer John Quinn; from World War I to
Zurich, where Joyce lived before he moved to Paris.
It works because
Birmingham employs Joyce’s technique of “epiphanies” — profound everyday scenes
— to create fresh pictures of the people who believed in “Ulysses” while it was
banned. Some are well known: Hemingway, Pound and Weaver; Sylvia Beach, owner
of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Company; the publisher Bennett Cerf;
and Margaret Anderson, the founding editor of the American magazine The Little
Review, which serialized about half of the book. Others are less so, such as
the erotic booklegger Samuel Roth, shunned after he sold what Joyce and his
friends called a pirated edition. (Technically it was legal, because of a quirk
in copyright law.) And then there is Barnet Braverman, a socialist who
schlepped “Ulysses” across the Canadian border in his pants, like a bottle of whiskey.
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Many of Birmingham’s
epiphanies are deliciously funny. Macho Hemingway, sympathizing with Joyce’s
serious eye troubles after his son accidentally scraped his: It “hurt like
hell.” Strident Anderson on how a young radical can improve her writing: “Use a
little lip rouge.”
The courtroom scenes
reveal (news flash!) that some of the government’s biggest objections about the
novel’s expression of female sexuality are wildly outdated. A 1921 obscenity
trial centered on how the “Nausicaa” episode, published in The Little Review,
described young Gerty MacDowell on the beach leaning back to show Bloom her
knickers. Confronted by an expert witness’s use of Freudian theories to explain
the value of “Nausicaa,” one of the judges was unconvinced: “He might as well
be talking in Russian.”
Besides adopting the
novel’s comic approach, Birmingham deftly imports Joyce’s idea of “Ulysses” as
“the epic of the human body” into “The Most Dangerous Book.” Quoting Joyce’s
notoriously bawdy letters to Nora (many of which cannot be printed in this
newspaper) is required for anyone writing about him in our era. Birmingham,
however, sees the descriptions of the dirty sexy things the writer wants to do
to Nora (and vice versa) not just as love notes but as “one of the secret headwaters
of modern literature.” O.K.
Yet the idea that poor
fragile Joyce wrote to be understood by Nora and that “Ulysses” is a
provocative love note to readers strikes me as a touch too romantic. I prefer
Edna O’Brien’s take: Joyce “wore many masks and he could change them sleekly.”
More unflinching are
Birmingham’s efforts to explain how Joyce’s ocular problems, caused by syphilis
contracted before he left Ireland, influenced his book. In Switzerland, his
“eye bled for two weeks.” In Paris, a nurse dropped leeches on his eyelids and
he howled all night. He contracted cataracts and glaucoma, endured multiple
surgeries, and wore bandages.
The pain Joyce suffered
makes the reader marvel that he wrote at all. It also helps explain why there
are so many references to sight in “Ulysses,” so many divergent points of view,
as if the writer was imagining what eluded him in life.
As for Birmingham, he
sees clearly, except in a few instances. He calls the apparently faithful
pornographer Samuel Roth, who printed that pirated edition of “Ulysses,” “not
as sordid” as Bennett Cerf, who brought out the first legal American edition at
Random House and was a philanderer. “Sordid” seems a harsh word for Cerf’s
affairs. Besides, it’s an unfair comparison: Roth lacked Cerf’s opportunities,
being (a) often broke and (b) often in jail.
So many of Birmingham’s
close readings are judicious that these infelicitous moments are as jolting as
moving from one episode to another in “Ulysses” can be. Characterizing the
collaboration between “Wall Street money and Greenwich Village bohemia” as
“unlikely,” for example. Where does Birmingham think bohemia gets its money
from?
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More irritating (because
of the care Birmingham otherwise takes to honor the novel’s ferocious
complexity) is the repetition of the words “coy” and “sentimental” to describe
the book and its author. If much in “Ulysses” seemed “coy” when first
published, that was partly because editors had blue-penciled chunks of text to
stave off the censors. Today “coy” might refer to how Joyce’s wordplay and
erudition make reading “Ulysses,” as one critic observed, like gazing at stars
while they brighten. But the word ultimately undercuts one of Birmingham’s
central ideas: While the erudition and punning are important, you can read
“Ulysses” (and even be transformed) without understanding it all.
Just as misleading is
“sentimental,” which Birmingham leans on to argue for his adored book’s
accessibility. “Ulysses” is sentimental at times, but stressing that can
occlude the book’s layered, tragicomic realism and its most disruptive female
characters — especially in Molly Bloom’s amazing stream-of-consciousness
monologue at the end. Molly graphically describes the hot sex she had with her
lover that afternoon, hilariously complains (and brags) about her anatomy, and
recalls the moment she agreed to marry Leopold years earlier: “he could feel my
breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I
will Yes.”
These lines affirm an
erotic, joyful moment from an unrecoverable past. They express an anticoy
unsentimentality that anticipates the frozen ending of Samuel Beckett’s
“Waiting for Godot” and that is sometimes suppressed in Birmingham’s
ambitiousflawedfast-pacedtwenty-firstcenturybook.
THE
MOST DANGEROUS BOOK
The Battle for James Joyce’s “Ulysses”
By Kevin
Birmingham
Illustrated.
417 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95.
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