Today is Bloomsday, the hundred and tenth anniversary of the events in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The weather in Dublin looks good; the sun won’t set tonight until just before ten. If you are a young tryster who happens to be in Dublin, why not take a walk through Ringsend Park, the way Joyce and his girl did that evening? Everybody else can commemorate the day by buying and reading Kevin Birmingham’s terrific new “biography” of Ulysses, “The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses.”
The hero—the Ulysses—of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is Leopold Bloom: a man, like Homer’s hero, skilled in all manner of contending, a wanderer, a strategist, a man of polytrypos—“many twists and turns.” For Joyce, Homer’s hero was the only complete person in literature. Hamlet was a human being, Joyce said, but he was “son only”:> Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a jusqu’auboutist. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall.
But Bloom was inadequate in at least one regard: he didn’t write “Ulysses.” Joyce did, and in doing so he rendered a picture of Dublin “so complete,” he wrote, that “if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth” the reader could reconstruct it from the pages of “Ulysses.” Dublin friends and contemporaries of Joyce who were left out of the book wondered if their very existence had somehow been redacted.
As anybody who has grappled with “Ulysses” knows, the ultimate contender, conniver, and man for every occasion is Joyce himself. He is its hero, and our sense of him is deepened immeasurably by Birmingham’s book. Joyce’s contrivance, the novel in our hands, ranks among the great human accomplishments, partly because its design protrudes beyond its covers into a social and political space unready for it, whose only word for it was “obscene.”
By setting the novel on the day his first inklings of it formed, Joyce ensured that the book would always be, whatever else it would be, a book about its own conception and growth. He had dreamed of writing “Ulysses” since at least 1904, the year two things happened: a Dublin Jew named Alfred Hunter dusted him off after a brawl and walked him all the way home; and a beautiful barmaid, Nora Barnacle, on their first date—the first Bloomsday—slid her hand “down down inside my trousers,” as Joyce reminded her, later, in a letter, “and pulled my shirt softly aside … and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and frigged me slowly till I came off through your fingers.”
Each of these courtesies was performed by a stranger for a stranger, though Nora would become Joyce’s lifelong companion and eventual wife. Neither one was an act of specific personal connection or love. Kindness, sexual willingness, patience, forbearance, and especially “equanimity”—that beautiful word that so comforts Bloom in the end, and perhaps the most important word in the novel—all exist quite independent of personal bonds and the private economies of friendship, family, and marriage. That these lovely traits exist outside of the exchange market of human frailties—that they exist at all, in fact—would have been news to Henry James or, for that matter, to Jane Austen; it is almost hard to conceive of the novel as a genre without the idea that human virtues are always tactical, and spent with the expectation of handsome returns. It may sound sappy, but for me “Ulysses” is chiefly valuable as the most moving tribute in literature to kindness.
The book is dirtier than people imagine or remember. If you know it only by reputation, you know, probably, that a guy jerks off on the beach, while, at home, his wife entertains her lover (the hilariously, humiliatingly named Blazes Boylan) in a bed whose brass quoits have been “loosed” by her infinite trysts. But sex, a pleasure more intense than others but not fundamentally distinct from them, is everything in “Ulysses.” There has never been a novel more sympathetic to every weird thing people do to make themselves happy, from preparing a mutton kidney to eating a gorgonzola sandwich, to singing aloud “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” to “worshiping at that altar where the back changes name,” one of many, many descriptions of backsides and things people do to other people while on all fours. You could watch porn for weeks and see the same repertoire of actions, the identical durations, the same outcomes, over and over; once in a while somebody mixes in a gourd or dresses as a nun, but the basic template is fixed. In Joyce, cheering on your wife as she fucks her boyfriend is a fantasy, a source of pleasure. (Joyce wanted Nora to cheat on him, so that he could feel for himself what a cuckold feels.) The pleasure Bloom takes in Molly’s backside, especially in its messes and smells, finds, in Joyce (like so many pleasures of its kind) an exact linguistic embodiment: “I do indeed explore the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump.” Language is, of course, the real pleasure, the fundamental bawdiness.
To align writing with the pleasures in tasting, smelling, chewing, swallowing, smearing, shitting, and on and on, suggests that the novel operates via an alternate epistemology that circumvents the feeble equipment of the mind and often is at odds with sight. The first sustained stream-of-consciousness passage in the novel happens partly when Stephen Daedalus has closed his eyes to “hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells.” A blind stripling drifts in and out of the novel, a reproach, in part, to the finality and moral guarantees of seeing. The ultimate proof of sight’s marginality is sex itself, which, unlike the spectacle of sex, invalidates seeing as a means of transformation. Only when we’ve closed our eyes does the real mellow yellow smellow information start to trickle in. Furthermore, shame in “Ulysses” is often aligned with being seen, as when, in the hallucinatory trial Bloom must undergo in the Circe episode, the cheap drawing of a nymph he hung above his marital bed surprisingly takes the stand:
Part of the language play in this exchange happens between “seas” and “sees,” a pun Joyce will suggest in the chapter that follows, when a bloviating old sailor reports, among other boasts, of his conquests in Gibraltar, Molly’s birthplace. (“Sea men” and semen is another relevant pun.)
* * *
Coming to terms with “Ulysses” inevitably means realizing what Joyce had to overcome when he brought it into the world—first in writing it, then in finding a publisher, and, finally, in getting it printed. These were very separate endeavors, separate dramas, each with its hazards and setbacks, and to comprehend the novel fully involves comprehending the bleak conditions that shaped it, and against which it contended. I repeat the Homeric word “contend” advisedly, partly because it is cognate with “content”: Ulysses became famous right away for its illicit contents and its alleged incomprehensibility. You had to pore over the book in order to find the dirty parts. The obscenity judges had to set aside weeks to read it.
“The Most Dangerous Book” is the fullest account anybody has made of the publication history of “Ulysses”: its life as contraband, as talisman, as symbol, as sensualist’s bible and micro-atlas of the modern city. Joyce knew what he was getting himself into; “Dubliners,” his first book, went unpublished for nine years, rejected by forty publishers for allegedly “unprintable” obscenities, especially, unbelievably, the word “bloody.” Thirteen printers turned down “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”; Ezra Pound, who by then had taken up Joyce’s cause, came up with the idea, which others rejected, of having the printer leave large blanks where the offending phrases would later be typed in by hand.
Joyce, some have said, was the first censor of “Ulysses,” skipping objectionable passages when he read it aloud to ladies. Pound blue-penciled the words “bowels” and “trousers” in one early chapter. Every ally of the book wanted to censor it, often in the noble cause of getting it into print. This involved significant cloak-and-dagger; in fact, Joyce, who was living in Trieste during the war, was investigated as a spy. (He had been smuggling love letters, it turned out, from a young student of his to the daughter of an Italian resistance fighter, Adolf Mordo.)
“Ulysses” was serialized in The Little Review, in twenty-three installments, beginning in 1918. The January, 1919 issue was seized owing to the scene in which Bloom, at Davy Byrne’s pub, enjoys a gorgonzola sandwich while remembering how, when Molly and him first kissed, she “softly gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed.” Soon The Little Review had been found guilty of obscenity under the New York Comstock Act.
Joyce was writing the novel knowing that to publish it was nearly impossible, and likely illegal. This made him more determined, as Pound complained, to catalogue “every possible human secretion.” He was also suffering from attacks of iritis in both eyes, and had undergone a painful surgery, without effective anesthesia, whereby his cornea was sliced and a small piece of iris extracted. (Boldly, and I think totally persuasively, Birmingham advances the theory that Joyce’s eye troubles were the chief symptom of syphilis, which he acquired on one of his many trips, in his early manhood, to Dublin’s brothels.) He exhibited, according to Birmingham, a combination of ruthlessness and vulnerability. When Sylvia Beach, of Shakespeare and Company, first met him, slumped over on a bookcase, he was so shaken by the barking of a dog across the street that he trembled and whispered, “Is it coming in? Is it feerrce?” (He had been bitten as a boy, he claimed, and grew his goatee to cover the scar.) Beach, who later all but lost patience with Joyce, remarked how he would always wait, when getting out of a taxi, until the driver “had finished what he was saying.”
* * *
In 1933, when Random House brought a test case to overturn the “Ulysses” ban, they at first had a hard time convincing the customs officers to confiscate it; “everyone brings that in,” one remarked. Victory in the case, The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, had to have been a foregone conclusion: a whole nation against “one book”? What could be more absurd? The decision by Judge John M. Woolsey, printed in the front matter to the first American edition, argued, essentially, that since “Ulysses” was a great work of art it could not be obscene, however dirty it was. As Birmingham points out, obscenity is still, to this day, illegal; we just don’t use the word to apply to masterpieces.
There is a scene in “Ulysses,” one of my favorites, where Bloom, looking for a book to turn Molly on, “rents” a steamy bit of trash titled “Sweets of Sin,” a book, critics have noted, bought by a cuckold about a cuckold. He carries it with him the rest of the day, along with a bar of soap and a potato; it is the one piece of contraband in the book that Bloom can’t fit entirely in his pocket or keep sealed up in his mind. Bloom might as well have been carrying “Ulysses,” since the book had been so badly denigrated in the public eye that it had become no different, for the officials in charge, from “Sweets of Sin.”
Birmingham’s brilliant study makes you realize how important owning this book, the physical book, has always been to people, maybe first and foremost because it told other people who they were. In 1994, in a bookstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I saw, in a case full of treasures, a ponderously bound book labelled “Bible.” I opened the case and plucked the book from its stand; inside it was an early edition of “Ulysses.” Copies of the book were bound in all manner of disguise; copies were unbound and carried as single sheets or small booklets. John Quinn, Joyce’s patron and the organizer of the Armory Show, hid several copies in a shipment of Picassos.
I wanted to own this book, but I had no money. I begged my friends for a loan. At this time, I had only scanned the book in high school and, as teenagers had done for decades, carried it around as a sign of my worldliness. It didn’t matter. I had to have it.
I could not have it, and so many years later, when I was planning this piece, I looked for something like it again. I found a fine copy of the first English edition, published in Dijon, in 1922, in a run of two thousand copies. Mine is number 1901. Several hundred were burned in customs, but this copy has bright blue wrappers and—in an amazing irony—uncut pages. The meaning of “Ulysses” was always bound up with buying it, owning it, and showing it off, actions that assert the primacy of pleasure—the moral right to experience it—over sanctimony. This is an assertion utterly continuous with those Joyce made inside its covers. May Birmingham’s book bring legions of new readers its way.
_
Dan Chiasson’s most recent book is “Bicentennial: Poems” (Knopf).
Above: James Joyce in Paris, 1934. Photograph by Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty.
