The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham

Author:Kevin Birmingham [Birmingham, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594203367
Amazon: 1594203369
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Published: 2014-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

When the solicitor’s judgment was handed down, officials in Boston and at the General Post Office Building gathered up nearly five hundred copies of Ulysses they had been collecting through the fall, wheeled them down the basement’s dim corridors and unloaded them in the furnace room. The piles of books sat before the furnace’s black doors and a row of lower chambers, narrow like catacombs. The men opened the round cast-iron hatches and began tossing James Joyce’s Ulysses into the chambers. Paper burns brighter than coal. Seven years of writing, months of revisions and typesetting, weeks of printing and hours of packaging and shipping were incinerated in seconds.

—

BURNING ULYSSES could not have been a difficult decision. A conviction against a portion of the book in New York would be enough to persuade even a lenient official that Ulysses was illegal throughout the country. It’s unclear how Miss Weaver heard news of the seizure and destruction. Federal law required notification of a government seizure and an opportunity to challenge the decision in court, but if such notices were sent to any of the individuals or wholesalers waiting for Ulysses, none have ever been found. What we do know is that when the books were burned, Miss Weaver did not contact John Quinn or ask her own solicitor to intervene. She didn’t remove the copies hidden in her apartment. She didn’t lament or inquire after the burned books. Instead, she printed more. Within days, Miss Weaver ordered five hundred more copies from Darantière in Dijon—a third edition to replace the copies destroyed. Rodker would ship them to England, where they would smuggle the copies the same way they had before, by pulling them apart and shipping them to hostile American shores disguised as newspapers. Yet Ulysses, as everyone would soon discover, was no longer permissible on British shores, either.

The decision to ban Ulysses in the United Kingdom began in March 1922, when a concerned citizen sent the first book review to the Home Office. “Obscenity?” the London Observer asked. “Yes. This is undoubtedly an obscene book.” The Home Office was the principal branch of His Majesty’s government, and it was responsible for all law enforcement matters. Following the complaint, a Home Office official contacted the undersecretary of state and requested the name and address of any bookseller selling Ulysses—the detective observing Miss Weaver may have been carrying out the undersecretary’s orders and following her as she delivered copies to London bookshops.

There was official silence regarding Ulysses until the end of November 1922, when the undersecretary obtained the sixteen-page Quarterly Review screed that compared Ulysses to a Fenian bomb blowing up the castle of English literature. Paraphrasing the review, the undersecretary called the book “unreadable, unquotable, and unreviewable.” Two days later, he issued instructions: any copy of Ulysses found in the post should be detained. The decision was provisional—it was, after all, based on nothing more than a citizen’s complaint and a couple of reviews (one of them favorable). The undersecretary did not so much as glance at the text itself.

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