The United States declared war on the German Empire on April 6, 1917. One week later, a bomb exploded in a munitions plant in Philadelphia, killing 130 people, the result of a German plot. After nearly three years of isolation, the war had come home. “German agents are everywhere,” ads warned in newspapers and magazines. Government notices encouraged citizens to send names of potential enemies and, in some cases, to take suspicious individuals by the collar and turn them over to the police: “The only badge needed is your patriotic fervor.”
Vigilance organizations—the Minute Women, the Sedition Slammers, the Boy Spies of America—sprouted up around the country looking for German spies, enemy sympathizers and draft dodgers. The most extensive organization was the American Protective League, a quasi-official auxiliary to the Justice Department. For a seventy-five-cent fee, many members received “U.S. Secret Service” badges, despite protests from the actual Secret Service. The APL made arrests, patrolled with sidearms and coordinated with local, state and federal officials. Members had no training and little oversight, and the loose organizational structure allowed them to engage in blackmail, wiretapping, burglaries, kidnappings and lynchings. By the end of the war, the APL had investigated roughly three million “character and loyalty” cases. They found zero German spies.
Some of the German spies were Irish. The most ardent Irish nationalists hoped a British defeat would give Ireland its independence, and a few plotted to use Ireland as a staging ground for German attacks on Britain—one of the conspirators was New York Supreme Court Justice Daniel Cohalan. In 1916, three months after the plot was uncovered, a cargo ship carrying two million pounds of munitions headed for Britain exploded in New York Harbor, and the resulting blast measured 5.0 on the Richter scale. Irish dockworkers had planted the firebombs. Like Justice Cohalan, the dockworkers were probably members of the Clan-na-Gael, a militant Irish nationalist group operating in semisecrecy in several U.S. cities.
In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which banned any activity hindering the U.S. armed forces or helping its enemies during the war. Citizens could be imprisoned for up to twenty years for using language that might provoke draft dodging or military insubordination. Congress amended the law to criminalize “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States,” and over the next three years the government waged the largest crackdown on political dissent in U.S. history. The highest government official enforcing the Espionage Act was the postmaster general, and he directed local postmasters around the country to inspect all newspapers and magazines—anything unsealed—for material that would “embarrass or hamper” the war effort. The prime enforcer of political control was neither a federal intelligence agency nor a league of citizen spies. It was an army of three hundred thousand civil servants.
It’s strange to think of it now, but the Post Office Department was a major federal law enforcement agency. On the eve of World War I, the FBI (then called the Bureau of Investigation) was a fledgling subsidiary of the Justice Department. When the Espionage Act was signed in 1917, there were only three hundred Bureau of Investigation agents, and the Secret Service had only eleven counterespionage agents in New York. But the Post Office (an executive branch department in those days) was well established. It had 300,000 employees, including 422 inspectors and 56,000 postmasters overseeing the circulation of fourteen billion pieces of mail every year. The Post Office reached the far corners of the country, and it had been that way for decades. Long before there were highways and telephones there were postal roads and mail couriers. Small towns had post offices before they had cemeteries.
So when the United States entered World War I and the government wanted to censor dangerous words with a nationwide mechanism that had a long history of constitutional authority, it turned to the Post Office. The government gained the power to censor words by mastering the ability to circulate them, and warfare—the other foundation of big government—justified more censorship. This was how the government found James Joyce. The censorship troubles of Ulysses began not because vigilantes were searching for pornography but because government censors in the Post Office were searching for foreign spies, radicals and anarchists, and it made no difference if they were political or philosophical or if they considered themselves artists.
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THE GROWTH of the federal government is largely a story of the growth of the Post Office, and a powerful Post Office was the cornerstone of the U.S. censorship regime. Since its establishment in 1782, the Post Office had a legal monopoly over mail circulation, but the government didn’t exercise that power until 1844, when Congress declared that the system’s purpose was “elevating our people in the scale of civilization and bringing them together in patriotic affection.” Out of a diverse population sprawling across the continent, the mail would make Americans. This policy began a half-century expansion during which the Post Office built roads, slashed postage rates and stiffened penalties for private carriers violating the government’s monopoly. From 1845 to 1890, mail volume increased one hundred times over.
The Post Office garnered most of its strength by slashing postage rates. In 1844, it charged twenty-five cents to carry a letter four hundred miles, and if the letter had two sheets, the postage doubled (envelopes counted as another sheet). Seven years later, that same letter could be delivered nearly across the continent for only three cents. Newspapers and magazines enjoyed reduced rates since before the days of Ben Franklin, and yet periodical postage also plummeted. By 1879, newspapers and magazines were grouped as “second-class mail” and delivered anywhere for two cents per pound. If the recipient lived in the same county as the sender, delivery was free. Rates didn’t hit rock bottom until 1885, when periodicals were delivered anywhere in the country for one cent per pound, and it remained that way until 1918.
The infrastructure that made Americans also made modernists. The Post Office enabled little magazines on shoestring budgets to reach nationwide audiences. If half of The Little Review’s subscribers were in Manhattan and the other half scattered around the country, Anderson and Heap could distribute two thousand copies of an issue for $3.33. Their postage bill for the October 1917 issue was $2.50—the price of just one Joyce fan’s subscription. And yet all the Post Office needed to do to control a magazine like The Little Review was revoke its second-class status. First-class postage was eight to fifteen times higher—an unsustainable cost for a little magazine—and the Supreme Court ruled that postal bans and rate increases didn’t infringe on free speech because publishers had other distribution options, even if denying a magazine’s second-class rates would bankrupt it.
World War I dramatically expanded postal censorship. Postmaster General Albert Burleson claimed the Espionage Act gave him the authority to judge mailed material without court approval or congressional oversight. When Congress asked Burleson to disclose his surveillance instructions to the nation’s postmasters, he simply refused. The Post Office decided who broke the law, who deserved rate increases or outright bans and who deserved criminal prosecution. Burleson was a man to be reckoned with. He wore a black coat to match the black umbrella he carried at all times, and one of the president’s advisers called him “the most belligerent member of the cabinet,” which was saying a lot in 1918. He once complained about a socialist newspaper’s “insidious attempt to keep within the letter of the law.”
Under Burleson’s direction, Post Office inspectors began leafing through newspapers and magazines for unpatriotic material. Within a year, the government suppressed more than four hundred different issues from scores of publications for a range of political statements, ranging from a poem praising Emma Goldman to a reprint of Thomas Jefferson’s opinion that Ireland should be a republic. By the end of the war, more than a thousand people were convicted of violating the Espionage Act, and hundreds received prison sentences.
The foundation of this systematic suppression of political speech was a particular reading strategy that government officials used when considering allegedly treasonous texts: intentions and effects were secondary to an inherently dangerous nature. It didn’t matter if a magazine or pamphlet actually led people to avoid the draft or aid the nation’s enemies. It was enough if the Post Office decided that the words could potentially cause trouble. The basis of political censorship was the self-evident danger of words, their ability to provoke illicit actions in anyone who might read them. In other words, the government read a treasonous text the same way it read pornography. You knew it when you saw it.
But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The government applied the Espionage Act well beyond the authority of the statute itself. Judges granted the Post Office broad power to crack down on the corrupting tendency of radical speech partly because they had been so accustomed to granting that same power over obscenity. By the time James Joyce’s Ulysses began to appear in The Little Review in 1918, the Post Office was in a position to ban the circulation of several of the novel’s chapters for being both obscene and anarchistic. In fact, the government’s reaction to Ulysses reveals how much nineteenth-century ideas about obscenity shaped twentieth-century ideas about radicalism. The threat of political words corrupting a vulnerable nation of immigrants might have seemed critical after President Wilson’s declaration of war in 1917, but the threat of sexual words—and the fight against them—had been established for decades.
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THE HISTORY of the U.S. censorship regime began in earnest in 1873, when Anthony Comstock boarded a train to Washington, D.C., with a draft of a new federal law in his pocket and a satchel filled with his dirtiest pornography. Comstock was the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and because he understood the power of words, he understood the power of the Post Office. The government’s postal expansion began the year Comstock was born, and his lifetime corresponded with the emergence of mass print markets. Cheap reading material was flooding the country because distribution costs were plummeting as quickly as production costs. “The daily papers are turned out by hundreds of thousands each day,” he wrote,
and while the ink is not yet dry the United States mails, the express and railroad companies, catch them up and with almost lightning rapidity scatter them from Maine to California. Into every city, and from every city, this daily stream of printed matter pours, reaching every village, town, hamlet, and almost every home in the land.
Circulation was insidious. Comstock wanted the government to ban not just immoral books and pictures but also circulars and advertisements—everything that kept pornographers in business. A book like Lord K’s Rapes and Seductions wasn’t the only problem. They had to outlaw the catalog listing the book for sale and the newspapers printing the ads that told people where to find it. The law also had to ban contraception and abortion-related articles—birth control, after all, was part of the same avaricious business of lust. Pharmacists and smut peddlers profited from the same fantasy of sin without consequences.
On March 3, 1873, after nearly a month of lobbying, Ulysses S. Grant signed Comstock’s bill banning any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print or other publication of an indecent character” as well as anything intended to prevent conception or induce abortion. And it wasn’t just illegal to mail indecent things. It was illegal for anyone—even a doctor—to mail information about indecent things. Advertisements for condoms, for example, or instructional manuals explaining how to use a condom (or what a condom is) were now criminal if sent through the mail, whether in a magazine or a private letter. The Comstock Act, as it was called, granted search and seizure powers with warrants based on nothing more than the sworn complaint of one individual (Comstock, for example), and the penalties for mailing obscene material were much harsher: the maximum fine was now five thousand dollars instead of five hundred, and the maximum prison sentence increased from one year to ten.
States across the country exercised even more power. New York’s anti-obscenity statute criminalized the sale, production, advertisement and possession of immoral material with intent to distribute. It gave the police search and seizure powers and allowed courts to order the destruction of books and property. This federal patchwork of obscenity laws had perverse effects. A man was free to visit a brothel, but if he wrote a story about visiting a brothel he could go to prison—immoral words became more punishable than immoral acts. An office clerk who mailed an obscene book faced a heavier sentence than the book’s author, publisher and seller because the Comstock Act wasn’t about raiding bookshops. It was about raiding the nation’s most powerful distribution network.
When President Grant signed the bill, Comstock was sworn in as a special agent of the Post Office Department. He carried a gun and a badge, and he was one of only a handful of special agents empowered to make arrests across the United States. In retrospect, Comstock’s special agent appointment was as important as the law that bears his name, for he single-handedly transformed postal law enforcement. Previously, the Post Office’s special agents collected debts, supervised delivery service and arrested mail thieves. Post–Civil War obscenity regulations required the government to supervise far more than the distribution of the mail. It supervised the content of the mail. And yet no one exercised that power until Comstock was sworn in. Since Abraham Lincoln signed the first postal obscenity law in 1865, officials prosecuted about one person per year. In Comstock’s first nine months as a special agent, he prosecuted fifty-five. The country’s largest bureaucracy suddenly had an attack dog, and the circulation of words was never the same again.
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WORLD WAR I exacerbated the resentment of the government’s growing authority, for nothing represents authority quite like military conscription. On draft registration day in 1917, Emma Goldman held protest rallies in New York. A few days later, eight policemen raided the office of her magazine, Mother Earth, on 125th Street. They searched for the names and addresses of anti-conscription supporters, radicals and anarchists. Goldman and her partner, Alexander Berkman, were arrested for conspiring to prevent registration and for advocating violent resistance to the U.S. government.
The Little Review was one of their most vocal defenders. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap circulated an open protest letter claiming that the anarchists faced imprisonment and deportation “for the hideous crime of free speech,” and they listed the addresses of the judge and the U.S. district attorney so that sympathizers could demand a fair trial. The judge and prosecutor received scores of letters and telegrams. Some of them, apparently, were threatening, and six officers were detailed to protect the judge’s life. The press reprinted the protest letter and quoted old issues of The Little Review featuring Anderson’s praise of Goldman, and federal authorities took note.
The trial of Goldman and Berkman was the first high-profile prosecution of anarchists in decades. By the end, Anderson and Heap were among Goldman’s only friends who weren’t thrown out of the courtroom (standing for “The Star-Spangled Banner” was mandatory), and they were sitting at the defendants’ table when the jury found them guilty. Goldman and Berkman received ten-thousand-dollar fines and two years in prison.
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THE CLIMATE OF SUPPRESSION had a chilling effect throughout the publishing industry. To avoid an Espionage Act prosecution, Ezra Pound made sure The Little Review didn’t talk about the war, but the editors felt a wartime backlash anyway. In September 1917, a longtime reader protested the “Ezraized Little Review,” and a reader from Chicago was blunt: “I wish you didn’t have such a craze for foreigners and self-exiled Americans. I think you have missed your chance right here in your own country . . . I am tired of these floods of Russian, French, Scandanavian [sic], Irish and Hindoo stuff that have swept the country.” Subscriptions dwindled, and The Little Review’s support of Emma Goldman got the editors evicted from their Fourteenth Street office. They scrounged for money and subsisted on potatoes for days. Nevertheless, Margaret Anderson, determined to live beautifully, dressed for their potato and biscuit dinners in a crepe de chine chemise and a fur scarf.
Then the legal problems started. The October 1917 issue of The Little Review included a short story by Wyndham Lewis about a British soldier who impregnates a woman and ignores her letters while he’s off fighting in the trenches. “And when he beat a German’s brains out, it was with the same impartial malignity that he had displayed in the English night with his Spring-mate.” Comstock Act or Espionage Act—you could take your pick. Three thousand copies of the October 1917 Little Review were halted in the weighing room of the Post Office while the New York postmaster sent a copy to Washington for inspection. The issue circulated to Postmaster General Burleson, the attorney general’s office and, finally, to the solicitor general of the Post Office, William H. Lamar.
In 1918, the law codified what had already been standard procedure: the solicitor general held the final authority to judge dangerous words, ban publications and begin criminal prosecutions over anything obscene or treasonous sent through the mail. The solicitor’s purview was massive and uncontested. When William Lamar took the job, the volume of publications circulating through the mail was increasing at a rate of thirty-five million pounds per year, and even liberal courts considered his censorship decisions “conclusive” unless they were “clearly wrong.”
Lamar did not take his responsibilities lightly. He had been a preacher from Alabama before he turned to the law in the 1880s, and he believed in the power of words. “Words are the first and last weapon of all fakers,” he told The Boston Globe, “big words, extravagant words, mysterious words.” Dealing with mysterious words was simply a matter of “reading between the lines,” he said, and he knew what radicalism looked like. “You know I am not working in the dark on this censorship thing,” he wrote to a journalist. “I am after three things and only three things—pro germanism, pacifism, and high browism.”
John Quinn wrote a legal brief defending The Little Review, and he appended a letter to William Lamar. “The foreign editor is Ezra Pound, Esq., who is a very distinguished writer and poet and is a personal friend of mine.” He informed Lamar that he was quite familiar with obscenity law and had a proven track record: when Anthony Comstock brought charges against another friend of his, Mitchell Kennerley, he won the case easily, and in his professional opinion the short story in question “does not come within gunshot of violating the statute or any Federal statute. I know the writer, Wyndham Lewis, personally.” Quinn kindly asked Lamar to cable his authorization for the magazine’s circulation to the New York postmaster and to do so quickly. Quinn was going to Washington to meet with the attorney general and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and after that he planned to speak with Lamar in person.
Quinn’s influence didn’t work. Lamar declared the October issue of The Little Review obscene under Section 211 of the U.S. Criminal Code, an updated version of the Comstock Act. Quinn filed a motion to restrain the Post Office, but Judge Augustus Hand ruled against it. There was more detail than necessary in Lewis’s story, and while there were legal books more salacious than this magazine, Judge Hand argued, they escaped government bans “because they come within the term ‘classics,’” which were justifiable exceptions “because they have the sanction of age and fame and usually appeal to a comparatively limited number of readers.” In other words, salacious classics were legal because they were old and most people didn’t read them.
The defeat was an embarrassment to Quinn. The postal ban associated him and The Little Review with radical magazines like Mother Earth and The Masses, and he kept news of the decision out of the papers. When the embarrassment subsided, he suspected something was amiss. Lewis’s story wasn’t particularly obscene, his direct appeals to Lamar hadn’t worked and his brief’s argument about the story’s moral lesson for unwed women had fallen on deaf ears. Quinn concluded that someone must have put pressure on the postmaster general. Then it suddenly made sense.
“Alas!” he wrote to Pound. “Here’s the fact, as I believe it: Miss Anderson broke into the papers last spring over that lousy old anarchist Berkman and that old slut Emma Goldman; in court every day; greatly excited and all ‘hot up’; thought Goldman a ‘great woman’—ad nauseam.” The Little Review’s antics attracted the attention of federal officials, Quinn wrote to Pound, and Anderson was now known as a pacifist, which was barely distinguishable from a traitor. “So there you are!! Attention centered on her! The country going through a spasm of spy-hunting and a greater spasm of ‘virtue.’” That’s why the magazine was confiscated. And he was right. The Bureau of Investigation opened a file on Margaret Anderson, and Lewis’s short story was just an excuse to harass a radical magazine. Lamar declared the October 1917 issue unmailable not for being obscene but for being a “Publication of Anarchistic tendency.” The Post Office banned its circulation under the auspices of the Espionage Act.
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POUND WAS ALARMED. His literary renaissance, only months old, was already in jeopardy. He was worried not just because Quinn’s displeasure threatened the magazine’s finances, but also because he had recently received the first chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses. And they were magnificent. Given the news from New York, however, he wasn’t sure it would survive the spasms of spy-hunting and virtue. He wrote to Joyce in mid-December 1917:
I suppose we’ll damn well be suppressed if we print the text as it stands. BUT it is damn wellworth it. I see no reason why the nations should sit in darkness merely because Anthony Comstock was horrified at the sight of his grandparents in copulation, and thereafter ran wode in a loin cloth . . . Wall, Mr. Joice, I recon you’re a damn fine writer, that’s what I recon’. An’ I recon’ this here work o’ yourn is some concarn’d litterchure. You can take it from me, an I’m a jedge.
Pound sent the typescripts to Margaret Anderson in February 1918, though he warned Anderson, in Chaucerian English, that “Joyce has run wode” in the third chapter—it was madness, even if different from the Comstock-in-loincloth variety. The chapter was, he said, “magnificent in spots, and mostly incomprehensible” (he later changed his mind). Stephen’s thoughts morph and proliferate without any gloss or mediation—Joyce did not adjust his content or style to assuage the inherent difficulty of overhearing someone’s mind. In the “Proteus” episode, Stephen walks alone on the beach, and as the exterior action falls away, his thoughts touch upon his family’s dissolution, the conversations he had earlier in the day, his silly childhood prayers, Hamlet and Shelley and Aristotle, his own pretentiousness, arias and nursery rhymes, last night’s dream about Baghdad, a newspaper report of a murder, the murderer’s imagined thoughts and the possibility of walking out into eternity from the shore.
As conceptual as the episode is, Stephen’s thoughts begin with (and return to) the visible world: “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.” The reader doesn’t know it yet, but Stephen broke his glasses the day before—he can barely see the rusty boot. He thinks about seeing because it helps him cope with blindness. For Joyce, writing Stephen’s stream of consciousness was partly a way to go beyond the visible world by thinking about it.
Margaret Anderson had always wanted to peer into the mind of the artist. She and Jane Heap spent hours exploring relevant questions. “By what touch does one immortalize objects? By what power does one create in one’s own image?” Anderson wanted to weigh the content of a person’s mind, to examine “the poignant human being” and distill the secrets of creativity. Here at last she had a key to the artist’s laboratory. Anderson read the manuscript straight through to the opening of “Proteus,” and when she came to the rusty boot, she stopped reading, looked up at Jane and said, “This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have. We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.”
Pound had no idea how the law would apply to Ulysses. He suggested they mail only three hundred copies of each Joyce issue. If the Post Office didn’t confiscate them, they could send out the rest. He asked Quinn if mentioning urination was illegal. What about mocking transubstantiation? Were there any statutes prohibiting blasphemy? He wanted to know where the line was so they wouldn’t cross it again. “When dealing with religious maniacs, one NEVER can tell.” Pound refused to let The Little Review fall apart before Ulysses was in print. “For God’s sake,” he wrote to Anderson, “do something to cheer Quinn. He is the best and most effective friend I have in America.” Since Quinn’s faith in the magazine was shattered, he tried to salvage his faith in Ulysses. All their troubles, he wrote to Quinn, would be worthwhile “even if we go bust and die in a blaze of suppression over Joyce’s new novel.”
For Pound, the fight for Ulysses was fueled by his outrage that a government capable of banning a writer like James Joyce even existed. When he saw the text of the Comstock Act, he wanted to reprint the statute in every issue as an example of the institutional mediocrity that their renaissance should vanquish. Pound tried to convince Quinn that their aristocracy of taste required a new law: “I think the statute which lumps literature and instruments for abortion into one clause is so fine a piece of propaganda for the Germans that it would be disloyal to publish it here till after the war” The law encapsulated the country’s ignorance. It was “grotesque, barbarous, ridiculous, risible, Gargantuan, idiotic, wilsonian, american, Concordia Emersonian, VanDykian, Hamilton-Mabiean, pissian, pharrrtian, monstrous, aborted, contorted, distorted, merdicious, stinkiferous, pestilent and marasmic.” Never had adjectives seemed so weak.
Pound wrote a letter to William Lamar “man to man” (“I trust you are proud of your handiwork,” he wrote) and asked Quinn to forward it (he didn’t). He wrote a Little Review article denouncing the legal system that could treat art like “the inventions of the late Dr. Condom,” and he skewered the judge’s argument that the “classics” escaped censorship because so few people read them. Pound thought that the reasoning thwarted literature’s development. Any contemporary writer who wanted to write a classic that violated social conventions would have to endure being outlawed—and therefore impoverished—until official approval arrived decades or centuries later. Until then, writers were at the mercy of an unaccountable authority like Lamar with no literary training.
Quinn wanted to drop the matter entirely. What seemed charmingly cavalier about Pound’s rants when his subject was art or poetry became petulant when he talked about the law, and The Little Review had enough problems without encouraging more scrutiny from federal officials. Quinn informed Pound that his intemperate article against the Comstock Law “might be the last straw”—his quip about “the inventions of the late Dr. Condom” was itself potentially illegal. Pound didn’t seem to grasp how quixotic his protest was in the middle of a war. The only way the government would change the law, he told Pound, would be to make it stronger.
“There is nothing in the anti-Comstock business. People are sick and tired of it,” and he warned Pound not to ruin his own reputation just as he was making a name for himself in the United States. “In the minds of nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand your campaign for free literature would be lumped in at once with pro-Sanger, pro-Washington Square, pro-free love, pro-anti-Comstock propaganda, pro-birth control propaganda, pro-socialist propaganda.” Once you were assigned to a group like that, it was impossible to get out.
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THE GROWING SCHISM between the two men was fundamental: Quinn was practical, and Pound was an ideologue trying to turn art into power. Imagism and Vorticism were his attempts to remove the barriers between the word and the world. Pound’s renaissance in art was trying to colonize the world of politics, and yet his reaction to the Comstock Act proved he was trapped inside the art world no matter what—he was reading the statute as if it were a poem. Pound was horrified not so much by the fact that immoral books and condoms were outlawed as that they were “lumped” into the same clause, as if the meanings of the listed items shaped one another like couplets in a stanza. Quinn didn’t want to change society or international relations through his patronage. He just wanted to change art. And it unnerved him to think that Pound’s creative spirit, his pugnacious honesty and his freedom to flee to China or Alaska were inseparable from his incompetence.
But he still had faith in Pound’s opinions about art, and Joyce’s work confirmed it. Quinn declared Dubliners “one of the most sincere and realistic books ever written.” When A Portrait was published in 1917, the U.S. publisher, Ben Huebsch, sent Quinn a copy and referred to it as a novel that “very nearly approaches genius.” Quinn no longer needed convincing. He bought about thirty copies of A Portrait for his friends and wrote an article praising James Joyce in Vanity Fair: “A new star has appeared in the firmament of Irish letters, a star of the first magnitude.” Quinn’s Joyce was Pound’s Joyce. His article praised the Irish writer’s newness and honesty, his rejection of ornament, rhetoric and compromise—he went so far as to copy portions of Pound’s letters verbatim.
National ties turned his appreciation for Joyce into devotion. Quinn was the son of Irish immigrants. His mother, whom he adored, was an orphan from Cork who had arrived on U.S. shores when she was fourteen, and Quinn visited Ireland for the first time only weeks after she died in 1902. The Irish became an extended family for a man who had lost his parents and whose closest ties were to a couple of siblings and a bevy of mistresses. With no children of his own, John Quinn began to think of his patronage of great Irish writers as a part of both his heritage and his legacy.
Quinn, in fact, suspected he was dying. He discovered that he had a malignant tumor in his large intestine and needed surgery to remove a section of his colon. For months, Quinn’s assistant was the only one who knew, but the reality was setting in. He was only forty-eight years old. “I am still interested in life,” he wrote to Pound, “still feel its sap, the world seems good to me, and I don’t want to go for a long, long time yet.” He prepared his will and squared away unfinished business before checking into the hospital. In March 1918, he sent Pound the remaining $750 he promised for his work for The Little Review, and he gathered an additional subsidy of $1,600 from himself and three of his friends. He did not intend to help the magazine any further.
So when Quinn’s assistant delivered his mail to his hospital room and Quinn, recovering from surgery, flipped through the March 1918 issue of The Little Review containing the debut installment of James Joyce’s new novel, Ulysses—the long-awaited masterpiece guaranteed to make all their troubles worthwhile—the references to “snotgreen” noserags and “the scrotumtightening sea” disgusted him. There was a joking ballad that included a line about Jesus urinating. The burden of Quinn’s sickness likely made every unpleasant detail unbearable, and he dictated an angry letter from his hospital bed. “That is what I call toilet-room literature, pissoir art. It doesn’t even rise to the dignity of boudoir art or whorehouse art or cabaret art.” He could have The Little Review convicted in thirty seconds before any judge or jury in the country.
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THE FIRST PERSON to censor Ulysses was Ezra Pound. Joyce sent the fourth chapter while Quinn was in the hospital, and the text was substantially worse than “snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening.” Leopold Bloom takes his morning trip to the outhouse in the small back garden of his Eccles Street flat. “He felt heavy, full: then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood up, undoing the waistband of his trousers. The cat mewed to him.” Ezra Pound took out his blue pencil and struck a line through the phrase “of his bowels” and another through “undoing the waistband of his trousers.” He cut about thirty lines before sending it to Anderson and Heap.
Pound told Joyce they could print the unexpurgated text in a Greek or Bulgarian translation someday, but Joyce was not amused. “I shall see that the few passages excised are restored if it costs me another ten years,” he vowed. Pound justified his deletions on artistic grounds. It was bad writing, he told Joyce in a letter. “Bad because you waste the violence. You use a stronger word than you need, and this is bad art, just as any needless superlative is bad art.” Pound didn’t want Quinn agitated any more than was absolutely necessary, and if The Little Review were suppressed too often it would be suppressed permanently. “I can’t have our august editress jailed, NOT at any rate for a passage which I do not think written with utter maestria.”
Pound sensed that The Little Review was falling apart just as Ulysses was starting to see the light of day. He went months without hearing from Anderson and Heap, and the situation in New York was worse than he knew. They were behind on rent, malnourished and sick. Jane wrote to a friend back in Kansas about their squalid apartment. “It is so dirty—and everything is broken or scuffed or bent and useless—and a perfect pest of mice—hordes of them. I can’t bear to look at my room, or put it in order.” Jane lost fifteen pounds from dysentery and had fever blisters on her face. Anderson caught the Spanish flu and began seeing someone else. She would lock herself in a room to proofread upcoming issues while Jane ensconced herself in some far corner of the apartment to avoid catching a glimpse of the other woman, half-naked, darting to and from the bathroom. Jane alternately entertained and avoided the advances of her own love interest, Djuna Barnes, but she was heartbroken and, eventually, suicidal. And The Little Review’s troubles were just beginning.
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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S censorship of Ulysses began with an offhand note about the novel’s unusual style. In March 1919, a copy of The Little Review landed in the Translation Bureau of the Post Office Department because the magazine contained pages of French prose. The Translation Bureau was tasked with sifting through foreign-language texts for wartime crimes, and it was still operating in 1919. The official inspecting The Little Review read the five-page installment of Ulysses, in which Leopold Bloom helps a blind man cross the street and wonders what it would be like not to see. The Translation Bureau official wrote to his supervisor, “The Creature who writes this Ulysses stuff should be put under a glass jar for examination. He’d make a lovely exhibit!”
The issue was perfectly legal, but the supervisor decided to examine the Creature more closely, and he discovered that the January issue of The Little Review was more offensive than peculiar. Leopold Bloom orders a gorgonzola sandwich for lunch at Davy Byrne’s pub and sips a glass of burgundy. The taste makes him think of the grapes in the Burgundy sun, which reminds him of a bright day on a hillside outside of Dublin. Molly kissed him with seedcake in her mouth, and he began to chew it.
High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warm folded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
The Post Office notified The Little Review that the January 1919 issue was henceforth forbidden from the U.S. mail—the censorship of Ulysses began with the novel’s central scene of affection.
Since the issues had already been sent to subscribers, the ban was effectively a warning. The second ban was more punctual. The Post Office notified Anderson that the May 1919 issue was being inspected in Washington, D.C., to determine whether Episode IX of Ulysses was obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy, and therefore in violation of the Comstock Act. John Quinn was the only person who could help, and his appreciation for Joyce—despite some of his nauseating details—made him feel as if he had no other option. Quinn spent nearly an hour and a half dictating a legal brief defending Ulysses, and Lamar gave him the courtesy of making his decision over the weekend. By Tuesday morning, Quinn heard that the issue was banned.
Quinn prepared to catalog the offenses to Ezra Pound, but he couldn’t bear to dictate the magazine’s illegal passages to his young female stenographer, so he dismissed her and composed the letter himself. There was an assortment of small objections. Stephen Dedalus mentions the “incests and bestialities” that stain “the criminal annals of the world[.]” He declares, “It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.” Buck Mulligan jokes about visiting Stephen “at his summer residence” in Nighttown, where he was “deep in the study of the Summa contra Gentiles in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay whore.” Buck shares a title for a masturbatory play: “Everyman His own Wife (a national immorality in three orgasms) by Ballocky Mulligan.” All of this, mind you, was happening in the course of a discussion of Shakespeare—at one point, Buck cheerfully brings up “the charge of pederasty brought against the bard.” Quinn wondered if Pound had even read the banned issue.
As with previous episodes, Pound had not only read it, he had censored it—he simply hadn’t gone far enough. Anderson informed her readers that the magazine “ruined” Joyce’s writing by “omitting certain passages in which he mentions natural facts known to everyone.” Whether pederasty, masturbation and incest were known to everyone was beside the point, Quinn wrote to Pound. “The fact of s—t—g being a common practice every day and hence must be ‘a natural fact known to everyone’ is no reason why it should be put upon a printed page of a magazine.” Perhaps Joyce’s conversations had been acceptable among students and librarians in the National Library of Ireland in 1904. They were not acceptable for a magazine sent through the U.S. mail system in 1919.
Pound resorted to flattery. He told Quinn that his legal brief was one of the most brilliant defenses of realist literature he had ever read, and he was sending it to T. S. Eliot (The Egoist’s current literary editor) for publication. Eliot wrote to Quinn from London a few days later to say that the suppression of Ulysses was “a national scandal . . . The part of Ulysses in question struck me as almost the finest I have read: I have lived on it ever since I read it.” Eliot pledged to do everything he could for Joyce in England, but he felt like a lone evangelist in a particularly hostile country. In London, he wrote to Quinn, “the forces of conservatism and obstruction are more intelligent, better educated, and more formidable.”