The courtroom was packed with spectators drawn by Margaret Anderson’s refined looks and reporters eager to get the scoop on the “Greenwich Girl Editors.” The previous week, a judge threatened another Village editor with psychiatric observation at Bellevue, and this week’s show was even more promising. Anderson and Heap were defending a book rumored to be radical Freudianism, impenetrable madness and what one reporter called “ultra-violet sex fiction.” But Quinn was determined that there wouldn’t be a scene. He told Anderson and Heap that they had two responsibilities: to shut their mouths and to surround themselves with “window trimmings.” Any Washington Squareites they brought to court were to dress like demure, tasteful ladies rather than the women who showed up at the preliminary hearing looking, he said, like they were rustled into court after a whorehouse raid. Anderson was determined to follow his advice, but it only made her more contemptuous of the proceedings.
“Everyone stands up as the three judges enter,” she recounted in The Little Review. “Why must I stand up as a tribute to three men who wouldn’t understand my simplest remark?” When she wasn’t outraged by the proceedings, she tried not to be bored by them. “Perhaps one can be enlivened by speculating as to whether they will swerve the fraction of an inch from their predestined stupidity.”
The men overseeing the stupidity were Special Sessions Chief Justice Frederic Kernochan and two white-haired judges, John J. McInerney and Joseph Moss. Assistant DA Forrester called only one witness, John Sumner. All Sumner had to do was explain the circumstances of the suppression—the troubled daughter, the outraged father and the undercover purchase in the bookstore on Eighth Street, where any young woman might find it—and James Joyce’s obscenity would speak for itself.
It occurred to Quinn that the trial was a demoralizing squabble among Irishmen. Two of the three judges were Irish. The indictment was handed down by Corrigan, an Irishman, against James Joyce, another Irishman, and in the middle of it all was John Quinn squaring off against an assistant DA who presented himself, Quinn thought, as “a one hundred and thirty percent Irish Republican” defending Ireland’s dignity against betrayers like Quinn and Joyce.
Quinn argued that Joyce was an artist matching the caliber of Shakespeare, Dante, Fielding and Blake. He was a satirist like Swift and Oscar Wilde, and there was less “filth” in Ulysses than there was in Broadway performances and Fifth Avenue window displays. Quinn initially thought the case was so hopeless that he wouldn’t even bother calling witnesses to defend Ulysses’ literary merits, but as the trial approached, the desire to win (or to mitigate sentencing) got the better of him, and he convinced the judges to hear expert testimony. One witness, a British lecturer named John Cowper Powys, testified that Joyce’s fusion of dialogue and narrative, thought and action, made his style too obscure to deprave and corrupt the public—the average reader would find it repellent. Ulysses, Powys testified, was “in no way capable of corrupting the minds of young girls.” He used to teach at a girls’ school, so he knew.
When Quinn’s second witness took the stand, the judges grew impatient with so-called experts. Philip Moeller was one of the founders of New York’s Theatre Guild, and he asked the judges if he might use technical terminology to explain how Joyce applied Freudian psychology. The scene between Gerty and Bloom on the beach was really “an unveiling of the subconscious mind.” Joyce’s chapter, he testified, “most emphatically is not aphrodisiac.”
“What’s this!” Judge Kernochan interrupted. “What’s that?”
Quinn tried to help, “Well, if I may explain your honor, an aphrodisiac is an adjective derived from the noun Aphrodite, supposed to be the goddess of beauty or love—”
“I understand that,” said Kernochan, “but I don’t understand what this man is talking about. He might as well be talking in Russian.”
When the judges proceeded without hearing from the rest of Quinn’s experts, it occurred to Anderson and Heap that Ulysses was trapped in a foreign country where beauty and craftsmanship were meaningless. One of the judges declared (without shame, apparently), “We don’t care who James Joyce is or whether he has written the finest books in the world.”
And yet the trial was going better than it seemed. The fact that there were witnesses at all was a victory. Courts typically ignored literary merit in obscenity cases, but Quinn cited an obscure 1913 ruling by Judge Learned Hand to secure an exception. Hand was a cousin of the judge who had ruled against The Little Review in 1917, but he was no friend of Anthony Comstock (“When I wish to hear from you,” he once told the bullying crusader in his courtroom, “I will let you know!”), nor did he approve of the Hicklin Rule. Hand was suspicious of judicial hunts for hidden tendencies in books, especially when they focused on anyone “into whose hands” a book “may fall.” The Hicklin Rule requires us, the judge wrote in 1913, “to reduce our treatment of sex to the standard of a child’s library.” The government had an interest in protecting valuable literature, he argued, and artists needed freedom to portray the full scope of human nature because “truth and beauty are too precious to society at large to be mutilated.” The Hicklin Rule’s tendency to tether modern society to Victorian values made it an instrument of immorality.
Learned Hand proposed his own definition of obscenity—it was the first time in over forty years that a federal judge questioned the reigning standards: “Should not the word ‘obscene’ be allowed to indicate the present critical point in the compromise between candor and shame at which the community may have arrived here and now?” The meanings of obscene and lewd and lascivious weren’t set in stone. They were fluid and local, hashed out by communities from year to year.
Though this seems like a small point to make, it was radical. To suggest that what corrupts a reader’s mind changes over time is to imply that what is natural about a mind—its uncorrupted state—also changes. If you read it carefully, Learned Hand’s ruling didn’t just make obscenity malleable. It made human nature malleable. But no one read it carefully, and Hand’s decision fell into obscurity. It was, after all, only a preliminary ruling on a savvy defense attorney’s motion to bypass a jury trial. John Quinn was the only person who paid attention to Hand’s argument—he quoted it at length in his memorandum—because Quinn himself was the savvy defense attorney.
—
THE COURT ADJOURNED for a week so that the judges could read The Little Review themselves. When the proceedings resumed, the Assistant DA Forrester prepared to read some of the offensive passages out loud, but one of the white-haired judges stopped him. There were ladies in the courtroom. Everyone turned to the statuesque woman in the high-collared coat, her clear eyes gazing steadily from behind heavy lids. Margaret Anderson’s virtuously dressed supporters were clustered behind her. Quinn turned back to the judge and smiled. The attentive women in the front rows didn’t need to be protected from the filth of The Little Review, he explained, and the woman who had caught his eye was the magazine’s editor.
The judge couldn’t believe it. “I am sure she didn’t know the significance of what she was publishing,” he said. “I myself do not understand Ulysses—I think Joyce has carried his method too far in this experiment.”
“Yes,” Judge McInerney said, “it sounds to me like the ravings of a disordered mind—I can’t see why anyone would want to publish it.”
The courtroom exercise infuriated Anderson. Even if the judges could understand Joyce, they would insist on applying incommensurable standards. It was like having your outfit for the day judged by a trio of weathermen. Anderson was on the verge of shouting out to the judges. “Let me tell you why I regard it as the prose masterpiece of my generation,” she wanted to say, “and why you have no right to pit the dullness of your brains against the fineness of mine.” Jane, eager to avoid prison, was poking Anderson in the ribs, whispering, “Don’t try to talk. Don’t put yourself into their hands.”
Quinn was pleased with the judges’ bewilderment—it was the cornerstone of his argument. So long as Joyce’s writing was unintelligible it couldn’t be obscene. Ulysses was “cubism in literature,” he said, trying to balance its seriousness with its obscurity, and he read a passage of Bloom’s thoughts to illustrate his point:
A monkey puzzle rocket burst, spluttering in darting crackles. Zrads and zrads, zrads, zrads. And Cissy and Tommy ran out to see and Edy after with the pushcar and then Gerty beyond the curve of the rocks. Will she? Watch! Watch! See! Looked round. She smelt an onion. Darling, I saw your. I saw all.
Joyce baffled. The text didn’t even have proper punctuation, which, Quinn suggested, was the unfortunate result of Joyce’s poor eyesight. The DA became so outraged at this insult to the court’s intelligence that he launched into a red-faced invective, at which point Quinn broke in and pointed to the prosecutor, “This is my best exhibit! There is proof Ulysses does not corrupt or fill people full of lascivious thoughts. Look at him!” Almost involuntarily, they looked. “Does a reading of that chapter want to send him to the arms of a whore? Is he filled with sexual desire? Not at all. He wants to murder somebody! He wants to send Joyce to jail. He wants to send those two women to prison. He would like to disbar me. He is full of hatred, venom, anger and uncharitableness. But lust? There is not a drop of lust or an ounce of sex passion in his whole body. . . . . He is my chief exhibit as to the effect of Ulysses.”
In his concluding statements, Quinn tried to put the prosecution in a logical bind. Readers would either understand the episode from Ulysses or they wouldn’t. The readers who couldn’t understand Ulysses would, by definition, not be corrupted by it. And the few readers who could understand it would either be captivated by its “experimental, tentative, revolutionary” style or else they would be repulsed or bored. Either way, the vulnerable young women of New York were protected from corruption by their own naïveté. Joyce’s chapter was inscrutable to all but the most sophisticated readers, readers that the state of New York did not need to worry about.
“It’s just the story of a lady’s lingerie,” Quinn said.
“The lady is in the lingerie,” a judge responded.
Quinn had the two older judges exactly where he wanted them—befuddled and amenable to his authority, but Judge Kernochan was different. “He is an ass without the slightest glimmer of culture, but he knows the meaning of words,” Quinn later wrote to Joyce.
After the judges conferred, Kernochan pronounced Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap guilty of violating the New York state law against obscenity. To keep the editors out of prison, Quinn certified that “Nausicaa” was the most offensive chapter in the book, but the judges still weren’t sure how seriously the women should be punished. One of them asked Sumner if there were any prior complaints regarding the magazine. Sumner glanced at Margaret Anderson, her full lips heavily rouged. Sensing the stakes of the question, he gallantly pushed the other suppressed issues under the pile of papers in front of him. “Not at all,” he said.
Whether it was because it was their first time in court or because the judges pitied their ignorance, Judge McInerney announced a penalty he considered “very lenient.” The judges ordered Anderson and Heap to serve ten days in prison or pay a fine of one hundred dollars, an amount they almost certainly didn’t have. Luckily, one of the ladies gathered in the courtroom, a wealthy Chicagoan named Joanna Fortune, kept Anderson and Heap out of jail by paying the fine herself.
Newspaper reporters and Greenwich Villagers crowded around as the Girl Editors were hauled off to be fingerprinted. Somewhere in the bustle of the crowd a young man called out, “That chapter was a bit disgusting.”
Jane Heap shouted back, “Is it a crime to be disgusting?”
Now that the proceedings were over, they were eager to break their silence. The question of obscenity “should be left to us experts,” Anderson told the newsmen, rather than to smut hounds like Sumner. “Give an artist a moral and he will lose his art.” And then she gave a plug: “The Little Review is the only medium through which the artist may enjoy his place in the sun.”
Anderson decided that if the law insisted on treating her like a delicate creature, then the men would have to take a delicate creature’s fingerprints. She examined the inkpad. She wanted more towels, she said, and one of the men hastened to retrieve them. She wanted better soap, she said, and they managed to find something more suitable. She wanted a nail brush, she said, and by some feat of resourcefulness they supplied even that. Miss Margaret C. Anderson reluctantly submitted her hands to the pad while the men assured her that the ink wouldn’t stain.
The prospects for the publication of Ulysses in the United States were bleak, and Quinn felt genuine remorse. He wrote to Anderson, “I thought of Joyce and of his need for the money and that he was abroad and out of touch with things here, and perhaps not in the best of health. And I remembered how hard it was for serious writers to live in these years and months and days . . . I have done the best I could, and I failed.” Word spread that the Post Office had sent the seized copies of The Little Review to the Salvation Army, where fallen women in reform programs were instructed to tear them apart.
—
ANDERSON AND HEAP were lucky. No one at the Little Review trial noticed the most scandalous aspect of “Nausicaa,” the obscurity at the heart of the episode: while Gerty MacDowell is leaning back on the rocks, Leopold Bloom is masturbating. The judges, the reporters, the innocent girl’s father and John Sumner himself missed it, which is understandable. Even if one were looking for something so improbably, outlandishly offensive, it wasn’t easy to find. When Gerty limps away, Bloom “recomposed his wet shirt,” but Pound had cut the word wet. A few pages later, the manuscript read, “O sweety. All your little white up I saw. Dirty girl. Made me do love sticky.” Pound crossed out “up I saw. Dirty girl” and, prudently, “love sticky” so that The Little Review’s version was more discreet though less coherent: “O sweety all your little white I made me do we too naughty darling.” An especially astute reader might connect Bloom’s “hoarse breathing” and his face’s “whitehot passion” several pages earlier, but the blue garters and nainsook knickers tend to steal the show.
If Anderson and Heap knew, they pretended not to, and Quinn himself may not have noticed if Pound hadn’t clued him in. Joyce, he told Quinn, was bent on mentioning “every possible physical secretion.” One of the only people who detected it was Judge Corrigan at the preliminary hearing. He held the editors for trial, despite knowing Quinn, because, he said, of “the episode where the man went off in his pants,” which was illegal beyond all doubt. When Quinn mocked Corrigan for having a dirty mind, what he meant was that an innocent judge wouldn’t have seen it—after all, it took a lascivious mind to find an orgasm in those bursting Roman candles.
So in the wake of the “Nausicaa” conviction, Joyce decided to make the tableau a bit more explicit. He restored “love sticky” and the wetness to Bloom’s shirt, of course, and he added a new insert as Gerty leans back: “His hands and face were working and a tremour went over her.” As with all of his revisions, Joyce was recalibrating: he wanted the details of his story to be just obscure enough to be found. He had a childlike desire to be searched for and discovered behind the couch or in a cupboard. When people couldn’t see the Homeric correspondences in Ulysses, Joyce tabulated them in a handy chart. And when the key he provided threatened to become too public, he forbade publishers from printing it.
The question Joyce had asked Nora before they left Ireland remained with him his entire life: “Is there one who understands me?” The coins jingling in Boylan’s pocket, Gerty’s fantasy about Bloom’s foreign name, the knock-medown cigar hinting at the blinded Cyclops and Bloom’s hoarse breathing are secrets waiting to be understood. Meanings in Ulysses are coy thrills. They are only partially revealed so as to draw people closer. Ulysses is difficult because Joyce was lonely. He was sentimental, prone to fantasy as well as rumination, and he beckoned readers onward through teases written into his book inch by inch. If Joyce resembles someone on that beach, it is not Leopold Bloom. Joyce is Gerty.