After nearly eight years of writing, Ulysses was finally navigating the world, and no one knew what would happen next. It had been convicted of obscenity in New York the previous year, and its publication in Paris led to cries of scandal on the front pages of British newspapers. While it was possible that U.S. authorities would turn a blind eye to Gerty MacDowell once she was bound in an expensive book rather than a cheap magazine, Molly Bloom and the outrageous spectacles of the “Circe” episode pushed Joyce’s novel beyond the pale. Obscenity laws were enforced so inconsistently that it was impossible to tell if the safe delivery of the first copies meant that Ulysses was tacitly sanctioned or if authorities simply didn’t notice it. And if authorities were inclined to sanction Joyce’s book, it was anyone’s guess when, where or how they would respond. Officials could notify readers of a book’s seizure and, in the absence of a legal challenge, its destruction, or they could press criminal charges against an unlucky bookseller. Copies could sell freely in the spring only to be seized in the fall. British authorities could object even if U.S. authorities did not, and an enforcement action anywhere—by a customs agent in Ireland, a police officer in Ohio or a postal inspector in London—could trigger bans in countries around the globe. Neither Sylvia Beach nor Joyce had the resources to fight for Ulysses in court, and Miss Weaver did not have the will.
Nevertheless, in the spring of 1922 copies of James Joyce’s big blue book made their way into the United States as parcels from Paris marked UN LIVRE. John Quinn saw his first copy of Ulysses in March at Drake’s Book Shop on Fortieth Street. Quinn, who had been receiving the manuscript in batches for months, felt the gentle striations of the handmade pages and admitted, begrudgingly, that Sylvia Beach had managed to publish a beautiful book. The demand for Ulysses was unprecedented. Drake sold Shakespeare and Company’s twelve-dollar copies for twenty dollars, and that was nothing. Brentano’s, one of New York’s major bookstores, was selling them for thirty-five dollars. Near the end of March, Quinn heard that a copy sold for fifty, and by October the rumored prices for the more expensive versions were as high as one hundred dollars in New York and an astonishing forty pounds in London. Everyone was talking about Ulysses.
And that was the problem. John Sumner and the NYSSV would soon discover that copies of Ulysses were landing on American shores. Anderson and Heap printed a full-page advertisement for Ulysses in The Little Review, and since Sumner and the Post Office Department were almost certainly keeping their eye on the magazine, the announcement must have sounded like a taunt. The NYSSV was extending its aggressive campaign against the wave of obscenity sweeping the nation—especially the “high filth” imported from overseas—and Sumner would be on the phone with postal inspectors and customs officials in every major port in the United States, urging them to seize any copies they could find. Quinn admired the fact that someone like Sylvia Beach could publish Ulysses. “She has tackled, with the audacity, if not the ignorance of amateurs, a really tough job,” he wrote to Joyce. “That is the job of beating the United States Federal and State laws.” But publishing Joyce’s novel was only the first obstacle. The fight to get Ulysses into the hands of readers had just begun.
John Quinn contacted Mitchell Kennerley, the publisher he had defended against obscenity charges in 1913, because Kennerley knew the captain of an Atlantic transport liner who would smuggle books into the country. But if his smuggler were going to take on a job like Ulysses, they would have to send the books slowly—twenty or thirty a month—to avoid detection. The idea was that Shakespeare and Company would ship the books in bulk from Paris to London while Kennerley would collect money from buyers, ship the copies to readers by private carrier (never touching a postman’s hands) and send the proceeds to Beach. Remaining inconspicuous was challenging, considering the book’s size. The key to the plan was importing the books by freight, where it was easier for customs agents to overlook them. If they were found, Kennerley said, they would probably be returned to London instead of being burned. He would do the job for only 10 percent of the retail value—as a favor to Quinn.
Under normal circumstances, Quinn wouldn’t consider such a scheme, but the Little Review trial and the book’s publication had received so much press that there was little choice. Quinn wrote to persuade Sylvia Beach by emphasizing the plan’s irresistible benefit: Kennerley was willing to break federal and state laws and risk arrest so that she wouldn’t have to, and if he were arrested, “there wouldn’t be a ghost of a shade of a shadow of a chance of acquitting Kennerley.” In fact, Quinn told her not to send his fourteen copies of Ulysses until he could devise his own smuggling plan.
Quinn tried to explain the complexities of distributing an illegal book in terms he thought Miss Beach would understand. Smuggling, he wrote, requires “about the same amount of attention that would be involved, I should say, in having a dress fitted and made.” As illuminating as Quinn’s tailoring analogy might have been, Beach was already aware of the challenges. By August 1922 she had safely shipped copies of Ulysses to all destinations except New York, where, as she put it, “the jaws of the Sumner S.P.V. monster” were waiting (she mistook “Suppression” as “Prevention”). But she hadn’t figured out how to ship the remaining copies, and she had been getting angry letters from New Yorkers since April.
One midtown bookshop was waiting for seventeen copies. The Sunwise Turn was a high-end shop below the Yale Club with an elaborate woodwork interior designed by Armory Show artists. It specialized in collector’s items—old and rare books presented to customers in wrappings also designed by artists—and its business model depended upon fifty reliable patrons spending five hundred dollars on books every year. Supplying a marquee title like Ulysses was crucial both to the bookstore’s survival and to its reputation. By May, the Sunwise Turn sent a letter reminding Shakespeare and Company that it had paid over three thousand francs in February and received neither a receipt nor the books. “We are rather disturbed.” In case it helped, they included the names of individuals willing to act as middlemen to receive the merchandise. They were all women.
By the end of July, the Sunwise Turn sent two more letters and a telegram to Shakespeare and Company. They received no response. Mary Mowbray-Clarke, one of the shop’s co-owners, was exasperated. “We cannot in any way of looking at it understand your treatment of us in regard to Ulysses.” Dozens of copies had been in New York for months, but her bookshop was empty-handed. There were rumors that Sylvia Beach had pocketed the money from subscribers and sold the entire first edition to a middleman in London. The Sunwise Turn hoped the wild stories weren’t true.
Sylvia Beach had known that publishing Joyce’s book might involve illicit activity sooner or later, and she went so far as to contact Mitchell Kennerley, but for some reason (possibly his fee), she searched for other options. In August, she entrusted ten of the most expensive copies to a longtime friend in Illinois, where customs authorities were presumably less vigilant, and at the end of the month six copies for the Sunwise Turn bookshop arrived from Illinois. Mowbray-Clark said the twice-mailed packages arrived “like telephone books with papers falling off them and quite exposed to the eyes of the postman.”
But the eyes of the postmen were no longer the primary problem: customs agents seized two of the ten copies. By the end of the summer, officials around the United States were looking for Ulysses, and there were still forty copies destined for New York. That’s when Sylvia Beach decided to contact Hemingway’s shadowy associate.
—
ERNEST HEMINGWAY WAS twenty-two years old when he arrived in Paris at the end of 1921. He didn’t speak French, though his new wife, Hadley, gave him lessons on the steamship across the Atlantic, and he kept a rabbit’s foot in his right pocket. He told everyone in Chicago that he was going to be a writer, and Paris was the best place to do it. Hemingway churned out articles for the Toronto Star and saved his best material for his fiction. He added up the prices in Paris. Their hotel room cost about a dollar a day (their rent would cost half that much). He knew a restaurant that served a steak and potatoes meal for 2.40 francs (about 20 cents), and he could find a bottle of wine for 60 centimes—a nickel. He calculated that one thousand dollars could sustain a person in Paris for a full year. For Hemingway, though, the bargain hunts were more of a sport than a necessity. The newspaper paid him decently, and Hadley had a trust fund of about three thousand dollars a year. The maid who cooked them dinner and their ski vacations in the Swiss Alps were not exactly bohemian, but Hemingway believed that hardship made him a better artist. He thought he understood Cézanne on an empty stomach and that abstaining from sex improved his writing.
In case the rabbit’s foot wasn’t enough, Hemingway had letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson to help him get established with the right people in Paris. One letter was addressed to Miss Sylvia Beach. Within a week of arriving, Hemingway walked from the Jardin Luxembourg up the narrow rue Férou. He circled around the stone church and passed the statue of John the Baptist pointing skyward beside the wooden doors. When he turned right on rue de l’Odéon, he could see the signboard with the bard’s picture halfway down the street. It was suspended above a newly painted storefront among shoemakers, a music shop and a nasal spray manufacturer. Shakespeare and Company had moved to 12 rue de l’Odéon the previous summer. The English bookstore and lending library was now across the street from its French counterpart, Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres. There was more foot traffic on rue de l’Odéon, and Sylvia Beach had more space for her growing library.
Walking into Shakespeare and Company felt like walking into someone’s living room. There were odd rugs, mismatched pieces of furniture and goldfish. A small cluster of Larbaud’s toy soldiers stood at arms in a cabinet by the front door, and the pictures of writers on the walls looked like snapshots lifted from the family album. It made Hemingway shy. So did Sylvia Beach’s attractiveness. Her hair ran in waves down to the collar of her velvet jacket, and she wore a rigidly tailored skirt that allowed Hemingway to admire her lower legs.
Conversations with Hemingway opened up naturally, and before long he started talking about the war (a favorite subject) and what it was like to recover in an Italian hospital (another favorite subject). A bomb had exploded next to Hemingway while he was handing out chocolate in the trenches. It spewed more than two hundred pieces of shrapnel into the lower half of his body and left him with scars all over his right leg and foot. “Would you like to see it?” Hemingway took off his right shoe and sock and rolled up his pants to the knee. Miss Beach saw the barely healed marbled skin. She was quite impressed.
People think of 1922 as the year modernism came of age because it was the year Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land appeared. It was also the year Ernest Hemingway came of age. Posterity focuses on his fraught tutelage under Gertrude Stein, whom he met in February, but Shakespeare and Company did more to usher him into the literary world than Stein did. Hemingway met Ezra Pound by chance, also in February, at Beach’s bookshop, and within a week Pound was reading his manuscripts and spreading the word about him around Paris and the States. Over the course of the year Pound sent six of Hemingway’s prose vignettes to The Little Review, where they were published in the spring of 1923. Later that year, Beach encouraged Robert McAlmon to publish Hemingway’s first book.
Hemingway met Joyce within weeks of meeting Pound, and before long the admiring young American began drinking with the great Irish novelist. Hemingway probably told stories about driving an ambulance during the war, and he listened skeptically as Joyce complained about his financial troubles. One night, Joyce became outraged by someone’s egregious barroom offense, and when the scrawny novelist realized he was arguing with a man he could hardly see, he turned to his barrel-chested companion and shouted, “Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!” Hemingway decided to deal with Joyce by carrying him home to Nora. “Well, here comes James Joyce the writer,” she said in the doorway, “drunk again with Ernest Hemingway.”
He met the pantheon of modernists just as Ulysses was published. Hemingway likely witnessed the scramble to fill orders at Shakespeare and Company, and the enthusiasm radiating through the Left Bank fueled his own ambitions. He ordered several copies of Ulysses and wrote to Sherwood Anderson, “Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book.” He purchased Dubliners, possibly during his first visit to Shakespeare and Company, and Joyce’s short stories influenced him deeply. Dubliners taught him economy and how to leave the most important things unspoken. When A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929, Hemingway gave Joyce a copy with the censored expletives lovingly handwritten in. “Jim Joyce was the only alive writer that I ever respected,” Hemingway said later. “He had his problems, but he could write better than anyone I knew.”
Hemingway had a genius for learning. He didn’t have a college degree, so he pursued his higher education through Shakespeare and Company, where he learned more about writing in a few months than most students learn in four years. His first selections from the library were D. H. Lawrence and Ivan Turgenev, and though borrowers had a two-book limit, Beach let him take more. He chose Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler and Other Stories. A few years earlier, Hemingway’s favorite authors had been Rudyard Kipling and O. Henry. As a Shakespeare and Company member, he discovered Flaubert and Stendhal. Hemingway probably hadn’t even heard of James Joyce and Ezra Pound before he left for Paris. Two months after he walked into Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach made them his mentors.
Kindness made Hemingway an even better student. While Gertrude Stein offered him gnomic advice (“Begin over again and concentrate”), Sylvia Beach offered him food. As with so many others, her bookshop became his post office and primary source for advice and gossip. She listened to his problems and lent him money. “No one that I ever knew was nicer to me,” he later claimed. Pound was similarly generous. Hemingway thought that he contained dangerous stores of energy (“He would live much longer if he did not eat so fast,” Hemingway wrote), but what struck him most was Pound’s kindness toward writers he believed in. “He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them.” The list went on. Pound was selfless and principled and angry like a saint. With his wild mane of hair and his staunch proclamations, he was a voice in the wilderness, a John the Baptist.
Pound taught Hemingway to distrust adjectives, and Joyce taught him how to be elliptical. He repaid Joyce by drinking with him and Pound by teaching him how to box. Wyndham Lewis recalled seeing Hemingway stripped down to the waist in Pound’s studio, his pale torso gleaming with sweat. Hemingway blocked Pound’s left jabs with a calm open glove, wasting as little energy as possible, moving instead of countering, nimbly avoiding the homemade furniture and Japanese paintings. The poet who taught W. B. Yeats how to fence in an English cottage was not afraid to learn how to box from a young Ernest Hemingway in a Left Bank studio. Pound needed to widen his stance and practice his left. He lunged, swung wildly and threw scattershot combinations—Hemingway had to shadowbox between rounds to keep up a sweat, which soon became a habit of his. He would bounce around on the sidewalks of Paris, jabbing and dodging, his lips moving as he goaded an invisible opponent.
Hemingway was younger and less educated than nearly everyone around him, and machismo was a way to compensate. Knowing he would never learn Latin or Greek (he would barely learn French), he cultivated streetside afición. Once, he took Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier to a boxing match in a rough neighborhood on the city’s outskirts. Hemingway led them through someone’s backyard to get to the ring where two fighters kept slugging each other as the blood dripped down their chests. It was his way of giving back. He went to Switzerland for the slopes and to Spain for the bullfights. He went fishing, lugeing and bobsledding. As a journalist, he covered nightlife, political conferences and the grim aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war. He interviewed Mussolini twice. When he wasn’t writing articles for the Toronto Star, he wrote short stories in cafés and talked about the war with disfigured men wearing Croix de Guerre ribbons. He drank. He changed his son’s diapers. He gambled on horses and bicycle races. He seemed to be involved in everything.
—
IT OCCURRED TO SYLVIA BEACH that Hemingway might know something about smuggling. John Quinn mentioned the possibility of smuggling Ulysses in bulk from Canada to Detroit or Buffalo, far from Sumner’s agents. Did Hemingway know anyone in Chicago who could smuggle contraband from Canada? He did.
“Give me twenty-four hours,” he told her. When he returned, he said he had a friend back in Chicago with Canadian connections, and he was exactly the type of person who could help. Hemingway gave her the man’s name and address so they could work out the details directly—he wanted his name kept out of the matter altogether. Beach wrote to the smuggler, Barnet Braverman, and said they had a mutual friend from Chicago. She had dozens of copies of a new novel by James Joyce that she wanted to move across the Canadian border. They were bound for important American readers like Alfred Knopf and Ben Huebsch, publishers who didn’t have the nerve to publish and distribute the book themselves. Braverman would also be responsible for fulfilling the largest single order: twenty-five copies destined for the Washington Square Book Shop, where the book’s criminal history began.
Braverman wasn’t as easy to contact as Hemingway thought. Beach waited nearly two months before receiving a curt telegram (“Shoot books prepaid your responsibility”) and a Canadian address. She did not respond. Braverman wrote a few weeks later to clarify his plans. He was now living in Detroit, where he regularly crossed the border into Windsor, Ontario, on business. She should ship the books in bulk to the Canadian address. Since storing them where he worked was out of the question, he would rent a small room in Windsor for a month and take the books across the river to Detroit one by one so that way the border agents on either side would be less likely to notice. The method was laborious, but Braverman knew people who could “expedite” the process. Once the books were in the United States, Braverman would bundle them in packages and send them by a private express company to avoid the Post Office. She would pay for the shipping, the customs duty and the rent on the room. He would offer his services for free.
Sylvia Beach waited over four months to respond, but after the first customs seizures in Chicago she decided that trusting a stranger to sneak Ulysses across the border was her best option. So she agreed. But if he got caught, she wrote back, he was on his own—she couldn’t pay to defend him against state or federal charges. And his chances of being arrested was substantial, for while Braverman’s plan minimized the risk of burned books (a border agent could only confiscate the copy he carried on any given day), it required him to break the law every time he crossed the border with a copy of Ulysses, possessed a copy for distribution in Michigan and shipped the book across state lines. He risked a five-thousand-dollar fine and five years in prison, but he would do it anyway. He found a room in Windsor for thirty-five dollars and told the landlord something vague about being involved in the publishing business.
Canadian customs agents were Braverman’s first challenge. He wasn’t worried about a seizure (it would take a couple of years before Canada banned the book, though it would maintain that ban until 1949), but he was worried about the steep import duty. The tariff on imported books was 25 percent of their retail price, which Sylvia Beach couldn’t afford. The duty he owed for the shipment was three hundred dollars, but whatever retail price the inspecting officials estimated for the books, Braverman began talking his way out of it—never mind the size or the handmade paper, the books were more or less worthless.
Bargaining meant risking added scrutiny of the book itself, and though there wasn’t a Canadian ban on Ulysses, censorship often began with routine inspections like this. But Braverman’s gamble worked. Canadian customs agreed that the mighty tomes from Paris sold in the United States for sixty-five cents. Rather than hundreds of dollars, Braverman paid an import duty of $6.50. With the shipment from Shakespeare and Company in hand, he hauled the books away by truck and stacked them in the otherwise empty room, where the contraband would be stored before crossing the border.
A few days later, Braverman opened the door to the room in Windsor and saw the stacks of books he had agreed to smuggle. The sheer bulk of the contraband began to sink in when he was faced with the prospect of carrying just one of them. Why was Ulysses, which he had never read, worth the risk of being arrested day after day for over a month?
The century’s changing tides drew people like Braverman to books like Ulysses. As the political protests of the nineteen-teens subsided into the cultural protests of the 1920s, prewar rebels found inspiration in Joyce’s iconoclasm, blasphemy and sexual transgressions. Ulysses tapped into a feeling of ebbing revolt. Smuggling a work of art into a supposedly free country that refused to tolerate its sale or distribution was a cultural jab when a political coup no longer seemed possible, and the opportunity would have been irresistible to someone like Braverman. He wasn’t a smuggler or a bootlegger or a criminal. He was a copywriter and salesman for an advertising agency. He was an artist in his spare time, and he was a radical.
—
BACK IN CHICAGO, where he had known Hemingway, Braverman was an editor of a magazine called The Progressive Woman. He delivered Socialist recruiting lectures and issued urgent pamphlets (“Suffragists, Watch Out for the Wolf!”). He denounced poverty and the wage slavery of women toiling in factories for as little as six dollars a week—“Womanhood,” he wrote, “is the cheapest commodity in the industrial mart.” He railed against the imprisonment and force-feeding of suffragist hunger strikers in England and condemned the assaults upon suffrage marchers at President Wilson’s inauguration. The brutal attacks, he believed, were public manifestations of the abuse that wives and daughters faced in homes throughout the country. He denounced capitalism and the warped government it produced. “The United States Constitution,” he wrote, “was framed and adopted by a horde of merchants, bankers, lawyers, smugglers and other cultured crooks, who had no use for popular institutions.”
For Braverman, vice societies were paragons of capitalist hypocrisy. They were the agents of a system selectively punishing the vices of society’s weakest members. Even when they had legitimate targets, they were fighting vices whose true cause was poverty. The country, according to Braverman, had three hundred thousand licensed prostitutes and more than a million unlicensed ones. If moralists really wanted people to lead virtuous lives, they’d focus less on the young women reading smut and more on helping the young women driven by hunger and exploitation to sell their bodies. “Behold the anti-vice crusaders! The dear things!” Braverman wrote. Comstock and Sumner couldn’t see the economic basis of vice, either because their vision was so blinkered by capitalist ideology that they remained blithely unaware of it or because the wealthy financiers backing them—J. P. Morgan and Samuel Colgate, Vanderbilts and Carnegies—told them to ignore it. Businessmen wanted to stop lust and yet refused to pay their female employees living wages.
Braverman’s articles sprang from the heady days of the 1910s. By 1922, with suffragists pacified by the Nineteenth Amendment, and the labor movement hobbled by the Red Raids, Braverman’s life had become ordinary. He devolved from the editor of a radical magazine to a capitalist functionary—scripting slogans for an ad agency, no less. He shuttled back and forth between Curtis Company’s two offices straddling the U.S.-Canadian border while the fervor of the 1910s slipped further into the distance. So when a letter arrived from a woman in Paris asking him to smuggle a book that capitalist society couldn’t countenance, he told Miss Beach that he was eager to break the law of “the hideous U.S.” He was ready, he said, to “put one over on the Republic and its Methodist smut hounds.”
Braverman took a copy of Ulysses from the rented room, walked down to the wooden dock at the end of Ouellette Avenue and boarded the ferry for Detroit just as he did every weekday after work. The smokestacks on the Detroit skyline inched closer during the longest ten-minute ferry ride of his life. After being funneled through the customs pens, he stood in front of a uniformed agent who told Braverman to unwrap the package he was carrying. The guard glanced at the book, handed it back to Braverman and motioned him through. It was easy. But the next day, he would have to do it all again. And then the next day, and the next. The steady repetition was unnerving, and the low-grade anxiety increased as the same rotation of Detroit border guards glanced yet again at the conspicuously large book he carried. Wouldn’t they get curious about James Joyce’s Ulysses? Braverman thought they were beginning to eye him suspiciously, which made him more nervous, and nothing alerted border guards as much as nervousness.
The guards were especially vigilant in 1922, for these were the days of bootleggers smuggling whiskey and gin across the Detroit River. The newest Windsor-Detroit ferry, the La Salle, would have been a prime Prohibition-era bootlegging vessel. With a capacity of three thousand passengers, it was much larger than the older ferries, and a rumrunner could get lost in the crowd. The La Salle could carry seventy-five cars belowdecks, which multiplied smugglers’ opportunities. They built compartments for liquor inside fuel tanks. They constructed false bottoms to everything—car seats, animal cages and lunch boxes. People smuggled alcohol in hot water bottles strapped to their bodies or sewn inside the linings of coats.
Braverman started to feel a bout of bad luck coming on, and when the rent on the storage room in Windsor was good for only a few more days, he recruited a friend to help him smuggle the last few copies as quickly as possible. They stuffed two copies of Ulysses down their pants, cinched their belts tightly on unused notches and shuffled casually on and off the ferry’s gangplanks. The late autumn weather made their bulky jackets plausible. The smuggling went faster, though Braverman and his friend were trading one risk for another. Guards couldn’t inspect books they couldn’t find, but if those jackets and baggy trousers could conceal a copy of Ulysses, then surely they could conceal a bottle or two of alcohol. And how could they explain it, exactly, if an agent searched one of them and found that the bulge in his waistband was a three-and-a-half-pound book?
Luckily, the border guards never stopped them. Braverman, with his shy demeanor and his hair brushed back from his boyish face, simply didn’t look like a bootlegger. He didn’t look like a radical, either. But he was. He was the first Ulysses booklegger, and he successfully smuggled every copy entrusted to him. The following year, he went to Paris and got his own copy of Ulysses signed by James Joyce.