Joyce’s life had become a shambles after Ulysses. In April 1922, Nora took the children to see her family in Galway. She didn’t say when she would return, and they left Paris just as Ireland was descending into civil war. A 1921 treaty between the Irish and British Parliaments established Ireland as a Free State within the United Kingdom (the Irish Parliament would swear allegiance to the Crown). The treaty split the Irish Republican Army into factions, those who supported the Free State agreement and those who demanded full Irish sovereignty, and Nora and the children were caught in the middle of escalating violence. Free State troops commandeered their hotel room and mounted machine guns in the windows, forcing Nora, Giorgio and Lucia to dash through Galway and board the next train for Dublin.
Joyce felt helpless and abandoned in Paris. Nora seemed to be thinking of staying in Ireland, and he wrote desperate letters hoping to win her back. Was she leaving him? Did she need money? “O my dearest,” he wrote, “if you would only turn to me even now and read that terrible book which has now broken the heart in my breast and take me to yourself alone to do with me what you will!” Nora felt that a part of Jim was moored to 1904 while she and their children pressed onward. Going to Ireland was her way of pulling him out of the terrible book that had colonized his life. Nora was reminding him that she was more than the voice of Molly Bloom.
Joyce did not fare well alone. He slept and ate poorly. He fainted in Shakespeare and Company. He had multiple tooth abscesses, and his iritis became worse than ever. Less than a week after Nora and the children returned (she would never leave him), Joyce developed glaucoma in his left eye. When the pain became unbearable, Joyce’s oculist sent his assistant to Joyce’s room in a small Left Bank residential hotel. The young man opened the door to find the famous Irish writer wrapped in a blanket and squatting on the floor in front of a stewpan containing the picked-over remains of a chicken. Nora was squatting across from him, and the entire place was in disarray. There were two rooms filled with mismatched furniture and half-empty bottles of wine. Clothes and toiletries were strewn over the tables, the mantelpiece and their chairs. Well-used trunks were gaping open, still half unpacked from the family’s recent return. Joyce turned from the chicken carcass to the visitor.
The doctor’s assistant told Joyce he needed surgery, and Joyce told the doctor never to send him again. A few days later, the doctor examined Joyce’s left eye and confirmed that he needed an immediate iridectomy. The longer he waited, the worse his vision would be. The prospect was terrifying. Joyce’s left eye was his “good” one—the one that hadn’t been operated on, the one he needed to read and write. Even a successful iridectomy would impair his vision, and a failed operation could render his left eye blind. Joyce remained so traumatized by his eye surgery in Zurich five years earlier that he was determined to find a doctor with less zeal for the knife. He sent a panicked telegram to Miss Weaver. Could she possibly help? Would her doctor fly to Paris? He believed the operation would end his literary career. The telegram begged: “Urgent reply every minute important.”
Sylvia Beach rushed over to find Nora renewing cold compresses on Joyce’s eyes to reduce the swelling. She had been doing it for hours, she said. “When the pain is unbearable he gets up and walks the floor.” So Beach decided to take Joyce to Dr. Louis Borsch, an American doctor who kept an inexpensive clinic on the corner of rue du Cherche-Midi and rue du Regard. The location, no doubt, was a good omen, but the clinic itself wasn’t reassuring. It had a drab exterior, a waiting room filled with wooden benches and the back office was barely large enough for the portly doctor to turn around. Joyce was amused by his Yankee drawl. “Too bad ye got that kickup in your eye,” he said, peering into the catastrophe. Nevertheless, Dr. Borsch thought he could diminish Joyce’s stubborn case of iritis “by eliminating the poison from the system.” Instead of surgery, he prescribed eyedrops (apparently cocaine), more cold compresses, a narcotic to help him sleep and a medication that would “purify the blood.” Dr. Borsch urged Joyce to improve his general health and adopt “a more comfortable and wholesome mode of living,” as Sylvia Beach described it to Miss Weaver.
—
IN 1922, Joyce decided to meet the other woman who had made Ulysses possible. Miss Weaver waited months for his illness to subside, and Dr. Borsch’s treatment appeared to help. By August, Joyce believed he was well enough to make the trip across the channel, but like so many other recoveries, it ended with a sharp relapse. He doused his eye with countless eyedrops and fought off London doctors who were as determined to perform surgery as their Parisian counterparts. The doctors seemed to agree in all particulars. “Mr. Joyce’s mode of life in Paris is very unhealthy,” Miss Weaver’s physician told her. He spent his nights in pain, sweating profusely and unable to sleep. Each morning at their hotel, Nora soaked cold compresses in a bucket of ice water and applied them to his eyes with cotton wads as big as small pillows. When the compresses were removed, Joyce stared at the brass knobs at the foot of his bed, their weak glimmer among the only things piercing the perpetual darkness.
But the writer and his patron finally met. Miss Weaver’s flowers were freshly cut and arranged for Mr. Joyce’s afternoon arrival at her flat. For seven years, Joyce had been an avid correspondent, a troubled figure in photos, a sensitive boy coming of age in A Portrait and the author of a city of voices in Ulysses. Now he was a man of full substance, of neat attire, impeccable manners and powerful spectacles. But what lay behind those spectacles jarred Miss Weaver, and it made her reluctant to look directly at her guest—not out of shyness but out of embarrassment. James Joyce’s left eye had no pupil. The dark window at the center of his eye and the reticulations of his iris were swept over by a fog. The natural blue pigment soured to a bluish green. Simply listening to him speak challenged Miss Weaver’s concentration, for even as he made jokes and pleasantries designed to put her at ease, Joyce looked back at her with something like a dull marble lodged in his head.
After years of imagining Joyce’s affliction through his letters, she was now confronted with its awful presence. Whatever was causing Joyce’s recurrent iritis had dilated his ocular blood vessels until they ruptured. The blood seeped into the intraocular fluid and mixed with dead cells and pus, all of which floated around inside his eye for months. The mixture of blood and exudate had persisted for so long that it started to “organize”—the viscous fluid was congealing into a solid membrane covering his pupil. To look at Mr. Joyce was to feel the dread of advancing blindness, to understand the delicacy of an eye and the terrible complexity of seeing.
—
MISS WEAVER DECIDED that the Egoist Press would publish the first U.K. edition of Ulysses. She was determined to correct Darantière’s misprints and bolster Joyce’s income—he would receive 90 percent of all profits after expenses. The edition would be two thousand copies, and like Shakespeare and Company, the Egoist Press would try to circumvent the authorities by selling directly to readers rather than bookshops. Sylvia Beach helped compile and distribute promotional materials, but there was only so much she could do from Paris. Miss Weaver approached only one London printer, the Pelican Press, who informally agreed to print Ulysses after seeing the first ten episodes. They changed their minds when they examined the rest.
Miss Weaver knew little about the legal risks she was taking. Her solicitor informed her that copies of a book deemed obscene could be seized anywhere (in a bookstore, in her office or in her home) if they were kept for sale or distribution, and, despite her inventive suggestion, distributing copies through an agent or dividing them among various distributors made no difference. A private edition’s only legal advantage was that it would demonstrate to judges that the publisher wanted to limit the book’s availability, or, in the words of the Hicklin Rule, that the publisher restricted the type of people “into whose hands” the book “may fall.”
But this was not much of an advantage, for if the Shakespeare and Company edition was any indication, bookstores would start reselling the book anyway, and legal action against a single copy nabbed in a police raid would affect all copies. And “private” or not, Ulysses was now a known quantity. The full text was in print, outraged reviews were circulating throughout Britain, and the cloak of privacy was stripped away. Weaver and Beach weighed the possibility that a hostile reader would order a copy and send it to the police. The editor of The Sunday Express, for one, seemed determined to have “The Bible of the Outcasts” burned.
Miss Weaver found another solution. An old contributor to The Egoist named John Rodker was publishing limited-edition books under the name Ovid Press. She remembered Rodker from Ezra Pound’s dinner meetings during the war—he had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector and joined the meetings after his hunger strike set him free. Rodker remained in Pound’s orbit, and he was, clearly, willing to break the law for his principles. Miss Weaver asked Rodker if he would act as her Paris agent: the Egoist Press would publish and finance the edition, but it would be advertised, sold and distributed from Paris. Rodker would have to collect two thousand copies from Darantière in Dijon, send out circulars announcing the publication, collect orders and finally wrap and ship the copies to readers around the world. Miss Weaver would pay him two hundred pounds for his work. It was simple.
Rodker discovered his first problem immediately: the high prices of Ulysses attracted literary pirates. He heard rumors that someone was planning a counterfeit version of the original Shakespeare and Company edition. It would be printed on cheap paper, circulated to booksellers eager to peddle a rare commodity like Ulysses, legitimate or not, and the criminals would pocket the profits. John Quinn heard the same rumors in New York. He wrote to Miss Weaver to warn her that “a gang” was about to print a thousand copies in a press somewhere near the city and sell the pirated version for thirty dollars. Getting an injunction against the pirates would be expensive, he told Weaver, and ultimately futile. If an injunction were issued against one gang, they’d simply pass the printing plates and remaining copies to someone else in another state. They’d have to track down literary pirates all over the country, issuing injunction after injunction. It wouldn’t end.
There was a more effective option, Quinn explained, but it made him cringe: he could ask John Sumner for help. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice would happily track down and arrest anyone mailing advertisements for Ulysses. It was, of course, a violation of the Comstock Act, and Sumner might be able to stop the pirates before their copies hit the streets. He wrote to Miss Weaver, “It would be somewhat ironical, wouldn’t it?—if I, who defended Ulysses in court against the charge brought by Sumner that it was obscene, should induce Sumner to suppress this new pirated edition because it was obscene.” Ironic or not, Quinn wouldn’t hesitate to use criminal law to stop pirates.
The worst part of the piracy was its timing. If it came out before the Egoist Press edition went on sale, buyers would evaporate. Rodker would have to sell the edition as quickly as possible, which meant that they no longer had time to correct the text’s misprints. So the Egoist Press edition was really a second printing of the Shakespeare and Company edition with a list of errata appended. The rush also meant that Rodker needed someone to ship the copies while he received payments. As luck would have it, Miss Weaver found help from another erstwhile attendee of Ezra Pound’s dinners. Iris Barry was twenty-two and already a former suffragette when she endured air raids to join the conversations. She was an avid Egoist reader growing up on a farm near Birmingham, and she moved to London in 1915, partly at Ezra Pound’s urging. In 1922, Barry lost her job as a secretary on Bond Street, and Miss Weaver was giving her weekly baths and wholesome meals. When Miss Weaver and Rodker asked her to help with the first U.K. publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, she happily agreed.
Rodker arranged everything in less than a month. He borrowed the back room of a friend’s bookshop to send out circulars and receive orders, and he rented a basement room in a shabby Left Bank hotel where Iris Barry could receive, store and ship copies of Ulysses. Rodker and Barry sailed for Paris, and on October 12, 1922, Darantière’s shipment arrived. Rodker sent out word that Ulysses was available for two guineas each, about the same price as the cheapest Shakespeare and Company edition. The copies were sold out in four days. While Rodker handled the orders, Iris Barry sat in a small room with vaulted ceilings in the basement of the Hotel Verneuil. The table was covered with sheets of brown parcel paper and hundreds of mailing labels. All around her were piles of the blue inventory to be wrapped, tied and addressed, one book at a time. She carried them in fours or fives to the nearest post office.
With rumors of pirated editions and the jaws of Sumner’s monster waiting for Ulysses in New York, the copies bound for the United States had to be shipped before officials realized another printing was circulating. Barry rushed the first lot of one hundred American orders into the mail, but the risk of detection by customs agents on the lookout for books with Paris postmarks increased with each book’s passage. There were so many American orders that Miss Weaver refused some of them lest they be seized. She kept dozens with her in London.
The largest orders came from American middlemen planning to resell copies to bookstores clamoring for Ulysses. Those orders couldn’t be refused, nor could they be shipped individually. Hundreds of copies certainly couldn’t be shipped in bulk, where they would catch the eye of any customs officials who weren’t bribed or incompetent. They would have to be smuggled—but the job was far too big for someone like Braverman. Rodker had a more ambitious plan. He shipped the books from Paris to London, where a wholesaler unstitched the bindings of each copy of Ulysses and pulled them apart. They tucked the dismembered sections of the books inside newspapers and stacked them for shipment. The first mate of an American merchant ship agreed to smuggle hundreds of copies disguised as a large consignment of British newspapers, filling, ostensibly, the New York area’s sudden demand for rugby scores and parliamentary political cartoons. It worked, and by hiding them in newspapers, the U.K. Ulysses arrived on American shores duty-free.
While Rodker’s first mate navigated copies through the North Atlantic and Iris Barry sent copies to individuals in the United States, France and beyond, Miss Weaver handled the London orders herself. Rodker sent copies to a private mailing agency, and when bookshops discreetly requested Ulysses from the Egoist Press, she withdrew them from the agency and delivered them herself. Miss Weaver would appear like any other reader in bookshops across London until she asked to see the shop’s proprietor by name and it dawned upon the clerk that the nervous woman with the bow on her hat was the Egoist Press representative they had been expecting, and the package she clutched under her arm contained that book, the book they quickly hid behind the counter.
Miss Weaver kept some copies at her office despite her solicitor’s advice. And while it meant putting herself in even more legal danger, she brought several copies to her apartment and hid them at the back of her large Victorian wardrobe—she wanted to protect as many books as possible from a potential police raid. They stayed there for months, and for months she waited for the constables to present themselves at her door and ransack her apartment while she would sit patiently and see if they would be brazen enough to rifle through a lady’s belongings to confiscate a work of art.
Her family noticed her anxiety, though they said nothing. They had grown accustomed to her silence regarding her literary endeavors, especially with Joyce, and so much the better. The suffragist screeds and the birth control advocacy of The Egoist were tolerable to her siblings for their principled courage, yet her involvement with Joyce was another matter. Some family members had gone so far as to read parts of Ulysses only to be baffled that Harriet not only subsidized such filth but that she actually published it. Her brother-in-law reacted with a mixture of outrage and dismay. “How could she? How could she? An enigma! An enigma!”
—
THE SECOND EDITION seemed to be going well. Hundreds of disassembled copies hidden in newspapers slipped by New York customs agents, and wholesalers rebound them to be sold. But near the end of 1922, reports of missing copies began to accumulate, both from the Egoist Press edition and from the Shakespeare and Company edition still being smuggled through Canada. There was no official word from any government department on either side of the Atlantic. There were no notices of confiscations. No news of burnings. No packages sent back to Paris or London. No smugglers or first mates arrested. Not even a warning from the U.S. Post Office or customs. Every now and then, copies of Ulysses simply disappeared. There was only one unmistakable sign of trouble. In early November, after Miss Weaver began distributing Ulysses in twos and threes across London, she noticed a detective, alone, watching her outside her window. Miss Harriet Weaver was under police surveillance.
By December 1922, it was clear that U.S. authorities were seizing every copy of Ulysses they could find, though the details are hazy. Either the U.S. government never kept the records, or they disappeared. In any case, copies of Ulysses that had apparently vanished were in fact falling into the hands of law enforcement officials. A raid in Boston in November turned up some of the imported copies. Others were accumulating in New York’s General Post Office Building on Thirty-fourth Street, where they awaited a decision from Washington. No one knew if it was John Sumner and the scathing press reviews that prodded officials to act or if they didn’t need to be prodded at all. Either way, New York customs officials forwarded the matter to the solicitor of the Post Office Department for a ruling. When the solicitor leafed through the heavy book, pausing over the passages marked by the customs officials, he discovered that Ulysses didn’t have to do with Greek mythology at all. It was about the Irish. The solicitor declared Ulysses “plainly obscene” and kept a copy in his office for his records.
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. And how could he? Ulysses wasn’t easy to obtain, and the price was prohibitively high. Given the nature of the case, the undersecretary requested the official opinion of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin.
As the director of public prosecutions, Sir Archibald was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service. The office had been malleable when Sir Archibald first took the position in 1920, but by the time he left in 1930 he had established precedent for future practices. He prosecuted all capital crimes and advised central government departments, the police and all Crown prosecutors. He initiated and oversaw proceedings against an array of high crimes, including sedition, counterfeit, obstruction of justice, public corruption and obscenity. He gave instructions on twenty-three hundred cases every year.
The undersecretary’s report on Ulysses may not have captured such a busy man’s attention, but as it was making its way up the chain of command, officials seized a single copy of Ulysses at Croydon Airport in London. In December, a customs officer noticed an oversized book that a passenger was bringing back from Paris. He flipped through the final pages teeming with unpunctuated text, and his eyes fixated on page 704.
yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf
The officer told the passenger that H.M. Customs and Excise was confiscating Ulysses as obscene under Section 42 of the Customs Consolidations Act of 1876. The owner objected to the confiscation and insisted that Ulysses was an important work of art by a reputable author. It was on sale in bookshops around London and reviewed by several esteemed periodicals, including The Nation, The English Review and the October issue of The Quarterly Review.
Given the citizen’s protest, customs forwarded the book to the Home Office and requested a quick decision about its legality. The matter came before Assistant Undersecretary of State Sydney Harris, who was thorough enough to read page 705: “he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all[.]” Harris retrieved the growing Home Office file on Ulysses. Even if there were some doubt that such passages were obscene, they could be swept away by the fact that the citizen defended Ulysses by citing the very same Quarterly Review article that the Home Office was keeping as evidence that the book was obscene. Harris discussed the matter with the director of public prosecutions himself.
Sir Archibald was a ruthless barrister who came to prominence by prosecuting suffragettes before the war. “He’s a beast,” one of them said after a high-profile conviction. Suffragettes pelted him with rotten fruit in the courtroom, and when he received kidnapping and arson threats, Scotland Yard assigned officers to guard him and his chambers. But Sir Archibald was unfazed. He was a man of unwavering Victorian sensibilities (cars were anathema to him even in the 1950s), and he worked so tirelessly that his complexion became sallow and bags developed under his eyes. On the rare occasions when he told a bawdy joke, he drained away the humor by delivering the punch line with a disapproving glare.
Sir Archibald read the final chapter of Ulysses, and on December 29, 1922, he submitted his opinion about its legality under British law:
As might be supposed, I have not had the time nor, I may add, the inclination to read through this book. I have, however, read pages 690 to 732. I am entirely unable to appreciate how those pages are relevant to the rest of the book, or, indeed, what the book itself is about. I can discover no story, there is no introduction which might give a key to its purpose, and the pages above mentioned, written as they are as if composed by a more or less illiterate vulgar woman, form an entirely detached part of this production. In my opinion, there is more, and a great deal more than mere vulgarity or coarseness, there is a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity.
He declared that customs authorities had every right to confiscate and burn Ulysses. And in the event that there was a public protest against such burnings, he advised, “the answer will be that it is filthy and filthy books are not allowed to be imported into this country.”
On January 1, 1923, Sir Archibald Bodkin’s opinion became the official position of the United Kingdom, and Harris forwarded Bodkin’s recommendation to the Home Secretary to make sure the decision was enforced. What if Ulysses started a trend? The Home Office was afraid that, in Harris’s words, “other morbid writers with a love of notoriety will attempt to write in the same vein.” They could not have books like this flooding British ports. They had to end it before it began.
In January, only days after Sir Archibald’s decision, five hundred copies of Ulysses were on their way to London to be disassembled and smuggled to replace the books burned in New York. By the time the cargo ship carrying the books crossed the English Channel, customs officers at the port of Folkestone were waiting for it. H.M. Customs and Excise officers duly informed the Egoist Press that its property had been seized pursuant to Section 42 of the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876 because the Home Office deemed the material prima facie obscene. The Egoist Press had the opportunity to appeal the government’s decision, but Miss Weaver couldn’t bear the public scrutiny—and her solicitor almost certainly advised against it. Winning an appeal in court was doubtful, and even if the Egoist Press could recover its books, the chances that they could be successfully smuggled into the Port of New York were thinner than ever. When the window for the appeal passed, customs officials burned them in “the King’s Chimney.” Then they burned the records of the burning.