Judge Woolsey liked to lumber up to his library on the hill behind his summer home while huffing a cigar or a pipe. In 1933 he stayed long enough in Petersham, Massachusetts, to see the leaves beginning to turn at the end of a particularly lively season. Woolsey played tennis with his wife for recreation (he wore a tie to their matches), and lawyers scattered over the fields picking blueberries during lunch recesses. The judge’s hilltop library doubled as a courtroom—there was a bench at the far end of the spacious hall and tables for counsel.
In the hot months, Woolsey liked to get out of Manhattan and convene his federal cases in Petersham, where he could hear the summer birds during arguments and where his gavel, carved from the original hull of the USS Constitution, could remain mostly ornamental. The library used to be the town hall of Prescott. The Woolseys transported the entire building to Petersham, set it down at the top of the hill behind their house and refurbished it with colonial paneling. When the judge was not hearing cases or writing decisions, he read in one of the upholstered armchairs by the fireplace. The wide floorboards creaked under his heavy legs, and he plumped himself down.
Judge Woolsey probably wanted a drink. It had been over a decade since he had one because he considered it hypocritical to put men behind bars for selling liquor if he was going to drink it. A century-old bottle of sherry had tempted him in his Manhattan apartment since Prohibition began, but even a convicted bootlegger might not have begrudged the man a glass after the year he had endured. Woolsey had presided over a fraud trial of a corporation that had scammed hundreds of Catholic priests out of three million dollars, purportedly to finance morally uplifting Hollywood talkies. It turned into the longest criminal court case in U.S. history. The testimony of ninety-eight witnesses produced a fifteen-thousand-page transcript. The trial began before Christmas 1932 and didn’t end until after the Fourth of July, and when it was over, Judge Woolsey told the jurors they should form an alumni association.
His trip to Petersham in the fall of 1933 was supposed to be his vacation, and he planned to spend a few leisurely weeks preparing to hear arguments regarding Ulysses. By then, Woolsey was comfortable with obscenity cases, so it would be rather enjoyable to apply the law to a book that was presumed to be a modern classic. Sitting in his library, with his legs crossed and an open novel resting on his outmoded knickerbockers, several pleasures in life would coalesce. But that was before he knew what he was getting into. Reading Ulysses, he said later, was “just about the hardest two months of my life.” After several weeks, he had barely gotten through the first few chapters, and he postponed the case for another month. Morris Ernst sent him a trove of supplementary materials to help him make sense of it, including Paul Jordan Smith’s The Key to the Ulysses of James Joyce and Herbert Gorman’s James Joyce: His First Forty Years. Ernst planned to send Stuart Gilbert’s book, James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Judge Woolsey already owned a copy.
Woolsey owned thousands of books. There were, of course, entire walls filled with legal titles—Patent Essentials, Maritime Cases, The Law of Unfair Competition and Trade-Marks—but he also devoured poetry and fiction. Browning and Tennyson, Thackeray and Fielding. He had a limited edition of The Odyssey of Homer signed by the translator and illustrator. He acquired every first edition of Samuel Johnson he could find, and he loved Anthony Trollope’s novels. Phineas Finn. Kept in the Dark. Can You Forgive Her? The judge planned to read them all.
Woolsey was a promiscuous connoisseur. He collected colonial furniture and pewter, old clocks and maps, pipes and blended tobaccos. Filling his life with the trappings of culture was a way of living up to his name, like stuffing your grandfather’s shoes in order to walk in them. John Munro Woolsey’s first New World ancestor had arrived in New Amsterdam in 1623 and ran an alehouse on the East River. Woolseys had attended Yale since 1705, and the judge was no exception. He was the descendant of a Yale founder, Yale presidents and Jonathan Edwards, the preacher who reminded sinners of their depravity. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you.”
Woolsey had received a growing pile of letters ever since the newspapers reported that he was presiding over the case. One man said Ulysses “seared his soul.” Another called Joyce’s book “the most precious thing in [my] life.” Legally, the judge could ignore it all—the letters, the books about Ulysses and the opinions pasted into the seized copy’s covers. In fact, he wasn’t even obliged to read Ulysses itself beyond the passages that the DA had marked as obscene. Judges were free to limit their evaluations to a book’s objectionable portions instead of bothering with the whole text. Judging excerpts wasn’t laziness. It was the logical consequence of the legal definition of obscenity. The Hicklin Rule was formulated to protect the people most susceptible to a text’s corrupting influence and, as even the liberal Learned Hand pointed out, “it would be just those who would be most likely to concern themselves with those parts alone, forgetting their setting and their relevancy to the book as a whole.” Judges and juries read books the way children did.
Yet judges and juries didn’t need the Hicklin Rule to have their readings blinkered by an obscenity charge. The very nature of obscenity encourages a piecemeal approach to books. Obscenity offends. It reads as a singular, jarring moment, something ripped out of the larger context of the book—blinding us to mitigating contexts is what offenses do. The word cunt or fuck stands out in relief against a page. Offended readers don’t contemplate their function in the narrative’s grand scheme or the role they play in the development of the characters. They become fixated on the words themselves. Judges of obscenity are the closest of close readers.
Woolsey was determined to read Ulysses cover to cover. It began like any other novel: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” An Englishman is visiting two Irishmen in an abandoned military tower on the shore overlooking the Irish Sea. The stage is suitably set. The first chapter has punchy dialogue mixed with a few mental impressions. There are dashes instead of quotation marks, though one gets used to that easily enough. But then the story begins to slip away from you. Instead of a voice breaking in to limn the characters and provide background and perspective, it inches forward with clipped impressions mixing seamlessly with details from the city of Dublin—streetside advertisements, a blind stripling tapping a cane, hungry seagulls by the river. Nothing is cordoned off from anything else. You begin to miss quotation marks.
Hundreds of characters pass through the pages. Who are you supposed to pay attention to? What is important? What isn’t? There is a funeral with a stranger in a macintosh whose name nobody knew. There are idle conversations, acrobatic theories about Hamlet and arcane political disputes. Most readers stop around page eighty, but it gets easier once you settle in and allow yourself not to know everything. There is a chapter in a newspaper office riven with headlines. Another chapter parodies dozens of writers, including Samuel Johnson, which Woolsey must have enjoyed. Then the bizarre drama in the brothel bursts forth. How many ways are there to tell a story? An entire chapter is a volley of questions and answers passed between two bodiless spectators as if they were conducting a deposition or an inquest. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus walk out into Bloom’s tiny backyard in the middle of the night.
What did each do at the door of egress?
Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.
For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?
For a cat.
What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
This wasn’t Trollope. When the judge turned to the final chapter, he found an unbroken block of text. Molly Bloom’s voice was unfastened from all punctuation. The thoughts were presumably liquid, but the absence of commas and periods had the opposite effect. It slowed Judge Woolsey down and forced him to focus on words he would otherwise glide past. The text compels readers to imagine the shapes of her phrases, to supply her pauses and breaths, to mouth her words.
yes when I lit the lamp because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me
The obscenity came when you weren’t expecting it and departed briskly. You stopped, as if you didn’t quite catch it, and went back to read it again. The judge took pride in acknowledging the perspectives and desires of women. That was why, in his opinion, Married Love was an important marital guide. But even after reading Dr. Stopes, a woman’s perspective was rather abstractly important, a matter of fairness, something to consider for the sake of a healthy marriage. Molly Bloom’s thoughts were not abstract, nor, it seemed, was her marriage healthy.
Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress
There were dark X’s like targets all along the margins. Passages like this were only a fraction of the book, but when you finally finished Ulysses and thought about it as a whole, as Woolsey intended to do, it was her voice that stayed with you. He read the marked passages several times. If they weren’t obscene, what was obscene? Parts of Ulysses, he felt, were artful, even brilliant. Others were inscrutable or downright boring. He knew how to judge something like Married Love (not guilty) or Fanny Hill (guilty), but this was a conundrum. Most of the book had nothing to do with sex, but when it did it was far worse than anything he had encountered in print.
Judge Woolsey skimmed through the supplementary books and the reviews taped into the covers of Ulysses. He was determined to be thorough both because he cared about literature and because he didn’t want to be duped. It would have been a nightmare, he said later, to discover, through some journalistic exposé, that James Joyce was indeed a pornographer, that Ulysses was little more than smut cloaked in opaque prose. Woolsey risked throwing his weight—his judgment, his name—behind something that might be a pornographic hoax or else banning a work of genius in a country that prided itself on fighting for freedom. He was beleaguered by two grim prospects: the dishonor of Woolseys preceding him and the derision of generations to come. He needed something stronger than sherry.
—
ON NOVEMBER 25, 1933, the small oval courtroom on the sixth floor of the Bar Association Building on Forty-fourth Street was filled to capacity. If Judge Woolsey had convened the hearing on a Saturday morning to avoid a crowd, he was disappointed. Nevertheless, a weekend morning allowed them to take their time. Woolsey had been convening cases at the Bar Building for weeks (he was, for a judge, surprisingly dissatisfied with courtrooms), and the well-appointed space suited his taste. A white-haired African American bailiff welcomed the judge at the door (he was also Woolsey’s chauffeur), and the crowd began to hush as he made his way toward the bench. A gold ring around his cravat was visible over his black robe’s neckline. No witnesses would be called, and each side would put forth arguments on competing motions. When the judge sat down, he looked over the documents pertaining to the case: The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses.”
Sam Coleman was unusually flustered, and he approached Ernst just before they were called to order.
“The government can’t win this case,” Coleman said.
“Why?”
“The only way to win the case is to refer to the great number of vulgar four-letter words used by Joyce. This will shock the judge and he will suppress the book. But I can’t do it.”
“Why?”
“Because there is a lady in the courtroom.”
Ernst turned around, and among the reporters near the front row he saw his wife, Maggie. She had taken the day off from school to hear the arguments her husband had been rehearsing for months. Ernst told Coleman he didn’t need to worry about offending his wife’s sensibilities. She saw the “Anglo-Saxon” expressions scribbled by her students on the school’s bathroom walls every day. In fact, Maggie had helped him parse the etymology of the words Coleman wouldn’t speak in her presence.
When the proceedings began, Judge Woolsey made it clear that he was skeptical about Ulysses. “Suppose that a girl of eighteen or twenty read the soliloquy of Molly Bloom,” he asked Ernst, “wouldn’t it be apt to corrupt her?”
“I don’t think that is the standard we should go by,” Ernst replied. “The law does not require that adult literature be reduced to mush for infants.”
Ernst’s argument depended upon discarding the Hicklin Rule. He wanted a definition of obscenity that protected Molly Bloom from phantom young readers rather than the other way around. To do so, he plucked Judge Learned Hand’s 1913 definition from obscurity: the word obscene should indicate “the present critical point in the compromise between candor and shame at which the community may have arrived here and now.” Judge Hand had made obscenity a “living standard,” as Ernst put it, a judgment that communities revise continually. Even if Ulysses had been obscene in 1922, it could still be legal in 1933. After all, Ernst noted, the signs of changing standards were all around them. Women once wore sleeves and long skirts at the beach. Twenty years ago, they began baring their knees—and he hardly needed to explain to the court how the so-called sunsuits of the 1930s left little to the imagination.
In case Woolsey didn’t like these mutable standards, Ernst also invoked steadfast principles. Judge Hand’s declaration that “truth and beauty are too precious” to be sacrificed to unsophisticated readers suggested a government interest in literary merit. If Ulysses was what the Treasury Department said it was—if it was a modern classic, if it rendered truth and beauty—then it was worthy of protection in the marketplace of ideas. Ernst didn’t dare bring up the First Amendment, but the crux of his argument echoed Oliver Wendell Holmes: books leading society toward the truth are essential.
Yet it would be enough if Woolsey accepted that literature couldn’t be obscene. Ernst cited the definition of classic in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and reasoned that obscenity, which depraves and corrupts, cannot also be a work “of acknowledged excellence.” The judge was forced to choose.
Judge Woolsey had been listening patiently. “Mr. Coleman,” he asked the prosecutor, “what do you think constitutes obscenity?”
“I should say a thing is obscene by the ordinary language used and by what it does to the average reader.” Obscenity could be measured by community standards rather than corruptible children, if Morris Ernst wished. In fact, Coleman made Ernst’s argument for him—he praised Ulysses. The style was “new and startling.” Ulysses offered “a new system of presenting people to themselves.” Joyce’s book was as scientific as it was poetic. “We know that it is an encyclopedia,” the government said in its brief, “thorough and classified, of the very substance of two beings, both physical and psychological, external and internal. We realize that it is a deep character study, that even the remotest characters in the book are limned with unmistakable distinctness upon its huge canvas.” The government defended Ulysses more eloquently than the defense.
Sam Coleman wasn’t a fool. He knew how much Ernst’s argument depended upon establishing the literary merit of Joyce’s book. He knew Ernst and Lindey would come trotting into court with piles of statements gathered from professors, clergymen, librarians and writers from around the country. They would juxtapose tributes to Ulysses from Paris art dealers (“almost perfect”) and well-known writers (“majestic genius”) with words of praise from female librarians in Texas (“superb”) and North Dakota (“classically exquisite”). He knew Ernst would piece together a “whole book” standard from an esoteric case history. He also knew that Ernst would take advantage of his admittedly ingenious tactics, from the seized copy loaded down with critical praise to the U.S. Treasury’s designation of the book as a “classic.” Section III, Subheading A of Ernst’s legal brief trumpeted the Treasury secretary’s approval: “THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS OFFICIALLY PAID TRIBUTE TO THE GREATNESS OF ULYSSES.” Ernst had outdone himself, and Judge Woolsey would be sympathetic. So instead of disputing the literary merit of Ulysses, the government simply agreed.
“No one would dare attack the literary value of the book,” Coleman said. But after praising Ulysses he began to zero in on the book’s unprintable words—he alluded to them indirectly, of course, for the sake of the lady present. Not even the most liberal judge thought an author’s artistry could legalize unlimited filth. All the government had to do was point out what Judge Woolsey already knew: that the filth in Ulysses went far beyond what any American court had ever allowed.
Sam Coleman and his assistant, Nicholas Atlas, pored over all of the books recently exonerated of obscenity charges and found their language far less colorful than Molly Bloom’s. Neither Mademoiselle de Maupin nor Casanova’s Homecoming contained bawdy words. Female wasn’t bad, either. “An occasional word is offensive to the general taste,” they found, but it wasn’t obscene by current standards. Woman and Puppet didn’t have a single dirty word. Clement Wood’s Flesh was the most obscene book they examined, and yet it didn’t have any dirty words either. Ulysses, on the other hand, was teeming with both obscenity and, they added, “endless blasphemy.” No other book contained what Ulysses contained.
Obscenity could be a “living standard” if Morris Ernst and Judge Woolsey felt so inclined. Coleman’s rebuttal was that the nation’s standards—shocking sunsuits notwithstanding—hadn’t changed enough to legalize Molly Bloom’s thoughts. The text made his case for him: “Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head[.]” To answer the judge’s earlier question, Coleman said, “I do not think that obscenity necessarily should be limited to exciting sexual feeling.” A book could be banned if its language were coarse or disgusting, and if the judge went back to his Oxford English Dictionary, he would find that it agreed. The case against Ulysses wasn’t just about isolated obscenities. Coleman granted that the book was a modern classic, a cohesive work of art to be judged as a whole, so that he could turn Ernst’s argument on its head. Ulysses had to be banned, he said, precisely because it was so skillfully integrated: it was both obscene and a masterpiece through and through.
—
THE GOVERNMENT’S STRATEGY WAS, for Ernst, both frustrating and exhilarating. Coleman sidestepped the brunt of his case with the same argument he had made on the phone the previous year. Though Coleman wouldn’t say the dirty words in front of the lady in the courtroom, he mounted more of a case than Ernst anticipated, possibly because Coleman resented his Treasury Department gambit. The DA’s office had began dragging its feet in the final months—Ernst had to contact Woolsey personally to get a court date. Now that Random House had its hearing, Ernst was forced to address the government’s argument about “bawdy words,” and he wasn’t going to tiptoe around it.
“Judge, as to the word fuck, one etymological dictionary gives a possible derivation from ‘to plant,’ an Anglo-Saxon agricultural usage—the farmer fucked the seed into the soil.” Ernst wanted to demystify the word by saying it out loud, and he wanted to make it less threatening by giving it a history (even if that history was wrong). Ernst said he rather liked the word. He was careful about when he used it—it didn’t win him many friends, he admitted—but that single syllable was freighted with power and honesty. “This, your honor, has more integrity than a euphemism used every day in every modern novel to describe precisely the same event.”
“Oh—‘They slept together.’ It means the same thing.”
Woolsey found the turn of phrase amusing. “Counselor, that isn’t even usually the truth!”
Ernst made his case to Judge Woolsey for nearly an hour, largely by extolling Joyce’s merits. James Joyce, he argued, “led a monastic existence” away from fans and reporters like “an austere Olympian.” His text was painstakingly structured. Not only did each chapter have its own distinctive style and correspondence with Homer’s Odyssey, it had its own color, its own symbol, and its own bodily organ. The novel didn’t pander to base instincts—the first sexually suggestive scene was several chapters into the book, by which point any reader looking for smut would have stopped reading. Ulysses as a whole didn’t even resemble pornography, he argued. It didn’t have a suggestive title. The book was too long. There wasn’t a single illustration. And Random House wasn’t in the pornography business—it published Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Brontë and Robert Frost. And if all of that wasn’t enough, Ernst produced a map of the United States with a red pin marking every city where a librarian expressed interest in obtaining Ulysses. The “community” that accepted Ulysses was nothing less than the entire nation. The argument was, in the end, about a gut reaction. People knew pornography when they saw it, and this wasn’t it.
Ulysses, after all, was bewildering. For every filthy word, how many inscrutable ones were there? Ernst and Lindey listed dozens of puzzling words in the book. Quadrireme. Entelechy. Epicene. Hebdomadary. For all they knew, some of those were obscene—and that was the point. If they were dirty, it wouldn’t matter. Obscenity, by definition, must deprave and corrupt. “It is axiomatic that only what is understandable can corrupt,” Ernst argued. “The worst Chinese obscenity is innocuous to anyone not acquainted with the language.” Ulysses was high art to the sophisticates who could understand it and gibberish to the morally vulnerable. They quoted incomprehensible passages (including Stephen’s “ineluctable modality”) to bewilder Judge Woolsey. If John Quinn had been alive to hear it, he would have been proud.
At first, Woolsey agreed with Ernst. He described what it had been like to read Ulysses in Petersham. “Some of it was so obscure and unintelligible that it was difficult to understand it at all. It was like walking around without your feet on the ground.” He sat back and, taking advantage of the setting, lit a cigarette lodged in a long, ivory holder. “This isn’t an easy case to decide,” he said. “I think things ought to take their chances in the marketplace. My own feeling is against censorship. I know that as soon as you suppress anything the bootlegger goes to work. Still . . .”
He broke off for a moment, remembering some of the passages the DA underlined—Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up in my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times—“Still, there is that soliloquy in the last chapter. I don’t know about that.”
The judge was curious about Mr. Ernst’s grasp of the novel. “Did you really read this entire book? It’s tough going, isn’t it?”
Ernst had tried to read it ten years ago, but he couldn’t get through it until the previous summer, when, in preparation for the case, he had an epiphany about Joyce’s technique. Ernst described it not as a stream of consciousness but as a double stream of consciousness that shaped our mental lives every day without our fully realizing it.
“Your honor, while arguing to win this case I thought I was intent only on this book, but frankly, while pleading before you, I’ve also been thinking about that ring around your tie, how your gown does not fit too well on your shoulders and the picture of John Marshall behind your bench.”
The judge smiled and rapped lightly on the bench in front of him. “I’ve been worried about the last part of the book, and I have listened as intently as I know how, but I must confess that while listening to you I’ve been thinking about the Hepplewhite chair behind you.”
Ernst smiled. “That, Judge, is the essence of Ulysses.”
As the thin, bespectacled lawyer continued, talking about “a weird epitome of what is going on in a human mind,” Woolsey began to wonder if that simultaneity really was the source of the book’s peculiar power. For in the same way that a pair of hornrimmed glasses reminds Leopold Bloom of his father who poisoned himself when Leopold was still a boy, the arching curve of the Hepplewhite chair might have reminded Woolsey of his mother sitting at home in South Carolina, where the rickety cotton pickers’ shacks were visible through the windows. A few years after they left that house, John Woolsey’s mother, having left his father, threw herself from a window in Brooklyn.
Something about Ulysses, Woolsey said, left him “bothered, stirred and troubled.” Even now, some of the passages moved him in unexpected ways. Molly Bloom’s final words—the novel’s final words—stayed with him.
O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Judge Woolsey interrupted the counselor again. “There are passages of moving literary beauty, passages of worth and power. I tell you,” he continued. “Reading parts of that book almost drove me frantic. That last part, that soliloquy, it may represent the moods of a woman of that sort. That is what disturbs me. I seem to understand it.”
—
BY THE TIME JUDGE WOOLSEY began to consider the legality of Ulysses, there were a few federal rulings, scattershot and little known, that could have laid the groundwork for a lenient judgment. Learned Hand’s 1913 ruling was the most ambitious, but not a single federal opinion had cited it in the intervening twenty years. It was easy for Hand to reject the Hicklin Rule and defend truth and beauty when the stakes were so low. He didn’t have to apply his standard to a particular book, and he certainly didn’t have to decide whether Molly Bloom’s nighttime thoughts struck the proper “compromise between candor and shame”—the very notion of a compromise must have seemed quaint to Woolsey. In Ulysses, the relationship between candor and shame felt more like a battle. Since the government acknowledged the book’s literary merit only to contend that it did nothing to mitigate its filth, Woolsey had to pit the virtue of literature against the vice of obscenity and declare a victor. He had no intention of categorically legalizing Molly’s coarse language. If Ulysses was going to be permissible in the United States, he would have to assert that the novel was transcendent, that it turned filth into art.
After the Ulysses hearing, Judge Woolsey walked to the Century Association around the corner, where he had his customary Saturday lunch. He might have felt alone as he left the Bar Building. The types of cases he knew best—patent, copyright and admiralty law—had clearer precedents. And yet even with decades of obscenity case law, it was difficult to escape the notion that a judge had to make it up as he went along. How could a person know whether a book stirred sexual impulses in the average person? Would he have to commission a poll?
It occurred to Woolsey that he might ask the Centurions what they thought about Joyce’s book, so he approached two members of the Century Association’s Literature Committee: Charles E. Merrill, Jr., a publisher, and Henry Seidel Canby, a former Yale English professor and a founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. It was not an “average” community, perhaps, but it would provide some semblance of objectivity. Woolsey wanted them to be as objective as possible, so he took each of them aside separately, into an alcove of the club’s reading room perhaps. Did James Joyce’s Ulysses incite sexual or lustful thoughts in them? (He was asking, of course, for legal purposes.)
Canby was no fan of literary modernism, and he remained one of the only nationally renowned critics who used the phrase “puritanic censorship” approvingly. In the 1920s, Canby had written that Joyce’s “obsession with inflamed or perverted sex” made Ulysses incoherent. The fact that Joyce finished his book, he noted in another essay, was the only real indication that he was sane. And yet Canby, like so many others, had changed his mind about Joyce’s novel. Both he and Merrill independently told Woolsey that the overarching effect of Ulysses wasn’t sexual at all—if anything, it was “somewhat tragic” and a “powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.”
At eight o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, Judge Woolsey was still thinking about the Ulysses case as he shaved. There was a vanity to his decisions. Like Joyce, he drafted in longhand and revised repeatedly. By the time he began sketching his Ulysses verdict he was trying to establish his own legal tradition. Woolsey wasn’t going to cite Judge Hand’s definition of obscenity (the two judges didn’t get along), and he made only passing references to a handful of other decisions. “The practice followed in this case,” Woolsey stated in his overview, “is in accordance with the suggestion made by me in the case of United States v. One Book, Entitled ‘Contraception.’” And Woolsey’s Contraception decree declared that Dr. Stopes’s birth control manual “does not fall within the test of obscenity or immorality laid down by me in the case of United States v. One Obscene Book, Entitled ‘Married Love.’ ” It was Woolsey all the way through.
The clocks in Judge Woolsey’s Lexington Avenue apartment (wall-mounted timepieces, nine-foot mahogany monuments) chimed on the hour with precision. The rugs and upholstery throughout the corner duplex softened the peals, and the bathroom door muffled them a bit more. When Woolsey glanced above his lathered face in the mirror, he could see the reflection of the clear blue sky. He often thought about a dreary Thanksgiving in New Hampshire decades earlier. The rain had kept him inside his friend’s house all day, and they explored the attic after dinner. Among the boxes of castoffs archived in crumpled newspaper, he found an old poetry anthology. Fipping through the pages, he came across a stanza from an eighteenth-century poem that inspired him enough to jot down a paraphrase. “I fear, Sir, that you may consider these protestations unmaidenly, but by the laws of Nature we are bound to love, although the Rules of Modesty oftentimes compel us to conceal it.”
Woolsey imagined the woman in the poem struggling against Rules of Modesty she had no part in creating, against customs whose power derived primarily from habit. It was, to Woolsey, an epiphany about the law itself, an insight he recited repeatedly over the years, an insight that was more compelling because he had rescued it from an attic: the law was really just a collection of rules pitted against the immutable laws of Nature, and the rules would have to bend lest they snap. Perhaps the law needed sincere, immodest women to bend the rules. He scraped away the unmaidenly stubble from his face and glanced from the lathered razor back to the blue sky. It was a kaleidoscope of impressions.
Judge Woolsey rushed to his desk, grabbed his pen and began writing his decision with a dripping razor in his left hand.
Joyce has attempted—it seems to me, with astonishing success—to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.
The decision stemmed from Joyce’s sincerity. Judge Woolsey peered into the text and imagined James Joyce, a half-blind artist, compelled by nature to say everything, and everything, including decorum, was subservient to his design. Joyce had been attacked and misunderstood, Woolsey wrote, because he “has been loyal to his technique” and “has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about,” no matter the consequences. Some of those thoughts were sexual, but, he pointed out, “it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.”
Woolsey did more than legalize Joyce’s book. He became an advocate. “Ulysses is an amazing tour de force when one considers the success which has been in the main achieved with such a difficult objective as Joyce set for himself.” He acknowledged the persuasiveness of Sam Coleman’s argument before casting it aside.
In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains, as I have mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake. Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers . . . when such a great artist in words, as Joyce undoubtedly is, seeks to draw a true picture of the lower middle class in a European city, ought it to be impossible for the American public legally to see that picture?
“Ulysses,” he concluded, “may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.”
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THE KEY PHRASE in the decision’s heading—“the government’s motion for a decree of forfeiture and destruction is denied”—did not quite capture how sweepingly successful Ernst’s argument was. Legal protection for literary value was more than granted. It was urged.
Time magazine declared Woolsey’s opinion “historic for its authority, its eloquence, its future influence on U.S. book publishing.” When the book was published, the magazine put Joyce on the cover, eye patch and all.
Watchers of the U.S. skies last week reported no comet or other celestial portent. In Manhattan no showers of ticker-tape blossomed from Broadway office windows, no welcoming committee packed the steps of City Hall. . . . Yet many a wide-awake modern-minded citizen knew he had seen literary history pass another milestone. For last week a much-enduring traveler, world-famed but long an outcast, landed safe and sound on U.S. shores. His name was Ulysses.
In Paris, the Joyces’ telephone was ringing constantly with the news. “Thus one half of the English speaking world surrenders,” Joyce said. “The other half will follow.” As calls of congratulations kept coming in, Lucia cut the telephone wires.
At 10:15 in the morning on December 7, 1933, just minutes after the decision was filed, Donald Klopfer called up Ernst Reichl and said, “Go ahead.” Random House had commissioned Reichl to design the Random House edition of Ulysses, while Judge Woolsey was still reading the book in Petersham, so that production could begin the moment it was legalized. Reichl, a PhD in art history, had designed everything himself—the binding, the cover, the jacket, the interior—to ensure that every aspect of Ulysses would be cohesive. It had taken him two months to test a variety of fonts and formats before he produced a sample copy set in Baskerville.
It was just what Random House wanted: bold, clean and jarringly modern. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” began with a monumental S on a page all to itself. Five minutes after Reichl got the call from Random House, his team began printing the first chapters. They included the full text of Judge Woolsey’s decision so that if the government brought charges again, Woolsey’s praise would be entered into evidence. It remained in the Random House edition for decades, making it possibly the most widely read legal decision in U.S. history.
Ulysses was bound and delivered to the publisher five weeks later. Random House planned an initial printing of ten thousand copies, but by the time publication day arrived (January 25, 1934) advance sales topped twelve thousand—“a really phenomenal figure for a $3.50 book in times like these,” Cerf said, a figure they had thought was months away. By April, sales climbed to thirty-three thousand copies, and Cerf went to Paris and gave Joyce a check for $7,500. Ulysses sold more in three months than it had in twelve years. In 1950, it was the Modern Library’s fifth highest-selling book. There was only one problem. The book that Random House gave Reichl to print wasn’t the latest Shakespeare and Company edition. It was Samuel Roth’s edition. The first legal edition of Ulysses in the United States was the corrupted text of a literary pirate.