“Ulysses” is a quintessence of consecration and desecration, at once serious and comical, hermetic and skittish, full of consequence and inconsequence, sounds and silences, lappings and anapests, horse hooves and oxen thuds, and a motley crew of Dubliners on June 16, 1904—in acknowledgment of the date on which Joyce began his courtship of Nora. It was “an uninterrupted unrolling” of thought and feeling—a method that Joyce had first come across in Edouard Dujardin’s novel “We’ll to the Woods No More.” Joyce said that he was giving Dujardin “cake for bread.”
For all the vividness of Bloom and Molly, language is the book’s hero and heroine—language in constant fluxion, and with a dazzling virtuosity. All the standard notions about story, character, plot, and human polarizings are capsized. To each chapter Joyce gave a title, a scene, an hour, an organ, an art, a color, a symbol, and a technique, so that we are successively in tower, school, strand, house, bath, graveyard, newspaper office, tavern, library, street, concert room, second tavern, a lying-in hospital, a brothel, a house, and a big bed. The medley includes kidneys, genitals, heart, brain, ear, eye, womb, nerves, fat, and skeleton. The symbols vary from horse to tide, from nymph to Eucharist, from siren to virgin, from Fenian to whore, and on to Earth Mother. The technique ranges from narcissistic to gigantic, from tumescent to hallucinatory, and the styles are so variable that the book’s eighteen episodes could really be described as eighteen novels between the covers.
It is hard to imagine the astonishment felt by those who read it for the first time. Margaret Anderson, who serialized “Ulysses” in her New York literary magazine, The Little Review, admitted to having cried upon reading the first lines of the “Proteus” section, in which Stephen Dedalus, walking on Sandymount Beach, declares, “Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide.” From 1918 to 1920, Anderson published fourteen chapters of the work-in-progress in twenty-three issues. Trouble arose when copies containing what Joyce called a “marmalady” section of the book were confiscated by order of the United States Post Office and burned. For Joyce, the incident was a repetition of the vandalism of “Dubliners,” whose publication had been delayed for eight years by pusillanimous publishers. He told Miss Weaver that being “burned” twice on earth would insure him a quick passage through Purgatory.
In September, 1920, John Sumner, the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, lodged a formal complaint, and Margaret Anderson and her co-editor, Jane Heap, were summoned to the Jefferson Market Courthouse, in Greenwich Village, before three judges and some fascinated New Yorkers. The lawyer John Qyinn, who had befriended Joyce, took up the defense of The Little Review. Joyce had always guessed that “Ulysses” would bring trouble. In the course of writing the book, he described it to Frank Budgen as a “namby pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto là!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette, chitchat, circumlocutions, etc., etc.”
Under the court’s scrutiny was “Nausicaa,” the thirteenth chapter of the novel and one of its most seductive ones. It centers on Gerty and her two girlfriends, Edy and Cissy, who have gone to the sea, to relax and discuss matters feminine. The words of the litany from the nearby Star of the Sea Church—“Tower of ivory, tower of gold,” those paeans to the Virgin Mary—intrude on Gerty’s erotic stirrings as her womanflower raises the spectre of a “manflower” in a gentleman not too far away. It is Leopold Bloom, eying her lasciviously, and very soon she realizes that she has “raised the devil in him.” Gerty, this veritable model of young Catholic girlhood, soon yields to the glances of the mysterious stranger. Under the brim of her chocolate straw hat, she sees a face worn but passionate, and, as the incense drifts out from the open window of the church, the pronouncements of the rosary become a little less mystical with each devouring glance.
How physically close Bloom and Gerty actually become we never learn. She swings her legs in and out and feels the warmth of her flesh against her stays as she gazes at fireworks from a nearby bazaar. While Roman candles burst in the sky, she leans far back to give the gentleman a view of her nainsook knickers. Trembling in every limb, Gerty would cry chokingly to welcome him into her snowy-white arms, but she daren’t. For him, it is not quite so ethereal. “Up like a rocket, down like a stick,” Bloom laments.
When the moment came for the offending passages to be read aloud at the trial, one of the judges asked Miss Anderson to be removed from the courtroom as an act of propriety. The two other judges found the material so incomprehensible that they asked for a week’s pause to collect their faculties and read the entire episode. When the proceedings resumed, Quinn contended that Gerty’s exhibition of her drawers was not nearly so flagrant as that of the display-window mannequins on Fifth Avenue. The prosecuting attorney became so apoplectic that Quinn cited his reaction as clear evidence that “Ulysses” did not fill people with sexual urges, it made them explode with anger. The judges laughed at this ruse, but the editors of The Little Review were nevertheless found guilty of publishing obscenity, fined fifty dollars each, and forbidden to print any more installments of “Ulysses.” Joyce countered by saying, “Obscenity occurs in the pages of life, too.” But New York publishers who had expressed interest in the novel were now fearful of prosecution, and he said despairingly, “My book will never come out.”
Yet for his art he always found what he wanted. Waiting in the wings was Sylvia Beach, a bright, eager young woman who had come from Baltimore and made a niche for herself in bohemian Paris with her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Her shop was salon, post office, lending library, and impromptu bank for a clutch of American writers, but it was Joyce whom she most coveted for her literary galaxy.
The story has been told again and again: their fairy-tale encounter on July 11, 1920, as she came upon him at a party in his tennis shoes and an old jacket, standing aloof. She approached him and said, “Is this the great James Joyce?” To which he replied, “James Joyce.” In keeping with his ever superstitious nature, he was pleased to find her shop linked to Shakespeare’s name, and he took it to be a good omen. Not long after, she asked if he would pay her the honor of allowing her to publish “Ulysses.” Joyce was incredulous. For all his burgeoning notoriety, he was living in a flat with no electricity, no bathtub, and a few cracked plates, and here was a woman who was proposing to print—through an intellectual printer in Dijon named Maurice Darantière—a thousand copies, a hundred on Holland paper, a hundred and fifty on de-luxe paper, and the remaining seven hundred and fifty on linen. She would give the author sixty-six per cent of the net profits. Neither Miss Beach nor M. Darantière could have guessed the complications that lay ahead, because neither of them knew James Joyce. In his possession was only a carbon copy of “Ulysses,” which did not carry the changes he had made in the versions that had been published in serial form. Moreover, these corrections, which were written in his cramped, weblike handwriting, were almost illegible.