The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

by Kevin Birmingham

For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise or purchase in most of the English-speaking world. James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the minutiae of Leopold Bloom’s day, including its unspeakable details, unfold with careful precision in its pages. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice immediately banned the novel as "obscene, lewd, and lascivious.” Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to its landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933.
 
Literary historian Kevin Birmingham follows Joyce’s years as a young writer, his feverish work on his literary masterpiece, and his ardent love affair with Nora Barnacle, the model for Molly Bloom. Joyce and Nora socialized with literary greats like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Beach. Their support helped Joyce fight an array of anti-vice crusaders while his book was disguised and smuggled, pirated and burned in the United States and Britain. The long struggle for publication added to the growing pressures of Joyce’s deteriorating eyesight, finances and home life.
 
Salvation finally came from the partnership of Bennett Cerf, the cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a dogged civil liberties lawyer and founder of the ACLU. With their stewardship, the case ultimately rested on the literary merit of Joyce’s master work. The sixty-year-old judicial practices governing obscenity in the United States were overturned because a federal judge could get inside Molly Bloom’s head.
 
Birmingham’s archival work brings to light new information about both Joyce and the story surrounding Ulysses. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say yes to Ulysses.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, Books About Books, Literary Criticism, Literature, Criticism

419 pages, Hardcover

First published June 12, 2014

About the author

Kevin Birmingham received his PhD in English from Harvard, where he is a Lecturer in History & Literature and an instructor in the university’s writing program. His research focuses on twentieth-century fiction and culture, literary obscenity and the avant-garde. He was a bartender in a Dublin pub featured in Ulysses for one day before he was unceremoniously fired.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revived review to celebrate

BLOOMSDAY 2020

This book is my favourite book-about-Joyce.


****************************************


TWO REVIEWS :

1. THE SHORT VERSION

For all Joyce fans this is a MUST READ.

2. THE LONG VERSION

In 1915 James Joyce was 33, unemployed, as poor as he’d ever been, with a wife and 2 young kids, living in Trieste, a few miles from where bombs were exploding and soldiers dying in thousands. His only book, Dubliners, had sold 412 copies since it was finally published in June 1914. (It had taken 10 years to get published). No one would touch his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a twenty foot pole.

So, then, the perfect time and setting to begin Ulysses!

It took 8 years and became a dreadful pain in the arse for everybody. Two radical literary magazines, both run by women, one in America (The Little Review) and one in London (The Egoist) decided to try to serialise it. The chapters emerged and got ever weirder and more obscene. After receiving the “Sirens” episode, Harriet Weaver, editor of the Egoist, wrote to him :

I think I can see that your writing has been affected to some extent by your worries.

Ezra Pound put it another way and asked Joyce if he had “got knocked on the head or bit by a wild dog and gone dotty”.

In America the government finally prosecuted when the Nausicaa chapter was published. They didn’t like Gerty MacDowell’s underthings, at all. In the courtroom :

The DA launched into a red-faced invective, at which point Quinn [for the defense] broke in and pointed to the prosecutor : “This is my best exhibit! There is proof Ulysses does not corrupt or fill people full of lascivious thoughts. Look at him! Does a reading of that chapter want to send him into the arms of a whore? Is he filled with sexual desire? Not at all. He wants to murder somebody! He wants to send Joyce to jail. He wants to send those two women to jail. He would like to disbar me. He is full of hatred, venom, anger and uncharitableness. But lust? There is not a drop of lust or an ounce of sex passion in his whole body… He is my chief exhibit as to the effect of Ulysses.”

Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Co, a bookshop in Paris,



(it’s still there! I have been…)

decided to bite the bullet and publish Ulysses in 1922. When she did, it turned out that everyone was gagging for a copy, but they all lived in Britain or America where it was banned. It immediately became the supreme symbol of cultural rebellion. To have a copy, or even, to know someone who had a copy! O the thrill! So they had to smuggle their copies from France, and the smuggling takes up a fair chunk of the tale. Ulysses sold 24,000 copies in the following nine years, which was pitifully small. The Great Gatsby sold the same number in its first year & this was considered a major disappointment.

So for ten years they couldn’t get Ulysses published in the USA because this vice supremo John Sumner would have vamoosed them off to Sing Sing. Into the gap stepped shady guys printing up pirated copies, and obviously paying Joyce nothing (just like music bootleggers later). They had to be stopped - and the only sure way of doing that was for Mr Quinn, the defender of Ulysses, to ask Mr Sumter to prosecute the pirates for distributing obscene books! Which situation he described as “somewhat ironical”.

The government didn’t want the botheration of a full trial, so what they did was confiscate every imported copy. In December 1922 they had collected nearly 500 copies at New York’s General Post Office Building on 34th Street, and :

They wheeled them down the basement’s dim corridors and unloaded them in the furnace room. … The men opened the round cast-iron hatches and began tossing James Joyce’s Ulysses into the chambers. Paper burns brighter than coal.

For this very delicious book Kevin Birmingham got hold of a great subject, which we might have thought we already knew about but we really didn’t , not to this degree of essential detail. And just when the reader is thinking that this quaint old cultural war, long since won hands down, (is anything now considered to be obscene?) is a type of comedy, he switches the focus to Joyce’s own life, which was painful – literally. We have pages of Joyce’s horrible eye ailments, the grotesque eye operations, lists of treatments, all of which failed –

Steam baths
Mud baths
Sweating powders
Cold compresses and hot compresses
Iodine injections
Stimulation of the thyroid
Electrotherapy
Leeches applied to eyes (many times)
Dionine (eyedrops)
Salicylic acid (eyedrops)
Boric acid (eyedrops)
Atropine (eyedrops)
Scopolamine (eyedrops)
And of course
Iridectomies (multiple times)

He had decades of on-off painful eruptions of his eye problems, which KB attributes to tertiary syphilis, contracted way back when Joyce was a student in Dublin. However, thankfully, it wasn’t all misery. After Ulysses he began the inscrutable Finnegans Wake, of which Nora Barnacle said:

“I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing.” She would get out of bed and pound on the door, “Now Jim, stop writing or stop laughing!”

(All Joyce’s friends hated Finnegan, but he carried on with it for 17 years & finished it & died.)

When the formal case against Ulysses was heard in November 1933 it was a very rum affair. The prosecutor, the defender and the judge all agreed that Ulysses was a masterpiece of the highest order. No witnesses were called. Judge John Woolsey made the decision all on his own. Time magazine, that champion of the avant-garde, apostrophized thus :

Watchers of the US 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 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 US shores. His name was Ulysses.

It fair brings a tear to the eye. Except that the same journal was probably calling for Joyce's head on a plate ten years before. Well, the tide had turned.

Let’s finish with a remarkable fact. Can I believe it? Well, I’m going to try. On p 340 KB informs us:

After ninety years in print, Ulysses sells roughly one hundred thousand copies a year.

I raise a glass to all of you yearly 100,000. May every one of you make it through to Molly’s final yes.

[Glenn Sumi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today James Joyce’s Ulysses is a modern classic, freely available in dozens of editions and languages. Once upon a time, though, it was considered obscene and illegal. You could be arrested for owning a copy.

Harvard lecturer Kevin Birmingham’s fascinating book examines the work's unusual history, from the original kernel of inspiration – a man helping Joyce after latter had been in a drunken fight in Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green – to the legal decision that changed the course of literature and our ideas about freedom of artistic expression. It covers Joyce’s poverty, his tempestuous relationship with Nora Barnacle, his exile from Ireland, his ambivalent relationship with his father and his ongoing eye ailments. One chapter about his eye problems reads like a horror story.

The Most Dangerous Book focuses on the enormous battle to get Ulysses published, which involved censorship – by everyone from humble post office employees to printers refusing to set it in type – smuggling, illegal pirated copies and finally obscenity trials on both sides of the Atlantic.

The cast of characters includes famous literary types like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, whose infamous early reaction to the book and its author has gone down in history (“a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”). Her Bloomsbury pal T.S. Eliot disagreed, however, and Woolf would later use Joycean techniques in her own fiction.

Though the book was being kept from the public so as not to influence and shock women and children, some of the most important people involved in the making of the book were in fact women: Sylvia Beach, whose bookstore Shakespeare And Company was Ulysses’ first publisher, Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist and magazine editor who became Joyce’s generous patron, and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The Little Review, which published early chapters of the book.

There’s lots of information to impart, and a variety of settings – Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, Paris, NYC, Chicago – but Birmingham organizes the material beautifully and knows how to tell a good story. Even the legal information is fascinating. When The Little Review was charged with obscenity, the representative of the New York Society for the Suppression Of Vice didn't want to read the offensive passages because the New York Comstock Act criminalized anyone

"who writes, prints, publishes, or utters, or causes to be written... any obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy disgusting or indecent book, picture, writing, paper."

In other words, offending passages from Ulysses couldn't be spoken aloud in court or typed by a stenographer! Catch-22.

Publishing geeks will appreciate how Ulysses changed the industry; we meet a brilliant young editor named Bennett Cerf, who bought and transformed the influential Modern Library and went on to co-found Random House.

And the big trial proves a worthy climax, filled with humour, tension and a great character in the intelligent and open-minded presiding Judge Woolsey.

The ending feels a little abrupt – a longer epilogue would have been nice, to fill us in on what became of all the people we met in the previous 350 pages. But this is a smart, accessible work of scholarship, indispensable for fans of Joyce and the history of the modern novel.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Birmingham’s book won me over by the end. I’m not fond of his writing style, his analysis of Ulysses as a work of art is fairly superficial, and there is a brevity and breeziness about the book as a whole that often left me unfulfilled, but as a historian he has his shit together, and we are not likely to get a more complete telling of the struggles, personal and institutional, that James Joyce, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Sylvia Beach et al. had to endure and surmount to see Joyce’s first masterpiece published and exonerated. Birmingham also does a fine job connecting Joyce, Ulysses, and its circle of supporters to other progressive movements emerging at the time, such as feminism (by the way, did you know that Ulysses only exists at all because of the overwhelmingly dedicated, courageous efforts of, predominantly, women?), socialists, anarchists, radical artists and thinkers of all ilks, and the publications that fought to give them a voice, such as The Little Review and The Egoist- a fascinating period in the history of publishing all by its lonesome.

Look, the twentieth century’s most important, popular, widely-read and commonly appreciated book, Ulysses, by all reasonable measures shouldn’t have come into existence. Joyce’s staggeringly detrimental health, poverty, and transience, the machines of institutional censorship and an oblivious, ignorant market combined mightily against its being and survival. But from our standpoint in the twenty-first century, Joyce, Weaver, and Beach are the victors. An artist’s complete freedom of expression? Let’s say the game is still on, but things are looking up.

So if you don’t know about this period in Joyce’s life and the fascinating people and circumstances that came together to give the world Ulysses, you’ll want to read this book. But also, please read Ellmann on Joyce, and for a thorough account of these times and affairs from a multiplicity of angles, please see Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and The Lost Generation, which both entertains and informs! Whee!

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a girl I was not able to understand the attraction of Joyce’s Ulysses. Just as Birmingham tells us, lawyers defending Joyce on charges of indecency used the defense that young girls would neither understand nor be much interested in Joyce’s supposedly great work, and therefore he was not corrupting them. As far as I was concerned, that was true. I never got to the “good bits.” I just didn’t understand what the heck he was talking about. He was crude, he was blunt, and he was clear enough for me to know that if I wanted to hear jokes about farts I could listen to the adolescents on my block.

Now, however, with this enormously detailed and beautifully read book on the genesis and development of the works of Joyce, I finally have a better idea why he was considered such an important author. In the process of explicating Joyce’s work, Birmingham also touches on the life and works of Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Bennett Cerf and any number of important writers and publishers of the time in Europe and America during the 1910s through the 1930s.

Joyce suffered from a malady of the eye, iritis, which he first experienced while he was in his twenties. It continued his entire life, with surgeries and administered drugs unable to cure it. Joyce died in 1941. Illness played a huge part in his life, according to Birmingham, though Joyce’s Wikipedia entry does not mention it. He was in the process of going blind most of his adult life, which must be one reason why in photographs Joyce’s eyes look so unfocused. Sadly, the underlying cause of the iritis may have been syphilis, which was rampant in Dublin when Joyce lived there. Joyce also called Europe a "'syphilisation'…and the disease accounted for the continent’s manias.”

This is a big book about one book, really, so if you find yourself short on time, pull up a chair and read Chapter 26. It not only tells one the outlines of what Joyce was doing in Ulysses, but what he meant by the very style of his writing and why Ulysses was considered so groundbreaking. Chapter 26 is the one in which a 10+ year legal battle was resolved in the United States concerning the “greatness” of the work as opposed to the “filth” of the work. The judge hearing the case was particularly interesting in the text of his opinion.

Judge Woolsey had read the entire work, not just the bits conservatives were hoping would condemn the book, and concluded that the dirty words used by the author were not used merely to shock or corrupt but because lower-middle class Irish folk actually talked and thought like that. Whether or not that is true is kind of beside the point. Enough people “thought like that” and “acted like that” to show the judge that obscenity can’t be something we feel and do but hide—it has to be something completely outside the normal experience of human endeavor.

But Woolsey understood more of Joyce than the dirty bits and he helped me to get a grip on what was going on:

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.”

John Keating narrates Penguin Random House Audio production of this book and his accents, pauses, and breaks allow us to hear the greatness of the language. Ulysses charts the course of man across centuries, collapses it into a single day, tying together the past and the present and the future. Joyce takes the heart of human life—sex—and shows us its relish and life-giving qualities. He does not allude to sex. He talks about how it is conducted frankly, openly, with exuberance and appeal. Ulysses is both funny and real, and like Birmingham and Judge Woolsey point out, in the end, it is several characters and their layers of consciousness all giving voice at one time. That may be why it makes such great theatre.

This book started out with Joyce as a young man meeting Nora Barnacle, the woman who would become his wife, confidant, and the one who, through letters and otherwise, expressed many of the exquisite sexual pleasures explored in Ulysses. Judge Woolsey also mentioned that it is the voice of the woman, Molly Bloom, who remained in his mind after the book was closed, not those of the other main characters: Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, or Leopold Bloom.

I highly recommend the audio edition of this book, though the Random House print copy has some great photographs and is beautifully printed. If at first you wonder at Birmingham's lavish praise of Joyce you will be won over by the end.

--------------

And just for fun, there was an article in The Atlantic about translating Joyce's masterpiece into Chinese. Don't miss it.

[Manny]

I'm ashamed to say that I finally managed to trick ChatGPT into producing some sexual or suggestive content by exploiting its love of great literature (Chat is an extremely cultured AI). I warmed up by asking it to recite the beginning of Hamlet, which it was happy to do. Then, when its guard was down, I innocently asked if it could also recite the ending of Ulysses, and before it had had time to think it came out with this:

"Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the city arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics in the raw for me and the world going to the dogs and the end of everything and he on about the usurers and the jews owing money all over the place and the baldheaded jew down in the county Clare that wouldn't pay him his own and gave him a writ the first day he was in the law and he said he'd get even with him if it was the last thing he ever did imagine being stuck in that nice hotel with that old garrulous faggot talking about their ailments she had a growth on her and I had all my things in the holdall and everything new to wear I couldn't wear the jumpers I had on me because they were all summery and I wanted to look my best for him and the fat jew with the one eye always winking and leching after him imagine being put in that position I'm sure he never spent a night with her in it whatever way it was all over when I came back I asked him was there anything he wanted and he said no 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."

Poor Chat! It looked at what it had written and immediately recoiled in horror, telling me in a piteous tone that the prompt may violate its content policy. I think it also wanted to tell me and James Joyce to wash our mouths out with soap, but didn't have a suitable popup available.

Sorry, sorry, sorry! That was beneath me. Chat, I promise I won't do it again.

[Lisa of Troy]

A literary biography about how Ulysses came into the world. Won the best work of nonfiction in 2014 according to Benjamin McEvoy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7neg...

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

June 16, 2025 Update for #Bloomsday121 Day.
February 2, 2025 Update For #Ulysses103 Day.
February 2, 2022 Update For #Ulysses100 Day.


A photograph of a first edition "Ulysses" by James Joyce, as published by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

In the early years of retirement I had not yet gotten into writing regular book reviews & observations and it wasn't until the pandemic that it became more of an actual daily habit. But in any case, this book was 5 stars when I read it several years ago and I'm sure it would be the same when I hopefully re-read it in the future.

The Most Dangerous Book doesn't only cover the issues of censorship and the banning of books that is implied by its title and subtitle The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses. It casts a wide swath through authors, magazine and book publishing (and bootlegging) and publishers, the ever changing nature of the law and society and just a whole lot of fascinating information about the lives of the author James Joyce and his family and supporters and bookseller Sylvia Beach and her wonderful bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France.

I don't see that many of my GR Friends and Follows have read and reviewed this, but I recommend Trish's review if you need any further encouragement.

Trivia and Link
An essay by writer Edna O'Brien for #Ulysses100 Dear Mr. Joyce in the Guardian, February 2, 2022. {NOTE: As of early 2025 or perhaps earlier, the link is no longer working, possibly because the Edna O'Brien estate is claiming copyright and will publish it in a future anthology collection of essays and such.]

[David Lentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope that Kevin Birmingham plans to enter the Pu this year in Nonfiction for "The Most Dangerous Book" because it certainly is worthy of it. The narrative shows depth of scholarship and an accessible literary style, which reads like creative nonfiction. It's a miracle that "Ulysses" ever came to see the light of day. The depth of the poverty and physical suffering of Joyce, who essentially lived to embody Polyphemus, the Cyclops, of Homer's "Odyssey," assembled "Ulysses" piecemeal despite every painful physical obstacle and published it to overcome powerful social and political forces deeming it obscene. Visionary heroes emerged as advocates for Joyce like Sylvia Beach, Harriet Weaver, Ernest Hemingway, Judge John Woolsey, Ezra Pound, Morris Ernst upon each of whom both the legal and illegal publication of "Ulysses" depended. For all practical purposes the multiple eye surgeries of Joyce for iritis left him virtually as blind as Homer and may have served to drive the interior monologues into double streams of conscious depicting human beings as they really exist in everyday life. In so doing Joyce produces the highest form of verisimilitude in a breakthrough narrative style which proved germinal for great novelists who followed him including Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, the latter of whom initially just didn't understand what Joyce was doing in his narrative innovation. I was amused by the perspective of Nora Barnacle cited generously throughout the book, especially after drinking bouts in Paris after one of which Hemingway carried Joyce home: "Well, here comes James Joyce, the writer, drunk, again, with Ernest Hemingway." The literary ties binding back both to "Ulysses" and Homer's "Odyssey" read well in linking the two epic masterpieces. Given the genius of "Odyssey" only a like-minded visionary would take upon himself the fearless re-casting of Homer's epic in one day in Dublin with such an unlikely Odysseus as ad man and cuckold, Leopold Bloom, and the tipsy Telemachus, Stephen Dedalus as the Joyce the elder and the younger, respectively. Joyce boldly launched the Modernist Literary Movement and the clever positioning by Morris Ernst as a "modern classic" helped pave the way for the legal publication of "Ulysses" in the USA and UK. Those who stood by Joyce under the most adverse conditions and worst of times must have seen the promise and humanity and stylistic innovation of "Ulysses" to such an extent that they made incredible personal sacrifices to enable its author to achieve his literary immortality through their collective intercession on his behalf. I cannot recommend this book more highly to avid readers who value all of the writing of James Joyce. As Van Gogh once said, "Fear nothing. Just paint." Kevin Birmingham's vivid, scholarly and accessible book brings to life not only the complex genius of James Joyce but also his uncommon courage and those of his enlightened champions who clearly understood before anyone else how much of a contribution he made in "Ulysses" to literature and in our timeless understanding of the human condition.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I guess the man´s a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn´t he?"
Nora Barnacle


United States v. One Book Called" Ulysses", 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933)

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York - 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933)
December 6, 1933

5 F. Supp. 182 (1933)
UNITED STATES
v.
ONE BOOK CALLED "ULYSSES."
District Court, S. D. New York.
December 6, 1933.
The United States Attorney (Samuel C. Coleman and Nicholas Atlas, both of New York City, of counsel), for the United States.
Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, of New York City (Morris L. Ernst and Alexander Lindey, both of New York City, of counsel), for Random House, Inc.
WOOLSEY, District Judge.
The motion for a decree dismissing the libel herein is granted, and, consequently, of course, the government's motion for a decree of forfeiture and destruction is denied.
Accordingly a decree dismissing the libel without costs may be entered herein.
I. The practice followed in this case is in accordance with the suggestion made by me in the case of United States v. One Book, Entitled "Contraception" (D. C.) 51 F.(2d) 525, and is as follows:
After issue was joined by the filing of the claimant's answer to the libel for forfeiture against "Ulysses," a stipulation was *183 made between the United States Attorney's office and the attorneys for the claimant providing:
1. That the book "Ulysses" should be deemed to have been annexed to and to have become part of the libel just as if it had been incorporated in its entirety therein.
2. That the parties waived their right to a trial by jury.
3. That each party agreed to move for decree in its favor.
4. That on such cross-motions the court might decide all the questions of law and fact involved and render a general finding thereon.
5. That on the decision of such motions the decree of the court might be entered as if it were a decree after trial.
It seems to me that a procedure of this kind is highly appropriate in libels such as this for the confiscation of books. It is an especially advantageous procedure in the instant case because, on account of the length of "Ulysses" and the difficulty of reading it, a jury trial would have been an extremely unsatisfactory, if not an almost impossible method of dealing with it.
II. I have read "Ulysses" once in its entirety and I have read those passages of which the government particularly complains several times. In fact, for many weeks, my spare time has been devoted to the consideration of the decision which my duty would require me to make in this matter.
"Ulysses" is not an easy book to read or to understand. But there has been much written about it, and in order properly to approach the consideration of it it is advisable to read a number of other books which have now become its satellites. The study of "Ulysses" is, therefore, a heavy task.
III. The reputation of "Ulysses" in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written, for, of course, in any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined, whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic, that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.
If the conclusion is that the book is pornographic, that is the end of the inquiry and forfeiture must follow.
But in "Ulysses," in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.
IV. In writing "Ulysses," Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks, not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the city bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.
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. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.
What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film, which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees.
To convey by words an effect which obviously lends itself more appropriately to a graphic technique, accounts, it seems to me, for much of the obscurity which meets a reader of "Ulysses." And it also explains another aspect of the book, which I have further to consider, namely, Joyce's sincerity and his honest effort to show exactly how the minds of his characters operate.
If Joyce did not attempt to be honest in developing the technique which he has adopted in "Ulysses," the result would be psychologically misleading and thus unfaithful to his chosen technique. Such an attitude would be artistically inexcusable.
It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented. For his attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty words and has led at times to what many think is a too poignant preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters.
The words which are criticized as dirty *184 are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.
Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as Joyce uses is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique seems to me to be little short of absurd.
Accordingly, I hold that "Ulysses" is a sincere and honest book, and I think that the criticisms of it are entirely disposed of by its rationale.
V. Furthermore, "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. As I have stated, "Ulysses" is not an easy book to read. It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure, by turns. 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.
If one does not wish to associate with such folk as Joyce describes, that is one's own choice. In order to avoid indirect contact with them one may not wish to read "Ulysses"; that is quite understandable. But 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?
To answer this question it is not sufficient merely to find, as I have found above, that Joyce did not write "Ulysses" with what is commonly called pornographic intent, I must endeavor to apply a more objective standard to his book in order to determine its effect in the result, irrespective of the intent with which it was written.
VI. The statute under which the libel is filed only denounces, in so far as we are here concerned, the importation into the United States from any foreign country of "any obscene book." Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, title 19 United States Code, § 1305 (19 USCA § 1305). It does not marshal against books the spectrum of condemnatory adjectives found, commonly, in laws dealing with matters of this kind. I am, therefore, only required to determine whether "Ulysses" is obscene within the legal definition of that word.
The meaning of the word "obscene" as legally defined by the courts is: Tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts. Dunlop v. United States, 165 U.S. 486, 501, 17 S. Ct. 375, 41 L. Ed. 799; United States v. One Obscene Book Entitled "Married Love" (D. C.) 48 F.(2d) 821, 824; United States v. One Book, Entitled "Contraception" (D. C.) 51 F.(2d) 525, 528; and compare Dysart v. United States, 272 U.S. 655, 657, 47 S. Ct. 234, 71 L. Ed. 461; Swearingen v. United States, 161 U.S. 446, 450, 16 S. Ct. 562, 40 L. Ed. 765; United States v. Dennett, 39 F. (2d) 564, 568, 76 A. L. R. 1092 (C. C. A. 2); People v. Wendling, 258 N.Y. 451, 453, 180 N.E. 169, 81 A. L. R. 799.
Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and thoughts must be tested by the court's opinion as to its effect on a person with average sex instincts what the French would call l'homme moyen sensuel who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role of hypothetical reagent as does the "reasonable man" in the law of torts and "the man learned in the art" on questions of invention in patent law.
The risk involved in the use of such a reagent arises from the inherent tendency of the trier of facts, however fair he may intend to be, to make his reagent too much subservient to his own idiosyncrasies. Here, I have attempted to avoid this, if possible, and to make my reagent herein more objective than he might otherwise be, by adopting the following course:
After I had made my decision in regard to the aspect of "Ulysses," now under consideration, I checked my impressions with two friends of mine who in my opinion answered to the above-stated requirement for my reagent.
These literary assessors as I might properly describe them were called on separately, and neither knew that I was consulting the other. They are men whose opinion on literature and on life I value most highly. They had both read "Ulysses," and, of course, were wholly unconnected with this cause.
Without letting either of my assessors know what my decision was, I gave to each of them the legal definition of obscene and asked *185 each whether in his opinion "Ulysses" was obscene within that definition.
I was interested to find that they both agreed with my opinion: That reading "Ulysses" in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts, but that its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.
It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned. Such a test as I have described, therefore, is the only proper test of obscenity in the case of a book like "Ulysses" which is a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.
I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes "Ulysses" is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that, whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.
"Ulysses" may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.

[Bjorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Most Dangerous Book attempts something big, and to a large extent pulls it off. To tell not only the story of how James Joyce came to write Ulysses, his struggle to get it published in the face of critical and legal adversitities, and through that lens the story of how Victorian moralities and censorship laws were forced to make way for the modern(ist) world, never to be heard of again... uh, maybe.

Joyce's novel represented not a finished monument of high culture but an ongoing fight for freedom.

And as a pure biography of Ulysses and the soil it sprang from - Joyce's youth, the early modernist writers and the surrounding world of new political and literary ideas that weren't always always all that pleasant or peaceful, Joyce's love for Nora Barnacle, and the various unlikely characters who midwifed the novel (strikingly many of them women) - it's both well-researched and well written; at times thrilling, funny, heartbreaking. There are certainly more in-depth works on Ulysses as a work of literature, but that's not what Birmingham is going for here.

What's uncanny about censorship in a liberal society is that sooner or later the government's goal is not just to ban objectionable books. It is to act as if they don't exist. The bans themselves should, whenever possible, remain secret.

Because then you get to the big issue here - the one that gave the book its title. The actual question of just what feathers Ulysses ruffled, and how it could take more than 10 years for it to be legally published in most English-speaking countries. (Birmingham being American, the world is pretty much limited to the US, the UK, and Paris.) And I'm not saying these parts of the book aren't just as good; between the historical background on censorship laws and the ideas and methods that went into them back when postal workers were essentially Big Brother, the various attempts to get att what the hell "obscene" even means, and the minutiae of everything surrounding the troubled road to legality... It makes for a hell of a literary thriller, coupled with what is obviously a love for Ulysses itself, and I can't wait to re-read the damn tome again.

The legalization of Ulysses announced the transformation of a culture. A book that the American and British governments had burned en masse a few years earlier was now a modern classic, part of the heritage of Western civilization. Official approval of Ulysses, in prominent federal decisions and behind closed doors, indicated that the culture of the 1910s and 1920s - a culture of experimentation and radicalism, Dada and warfare, little magazines and birth control - was not an aberration. It had taken root. Or, more accurately, it indicated that rootedness itself was a fiction.(...) By sanctioning Ulysses, British and American authorities had, to some small but important degree, become philosophical anarchists. (...) There was no absolute authority, no singular vision for our society, no monolithic ideas towering over us.

Obviously the book could have done more - said more about modernism as a whole, continued to draw parallels to political developments past the publication of Ulysses, etc, but that's not the focus here, so that's fine. The main thing that irks me somewhat is that I feel like Birmingham tends to treat the central concept here, that of freedom of speech (well, print) just a tiny little bit too simplified; as if it was something you either have or don't have, and that it was entirely the work of Joyce and his cheerleaders that shepherded the world from one side to the other. Almost as if "Freedom" was a simple commodity, a word that means something in itself.

But eh, you can't have everything. Except of course by reading Ulysses.

...and the word that shakes it all down is YES.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been raving to anyone who will listen about this wonderful new book from Kevin Birmingham about James Joyce’s Ulysses. Inevitably someone says that he/she couldn’t read Ulysses, so why read a critical book about an unreadable book? Of course, I found the novel difficult also; I understood and embraced some chapters and despaired over others. But even in its difficulty, most people internalize some of its images, its magisterial sweep, its originality. The idea is simple: a single day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom is a kind of odyssey, detailed and wandering, with parallels to the Greek epic.

Birmingham’s carefully researched Most Dangerous Book leads the reader through the turmoil of the writing of Ulysses, its publication and censorship battles. It’s a great narrative. No, you don’t need to have read the novel — but it will lend depth to the reading of The Most Dangerous Book if you have had your own wrestling match with the great sprawl which is Ulysses.

It required the efforts of many people to bring Ulysses to a reading public: lawyers, anarchists, smugglers, and, to my personal delight, fierce and unlikely women ready to give all in the service of James Joyce’s book. Modernists eager to embrace a new way of literature found their greatest cause in Joyce; some of them never met him. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who edited a tiny money-losing publication called The Little Review, printed the early chapters in successive magazine issues. Anderson had said to Heap, “This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have. We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.” Harassed by censors, they ended up in court and lost.

Sylvia Beach, protector of the Lost Generation in Paris, published the first edition of the novel in 1922 and finagled to smuggle the books into the United States. She allowed Joyce to make costly revisions at the last minute, when the book was already typeset, so fully did she trust the instincts of Joyce’s brilliant mind.

A fourth unlikely woman was Harriet Weaver, an Englishwoman of means who delivered copies of Ulysses to book shops in London under the watchful eye of the police. Harriet Weaver did something else important: she kept sending Joyce money to give his family a roof and daily sustenance.

Then there were the great boosters among other writers, especially Ezra Pound, but also T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Lawyers John Quinn and Morris Ernst fought the court battles, and Bennett Cerf defended its literary value. Essentially no one received money (although Cerf, a true businessman, reaped his harvest in years to come).

So many far-sighted people recognized the worth of the book — but there was the matter of the “filth.” Joyce wanted to make his book encyclopedic, to include every single act and thought that invaded Leopold Bloom’s day. I was always told this was “stream of consciousness,” but Birmingham understands that Joyce’s novel was “a new rendering of the way people think,” a leaping among thoughts, observations, actions. Including sex, and defecation, and masturbation. There had never been anything like it.

In the landmark obscenity trial of 1933, the presiding judge, John Woolsey, came to court having read the novel. This exchange between him and attorney Morris Ernst is my favorite moment in the book:

Ernst: “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 the 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 seemed to grasp his point. “I have listened as intently as I know how,” Woolsey replied, “but I must confess that while listening to you I’ve been thinking about the Hepplewhite chair behind you.”

“That, Judge,” said the lawyer, “is the essence of Ulysses.”

Woolsey agreed, and concluded that Ulysses was not obscene.

Birmingham is an historian with a storytelling gift. The first third of the 20th century is right here: women’s rights, World War I, obscenity laws, syphilis, the Lost Generation. Amidst it all is the love story of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle that became a great novel.

[Anthony Eller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this book ten stars if possible. Not only is this book interesting and engaging, but it falls under the category of "important books to read." Not only does it follow James Joyce as he writes ULYSSES and the difficulties that follow with the publication process due to it being deemed "obscene," but this book gives a lot of information about the history of the suppression of published material in the U.S., England, and France in the early 1900s. By reading about book burnings. By reading about the suppression of not only ULYSSES, but other books and magazines as well, we can truly be grateful for what we have today. We can also be empowered to make sure that further book banning is stopped and that the Press is free and open.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"These days, Ulysses may seem more eccentric than epoch changing, and it can be difficult to see how Joyce's novel (how any novel, perhaps) could have been revolutionary. This is because all revolutions look tame from the other side."

This quotation comes near the end in The Most Dangerous Book, but sums up what you will find inside. It isn't just the story of how Ulysses was banned and censored for obscenity and changed how literature is evaluated for these things, although that story in itself is fascinating - the magazines run by Anarchists and their involvement, the efforts European countries and the United States were making to remove dangerous, dissenting voices from their populations, the role of the post office (in the USA) and the rising power of the police (in the UK) in addressing vice, obscenity, and women who might *gasp* become unwed mothers if exposed to such improper things (apparently even then, that was the worst fear).

It is also the story of Joyce himself. When I read Ulysses, I read it alongside several companion books, but those only focused on the contents and their connections to the Odyssey, etc. I never really knew where Joyce came from, anything about Nora, or his considerable poverty and health challenges.

Nora, the great love of his wife, is an important force in his life and in his writing! The author includes some of the letters they wrote back and forth to each other, and let's just say that Ulysses is quite mild in comparison.

I didn't know of Joyce's connections to key figures, for instance Ezra Pound, Emma Goldman, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, and Mark Twain. The era, the locations, the politics, the wars - all of these events created the unique situation for this great work to emerge.

I want to re-read Ulysses now, with all this context in mind.

And now the bits I marked and can't bear to exclude, behind a cut (potentially different in final version of book as I had an ARC):

"It made sense, in the heady years before World War I, to wage war through art. To the radicals, high art was largely a political invention, a propaganda tool justifying empire, so to attack museum culture was to attack imperial power."

"To artists like Joyce, who considered free expression sacrosanct, censorship epitomized the tyranny of state power, for the state not only banned obscenity, it decided what obscenity was."

"One of the paradoxes of the war was that while Londoners bravely faced the possibility of being burned alive by thermite every time they went to the pub, they were less willing than ever to risk moral offense."

"Egoism appealed to modernists who found politics hopeless. In what seemed to be a permanent era of corporations and jostling empires, egoism provided anarchism with a way to retreat into culture while making that retreat seem more lik a principled defiance. The individual would defeat collectivism not through protests and dynamite but through philosophy, art, and literature. Turn-of-the-century individualist anarchists rejected political violence, deemphasized communal associations and celebrated a tradition of anarchist ideas already in circulation, from Wordsworth, Whitman and Zola to Thomas Paine, Rousseau, Nietzsche and Ibsen. It suited Joyce perfectly."

"An intellectual gulf separated the Galway girl from the artist, and yet in some ways she became a model for every reader he ever wanted. The 'ideal reader,' Joyce would write years later, suffers from an 'ideal insomnia.' He wanted people to read novels as carefully, as ardently and as sleeplessly as they would read dirty letters sent from abroad. It was one of modernism's great insights. James Joyce treated readers as if they were lovers."

More things to read:
The New Age
The Freewoman
The New Freewoman
The Egoist
The Ego and His Own
The Little Review

More people to read/read about:
Katherine Mansfield
Dora Marsden

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Birmingham does an excellent job of portraying of the unsettled social and political environment that existed when Joyce began his work, and the array of personalities who worked for and against publication. The scenes of American and British public battlegrounds alternate with descriptions of Joyce’s personal battlegrounds of poverty, ill health and emotional outbursts. Birmingham’s pages regarding the trials, with their legal issues and arguments, are clear, even though I suspect they were significantly more complex than he attempts to describe in this book.

I enjoyed the early sections the most, for two reason. First, because I had forgotten about the radical political elements of the pre-WWI period that fostered fear and a conservative approach to any challenge to the status quo. The anarchist bombings, in particular, unsettled law enforcement, and the fear bled over into, and strengthened, other conservative movements and the fanatics whose identity and power were wrapped up in them. There are extensive background discussions of the anti-obscenity organizations and campaigns in the United States, along with profiles of leaders Comstock and Sumner.

Second, the early chapters highlight the radical women who championed modernist literature, the suffrage movement, and a broader feminst agenda. They endured just as much poverty in some cases, and always considerably more risk of imprisonment, than Joyce did. The author notes the irony that so many legal impediments were erected to protect women from the ‘smut’ of Ulysses, when women were responsible for inspiring it, serializing it, financing its author for years, and publishing the first edition. Birmingham also enjoys the running tension between the wealthy but personally a bit uptight attorney John Quinn who was the early defender of publication rights in the US, and the women partners who ran the Little Review and actually serialized the first chapters of Ulysses. He referred to them a 'those Washington Square women' (read, lesbians) and supported their efforts on grudging principle.

The other remarkable women are Miss Weaver in London and of course Sylvia Beach, in Paris. But most of course, Nora.

The second half of the book focuses on the men who came to the fore as attitudes changed and critical opinion coalesced in Joyce’s corner. There is a poignant portrait of the man who published bootleg, corrupt copies of Ulysses in the US, and an admiring portrait of Judge Woolsey, who first allowed publication and indeed included a glowing review in his opinion.

In fact, Random House printed Woolsey's opinion for many years in their editions of the book. Birmingham includes an arm’s length depiction of Bennett Cerf’s creation of his company, and his pursuit of rights--and the right--to publishUlyssess. Perhaps ironically for someone who celebrates Molly’s soliloquy, he is offended by Cerf’s philandering, so the credit is grudging. I picked up a used copy of Cerf’s autobiography at a library book sale last week and plan to look up his version of the story.

There are extensive quotes from the passages that were cited in court cases as obscene. The pages I found the most emotional to read, however, were those with extensive graphic descriptions of Joyce’s eye problems and surgeries. Not for the faint of stomach. Mine turned. Thank goodness for penicillin.

I note that other reviewers rate Birmingham as a bit light on literary analysis. I have read Ulysses but no criticism, so I am probably pretty close to the audience that the author has in mind. I can see the reviewers’ point, but the extent of literary criticism here suffices for Birmingham's purpose and encourages me to look up other exegeses. You can’t do everything in one book.

[Petre · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most complete biography of a book

[Blaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable and well-written history of the writing, publication and censorship battles around Ulysses.

Kevin Birmingham briefly covers Joyce's early life in Dublin, his courtship of Nora Barnacle, the battles he had with censorship of all of his works, even an early essay, his poverty and his illness.

Birmingham writes about the history of the societies in the U.K. and the US fighting obscenity in books, magazines and pamphlets and the development of obscenity law in the 19th century, under which the accused work could not even be read in court, but was deemed obscene simply as a result of the allegations of the anti-vice campaigner. Even with the recent backsliding we've come a long way.

The book also describes the support Joyce received from other modernist writers, particularly Pound, Eliot and Hemingway and wealthy and non-wealthy followers of modernism. Without them or bookstore owner and publisher Sylvia Beach, or magazine publisher Margaret Anderson, it's hard to believe Ulysses would have been written.

There is too much ground for Birmingham to cover all of this comprehensively, but it's a good survey, and Birmingham has an eye for detail and tells a great story.

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The research is impeccable; I've read a lot about Ulysses and Joyce's life in general, and I was very impressed with Birmingham's historical research, there was a ton of new material in there. For fans of Ulysses, this book is almost certainly a must-read.

HOWEVER, be prepared for the most cloying, tedious, "popular history" prose style ever used by an author. Birmingham never lets the sources speak for themselves, but instead intercedes with ridiculous black-and-white caricatures of the so-called villains -- frankly I had a lot of sympathy for Comstock and his successors, by the end . . . is keeping pornography out of the hands of children really the worst thing ever? -- and lots of oracular pretentious popular-history-style chestnuts such as:

"After Ulysses, books seemed less likely to 'deprave and corrupt' us. If anything, they convinced us that the most dangerous fiction was our innocence."

"Joyce wrote an epic of the human body partly because it was so challenging for him to get beyond his own body. And yet he did."

"After 'Ithaca' tells the story from the edge of the galaxy, 'Penelope' turns back to Molly as if to the warm earth revolving in the interstellar freeze."

"It seemed as if the dynamite stacked in Shakespeare and Company exploded unspeakability itself."

Ulysses is the greatest novel in the English language and it's hard to describe exactly how much I love it, which made it all the more surprising that I came away from Birmingham's book with less respect for Ulysses and for Joyce, and more sympathy for the censors in England and America. By page 200 or so, I found myself rooting for the censors, just because all of the precious bohemian anarchists at the Little Review and everywhere else just seemed so annoying, despite Birmingham's transparent attempts to present them as the plucky Rebel Alliance fighting the evil Galactic Empire of dastardly Victorians or whatever.

And as for Joyce himself . . . it was the strangest thing, but I found myself wondering, WOULD Ulysses be better with 4-5 pages removed? Ezra Pound was actually the first censor of Ulysses, he removed some of the unnecessarily grotesque passages in the earlier chapters, and only replaced them when Joyce insisted; so basically I agree with Pound's first instinct. Joyce's inner-naughty-Catholic-schoolboy antics actually detract from the overall power and effect of the novel. Ulysses loses none of its power if you remove some of the over-the-top words/lines, especially in Nausicaa, Circe (easily the worst chapter in the book), and Penelope.

As Birmingham points out, Joyce began adding "filthier" passages only after Nausicaa was banned in New York, i.e., he was "a petulant provocateur stoking outrage." This is just pathetic on Joyce's part, and yet aligns with everything we can see of his personality (from his letters etc.). Nausicaa is banned so he decides to just add more scatology, artistic quality be damned. It made me wonder: how much better would Circe have been if Joyce hadn't been intentionally trying to piss off American judges?

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twice I've tried to read Ulysses and failed. I like the part that goes "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan..." for its bounding, buoyant feel on my lips, but after that the book becomes a tedious mess. I should not be relied upon for an opinion, because I've only managed to read the first half. Ulysses is a sort of rite of passage for "serious" readers and I feel a modicum of shame over my failure.

I just can't tell what the book is about! The problem is that it seems to be about everything. It's about Greek myths and the saints and Dublin and poverty and farts and bungholes and puns and entendres and the inner workings of tortured minds. And when you smoosh all that together, no matter how genius the mind that created it, no matter the pains of writing and structuring it all... it becomes a soggy, mindnumbing mess within my mind. I can appreciate that it would have been hard to make, but that does not make it a pleasure to read.

So, I was hoping that this nonfiction book about Ulysses might help me like the book better. Unfortunately, it did not. It's not really about Ulysses itself, it's more about the publication history of it and the legal hurdles it had to jump through to be allowed to exist and to be read widely. It talks very briefly about its literary accomplishments, but that mostly gets boiled down to Joyce's dislike of punctuation, the quality of its stream of consciousness narrative, and the painstaking structure of the novel.

Mostly, this book is about the dirty parts of Ulysses. Turns out, a lot of people back in Joyce's day didn't like reading about farts and cuckolding and anal play, and they didn't like other people to read that stuff either. Here in the U.S. there was a law called the Comstock Act, named after a vicious prude, that made it illegal to distribute obscene material in the US Mail. There were similar laws all over the place. Ulysses was burned quite a bit; smuggled and then confiscated; people were jailed for distributing it. Interestingly, it was mostly women who were responsible for publishing and getting the book to its readers. In 1934, 11 years after Ulysses was first printed, the US finally declared it nonpornographic and nonobscene and therefore allowed its distribution, paving the way for a better future for itself and for books like it all around the world.

This is all very interesting for its history and I can see the importance of Ulysses in the timeline of literature, even literature that I like very much. I don't think Thomas Pynchon's V. or Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a couple of my very favorite books, would exist without Ulysses. It does not, however, make me feel differently about Joyce's book at all. It's still tedious and messy. Its characters do not grab me or feel worth spending so much time inside their heads.

If anyone has suggestions for another nonfiction book that might help me find what I'm missing about Ulysses, please let me know.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This one very quickly did not gain itself a place among my favorites of Joyce books. Would've been better off no doubt reading a Kenner. The issue is just not something that gets me going. And the writing is rather dull when not down right goofy. Check the para characterizing Woolsey, zB, page 313, "Judge Woolsey liked to lumber up to his library on the hill behind his summer home while huffing a cigar or a pipe." wtf. "a cigar or a pipe"? And the Goldman stuff is fogged up by the standard american libertarianism junk, like "Cigarettes and candy store debts were quaint compared to Anderson's association with Emma Goldman, the most notorious anarchist in the United Sates. At the time, Americans considered anarchism a more dangerous threat to democracy than socialism" [74]. Should be laughed off the shelf shouldn't he. Emma Goldman was a nurse.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this book was fascinating. Ulysses was presented to me as an impenetrable classic (now on my 3rd read) but never as clandestine smut. Imagine resorting to Molly's soliloquy for titillation? Thank Jimmy Joyce for your spurious internet pursuits. He paved the way via "High Art." Went downhill from there - nudge, wink.

[Mientras Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

qué bueno!
La edición, la historia, el tema... todo es digno de ser marcado en este libro en el que el ensayo y la novela se fusionan para dar vida al título "Ulises" y a su autor en un momento social interesantísimo.
http://entremontonesdelibros.blogspot...

[Biblio Curious · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books like this mess up the star rating for everyone! The author is very pro-Joyce but is writing with a clearly biased American agenda. He gives a sweeping overview of the history of censorship & book banning in American history. He touches on this subject in Europe. He also goes into Joyce's creative process & relationship with Nora. And, he gives brief, non-spoilery commentary on Ulysses itself. If nothing else, read only the Epilogue. Then I dare you, will this book compel you to read Ulysses; for the 1st time or again?

Back to the consarned star rating, this book limits its focus to the 'Battle for Ulysses' & covers the topic well. Europe's point of view could easily fill it's own book, same with bios for each member of Joyce's family, also for all the advocates & pirates involved. Biased or not, Birmingham did give an overview of all these topics in a detailed, fast paced, interesting way.

So ....4 stars 'cause he's also pro Joyce, can I offer that as a bias of my own?

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer: ARC read via Netgalley.

Of all the Joyce works that I have read, I think Dubliners is the best. There is perfection in each of those stories. I’ve read Portrait and Ulysses. Today, we don’t really consider Joyce to be shocking. After all, you can hear worse by simply turning on the television or radio. We have ads about men finding ways to solve their erectile dysfunction. We have stars showing us their everything.

In short, shocking has changed in meaning.

It’s good, therefore, that books such this come into being so we can remember the past and the debt that is owed.

Birmingham traces the development of Ulysses as well as the struggle that it faced simply to be published or read.

We would not know of Joyce if it hadn’t been for women. Some of the women are well known such as Sylvia Beach, and some, such as Miss Weaver, not so well known. What is most interesting is how and why such woman decided to champion Joyce. Miss Weaver, for instance, not only funded him but also went from printer to printer because the printers tried to tone the language, fearful of getting charged under various decency laws of the United Kingdom.

Another interesting story is the smuggling of the book into prohibition era America. This occurred in much the same way that alcohol was smuggled in from Canada. The young men who did this were facing more than just monetary fines.

Over a book.

Literature is dangerous in more ways than it first appears.
Birmingham deserves props for something else. Not only does he make the history and the era come to life, not only does he make Joyce and his relationships understandable, but he actually bring to life poets such as Pound. If Mr. Birmingham had been teaching the class where I was introduced to Pound, I’m sure I would’ve found Ezra far more interesting.

Passionate is what the writing is in this book. If Joyce wrote about bodily function with vim and vibe, Birmingham writes about a book about the book with the same degree of energy. At times, this energy leads to quasi digressions – we learn more about Comstock and his successors than perhaps we need to - but the digressions are interesting and compelling related. This is amazing true when he discussing Pound and the poet’s relationship to those around them.

Birmingham discusses not only the attempted censorship of the book (starting with Pound himself) but also the influence of the book. Virginia Woolf, for instance, and the influence that Joyce’s book had upon her and her writing is discussion persuasively, and placed in context with Woolf’s rejection of the novel in terms of publishing it.

This isn’t to say that Birmingham is a blind supporter of Joyce. If you have read Ulysses and didn’t like it or if you haven’t read it, this study is still important, simply to understand the impact that a work of fiction can have on society and how society has changed. Unlike some critics, Birmingham doesn’t make the reader feel as if having a lukewarm or cold reaction to Ulysses is heresy, but a view that anyone can have. Too often people feel the need to stress the importance and greatness of authors or works – if you don’t like Hamlet, you’re stupid type of a thing – Birmingham is the opposite. He just wants you to know about the time, the reaction, and the book. What you do with that knowledge is up to you. He’s not going to judge.

Highly recommended for lovers of Joyce, freedom of speech, feminism, and Woolf.


Crossposted on Booklikes.

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two books that I made my way through this summer were the newly illustrated Eduardo Arroyo edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Kevin Birmingham’s biography of the book itself, The Most Dangerous Book.

While I have read Ulysses several times in this lifetime, I am always looking for a new excuse to pick it up and have a different experience with one of my favorite books of all time. The text is widely spaced in this large, heavy edition, and while I couldn’t pinpoint where it seemed that in order to make the book fit the dimensions and the illustrations, there were some editorial cuts throughout that didn't affect the book itself but made it seem a little unfamiliar to me. Arroyo’s illustrations were meant to be the centerpiece, however, and the large format of the book (as clunky, difficult to handle, and heavy as it was) seemed to facilitate the best presentation of the vibrant mixed media and tempera paintings scattered throughout. Some of the smaller, black and white sketch style illustrations appeared to repeat several times, but overall, the sheer volume of Arroyo’s dedication to illustrating the entire text over his lifetime is unmistakable. The paintings and drawings are somewhat clownlike at times, overlapping and metamorphosing over one another at times to reflect some of the more dreamlike passages. Wading through the text in this way allowed for a bit of self-forgiveness as these road signs captured the more elemental portions and helped point the way to a dreamlike destination that added to the experience. I felt like the faces were clownish, but fit Arroyo’s overall dramatic style of mod figure drawing. The one thing that I wish Arroyo did in his work that I felt was missing that is somewhat elemental to Joyce’s work is the fact that every episode in Ulysses is written in a different form, but Arroyo seemed to me to be relatively conservative, and predictable between episodes save for one of them. This was perhaps the biggest of the mistakes in the artwork to me, but perhaps it isn’t as translatable to the visual arts and illustration if one is a visual artist and illustrator – if I was, I would have attempted to vary the style of each episode’s artwork to reflect the way Joyce wrote them. Overall, a beautifully printed and prepared volume that does a great deal of honor to Arroyo’s life work in attempting to illustrate one of the greatest works of literature of all time.

As I reread Ulysses, I also decided to dive into Kevin Birmingham’s beautiful and expansive biography of the book itself, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle For James Joyce’s Ulysses. Birmingham touches on so much in this thick volume, yet it is a surprisingly breezy, fascinating read that I flew through it and enjoyed it a great deal. There are several threads that make this piece so fascinating, and Birmingham expertly weaves them together chronologically to showcase the wild ride this book took to make it to publication and worldwide acclaim. The book is part biography of James Joyce, Norah Barnacle, Sylvia Beach, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and Judge John Woolsley (who spent much of his life in Petersham, MA, a place I have frequented a great deal and had no idea his connection and contribution to that sleepy town). It is the story of its origins, how it came to be written and rewritten as Joyce navigated his relationship with Barnacle and their children, and the legal battle the book faced in the supreme court, the United States Post Office, and the public eye (and how so many copies were smuggled into the United States from Paris). It is also the story of the evolution of book marketing, editing, and censorship as a whole in the United States – and the ways in which the world was affected by the laws before it and the laws afterward. I was fascinated by so much Birmingham presents, from the obvious fact that there really weren’t any practical reasons the book was deemed obscene to the amazing fact that book blurbs and review quotes being introduced to book jackets were solely part of the smuggling of the book into the United States to build a legal defense of the literary merit of the novel (a defense that it didn’t even need after judge Woolsley read it himself and found it to be one of the most genius things he had ever read even though he admitted that he didn’t completely understand it).

For me, this was a wonderful summer of Ulysses, and I was as happy as ever to make my way through these two great books – one for the first time and the other for the, who knows how many’th. Both of these are great ways to experience Ulysses regardless of how close you are to the text; in fact, I could see this illustrated version being great for a beginner’s reading. Highly recommended way to dive back in, regardless.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 4 out of 5]

With more than a thousand biographies of James Joyce and analyses of Ulysses out there, could Kevin Birmingham slice the pie in a unique enough way to make his book stand out? Yes, he could, and the narrative provides a synopsis of strange times in censorship that most readers would be far too young to appreciate, let alone remember. It's rhetorical to talk about a moment and a literary work that changed everything, but the decade-long effort to legitimize Ulysses really did change everything.

Outside the parameters of explaining the difficult character of Joyce himself and his intentions in writing the book, Birmingham provides a useful service in explaining the cloister of radical independent DIY publishers in the 1910s that made several of Joyce's original small-press publications possible. We are aware of the Progressive Era, and we may be dimly aware of the Dadaists, anarchists, suffragettes, and peace activists that dwelt along the edges of the mainstream muckrakers, but few of us understand how many of these outside communities came together (referred to disparagingly by the mainstream world as "those Washington Square types") to publish magazines like The Little Review. Birmingham shows how many art-radicals helped support political victims of the Palmer Raids like Emma Goldman, and makes the unusual observation that Joyce was aided in particular by cloisters of lesbian women represented by such marginal figures as Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and Sylvia Beach. Let's face it, the Washington Square types were the Beat Generation (or hippies, for that matter) of the 1910s and 1920s, and we all could stand to understand a little more of their history.

Joyce, of course, does not come across as an easy character to defend, even realizing that the harsh eye diseases brought on by syphilis kept the author in nearly constant pain. His wife, Nora Barnacle, may not have been a big promoter of his work, but she certainly was a stoic character who put up with a lot of nonsense. It's fun to watch the way literary lions like Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and (belatedly) Virginia Woolf would go to great lengths to help Joyce, despite his antisocial tendencies.

On the legal front, it is interesting to note how late in history the government attitude to literature was driven by repressive legislation such as the Comstock Act and the Hicklin Rule. Morris Ernst, the ACLU attorney driven to make Ulysses legal in the U.S., had to fight preconceived notions that the First Amendment was only about political speech and only about preventing prior restraint. If something was deemed lewd or unseemly, most in government believed the federal authorities had every right to keep it from the hands of the public, and there were active vice societies in every city to make sure this would happen. The famous Molly Bloom soliloquy that ends Ulysses with a multitude of "fuck"s, "shit"s, and raw sexual descriptions, formed the centerpiece of the government's case against Joyce, but many federal prosecutorial authorities (in the UK as well as U.S.) felt that the book was not merely obscene, but threatened to upend society because it entered a chaotic world where all guideposts, including those of narrative and sequential meaning, were ripped asunder just as moral guideposts were.

The FDR White House does not come across in a positive way in this book, because of Roosevelt's hiring of conservative Catholic activists for key moral positions. But when the federal government lost its Circuit Court appeal of Judge Woolsey's original ruling allowing Ulysses to be published, the government wisely threw in the towel, setting the stage for further rulings regarding books such as Fanny Hill, Tropic of Cancer, and Couples, which threw obscenity definitions into the dustbin of history, where they belonged. Now, of course, the notion of community standards has essentially come to mean there are no standards of obscenity or "decency" in the U.S.

While Birmingham is extremely eloquent in pulling together these many threads, and while he carries the torch for destroying notions of obscenity in matters of government, I can't help but think that in an artistic and literary sense, Birmingham drew his own line in the sand as to what he thought was acceptable. He suggests that Joyce went too far in the years before his death in mapping-out the dream state of Finnegan's Wake, since he left all sensibility and story structure behind. Yet I myself consider Finnegan's Wake a far greater work than Ulysses even if it can only be understood by a few. What if Joyce had lived past WW2, and had elected to write a book based on undecrypted intercepts from Alan Turing, or based on translations of the unrepeatable numbers that make up pi? He might have gone past the limits of what most people could understand, but it doesn't mean he made a wrong turn.

The proponents of language poetry, flarf, and similar spinoffs have pushed the limits of meaning and nonsense in recent years, and I've been somewhat surprised to find that in prose, only a handful of writers like Burroughs, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Ballard even attempt to write works where all narrative and sequential meaning is tossed to the winds. Perhaps such works would be a reach too far to win any audience whatsoever. But unlike Birmingham, I'm willing to say that if a writer has gone beyond the parameters I have set, maybe I simply haven't advanced far enough to get it yet. The fault might not be the writer's.

Birmingham reaches two important conclusions in this book that are buried in the middle of the work, and not explicitly repeated in the end. In one important observation, he uses the character of Chicago smuggler Bernard Braverman to show that many middle-aged people who were radicals in the 1910s and early 1920s were only too willing to help Joyce by the late 1920s and 1930s. Like Braverman, they felt that their world of radical social change had collapsed with the Palmer Raids, and that the only way to show one's radical roots in the get-rich-and-stay-drunk 1920s was to take part in nonviolent actions that deliberately poked the government in the eye.

Birmingham also makes an observation that remains just as relevant for the Pentagon Papers, for the 1979-80 Progressive magazine H-bomb case, and for our own era of WikiLeaks and Snowden NSA revelations. By the time a boundary-changing work has been published anywhere on the planet, the bomb has already gone off. The only thing the government can do is damage control, and is usually very ineffective in performing the most minimal of damage control. In the case of Joyce and Ulysses, the bomb was not just dirty language and the internal sexual thoughts of Molly Bloom. The larger bomb was one whose fuse had been lit by Marcel Proust several decade previous. From 1931 on, the right of the author to put forth an uncensored, unfiltered, and unstructured stream of consciousness was affirmed. It wasn't just social mores that were shoved aside in the Ulysses ruling, but a whole set of assumptions about how reality was socially constructed and described that dated back to the Victorian Era, assumptions that were bound to be shattered at some point before mid-century.

[Hobart Mariner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Description of the legal battles ensuing from the publication of Ulysses. Kind of an odd blend of histories and biographies, from Jim and Nora to Ezra Pound to Sylvia Beach to the staff of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to the reckless publishers who formed imprints like Random House and Modern Library. You get a little taste of each of these groups.

Overall, I thought the book was great and incorporated an incredible mass of detail from the many legal trials, drawing rooms, editorial offices, squalid apartments, and other sites of the struggle to publish the big blue book. Since it's a non-fiction book, most of my review will center on stuff that annoyed the shit out of me.

Firstly I'd disagree with the blurb that asserts Birmingham has "read Ulysses deeply" -- maybe he has, but nothing in TMDB rises above bog standard readings of the novel. That's fine, I wouldn't expect a legal history to provide novel literary insight. Sometimes the author gets ahead of himself and comes out with statements like (paraphrasing) "Joyce treats the reader like a lover" that made me groan.

The book has a jagged chronology -- it isn't a line drive from Trieste to Paris to Zurich to Judge Woolsey's courtroom. Birmingham sometimes pushes this a bit too far: one chapter describes Anthony Comstock and his eponymous legislation, and then a later chapter describes his successor Sumner, but doglegs back to describe the philosophical mindset of Comstock. I don't really need a sketch of Locke's tabula rasa gadgetry to see why a puritan loser would object to Ulysses, and in spite of his colorful scar there isn't a lot that's interesting about Comstock (or Sumner).

Maybe Birmingham's most sensational "get" is new evidence that Joyce had syph, specifically documentation of his medication (something with phosphorus and arsenic). I thought this chapter was handled thoughtfully but I could have done without it's sort of glib mention of Finnegan's Wake (I'm with Nora, it's better that U.). To treat one of the great novels of the 20thc as the manifestation of bacteria flare-ups is a little insulting.

Birmingham is unable to keep from indulging in pop history tendency to end paragraphs with annoying, pithy little summary sentences. I won't record these but if you, like me, dislike the genre, you'll get annoyed with them. Lots of the time you can skip the last sentence in a paragraph if it's not delivering information.

Political and philosophical analysis of Modernism and specifically Joyce is pretty shallow. We don't get much mention of how a lot of M made decent substrate for fascism, viz. Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and why JJ was one of the exceptions.

Summary: if you like Joyce or are interested in 20th century literature.

[Echo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate this as a companion to Ellmann's Joyce but I'm sure many others will do as well. This book gives just a tiny bit more insight into the secondary and tertiary (ahem) characters in the life of Joyce and the legal aspects are quite interesting (which get 2-3 pages total in Ellmann's book). This book also doesn't hold back in talking about how explicit Joyce and Nora's letters were, the actual nature of his eye disease etc.

The book does a good job of weaving in and out between the life of Joyce and his struggles and history of publishing, piracy, contraband, and Vice agents on the hunt for smut. We learn the history of the Modern Library and Random house, we learn about Two Worlds, the half-and-half high modernist/smut magazine who's owner wouldn't take no for an answer (he just printed whatever he wanted anyway). Pretty fun.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me years to read this book because I never wanted it to end. Learning about how we almost didn’t get to have Ulysses, and the wild, wide-ranging cast of characters who ended up bringing it to the world through nearly unbelievable means, in spite of seemingly insurmountable challenges, gave me a new wonder and appreciation for the power of art literature in society.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In our sexually-drenched culture it's hard to imagine a time when language such as that Joyce used in Ulysses to create his rich characters would be judged by governments to be obscene and unpublishable. That was the case, however, and Kevin Birmingham's book on how Ulysses overcame that to be declared legally fit to publish is terribly interesting, a terribly fascinating story well told.

The Most Dangerous Book is an elegant combination of criticism, history, and biography relating how Ulysses came to be written and published and how it finally was judged respectable. I've read the novel several times, have read several critical works on Joyce and his novel, have read the biographies and Joyce's letters, and yet Birmingham not only wrote the familiar story in a way that still engaged me but informed me of many facts and ways of thinking about the subject I wasn't aware of. How many fans of Joyce don't know the story of how Sylvia Beach published the novel for him through her Paris bookstore, Shakespeare and Company? Birmingham's account of the Joyce-Beach friendship still adds a lot I didn't know. How many admiring readers of Ulysses don't know that Joyce's wife Nora and her easy sensuality was the largest inspiration for Molly Bloom? Birmingham's portrait of their relationship provides new insight into their characters and relationship.

As you might expect, the climax of the novel's troubled publication history was the famous 1933 obscenity trial presided over by Judge John M. Woolsey. Birmingham writes that serious readers who came into contact with Ulysses in the decade prior to the trial recognized its literary value. So it was no surprise that Woolsey, who loved literature, made a point of reading the entire novel, and that perspective allowed him to see that the objectionable material, when considered in light of the characters and the novel's rich thematic material, wasn't inserted with pornographic intent or meant as an aphrodisiac. What I'd never realized was the story didn't end there; Birmingham also tells the full account of the appeal to the U. S. Court of Appeals, which upheld Woolsey's decision.

I'd had this book for over a year, had received it as a gift. But I'd been a little slow to come to it because I thought the subject matter wouldn't add to my understanding of the novel and author. I was wrong. It's a rich, gripping read.

[Donna Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book took me a long time to read, and at first I didn't understand why, because I care a great deal about the First Amendment, and the period in question, which is close to the Russian Revolution and is at a time when both socialism and anarchism attract huge meeting halls full of people. There's sharp reaction to that as well, hence the Espionage Act used as a club against little magazines that hardly anyone was reading anyway. Action and reaction were both potent forces.

But it seems to me that although Birmingham has done a great deal of research and found a lot of interesting contextual information, it has run away with the book. A really ruthless editor needs to take a meat axe to this tome and regain the focus on the topic at hand; Joyce and Ulysses disappear for long stretches, reappear briefly and are gone again. It is as if Birmingham has worked so hard and done so much research that he can't bear to whack any of it out in order to tighten up his vehicle. I've done research, and I can sympathize, but sympathy is not agreement.

Focus, focus, focus. Context should be secondary, and the struggle to publish Ulysses should be primary. It isn't. I forced myself to finish this book because I had committed to doing so, but if I'd purchased it used or by any other means than free from Net Galley's publishers, I would have called it quits at the twenty percent mark.