The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham
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The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham
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Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction“The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times 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. 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 the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. 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.
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham- Amazon Sales Rank: #266032 in Books
- Brand: Birmingham, Kevin
- Published on: 2015-05-26
- Released on: 2015-05-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.40" h x .97" w x 5.45" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
From Booklist Convinced that Joyce’s Ulysses contained “unmitigated filth and obscenity,” Sir Archibald Bodkin was determined in 1922 to burn all copies already in the UK and to ban importation of additional copies. Birmingham here tells the story of how Bodkin and his American counterparts (John Sumner and Anthony Comstock) lost the battle to keep Joyce’s explosive book out of readers’ hands. To be sure, Birmingham starts by recounting Joyce’s travails in simply writing the book. But others (including Ellmann, Gorman, and Bowker) have already examined that torturous composition process. What Birmingham delivers for the first time is a complete account of the legal war waged—chiefly by publisher Bennett Cerf and attorney Morris Ernst—to get Joyce’s masterpiece past British and American obscenity laws. Readers dismayed by the rising tide of pornography may view the obscenity laws breached for Joyce’s high art less dismissively than does Birmingham. But for readers who value Ulysses for the revolution it effected in fiction, Birmingham has chronicled an epoch-making triumph for literature. --Bryce Christensen
Review Dwight Garner, The New York Times:"Kevin Birmingham’s new book about the long censorship fight over James Joyce’s Ulysses braids eight or nine good stories into one mighty strand... The best story that’s told… may be that of the arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer. Mr. Birmingham, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, appears fully formed in this, his first book. The historian and the writer in him are utterly in sync. He marches through this material with authority and grace, an instinct for detail and smacking quotation and a fair amount of wit. It’s a measured yet bravura performance."Michael Dirda, The Washington Post:“Birmingham has produced an excellent work of consolidation…. [A] lively history …. The Most Dangerous Book is impressivelyresearched and especially useful for its meticulous accounts of various legal battles. It is meant to be fun to read and, setting aside my fogeyish cavils, it is.”The Economist:“[G]ripping. Like the novel which it takes as its subject, it deserves to be read.”The New Yorker:“Terrific…. The Most Dangerous Book is the fullest account anybody has made of the publication history of Ulysses. Birmingham’s brilliant study makes you realize how important owning this book, the physical book, has always been to people." Vanity Fair:“Birmingham recounts this story with a richness of detail and dramatic verve unexpected of literary history, making one almost nostalgic for the bad old days, when a book could be still be dangerous.”The Wall Street Journal:“The story of Ulysses has been told before, but not with Mr. Birmingham's thoroughness. The Most Dangerous Book makes use of newspaper reports, court documents, letters and the existing Joyce biographies. It looks back to a time ‘when novelists tested the limits of the law and when novels were dangerous enough to be burned’ and makes one almost nostalgic for it.”Dallas Morning News:“Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written about Ulysses since its publication. Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book is a splendid addition…. this book has groundbreaking new archival research, and it thrills like a courtroom drama.”Boston Globe:“I am not a Joycean. But I loved Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book anyway. You don’t need to be a Bloomsday devotee to enjoy or profit mightily from it. Birmingham… writes with fluidity and a surprising eye for fun. He probably has read through the mountains of books and scholarly articles on Ulysses and seems obsessed with the book itself, but wears it all lightly. [A] vivid narrative [that]…makes you want to go back and read—and treasure—Joyce’s novel because he liberally salts the novel’s backstory with memorable anecdotes and apercus, especially at the close of each chapter.”Houston Chronicle:“Lively and engrossing.”Slate:“[A] deeply fun work of scholarship that rescues Ulysses from the superlatives and academic battles that shroud its fundamental unruliness and humanity.”Salon:“Astute and gorgeously written…. [The] battle for Ulysses…is a story that, as Birmingham puts it, forced the world to ‘recognize that beauty is deeper than pleasure and that art is larger than beauty.’ He has done it justice.”Chronicle of Higher Education:“An essential, thoroughly researched addition to Joyceana and a consistently engaging narrative of how sexuality, aesthetics, morality, and jurisprudence collided almost a century ago.”The Nation:“Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses casts its nets… widely, synthesizing enormous amounts of information and describing in detail the multiple circumstances surrounding the gestation, publication and suppression of Ulysses. Birmingham is a fluid writer, and the more intricate the detail, the more compelling the narrative he constructs: his account of the rise of American obscenity laws… is as gripping to read as his account of the barbaric eye surgeries Joyce endured or his account of the nearly slapstick manner in which Samuel Roth published a pirated edition of Ulysses in 1929.”Publishers Weekly (starred):“Exultant….Drawing upon extensive research, Birmingham skillfully converts the dust of the archive into vivid narrative, steeping readers in the culture, law, and art of a world forced to contend with a masterpiece.”Kirkus Reviews (starred):“[A] sharp, well-written debut….Birmingham makes palpable the courage and commitment of the rebels who championed Joyce, but he grants the censors their points of view as well in this absorbing chronicle of a tumultuous time. Superb cultural history, pulling together many strands of literary, judicial and societal developments into a smoothly woven narrative fabric.”Library Journal:“What begins as simply the ‘biography of a book’ morphs into an absorbing, deeply researched, and accessible guide to the history of modern thought in the first two decades of the 20th century through the lens of Joyce’s innovative fiction.”Booklist:“Birmingham delivers for the first time a complete account of the legal war waged…to get Joyce’s masterpiece past British and American obscenity laws. Birmingham has chronicled an epoch-making triumph for literature.”
About the Author KEVIN BIRMINGHAM received his PhD in English from Harvard, where he is an instructor in the university’s writing program. This is his first book.
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44 of 46 people found the following review helpful. Smart and engaging By Glenn Hopp The main strength of this book is its infectious, informed passion. The writer’s interest and enthusiasm give the book an appeal and an ongoing sense of drama that is hard for a reader to resist. Kevin Birmingham presents the rise of Modernism and the early career of James Joyce as important breaks with the thinking of the past that helped to create the early twentieth-century world. These points may seem marginal in their importance, but they are not. Nonfiction writers, like teachers, can fall into habits where they merely present rather than underscore the importance of the information they set forth. The second approach not only engages readers better but also indicates a writer who has mastered a subject to find even subtle significance beyond the facts and events.The conciseness of the writing and the high ratio of ideas to words contribute to the book’s appeal. One good example turns up on page 209. We read that “the pressure of writing enhanced Joyce’s superstitions” and then find some examples: “Opening an umbrella inside, placing a man’s hat on a bed and two nuns walking down the street were all bad luck. Black cats and Greeks were good luck.” But our understanding is sharpened and our interests energized when Birmingham brings out the larger point: “Superstitions gave Joyce the feeling of control, the illusion that he could place a finger on the tiller of fortune to help steer a life that seemed blown by chance—money arriving just when the cupboards were bare . . . . It was comforting to think that all the world’s details were like the details of a novel, that they had meaning and that they could be altered by marginal revisions like replacing a hat or adding a fourteenth dinner guest.”Again and again the author distills information and significance into similarly concise, stimulating passages—on Joyce’s early life in Dublin, on meeting Nora Barnacle, on Ezra Pound and Dora Marsden, on the diminished view of epics, on censorship and anarchism, etc.A person could read the Introduction to the book, recognize these qualities, and also see the map for the entire book. At the end of that section, Birmingham surveys some of the books about Joyce and describes his research. You get the feeling that his passion for Joyce and Ulysses is so great as to justify any effort to track down any fact or document, even some stray something in one of the twenty-five archives around the world that he cites. It is a pleasure to read his energetic, compelling study.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful. First smuggled, then sold: how this novel triumphed in court By John L Murphy Not a biography of its author but of his most famous novel, Kevin Birmingham's study of Ulysses emphasizes what nine decades and eight major biographies of James Joyce have not. The "rapture and pain" of its creator and his creation, this Harvard professor avers, energized its modernist impact. The Most Dangerous Book, therefore, skims past much of Joyce's by now exhaustively documented life, to saunter past some of his literary influences, and to connect Joyce's battle with censorship to the new century's unrest.While much is familiar to students of Joyce, Birmingham's endnotes attest to his archival research. He examines eye disease treatments, anti-Catholic tracts, and subversive newspapers, for instance, along with many Joycean contributions, standard and marginal, that help us understand this context. He writes with admirable directness. He efficiently guides readers through the difficulties for Joyce and his supporters which loomed as the forces of censorship by the various state authorities fought those who challenged pieties and proprieties. For example, Birmingham fills in the early twentieth-century reactions to obscenity by depicting how Britain was under siege, according to the Crown forces, from a violent, bomb-throwing and knife-slashing faction with a dangerous radical ideology. Against this, Scotland Yard invested in the latest technology to keep Londoners safer. The culprits were suffragettes, and the counter-terrorist ploy was the department's purchase of their first camera.How Joyce fits in, Birmingham shows, comes via not only his patron and inspiration Ezra Pound, as is well known, but by Dora Marsden, whose militant feminism radicalized Pound. In turn, Emma Goldman's anarchism squares off against the publisher of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson, to deepen the tension in the Vorticist (radical) and then the Egoist (apolitical) movements for artists. Pound wrote for that fledgling review, while patron John Quinn had boosted the Armory Show in Manhattan, a vanguard for the forces from the art world parallel to emerging talents within literature. Going beyond the Irish setting for the novel itself, this attention stirs up the ideological debates by which Joyce and his associates took up the protests and demands of their restive, brooding era.Modernist magazines afforded writers a platform akin to today's blogosphere. Such bold support confirmed Joyce's resolve, as he joined his own "philosophical" anarchism to a "literary" form, in Birmingham's interpretation, to undermine the tyranny of a ruthless state. "Individuals were crushed by big ideas." Joyce countered by obscenity (as defined by the state) apparatus) to protest.In Trieste, as the Great War broke out, Joyce began his big book, superimposing the Dublin he had left behind on an Homeric grid, and elaborating in increasingly experimental chapters and styles of prose, his take on ancient myth reborn in his home city. Birmingham finds that Ulysses opens with choppy, fragmentary rhythms of conscious awareness. These ebb and flow, as if "a rusty boot briefly washed ashore before the tide reclaims it." As the novel in progress was serialized in the little magazines, large forces grouped against its supposed obscenity, and part two narrates the showdown.Fearful of Reds and Germans, before the FBI as we know it now, the vigilant U.S. Post Office clamped down on any material deemed dangerous. Joyce's anarchy might be far more philosophical than overtly political, but it fell into the net cast by the Federal trawlers in the wake of the Espionage Act. Birmingham connects the Comstock Law and nineteenth-century jitters about pornography to twentieth-century unease over radicalism: Joyce's work-in-progress appeared to violate restrictions against lewdness in the U.S. Mail, as sent to subscribers of The Little Review, whose editors had defended the reviled Emma Goldman. With Joyce's content flagged, its May1919 issue was banned.Meanwhile, Harriet Weaver had also been serializing the novel, in The Egoist. T.S. Eliot through Pound and Virginia Weaver through Weaver begin to pay attention to Joyce. They may also be some of the first readers as bewildered by its increasingly daring departures from conventional narrative as generations since--who after all have industrious scholars and encouraging interpreters to guide them. As Birmingham reminds us, Joyce sought to write not a story for a million readers, but one a single reader could read a million times. The playful prose burst forth as its author grew more confident. As the scholar finds in its subject, who began when writing erotic letters to his Nora Barnacle an entry into the "unwritten thoughts that go on in his mind," so Joyce treats "readers as if they were lovers."Despite Joyce's painful eye surgeries (and see Gordon Bowker's 2012 biography, reviewed by me, for more of the "pain" that accompanies the "rapture" in Joyce's Parisian and Zurich years in exile as he labors on), success beckoned. In postwar Paris, the milieu of the novel's printing during the Lost Generation grounds it in the Left Bank's "café culture." But America, frightened by bombings, cracked down with a Red Scare. Ulysses would soon be linked not only with obscenity but to "parlor Bolshevism."Anthony Comstock had fulminated against contraception in the mail, and his successor John Sumner, newly appointed to suppress vice on behalf of New York, extended his control over Red propaganda in The Masses and anarchist rabble-rousing to attack The Little Review for a salacious episode, Gerty MacDowell's "fireworks" on Sandymount Beach in what would be known as the Nausicaa chapter.The New York City District Attorney's Office required John Quinn, a lawyer too, to mount a defense, but his disgust appears to have overwhelmed his earlier sympathies for Joyce and his disreputable companions. For, Quinn's reservations about the Nausicaa portion notwithstanding, he and Pound had tired of the "unreasonable" stance asserted by a Joyce whom, with his novel yet to be completed, refused to assuage the censors, while incurring legal costs and penalties nobody could easily resist."Greenwich Girl Editors" Anderson and Jane Heap were summoned against the State's charges of obscenity for their magazine's contents. Ironically, as Birmingham nudges the reader to remember, those on the stand seemed to have failed to notice that Leopold Bloom was masturbating as he watched Gerty during the fireworks on the strand. Or, they chose not to notice, if they were the editors of the passage. Typically daring, Joyce then rewrote it after the 1921 conviction of the magazine for distributing lascivious material in the mail, to highlight Bloom's surreptitious activity.On the author's fortieth birthday early in 1922, Ulysses was published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Joyce could not stop fiddling with it. Even during temporary blindness a few months earlier as a time away from the manuscript, he kept tinkering mentally with refining its elaborate structures. With the novel out, more troubles rushed in, for now, the typos massed and worried him. But the revolutionary nature of it, which to us dims nearly a century later, cannot be denied: "It demanded complete freedom. It swept away all silences." Shattering verbal boundaries, it rises.Ernest Hemingway, with perfect timing, enters Sylvia Beach's Parisian bookshop to assist smuggling the novel into the U.S., by way of his contact, Chicago socialist editor Barnet Braverman, who by 1922 under the restrictions of Red Raids had to work at an ad agency to get by. Joyce's patron Harriet Weaver, in London, founds the Egoist Press to print the novel. During 1922, the allure of a censored import, coming from London now and Paris, increases overseas demand for a forbidden book.Then, the Port of New York authorities swooped in. Customs authorities in London did too. Eight editions followed, but distribution lagged due to censorship. Officials aiding a single copy's importation into America faced a fine of ten thousand dollars and up to ten years in prison. It took Bennett Cerf's Modern Library imprint at Random House--which marketed classics old and new to a discerning readership on campuses and after graduation-- to defend the novel in the U.S. The cover, shown on the cover of Birmingham's book, did not appear until 1934 after another legal battle. Random House took on not the Comstock Act but the Tariff Act prohibiting the importation of obscenity. One charge was easier to disprove in court than the many dangers the Comstock Act listed. Cerf , a wit and a pundit too in the quest (and indirectly his roguish predecessor whose corrupted "Paris" edition was used illegally in the U.S., the literary pirate Samuel Roth), finally triumphed.Birmingham provides a lively, learned, yet accessible and welcoming survey of this struggle. He intersperses enough of the novel to orient readers, and he blends in the difficulties of Joyce's life as he weakened in vision and endurance, to prove the heroic nature of his artistic achievement despite his personal tetchiness. This may encourage readers to begin or return to Ulysses, their next book to read
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful. Simply masterly study of the writing and publication of Joyce's best-known work By Stanley Hauer Seldom does a work of literary history or criticism deserve the epithet "virtually un-put-downable"; this one does. Birmingham's treatise on the composition, publication, and afterlife of Joyce's Ulysses is simply masterly.It is important for a modern reader to understand just how controversial Ulysses was in its day. Birmingham writes: "Nearly a century later, the reactions to Ulysses can feel overblown. . . . 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." But in its day Ulysses was both controversial and widely seen as pornographic.The cast of characters here reads like a roster of the greatest English-language authors of the early twentieth-century. I, for one, had no idea that Ezra Pound has played such a cardinal role in Joyce's life and works. And the full story of how the unlikely storefront of Shakespeare and Company came to publish this work, only to see many of its copies swept up and burned by wacko censors and customs agents, reads like an espionage thriller.It has been many years since I reread Ulysses, even longer since I trekked through Ellman's magisterial biography. Maybe much of what is here the Joyce scholar knows already. But this humble reader did not. I learned much. And I thoroughly enjoyed doing so.
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