The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses Read Online Free

window for him (the offer, thankfully, was declined).
    Several donors, including a Rockefeller, helped Joyce when times were bleak. John Quinn purchased Joyce’s manuscripts, and his devotion tethered him to
The Little Review
and its legal misadventures long after he swore to abandon its Washington Squareite editors. Joyce’s most important patron was a prim London spinster named Harriet Shaw Weaver, whose dedication to Joyce puzzled Londoners as well as her devout family. Miss Weaver, as she was known to everyone, subsidized Joyce during the years he wrote
Ulysses
and continued to support him until he died. And Sylvia Beach, as Joyce belatedly acknowledged, devoted the best years of her life to Joyce and his novel. One of the ironies of
Ulysses
is that while it was banned to protect the delicate sensibilities of female readers, the book owes its existence to several women. It was inspired, in part, by one woman, funded by another, serialized by two more and published by yet another.
    Sylvia Beach’s eleven printings of
Ulysses
throughout the 1920s helped make Shakespeare and Company a nexus for Lost Generation expatriates, and it was only a matter of time before the book’s enduring appeal enticed larger U.S. publishers to mount a legal battle. In 1931, an ambitious New York publisher named Bennett Cerf became eager to acquire a risky, high-profile book that could jump-start his young company, Random House. Cerf teamed up with an idealistic lawyer named Morris Ernst, a founder of the ACLU, to defend
Ulysses
in front of patrician federal judges like Learned Hand, who reshaped modern law, and John Woolsey, who reshaped obscenity law.
    It took a transformation of all of this—artists, readers, patrons, the publishing industry and the law—to make modernism mainstream. Publishers like Random House marketed modernism as a collection of treasures accessible to everyone, regardless of educational background—affordable books were supposed to be a democratic form of acculturation. But the marketing strategy for
Ulysses
was a federal court case. Its accessibility became secondary to its legality, and that was the impression of modernism that stuck: Joyce’s novel represented not a finished monument of high culture but an ongoing fight for freedom. When the
Ulysses
case came before Judge Woolsey in the fall of 1933, Nazi book burnings had taken place only four months earlier, which is why owning
Ulysses
without ever reading it was not an idle gesture. In the ominous climate of the 1930s, Woolsey’s decision did more than legalize a book. It turned a cultural insurgency into a civic virtue of a free and open society. The renovation of
Ulysses
from literary dynamite to a “modern classic” is a microhistory of the way modernism was Americanized.
    —
    THE PUBLICATION HISTORY of
Ulysses
reminds us that what makes Joyce’s book difficult is a facet of what makes it liberating.
Ulysses
declared its ascendancy over stylistic conventions and government censors alike—the freedom of form was the counterpart to the freedom of content. The way people actually spoke and what people actually thought and did during a typical day became the stuff of art. This seems unremarkable until we remember that a full account of our lives had been illegal to put on paper for distribution. Novelists before Joyce took it for granted that a veil of decorum separated the fictional world from the actual world. To write was to accept that entire categories of human experience were unspeakable. Joyce left nothing unspoken, and by the time
Ulysses
was legalized and published in the United States in 1934, it seemed as if art had no limitations. It seemed as if the dynamite stacked in Shakespeare and Company exploded unspeakability itself.
    The story of the fight to publish
Ulysses
has never been told in its entirety, though several scholars (including Jackson Bryer, Rachel Potter, David Weir, Carmelo Casado and Marisa Anne Pagnattaro) have examined some of