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

of
Ulysses
is more than the story of a defiant genius. Joyce’s persistence and sacrifice, his talent and painstaking work, inspired the devotion of those around him, and he needed that devotion desperately—even the most individualist endeavor requires a community. Of all the people who made
Ulysses
possible, the most important is Nora Barnacle, the woman who fled Ireland with Joyce when he decided to become an artist, the woman whose letters inspired some of his most beautiful and obscene writing and the woman whose first evening with Joyce in 1904 hovers over everything that happens in
Ulysses
. The story surrounding the novel shows us how high modernism emerged from the low regions of the body and the mind. It shows us how artworks containing the extremities of experience—rapture and pain—went from being contraband to being canonical. It’s a snapshot of a cultural revolution.
    The battles over
Ulysses
didn’t end literary censorship. They didn’t usher in an era of untrammeled freedom or pervasive avant-garde aesthetics. But they did force us to recognize that beauty is deeper than pleasure and that art is larger than beauty. The biography of
Ulysses
revisits a time when novelists tested the limits of the law and when novels were dangerous enough to be burned. You do not worry about your words being banned partly because of what happened to
Ulysses
. The freedom it won shapes more than our idea of art. It shapes the way we make it.
    PART I
     
     
    Now, my darling
    Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.
    —JAMES JOYCE
    1.
    NIGHTTOWN
    Dublin wasn’t always like this. In the eighteenth century, aristocrats walked the paths of St. Stephen’s Green and the spacious new avenues on the city’s north side. Mansions and town houses with terrace gardens lined Rutland and Mountjoy Squares, and the clubhouses and ballrooms radiating out from the squares hosted salons and masquerades. Dublin had its share of elegance. It was, after all, a seat of power—the second city of the British Empire and the fifth largest city in all of Europe. Four hundred members of the Irish Parliament and their families supported fashionable shops, a professional class and a proud enclave of civilization.
    But the Irish Parliament had become a nuisance, and after thousands of rebels and British soldiers died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, a new law from London simply dissolved the Irish assembly to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. On January 1, 1801, the aristocrats and power brokers departed, followed by the professionals and the shops and the masquerades. Dublin’s Georgian grandeur evaporated from all but a few streets lining the squares, and even there the remaining wealthy families seemed more like stubborn survivors with roots too deep to be removed. The larger properties became hotels, offices and almshouses, and the rest were divided up into tenements that were left to molder and decay. By 1828, a third of Dublin’s houses were worth less than £20.
    The city’s population swelled in the nineteenth century as people from around the country came looking for jobs. Then the famine struck, and the refugees who escaped mass starvation in the countryside found themselves crammed in a squalid city and still hungry. Slaughterhouses were scattered among tenements sheltering dozens of people in airless rooms that bred dysentery, typhoid and cholera. The sewers, where they existed, emptied directly into the River Liffey, and the tides washed the waste back through the city so that the stench blended with the rich smells from brewery chimneys, streetside manure and waste heaped in tiny backyards. In some neighborhoods, children were more likely to die than see their fifth birthday, and still-rotting bodies were dug up from graveyards to make more room for the dead. Ireland’s