The Sheila Variations

Bloomsday 2010

Therese and I arrived, books in hand, at the pub where the Bloomsday celebration was being held. Colum McCann was the emcee, and we both were a bit starstruck, although both of us have met him before, on separate occasions. He just won the National Book Award, which is very exciting. He has been emceeing this particular event for 7 years (I was at the very first one!), and he pulls out the big guns, and gets great people to participate in the readings. This was the first year without Frank McCourt attending, so the entire event started with everyone raising a glass to McCourt. The pub has two entrances, a front and a back, and the back entrance goes out into a winding cobblestone alley, with picnic tables placed. It doesn't feel like New York. It feels like Europe. It was threatening to rain all day, and there were times when a great wind came galloping down that concrete canyon, but not a drop fell. We stayed outside the whole time. Therese and I were there early enough that we were alone at our picnic table (although that wouldn't last long.) There was complementary gorgonzola and burgundy (naturally). I recognized a lot of people from other Bloomsday celebrations, most notably the Symphony Space one I went to a couple years back. We had about an hour before the readings started, so we just enjoyed ourselves, and compared our different copies of Ulysses. Everyone who was there had a book on the table in front of them. There were a couple of guys in straw boaters.

Then, at one point, suddenly Colum McCann was at our table, holding a notebook, and said, "Do you girls want to read?" (Meaning: participate in the readings. The way it works is each person gets up and reads a section - most of them are no longer than 5 minutes long). But McCann had obviously got the literati out in force, so we were shocked and befuddled when he asked us, and we stuttered and stammered and looked at each other, but what: we're gonna say No to such a request? We're gonna turn down Colum McCann? We said "Yes, sure, yes ..." And he asked for our names, writing them down, and said, "Pick out a short section - just not Molly, okay?" "Okay." And he left us in a whirlwind of panic and adrenaline, as we flipped feverishly through our books looking for something we wanted to read. "What have we gotten ourselves into ..." I murmured. I immediately turned to the Ithaca section, one of my favorites in the book, thinking of the long water monologue (which is actually included in that excerpt) and which I find hilarious. I thought I could make something funny of it. Okay, fine. I'll do that. I skimmed it like a madwoman, looking for words I might not know, things I might trip over. Oh, and I forgot, before Colum McCann left our table, he said to us, "Make sure you read good now!" You got it, Mr. McCann. No pressure or anything.

Suddenly I saw an old friend, Aedin Moloney, who always reads sections of the Molly monologue throughout the celebration, and the entire thing ends with her reading the last 4 pages of the book. She's an actress, a musician, a great person, and I haven't seen her in years. We have many mutual friends, and I keep missing her, like ships in the night. We did a show together years ago, we played Irish sisters, and it was a crazy and great experience. We were two peas in a pod. I saw her arrive, and then we saw each other, it was great to finally re-connect.

Meanwhile, the place was filling up. An elderly gentleman named Bob sat at our table with us, he had a hardcover copy of Ulysses, and by the end of the day, we were all fast friends. He was terrific. Really interesting, friendly, funny, and loved James Joyce. It was great luck that he sat with us.

There was a microphone and podium set up, under a couple of giant umbrellas (which were eventually removed), and Colum McCann started off with a speech, and then read the opening couple of pages of the book. People were following along in their own copies, or just listening. There was a festive atmosphere. It is strange: to hear voices booming out through the financial district: "Stately plump Buck Mulligan ..." Like some sort of weird political rally.

McCann would introduce each reader, and it appeared that it was up to that person to choose whatever section they liked. There was a great mix. McCann and another guy read a bit from the Circe episode, which of course is written like a play. Once you hear this stuff read out loud, by witty people, it becomes totally apparent how hysterical this book is, something that might be missed if you get bogged down in the language. It is absurd, it is breathlessly ridiculous, it is a big showoffy book, it is filled, end to end, with jokes. What a delight. I should have written down everyone's names, so I could properly attribute their readings, but I was too involved in the moment.

Readings heard:

-- a guy named Seamus read the whole "cat" section of the Calypso episode, and at the "Meow" sections, the entire audience started Meow-ing back.

-- Eilin O'Dea, just off the plane from Ireland to go to Symphony Space, dropped by and did a bit of Molly's monologue (a bit? How about 7 or 8 pages) by heart. She was amazing.

-- Larry Kirwan (from Black 47) was there, beer in hand, and I can't remember which episode he read from [Update: I remember, it was from the Nausicaa episode], and it had to do with religion and sex, and he said beforehand, "This is for all the Catholics present." A cheer went up and down the alley. When he finished the reading, which was quite sexy, as much of Ulysses is, a white-haired woman in the front row (obviously a friend of Larry's) got up and whispered something to him and he then said into the microphone, "She just told me that that reading was better than her vibrator." I am sure she loved having what she whispered to him privately BROADCAST into a microphone through the financial district. Everyone burst into laughter (including the white-haired woman), and people cheered. Let's all cheer for vibrators and James Joyce. It's only 3 o'clock in the afternoon, why not.

-- Two guys got up - one Irish and one from Lancashire - and read from the Ithaca episode (not MY part, though), and it was like a Laurel and Hardy routine. Seriously: that episode can seem so ponderous, because of all of the lists and scientific vocabulary - but that's the joke of it. The answers so outweigh the questions (which usually are prosaic like, "Where?" and "What next?") that the entire thing becomes an exercise in absurdity. Hilarious.

-- A guy got up who was one of Colum McCann's writing students. McCann gave him a glowing introduction: "It's rare that you find a writer who can assert his voice in only three words." He's a writer and a Marine, who said before he started reading (from the Proteus episode), that he took Ulysses with him to Iraq and would read the Proteus episode over and over again, he said it helped give him a perspective on mind and body that he felt he needed while in the middle of a war zone.

-- One guy got up and read from Judge Woolsey's decision, declaring Ulysses NOT obscene and admitting it into the United States in 1934. I know I'm with my own kind when the name "Judge Woolsey" arouses spontaneous applause.

-- An Irish guy named Ned (ubiquitous at this function and others, I've seen him around) sat behind us. He also did a reading, and judging from his commentary behind me, knows most of the book by heart. He arrived a bit late, and sat down, just as one of the readers said the famous line, "The snot green sea. The scrotum tightening sea." and Ned called out, "Ah, snotgreen, it's a luvely color." This is not a crowd where you stand on ceremony. There's a lot of talk-back. It's awesome.

-- One gentleman (so sorry I do not remember his name) wearing a floppy little fishing hat got up and read a long hilarious section of Leopold Bloom's innermost thoughts, and it had to be over 10 pages long, and he had it memorized. I think he glanced at the page once. This was not a rote performance, he wasn't rattling off words he had just memorized - he knew it, he performed it, he embodied it. He was so funny, so great.

-- Tragedy struck. A woman got up and read the section from Ithaca I had been planning to read. PANIC. I barely listened to her reading, unfortunately, because I was frantically pawing through the book looking for another reading. Never count on Plan A. So far, no one had read from the Scylla and Charybdis episode (the one where Stephen discourses on Hamlet in the library), so I chose a brief section from that, hoping no one else would steal my thunder in the meantime. FEAR. PANIC.

-- Overheard: A young hot guy in a hoodie with an Irish accent, holding a Guinness, and saying into his cellphone, "I've been down here for hours. I'm wasted."

-- One of the things that surprised me was that no one read the list of names, which is usually a huge crowd-pleaser. Therese knew exactly what I was talking about, and we both forgot which episode it was from (and I have now forgotten it again) but we flipped through our books looking for it. It is one of those things that is immediately recognizable just from the LOOK of it, because it is a page consisting entirely of a list of names, so it's peppered with capital letters. We were laughing at ourselves as we looked for it, since we both knew what we were looking for, and how fun it was to be with a person who knew what the "list of names" was.

-- Finally, Colum came over to our table and said, "You two are up next - you can go and stand off to the side." We obeyed. Despite our nerves. We stood off to the side, and the wind at that point was huge, whipping the Irish flag off to the side. Rain seemed imminent. As I stood there, looking out at the huge listening rapt crowd, faces of all ages, I suddenly felt very happy to be myself, and to be exactly where I was at that moment in time. Ulysses, as I mentioned, is all tied up with my father, and I miss him very much, and I felt him with me right then. I felt happy that I am in my tradition, that I have embraced it, that I have taken his cues in my own insane way. I wished he had been there.

-- Therese read from the Hades section, the ending of it, and it has one of my favorite bits, chilling and simple:

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time.

It sure does.

-- I loved looking out at all the faces, watching, and listening, books open to the section Therese was reading. I was weirdly proud of the two of us for saying, despite our fear and sense of pressure, "Yes" to Colum McCann. It was such a treat!

-- While Therese was reading, Colum came over to me and said he was afraid it was going to start raining so if I could read something short, that would be great. I showed him what I wanted to read, and then said, "How about if I just do this paragraph?" and he said, "That would be great." He was keeping things moving, man. NOT an easy task. He had to get all of the readings done before the Happy Hour proper commenced, and he had to make sure to leave enough time for the big finale, which was Aedin's reading of the last 4 pages of the book.

-- I was pleased, because mine was the only reading the whole day from Scylla and Charybdis. Every other episode was represented, so I was happy to fill out the day. It is a chapter I love.

-- My turn. Stepped up to the microphone and said, "Let's talk about Shakespeare, shall we?" and I heard a couple of cheers from people who knew where I was going. I love geeks. I chose a section where Stephen talks about adultery in Shakespeare, and betrayal, to bolster up his theory that everyone in every play that Shakespeare wrote is Shakespeare himself. As he says later, "The boy of act one is the mature man of act five." It was so strange and funny and singular, to speak into that mike, and hear my voice booming through the concrete canyons. I felt like Hal Phillip Walker for a moment. I read:

-- Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, and in all the other plays which I have not read.

A beautiful and thought-provoking section, but best part is the last line (the last phrase of the last line, I should say). Stephen is going on and on with his theories, browbeating his friends into submission, and he hasn't even read all of the plays - yet he KNOWS that his theory is true, even in the "other plays which I have not read." I haven't acted in a long time. I got a laugh on the last line, a big laugh, and you will forgive me if I admit that it thrilled and satisfied me, remembering the unbelievable feeling you get when you are onstage, and there's that sudden two-way current of communication open: You communicate, the response comes back loud and clear. Nothing like that feeling on earth. I don't take all the credit, naturally. Joyce wrote the damn thing. That's a funny line. But I suppose a personal moment, of remembering that feeling, that feeling of being in command onstage, was a beautiful rush for me. Thanks, Jimmy.

-- Perhaps my favorite moment of the day was as I walked back to my seat, a red-faced drunken Irishman held his hand out to me and shouted, "WELL DONE."

-- Therese and I, now drinking Guinness, had a private happy moment of self-congratulation for getting through it, for saying Yes, and for being a part of the entire celebration. "That was so cool - wasn't that so cool???"

-- Aedin had been reading parts of Molly's section throughout the day, at intervals, leaving the best for last. Her voice is eloquent, in and of itself, her accent thick and beautiful. Her sense of humor is undeniable, she knows where all the jokes are, and she is able to ride the waves of Molly's stream-of-consciousness with total ease, you never feel her jerking from one section to the next. But it was her reading of the last 4 pages that blew the top of the roof off of this event. There was so much emotion floating around that alley, for me, and for others, and I imagine that it was different for everyone. We all have associations, baggage we bring - to this book. Maybe it's our families, maybe it's memories of childhood, maybe it's about living in America now and missing Ireland ... who knows. It's a big book, it can take all of those associations. Aedin, in that intuitive way she has, spoke right into that space, the vast space of people's own associations ... and clicked into it in a way that was primal and, as one man said afterwards, tears in his eyes, "Transcendent." She started off the last section with a personal story. She plucked the book off the shelf when she was 10 years old and read it straight through. She found it easy and fun. She didn't know what it was, or that it was important, and kind of just fell into it. "I think you should start reading Ulysses when you're young, because a child can absorb so much, you have no idea how much." The next time she read it she was 14 years old, and the Molly section "exploded in my head". Why? "It was my mother. It was myself. It was all women. I recognized it all. This isn't just a woman - this is an Irish woman." And then she began. The last four pages of the book are a slow build, with a million tangents. Molly tries to fall asleep, but her mind keeps wandering. Sometimes it's funny and irrelevant, sometimes it's full of longing, a sudden sharp memory of burying her son, and reliving her relationship with her husband up to that point. And then, about a page and a half before the end, the thing takes a turn. The "Yes" refrain begins, and while what is happening is sexual, obviously, seen in the context of the rest of it, it becomes tragic, beautiful, loving, longing, a cry of pain in a world that has moved on, a cry of bliss in the face of disconnection, a re-imagining of herself as a wife, going back into the past, pushing herself into the future ... Even just describing it doesn't do what goes on in those pages justice. Aedin's performance was so insistent, so moving, so controlled, and so perfect that by the last "paragraph" people had started to spontaneously cry in the audience. Myself included. She pulled it out of us. She didn't emote. She just connected, and there was a groundswell of emotion charging through that alley that had a FEEL, it had a TASTE, it had SUBSTANCE. I glanced around wildly at one point, and saw a little old man holding his hat over his face, his shoulders shaking with sobs. He was embarrassed about crying. No need, sir. You were not alone. That is what Molly's monologue is all about, ultimately. None of us are alone. Even alone in our beds, trying to connect, to ourselves, to our husbands, to our sexual fantasies, even, none of us are alone. It is the most human of passages in the 20th century, and listening to Aedin's phenomenal reading, I had this strange disoriented thought: "Someone wrote this??" (Here's a clip of Aedin reading it at another function.) I've read the thing a million times. But at that moment, it was like I first really heard it. It should be heard rather than read to get its true power.

When she finished, the alley ERUPTED. People stood, screaming, and roaring, clapping, and crying. Again, the noise had a feel, a substance to it, you could feel your ear drums contracting.

We had been there for hours, most of us. The celebration ended on a clarion call for affirmation, for love, for acceptance (of oneself and others), for forgiveness (of oneself and others), and for saying, always, for saying YES.

Rejoyce. It's Bloomsday.

Notes in my copy of Ulysses

On June 15, 1904, young James Joyce sent a note to Nora Barnacle, on June 15, 1904. She was a waitress at Finn's Hotel, a girl from Galway who had moved to Dublin. They had had a chance encounter on the street, where she had wondered aloud if he was Swedish, because of his eyes. When she told him her name, he said something about Ibsen (his inspiration and guiding star as an artist). Nora did not know who Ibsen was but she knew she liked this Jimmy with the blue eyes. He had asked her "out" - which, in Dublin, in those days, meant going for a walk. She had blown him off. He sat in the park waiting. She never showed up. So on June 15, 1904, he sent her this note:

60 Shelbourne Road
I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me -- if you have not forgotten me!

James A. Joyce 15 June 1904

And apparently they went out the next night - June 16, 1904. They took a walk. It's not 100% certain what happened on that walk, although from various comments both of them made, it is clear that something sexual happened. James Joyce's main experience with women at that point was with prostitutes. In Nora, he met his match, his mate. He told Nora later that on that day, June 16, 1904, he became a man. No longer isolated. A couple of months later, he got a job in Europe through the Berlitz School, and she came with him. They fled Ireland together, an unmarried couple, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind them. They had two kids together - Giorgio and Lucia - and were not officially married until 1930. They lived abroad their entire lives together, and were rarely parted from one another, maybe a couple months in that entire time was spent outside of one another's presence. She was the only woman for him. They were not a romantic pair, not at all (just read their "dirty letters" to one another! the early 20th century version of phone sex) but whatever it was that was between them was profound. They both clicked into place. Nora was an uneducated wild girl from Galway, with a tragic failed romance in her past (which James Joyce would use to spectacular effect in 'The Dead' - excerpt here). He was a struggling writer, frustrated and claustrophobic in Ireland, a country he found provincial, prudish, and stifling.

Years later, Joyce would pay tribute to the walk he took through the streets of Dublin with Nora, and what it meant to him, by setting the entire book of Ulysses on that one day: June 16 1904.

Richard Ellmann, in his biography on James Joyce, a highwater mark for biographies in the 20th century:

Several aspects of Joyce's life converge upon June 16, 1904, the day he afterwards chose for the action of Ulysses. It was on that day, or at least during the month of June, that he began to work out his theory that Shakespeare was not prince Hamlet but Hamlet's father, betrayed by his queen with his brother as Shakespeare was -- Joyce thought -- betrayed by Anne Hathaway with his brother. Joyce was at his search for distinguished victims -- Parnell, Christ, himself. Instead of making the artist Shakespeare an avenging hero, he preferred to think of him as a cuckold. Joyce developed the theory with excitement ... He was not yet living at the famous Martello tower at Sandycove, as Ulysses would suggest. On June 15 the McKernans, with whom he had his room, encouraged him to leave until he could pay his rent, and he went to his friends James and Gretta Cousins and asked them to take him in. They hospitably turned over the spare room in their tiny house on the sea's edge at Ballsbridge. After dinner on June 15 the Espositos came to call. Michele Esposito was an accomplished teacher of music who had brought his family, including his two attractive daughters Vera and Bianca, to Ireland several years before. Vera noted in her diary later that Joyce was very quiet and scarcely opened his mouth except to sing, to his own piano accompaniment, Henry VIII's 'Pastime with good companee, I love, and shall until I dee,' and the ballad of 'Turpin Hero'. These he followed with two sentimental songs, 'Love, could I only tell thee' and 'It is not mine to sing the stately grace.' The Esposito girls also sang. They and their father were impressed by Joyce and suggested he call on them. But for two reasons this visit never took place. One was that he offended the Esposito girls, the other that he began to fall in love.

The best part of the whole story is a comment from Nora in one of her letters to James Joyce, 1940:

Well, Jim I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.

Nora exaggerated - she had read the books, although they were not her thing at all - and after his death, when every reporter was hounding her, asking her about Ulysses, she complained, with an insight that should be startling to anyone who underestimates her as some dumb silly woman (and believe me, there are those people out there):

"What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

Additionally, there is this comment from Nora (a most quotable woman). After her husband's death, she was asked what current writers she liked, and her reply was:

"Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."

Here are my long posts on each chapter in Ulysses, which, if you haven't read the book, are a good guide. It's good to have a guide, although you don't need one.

One of the things that people don't get about Ulysses (by that I mean, the people who haven't read it, and yet still maintain some hostile opinion about it) and one of the most important things to remember about the book is that it is not about anything. It is not "important", in any self-conscious way - although it is an extremely self-conscious book (Joyce was one of the most self-conscious of all writers; I don't mean shy or unsure, I mean acutely aware of himself). It is not trying to make a point, it doesn't care about the world at large, it's not taking on "issues" of the day (at least not in any pamphleteering type way - although the book deals with Irish issues, and politics, and education, and sex and religion) - but Joyce didn't narrow anything down. He excludes nothing. It does not illuminate for us the subtext of a giant world war, or revolution, it is not political. It is a "day in the life" and that's pretty much it.

Something that Joyce said about his own work which I found really helpful to keep in mind was that: "With me, the thought is always simple." It should be a mantra for those wanting to read Ulysses for the first time. It is not a complex book, although the structure is highly intricate, and you could spend your entire life trying to unravel it, and understand it. It's a detailed web of references and styles and language clues - but the thought itself behind all of it is never ever complicated or opaque. The thought is always simple.

I want to belong.
I love my wife.
What does it mean to be a man?
What does it mean to be Irish?
What does it mean to be a Jew?
I wish I fit in.
I love music.
I wish I was like everyone else.
I wish my wife loved me more.
I wish my husband loved me more.
Doesn't this beer taste good?

These are the thoughts that make up the book. Joyce makes you work for it, though - he sure as hell does ... but once it is revealed to you, once you open that magic door ... you are never the same again. There are sections of that book that will be with me forever.

So much of Ulysses is tied up, for me, in my father, who was my tutor and mentor when I first read the book. One of the things I got from my dad was to just go easy with the book, don't work too hard, but make sure you try to get into his mindset (which changes from chapter to chapter). My favorite example of my father helping me do this is when I was struggling, desperately, over the first pages of what I now know is the Cyclops episode. Every "episode" in the book has a different style - dictated by an internal list of cues in Joyce's head which is what makes the book so fun - figuring out what the hell he is doing. And the chapters are not helpfully labeled "This is the Cyclops episode", "This is the Lestrygonians episode" - you have to figure it out yourself. It's helpful to have a copy of Homer's epic nearby, it really is. So this new chapter starts, and it's a whole new voice: it's a first person narration but it is obvious that it is not Leopold Bloom speaking ... who the heck is this person? And this new narrator is regaling his friends with a story of what happened earlier, an altercation in a pub between a man known as The Citizen, a crotchety Irish patriot, a bigot, who eventually turns his sights on Leopold Bloom, also in the pub, with an anti-Semitic rage. Bloom is Jewish but he is also Irish. The Citizen is having NONE of that bullshit. But it's not The Citizen who narrates, it's some other guy. He tells his story, and one of the things he always says is in his narration is: "says I". He's telling a story where he was a main player, so the refrain is "says I":

There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause.

Just one example of many. I was completely LOST reading it. I got caught up in looking for the meaning in an intellectual way. The writing itself is not unclear - but I needed to get into Joyce's motivations ... or I would never "get it". I said to my dad, "I have no idea what the hell is going on here." I handed him the book. He looked at the page. He didn't read any of it, just looked at the page itself, and said, handing the book back to me, "Oh, that's the Cyclops episode."

What?? "How can you tell that just by looking at the page? You didn't even read it!"

Dad said, "Look at how many times the letter 'I' is on that page."

I glanced down again, and that was the key, that was the abracadabra: All I could see on the page suddenly was:

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

"I" meaning "eye" meaning "Cyclops".

The clue was right in front of my face, I just needed a bit of a push to "see" it. That's another thing: Ulysses is one of the few books that you can identify just by the LOOK of the words on the page. And once you know the book, you can tell the episode you're in - by how the words LOOK on the page. The Molly episode, with its 40 page runon sentence, and almost no paragraph breaks, doesn't look like anything else. The Sirens episode, with its choppy musical beats, its short phrasing, doesn't look like anything else. And the Cyclops episode is slashed with the letter "I". The Citizen IS the Cyclops - and the one eye of the Cyclops is IN the language. You can SEE it. It's right there.

That's the fun of James Joyce.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

It took James Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. Later, he would joke, when faced with criticism that the book was just too damn big - "I spent seven years writing it. People could at least spend seven years reading it."

His next book was Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) and that took him seventeen years to write.

Boy marched to the beat of his own drummer.

The history of the publication of Ulysses is a book in and of itself.

James and Nora lived in Trieste for 10 years, having children (two of them), not getting married just to spite tradition - although they referred to one another as "husband" and "wife", and living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Joyce was working on Dubliners, which was a struggle. He could not find anyone willing to publish it. Dubliners was eventually published in 1914. He had already been working on it for years. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was published (in serial form) in 1914 and finally brought out as a book in 1916. It had been serialized in the highly influential The Egoist. Around this time, James Joyce was taken under the wing of Ezra Pound (what a shock. Pound was everywhere).

James Joyce had been interested in the plight of the Jews for a long time. Especially as a man living in perpetual exile, country-less, yet always looking "homeward". He felt that there was an affinity between the Jews and the Irish, and he thought it was something to explore. He had considered writing a story along these lines for Dubliners but it didn't end up happening. However, the idea percolated. It ended up being one of the main ideas in the book Ulysses, based, of course, on Homer's epic, but Joyce, with his obsessive tendencies, was the kind of man who saw connections everywhere. Exile, journey, what does "home" mean, where is it? These were questions of great relevance to the Jews, but also to himself, who felt he could never live in Ireland again (and he never did). Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses is a Jew, living in Ireland. Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego, the "star" of Portrait of the Artist as well) is one of the aimless men Ireland is so fond of creating, a man looking for a father figure, a guide. Through their mutual wanderings through the city of Dublin, on June 16, 1904, they eventually cross paths. It is not that a kindred spirit is revealed, not really. They do not connect, or heal, or grow, or become empowered. None of those pat concepts are at work in Ulysses. It is more that it is a meeting of the minds. A realization of the connection between them, but also that such connection is transitory. At the end of the book they go their separate ways.

Joyce wrote:

Ulysses is the epic of two races (Israel - Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book-- blast it!

What was such a big deal about Ulysses? A book where nothing, let's be honest, really happens?

Much of the brou-haha (at least in the literary set) was about the writing itself, a deepening and broadening of the landscape he had explored in Portrait: what is existence really like? What is it like to live, moment to moment?

James Joyce wrote once:

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?

Joyce did not delve into the psychologies of his characters so much, although we get to know Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus better than we even know our best friends through reading Ulysses. Joyce goes behind closed doors. He goes inside the body. Circulation, digestion, sex drive, the splitting of cells ... all of that is going on in his writing, because the book - as well as being an homage to Homer's Odyssey - as well as being set up in a complicated structure, mirroring Homer's work - as well as having colors associated with each episode, and a different writing style for each episode ... it is also, chapter by chapter, a dissection of the human body. The Cyclops chapter, as I mentioned) is the "eye" chapter. But instead of going for obvious symbolism, working in things about vision and color and landscape - Joyce hides his meaning completely. So if you are looking for literal eyes there in the obvious places, you will not find it. Joyce involves the reader in his game like no other writer. One chapter is the stomach chapter. One chapter is the sex organs chapter. And etc. None of this is explicit. There is no guide. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to get into HIS mode when reading the book, and let your OWN mode go. This is why many people were (and are) annoyed by Joyce. But geniuses have always annoyed people. As William Blake famously wrote:

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Crows don't like it when you point that out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about what crows think of them. They need to just keep being eagles.

James Joyce probably wouldn't have thought of it like that. His defenders (like myself) say stuff like that all the time, but Joyce (perhaps disingenuously) really didn't see what the big deal was. He wrote what he wrote because it amused and fascinated him. He wrote only what he could write. Ulysses is one of the most "clever" books ever written, and that can be annoying if you don't like cleverness. But I think the whole thing is a hoot. It's a game, a romp, a puzzle, something to be decoded. That's the fun of it. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't trying to be so, as many of his literary contemporaries were. There was a great shift going on, in general, in the world at that time, and it affected all genres of art. Painters. Architects. Dance was going through a revolution. The past being shuffled off, or at least an attempt being made to, to quote Ezra Pound, "make it new". How much of our language is really ours, and how much of it is inherited? Joyce, as an Irishman, found this to be a personal and volatile issue, something he shared with Yeats. But across the board, artists were looking to each other, to push one another on, to not look BACK, to not try to imitate Tennyson, which had been the style for a generation or so, but to find new forms to express the new world in which they lived.

This was the generation that grew up traveling by horse-and-carriage, and when they died, airplanes were flying across the ocean. The change in psychology was astronomical. Everyone struggled with it in different ways. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams ... World War I (or The Great War) was a shattering experience, leaving Europe in ruins. The struggle of the artist: how can anything I do ever comment on the actual experience around me? There is a great anxiety in the work of the modernists, a fracturing of the CERTAIN. There was no certainty anymore. Einstein's theory was published. The Russian Revolution exploded forth. The work of Freud and Jung made people look differently at themselves, at their motivations and dreams and personalities. Painters went more and more abstract, breaking apart that which is known and understood, into colors, shapes, incoherence. A valid response to a crazy world. James Joyce was a part of all of this, mostly by osmosis. Ezra Pound said, when he first read the work of William Carlos Williams, that he had "become modern all on his own." Perhaps a shock to Pound, who was so at the center of things at that time, pushing writers forward, helping TS Eliot to piece together "The Waste Land", promoting people, bullying editors into publishing new work, etc. William Carlos Williams did not live in Paris and never did. He was a doctor. And yet, the change ... was in the atmosphere. He became modern "all on his own". There were those (like Amy Lowell) who felt they had to be at the center of things, so they moved to Paris, separating themselves from any hint of bourgeois existence. It worked well for many of these people. But it wasn't necessary. James Joyce did live in Paris, but he had been doing his thing from the isolated Trieste for decades. That decade - 1910 - 1920 - saw a massive shift on every level of life, the world surging into a new era, bloody, technological, Freudian, and writers struggled with forms to describe it, react to it. There is nothing comparable today, when technology is so much a part of our lives that we take it for granted. Not so then.

"The Waste Land" was published in 1922 as well. "The Waste Land" and Ulysses coming out the same year? Evidence enough of the upheaval, anxiety and change rupturing the modern world.

Joyce wrote Ulysses not to make a big splash, not to stick it to the censors, not to show lesser writers how it's REALLY done (although all of these things were results) ... he wrote it because he liked it. He found it funny. Engaging. He wrote that way because he couldn't write any other way.

He said (and this may be perhaps my favorite Joyce quote, and it is something to keep in mind should you pick up Ulysses for the first time - it's a clue in HOW to read it):

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

I believe him. We must take his words with a grain of salt (because, remember, he also said: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." Ha!), but I think it is important to keep his words in mind, and if the book is not read in that manner, if it is read in the way you would read any other socially conscious novel or novel that is attempting to shed light on a pressing issue, or any other "hard" book, if you try to read Ulysses in the same way, it will become impenetrable. It will refuse to unlock its secrets.

My advice to those who want to take it on: Just pick it up and start. Don't look for meaning. The book is not about its meaning. It is about the WORDS.

Surrender to the language - because that, after all, is what Joyce is all about - the sound (I am sure this is partly because of how blind he was, his books are so musical, not visual at all) - and the book opens all of its secrets to you. It does not withhold. It does not stand like some snotty barrier written by a pretentious modernist. It is a rollick. A ridiculous romp through the streets of Dublin by human beings who worry, laugh, eat, fart, have fights, think about things, argue, masturbate, chat ... It has NO point. It is not meant to have a point.

Samuel Beckett's wonderful quote in regards to Finnegans Wake is also applicable to Ulysses:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

And THAT is why Joyce is such a big deal. THAT is why the book went off like a bomb throughout the literary world. THAT is why people like T.S. Eliot, no slouch himself, said, "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." James Joyce lived in a world of giants. Hemingway, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pound, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot ... the modernists. He was part of his time, but he went so much further than any of his contemporaries that many of them never quite recovered from the Ulysses juggernaut. The comments of other writers about Ulysses are absolutely marvelous, because they all recognized what has come. They all realized what had happened. The 20th century had arrived. They had all been working towards it, trying to wrestle the 19th century out of existence, bringing new forms to light. And it's not that any of these people failed. But Ulysses was the "star". Ulysses was the death-knell.

T.S. Eliot put it perfectly when he said that Ulysses "killed the 19th century".

James Joyce hadn't set out to "kill the 19th century", but his sensibility - contrarian, sensitive, angry, loving - led him to a form that couldn't help but do so.

Quiet little Trieste ended up being a major crossroads in WWI, changing hands, and Joyce and his family moved to Paris.

Now let me talk about the actual publication of the book.

Into our story now steps Sylvia Beach. Born in Maryland, the daughter of a pastor, as an adult she became a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all. Oh, for a time machine, to go hang out at that place in the 1920s, where Hemingway would stop by, Fitzgerald would browse, Joyce would sneak in and out, Gertrude Stein would bitch and moan (haha) ... and Pound would negotiate with all of them, trying to help them all out and promote his favorites ... they ALL were there. In WWII, when the Nazis invaded Paris, Sylvia Beach had refused to leave, against all advice, because she couldn't abandon her library. Now you see why I love this woman. She hid the library away just in time, and then was captured by the Nazis and put in an internment camp. Most of the people in that camp were eventually sent to Auschwitz. Beach was released, and returned to her bookshop. When Hemingway himself came to liberate Paris, the first place he chose to "liberate" was Shakespeare & Co. There is a photo of him, in his military uniform, standing on a chair in the bookshop, the conquering hero. Shakespeare & Co. never re-opened. The economy was shattered, and Beach couldn't keep things running anymore. But the memory of that place remains to this day.

Here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends in Paris (try to find Joyce - isn't that hysterical?? He doesn't even have a body! That was how he was seen - just a big floating brain with enormous glasses!).

Who was the cartoonist?

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In this vibrant world of literary rivals and giants struggling for the stage, Sylvia Beach played an important role. She had good taste, first of all, she liked the "good" ones, and didn't waste her time with the crows. She also had courage (as we shall see).

When Beach met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". You have to get into the mindset of the censors, as unpleasant an experience as that is. What on earth is "obscene" about Ulysses? Ultimately, the book expresses love. You cannot deny it, you cannot escape from it. It is love. Leopold Bloom, throughout his long long day, is only thinking about his wife Molly, and how much he loves her, and how afraid he is that she is being unfaithful. There is only one woman for him. In the same way that there was only one woman for Joyce. Love, it is love that drags us home after our long journey. Only love. But Joyce did not shy away from the more unsavory aspects of life (and let's remember his comment about the "mystery of the conscious" - that's so so important: he did not, as Proust did, or Woolf did, or some of the other modern writers - delve into psychology and the workings of the subconscious. He did not look at motivations and childhood repression. As I mentioned, Freud changed everything, for good and ill. A revolution in the understanding of the workings of humanity. Whether or not you agree with Freud, and whether or not you think Freud is over-rated is irrelevant. I am talking about the time and place from which Joyce wrote.) But Joyce, unlike Proust, did not explore how memory works, and how the senses trigger thoughts and feelings and entire narratives from our lives. He was much more prosaic. Blunt. He presented man in the most honest manner possible. Leopold Bloom takes a dump, for example. He sits on the toilet after breakfast, and thinks about things, worrying about things, as he goes to the bathroom. Now, this is one of the most human of experiences. Anyone who says they haven't sat on the toilet, pondering their day, and what they are worried about, is lying. But to put that in a book?? What are you, cracked?

There are those who feel that while such things may be 'real', they have no place in literature. Now we're getting into the realm of the censors, who wanted to control what could be shown. It's the same as people nowadays who seem to feel that saying "TMI" is the be-all and end-all of human interaction. Never mind if you're struggling with grief, loss, having a personal struggle, some people shun intimacy in any way, shape or form. (And then they wonder why they are miserable.) I despise the "TMI" trend. I despise it in its surface form and I despise what it represents. There is a reason for it, as there is a reason for all trends. It is a reaction, perhaps, to our world of reality television, and tell-all books, where everyone seems to feel that talking about themselves and their issues is a holy and sacred act. So I get it. But reactions tend to be too extreme and I resist extremes. Besides, "TMI" is nothing new. There have always been those who really DON'T want to know you, who really DON'T want the truth when they ask "How are you?" There is such a thing as "over-sharing", but I'm not really talking about that. I am talking about something far more insidious. It has been going on for as long as human beings have been in contact with one another. There is a shying away from real experience of one another. Of course. Because if you allow yourself to experience what it is like for another person, then that might mean you might have compassion for them, or empathy, or you might have a sense of recognition, an awareness of the universal: "Yes, I do that, too!" Many people do not want to be shaken out of their selves like that. The first response for many, to some demand for connection, or understanding, is to batton down the hatches, draw the line in the sand, and say, "Nope. Nope. That's YOU, that's not ME."

People like that, powerful though they may be in certain sections of society, will always be on the wrong side of history. Forward motion, always has, at its core, an examination of motivation, of meaning, of, to quote Mike Nichols, "what is this REALLY like?" (He says that when he sits down to film any scene, of any event, that is his first question: "what is this REALLY like?") If you are so busy crowing "TMI" at every revelation of character and story around you, you will never move forward. You will be stuck, like a fly drowned in amber.

Joyce does not let the reader off the hook. If you insist on insisting, "That's YOU, not ME", then Ulysses will be a terribly confronting book. Joyce, above all else, was a humanist, although his cynicism and rage were titanic. That's what The Dead (excerpt here), with its final revelation of connection and love in the last four paragraphs, is all about. I have said it before: Without The Dead, The Dubliners would be merely a bitchy gossipy excavation of a modern-day city. Yes, with some good writing and memorable scenes, but it would be, essentially, a cynical book, and cynical books usually do not outlast their own time. With The Dead, in the last four paragraphs, Joyce rises up. If you only read the other stories, you might presume that Joyce despised his fellow man. His eye is excruciatingly honest. He is brutal. Who would ever have suspected that in the last story of the collection, Joyce would pull such a hat-trick, and say, essentially, "You think you know me. You do not. You think all I feel is anger. I do not. My anger comes from grief and loss. And right now, all I feel is love." If you read the book from beginning to end, The Dead, no matter that you know its coming, always comes as a surprise. Nothing in the book before that story prepares you for it. Gabriel realizes, as he watches his wife sleep, that he loves her, and yet that he has never really known her. And in that realization, his consciousness rises up and up, until he is looking down on the snowy landscape, on all of Ireland ... and he, for the first time, feels connected to life, because of his experience of heartbreak. He feels connected not just to all mankind, but also to all of the "shades", all of those people who have gone before.

The irony of all of this is that Joyce was one of the most isolated of beings, although not melancholy or a downer or any of that. He wasn't a tortured artist. He was not bohemian in the slightest. He was rather old-fashioned, believe it or not, totally bourgeois, a family man, who had dinner every night with Nora and his kids and that was that. There is no scandal about Joyce. He didn't sleep with every woman in Paris. He didn't experiment with free love. Yes, he lived in sin for 30 years before tying the knot, but he was faithful to Nora. He wasn't a big socializer. He was a big drinker, but everyone was then. He wasn't dancing in fountains like F. Scott Fitzgerald was, and cheering as his wife did a jig on the table showing her knickers. He was rather conventional. That's the shocker.

Additionally, there is a tremendous self-consciousness in his books (which I mentioned earlier). He can ONLY write from his own life. He was not an "inventor". He did not make up characters, and devise complicated plots. He did not write one standard novel. It was all self self self self self. I truly believe that you MUST be a genius in order to only focus on self. (Oscar Wilde said something similar, after reading his friend Andre Gide's novel, which I haven't read, but which Wilde was not impressed with. He said, "In order to be an Egotist, one must first have an Ego." Ouch. This is similar to Blake's comment mentioned earlier. Crows trying to be eagles always give themselves away. Only a genius can only focus on Self, and get away with it.) The memoir-trend in publishing today proves that, in my mind. There are very few good ones out there, very few stories worth telling ... the thing that elevates one memoir over another is, of course, the writing style ... If you're not a good writer then nobody cares that your mama locked you in a closet and your papa couldn't put down the whiskey. Angela's Ashes was such a phenomenal success because of McCourt's writing. You write that same story without McCourt's voice and you'd want to vomit. I know that there are folks in Limerick, especially, who already want to vomit when reading McCourt's book - but that just goes to show you that you can never please everybody.

Ulysses picked up where Portrait left off. As Portrait comes to a close, the traditional narrative voice breaks down, leaving us only with Stephen Dedalus' journal entries. There is no more voice outside the "I". Joyce has abandoned the traditional narrator. Dedalus will now take over. We are inside experience, as opposed to looking on. In the third episode in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus takes a walk on the beach. We learned in the first chapter that he had broken his glasses. This fact is mentioned only once in the entire 800 page book, but we are meant to remember it. In the third chapter, during his walk on the beach, sans glasses ... the experiences come at him through a vague impression of colors and sounds. If you somehow missed that he has no glasses, and this episode is told from the perspective of someone who can't see, then you might not know what the hell is going on. At one point:

The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.

As someone who needs her glasses, I can say that that image is just just right. When I have been stranded without glasses, it is as though sounds "run towards" me ... It is not the DOG running at Dedalus, it is its BARK. Sound before vision.

Perhaps now it seems obvious, or perhaps now it seems like everyone tries to write in this subjective manner. But that's only because Joyce did it first.

All of this made Ulysses a tough sell to publishers, not even counting the bowel movements, and penises, and the evening in "Nighttown" (Dublin's red-light district) and Molly Bloom's long 40 page run-on sentence that closes the book, full of farts and menstruation and masturbation. But also, please, let us not forget, that it is some of the most beautiful writing in the English language. Joyce said he wanted to end the book with "the most positive word in the English language" - and that is one of the things I think is so important to get about Joyce, whose reputation precedes him, making him seem all top-heavy and serious, and that is all well and good, I am personally pleased that Joyce was not a "forgotten genius", or that his work suffered in obscurity until some academic rescued it in the 1950s, but that top-heaviness is really not appropriate for who the man actually was. The man loved life, he loved white wine, he loved his wife and kids, he loved music (he had almost gone on to a singing career), he even loved Ireland. He was not nihilistic in his outlook at all. He was not depressed. He is one of the great humanists of our age. So, here's Molly Bloom, center stage now, closing out the book, in her declamation of positivity, of affirmation, of love and life:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another 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.

Read it out loud. It becomes apparent what she is doing immediately. While there may be a prurient aspect to this, and it was certainly seen that way by the censors, in another light it can be seen as this: Sex is the ultimate in connection. Even when we have sex with ourselves. Sex is not dirty, sex is nothing to be ashamed of. One of the reasons Joyce felt he could not live in Ireland with Nora was that the attitudes towards sex were so prudish, the country was so priest-ridden, that the people couldn't "touch one another". It was a lonely place. Here, he shows his cards, here, in Molly's monologue, he tips his hand for us and shows us what he is really about. And, fascinatingly, he puts it in the mouth of the woman, the female character everyone has been talking about for the entire book, whom we have not met yet. Here she is, in bed, yearning for her husband, and going off into fantasy. This is not dirty. This is the stuff that makes the world go round, that makes life, which can be a bit of a drag, worth living.

Brings me to tears every time.

And ... it's everywhere in my life. Even ...

... at the gym.

And here is Exhibit B, a T-shirt worn by my brother:

Here is my brother's post on Ulysses.

Someone had suggested that Marilyn Monroe work on Molly Bloom's section of the book as a monologue, perhaps at the Actors Studio. I love this photo, because, while it may be posed, she is clearly reading the end of the book, Molly Bloom's part of it. And Molly, with her earthy sexiness and romantic nature, would have been very interesting for Monroe to tackle.

The book was a bomb waiting to go off. No one would touch it. It was this project everyone was waiting for, but everyone also had a sense that it would cause lots of problems, in terms of censorship. Pound had arranged for some excerpts to be published and that was the start of it. The controversy had begun before the book had even been published.

But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. She would publish it herself. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what the repercussions could be. It was an act of courage. She wrote to her sister in 1921:

"‘Ulysses’ is going to make my place famous."

Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it. On February 2, 1922.

I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922. -- Sylvia Beach

And the shit hit the fan.

Nora Tully describes it thus:

The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once".

Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned everywhere - Ireland, America - everybody was talking about it, but who had actually read it? The first edition was only 1000 copies! You couldn't get the book anywhere. Additionally, you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - so there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet that you could get a copy of Ulysses was at Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, other writers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.

Here is a copy of Peggy Guggenheim's urgent order-form, sent to Sylvia Beach:

Imagine you are dying to read the book. Imagine you can't get it anywhere. Imagine that it is illegal to smuggle it back into the United States. Imagine the frenzy. You can see it in Guggeinheim's writing, can't you?

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had supported Joyce financially for years (at Pound's insistence) also arranged for another edition to be published by The Egoist press. She also arranged for them to be shipped to the United States, but they were seized by the customs officials. In 1923, John Rodker, through The Egoist again, arranged for a small printing of the book, but these were burned by English customs officials. In 1924, Shakespeare & Co., a small outfit really, and not set up to handle the demand, brought out another small printing.

Extraordinary.

Eventually, as the controversy died down, Joyce ended up going with another publisher, which left Beach bereft financially. She already had suffered as a consequence of taking the risk to publish Ulysses. She was hounded by the police, by the censors ... so although Joyce really did need to move on, to a publisher who could handle his stardom, Beach was the first. Beach was the pioneer. Amazing woman.

Meanwhile, the comments from people who had actually read it were pouring in. This went on for years. You could read it in Europe, but America had declared it obscene, and would not allow it to arrive on its shores.

Finally, on August 7, 1934, over 10 years after its first publication by little Sylvia Beach and her little Shakespeare & Co. - a far-seeing and open-minded US Court of Appeals judge, Judge John Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and could be admitted into the United States.

Here's what the first American edition of that book looked like:

Morris L. Ernst, counsel for Random House - who successfully defended the book against obscenity charges in 1933-34 - wrote in his foreward to the 1934 edition:

It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Judge Woolsey's decision. For decades the censors have fought to emasculate literature. They have tried to set up the sensibilities of the prudery-ridden as a criterion for society, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.

Here is Judge Woolsey's decision in its entirety, it's a masterpiece of its kind. It's long, but don't let that fool you. Not only is it an important legal decision, but it is an acutely sensitive analysis of the book itself.

United States Discrict Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A. 110-59

December 6, 1933

On cross motions for a decree in a libel of confiscation, supplemented by a stipulation -- hereinafter described -- brought by the United States against the book "Ulysses" by James Joyce, under Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305, on the ground that the book is obscene within the meaning of that Section, and, hence, is not importable into the United States, but is subject to seizure, forfeiture and confiscation and destruction.

United States Attorney -- by Samuel C. Coleman, Esq., and Nicholas Atlas, Esq., of counsel -- for the United States, in support of motion for a decree of forfeiture, and in opposition to motion for a decree dismissing the libel.

Messrs. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, -- by Morris L. Ernst, Esq., and Alexander Lindey, Esq., of counsel -- attorneys for claimant Random House, Inc., in support of motion for a decree dismissing the libel, and in opposition to a motion for a decree of forfeiture.

WOOLSEY, J:
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.

1. 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", 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 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 for the confiscation of books such as this. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 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.

5. 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 real 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.

6. 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, Section 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; United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, 528; and compare Dysart v. United States, 272 U.S. 655, 657; Swearingen v. United States 151 U.S. 446, 450; United States v. Dennett, 39 F. (2d) 564, 568 (C.C.A. 2); People v. Wendling, 258 N.Y. 451, 453.

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 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.

JOHN M. WOOLSEY
United States District Judge

Joyce heard of the decision and replied:

Thus one half of the English speaking world surrenders. The other half will follow ... And Ireland 1,000 years hence.

The comments of other great writers, Joyce's contemporaries, on this book are of great interest to me. The responses run the gamut from disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... but whatever the response, the only emotion you will NOT find is indifference.

The 19th century was certainly ready to be killed, and there were legions of artists who hacked away at it, but it took a nearly-blind perpetually-broke Irishman-in-exile, with his wife and two kids in tow, to finish the job.

Yeats (an early champion of Joyce) had this as his first response on reading Ulysses: "A mad book!"

Then later, as he let the book percolate, Yeats corrected himself: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

Hart Crane said: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, he took it personally, he did not like what it revealed - about man, about Irish men, about the life of Ireland, but he grappled with the implications in an honest way: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."

The great Stefan Zweig on meeting Joyce, and the "meteor" of Ulysses:

"He was inclined to be testy, and I believe that just that irritation produced the power for his inner turmoil and productivity. His resentment against Dublin, against England, against particular persons became converted into dynamic energy and actually found release only in literary creation. But he seemed fond of his own asperity; I never saw him laugh or show high spirits. He always made the impression of a compact, somber force and when I saw him on the street, his thin lips pressed tightly together, always walking rapidly as if heading for a definite objective, I sensed the defensive, the inner isolation of his being even more positively than in our talks. It failed to astonish me when I later learned that just this man had written the most solitary, the least affined work -- meteor-like in its introduction to the world of our time."

T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"

John Banville, who has written a bit about Joyce, and how Irish writers get fed up with trying to struggle out from under his shadow:

Ulysses is not mainstream, nor was it ever meant to be. When people claim Joyce had his eye on posterity, that is true, but it was intellectual posterity he was after, not mass approval.

T.S. Eliot again: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."

Edmund Wilson wrote of it:

The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.

Carlos Fuentes wrote:

That James Joyce is indeed a black Irishman, wreaking a vengeance, even wilder than the I.R.A.'s, on the English language from within, invading the territory of its sanitary ego-presumptions with a flood of impure, dark languages flowing from the damned up sources of collective speech, savagely drowning the ego of the traditional speaker and depositing the property of words in everybody, in the total human community of those who speak and have spoken and shall speak.

Edmund Wilson also wrote:

Yet for all its appalling longeurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."

Carl Jung read the book and wrote Joyce a rather extraordinary letter:

Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung

Joyce was very proud of this letter and would read it out loud to guests in his house. Nora would snort at the end, "Jimmy knows nothin' about women!"

Friend Oliver St. John Gogarty wrote of Joyce's earlier years:

Looking back, there was something uncanny in his certainty, which he had more than any other writer I have ever known, that he would one day be famous. It was more than mere wishful thinking. It gocerned all his attitudes to his compatriots and accounts for what many referred to as his arrogance. He was never really arrogant, but seemed to have a curious sense of his own powers and wouldn't tolerate anyone who didn't really appreciate his work.

Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter about having Joyce over to meet her and her usband:

"Joyce was rather ... difficile. I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses -- no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. I've read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry [Mansfield's husband] and Joyce simply sailed out of my depth. I felt almost stupefied. It's absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. It's almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geologic standpoint or -- oh, I don't know!"

The most humorous part of this is that Joyce said, after meeting Katherine and her husband:

"Mrs. Murry understood the book better than her husband."

Henry Miller wrote:

Endowed with a Rableaisian ability for word invention, embittered by the domination of a church for which his intellect had no use, harassed by the lack of understanding on the part of family and friends, obsessed by theparental image against which he vainly rebels, Joyce has been seeking escape in the erection of a fortress composed of meaningless verbiage. His language is a ferocious masturbation carried on in fourteen tongues.

George Moore, another Irish writer, wrote:

"Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That's not art, it's like trying to copy the London Directory."

Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:

"Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."

Wyndham Lewis wrote:

But on the purely personal side, Joyce possesses a good deal of the intolerant arrogance of the dominie, veiled with an elaborate decency beneath the formal calm of the Jesuit, left over as a handy property from his early years of catholic romance -- of that Irish variety that is so English that it seems stranger to a continental almost than its English protestant counterpart.

Gertrude Stein wrote:

"Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day."

Joyce heard what Stein wrote, thought about it, and said, "I hate intellectual women."

George Bernard Shaw again:

"I have read several fragments of Ulysses ... It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity...It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject."

Ezra Pound said:

"Joyce -- pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats' -- Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses."

Frank McCourt wrote:

Look! Ulysses is more than a book. It's an event -- and that upsets purists, but who's stopping them from retiring to quiet places for an orgy of textual analysis?... Joyce's work has liberated many an artist while his life stands as a lesson for all of us. He suffered greatly: the growing failure of his eyes, the growing madness of his daughter. All his days he skirmished for pennies and fought pitched battles for his art. He was a family man, fiercely tribal, and we must not forget he was driven by love.

Did he love Ireland? As the squirrel loves the nut.

Did he love Catholicism? Imagine his work without it.

William Carlos Williams wrote (echoing what many of Joyce's contemporaries felt):

"Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least."

E.M. Forster wrote:

"Perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day."

Dr. Joseph Collins reviewed "Ulysses" in The New York Times and wrote:

Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky ... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.

Hart Crane, who had totally lost his head about the book, wrote:

"The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek ... It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses."

Edna O'Brien wrote:

To call this man angry is too temperate a word, he was volcanic.

Ford Madox Ford wrote:

"For myself then, the pleasure -- the very great pleasure -- that I get from going through the sentences of Mr. Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose."

William Faulkner wrote:

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote:

Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce's champion game.

That's a drawing by Guy Davenport, entitled "Joyce Writing a Sentence".

My father gave me his treasured and rare copy of Ulysses - part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you pick it up. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it - which has on the spine: ULYSSES - PARIS, 1924.

Every page has something of interest on it. There is a sticker on the first page - stamped with the personal imprint of the couple who had bought the book (my father, naturally, knew everything about them). The copyright page is amazing. First of all, it lists all of the controversial editions that had gone before ... 500 copies burned, etc. And to see the legendary "Shakespeare & Co.", in print, signing its name, so to speak, to the book, bravely putting it out again, knowing what will happen to their small operation ... It's just something that makes me feel humble, awed, and proud that I am aware that such people existed.

My copy of the book is not one that I will take out and read. It is too fragile.

But it is now my most prized possession, and I do take it out sometimes, to flip through the pages, looking for my favorite parts (the conversation about Shakespeare in the library is my favorite section), and reveling in the feel of the pages, their soft fragility, the print on the page showing its indent. Ulysses is so wrapped up in my father (I read it for the first time and basically called him every other day to get tips - "what the hell is going on HERE?") that it cannot be separated out. Each page resonates with some tidbit from my father, some explication, or biographical detail of all of the names that show up in Joyce's book.

I took some photos of this gift from my father. They are below.

The last photo has a framed picture of my dad in the background, standing by Yeats' grave. That was not deliberate. I did not consciously place the framed photo in the frame. It's just that everywhere in my apartment that you look you will see evidence of my heritage, my family, my inheritance.

My father taught us well.

According to Eva Joyce, James Joyce's sister:

His last words were, 'Does nobody understand?' -- and I'm afraid that's what none of us did -- understand him.

Maybe we can try now.

Joyce wrote:

I'd like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.

And lastly, Nora, Joyce's lifetime companion and wife, said:

I don't know whether or not my husband is a genius, but I'm sure of one thing, there is no one like him.

"‘Ulysses’ is going to make my place famous." - Sylvia Beach, 1921

And indeed it did.

I'm in heaven these days due to the recent publication of The Letters of Sylvia Beach, which I have not read yet, but it means that Sylvia Beach is all over the place right now. It's wonderful! It's wonderful to see her name everywhere. Naturally this means that Joyce's name is everywhere, too, so consider me thrilled.

Here is a review of the letters, which makes me drool to get my hands on a copy. This is all well-trod ground for me, having read many biographies of Joyce (and other literary giants of the day), where she plays a prominent role. But there's something about reading someone's letters ... the un-cleaned-up un-edited thought process and syntax revealed. Relationships made clear, without an editorial voice inserting itself. For example:

More and better literary gossip is spilled in Beach’s 1959 memoir, but these letters have tart moments on nearly every page. Beach introduced Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Joyce, and knew everyone. She describes a reading in her bookstore, given by Hemingway and Stephen Spender, during which beer and whiskey were “displayed on the table in front of the boys, of which they were partaking freely.” The sight of this made Joyce stand up and leave. It “made him too thirsty,” she writes, “to stand it any longer.” Beach, a popular giver of dinner parties and a bohemian cult hero, was unpretentious. Inviting the writer Bryher to a reception, she wrote: “You know it won’t be at all formal, never is in our house, and people don’t dress up here. I never wear an evening gown no matter what they invite me too — haint got none.”

Go read the whole thing.

"because no voice can hold out over the brutalities of life without breaking"

Awesome: Djuna Barnes's profile of James Joyce for Vanity Fair in 1922. It's a PDF file. Ulysses was published in February, 1922, and was already running into trouble with censorship. It would be over 10 years before the United States (Judge Woolsey presiding) deemed the book to be "not obscene" and would allow Ulysses to come to America. But Barnes's profile is before that long long fight, although the harbingers of it were already present. This is fascinating stuff. It's a "portrait of the artist" just on the cusp of the typhoon he had unleashed. It is in this interview that he says one of my favorite quotes from him about Ulysses, and it's a quote that many people seem to have a problem with, or they assume he is being disingenuous with it:

The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book - or worse they may take it some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

It's my view that he is exaggerating to make a point. He is not lying. He is not being mock-naive. He is on the level. It is my view that while Ulysses obviously has some serious moments and takes on serious themes (infidelity, Irish history, Shakespeare, sex, life itself) - it is not at all a "serious" book. It has no ulterior motives. It does not want to SCHOOL you. It really does have no moral. It is not like any other book. Joyce wrote it because he was obsessed by it, and it was the only book he could write at that particular time. He said that again and again. It took him 7 years to write it. There were many moments during that time when he felt like he was drowning, being pulled down by his own book. He said:

The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book-- blast it!

So I believe what he says to Barnes. I knew of that quote when I read Ulysses for the first time and it (along with my Dad) helped keep me on track. It took the edge off of this book with the giant reputation. Yes, it has a giant reputation. So does Hamlet. But when you sit down to actually read the thing, you start to feel the nuts and bolts of it, how it works, and instead of being serious and solemn and "important", it feels, actually, rather ridiculous. In a good way. The whole book is ridiculous. Looking for "what it means" certainly diminishes the book. There is no meaning. If you tell the plot: a young Irishman and a middle-aged cuckolded Jew wander the streets of Dublin for 800 pages, and only meet near the end, and they get drunk and go to a brothel, and then walk home, taking time to stop and urinate in the garden ... Oh, and it all takes place on one day ... it sounds like nothing. And it IS nothing. The book is not about anything: its story, its narrative, its "events". It's about the language. And through the sometimes difficult language (but remember, Joyce said: "with me, the thought is always simple" - and this is 100% true. He is not an abstract man in the SLIGHTEST. He's Irish. Abstraction is not one of their strong suits), you get the characters, you get the setting, you get the "problems" each one has ... but if you see the language as a "barrier" to the "meaning", you are going to have a problem. As Samuel Beckett wrote about Finnegans Wake (and it applies to Ulysses as well):

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

Joyce was not concerned with story. He did not create characters. He wrote the people he knew. His protagonist is his alter ego (Stephen Dedalus), and he only wrote books that took place in Ireland. He didn't INVENT anything. He got the "plot" of Ulysses from the "plot" of Homer's epic. His concerns were elsewhere. He wanted to attempt to "describe" (not explain, but describe) what it felt like to live. All the sensations, feelings, urges (hunger, bodily functions, sex) - palpitating and pulsing through a human being, at all times, at strange times. You walk down the street on a bright morning and suddenly, out of nowhere, you are dying to fuck someone. The urge passes (unless you have no impulse control), and then you go into a bookstore to browse, and then suddenly, your stomach growls, and you realize, "Huh. Time for a snack." This is prosaic stuff, people, but nobody had attempted to describe life at this level. Because why would they want to, some critics would ask. That's a valid point. But it's somewhat irrelevant. JOYCE wanted to. And as a writer, he only did what he wanted to do. He wished, often, that he could write other types of books - and his wife, looking at one of the pages of Finnegans Wake lying on his desk, asked him, "Why can't you write books that people would want to read?" Of course, they did want to read them, but her point is also valid. Accessibility is not what Joyce was ever about. Not because he was obnoxious (although he could be that as well, from time to time), and wanted to be "cleverer than you" - but because he only wrote what he felt like writing. And Ulysses was what he felt like writing at the time. Then, 17 years later, came his next book, Finnegans Wake, nothing from him at all in the in-between years. This was a man who followed his own star. It was a lonely existence, certainly, although he found his lifelong companion, and always had his kids around him - but he wasn't the type of writer who hung out with other writers, reveling in competition and comparing notes. He was solitary.

I loved his comment on Oscar Wilde:

[Oscar Wilde] studied the Restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening.

Recently we had a conversation here about whether or not Joyce had any opinions on Oscar Wilde. As so often happens, the second I start wondering about things, suddenly answers start coming - answers that were there all along, I just wasn't looking for them. Like learning a new word and suddenly you start hearing it everywhere.

Djuna Barnes is, of course, a marvelous writer herself, and the piece is not to be missed.

“Already the publicity is beginning, and swarms of people visit the shop on hearing the news." - Letter from Sylvia Beach to her sister

("the news" being the publication of Ulysses.)

Recently it was Sylvia Beach's birthday, and this coming month will see the publication of The Letters of Sylvia Beach, which should be a bit of a treasure-trove, considering the people she interacted with daily (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce ... you know, minor figures like those guys). Naturally, Sylvia Beach is most known for her publication of Ulysses (through the auspices of her bookstore/publishing company Shakespeare & Co.) - which turned her into a notorious world-famous woman. The journey of Ulysses (the book, I mean) is well-known, and Beach was at the forefront of that important battle, concerning censorship and free speech. Relations with Joyce eventually broke down, and Beach, who was, essentially, running a very small-time operation, could not keep up with the demands.

James Campbell reviews the Letters of Sylvia Beach for the TLS, and seems frustrated with the editing thereof, the sketchy shorthand footnotes, the blanks not filled in for the lay reader. The events of Sylvia Beach's life are fascinating in and of themselves (who WAS this woman??), and I mainly know her through her intersections with the literary giants of the day. I love that Campbell calls her the "midwife of Modernism". I look forward to hearing her voice in these letters.

Here is a really interesting anecdote (which gives you some background of just ONE aspect of her life - and, of course, of course, James Joyce is peripherally involved):

When the Nazis entered Paris, Beach, who had lately made a visit home to the United States where she underwent a hysterectomy (she was also “knocked out by headaches” all her life), declined to leave rue de l’Odéon a second time. In her memoir, she told the almost too-cinematic story of how a “high-ranking German officer” entered her shop one day and, “speaking perfect English”, asked to buy the single copy of Finnegans Wake (published by Faber and Faber) displayed in the window. Beach told him it was not for sale, and duly removed it.

A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop. Where was Finnegans Wake? I had put it away. Fairly trembling with rage, he said, “We’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.” “All right.” He drove off.

Within a few hours, she had boxed up the stock, removed the sign and painted over the patron’s name. The Germans did not get Finnegans Wake, but they did get Beach. She spent six months in an internment camp at Vittel, alongside Jewish prisoners who would later be removed to Auschwitz.

I loved this, too: Recently, long-time commenter Bryan and I had a conversation about Joyce (in the comments section here). It had to do with Joyce's poetry and influences. Bryan (clearly) knows a lot about this subject, and I wondered if there was any known connection between Joyce and Oscar Wilde? Did Joyce say anything about Wilde? Refer to him at all? Bryan came up with a couple of great examples (again, see that old post). So I was thrilled to read that Sylvia Beach wrote of her first meeting with James Joyce in her memoirs - he walked into her bookshop (Shakespeare & Co.) in Paris. She describes his behavior thus:

He stepped into my bookshop . . . he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde. Then he sat down beside my table.

Marvelous. I wonder what he was thinking.

Look forward to reading her letters. The midwife of Modernism, indeed!

A guide through June 16, 1904

A companion piece, I suppose, to my recent post about my Ulysses playing cards:

I find posts like this to be very gratifying. Blogger Deepan Joshi calls me his "guide" for Joyce's Ulysses and writes, after reading all of my posts about it:

My guide has encouraged me with her simple explanation and after years I have finally mustered the courage to get past ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…’ and hopefully would reach the 40-page run-on sentence of Molly Bloom, lying in bed.

My work here is done. When I wrote all of those essays about each chapter in Ulysses, I did it for myself, certainly, because I enjoy talking about the book, and thinking about the book. I also, obviously, like to share what I'm thinking about things (hence: the blog). But I also hoped that my writing may remove some of the mystique surrounding Ulysses (critics can be quite annoying about the book, making it seem like it is only for specialists, and that could not be farther from the truth), and might encourage someone to pick up the book and give it a go.

It can be opaque. Yes. I had a guide. My father. And Anthony Burgess, too, but mostly my father. I could call him up and say, "Dad. WTF?" and I would read him a passage and he would start explaining it. My favorite example is how my dad, in one comment, cracked open the Cyclops episode for me. I could understand the LANGUAGE of the damn episode just fine (which is more than I can say for the Oxen of the Sun episode), but I didn't know WHY. I didn't know what was going on, who was the new narrator, why why why why. Remember what Joyce said: "With me, the thought is always simple." But sometimes to get to that thought is a bit of a journey (which is part of the fun of the book).

I loved reading Joshi's thoughts about Ulysses, and so thrilled that my posts would have traveled out there into cyberspace, and encouraged someone to continue on.

With a book like Ulysses, it is worth it. Believe me. No other book like it.

Ulysses playing cards

I bought these a while back, and find great pleasure in flipping through them, from time to time. Ulysses playing cards. They're quite beautiful and evocative, and pry open the famous episodes of the book. The back of each card is black with white lettering, and a collage of words found in Joyce's book. The other side are typical playing cards, nothing out of the ordinary, the suits are the same, the amount of cards - you could play Solitaire with these - but each card is different, each card represents a theme/object/character in Ulysses.

If you're familiar with the book, then you will have a response to such words as "kidneys", "ashplant", "rhododendrons" - these are all here. And I love the two Joker cards as well. Of course it would be those two on those two cards. Remember Joyce's statement about Ulysses: "The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it."

"Falling as in the silence falleth now / Dusk from the air."

James Joyce's poem "Tutto è Sciolto" appeared in the May, 1917 issue of Poetry.

Beautiful. That line I excerpted calls to mind the final four paragraphs of The Dead.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The word "falling" appears 7 times there. On the face of it, it seems like that would be WAY too much. It breaks all the rules. But that's why it is so brilliant.

And there it is again in the poem. Falling. Falleth.

Today in history: March 14, 1887

Sylvia Beach, who is responsible for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would touch it, was born on this day, in 1887.

Here is a photo of Sylvia and Jimmy:

Sylvia said of Joyce: "As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore."

(Anyone who can say that he has "never met a bore" is a genius of the human spirit.)

A fascinating woman: born in Maryland, and as an adult a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Let's see - here are a couple of the names in Paris at that time: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Joyce ... (GOD for a time machine!) And so Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all.

When she met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". The funny thing about all of this is that Joyce said later, "The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it."

But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book, which was already highly controversial. It was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it.

And the shit hit the fan.

Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned (Joyce said later, "I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.") everybody was talking about it, who had actually read it? - you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - and there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet you could get a copy of Ulysses was through Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.

The comments of other great writers on this book are, of course, great interest to me. They run the gamut of disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... and I love it, too, that Yeats (an early supporter of Joyce) changed his mind. His first response on reading it? "A mad book!"

Then later, as it percolated, Yeats said: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

Hart Crane had this to say (or shout): "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, and its view of Ireland - so much so that it tormented him a bit. He saw it as an indictment (and, in a way, it was). He said, however: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."

T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?" And also - this quote really touches me, because as a writer, Eliot wasn't half-bad himself: "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." And lastly (and I think this pretty much gets at the root of what was so disturbing to Eliot): "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."

Goose bumps.

Edmund Wilson wrote of it:

The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.

Wilson also wrote:

"Yet for all its appalling longeurs, "Ulysses" is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. "Ulysses" has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."

And here is the lady who first made this "epic of the age" available to the world, at great financial and personal risk:

Joyce eventually moved to another publisher - for later editions - which left Beach financially stranded (along with the Great Depression which really hit Shakespeare & Co. hard.) But Beach had rich influential literary friends - many of whom came to her rescue during this difficult time. Famous writers did readings at Shakespeare & Co., admission was charged, people paid subscription fees - and in this way the bookstore made it through. Beach died in 1962. She wrote a memoir called Shakespeare and Company (which I haven't read - my dad said it's okay, not great, but okay) - and is widely revered for her courageous independent move to publish Ulysses - the book that T.S. Eliot said "destroyed the 19th century".

She said:

I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922.

Finnegans Wake corrected

I can't believe I am only hearing of this now, but a new "corrected" version of Finnegans Wake is set to be published next week. The Irish Times has the story. Hmmmm. Isn't the syntactical oddness of the language actually the point? Is this akin bossy editors who take it upon themselves to either modernize Shakespeare, or make his punctuation intelligible to a modern audience (adding things like exclamation points, which Shakespeare rarely wrote). A nervousness about the chaos of the work, and a need to "correct" that which is actually genius, in all its chaos? I know that Joyce labored over Finnegans Wake for 17 years. There is a story told by a friend of his who watched Joyce, maybe 16 years into the thing, laboring over a draft of Finnegans Wake which had come back from the publishers. Joyce huddled over the mass of pages, working on it, and his friend, baffled, asked him what on earth he could possibly be correcting. Joyce replied, "I'm adding commas."

The "correction" listed in The Irish Times is basically one word that is removed: "and". And while I applaud geekery in any form, I am not sure that here you can top Joyce, and top how deeply JOYCE thought about all of these things. I will probably have to buy the corrected Finnegans Wake, because I will not be able to help myself, but sometimes I think that the sheer difficulty of a certain work, its scope, power, and accomplishment, can end up baffling critics unnecessarily - they are looking for SENSE, perhaps, where there is none. The "there" is already THERE, but because we are only mortal, and prone to things like envy and confusion, we want to try to wrestle the work into a form that WE can understand. This is certainly true of some of the editions of Shakespeare which, if you compare it to the text in the First Folio, you realize just how much "correcting" was done. In the First Folio (considered closer to what Shakespeare actually wrote, although that is still up for debate), when Hamlet dies, he ends with, "The rest is silence" - and then, in the Folio, it says that Hamlet says, "O - o - o - o" and then "He dyes." Fascinating. You don't find those "O-groans" in any modern version of Hamlet, and it is (of course) still not clear if Shakespeare wrote those "O"s, or if it was someone else, or if it was a memory of what a certain actor did when performing the role of Hamlet - Perhaps he said the last line, and then died beautifully - with big declamatory "O-groans" all the way down. Who knows. But to edit them out seems a bit sketchy (editors are, in general, embarrassed by the "O-groans" that show up in Shakespeare - perhaps it is a pesky reminder to these scholars that the work they so adore is actually a piece of entertainment - a SCRIPT - meant to be PLAYED - by actors - who, everyone knows, are barely better than prostitutes - so out with the "O groans" because they are flat out embarrassing - to ME, personally! - thinks the scholar). Additionally, here's another element to all of this: The mere fact that Hamlet's last words are "The rest is silence" - and THEN - this most indecisive of characters in all of Western literature - refuses to follow his own observation - and does not remain silent - but groans as he dies. It's just so Hamlet, if you look at it in that way. He makes a declarative statement of certainty for almost the first time: "The rest is silence" - and then, uh-oh, Hamlet isn't done, he is NOT silent - even in death, he is waffling back and forth. Anyway, that's MY interpretation of it - and I'm not coming down on one side or the other - because the "O-groans" are controversial, and I get that - but I still think it's interesting to at least acknowledge their presence, to not edit them out entirely because they are embarrassing to YOU, the scholar in his dusty office, who thinks theatre is probably a bit distasteful, and actors even worse ... Like: who cares what YOU think? I think it's kind of funny and totally in character that Hamlet, in his second to last breath, declares, "The rest is silence" - and then dies - in the loudest least-silent way possible. I don't know. I like contemplating the possibilities in that.

Joyce's wife, Nora, who claimed to never have read any of her husband's work (hahaha), said to interviewers after Joyce's death, ""What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

I have always tended to agree with that, and I also believe that Finnegans Wake is actually MORE accessible than Ulysses. It is certainly less intricate in structure, although the language can be daunting. Joyce certainly believed that everyone, uneducated or not, could read Finnegans Wake, and coming as he does from Ireland, with its long history of oral storytelling, Finnegans Wake seems to me to be meant to be read out loud. That's how I read it (thanks, Dad, for the tip), and once you read it out loud, the language is not difficult at all. Not in the slightest. It's way easier to "get" than Ulysses, which demands your commitment in a way that no other book really does. Finnegans Wake, I suppose, demands your submission as well, but once you do submit, the entire text cracks open. It's like being in a dream. The logic of dreams is rock-solid, everyone understands their own dreams, and the text of Finnegans Wake is an extended subconsciously-driven monologue of someone falling in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams.

Samuel Beckett said, perceptively, about the language in Finnegans Wake:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

So I am curious to see what is going on here with the corrections to Finnegans Wake, and what the editors and scholars felt needed correcting. I do know that the book was finally published, with Joyce racing after his own manuscript, still tweaking it. He was never done. Shall we call him OCD? There is a level of that here. Writing, and editing, was, in a way, a beautiful torment to him, as the overlay of meaning, the collapsing structure expanding and contracting, was ALIVE to James Joyce. I am sure it went to the printer with Joyce's ink still drying on the pages.

Here are some thoughts of mine on Finnegans Wake - and, as always, I miss the one I really want to talk to about all of this.

Groucho Marx to Peter Lorre

(speaking of James Joyce...):

October 5, 1961

Dear Peter:

It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce's "Ulysses". All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years' difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.

You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.

Best to you both.

Regards,
Groucho

"This may sound odd, but I have found Ulysses to be my easiest translation thus far! The most demanding and yet the easiest."

A FASCINATING interview with Finnish translator Leevi Lehto on translating James Joyce's Ulysses into Finnish. A couple of translations had already been done in Finland, the main one done by Pennti Saarikoski in 1964, but Lehto found them unsatisfactory for various reasons (which he goes into in the interview). My favorite comment from him about the Saarikoski translation revealed him to me as a kindred spirit, and made me want to send this to my father so badly.

Saarikoski’s translation is also clearly influenced by certain basic aesthetics of Finnish modernist prose, and its particular concept of realism. The leading theoretician of Finnish modernism, Tuomas Anhava (1927–2001), was one of the cursory readers of Saarikoski’s translation, and, as I like to say, the result is what Joyce’s Ulysses might have become if Joyce had let Ezra Pound have his way with it.

Hahahaha. Dad would love that. So, Mr. Lehto decided to give it a go himself. He explains a moment he had translating the Sirens episode, just as an experiment:

Having worked as a professional translator for 15 years, I was naturally intrigued by the translation aspects. It was also around that time that, as a poet, I was becoming increasingly fascinated in the sound and phonetics of language (today one of the areas of poetry identified with me is sound poetry): therefore the ‘Sirens’ episode, balancing – as it does – on the boundary between language and music, became the focal point of my study of the translation. After reaching Molly’s final “yes” I put down my Saarikoski, located my Joyce, and sat down to translate the ‘Sirens’. After about ten pages I showed it to my wife. “It’s a new text altogether,” said she, having read her Saarikoski years ago, and added: “Why don’t you translate the whole book?” I remember how strange the notion seemed to me at the time. I was rather thinking that my translating days were behind me, and that it was (finally) time for me to concentrate on doing “something of my own”. The idea stuck, however, and by the next New Year I found myself making finishing touches on the ‘Sirens’. In January and February of 2003 I made first drafts of episodes 1-3 and sent all the four episodes to Gaudeamus publishing house to be looked over by Tuomas Seppä. Tuomas sent them to Professor Hannu K. Riikonen, who gave his support to the enterprise. The process of a new translation of Ulysses had begun.

The Sirens episode is all sound (naturally. Why? Because it's the SIRENS EPISODE, got it? What do Sirens do? They call to sailors, with their voices, causing them to crash. Therefore, the Sirens episode is all sound, sound upon sound - Joyce trying to capture what it sounds like in a crowded bar with chattering waitresses and conversing patrons.) Here's the excerpt I posted a while back - and it seems, basically, untranslateable, right? Because it's barely in English, right? Leevi Lehto went at it another way, and his conversation about this and other episodes (I was particularly interested in his story of translating the 'Circe' episode - and also the Oxen of the Sun episode) is deep and fascinating stuff. It reminds me of Seamus Heaney deciding to start off his translation of Beowulf with the conversational word, "So." I remember my dad talking about that, how exciting he found it. In the NY Times on March 29, 2000, there was an interview with Heaney. Here is what he had to say about that "So" (and, by the way, his recording of the translation is not to be missed!):

A breakthrough came with his discovery of the verb "thole" in the text. Anglo-Saxon for suffering, it was a word that he had heard in his childhood in Northern Ireland. That offered him a bridge between cultures and centuries. Searching for an equivalent oral tradition, he remembered his father's cousin Peter Scullion, a man who had "a large voice and a very stately method of speech." As Mr. Heaney said, "That's how I got started on 'Beowulf', with those voices from my country past."

The first problem was the first word, hwaet in Old English, which had been translated as lo, hark, behold, attend and listen. By choosing the more conversational "so", Mr. Heaney called for attention and plunged the reader into the middle of the story.

I wonder if I had read a version in high school that started with "so", as opposed to "hark", I might have responded better to Beowulf. Translation can be KEY. There is always something lost in the transfer. I am fluent enough in French to at least be able to read it, and Moliere reads so different in the original than in translation. Moliere translations can be clunky, due to the rhyming couplet nature of so many of his plays, which rollick along in French, but sometimes feel amateurish in English. Same with Little Prince. Perhaps the most famous line in Le Petit Prince is: "Here is my secret: Only with the heart can one see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye." Now that is quite nice. The meaning is nice, but it sounds nice too. I couldn't improve upon it. But here it is in French: Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple : on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. I know enough of French to know that the translation is not exact - it can't be. Two different languages.

I remember my French teacher in high school saying once, when a student asked him, "So 'c'est' is 'It is' ... right?" and he replied, "No. It is 'c'est'." He wanted us to get away from English entirely and stop trying to find the correlation in our own language. Only then will you become actually fluent. You won't be translating it all in your head before you open your mouth.

Now that I'm older, and feel pretty comfortable with my ability to handle difficult language, I actually prefer the Constance Garnett translations of Russian literature, even though she is a bit out of favor now, and new translations are out, with more of a modern feel to the language. For Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I prefer the more stately formal translations of Garnett, having tried the other ones, and not liking them. Contrarily, the new Paul Schmidt translation of Chekhov's plays (I wrote a little bit about it here) are fantastic, and I prefer them so much more to the translations I grew up with. Maybe it's different with plays. Chekhov's works are emotional and personal, and the standard translations I read (and performed) in college and beyond were really difficult to get your mouth around. They FELT foreign. Paul Schmidt's translations breathe and pulse with life. Constance Garnett's translation of Sonya's big confession to Yelena in Act 3 (and this is a scene done in acting classes across the land - and this was the translation most often used):

No, when a woman is ugly they always say she has beautiful hair or eyes. I have loved him now for six years, I have loved him more than one loves one’s mother. I seem to hear him beside me every moment of the day. I feel the pressure of his hand on mine. If I look up, I seem to see him coming, and as you see, I run to you to talk of him. He is here every day now, but he never looks at me, he does not notice my presence. It is agony. I have absolutely no hope, no, no hope. Oh, my God! Give me strength to endure. I prayed all last night. I often go up to him and speak to him and look into his eyes. My pride is gone. I am not mistress of myself. Yesterday I told Uncle Vanya I couldn’t control myself, and all the servants know it. Every one knows that I love him.

Heartbreaking. Heartbreaking even in its rather overblown formality of language. This is how Chekhov writes. It would be a mistake to lessen the impact of that language - you need that "Oh my God" in there, for example. But take a look at Paul Schmidt's translation of the same monologue. It feels more speak-able, to this English-speaking woman:

That's what people always say to an ugly woman; they say: "Oh, you have beautiful eyes. Oh, you have beautiful hair." I've been in love with him for six years now; I love him more than my own mother. All I can hear is the sound of his voice, feel the touch of his hands. I keep watching the door, I always think it's him coming. And now look, I keep coming to you so I can talk about him. He's here every day now, but he never looks at me, he doesn't even see me ... It hurts so much! And it's all so hopeless, it's completely hopeless! Oh, my God, I don't know where I'll get the strength ... I lie in bed all night long, just praying ... And I have no shame anymore - I hang around talking to him, I keep looking him right in the eyes... I just can't help myself anymore! Yesterday I told Uncle Vanya I was in love with him ... And the servants know, they all know.

Bravo, Mr. Schmidt.

I couldn't even begin to translate a work of literature from one to another language, and writing about this right now makes me a bit lonely, because this is the kind of stuff I want to talk about with my father, who loved this stuff as well. He was particularly interested in an essay I found by Jim Di, who translated Ulysses into Chinese (I posted it here.) Marvelous stuff. "The woman word." Translation cannot be a one-to-one correspondence because languages don't work that way. If you want to get across the feel of Molly Bloom's monologue, and how it feels to us in English, to a Chinese audience, then you have to think deeply about the language, and find appropriate correspondences. Interviews with translators help me to think more deeply about works such as Ulysses - they grapple with the text in a way I never could, because their purposes are different.

Joyce's language is its own thing. He was a linguist. He loved puns. He loved making connections, with sound and the look of words. This works in English, but it wouldn't in, say, Finnish, because the base is different. So Leevi Lehto, especially in the Oxen of the Sun episode, really wrestled with this.

The Oxen of the Sun episode (basically, the "maternity ward" episode) is difficult for English readers - especially those of modern-day audiences who, as a whole, are not as well read as the regular readers back in Joyce's day. In the Oxen of the Sun episode, a baby is being born (the literal "story" of the episode). Joyce writes the chapter in a way that it takes you through the entire history of the English language - the English language being "born". I write about that here. If you don't know the references (and Joyce doesn't give them to you, you just have to recognize them on your own), then you will be baffled. As I said, that chapter is one of the ones where I can actually sense how unqualified I am to "get" it. No matter. I struggle on through it.

However, Mr. Lehto comes up against a big problem with translating this episode. Listen to what he has to say. The question is: In episode 14, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, you have decided to translate the ‘embryonic development’ of English prose by going through the history of Finnish prose style instead of, for example, alluding to those English writers Joyce parodies. Why is this? Lehto answers:

Interesting question! This decision is an example of how there is no one single correct way to convey the how-aspect of translation (cf. 2.3. above). In the ’Oxen of the Sun’ my technique is, so to say, categorical domestication, whereas in other parts of the novel I categorically refuse to domesticate – for the most part I don’t translate Irish/Dubliner idioms into their Finnish/Helsinkiner correspondents, because I consider Joyce has meant his idioms to be foreign to an average English reader. (My rule of thumb has been to abstain from domesticating if Gifford & Seidman consider it necessary to add an explanation to their English readers.) In the ’Oxen of the Sun’, in my view, Joyce’s aim is slightly different: Instead of alienation he is striving for, shall we say, maximum recognition: the exact way they wrote in such and such time at a given part of the British Empire (presuming a reader with maximum of education and imagination, as Joyce always happily and shamelessly presumes). In this exact way aspect Joyce is not, in fact, content with imitation – ’Oxen of the Sun’ has more direct quotation and plagiarism than pastiche and parody. One proof of this is that Joyce’s “parodies” stop at the point of history, in which copyright laws become a factor (on this, cf. Paul Saint-Amour’s excellent book The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination, Cornell University Press 2003). Again, I aimed to “do what Joyce did”: where he had his manuals of English prose style, I had Paavo Pulkkinen’s book on the development of modern Finnish language (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1972), with its excellent text appendices.

Amazing, and I am sure will be controversial to some, but to me Lehto's tactic here is a way of bringing the text alive in another context, a Finnish context. I love love his thoughts on it. I am not sure that Joyce would agree that all good literature is local (I am thinking of Thomas Hardy's praise and dedication to "provincialism" in literature) - and although he didn't live in Ireland at all after a certain point, it certainly was the wellspring of his creativity, and his rage. It is a local concern. He is a writer in exile from his home. Like Ulysses, his journey is always about going home. So Lehto sees the universal concern in that (it is something anyone from any culture anywhere can relate to), and works on the idioms and symbols and clues from a Finnish context. I was just so fascinated to hear his thought process on it.

There is more good stuff in the interview (read the whole thing here) - and I have to admit, I feel a strange connection with Joyce and Finland - because, for some reason, my post on Finnegans Wake is linked on the Finnish Wikipedia page for that book. I am strangely proud of that. So go Finland with your Joycean adventures!! And thanks for including me, in some sideways kind of way.

Today in history: February 2 (1882, and 1922)

Two things happened on today in history:

February 2, 1882: James Joyce was born in Rathgar.

February 2, 1922: Joyce's Ulysses was published by Shakespeare & Co.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

It took James Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. Later, he would joke, when faced with criticism that the book was just too damn big - "I spent seven years writing it. People could at least spend seven years reading it."

His next book was Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) and that took him seventeen years to write.

Boy marched to the beat of his own drummer.

The history of the publication of Ulysses is a book in and of itself.

James Joyce had fled Ireland, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind him, back in 1904. Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school in first Zurich (that didn't work out), and then Trieste. He convinced his new-found love, Nora Barnacle, a wild girl from Galway, to run away with him. He had known her for only a couple of months. They had met on June 16, 1904 - the day that he would choose to set the entirety of Ulysses on, the ultimate tribute to the significance she had in his life. Without her, he would not have been a man. James and Nora lived in Trieste for 10 years, having children (two of them), not getting married just to spite tradition - although they referred to one another as "husband" and "wife" (the two would eventually marry in the 1930s) ... and living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Joyce was working on Dubliners, which was quite a struggle. He could not find anyone willing to publish it. Dubliners was eventually published in 1914. He had already been working on it for years. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was published (in serial form) in 1914 and finally brought out as a book in 1916. It had been serialized in the highly influential The Egoist. Around this time, James Joyce was taken under the wing of Ezra Pound (what a shock. Pound was everywhere).

James Joyce had been interested in the plight of the Jews for a long time. Especially as a man living in perpetual exile, country-less, yet always looking "homeward". He felt that there was an affinity between the Jews and the Irish, and he thought it was something to explore. He had considered writing a story along these lines for Dubliners but it didn't end up happening. However, the idea percolated. It ended up being one of the main ideas in the book Ulysses, based, of course, on Homer's epic, but Joyce, with his obsessive tendencies, was the kind of man who saw connections everywhere. Exile, journey, what does "home" mean, where is it? These were questions of great relevance to the Jews, but also to himself, who felt he could never live in Ireland again (and he never did). Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses is a Jew, living in Ireland. Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego, the "star" of Portrait of the Artist as well) is one of the aimless men Ireland is so fond of creating, a man looking for a father figure, a guide. Through their mutual wanderings through the city of Dublin, on June 16, 1904, they eventually cross paths. It is not that a kindred spirit is revealed, not really. They do not connect, or heal, or grow, or become empowered. None of those pat concepts are at work in Ulysses. It is more that it is a meeting of the minds. A realization of the connection between them, but also that such connection is transitory. At the end of the book they go their separate ways.

Joyce wrote:

Ulysses is the epic of two races (Israel - Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book-- blast it!

What was such a big deal about Ulysses? A book where nothing, let's be honest, really happens?

Much of the brou-haha (at least in the literary set) was about the writing itself, a deepening and broadening of the landscape he had explored in Portrait: what is existence really like? What is it like to live, moment to moment?

James Joyce wrote once:

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?

Joyce did not delve into the psychologies of his characters so much, although we get to know Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus better than we even know our best friends through reading Ulysses. Joyce goes behind closed doors. He goes inside the body. Circulation, digestion, sex drive, the splitting of cells ... all of that is going on in his writing, because the book - as well as being an homage to Homer's Odyssey - as well as being set up in a complicated structure, mirroring Homer's work - as well as having colors associated with each episode, and a different writing style for each episode ... it is also, chapter by chapter, a dissection of the human body. One chapter (the Cyclops chapter, naturally) is the "eye" chapter. But instead of going for obvious symbolism, working in things about vision and color and landscape - Joyce hides his meaning completely, and instead makes the entire chapter into a first-person diatribe, and the person telling the story says, over and over as he relates the tale he needs to tell, "says I." The overall effect is that when you look at the page, all you can see is the letter "I". Says I, says I, says I. So if you are looking for eyes there in the obvious places, you will not find it. But it's in the language and the LOOK of it, one of the pieces of writing that is immediately identifiable just by looking at it. My father taught me that. And how brilliant is it to have the "eye" chapter not involve eyes, or vision, openly - but to have the meaning of the symbolism in the language to such a degree that you can recognize it at a glance. From, of course, your eyes. Joyce involves the reader in his game like no other writer. One chapter is the stomach chapter. One chapter is the sex organs chapter. And etc. None of this is explicit. There is no guide. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to get into HIS mode when reading the book, and let your OWN mode go. This is why many people were (and are) annoyed by Joyce. But geniuses have always annoyed people. As William Blake famously wrote:

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Crows don't like it when you point that out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about what crows think of them. They need to just keep being eagles.

James Joyce probably wouldn't have thought of it like that. His defenders (like myself) say stuff like that all the time, but Joyce (perhaps disingenuously) really didn't see what the big deal was. He wrote what he wrote because it amused and fascinated him. He wrote only what he could write. He wasn't going for an effect, he wasn't trying to be clever. Or actually, maybe he was. Ulysses is one of the most "clever" books ever written. It's a game, a romp, a puzzle, something to be decoded. That's the fun of it. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't trying to be so, as many of his literary contemporaries were. There was a great shift going on, in general, in the world at that time, and it affected all genres of art. Painters. Architects. Dance was going through a revolution. The past being shuffled off, or at least an attempt being made to, to quote Ezra Pound, "make it new". How much of our language is really ours, and how much of it is inherited? Joyce, as an Irishman, found this to be a personal and volatile issue, something he shared with Yeats. But across the board, artists were looking to each other, to push one another on, to not look BACK, to not try to imitate Tennyson, which had been the style for a generation or so, but to find new forms to express the new world in which they lived.

This was the generation that grew up with horse-and-carriage, and when they died, airplanes were flying across the ocean. The change in psychology was astronomical. Everyone struggled with it in different ways. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams ... World War I (or The Great War) was a shattering experience, leaving Europe in ruins. The struggle of the artist: how can anything I do ever comment on the actual experience around me? There is a great anxiety in the work of the modernists, a fracturing of the CERTAIN. There was no certainty anymore. Einstein's theory was published. The Russian Revolution exploded forth. The work of Freud and Jung made people look differently at themselves, at their motivations and dreams and personalities. Painters went more and more abstract, breaking apart that which is known and understood, into colors, shapes, incoherence. James Joyce was a part of all of this, mostly by osmosis. Ezra Pound said, when he first read the work of William Carlos Williams, that he had "become modern all on his own." Perhaps a shock to Pound, who was so at the center of things at that time, pushing writers forward, helping TS Eliot to piece together "The Waste Land", promoting people, bullying editors into publishing new work, etc. William Carlos Williams did not live in Paris and never did. He was a doctor. And yet, the change ... was in the atmosphere. He became modern "all on his own". There were those (like Amy Lowell) who felt they had to be at the center of things, so they moved to Paris, separating themselves from any hint of bourgeois existence. It worked well for many of these people. But it wasn't necessary. James Joyce did live in Paris, but he had been doing his thing from the isolated Trieste for decades. That decade - 1910 - 1920 - saw a massive shift on every level of life, the world surging into a new era, bloody, technological, Freudian, and writers struggled with forms to describe it, react to it. There is nothing comparable today, when technology is so much a part of our lives that we take it for granted. Not so then.

"The Waste Land" was published in 1922 as well. "The Waste Land" and Ulysses coming out the same year? Evidence enough of the upheaval, anxiety and change rupturing the modern world.

Joyce wrote Ulysses not to make a big splash, not to stick it to the censors, not to show lesser writers how it's REALLY done (although all of these things were results) ... he wrote it because he liked it. He found it funny. Engaging. He wrote that way because he couldn't write any other way.

He said (and this may be perhaps my favorite Joyce quote, and it is something to keep in mind should you pick up Ulysses for the first time - it's a clue in HOW to read it):

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

I believe him. Certainly there were serious ideas in the book, it's a revolution, really ... but looked at in another light, in Joyce's light, there is "not one single serious word in it". It's a joke, a maze, a puzzle, an examination of ridiculous coincidences and connections. What does it "mean"? That's the stupidest question of all with which to concern yourself. It means nothing.

Samuel Beckett's wonderful quote in regards to Finnegans Wake is also applicable to Ulysses:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

And THAT is why Joyce is such a big deal. THAT is why the book went off like a bomb throughout the literary world. THAT is why people like T.S. Eliot, no slouch himself, said, "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." James Joyce lived in a world of giants. Hemingway, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pound, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot ... the modernists. He was part of his time, but he went so much further than any of his contemporaries that many of them never quite recovered from the Ulysses juggernaut. The comments of other writers about Ulysses are absolutely marvelous, because they all recognized what has come. They all realized what had happened. The 20th century had arrived. They had all been working towards it, trying to wrestle the 19th century out of existence, bringing new forms to light. And it's not that any of these people failed. But Ulysses was the "star". Ulysses was the death-knell.

T.S. Eliot put it perfectly when he said that Ulysses "killed the 19th century".

James Joyce hadn't set out to "kill the 19th century", but his sensibility - contrarian, sensitive, angry, loving - led him to a form that couldn't help but do so.

Quiet little Trieste ended up being a major crossroads in WWI, changing hands, and Joyce and his family moved to Paris.

Now let me talk about the actual publication of the book.

Into our story now steps Sylvia Beach. Born in Maryland, as an adult she became a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all. Oh, for a time machine, to go hang out at that place in the 1920s, where Hemingway would stop by, Fitzgerald would browse, Joyce would sneak in and out, Gertrude Stein would bitch and moan (haha) ... and Pound would negotiate with all of them, trying to help them all out and promote his favorites ... they ALL were there.

Here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends in Paris (try to find Joyce - isn't that hysterical?? He doesn't even have a body! That was how he was seen - just a big floating brain with enormous glasses!).

Who was the cartoonist?

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In this vibrant world of literary rivals and giants struggling for the stage, Sylvia Beach played an important role. She had good taste, first of all, she liked the "good" ones, and didn't waste her time with the crows. She also had courage (as we shall see).

When Beach met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". You have to get into the mindset of the censors, as unpleasant an experience as that is. What on earth is "obscene" about Ulysses? Ultimately, the book expresses love. You cannot deny it, you cannot escape from it. It is love. Leopold Bloom, throughout his long long day, is only thinking about his wife Molly, and how much he loves her, and how afraid he is that she is being unfaithful. There is only one woman for him. In the same way that there was only one woman for Joyce. Love, it is love that drags us home after our long journey. Only love. But Joyce did not shy away from the more unsavory aspects of life (and let's remember his comment about the "mystery of the conscious" - that's so so important: he did not, as Proust did, or Woolf did, or some of the other modern writers - delve into psychology and the workings of the subconscious. He did not look at motivations and childhood repression. As I mentioned, Freud changed everything, for good and ill. A revolution in the understanding of the workings of humanity. Whether or not you agree with Freud, and whether or not you think Freud is over-rated is irrelevant. I am talking about the time and place from which Joyce wrote.) But Joyce, unlike Proust, did not explore how memory works, and how the senses trigger thoughts and feelings and entire narratives from our lives ... He was much more prosaic. Blunt. He presented man in the most honest manner possible. Leopold Bloom takes a dump, for example. He sits on the toilet after breakfast, and thinks about things, worrying about things, as he goes to the bathroom. Now, this is one of the most human of experiences. Anyone who says they haven't sat on the toilet, pondering their day, and what they are worried about, is lying. But to put that in a book?? What are you, cracked?

There are those who feel that while such things may be 'real', they have no place in literature. Now we're getting into the realm of the censors, who wanted to control what could be shown. It's the same as people nowadays who seem to feel that saying "TMI" is the be-all and end-all of human interaction. You complain that you stubbed your toe that morning, and certain people will say, "TMI!" Never mind if you're struggling with grief, loss, having a personal struggle, some people just shun intimacy in any way, shape or form. (And then they wonder why they are miserable ...) I despise the "TMI" trend. I despise it in its surface form and I despise what it represents. There is a reason for it, as there is a reason for all trends. It is a reaction. A reaction, perhaps, to our world of reality television, and tell-all books, where everyone seems to feel that talking about themselves and their issues is a holy and sacred act. So I get it. But reactions tend to be too extreme and I resist extremes. Besides, "TMI" is nothing new. There have always been those who really DON'T want to know you, who really DON'T want the truth when they ask "How are you?" It's just that now that we have "TMI" to say. It's a constant refrain from certain corners.. Sure, there's such a thing as "over-sharing", but I'm not really talking about that. I am talking about something far more insidious. Something that is not in any way, shape or form new - it's been going on forever, as long as human beings have been in contact with one another. There is a shying away from real experience of one another. Of course. Because if you allow yourself to experience what it is like for another person, then that might mean you might have compassion for them, or empathy, or you might have a sense of recognition, an awareness of the universal: "Yes, I do that, too!" Many people do not want to be shaken out of their selves like that. I include myself, by the way, although you will never ever catch me saying "TMI"! I am all ABOUT "TMI"! But the first response for many, to some demand for connection, or understanding, is to batton down the hatches, draw the line in the sand, and say, "Nope. Nope. That's YOU, that's not ME."

People like that, powerful though they may be in certain sections of society, will always be on the wrong side of history. Progress, forward motion, always has, at its core, an examination of motivation, of meaning, of, to quote Mike Nichols, "what is this REALLY like?" (He says that when he sits down to film any scene, of any event, that is his first question: "what is this REALLY like?" Infidelity, drug addiction, love triangles - all of these things are nothing new. How can one presume to say anything new about them? You really can't. All you can do, if you are an artist, is try to understand "what it is REALLY like" and try to portray that.) If you are so busy crowing "TMI" at every revelation of character and story around you, you will never move forward. You will be stuck, like a fly drowned in amber.

Joyce cuts right to the core of that very human experience. He will not let the reader off the hook. If you insist on insisting, "That's YOU, not ME", then Ulysses will be a terribly confronting book. Joyce, above all else, was a humanist, although his cynicism and rage were titanic. That's what The Dead (excerpt here), with its final revelation of connection and love in the last four paragraphs, is all about. I have said it before: Without The Dead, The Dubliners would be merely a bitchy gossipy excavation of a modern-day city. Yes, with some good writing and memorable scenes, but it would be, essentially, a cynical book, and cynical books usually do not outlast their own time. With The Dead, in the last four paragraphs, Joyce rises up. If you only read the other stories, you might presume that Joyce despised his fellow man. His eye is excruciatingly honest. He is brutal. Who would ever have suspected that in the last story of the collection, Joyce would pull such a hat-trick, and say, essentially, "You think you know me. You do not. You think all I feel is anger. I do not. My anger comes from grief and loss. And right now, all I feel is love." If you read the book from beginning to end, The Dead, no matter that you know its coming, always comes as a surprise. Nothing in the book before that story prepares you for it. Gabriel realizes, as he watches his wife sleep, that he loves her, and yet that he has never really known her. And in that realization, his consciousness rises up and up, until he is looking down on the snowy landscape, on all of Ireland ... and he, for the first time, feels connected to life, because of his experience of heartbreak. He feels connected not just to all mankind, but also to all of the "shades", all of those people who have gone before.

The irony of all of this is that Joyce was one of the most isolated of beings, although not melancholy or a downer or any of that. He wasn't a tortured artist. He was not bohemian in the slightest. It's just that he was rather old-fashioned, believe it or not, a family man, who had dinner every night with Nora and his kids and that was that. There is no scandal about Joyce. He didn't sleep with every woman in Paris. He didn't experiment with free love. Yes, he lived in sin for 30 years before tying the knot, but he was faithful to Nora. He wasn't a big socializer. He was a big drinker, but everyone was then. He wasn't dancing in fountains like F. Scott Fitzgerald was, and cheering as his wife did a jig on the table. He was rather conventional, rather bourgeois.

Additionally, there is a tremendous self-consciousness in his books (which I mentioned earlier). He can ONLY write from his own life. He was not an "inventor". He did not make up characters, and devise complicated plots. He did not write one standard novel. It was all self self self self self. I truly believe that you MUST be a genius in order to only focus on self. (Oscar Wilde said something similar, after reading his friend Andre Gide's novel, which I haven't read, but which Wilde was not impressed with. He said, "In order to be an Egotist, one must first have an Ego." Ouch. This is similar to Blake's comment mentioned earlier. Crows trying to be eagles always give themselves away. Only a genius can only focus on Self, and get away with it.) The memoir-trend in publishing today proves that, in my mind. There are very few good ones out there, very few stories worth telling ... the thing that elevates one memoir over another is, of course, the writing style ... If you're not a good writer then nobody cares that your mama locked you in a closet and your papa couldn't put down the whiskey. Angela's Ashes was such a phenomenal success because of McCourt's writing. You write that same story without McCourt's voice and you'd want to vomit. I know that there are folks in Limerick, especially, who already want to vomit when reading McCourt's book - but that just goes to show you that you can never please everybody.

Ulysses picked up where Portrait left off. As Portrait comes to a close, the traditional narrative voice breaks down, leaving us only with Stephen Dedalus' journal entries. There is no more voice outside the "I". Joyce has abandoned the traditional narrator. Dedalus will now take over. We are inside experience, as opposed to looking on. In the third episode in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus takes a walk on the beach. We learned in the first chapter that he had broken his glasses. This fact is mentioned only once in the entire 800 page book, but we are meant to remember it. In the third chapter, during his walk on the beach, sans glasses ... the experiences come at him through a vague impression of colors and sounds. If you somehow missed that he has no glasses, and this episode is told from the perspective of someone who can't see, then you might not know what the hell is going on. At one point:

The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.

As someone who needs her glasses, I can say that that image is just just right. When I have been stranded without glasses, it is as though sounds "run towards" me ... It is not the DOG running at Dedalus, it is its BARK. Sound before vision.

Perhaps now it seems obvious, or perhaps now it seems like everyone tries to write in this subjective manner. But that's only because Joyce did it first.

All of this made Ulysses a tough sell to publishers, not even counting the bowel movements, and penises, and the evening in "Nighttown" (Dublin's red-light district) and Molly Bloom's long 40 page run-on sentence that closes the book, full of farts and menstruation and masturbation. But also, please, let us not forget, that it is some of the most beautiful writing in the English language ... and her image of embracing her husband as they lie among the rhododendrons is some of the most romantic language of all time:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another 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.

Brings me to tears every time.

And ... it's everywhere in my life. Even ...

Ahem.

The book was a bomb waiting to go off. No one would touch it. Pound had arranged for some excerpts to be published and that was the start of it. Writers, in general, were itching to get their paws on the book ... what the hell is that crazy Joyce working on now?? ... people felt competitive, nervous ... he helped them up their own game ... but in terms of the business side of things, the controversy had started before the book had even been published.

But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. She would publish it herself. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what the repercussions could be. It was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it. On February 2, 1922.

I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922. -- Sylvia Beach

And the shit hit the fan.

Nora Tully describes it thus:

The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once".

Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned everywhere - Ireland, America - everybody was talking about it, but who had actually read it? The first edition was only 1000 copies! You couldn't get the book anywhere. Additionally, you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - so there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet that you could get a copy of Ulysses was at Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, other writers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.

Here is a copy of Peggy Guggenheim's urgent order-form, sent to Sylvia Beach:

Imagine you are dying to read the book. Imagine you can't get it anywhere. Imagine that it is illegal to smuggle it back into the United States. Imagine the frenzy. You can see it in Guggeinheim's writing, can't you?

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had supported Joyce financially for years (at Pound's insistence) also arranged for another edition to be published by The Egoist press. She also arranged for them to be shipped to the United States, but they were seized by the customs officials. In 1923, John Rodker, through The Egoist again, arranged for a small printing of the book, but these were burned by English customs officials. In 1924, Shakespeare & Co., a small outfit really, and not set up to handle the demand, brought out another small printing.

Extraordinary.

Eventually, as the controversy died down, Joyce ended up going with another publisher, which really left Beach bereft financially. She already had suffered as a consequence of taking the risk to publish Ulysses. She was hounded by the police, by the censors ... so although Joyce really did need to move on, to a publisher who could handle his stardom, Beach was the first. Beach was the pioneer. Amazing woman.

Meanwhile, the comments from people who had actually read it were pouring in. This went on for years. You could read it in Europe, but America had declared it obscene, and would not allow it to arrive on its shores.

Finally, on August 7, 1934, over 10 years after its first publication by little Sylvia Beach and her little Shakespeare & Co. - a far-seeing and open-minded US Court of Appeals judge, Judge John Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and could be admitted into the United States.

Here's what the first American edition of that book looked like:

Morris L. Ernst, counsel for Random House - who successfully defended the book against obscenity charges in 1933-34 - wrote in his foreward to the 1934 edition:

It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Judge Woolsey's decision. For decades the censors have fought to emasculate literature. They have tried to set up the sensibilities of the prudery-ridden as a criterion for society, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.

Here is Judge Woolsey's decision in its entirety - it's a masterpiece of its kind. Not only is it an important legal decision, but it ends up being an acutely sensitive analysis of the book itself.

United States Discrict Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A. 110-59

December 6, 1933

On cross motions for a decree in a libel of confiscation, supplemented by a stipulation -- hereinafter described -- brought by the United States against the book "Ulysses" by James Joyce, under Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305, on the ground that the book is obscene within the meaning of that Section, and, hence, is not importable into the United States, but is subject to seizure, forfeiture and confiscation and destruction.

United States Attorney -- by Samuel C. Coleman, Esq., and Nicholas Atlas, Esq., of counsel -- for the United States, in support of motion for a decree of forfeiture, and in opposition to motion for a decree dismissing the libel.

Messrs. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, -- by Morris L. Ernst, Esq., and Alexander Lindey, Esq., of counsel -- attorneys for claimant Random House, Inc., in support of motion for a decree dismissing the libel, and in opposition to a motion for a decree of forfeiture.

WOOLSEY, J:
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.

1. 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", 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 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 for the confiscation of books such as this. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 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.

5. 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 real 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.

6. 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, Section 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; United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, 528; and compare Dysart v. United States, 272 U.S. 655, 657; Swearingen v. United States 151 U.S. 446, 450; United States v. Dennett, 39 F. (2d) 564, 568 (C.C.A. 2); People v. Wendling, 258 N.Y. 451, 453.

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 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.

JOHN M. WOOLSEY
United States District Judge

The comments of other great writers, Joyce's contemporaries, on this book are of great interest to me. The responses run the gamut from disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... He made other writers feel like putting down their pens. He enraged those who felt that THEY deserved HIS accolades (phone call for Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, phone call) ... but whatever the response, the only emotion you will NOT find is indifference.

Joyce had made his mark.

Yeats (an early champion of Joyce) had this as his first response on reading Ulysses: "A mad book!"

Then later, as he let the book percolate, Yeats corrected himself: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

Hart Crane said: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, he took it personally, he did not like what it revealed - about man, about Irish men, about the life of Ireland, but he grappled with the implications in an honest way: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."

T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"

T.S. Eliot again: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."

Edmund Wilson wrote of it:

The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.

Wilson also wrote:

Yet for all its appalling longeurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."

Carl Jung read the book and wrote Joyce a rather extraordinary letter:

Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung

Joyce was very proud of this letter and would read it out loud to guests in his house. Nora would snort at the end, "Jimmy knows nothin' about women!"

Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter about having Joyce over to meet her and her usband:

"Joyce was rather ... difficile. I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses -- no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. I've read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry [Mansfield's husband] and Joyce simply sailed out of my depth. I felt almost stupefied. It's absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. It's almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geologic standpoint or -- oh, I don't know!"

The most humorous part of this is that Joyce said, after meeting Katherine and her husband:

"Mrs. Murry understood the book better than her husband."

Hilarious.

George Moore, another Irish writer, wrote:

"Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That's not art, it's like trying to copy the London Directory."

Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:

"Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."

Gertrude Stein wrote:

"Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day."

Joyce heard what Stein wrote, thought about it, and said, "I hate intellectual women."

George Bernard Shaw again:

"I have read several fragments of Ulysses ... It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity...It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject."

Ezra Pound said:

"Joyce -- pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats' -- Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses."

Yeats wrote:

"It is an entirely new thing -- neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

William Carlos Williams wrote (echoing what many of Joyce's contemporaries felt):

"Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least."

E.M. Forster wrote:

"Perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day."

Dr. Joseph Collins reviewed "Ulysses" in The New York Times and wrote:

Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky ... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.

Hart Crane, who had totally lost his head about the book, wrote:

"The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek ... It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses."

Ford Madox Ford wrote:

"For myself then, the pleasure -- the very great pleasure -- that I get from going through the sentences of Mr. Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose."

William Faulkner wrote:

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote:

Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce's champion game.

That's a drawing by Guy Davenport, entitled "Joyce Writing a Sentence".

My father gave me his treasured and rare copy of Ulysses - part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you pick it up. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it - which has on the spine: ULYSSES - PARIS, 1924.

Every page has something of interest on it. There is a sticker on the first page - stamped with the personal imprint of the couple who had bought the book (my father, naturally, knew everything about them). The copyright page is amazing. First of all, it lists all of the controversial editions that had gone before ... 500 copies burned, etc. And to see the legendary "Shakespeare & Co.", in print, signing its name, so to speak, to the book, bravely putting it out again, knowing what will happen to their small operation ... It's just something that makes me feel humble, awed, and proud that I am aware that such people existed.

My copy of the book is not one that I will take out and read. It is too fragile.

But it is now my most prized possession, and I do take it out sometimes, to flip through the pages, looking for my favorite parts (the conversation about Shakespeare in the library is my favorite section), and reveling in the feel of the pages, their soft fragility, the print on the page showing its indent. Ulysses is so wrapped up in my father (I read it for the first time and basically called him every other day to get tips - "what the hell is going on HERE?") that it cannot be separated out. Each page resonates with some tidbit from my father, some explication, or biographical detail of all of the names that show up in Joyce's book.

I took some photos of this gift from my father. They are below.

The last photo has a framed picture of my dad in the background, standing by Yeats' grave. That was not deliberate. I did not consciously place the framed photo in the frame. It's just that everywhere in my apartment that you look you will see evidence of my heritage, my family, my inheritance. My father taught us well. Here is my brother's post on Ulysses, which gives me goosebumps. We are, apparently, a family of Joycean T-shirts, as evidenced by my T-shirt above. And here is Exhibit B from my brother:

Happy birthday to Jimmy Joyce and to his masterpiece. The 19th century was certainly ready to be killed, and there were legions of artists who hacked away at it, but it took a nearly-blind perpetually-broke Irishman-in-exile, with his wife and two kids in tow, to finish the job.

Today in history: February 2 (1882, and 1922)

Two things happened on today in history:

February 2, 1882: James Joyce was born in Rathgar.

February 2, 1922: Joyce's Ulysses was published by Shakespeare & Co.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

It took James Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. Later, he would joke, when faced with criticism that the book was just too damn big - "I spent seven years writing it. People could at least spend seven years reading it."

His next book was Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) and that took him seventeen years to write.

Boy marched to the beat of his own drummer.

The history of the publication of Ulysses is a book in and of itself.

James Joyce had fled Ireland, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind him, back in 1904. Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school in first Zurich (that didn't work out), and then Trieste. He convinced his new-found love, Nora Barnacle, a wild girl from Galway, to run away with him. He had known her for only a couple of months. They had met on June 16, 1904 - the day that he would choose to set the entirety of Ulysses on, the ultimate tribute to the significance she had in his life. Without her, he would not have been a man. James and Nora lived in Trieste for 10 years, having children (two of them), not getting married just to spite tradition - although they referred to one another as "husband" and "wife" (the two would eventually marry in the 1930s) ... and living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Joyce was working on Dubliners, which was quite a struggle. He could not find anyone willing to publish it. Dubliners was eventually published in 1914. He had already been working on it for years. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was published (in serial form) in 1914 and finally brought out as a book in 1916. It had been serialized in the highly influential The Egoist. Around this time, James Joyce was taken under the wing of Ezra Pound (what a shock. Pound was everywhere).

James Joyce had been interested in the plight of the Jews for a long time. Especially as a man living in perpetual exile, country-less, yet always looking "homeward". He felt that there was an affinity between the Jews and the Irish, and he thought it was something to explore. He had considered writing a story along these lines for Dubliners but it didn't end up happening. However, the idea percolated. It ended up being one of the main ideas in the book Ulysses, based, of course, on Homer's epic, but Joyce, with his obsessive tendencies, was the kind of man who saw connections everywhere. Exile, journey, what does "home" mean, where is it? These were questions of great relevance to the Jews, but also to himself, who felt he could never live in Ireland again (and he never did). Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses is a Jew, living in Ireland. Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego, the "star" of Portrait of the Artist as well) is one of the aimless men Ireland is so fond of creating, a man looking for a father figure, a guide. Through their mutual wanderings through the city of Dublin, on June 16, 1904, they eventually cross paths. It is not that a kindred spirit is revealed, not really. They do not connect, or heal, or grow, or become empowered. None of those pat concepts are at work in Ulysses. It is more that it is a meeting of the minds. A realization of the connection between them, but also that such connection is transitory. At the end of the book they go their separate ways.

Joyce wrote:

Ulysses is the epic of two races (Israel - Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book-- blast it!

What was such a big deal about Ulysses? A book where nothing, let's be honest, really happens?

Much of the brou-haha (at least in the literary set) was about the writing itself, a deepening and broadening of the landscape he had explored in Portrait: what is existence really like? What is it like to live, moment to moment?

James Joyce wrote once:

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?

Joyce did not delve into the psychologies of his characters so much, although we get to know Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus better than we even know our best friends through reading Ulysses. Joyce goes behind closed doors. He goes inside the body. Circulation, digestion, sex drive, the splitting of cells ... all of that is going on in his writing, because the book - as well as being an homage to Homer's Odyssey - as well as being set up in a complicated structure, mirroring Homer's work - as well as having colors associated with each episode, and a different writing style for each episode ... it is also, chapter by chapter, a dissection of the human body. One chapter (the Cyclops chapter, naturally) is the "eye" chapter. But instead of going for obvious symbolism, working in things about vision and color and landscape - Joyce hides his meaning completely, and instead makes the entire chapter into a first-person diatribe, and the person telling the story says, over and over as he relates the tale he needs to tell, "says I." The overall effect is that when you look at the page, all you can see is the letter "I". Says I, says I, says I. So if you are looking for eyes there in the obvious places, you will not find it. But it's in the language and the LOOK of it, one of the pieces of writing that is immediately identifiable just by looking at it. My father taught me that. And how brilliant is it to have the "eye" chapter not involve eyes, or vision, openly - but to have the meaning of the symbolism in the language to such a degree that you can recognize it at a glance. From, of course, your eyes. Joyce involves the reader in his game like no other writer. One chapter is the stomach chapter. One chapter is the sex organs chapter. And etc. None of this is explicit. There is no guide. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to get into HIS mode when reading the book, and let your OWN mode go. This is why many people were (and are) annoyed by Joyce. But geniuses have always annoyed people. As William Blake famously wrote:

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Crows don't like it when you point that out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about what crows think of them. They need to just keep being eagles.

James Joyce probably wouldn't have thought of it like that. His defenders (like myself) say stuff like that all the time, but Joyce (perhaps disingenuously) really didn't see what the big deal was. He wrote what he wrote because it amused and fascinated him. He wrote only what he could write. He wasn't going for an effect, he wasn't trying to be clever. Or actually, maybe he was. Ulysses is one of the most "clever" books ever written. It's a game, a romp, a puzzle, something to be decoded. That's the fun of it. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't trying to be so, as many of his literary contemporaries were. There was a great shift going on, in general, in the world at that time, and it affected all genres of art. Painters. Architects. Dance was going through a revolution. The past being shuffled off, or at least an attempt being made to, to quote Ezra Pound, "make it new". How much of our language is really ours, and how much of it is inherited? Joyce, as an Irishman, found this to be a personal and volatile issue, something he shared with Yeats. But across the board, artists were looking to each other, to push one another on, to not look BACK, to not try to imitate Tennyson, which had been the style for a generation or so, but to find new forms to express the new world in which they lived.

This was the generation that grew up with horse-and-carriage, and when they died, airplanes were flying across the ocean. The change in psychology was astronomical. Everyone struggled with it in different ways. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams ... World War I (or The Great War) was a shattering experience, leaving Europe in ruins. The struggle of the artist: how can anything I do ever comment on the actual experience around me? There is a great anxiety in the work of the modernists, a fracturing of the CERTAIN. There was no certainty anymore. Einstein's theory was published. The Russian Revolution exploded forth. The work of Freud and Jung made people look differently at themselves, at their motivations and dreams and personalities. Painters went more and more abstract, breaking apart that which is known and understood, into colors, shapes, incoherence. James Joyce was a part of all of this, mostly by osmosis. Ezra Pound said, when he first read the work of William Carlos Williams, that he had "become modern all on his own." Perhaps a shock to Pound, who was so at the center of things at that time, pushing writers forward, helping TS Eliot to piece together "The Waste Land", promoting people, bullying editors into publishing new work, etc. William Carlos Williams did not live in Paris and never did. He was a doctor. And yet, the change ... was in the atmosphere. He became modern "all on his own". There were those (like Amy Lowell) who felt they had to be at the center of things, so they moved to Paris, separating themselves from any hint of bourgeois existence. It worked well for many of these people. But it wasn't necessary. James Joyce did live in Paris, but he had been doing his thing from the isolated Trieste for decades. That decade - 1910 - 1920 - saw a massive shift on every level of life, the world surging into a new era, bloody, technological, Freudian, and writers struggled with forms to describe it, react to it. There is nothing comparable today, when technology is so much a part of our lives that we take it for granted. Not so then.

"The Waste Land" was published in 1922 as well. "The Waste Land" and Ulysses coming out the same year? Evidence enough of the upheaval, anxiety and change rupturing the modern world.

Joyce wrote Ulysses not to make a big splash, not to stick it to the censors, not to show lesser writers how it's REALLY done (although all of these things were results) ... he wrote it because he liked it. He found it funny. Engaging. He wrote that way because he couldn't write any other way.

He said (and this may be perhaps my favorite Joyce quote, and it is something to keep in mind should you pick up Ulysses for the first time - it's a clue in HOW to read it):

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

I believe him. Certainly there were serious ideas in the book, it's a revolution, really ... but looked at in another light, in Joyce's light, there is "not one single serious word in it". It's a joke, a maze, a puzzle, an examination of ridiculous coincidences and connections. What does it "mean"? That's the stupidest question of all with which to concern yourself. It means nothing.

Samuel Beckett's wonderful quote in regards to Finnegans Wake is also applicable to Ulysses:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

And THAT is why Joyce is such a big deal. THAT is why the book went off like a bomb throughout the literary world. THAT is why people like T.S. Eliot, no slouch himself, said, "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." James Joyce lived in a world of giants. Hemingway, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pound, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot ... the modernists. He was part of his time, but he went so much further than any of his contemporaries that many of them never quite recovered from the Ulysses juggernaut. The comments of other writers about Ulysses are absolutely marvelous, because they all recognized what has come. They all realized what had happened. The 20th century had arrived. They had all been working towards it, trying to wrestle the 19th century out of existence, bringing new forms to light. And it's not that any of these people failed. But Ulysses was the "star". Ulysses was the death-knell.

T.S. Eliot put it perfectly when he said that Ulysses "killed the 19th century".

James Joyce hadn't set out to "kill the 19th century", but his sensibility - contrarian, sensitive, angry, loving - led him to a form that couldn't help but do so.

Quiet little Trieste ended up being a major crossroads in WWI, changing hands, and Joyce and his family moved to Paris.

Now let me talk about the actual publication of the book.

Into our story now steps Sylvia Beach. Born in Maryland, as an adult she became a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all. Oh, for a time machine, to go hang out at that place in the 1920s, where Hemingway would stop by, Fitzgerald would browse, Joyce would sneak in and out, Gertrude Stein would bitch and moan (haha) ... and Pound would negotiate with all of them, trying to help them all out and promote his favorites ... they ALL were there.

Here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends in Paris (try to find Joyce - isn't that hysterical?? He doesn't even have a body! That was how he was seen - just a big floating brain with enormous glasses!).

Who was the cartoonist?

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In this vibrant world of literary rivals and giants struggling for the stage, Sylvia Beach played an important role. She had good taste, first of all, she liked the "good" ones, and didn't waste her time with the crows. She also had courage (as we shall see).

When Beach met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". You have to get into the mindset of the censors, as unpleasant an experience as that is. What on earth is "obscene" about Ulysses? Ultimately, the book expresses love. You cannot deny it, you cannot escape from it. It is love. Leopold Bloom, throughout his long long day, is only thinking about his wife Molly, and how much he loves her, and how afraid he is that she is being unfaithful. There is only one woman for him. In the same way that there was only one woman for Joyce. Love, it is love that drags us home after our long journey. Only love. But Joyce did not shy away from the more unsavory aspects of life (and let's remember his comment about the "mystery of the conscious" - that's so so important: he did not, as Proust did, or Woolf did, or some of the other modern writers - delve into psychology and the workings of the subconscious. He did not look at motivations and childhood repression. As I mentioned, Freud changed everything, for good and ill. A revolution in the understanding of the workings of humanity. Whether or not you agree with Freud, and whether or not you think Freud is over-rated is irrelevant. I am talking about the time and place from which Joyce wrote.) But Joyce, unlike Proust, did not explore how memory works, and how the senses trigger thoughts and feelings and entire narratives from our lives ... He was much more prosaic. Blunt. He presented man in the most honest manner possible. Leopold Bloom takes a dump, for example. He sits on the toilet after breakfast, and thinks about things, worrying about things, as he goes to the bathroom. Now, this is one of the most human of experiences. Anyone who says they haven't sat on the toilet, pondering their day, and what they are worried about, is lying. But to put that in a book?? What are you, cracked?

There are those who feel that while such things may be 'real', they have no place in literature. Now we're getting into the realm of the censors, who wanted to control what could be shown. It's the same as people nowadays who seem to feel that saying "TMI" is the be-all and end-all of human interaction. You complain that you stubbed your toe that morning, and certain people will say, "TMI!" Never mind if you're struggling with grief, loss, having a personal struggle, some people just shun intimacy in any way, shape or form. (And then they wonder why they are miserable ...) I despise the "TMI" trend. I despise it in its surface form and I despise what it represents. There is a reason for it, as there is a reason for all trends. It is a reaction. A reaction, perhaps, to our world of reality television, and tell-all books, where everyone seems to feel that talking about themselves and their issues is a holy and sacred act. So I get it. But reactions tend to be too extreme and I resist extremes. Besides, "TMI" is nothing new. There have always been those who really DON'T want to know you, who really DON'T want the truth when they ask "How are you?" It's just that now that we have "TMI" to say. It's a constant refrain from certain corners.. Sure, there's such a thing as "over-sharing", but I'm not really talking about that. I am talking about something far more insidious. Something that is not in any way, shape or form new - it's been going on forever, as long as human beings have been in contact with one another. There is a shying away from real experience of one another. Of course. Because if you allow yourself to experience what it is like for another person, then that might mean you might have compassion for them, or empathy, or you might have a sense of recognition, an awareness of the universal: "Yes, I do that, too!" Many people do not want to be shaken out of their selves like that. I include myself, by the way, although you will never ever catch me saying "TMI"! I am all ABOUT "TMI"! But the first response for many, to some demand for connection, or understanding, is to batton down the hatches, draw the line in the sand, and say, "Nope. Nope. That's YOU, that's not ME."

People like that, powerful though they may be in certain sections of society, will always be on the wrong side of history. Progress, forward motion, always has, at its core, an examination of motivation, of meaning, of, to quote Mike Nichols, "what is this REALLY like?" (He says that when he sits down to film any scene, of any event, that is his first question: "what is this REALLY like?" Infidelity, drug addiction, love triangles - all of these things are nothing new. How can one presume to say anything new about them? You really can't. All you can do, if you are an artist, is try to understand "what it is REALLY like" and try to portray that.) If you are so busy crowing "TMI" at every revelation of character and story around you, you will never move forward. You will be stuck, like a fly drowned in amber.

Joyce cuts right to the core of that very human experience. He will not let the reader off the hook. If you insist on insisting, "That's YOU, not ME", then Ulysses will be a terribly confronting book. Joyce, above all else, was a humanist, although his cynicism and rage were titanic. That's what The Dead (excerpt here), with its final revelation of connection and love in the last four paragraphs, is all about. I have said it before: Without The Dead, The Dubliners would be merely a bitchy gossipy excavation of a modern-day city. Yes, with some good writing and memorable scenes, but it would be, essentially, a cynical book, and cynical books usually do not outlast their own time. With The Dead, in the last four paragraphs, Joyce rises up. If you only read the other stories, you might presume that Joyce despised his fellow man. His eye is excruciatingly honest. He is brutal. Who would ever have suspected that in the last story of the collection, Joyce would pull such a hat-trick, and say, essentially, "You think you know me. You do not. You think all I feel is anger. I do not. My anger comes from grief and loss. And right now, all I feel is love." If you read the book from beginning to end, The Dead, no matter that you know its coming, always comes as a surprise. Nothing in the book before that story prepares you for it. Gabriel realizes, as he watches his wife sleep, that he loves her, and yet that he has never really known her. And in that realization, his consciousness rises up and up, until he is looking down on the snowy landscape, on all of Ireland ... and he, for the first time, feels connected to life, because of his experience of heartbreak. He feels connected not just to all mankind, but also to all of the "shades", all of those people who have gone before.

The irony of all of this is that Joyce was one of the most isolated of beings, although not melancholy or a downer or any of that. He wasn't a tortured artist. He was not bohemian in the slightest. It's just that he was rather old-fashioned, believe it or not, a family man, who had dinner every night with Nora and his kids and that was that. There is no scandal about Joyce. He didn't sleep with every woman in Paris. He didn't experiment with free love. Yes, he lived in sin for 30 years before tying the knot, but he was faithful to Nora. He wasn't a big socializer. He was a big drinker, but everyone was then. He wasn't dancing in fountains like F. Scott Fitzgerald was, and cheering as his wife did a jig on the table. He was rather conventional, rather bourgeois.

Additionally, there is a tremendous self-consciousness in his books (which I mentioned earlier). He can ONLY write from his own life. He was not an "inventor". He did not make up characters, and devise complicated plots. He did not write one standard novel. It was all self self self self self. I truly believe that you MUST be a genius in order to only focus on self. (Oscar Wilde said something similar, after reading his friend Andre Gide's novel, which I haven't read, but which Wilde was not impressed with. He said, "In order to be an Egotist, one must first have an Ego." Ouch. This is similar to Blake's comment mentioned earlier. Crows trying to be eagles always give themselves away. Only a genius can only focus on Self, and get away with it.) The memoir-trend in publishing today proves that, in my mind. There are very few good ones out there, very few stories worth telling ... the thing that elevates one memoir over another is, of course, the writing style ... If you're not a good writer then nobody cares that your mama locked you in a closet and your papa couldn't put down the whiskey. Angela's Ashes was such a phenomenal success because of McCourt's writing. You write that same story without McCourt's voice and you'd want to vomit. I know that there are folks in Limerick, especially, who already want to vomit when reading McCourt's book - but that just goes to show you that you can never please everybody.

Ulysses picked up where Portrait left off. As Portrait comes to a close, the traditional narrative voice breaks down, leaving us only with Stephen Dedalus' journal entries. There is no more voice outside the "I". Joyce has abandoned the traditional narrator. Dedalus will now take over. We are inside experience, as opposed to looking on. In the third episode in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus takes a walk on the beach. We learned in the first chapter that he had broken his glasses. This fact is mentioned only once in the entire 800 page book, but we are meant to remember it. In the third chapter, during his walk on the beach, sans glasses ... the experiences come at him through a vague impression of colors and sounds. If you somehow missed that he has no glasses, and this episode is told from the perspective of someone who can't see, then you might not know what the hell is going on. At one point:

The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.

As someone who needs her glasses, I can say that that image is just just right. When I have been stranded without glasses, it is as though sounds "run towards" me ... It is not the DOG running at Dedalus, it is its BARK. Sound before vision.

Perhaps now it seems obvious, or perhaps now it seems like everyone tries to write in this subjective manner. But that's only because Joyce did it first.

All of this made Ulysses a tough sell to publishers, not even counting the bowel movements, and penises, and the evening in "Nighttown" (Dublin's red-light district) and Molly Bloom's long 40 page run-on sentence that closes the book, full of farts and menstruation and masturbation. But also, please, let us not forget, that it is some of the most beautiful writing in the English language ... and her image of embracing her husband as they lie among the rhododendrons is some of the most romantic language of all time:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another 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.

Brings me to tears every time.

And ... it's everywhere in my life. Even ...

Ahem.

The book was a bomb waiting to go off. No one would touch it. Pound had arranged for some excerpts to be published and that was the start of it. Writers, in general, were itching to get their paws on the book ... what the hell is that crazy Joyce working on now?? ... people felt competitive, nervous ... he helped them up their own game ... but in terms of the business side of things, the controversy had started before the book had even been published.

But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. She would publish it herself. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what the repercussions could be. It was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it. On February 2, 1922.

I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922. -- Sylvia Beach

And the shit hit the fan.

Nora Tully describes it thus:

The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once".

Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned everywhere - Ireland, America - everybody was talking about it, but who had actually read it? The first edition was only 1000 copies! You couldn't get the book anywhere. Additionally, you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - so there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet that you could get a copy of Ulysses was at Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, other writers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.

Here is a copy of Peggy Guggenheim's urgent order-form, sent to Sylvia Beach:

Imagine you are dying to read the book. Imagine you can't get it anywhere. Imagine that it is illegal to smuggle it back into the United States. Imagine the frenzy. You can see it in Guggeinheim's writing, can't you?

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had supported Joyce financially for years (at Pound's insistence) also arranged for another edition to be published by The Egoist press. She also arranged for them to be shipped to the United States, but they were seized by the customs officials. In 1923, John Rodker, through The Egoist again, arranged for a small printing of the book, but these were burned by English customs officials. In 1924, Shakespeare & Co., a small outfit really, and not set up to handle the demand, brought out another small printing.

Extraordinary.

Eventually, as the controversy died down, Joyce ended up going with another publisher, which really left Beach bereft financially. She already had suffered as a consequence of taking the risk to publish Ulysses. She was hounded by the police, by the censors ... so although Joyce really did need to move on, to a publisher who could handle his stardom, Beach was the first. Beach was the pioneer. Amazing woman.

Meanwhile, the comments from people who had actually read it were pouring in. This went on for years. You could read it in Europe, but America had declared it obscene, and would not allow it to arrive on its shores.

Finally, on August 7, 1934, over 10 years after its first publication by little Sylvia Beach and her little Shakespeare & Co. - a far-seeing and open-minded US Court of Appeals judge, Judge John Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and could be admitted into the United States.

Here's what the first American edition of that book looked like:

Morris L. Ernst, counsel for Random House - who successfully defended the book against obscenity charges in 1933-34 - wrote in his foreward to the 1934 edition:

It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Judge Woolsey's decision. For decades the censors have fought to emasculate literature. They have tried to set up the sensibilities of the prudery-ridden as a criterion for society, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.

Here is Judge Woolsey's decision in its entirety - it's a masterpiece of its kind. Not only is it an important legal decision, but it ends up being an acutely sensitive analysis of the book itself.

United States Discrict Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A. 110-59

December 6, 1933

On cross motions for a decree in a libel of confiscation, supplemented by a stipulation -- hereinafter described -- brought by the United States against the book "Ulysses" by James Joyce, under Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305, on the ground that the book is obscene within the meaning of that Section, and, hence, is not importable into the United States, but is subject to seizure, forfeiture and confiscation and destruction.

United States Attorney -- by Samuel C. Coleman, Esq., and Nicholas Atlas, Esq., of counsel -- for the United States, in support of motion for a decree of forfeiture, and in opposition to motion for a decree dismissing the libel.

Messrs. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, -- by Morris L. Ernst, Esq., and Alexander Lindey, Esq., of counsel -- attorneys for claimant Random House, Inc., in support of motion for a decree dismissing the libel, and in opposition to a motion for a decree of forfeiture.

WOOLSEY, J:
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.

1. 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", 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 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 for the confiscation of books such as this. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 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.

5. 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 real 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.

6. 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, Section 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; United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, 528; and compare Dysart v. United States, 272 U.S. 655, 657; Swearingen v. United States 151 U.S. 446, 450; United States v. Dennett, 39 F. (2d) 564, 568 (C.C.A. 2); People v. Wendling, 258 N.Y. 451, 453.

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 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.

JOHN M. WOOLSEY
United States District Judge

The comments of other great writers, Joyce's contemporaries, on this book are of great interest to me. The responses run the gamut from disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... He made other writers feel like putting down their pens. He enraged those who felt that THEY deserved HIS accolades (phone call for Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, phone call) ... but whatever the response, the only emotion you will NOT find is indifference.

Joyce had made his mark.

Yeats (an early champion of Joyce) had this as his first response on reading Ulysses: "A mad book!"

Then later, as he let the book percolate, Yeats corrected himself: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

Hart Crane said: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, he took it personally, he did not like what it revealed - about man, about Irish men, about the life of Ireland, but he grappled with the implications in an honest way: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."

T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"

T.S. Eliot again: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."

Edmund Wilson wrote of it:

The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.

Wilson also wrote:

Yet for all its appalling longeurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."

Carl Jung read the book and wrote Joyce a rather extraordinary letter:

Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung

Joyce was very proud of this letter and would read it out loud to guests in his house. Nora would snort at the end, "Jimmy knows nothin' about women!"

Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter about having Joyce over to meet her and her usband:

"Joyce was rather ... difficile. I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses -- no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. I've read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry [Mansfield's husband] and Joyce simply sailed out of my depth. I felt almost stupefied. It's absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. It's almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geologic standpoint or -- oh, I don't know!"

The most humorous part of this is that Joyce said, after meeting Katherine and her husband:

"Mrs. Murry understood the book better than her husband."

Hilarious.

George Moore, another Irish writer, wrote:

"Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That's not art, it's like trying to copy the London Directory."

Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:

"Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."

Gertrude Stein wrote:

"Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day."

Joyce heard what Stein wrote, thought about it, and said, "I hate intellectual women."

George Bernard Shaw again:

"I have read several fragments of Ulysses ... It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity...It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject."

Ezra Pound said:

"Joyce -- pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats' -- Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses."

Yeats wrote:

"It is an entirely new thing -- neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

William Carlos Williams wrote (echoing what many of Joyce's contemporaries felt):

"Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least."

E.M. Forster wrote:

"Perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day."

Dr. Joseph Collins reviewed "Ulysses" in The New York Times and wrote:

Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky ... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.

Hart Crane, who had totally lost his head about the book, wrote:

"The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek ... It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses."

Ford Madox Ford wrote:

"For myself then, the pleasure -- the very great pleasure -- that I get from going through the sentences of Mr. Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose."

William Faulkner wrote:

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote:

Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce's champion game.

That's a drawing by Guy Davenport, entitled "Joyce Writing a Sentence".

My father gave me his treasured and rare copy of Ulysses - part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you pick it up. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it - which has on the spine: ULYSSES - PARIS, 1924.

Every page has something of interest on it. There is a sticker on the first page - stamped with the personal imprint of the couple who had bought the book (my father, naturally, knew everything about them). The copyright page is amazing. First of all, it lists all of the controversial editions that had gone before ... 500 copies burned, etc. And to see the legendary "Shakespeare & Co.", in print, signing its name, so to speak, to the book, bravely putting it out again, knowing what will happen to their small operation ... It's just something that makes me feel humble, awed, and proud that I am aware that such people existed.

My copy of the book is not one that I will take out and read. It is too fragile.

But it is now my most prized possession, and I do take it out sometimes, to flip through the pages, looking for my favorite parts (the conversation about Shakespeare in the library is my favorite section), and reveling in the feel of the pages, their soft fragility, the print on the page showing its indent. Ulysses is so wrapped up in my father (I read it for the first time and basically called him every other day to get tips - "what the hell is going on HERE?") that it cannot be separated out. Each page resonates with some tidbit from my father, some explication, or biographical detail of all of the names that show up in Joyce's book.

I took some photos of this gift from my father. They are below.

The last photo has a framed picture of my dad in the background, standing by Yeats' grave. That was not deliberate. I did not consciously place the framed photo in the frame. It's just that everywhere in my apartment that you look you will see evidence of my heritage, my family, my inheritance. My father taught us well. Here is my brother's post on Ulysses, which gives me goosebumps. We are, apparently, a family of Joycean T-shirts, as evidenced by my T-shirt above. And here is Exhibit B from my brother:

Happy birthday to Jimmy Joyce and to his masterpiece. The 19th century was certainly ready to be killed, and there were legions of artists who hacked away at it, but it took a nearly-blind perpetually-broke Irishman-in-exile, with his wife and two kids in tow, to finish the job.

"all fecund with its nuttiness"

An hysterical short film by Bórd Scannán na hEireann of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett playing pitch 'n putt and ... waiting ... for ... someone. Joyce is in a perpetual rage. Beckett is impenetrable. I laughed the whole way through. I love these actors. Like, Joyce: chill OUT. "all blood-red something ..." Non-stop rageful improvisation.

Thanks to Carrie for the link.

Today in history: August 7, 1934

The US Court of Appeals judged Ulysses by James Joyce to be NOT obscene and declared that the book could be admitted into the United States. The book had originally been published by Shakespeare & Co in Paris in 1922 by the courageous Sylvia Beach. Since its publication in 1922, the book had been near impossible to get. A frenzy ensued. There was an obscenity trial. Copies were confiscated by customs officials around the world. Entire shipments of books were burned. There was a time when literally the only place you could buy a copy of the famous book was at the little bookshop in Paris.

Here's what the first American edition of that book looked like:

Morris L. Ernst, counsel for Random House - who successfully defended the book against obscenity charges in 1933-34 - wrote in his foreward to the 1934 edition:

It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Judge Woolsey's decision. For decades the censors have fought to emasculate literature. They have tried to set up the sensibilities of the prudery-ridden as a criterion for society, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.

Here is Judge Woolsey's decision in its entirety - it's a masterpiece of its kind. Not only is it an important legal decision, but it ends up being an acutely sensitive analysis of the book itself.

United States Discrict Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A. 110-59

December 6, 1933

On cross motions for a decree in a libel of confiscation, supplemented by a stipulation -- hereinafter described -- brought by the United States against the book "Ulysses" by James Joyce, under Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305, on the ground that the book is obscene within the meaning of that Section, and, hence, is not importable into the United States, but is subject to seizure, forfeiture and confiscation and destruction.

United States Attorney -- by Samuel C. Coleman, Esq., and Nicholas Atlas, Esq., of counsel -- for the United States, in support of motion for a decree of forfeiture, and in opposition to motion for a decree dismissing the libel.

Messrs. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, -- by Morris L. Ernst, Esq., and Alexander Lindey, Esq., of counsel -- attorneys for claimant Random House, Inc., in support of motion for a decree dismissing the libel, and in opposition to a motion for a decree of forfeiture.

WOOLSEY, J:
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.

1. 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", 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 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 for the confiscation of books such as this. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 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.

5. 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 real 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.

6. 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, Section 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; United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, 528; and compare Dysart v. United States, 272 U.S. 655, 657; Swearingen v. United States 151 U.S. 446, 450; United States v. Dennett, 39 F. (2d) 564, 568 (C.C.A. 2); People v. Wendling, 258 N.Y. 451, 453.

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 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.

JOHN M. WOOLSEY
United States District Judge

My favorite line of the whole thing:

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.

To quote Joyce - whose words have been at the top of my blog since I started this damn thing:

This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

You go, Jimmy.

Last year my father gave me his treasured and rare copy of Ulysses - part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you pick it up. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it - which has on the spine: ULYSSES - PARIS, 1924.

Every page has something of interest on it. There is a sticker on the first page - stamped with the personal imprint of the couple who had bought the book (my father, naturally, knew everything about them). The copyright page is amazing. First of all, it lists all of the controversial editions that had gone before ... 500 copies burned, etc. And to see the legendary "Shakespeare & Co.", in print, signing its name, so to speak, to the book, bravely putting it out again, knowing what will happen to their small operation ... It's just something that makes me feel humble, awed, and proud that I am aware that such people existed.

But it is Judge Woolsey's decision and its eloquence (and courage) that I would like to celebrate today.

So this day is a very big day, one of those moments when free speech triumphed, when good itself triumphed. These fights will continue to come up, as long as there are those who want to control what others read, look at, even think - because it offends THEM. Whether or not Ulysses is your taste is irrelevant. Different people have different tolerance levels for things such as smut, dirty words, frank sexual talk, and bathroom humor. The finger-waggers want their tolerance level to be the default. This is a fight I take very seriously. I respect that some people don't like certain things. But I'll be damned if I let those people corral MY tolerance level. You would have to pay me to watch NASCAR races, I don't like gambling, and I think Nicholas Sparks is a hack. Doesn't mean I have any desire to stop those who love those things from having access to them. Therein lies the difference.

We can only hope there are more Judge Woolseys out there.

Thank you, sir!

It's kind of a family epidemic.

These photos were taken on the same day. It was not planned. It's just how things are when you are an O'Malley.

MY SHIRT

MY BROTHER'S SHIRT

Reunion

Speaking of Joyce and February 2nd and Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company:

Here is a great photo of a Shakespeare & Co. reunion. What a cast of characters. Posted on that wonderful website on February 2nd. Coincidence? I think not.

More Joyce

In my web wanderings today, I came across this wonderful post - a man tracking down Joyce's birthplace in Rathgar. With photos and commentary. He braved "the apocalyptic snows of Leinster to find the truth."

And thanks for the link, Ernie. You've been sending all kinds of fascinating people my way.

Today in history: February 2nd

Two things happened on today in history:

February 2, 1882: James Joyce was born in Rathgar.

February 2, 1922: Joyce's Ulysses was published by Shakespeare & Co.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

It took James Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. Later, he would joke, when faced with criticism that the book was just too damn big - "I spent seven years writing it. People could at least spend seven years reading it."

His next book was Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) and that took him seventeen years to write.

Boy marched to the beat of his own drummer.

The history of the publication of Ulysses is a book in and of itself.

James Joyce had fled Ireland, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind him, back in 1904. Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school in first Zurich (that didn't work out), and then Trieste. He convinced his new-found love, Nora Barnacle, a wild girl from Galway, to run away with him. He had known her for only a couple of months. They had met on June 16, 1904 - the day that he would choose to set the entirety of Ulysses on, the ultimate tribute to what she gave him. James and Nora lived in Trieste for 10 years, having children (two of them), not getting married just to spite tradition - although they referred to one another as "husband" and "wife" (the two would eventually marry in the 1930s) ... and living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Joyce was working on Dubliners, which was quite a struggle. He could not find anyone willing to publish it. Dubliners was eventually published in 1914. He had already been working on it for years. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was published (in serial form) in 1914 and finally brought out as a book in 1916. It had been serialized in the highly influential The Egoist. Around this time, James Joyce was taken under the wing of Ezra Pound (what a shock. Pound was everywhere).

James Joyce had been interested in the plight of the Jews for a long time. Especially as a man living in perpetual exile, country-less, yet always looking "homeward". He felt that there was an affinity between the Jews and the Irish, and he thought it was something to explore. He had considered writing a story along these lines for Dubliners but it didn't end up happening. However, the idea percolated. It ended up being one of the main ideas in the book Ulysses, based, of course, on Homer's epic, but Joyce, with his obsessive tendencies, was the kind of man who saw connections everywhere. Exile, journey, what does "home" mean, where is it? These were questions of great relevance to the Jews, but also to himself, who felt he could never live in Ireland again (and he never did). Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses is a Jew, living in Ireland. Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego, the "star" of Portrait of the Artist as well) is one of the aimless men Ireland is so fond of creating, a man looking for a father figure, a guide. Through their mutual wanderings through the city of Dublin, on June 16, 1904, they eventually cross paths. It is not that a kindred spirit is revealed, not really. They do not connect, or heal, or grow, or become empowered. None of those pat concepts are at work in Ulysses. It is more that it is a meeting of the minds. A realization of the connection between them, but also that such connection is transitory. At the end of the book they go their separate ways.

Joyce wrote:

Ulysses is the epic of two races (Israel - Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book-- blast it!

What was such a big deal about Ulysses? A book where nothing, let's be honest, really happens?

Much of the brou-haha (at least in the literary set) was about the writing itself, a deepening and broadening of the landscape he had explored in Portrait: what is existence really like? What is it like to live, moment to moment?

James Joyce wrote once:

"Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?"

Joyce did not delve into the psychologies of his characters so much, although we get to know Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus better than we even know our best friends through reading Ulysses. Joyce goes behind closed doors. He goes inside the body. Circulation, digestion, sex drive, the splitting of cells ... all of that is going on in his writing, because the book - as well as being an homage to Homer's Odyssey - as well as being set up in a complicated structure, mirroring Homer's work - as well as having colors associated with each episode, and a different writing style for each episode ... it is also, chapter by chapter, a dissection of the human body. One chapter (the Cyclops chapter, naturally) is the "eye" chapter. One chapter is the stomach chapter. One chapter is the sex organs chapter. And etc. None of this is explicit. There is no guide. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to get into HIS mode when reading the book, and let your OWN mode go. This is why many people were (and are) annoyed by Joyce. But geniuses have always annoyed people. As William Blake famously wrote:

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Ouch. Crows don't like that when you point it out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about the response of crows to their superiority. They need to just keep being eagles.

But James Joyce wouldn't have thought of it like that. His defenders (like myself) say stuff like that all the time, but Joyce (perhaps disingenuously) really didn't see what the big deal was. He wrote what he wrote because it amused and fascinated him. He wrote only what he could write. He wasn't going for an effect, he wasn't trying to be clever. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He wrote from that stance. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't precocious, he wasn't self-conscious about it. (Actually, he was - but I'll touch on that in a bit.) The thing to get about Joyce (and this is where he is truly an eagle) is that he wrote Ulysses not to make a big splash, not to stick it to the censors, not to show lesser writers how it's REALLY done (although all of these things were results) ... he wrote it because he liked it. He found it funny. Engaging.

He said (and this may be perhaps my favorite Joyce quote, and it is something to keep in mind should you pick up Ulysses for the first time - it's a clue in HOW to read it):

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

I believe him. Certainly there were serious ideas in the book, it's a revolution, really ... but looked at in another light, in Joyce's light, there is "not one single serious word in it". It's a joke, a maze, a puzzle, an examination of ridiculous coincidences and connections. What does it "mean"? That's the stupidest question of all to concern yourself with. It means nothing.

Samuel Beckett's wonderful quote in regards to Finnegans Wake is also applicable to Ulysses:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

And THAT is why Joyce is such a big deal. THAT is why the book went off like a bomb throughout the literary world. THAT is why people like T.S. freakin' Eliot, no slouch himself, said, "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." James Joyce lived in a world of giants. Hemingway, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pound, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot ... the modernists. He was part of his time, but he went so much further than any of his contemporaries that many of them never quite recovered from the Ulysses juggernaut. The comments of other writers about Ulysses are absolutely marvelous, because they all recognized what has come. They all realized what had happened. The 20th century had arrived. They had all been working towards it, trying to wrestle the 19th century out of existence, bringing new forms to light. And it's not that any of these people failed. But Ulysses was the "star". Ulysses was the real death-knell.

T.S. Eliot said that Ulysses "killed the 19th century".

James Joyce hadn't set out to "kill the 19th century", but his sensibility - contrarian, sensitive, angry, loving - led him to a form that couldn't help but do so.

Now let me talk about the actual publication of the book.

Into our story now steps Sylvia Beach. Born in Maryland, as an adult she became a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all. Oh, for a time machine, to go hang out at that place in the 1920s, where Hemingway would stop by, Fitzgerald would browse, Joyce would sneak in and out, Gertrude Stein would bitch and moan (haha) ... and Pound would negotiate with all of them, trying to help them all out and promote his favorites ... they ALL were there.

I love this - here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends (try to find Joyce - isn't that hysterical?? He doesn't even have a body! That was how he was seen - just a big floating brain with enormous glasses!).

Who was the cartoonist?

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In this vibrant world of literary rivals and giants struggling for the stage, Sylvia Beach played an important role. She had good taste, first of all, she liked the "good" ones, and didn't waste her time with the crows. She also had courage (as we shall see).

When Beach met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". You have to get into the mindset of the censors, as unpleasant an experience as that is. What on earth is "obscene" about Ulysses? Ultimately, the book expresses love. You cannot deny it, you cannot escape from it. It is love. Leopold Bloom, throughout his long long day, is only thinking about his wife Molly, and how much he loves her, and how afraid he is that she is being unfaithful. There is only one woman for him. In the same way that there was only one woman for Joyce. Love, it is love that drags us home after our long journey. Only love. But Joyce did not shy away from the more unsavory aspects of life (and let's remember his comment about the "mystery of the conscious" - that's so so important: he did not, as Proust did, or Woolf did, or some of the other modern writers - delve into psychology and the workings of the subconscious. He did not look at motivations and childhood repression. Let's not forget the huge influence of Freud at this time. A revolution in the understanding of the workings of humanity. Whether or not you agree with Freud, and whether or not you think Freud is over-rated is irrelevant. I am talking about the time and place from which Joyce wrote. Freud - and Jung - were hugely influential to writers like Joyce and Proust.) But Joyce, unlike Proust, did not explore how memory works, and how the senses trigger thoughts and feelings and entire narratives from our lives ... He was much more prosaic. Blunt. He presented man in the most honest manner possible. Leopold Bloom takes a dump, for example. He sits on the toilet after breakfast, and thinks about things, worrying about things, as he goes to the bathroom. Now, this is one of the most human of experiences. Anyone who says they haven't sat on the toilet, pondering their day, and what they are worried about, is lying. But to put that in a book?? What are you, cracked?

There are those who feel that while such things may be 'real', they have no place in literature. Now we're getting into the realm of the censors, who wanted to control what could be shown. It's the same as people nowadays who seem to feel that saying "TMI" is the be-all and end-all of human interaction. You complain that you stubbed your toe that morning, and certain people will say, "TMI!" Someday I'll write a post on how much I despise the "TMI" trend, and how I think it is actually indicative of so much that is effed up ... "TMI" is nothing new. There have always been those who really DON'T want to know you, who really DON'T want the truth when they ask "How are you?" It's just that now that we have "TMI" to say, it's way over-used. If I never hear the phrase "TMI" again, I will fall asleep a happy woman. Sure, there's such a thing as "over-sharing", but I'm not really talking about that. I am talking about something far more insidious. Something that is not in any way, shape or form new - it's been going on forever, as long as human beings have been in contact with one another. There is a shying away from real experience of one another. Of course. Because if you allow yourself to experience what it is like for another person, then that might mean you might have compassion for them, or empathy, or you might have a sense of recognition, an awareness of the universal: "Yes, I do that, too!" Many people do not want to be shaken out of their selves like that. I include myself, by the way, although you will never ever catch me saying "TMI"! I am all ABOUT "TMI"! But the first response for many, to some demand for connection, or understanding, is to batton down the hatches, draw the line in the sand, and say, "Nope. Nope. That's YOU, that's not ME."

Joyce cuts right to the core of that very human experience. He will not let the reader off the hook. If you insist on insisting, "That's YOU, not ME", then Ulysses will be a terribly confronting book. Joyce, above all else, was a humanist, although his cynicism and rage were titanic. That's what The Dead, with its final revelation of connection to all in the last four paragraphs, is all about. Gabriel realizes, as he watches his wife sleep, that he loves her, and yet that he has never really known her. And in that realization, his consciousness rises up and up, until he is looking down on the snowy landscape, on all of Ireland ... and he, for the first time, feels connected to life, because of his experience of heartbreak. He feels connected not just to all mankind, but also to all of the "shades", all of those people who have gone before.

To walk around saying "TMI, TMI" whenever anyone reveals anything about themselves is to exclude yourself from the human family.

The irony of all of this is that Joyce was one of the most isolated of beings, although not melancholy or a downer or any of that. It's just that he was rather old-fashioned, believe it or not, a family man, who had dinner every night with Nora and his kids and that was that. There is no scandal about Joyce. He didn't sleep with every woman in Paris. He didn't experiment with free love. Yes, he lived in sin for 30 years before tying the knot, but he was faithful to Nora. He wasn't a big socializer. He was a big drinker, but everyone was then. He wasn't dancing in fountains like F. Scott Fitzgerald was, and cheering as his wife did a jig on the table. He was rather conventional, rather bourgeois.

Additionally, there is a tremendous self-consciousness in his books (which I mentioned earlier). He can ONLY write from his own life. He was not an "inventor". He did not make up characters, and devise complicated plots. He did not write one standard novel. It was all self self self self self. I truly believe that you MUST be a genius in order to only focus on self. The memoir-trend in publishing today proves that, in my mind. There are very few good ones out there, very few stories worth telling ... the thing that elevates one memoir over another is, of course, the writing style ... If you're not a good writer then nobody cares that your mama locked you in a closet and your papa couldn't put down the whiskey. Angela's Ashes was such a phenomenal success because of McCourt's writing. You write that same story without McCourt's voice and you'd want to vomit. I know that there are folks in Limerick, especially, who already want to vomit when reading McCourt's book - but that just goes to show you that you can never please everybody.

Ulysses picked up where Portrait left off. As Portrait comes to a close, the traditional narrative voice breaks down, leaving us only with Stephen Dedalus' journal entries. There is no more voice outside the "I". Joyce has abandoned the traditional narrator. Dedalus will now take over. We are inside experience, as opposed to looking on. In the third episode in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus takes a walk on the beach. We learned in the first chapter that he had broken his glasses. This fact is mentioned only once in the entire 800 page book, but we are meant to remember it. In the third chapter, during his walk on the beach, sans glasses ... the experiences come at him through a vague impression of colors and sounds. If you somehow missed that he has no glasses, and this episode is told from the perspective of someone who can't see, then you might not know what the hell is going on. At one point:

The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.

As someone who needs her glasses, I can say that that is just just right. When I have been stranded without glasses, it is as though sounds "run towards" me ... It is not the DOG running at Dedalus, it is its BARK.

Perhaps now it seems obvious, or perhaps now it seems like everyone tries to write in this subjective manner. But that's only because Joyce did it first.

All of this made Ulysses a tough sell to publishers, not even counting the bowel movements, and penises, and the evening in "Nighttown" (Dublin's red-light district) and Molly Bloom's long 40 page run-on sentence that closes the book, full of farts and menstruation and masturbation. But also, please, let us not forget, that it is some of the most beautiful writing in the English language ... and her image of embracing her husband as they lie among the rhododendrons is some of the most romantic language of all time:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another 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.

Brings me to tears every time.

The book was a bomb waiting to go off. No one would touch it. Pound had arranged for some excerpts to be published and that was the start of it. Writers, in general, were itching to get their paws on the book ... what the hell is that crazy Joyce working on now?? ... people felt competitive, nervous ... he helped them up their own game ... but in terms of the business side of things, the controversy had started before the book had even been published.

But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. She would publish it herself. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what the repercussions could be. It was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it. On February 2, 1922.

I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922. -- Sylvia Beach

And the shit hit the fan.

Nora Tully describes it thus:

The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once".

Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned everywhere - Ireland, America - everybody was talking about it, but who had actually read it? The first edition was only 1000 copies! You couldn't get the book anywhere. Additionally, you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - so there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet that you could get a copy of Ulysses was at Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, other writers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.

Here is a copy of Peggy Guggenheim's urgent order-form, sent to Sylvia Beach:

Imagine you are dying to read the book. Imagine you can't get it anywhere. Imagine that it is illegal to smuggle it back into the United States. Imagine the frenzy. You can see it in Guggeinheim's writing, can't you?

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had supported Joyce financially for years (at Pound's insistence) also arranged for another edition to be published by The Egoist press. She also arranged for them to be shipped to the United States, but they were seized by the customs officials. In 1923, John Rodker, through The Egoist again, arranged for a small printing of the book, but these were burned by English customs officials. In 1924, Shakespeare & Co., a small outfit really, and not set up to handle the demand, brought out another small printing.

Extraordinary.

Eventually, as the controversy died down, Joyce ended up going with another publisher, which really left Beach bereft financially. She already had suffered as a consequence of taking the risk to publish Ulysses. She was hounded by the police, by the censors ... so although Joyce really did need to move on, to a publisher who could handle his stardom, Beach was the first. Beach was the pioneer. Amazing woman.

Meanwhile, the comments from people who had actually read it were pouring in. This went on for years. You could read it in Europe, but America had declared it obscene, and would not allow it to arrive on its shores.

Finally, on August 7, 1934, over 10 years after its first publication by little Sylvia Beach and her little Shakespeare & Co. - a far-seeing and open-minded US Court of appeals judge, Judge Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and could be admitted into the United States. It was a ground-breaking moment, a true historical watershed - and his decision reads almost like an insightful and intuitive literary review. Not to be missed. Go, Judge Woolsey!

The comments of other great writers on this book are of great interest to me. I can't get enough. I have compiled them all in a notebook. I love to read through them. The responses run the gamut from disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... He made other writers feel like putting down their pens. He enraged those who felt that THEY deserved HIS accolades (phone call for Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, phone call) ... but whatever the response, the only emotion you will NOT find is indifference.

Joyce had made his mark.

Yeats (an early champion of Joyce) had this as his first response on reading Ulysses: "A mad book!"

Then later, as he let the book percolate, Yeats corrected himself: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

Hart Crane said: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, he took it personally, he did not like what it revealed - about man, about Irish men, about the life of Ireland, but he grappled with the implications in an honest way: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."

T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"

T.S. Eliot again: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."

Edmund Wilson wrote of it:

The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.

Wilson also wrote:

Yet for all its appalling longeurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."

Carl Jung read the book and wrote Joyce a letter:

Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung

Joyce was very proud of this letter and would read it out loud to guests in his house. Nora would snort at the end, "Jimmy knows nothin' about women!"

Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter:

"Joyce was rather ... difficile. I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses -- no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. I've read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry [Mansfield's husband] and Joyce simply sailed out of my depth. I felt almost stupefied. It's absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. It's almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geologic standpoint or -- oh, I don't know!"

The most humorous part of this is that Joyce said, after meeting Katherine and her husband:

"Mrs. Murry understood the book better than her husband."

Hilarious.

George Moore, another Irish writer, wrote:

"Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That's not art, it's like trying to copy the London Directory."

Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:

"Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."

Gertrude Stein wrote:

"Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day."

Joyce heard what Stein wrote, thought about it, and said, "I hate intellectual women."

George Bernard Shaw again:

"I have read several fragments of Ulysses ... It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity...It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject."

Ezra Pound said:

"Joyce -- pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats' -- Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses."

Yeats wrote:

"It is an entirely new thing -- neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

William Carlos Williams wrote (echoing what many of Joyce's contemporaries felt):

"Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least."

E.M. Forster wrote:

"Perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day."

Dr. Joseph Collins reviewed "Ulysses" in The New York Times and wrote:

Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky ... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.

Hart Crane, who had totally lost his head about the book, wrote:

"The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek ... It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses."

Ford Madox Ford wrote:

"For myself then, the pleasure -- the very great pleasure -- that I get from going through the sentences of Mr. Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose."

William Faulkner wrote:

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote:

Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce's champion game.

That's a drawing by Guy Davenport, entitled "Joyce Writing a Sentence".

Last year, at around this time - almost exactly a year now - my father gave me his treasured and rare copy of Ulysses - part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you pick it up. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it - which has on the spine: ULYSSES - PARIS, 1924.

I have been unable to look at it over the past year. I brought it home with me, put it on a special shelf, and stayed the hell away from it. It seemed to mean something ominous, something final. I didn't want to pick it up, and be casual about it. Even just looking at the book gives me a chill down my spine.

This morning I took it out and spent an hour with it, treating it as carefully as a glass figurine. Every page has something of interest on it. There is a sticker on the first page - stamped with the personal imprint of the couple who had bought the book (my father, naturally, knew everything about them). The copyright page is amazing. First of all, it lists all of the controversial editions that had gone before ... 500 copies burned, etc. And to see the legendary "Shakespeare & Co.", in print, signing its name, so to speak, to the book, bravely putting it out again, knowing what will happen to their small operation ... It's just something that makes me feel humble, awed, and proud that I am aware that such people existed.

My copy of the book is not one that I will take out and read. It is too fragile.

But it is now my most prized possession. I spent some time with it this morning. 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. In honor of the man who gave it to me, and in honor of the birthday of this book that means so much to me, that connects me to something so deep, so powerful - that I can barely speak to it.

I took some photos of this gift from my father. They are below.

The last photo has a framed picture of my dad in the background, standing by Yeats' grave. That was not deliberate. I did not consciously place the framed photo in the frame. It's just that everywhere in my apartment that you look you will see evidence of my heritage, my family, my inheritance. My father taught us well.

Happy birthday to Jimmy Joyce and to his masterpiece.

Happy birthday to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had been serialized by Ezra Pound in The Egoist - in 1914, 15 (speaking of Ezra Pound) - but yesterday was the day it was published as a whole, in 1916.

Dubliners had already been published - and very controversial were those stories - not embraced by his own country of course (they hit too close to home). Joyce had known what the reaction would be. He had found much more acceptance "on the Continent" than in his native land.

But it was Portrait of the Artist which really firmed up his reputation as a writer. Portrait, a book broken up into five long chapters, details Stephen Dedalus' journey from unknowing unthinking participant of life to artist. In order for Stephen Dedalus to put on the wings of Icarus, so to speak, he had to divorce himself from his influences: family, politics, church, language, and country. James Joyce himself wrote:

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning. ... I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

Portrait is one of the most self-involved books of all time. Fatherland needed to be jettisoned. So did family. So did church.

It ends with the famous lines:

April 27 Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

It is that word - "artificer" - that is the clue to the book's power. What is art but artifice? This is not a bad thing in Joyce's lexicon. As a matter of fact, it is the whole point. It is the other things, the things we receive passively but without questioning (nationality, religion, our place in our own families) that are the true artificial entities ... Only art is real.

Then, naturally, 1922 brought the world Ulysses which changed everything. According to TS Eliot, Joyce "killed the 19th century" with that book.

Portrait is a huge accomplishment in and of itself, and it is best to look at it outside of the influence of Ulysses - because Ulysses is one of those things that casts such a long shadow in every direction - it's hard to see anything clearly. It's like trying to appreciate the other playwrights during Shakespeare's time (everyone besides Marlowe, I mean, who is great enough to be appreciated on his own). How does one get Shakespeare out of the way in order to appreciate the lesser accomplishments of his contemporaries? It's very difficult.

Kinda like that great quote from Bing Crosby, no slouch himself, on his contemporary rival Frank Sinatra: "Frank [Sinatra] is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in mine?"

Ulysses has the same effect - not just on Joyce's other writing, but on all other writers writing at that time (and they all knew it AS it was happening. Ulysses came out and it was like a bomb went off - the reverberations felt the world around).

I love Portrait of the Artist. I have read it many times, and each time I come to it I find something new. It's one of those books you can grow up with. At times in my life I find Stephen Dedalus frustrating. At other times I find him exciting, illuminating. It seems like the book changes with me. I also feel like I will never get to the bottom of the book. It's much more of a straight narrative than Ulysses (excerpt here) or Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) - but it still has a lot of mystery in it. It's not nonsensical - it's not mysterious for the sake of being mysterious - it's just that it's a deep deep pool. Joyce was beginning his internal journey, the one where he, as a writer, would try to break down what life actually felt like, moment to moment to moment ... For example, in the third chapter of Ulysses (excerpt here), Stephen Dedalus (again the protagonist) goes for a walk on the beach. We have learned in chapter one (excerpt here) that Dedalus has broken his glasses. Joyce does not remind us of this fact in chapter three. As a matter of fact, it never comes up again in the entire 800 page book. He mentions it just once. But in that walk on the beach, all of the sensations come to Dedalus as either blurry images or sound, just the way they would if you had lost your glasses. But Joyce doesn't spell it out, he does not say, "Having lost his glasses, Dedalus saw the world as blurry." Instead, he shows us this, he tries to put us inside that experience with lines like:

The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.

Brilliant. The dog itself is not seen clearly or perceived. But the dog's bark runs towards him, stops, and runs back again.

Ineluctable modality of the visible.

Joyce complained once:

"Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?"

Trying to describe and experience "the mystery of the conscious" was what Joyce's life-work was all about.

Here is an excerpt from the masterful Richard Ellman biography of Joyce
:

To write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce plunged back into his own past, mainly to justify, but also to expose it. The book's pattern, as he explained to Stanislaus, is that we are what we were; our maturity is an extension of our childhood, and the courageous boy is father of the arrogant young man. But in searching for a way to convert the episodic Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce hit upon a principle of structure which reflected his habits of mind as extremely as he could wish. The work of art, like a mother's love, must be achieved over the greatest obstacles, and Joyce, who had been dissatisfied with his earlier work as too easily done, now found the obstacles in the form of a most complicated pattern.

This is hinted at in his image of the creative process. As far back as his paper on Mangan, Joyce said that the poet takes into the vital center of his life "the life that surrounds it, flinging it abroad again amid planetary music." He repeated this image in Stephen Hero, then in Portrait of the Artist developed it more fully. Stephen refers to the making of literature as "the phenomenon of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction," and then describes the progression from lyrical to epical and to dramatic art:

The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the center of an epical event and this form progresses till the center of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea ... The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life ... The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished.

This creator is not only male but female; Joyce goes on to borrow an image of Flaubert by calling him a "god", but he is also a goddess. Within his womb creatures come to life. Gabriel the seraph comes to the Virgin's chamber and, as Stephen says, "In the virgin womb of the imagination, the word is made flesh."

Ellman goes on to discuss Joyce's structural choices for this book - much of it tied up with the fact that Nora (his wife) was pregnant at the time of writing:

His brother records that in the first draft of Portrait, Joyce thought of a man's character as developing "from an embryo" with constant traits. Joyce acted upon this theory with characteristic thoroughness, and his subsequent interest in the process of gestation, as conveyed to Stanislaus during Nora's first pregnancy, expressed a concern that was literary as well as anatomical. His decision to rewrite Stephen Hero as Portrait in five chapters occurred appropriately just after Lucia's birth. For A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul, and in the metaphor Joyce found his new principle of order. The book begins with Stephen's father and, just before the ending, it depicts the hero's severance from his mother. From the start the soul is surrounded by liquids, urine, slime, seawater, amniotic tides, "drops of water" (as Joyce says at the end of the first chapter) "falling softly in the brimming bowl." The atmosphere of biological struggle is necessarily dark and melancholy until the light of life is glimpsed. In the first chapter the foetal soul is for a few pages only slightly individualized, the organism responds only to the most primitive sensory impressions, then the heart forms and musters its affections, the being struggles towards some unspecified, uncomprehended culmination, it is flooded in ways it cannot understand or control, it gropes wordlessly toward sexual differentiation. In the third chapter shame floods Stephen's whole body as conscience develops; the lower bestial nature is put by. Then at the end of the fourth chapter the soul discovers the goal towards which it has been mysteriously proceeding -- the goal of life. It must swim no more but emerge into air, the new metaphor being flight. The final chapter shows the soul, already fully developed, fattening itself for its journey until at last it is ready to leave. In the last few pages of the book, Stephen's diary, the soul is released from its confinement, its individuality is complete, and the style shifts with savage abruptness.

If you go back and read the book again (or if you haven't read it - and are reading it for the first time), keep in mind the underlying structure. It's subtle - it's all done through metaphor, imagery, and language - but it's there. The development of the soul is never described - it is experienced through Joyce's language choices. This is Joyce's main contribution to literature as we know it. No other writer even comes close to accomplishing what he did - although many imitate him. Many probably imitate him without even realizing who it is they are imitating, that is the level of Joyce's influence. But Joyce was imitating no one. He had many influences - his sense of the tide of literature is encyclopedic - but he knew he was breaking with the past. He didn't break with the past just to be a rebel, or because he thought the past was worthless. On the contrary. He wrote the best way he knew how. He said later, "With me, the thought is always simple." And this is true in the stories of Dubliners, and it's true in the "gibberish" of Finnegans Wake. The structure may be complex, and it usually is with Joyce - but "the thought is always simple". Literature was old, tired, and language itself had no meaning in and of itself.

Remember: Joyce was an Irishman. The Irish language had been stomped out by British imperialism. Whatever language he wrote in, and he wrote in English, he knew that it was not really his own. Joyce wrote:

"Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The British, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget -- the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature."

Joyce also said:

"I'd like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition."

Portrait, without becoming polemical, without turning itself into Irish nationalistic propaganda (something Joyce had contempt for), describes one Irishman's journey to divorce himself from that tradition. Joyce wrote his books about Ireland, but they were not really FOR Ireland. The funny thing is: Joyce lived most of his life outside of Ireland. But he could not write about anything else. He had a lot of anger towards Ireland. My words there are not really appropriate. Anger? Try rage. The provincial nature of the culture, the priest-ridden social life (Joyce said, "In Ireland, Catholicism is black magic"), the inability of its inhabitants to live freely, to "touch one another" (not just sexually, altlhough he meant that as well) ... He knew he offended his countrymen by telling the truth about what really went on in Ireland, but he didn't care. First of all, he came to the realization at some point that "I can't write without offending people", and he also realized:

"It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.

Rage.

Joyce got in there WITH the language - and made it do what he needed it to do. He said that he would like a language that is "above all other languages". And so he set out to create it. Shakespeare did the same thing. Chaucer did the same thing. This is the level we're at here: Writers who didn't just accept language as it is. Writers who, through their own work, catapulted language to another level. We cannot think about the English language without talking about Shakespeare. Or Chaucer. Joyce, with his status as an Irishman, had a lot of feelings about all of this - because the English language was imposed upon his country. It wasn't imposed on him personally - he grew up speaking English - but it was imposed on his ancestors, and he had internalized that cultural disconnect. This is one of the reasons why he felt that the Celtic revival of his time, and all of the Irish language classes that started popping up again, were so ridiculous. Why would Ireland want to go backwards? Religion and language were the things that were holding Ireland back in the first place. He, unlike Yeats, unlike Synge, unlike the other big writers of that time, had no interest in cavorting with the peasantry in the west of Ireland. Joyce was a city boy, first of all, strictly urban ... and his gaze was turned permanently towards Europe. His first big influence was Ibsen. Dubliners is filled with stories where the characters yearn to get out, to flee ... they stare at the boats in the quays (excerpt here), boats from places like Norway and Argentina (excerpt here), and they know that getting out is their only chance of soul-survival.

Most writers who come from countries who were colonized have these feelings about language - it's a very interesting dialogue. If he COULD express himself fully - it would have to be in some OTHER kind of language (which is where Finnegans Wake came from.) Language ITSELF needed an overhaul. Again - you can count the writers on one hand who actually have this sense about language - and who are actually genius enough to pull it off. Joyce rebelled against that tradition of language, but unlike lesser talents, he didn't rebel against it by ignoring or belittling Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, or Chaucer, all of the great influences on the English language. No. He accepted that tradition, and he took from it what he felt would help him, propel him ... He loved language, and puns, and derivations ... He felt there was a deeper meaning to all of it, something that was quite universal. By retreating into the Irish language, Joyce felt that the Irish were damning themselves to irrelevance.

But he never forgot that English was NOT, in fact, his "native" language. It propelled him forward. It helped him be free of his influences (but not without a struggle), it helped him write from the inside, as opposed to narrate from the outside. This is one of the reasons why you can tell, just by looking at the page, that something is by James Joyce. His stuff doesn't LOOK like other people's stuff. It is instantly recognizable, not just by sound, but by sight as well.

The first chapter of Portrait is told from the point of view of Stephen Dedalus as a small child. Instead of either making the child precocious and able to narrate his own tale (like most writers do when writing from the point of view of children), or just deciding, "what the hell, he's a child, but he will speak with MY voice" ... Joyce opens the book with a cascade of senses, sound, sounds, colors, random comments, strange connections, nursery rhymes ... He was writing AS a child. What it might be like to BE a child. It is an act of ventriloquism.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:

Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.

Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.

The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:

-- O, Stephen will apologize.

Dante said:

-- O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.--

Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.

Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.

This type of writing is par for the course now. Joyce's influence was as wide-spread as Marlon Brando's was in the world of acting. If you watch Streetcar now, it may not seem as revolutionary, because that is the style of acting practiced by pretty much everyone now (although without as much talent!). But that is only because of Brando's power and range in those early roles. He set the standard. There were others, of course, but his name will always be attached to that revolution in acting. Joyce's contemporaries - Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and others - were also working in the same vein as Joyce. This was not a singular journey, it was part and parcel of the mood of the time (same with Brando's new naturalistic style of acting).

As the book moves on, Stephen leaves childhood behind, and begins to open his eyes to the world around him. He is not immediately a rebel. On the contrary. He does not know yet that he is an artist. He is still a "young man". He wanders the streets of Dublin arguing about aesthetics and Aquinas with his friends. He resists, for some reason, signing petitions supporting Irish nationalism. The group will never be "for" Stephen Dedalus. Even before he knows who he is, he remains solitary, uncommitted. He will not be a joiner. Although he flirts with it. He becomes deeply religious in one chapter, terrified of the fires of hell (mainly because of his lustful thoughts and his masturbation). The pendulum swings to one side, and Dedalus feels he cannot keep up with his own sinning ... not enough praying in the world will make that sin vanish. The pendulum then swings back, and after the fire of religious piety fades, you get the sense it will never return. Dedalus has left it behind, shedding that self along his journey. He will now be free.

Language must also be jettisoned.

This is clearly shown in the "tundish scene", the most famous episode in the book. It is also (in my opinion) the most overtly angry, although you have to really pay attention ... Joyce requires you, the reader, to do some work here.

-- To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.

-- What funnel? asked Stephen.

-- The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.

-- That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?

-- What is a tundish?

-- That. The funnel.

-- Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.

-- It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.

-- A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.

On the surface, that might seem like a benign moment. An intellectual moment. A moment of appreciating the difference of the languages and cultures. But that is a mistake with Joyce. If you take only the surface of it, you will never understand "what the big deal is" about this writer. Seen in its context, the "tundish scene" is one of the angriest moments in all of Irish literature, hell - all of literature, period. So yes, with Joyce, the "thought is always simple". In that scene, the English priest is unaware of the language of the country he actually lives in. It has never occurred to him that there might be another word for the "funnel", and he is fascinated by that prospect. But seen from the other side of the fence, the Irish side, the priest's ignorance of what his own culture has done to the culture it now sits upon, to know that a very fine word, "tundish", has been stomped out of existence ... and to have the priest be unaware of that fact, and also curious about it in mainly an intellectual way ...

It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Back to Ellman's analysis of the development of Portrait:

The sense of the soul's development as like that of an embryo not only helped Joyce to the book's imagery, but also encouraged him to work and rework the original elements in the process of gestation. Stephen's growth proceeds in waves, in accretions of flesh, in particularization of needs and desires, around and around but always ultimately forward. The episodic framework of Stephen Hero was renounced in favor of a group of scenes radiating backwards and forwards.¹ In the new first chapter Joyce had three clusters of sensations: his earliest memories of infancy, his sickness at Clongowes (probably indebted like the ending of "The Dead" to rheumatic fever in Trieste), and his pandying at Father Daly's hands. Under these he subsumed chains of related mometns, with the effect of three fleshings in time rather than of a linear succession of events. The sequence became primarily one of layers rather than of years.

In this process other human beings are not allowed much existence except as influences upon the soul's development or features of it. The same figures appear and reappear, the schoolboy Heron for example, each time in an altered way to suggest growth in the soul's view of them. E--- C---, a partner in childhood games, becomes the object of Stephen's adolescent love poems; the master at Clongowes reappears as the preacher of the sermons at Belvedere.² The same words, "Apologise", "admit", "maroon", "green", "cold", "warm," "wet", and the like, keep recurring with new implications. The book moves from rudimentary meanings to more complex ones, as in the conceptions of the call and the fall. Stephen, in the first chapter fascinated by unformed images, is next summoned by the flesh and then by the church, the second chapter ending with a prostitute's lingual kiss, the third with his reception of the Host upon his tongue. The soul that has been enraptured by body in the second chapter and by spirit in the third (both depicted in sensory images) then hears the call of art and life, which encompass both without bowing before either, in the fourth chapter; the process is virtually compete. Similarly the fall into sin, at first a terror, gradually becomes an essential part of the discovery of self and life.

Now Stephen, his character still recomposing the same elements, leaves the Catholic priesthood behind him to become "a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life." Having listened to sermons on ugliness in the third chapter, he makes his own sermons on beauty in the last. The Virgin is transformed into the girl wading on the strand, symbolizing a more tangible reality. In the last two chapters, to suit his new structure, Joyce minimizes Stephen's physical life to show the dominance of his mind, which has accepted but subordinated physical things. The soul is ready now, it throws off its sense of imprisonment, its melancholy, its no longer tolerable conditions of lower existence, to be born.

¹ It is a technique which William Faulkner was to carry even further in the opening section of The Sound and the Fury, where the extreme disconnection finds its justification, not, as in Joyce, in the haze of childhood memory, but in the blur of an idiot's mind. Faulkner, when he wrote his book, had read Dubliners and A Portrait; he did not read Ulysses until a year later, in 1930, but he knew about it from excerpts and from the conversation of friends. He has said that he considered himself the heir of Joyce in his methods in The Sound and the Fury. Among the legacies may be mentioned the stopped clock in the last chapter of A Portrait and in the Quentin section.

² In both these instances Joyce changed the actual events. His freedom of recomposition is displayed also in the scene in the physics classroom in Portrait, where he telescopes two lectures, one on electricity and one on mechanics, which as Professor Felix Hackett remembers, took place months apart. Moynihan's whispered remark, inspired by the lecturer's discussion of ellipsoidal balls, "Chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry!" was in fact made by a young man named Kinahan on one of these occasions. In the same way, as JF Byrne points out in Silent Years, the long scene with the deean of studies in A Portrait happened not to Joyce but to him; he told it to Joyce and was later displeased to discover how his innocent description of Father Darlington lighting a fire had been converted into a reflection of Stephen's strained relations with the church.

The end of Portrait fractures. The narrative voice has left us. The story fragments into Dedalus' journal entries. He is now free from family, church, the pull of Ireland ... he is now free to go inward and see where his soul wants to go. The wings of Icarus. It has not been an easy journey. Becoming free never is. But Dedalus now sees that he is an artist, he does not know what that means - he hasn't even created anything yet ... but he is ready ... ready ... for whatever what will come next.

Portrait of the Artist is the launching-off point.

For Ulysses.

Here are the excerpts I posted from each chapter of Portrait:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Happy birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As with most other things, this book is so full of my father for me - that I can't tell where the book ends and my dad begins. He is woven into it. He taught me how to read it. He was there to talk with me about it when I wanted to talk, or ask questions. He showed me how to see.

Joyce, old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Ezra Pound

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

I grew up hearing stories of Ezra Pound - not just the stories of his fascism and his time in a cage in Italy out in the open air, or being indicted for treason or his breakdown - I mean, all that is interesting and fascinating and almost frightening. But Pound was a character in my childhood lexicon because of his support and promotion of James Joyce. His name came up all the time. Ezra Pound. Even the name calls up the rows and rows of books on my father's shelves, and my father's gravelly voice talking to me about these titanic clashes of the 20s and 30s, spearheaded by Pound.

Ezra Pound. The name is an onomatopoeic device. The man was tireless. He didn't just do it for Joyce, he did it for all of the Modernists. He was amazingly generous with new talent. Ferocious in his regard, and relentless. He promoted people until the public really had no choice but to accept the new voices. The relationship with Joyce is fascinating to me - but it is just the tip of the iceberg with Ezra Pound. Pound wasn't a rich man. He couldn't afford to be a Renaissance-era-type benefactor. But he had pull and power. He used his power wisely and well, yanking new writers into the spotlight, forcing them to stand still so that they could be fully regarded. Pound's dictum "make it new" is famous, and perhaps overused now - it is an oversimplification of Pound's general philosophy. Pound was a poet too, of course, but I think his true legacy lies in how he promoted other people. We owe him a great debt for that. His poems are controversial to this day, mainly because of his political beliefs and his eventual insanity. He was an anti-Semite, and worked against the United States openly during WWII. He paid for that, obviously.

Pound's poetry can be dense, difficult - and his contemporaries (like Eliot, Yeats) were conflicted about how good it was. I guess I am, too. Some of it blazes off the page with a truth that sears right through me - there are times (like the poem I post today) when his voice is clear, open, with nothing in between it and the reader. Pound can be awfully clever, and that can act as a smokescreen, or a barrier ... his cleverness ... but when he is NOT clever, when he speaks from the heart - I don't know, I find him to be pretty damn powerful. His engagement seems to me to be with abstractions. I could be wrong about that. I don't know much about Pound - although because he is such a giant figure to my father he resonates for me on that level as well. But it seems to me that Pound had that gift-slash-curse of the insane - which is to inflate abstractions into something almost unlivably austere. It is when people strive to live by their theories - come hell or high water - that they lose their humanity. The great political cataclysms of the 20th century, the genocides and slaughter, can all be somehow explained (again, oversimplifying) by heaving apocalyptic love affairs with theory. Let us take this THEORY of politics and force it into being. Abstractions imposed from above on a living breathing populace. It is amazing how powerful those delusions really are. One of the harbingers of living-by-theory is a belief in utopia (on the left-wing as well as the right-wing side), a true belief that the world can actually be perfected ... and it is my general belief that anyone who talks about utopia is someone to be feared. I've written about that before. Utopians may have the best intentions, but LOOK OUT for people with good intentions. Utopia requires the mess of humanity to be ironed out, eradicated. That is the only way it can work.

Now, again, I'm not a Pound scholar, so I don't want to go too off on a tangent here, because I am not on certain ground. But his insanity was obviously something clinical, a mental illness - but much of its manifestation had to do with the rigidity of abstractions. Rigidity cannot hold. There will be a snap sooner or later. There's controversy too surrounding Pound's eventual retraction of his fascism and anti-Semitism ... but all of that doesn't interest me as much as his poetry does. And even more than his poetry - his BELIEF in people of talent. James Joyce MUST find a wide audience. Pound was a dog with a bone when it came to his contemporaries with talent. My dad loves him for that, and so do I.

I also love Pound because that very tendency towards abstraction - which was so detrimental to his mental health, and led him down some very unsavory philosophical paths - also helped him be a master theorist of verse. He really engaged with poetry (that is also shown in the poem I posted below). He wrestled with it. He tried to divorce himself from his influences. He hated anything that was passively received. Everything must be examined, pulled apart, and evaluated on its own merits. Accept NOTHING at face value. He wrote about writing, he wrote about poets and poetry and what a poem SHOULD be (again with the dogmatic certainty, the pushing towards abstraction - which loves rules) ... and if he couldn't do it himself in his own work, he recognized the genius of others. He was not a bitter Salieri. Or who knows, maybe he was - but the impression I get of him is not of mediocrity, seething at the grandiose talents of his contemporaries. What I get from him is that he understood his poetry to be at the level it was at ... he worked hard at it, he was ambitious ... but his "mediocrity" (and please, I would count my lucky stars if I could be as "mediocre" as Ezra Pound) did not cause him to be ungenerous or stingy. Quite the opposite.

Modernism needed a champion. That champion was Ezra Pound.

He wrote in 1915:

Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (ie. simplicity). There must be no book words, no periphrases, no inversions. It must be as simple as De Maupassant's best prose, and as hard as Stendahl's ... Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindeside-beforeness, no straddled adjectives (as 'addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing - nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance in the stress of some emotion, actually say. Every literaryism, every book word, fritters away a scrap of the reader's patience, a scrap of his sense of your sincerity.

This was a revolution at the time.

Pound was breaking away from the Victorian stylings of the former generation. His belief was that Yeats was the greatest writer in English (and I can't disagree with him) and it was because of Yeats's emotional yet stark language, its lack of fripperies and embellishments (at least in his later great work) ... its sense that it was something "new". And indeed it was. Yeats began with lots of fripperies, lots of fancy-pants language, and while it always feels sincere - you can sense the struggle in Yeats. You can sense him trying to wrench himself out of the 19th century into the unknown 20th. Pound was instrumental in pushing him in that direction, encouraging him, saying, "yes, yes, yes, THAT way ... THAT is where you need to go ..." If you read Yeats's work in chronological order, the development is startling. It's like you are reading the works of two entirely separate poets. You wonder where that second guy, the guy who wrote poems like "Among School Children" came from. Pound was part of that breaking-free of the past for Yeats.

A fascinating man. There's a new biography out (the first volume of what promises to be a giant work) and I am looking forward to reading it.

It sits on my father's shelf right now, taking its place beside all the other Pound books.

Pound's politics may have been controversial, and they certainly ruined him (along with a host of other factors). His reputation has not recovered, and maybe it shouldn't. Who knows. It's not my place to worry about Pound's reputation, or to try to explain to annoyed people who ONLY know him for his politics why he is such a giant figure in the world of 20th century literature, and why he must not be discounted. To discount him, to ignore him, is to render the entire Modernist movement opaque. He is too big. He cannot be gotten out of the way.

Here's a poem he wrote that I really like. Any artist must grapple with his influences - either accepting or rejecting. It is a process. Once upon a time I hated Herman Melville. Now I love him. Ironically, after all of this talk about Pound's political rigidity ... what I am struck most in this poem is its flexibility. Its willingness to accept, to change.

His reputation has not surpassed those of his friends whom he championed. Eliot, Joyce, and many many others ... they loom far larger on the literary map, casting shadows that are far longer. But if you look into their journeys on even a superficial level, one name comes up again and again and again.

Ezra Pound.

A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.

Speaking of Joyce:

A very interesting article about hearing writers read their own work, and the shock that can come hearing the actual voice.

The British Library has released a CD series of the recordings they have in their archives. Here's an article about it that makes me drool. That National Post article above made me think that Joyce had been included which made me think: "Huh. I have just one question. James Joyce was British? You're opening up a whole can of worms there, boyo. Kinda like the Russian Film Society inviting Jack Palance, a Ukrainian, to one of their awards shows. Not a good idea." But no - this is a collection of American and English writers, reading their own work, being interviewed, etc. Marvelous.

James Joyce has a brawling lilting Dublin voice that seems straight out of a book of stereotypes. Interesting: that the man lived the majority of his life outside Ireland, and yet the brogue remained thick as butter. Not surprising.

(I've put a clip of him reading from Finnegans Wake below the jump. It's TO DIE FOR.)

Here's a post I wrote about Finnegans Wake for anyone who is interested.

Happy birthday, Mary Gordon

Best-selling author Mary Gordon has her birthday today. I am particularly taken by Gordon's essay on James Joyce's "The Dead", which I post here.

Mary Gordon on James Joyce's "The Dead"

It begins with a slap in the face. "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."

Well, and did you fall for that one? Literally? Don't you know the difference between literally and figuratively? You're no better than Lily herself, are you? Or perhaps you're not Lily, but the garrulous speaker of the second paragraph, the platitude-spouting fool. "It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance ... Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember ... Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout."

"The Dead" is built around a party, and for most of its duration we, like partygoers, swim in a clamor of voices, not only Gabriel's and the omniscient narrator's. Even Gabriel has many voices. There is the self-conscious Gabriel, the prissy Gabriel, the pompous Gabriel, the affectionate Gabriel, the lustful Gabriel. But many others speak: Miss Ivors, the political nettler; Mr. Browne with his forced jokes; Freddy Malins, who's just a little bit "screwed"; his mother, who tells us everything is "beautiful", including the fish her son-in-law caught in Scotland and had boiled for their dinner by the innkeeper. There is the novelettish voice of such sentences as "Aunt Kate was making frank use of her handkerchief," and the society-page gabble of "the acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper-room by many of the other guests and renewed time after time." There is Aunt Julia's voice singing "Arrayed for the Bridal" and Bartell D'Arcy's singing "The Lass of Aughrim." There is the voice of Patrick Morkan, Gabriel's grandfather, imitated by Gabriel: the very model of a stuffy twit when his horse makes a fool of him by walking round and round the statue of the King: "Go on, sir! What do you mean, sir? ... Most extraordinary conduct! Can't understand the horse!"

To add to the tumult, Joyce offers us a series of lists, giving us information we have no need of: things that are only there for the pleasure of their naming. Guests are introduced briefly, for the sound of their names: Mr. Bergin, Mr. Kerrigan, Miss Power, Miss Furlong, Miss Daly. There are the secondhand booksellers on the Dublin quays: Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, Webb's and Massey's on Aston's Quay, O'Clohissey's in the by-street. And, most important, the meal spread out before us, like Homer's catalogue of ships. Followed by dessert, the sweetmeats joined together by their jumpy integument of "and's".

This is the hubbub of realism, the buzz and Babel of the nineteenth century. Words, words, words, talk talk talk, and in so many voices, such an abundance that of course there must be misunderstandings and mistakes. "The Dead" is chock full of mistakes, beginning with Gabriel's ill-considered joshing of Lily about her beau, to which she replies, "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you." Twice, Aunt Julia misunderstands: she doesn't know what galoshes are and doesn't get Gabriel's reference to the Three Graces. Browne repeatedly calls Freddy Malins Teddy and embarrasses the young ladies by telling the kind of joke they don't like. Errors of tone abound. Gabriel takes the wrong tone in responding to Miss Ivors's political challenge, and he mistakes the pressure of her hand for a conciliatory gesture, when it is really a prelude to her standing on tiptoe to whisper into his ear: "West Briton." Aunt Kate offers an ill-considered criticism of the pope's decision to banish women from choirs in favor of young boys, and she is chastised for doing this in the presence of Mr. Browne, who is of "the other persuasion". A conversation about monks sleeping in their coffin is dropped because it is too "lugubrious". And Freddy is ready to pick a fight in defense of a black opera singer whom no one, in fact, has criticized. "And why couldn't he have a voice too? Is it because he's only a black?"

The mistakes and misunderstandings seem to be smoothed over by Gabriel's speech in praise of his aunts and cousin, whom he compliments for their hospitality, their harmoniousness. There is the bustle of leave-taking, when Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne can't make the cabdriver understand them, and everyone shouts directions from the door, only adding to the confusion. Finally, the cab takes off, and upstairs there is the sound of music.

In the quiet surrounded by music, Gabriel sees his wife standing on the stairs. "There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of."

We usually think of mistakes as affairs of language, a by-blow of the very separateness that causes us to wish to communicate with one another. But what Gabriel perceives and tries to create in silence -- a woman who is a symbol -- constitutes the central mistake both of his life and of the story. He assumes that the light in her eyes and the color on her cheeks have to do with him, as he will later assume that she has understood his desire for her and shared it. In his silent creation of Gretta -- a creation brought about without a word from her -- Gabriel has misconstrued the woman he has lived beside. Just as the narrator refers to Gretta only as Mrs. Conroy or Gabriel's wife, Gabriel assumes that Gretta's whole identity is connected to him. It is only after she speaks what is in her heart, after she tells her story, that the vision which both takes in and transcends separateness can occur.

She tells him of a boy she knew as a young girl in the West Country, a boy who died for love of her. Afterward, she sleeps. And in this silence, the silence which comes after true speech, Gabriel is transformed from petty if dutiful pedant to a man of vision.

The process happens in stages. He is dully angry, and this anger rekindles his lust. He is jealous. He is ironic. He feels humiliated, seeing himself as far less than the boy who died for her. When he speaks, his voice is "humble and indifferent," the humility and indifference Joyce thought to be the necessary conditions of the true artist. Then he is terrfied at the "impalpable and vindictive being ... coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world." He notes that Gretta's not as young as she used to be and feels disgust for the reality of her body, represented by her petticoat string and the limp upper of her boot.

He thinks of his Aunt Julia's impending death, and this thought, born of benevolence, leads him to understand that to be alive is to be in the process of becoming a shade. Tears fill his eyes, and his blurred physical vision allows him to imagine the dead boy -- a shade, to be sure, but standing near, under a dripping tree. Gabriel loses himself, that distinct and separate self by which he has been able to be named. He is among the dead.

"His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world in itself which these had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling." What a strange word, the word "reared". What does it imply? That the dead have nurtured the world we think of as the real one as parents "rear" a child, feeding it, sheltering it, educating it, until it is ready to leave them?

Gabriel's vision takes him to the graveyard where the boy is buried. The snow is falling. In the extraordinary last paragraph of "The Dead", the word "falling" is repeated seven times: seven, the theologically magic number, the number of the seven deadly sins, the seven moral virtues, the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

The vagueness of the flickering shades subsides. Gabriel sees the snow on "the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns," those singular sharp things asserting, inexorably, their individuality, their separateness from their fellows. But the snow that is falling generally falls on them all alike and muffles their sharpness, their distinctness. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Consider the daring of Joyce's final repetitions and reversals: "falling faintly, faintly falling" -- a triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement. How can any of us come up to it? Only, perhaps, humbly, indifferently, in its honor and its name, to try.

And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.

Brilliant. My dad loved that last line, too.

Here is my essay on the greatest short story ever written.

"O tell me all about Anna Livia!

I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear."

-- Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

A wonderful post from one of my favorite bloggers about Finnegans Wake, which he calls "one of history's freakish cul-de-sacs", (I love that).

Like Patrick, I have read Finnegans Wake - in increments - and mainly outloud to myself. In my opinion, it reads much better out loud - you can hear it - because Joyce, being nearly blind himself, was mostly all about the sound of things. He experienced the world not visually, but aurally ... and the music of Finnegans Wake, because that is what it is, is in what it sounds like.

I was in grad school, a rigorous environment already - and I found, while I was in school, that I only gravitated towards mostly difficult works. My brain was used to difficulty (and I've never been one who thinks "it's an easy book" is the highest of compliments anyway) so while I was in school, and already tremendously strapped for time, I found myself reading difficult things like Leviathan and Antonin Artaud (Artaud? I need you to CHILLAX, okay? You're freaking me out. Just CHILLAX) and Finnegans Wake. If it wasn't rigorous, it didn't hold my interest at that time. Finnegans Wake was not a book I carried around with me, reading while I was in line at the bank. It didn't seem to lend itself to that kind of behavior, so typical for me with other books. I couldn't just pick it up and put it down again. I needed to clear a space for it, intellectually, and I did so every morning for about half an hour at a time.

Then, as now, I was a morning creature - waking up at 5:30 a.m. to have quiet alone time before charging off to school where I would be busy until 11 o'clock at night, with barely time to grab a granola bar for lunch. I would sit on the couch in the living room, and read out loud to myself (quietly, because I had a roommate) - drinking my coffee - and sometimes taking notes, underlining things that struck me. I could only do a couple of pages a day. That was fine for me. I felt no pressure. I didn't try to read it like a regular book.

I had, of course, already read all of Joyce's other stuff - multiple times - "The Dead" is a story I go back to time and time again (I consider it to be that rarity: a truly perfect thing) - (excerpt and essay about it here) ... not to mention certain sections of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (excerpt and essay here) - and my reading experience of Ulysses, one summer, under the tutelage of my dad, is one of the most memorable and exciting reading experiences I have ever had, rivaled only by my first re-reading of Moby-Dick, 15 years after I had first read it (and hated it) in high school.

There is always a 'code' in Joyce, he loved codes and symbols and secret messages - and while there is always much for me to learn with Ulysses, that first time, with the help of my dad, I cracked the code. I got it. Once I could see what he was doing, it was seriously like Alice in Wonderland going through the magic locked door into the Queen's garden of roses. Not that the language is that opaque, it's really not - certainly it's not the mysterious dreamspace language of Finnegans Wake - but it's way more fun to figure out what Joyce was attempting so that you can then just relax, and stop struggling. ("The Oxen of the Sun" chapter in Ulysses is a perfect example of what I am talking about. It is, by far, the most difficult chapter of the book - with language that predicts Finnegans Wake - and it was the only time where I felt, within 1 or 2 pages, "Yeah, uh-huh, so I am obviously not QUALIFIED to read this." And I still feel that way, to some degree - I am not a linguist, so I can't say what Joyce is up to 9 times out of 10 - but with the help of my dad, I saw what Joyce was doing - and so it stopped being a foggy mystery, a wall of incomprehensible language - and suddenly became, oh, one of the most genius things I have ever read in my life. Not because it was difficult - but because it was complex and had an inner structure that I couldn't really see until I adjusted my own vision. I was really pleased when I received an email from a graduate student in Ireland, telling me that he had tripped over my post about the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, and it had really helped him crack the code for himself. I MUST give the props to my dad for that, because he was a big reason why I could figure it out. "Okay, so that's a chapter about birth. So look for nine sections ... everything's about NINE in that chapter..." etc.)

Finnegans Wake (excerpt and essay here) makes Ulysses seem easy, like a dime-store novel. But to me, that is the fun of it. Ironically (or, not so ironically) Joyce considered it his most accessible book. Joyce did not worry about his audience (of course he didn't - he went 17 years in between books!!) - but he felt that Finnegans Wake was almost populist in nature, made up of folklores, myths, oral history, legends ... Anyone could understand it. (Of course "anyone", at least in the Western world, was way more educated back then - Greek, Latin, all of that was par for the course in primary education ... so the frame of reference was much larger). Nora (Joyce's wife) looked at one of his pages of gobbledygook language and said, "Why can't you write a book that people would want to read?"

However, she - a rough uneducated girl from Galway - said, after his death, when reporters continually brought up Ulysses to her:

"What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

I can't say I enjoyed Finnegans Wake (although once I got into it I actually found the whole thing to be a hoot. Seriously. A HOOT.) Joyce famously said about Ulysses:

The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

And you know, the more I read Joyce, the more I see what he was talking about. He obviously took his work seriously, agonizing over commas, and stuff like that ... but regardless of his giant reputation in the canon of 20th century literature - and the shadow he casts forward and back ... I always find there to be a silliness in his work, a lightness (this is actually not the case in The Dubliners, which feel like straight-up social realism to me - you can feel the influence of Ibsen there, Joyce's favorite writer) ... but I find the books to be ABOUT nothing. There is no "theme", no "message" and if you try to pin it down you will certainly miss the whole of it. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are not their plots (thank God - because what the hell happens in those books??) ... they are their language.

To quote Samuel Beckett, who had this to say about Finnegans Wake:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

And once I surrendered, once I let JOYCE lead, and stop trying to lead the book myself ... the language took over, filling my head with sounds and echoes and reverb ... silly, juvenile, audacious, pointless - yet fun. Because it was fun for Joyce.

E.M. Forster gave a series of lectures on "the novel" and devoted a great deal of time to Melville's Moby Dick. He closed his lecture with words I find appropriate for Joyce as well, and Finnegans Wake in particular:

Moby Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about Moby Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song.

And speaking of song: Patrick also has a link to James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake.

Perceptions of Portrait

I loved this 1958 essay by John Kelleher about James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is a book I have read probably 4 times, all the way through, and I feel that I am never done with it. I can never say, "Okay, won't be reading that again, probably." There are only a few books like that, for me.

Portrait continues to morph, and grow - in my perception as a reader. It never seems like the same book twice.

Kelleher writes about this:

I remember that when I first encountered Stephen Dedalus I was twenty and I wondered how Joyce could have known so much about me. That is what I mean by the sort of reading the book will continue to get, whatever literary fashion may decree. Perhaps about the third reading it dawned on me that Stephen was, after all, a bit of a prig; and to that extent I no longer identified myself with him. (How could I?) Quite a while later I perceived that Joyce knew that Stephen was a prig; that, indeed, he looked on Stephen with quite an ironic eye. So then I understood. At least I did until I had to observe that the author's glance was not one of unmixed irony. There was compassion in it too, as well as a sort of tender, humorous pride. By this time I was lecturing on Joyce, and I was having a terrible time with the book. I could not coordinate what I had to say about it; and the students; as their papers showed, were mostly wondering how Joyce could have known so much about them--which was fortunate, for the lectures made very little sense, and it was well that the victims had their own discoveries to distract them.

Beautiful!

I also very much appreciated Kelleher's thoughts on Joyce's technique and themes. Because Joyce is often misunderstood. As Joyce himself said in regards to Ulysses:

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book [Ulysses], or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

If you miss the fun, if you miss that part of his work ... you miss most of it.

Kelleher writes:

He was past master of the confessorial technique that confesses nothing because it blabs too much. He could rarely permit himself to write simply from the heart, though when he did--as in the ending of Finnegans Wake or in the poem, "Ecce Puer," on his father's death and his grandson's birth--a most poignant power was released. Such passages give the lie to his usual affectation of wearing his heart up his sleeve. Why, then, the affectation? Partly, perhaps, because his artistic discipline was primarily late nineteenth century, art for art's sake, absolute subordination of subject to form, and because his subject was usually his own, often bitterly unhappy experience. What impelled him, I think, to choose and continue such a discipline was not just his artistic proclivities or the fact that he grew up in a cultural province where that view of art and the artist was still high fashion, but rather that he had a very Irish nature (counter to another Irish nature) that instinctively chose mockery if the alternative was tears. It is useless to observe that tears might often have been better for his health or that there are many places in his work where open emotion could have been admitted without loss of integrity. He was what he was. He hated what he called the "whine" in Irish poetry. When he noticed the impulsive tear and smile mingled in Ireland's eye his instinct was to give it a rough wipe. He did his best to keep his own eye dry in public. If he sometimes succeeded all too well, that was only what he intended.

Marvelous insight, I think. It's a funny thing: the Irish have a reputation for being full of sentimentality and twee-ness ... but the opposite is also true. Joyce despised sentimentality. Kelleher's thoughts there are quite good.

And the ending of the article brought a lump to my throat. That is my response to his letters to his daughter Lucia as well. Upsetting. But full of love.

Joyce fans: Read the whole thing.

(Here is just one of my many posts about Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.)

Today in history: August 7, 1934

The US Court of Appeals judged Ulysses by James Joyce to be NOT obscene and declared that the book could be admitted into the United States. Here's what the first American edition of that book looked like:

Morris L. Ernst, counsel for Random House - who successfully defended the book against obscenity charges in 1933-34 - wrote in his foreward to the 1934 edition:

It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Judge Woolsey's decision. For decades the censors have fought to emasculate literature. They have tried to set up the sensibilities of the prudery-ridden as a criterion for society, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.

Here is Judge Woolsey's decision in its entirety - it's a masterpiece of its kind. Not only is it an important legal decision, but it ends up being an acutely sensitive analysis of the book itself:

United States Discrict Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A. 110-59

December 6, 1933

On cross motions for a decree in a libel of confiscation, supplemented by a stipulation -- hereinafter described -- brought by the United States against the book "Ulysses" by James Joyce, under Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305, on the ground that the book is obscene within the meaning of that Section, and, hence, is not importable into the United States, but is subject to seizure, forfeiture and confiscation and destruction.

United States Attorney -- by Samuel C. Coleman, Esq., and Nicholas Atlas, Esq., of counsel -- for the United States, in support of motion for a decree of forfeiture, and in opposition to motion for a decree dismissing the libel.

Messrs. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, -- by Morris L. Ernst, Esq., and Alexander Lindey, Esq., of counsel -- attorneys for claimant Random House, Inc., in support of motion for a decree dismissing the libel, and in opposition to a motion for a decree of forfeiture.

WOOLSEY, J:
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.

1. 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", 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 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 for the confiscation of books such as this. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 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.

5. 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 real 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.

6. 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, Section 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; United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, 528; and compare Dysart v. United States, 272 U.S. 655, 657; Swearingen v. United States 151 U.S. 446, 450; United States v. Dennett, 39 F. (2d) 564, 568 (C.C.A. 2); People v. Wendling, 258 N.Y. 451, 453.

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 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.

JOHN M. WOOLSEY
United States District Judge

My favorite line of the whole thing:

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.

To quote Joyce - whose words have been at the top of my blog since I started this damn thing:

This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

All my Ulysses book excerpts can be found as links on this page.

Bloomsday: "modality of the visible"

Notes in my copy of Ulysses

On June 15, 1904, young James Joyce sent a note to Nora Barnacle, on June 15, 1904. She was a waitress at Finn's Hotel, a girl from Galway who had moved to Dublin. They had had a chance encounter on the street, where she had wondered aloud if he was Swedish, because of his eyes. When she told him her name, he said something about Ibsen (his inspiration and guiding star as an artist). Nora obviously did not know who this Ibsen was but she knew she liked this Jimmy with the blue eyes. He had asked her "out" - which, in Dublin, in those days, meant going for a walk. She had blown him off. He sat in the park waiting. She never showed up. So on June 15, 1904, he sent her this note:

60 Shelbourne Road
I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me -- if you have not forgotten me!

James A. Joyce 15 June 1904

And apparently - they went out the next night - June 16, 1904. They took a walk. It's not 100% certain what happened on that walk, although from various comments both of them made, it is clear that something sexual happened. James Joyce's main experience with women at that point was with prostitutes. In Nora, he met his match, his mate. He told Nora later that on that day, June 16, 1904, he became a man. He did not just mean because of the sexual encounter. He meant that he joined the world - the world of being connected, not isolated ... his own man. A couple of months later, he got a job in Europe through the Berlitz School, and she came with him. They fled Ireland together, an unmarried couple, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind them. They had two kids together - Giorgio and Lucia - and were not officially married until 1930. They lived "abroad" their entire lives together, and were rarely parted from one another, maybe a couple months in that entire time was spent outside of one another's presence. She was the only woman for him. They were not a romantic pair, not at all (just read their "dirty letters" to one another! - the early 20th century version of phone sex) - but whatever it was that was between them ... was profound. They both clicked into place. Nora was an uneducated wild girl from Galway, with a tragic failed romance in her past (which James Joyce would use to spectacular effect in 'The Dead' - excerpt here). He was a struggling writer, frustrated and claustrophobic in Ireland, a country he found provincial, prudish, and stifling. Years later, Joyce would pay tribute to the walk he took through the streets of Dublin with Nora, and what it meant to him, by setting the entire book of Ulysses on that one day: June 16 1904.

The best part of the whole story is a comment from Nora in one of her letters to James Joyce, 1940:

Well, Jim I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.

Nora exaggerated - she had read the books, although they were not her thing at all - and after his death, when every reporter was hounding her, asking her about Ulysses, she complained, with an insight that should be startling to anyone who underestimates her as some dumb silly woman (and believe me, there are those people out there):

"What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

Additionally, there is this comment from Nora - a most quotable woman. After her husband's death, she was asked what current writers she liked, and her reply was:

"Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."

Ulysses came out in 1922. Nora Tully describes the reaction:

The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once.

The wonderful John Banville, who has written a bit about Joyce, and how Irish writers get fed up with trying to struggle out from under his shadow:

Ulysses is not mainstream, nor was it ever meant to be. When people claim Joyce had his eye on posterity, that is true, but it was intellectual posterity he was after, not mass approval.

I mean, how many people have an opinion about the book without having even read it?? It was never for the masses - Joyce always felt that Finnegans Wake was far more accessible, he thought everyone could read that book - 5 year old kids, 80 year old women, doesn't matter - it had everything in it, it was about sound and myth and dreams ... humanity. Ulysses was far more specific, it had far more ambition.

Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company in Paris, is the one really responsible for bringing Ulysses forth to the public - and because of all of the obscenity accusations and brou-haha about the content of the book - it was banned pretty much everywhere. You could be arrested if you were caught smuggling a copy into the United States. So because of that, there was a time where the only place you could get a copy of the book was at Shakespeare & Company - so frantic orders came in from people all over the world, famous, not-famous ... I've seen one of the orders - from Peggy Guggenheim - covered in exclamation points - begging to send her a copy as soon as possible. It was the literary event of the decade (and, eventually, the century - and pretty much everyone had that sense ... that Joyce, with one damn book, the Irish bastard, had changed everything. Like TS Eliot remarked, famously, "He has single-handedly killed the 19th century."). Here's a post I wrote in honor of Sylvia Beach.

Now. Enough about the background of the book.

The book itself.

I recently did long posts on each chapter in Ulysses - which were exhausting, actually - I had to gear myself up for it - and which were tremendously gratifying. I get wonderful emails from strangers telling me they used those posts as a guide when reading the book for the first time. I cannot explain how much that means to me - and how that is one of the main reasons I still maintain this blog.

One of the things that people don't get about Ulysses (by that I mean, the people who haven't read it, and yet still maintain some hostile opinion about it) - and one of the most important things to remember about the book is that it is not about anything. It is not "important", in any self-conscious way - although it is an extremely self-conscious book (Joyce was one of the most self-conscious of all writers - I don't mean shy or unsure, I mean acutely aware of himself) - it is not trying to make a point, it doesn't care about the world at large, it's not taking on "issues" of the day (at least not in any pamphleteering type way - although the book deals with Irish issues, and politics, and education, and sex and religion) - but Joyce didn't narrow anything down. It's not "important". It doesn't have anything to say about the world. It does not illuminate for us the subtext of a giant world war, or a Great Depression ... it is not political. It is a "day in the life" and that's pretty much it. Yes, the writing stuns ... the amount of information and references he gets in ... the style of each section is breathtaking ... but Joyce himself said (and this is key):

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

SO true and I think if the book is not read in that manner, if it is read in the way you would read any other socially conscious novel or novel that is attempting to shed light on a pressing issue, or an unforgotten people - we're all used to reading books like that ... If you try to read Ulysses in the same way, it will be absolutely impenetrable.

But if you give up your expectations of all of that, and surrender to the language - because that, after all, is what Joyce is all about - the sound (I am sure this is partly because of how blind he was - his books are so musical, not visual at all) - the book opens all of its secrets to you. It does not withhold. It does not stand like some snotty barrier written by a pretentious modernist. It is a rollick. A ridiculous romp through the streets of Dublin by human beings who worry, laugh, eat, fart, have fights, think about things, argue, chat ... It has NO point. It is not meant to have a point.

Another thing that Joyce said about his own work which I found really helpful to keep in mind was that: "With me, the thought is always simple." It should be a mantra for those wanting to read Ulysses for the first time. It is not a complex book, although the structure is highly intricate, and you could spend your entire life trying to unravel it, and understand it ... It's a hugely complicated and detailed web of references and styles and language clues - but the thought itself behind all of it is never ever complicated or opaque. The thought is always simple.

I want to belong.
I love my wife.
What does it mean to be a man?
What does it mean to be Irish?
What does it mean to be a Jew?
I wish I fit in.
I wish I was like everyone else.
I wish my wife loved me more.
I wish my husband loved me more.
Doesn't this beer taste good?
Why can't we all get along?

These are the thoughts that make up the book. Joyce makes you work for it, though - he sure as hell does ... but once it is revealed to you, once you open that magic door ... you are never the same again. There are sections of that book that will be with me forever.

So much of Ulysses is tied up, for me, in my father, who was my tutor and mentor when I first read the book. I have written extensively about that experience, and I won't go into it again. But one of the things I got from my dad was to just go easy with the book, don't work too hard, but make sure you try to get into his mindset (which changes from chapter to chapter) - because if you don't it will all seem to be gibberish. My favorite example of my father helping me do this is when I was struggling, desperately, over the first pages of what I now know is the Cyclops episode. Every "episode" in the book has a different style - dictated by an internal list of cues in Joyce's head which is what makes the book so fun - figuring out what the hell he is doing. And the chapters are not helpfully labeled "This is the Cyclops episode", "This is the Lestrygonians episode" - you have to figure it out yourself. It's helpful to have a copy of Homer's story nearby, it really is. So this new chapter starts, and it's a whole new voice - it's a first person narration but it is obvious that it is not Leopold Bloom speaking ... who the heck is this person? And this new narrator is regaling his friends with a story of what happened earlier - an altercation in a pub between a man known as The Citizen - a crotchety Irish patriot, a bigot - who eventually turns his sights on Leopold Bloom, also in the pub, with an anti-Semitic rage. Bloom is Jewish but he is also Irish. The Citizen is having NONE of that bullshit. But it's not The Citizen who narrates - it's some other guy. He tells his story, and one of the things he always says is: "says I" ... He's telling a story where he was a main player, so the refrain is "says I":

There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause.

Just one example of many. I was completely LOST reading this. The writing itself is not unclear - but I needed to get into Joyce's motivations ... or I would never "get it". I said to my dad, "I have no idea what the hell is going on here." I handed him the book. He looked at the page. He didn't read any of it - just looked at it - and said, handing the book back to me, "Oh, that's the Cyclops episode."

What?? "How can you tell that just by looking at the page? You didn't even read it!"

Dad said, "Look at how many times the letter 'I' is on that page."

I glanced down again, and that was the key, that was the abracadabra: All I could see on the page suddenly was:

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

The clue was right in front of my face, I just needed a bit of a push to "see" it. That's another thing: Ulysses is one of the few books that you can identify just by the LOOK of the words on the page. And once you know the book, you can tell the episode you're in - by how the words LOOK on the page. The Molly episode, with its 40 page runon sentence, and almost no paragraph breaks, doesn't look like anything else. The Sirens episode, with its choppy musical beats, its short phrasing, doesn't look like anything else. And the Cyclops episode is slashed with the letter "I". The Citizen IS the Cyclops - and the one eye of the Cyclops is IN the language. You can SEE it. It's right there.

That's the fun of James Joyce.

He never disappoints. He may have "killed the 19th century" but he is still, today, fun and relevant and new. He will always be ahead of his time. That's why the writers of the day - Hemingway and Yeats and Pound and all the others - were so freaked and excited (and, in some cases, envious and pissed) by Ulysses. There was no middle ground. And I suppose there still isn't. Neither should there be.

It's just that kind of book.

And so, to those Joyce fans out there - to those heading off to Bloomsday celebrations - to those who decided to read the book based on my posts and who loved it and had fun with it - to those who approach Joyce with openness and curiosity (or, like William Faulkner commented: "You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.") - I wish you the happiest of Bloomsdays!

I'll let Molly Bloom have the last word. I mean, she would anyway, so why not oblige her. Ulysses closes thus (and, in my opinion, it is meant to be read out loud - we are inside Molly Bloom's head in the last episode, there is no outside narration ... but we don't need it to understand what is going on ... especially here ... If you can't figure out what Molly Bloom is doing here, then there is no hope for you. But, as always with Joyce, there is another level ... or many other levels, I'm sure I am only aware of one or two ... Joyce said he wanted to end the book with "the most positive word in the English language" - and that is one of the things I think is so important to get about Joyce, whose reputation precedes him, and that is all well and good - but not if he is then suffused with a seriousness that he did not embody ... The man was fun, the man loved life - he loved his wife and kids - he even loved Ireland ... He was not nihilistic in his outlook at all. He is one of the great humanists of our age.) So, here's Molly, center stage now, closing out the book, in her declamation of positivity, of affirmation, of love and life:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another 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.

yes, indeed.

Happy Bloomsday.

"I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true."

WONDERFUL interview with Anne Enright, author of The Gathering, winner of the Man Booker Prize last year. I finished it near my birthday last year (post here) - and had mixed feelings about it, although the writing knocked me on my ass. I just LIKE her as a person, too - every interview I've read with her has been fascinating. Seems like a lady I'd like to have a pint with.

She says in the interview:

Q. Where does the idea of "authentic" Irishness come from?

A. From the diaspora. They dreamt about Ireland and reinvented it. Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in "Old Ireland." It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.

I read that, and thought of the piece I wrote "Road Works Ahead". I'm a writer. I read other people's thoughts and think of my own work. That's the way it goes. I still get emails about that "Road Works Ahead" piece. Irish people, Irish-American people - but mostly straight Irish. After I wrote that piece, an Irish newspaper linked to it, a big one, a national paper - and my piece was used as a launching-off place for an op-ed column - by an Irishman, who was worried about what had happened to that good old Irish hospitality. I felt a cringing within me when I saw that I had been referenced, I have a sensitivity towards how i come off ... i didn't want to seem like I was criticizing Ireland, or behaving like an obnoxious irish-American, pissed off that there were no more leprechauns. But the op-ed column was quite honest, and quite open ... it took my observations (made as an outsider, yes) and started to ask questions, based upon those observations. And the response I got was overwhelming. And also quite respectful and nice. It was great. Like I said, people still email me about that piece.

I am (a couple generations removed) a member of the diaspora and I recognize it in her words. I recognize it from the conversation I had with Eamon in the piece I wrote above. The whole Quiet Man thing, and the whole ambivalence about progress and change.

And I LOVED LOVED LOVED Anne Enright's thoughts on Joyce. I literally giggled with glee when I read them:

Q. Almost every review of an Irish writer's work makes comparisons to James Joyce. Is it hard to get away from him?

A. I don't want to get away from him. It's male writers who have a problem with Joyce; they're all "in the long shadow of Joyce, and who can step into his shoes?" I don't want any shoes, thank you very much. Joyce made everything possible; he opened all the doors and windows. Also, I have a very strong theory that he was actually a woman. He wrote endlessly introspective and domestic things, which is the accusation made about women writers - there's no action and nothing happens. Then you look at "Ulysses" and say, well, he was a girl, that was his secret.

Marvelous. I want to read that to my father. He will appreciate it.

Full interview here.

Will Ferrell: "James Joyce spent a lot of his life living outside of Ireland. I too have spent a lot of time living outside of Ireland."

Congrats to Will Ferrell - latest recipient of the James Joyce award. Now, honestly, you have to read the article - check out the OUTFIT he wore to accept the award. I'm howling!! And his comments on Joyce ("As I perused my leatherbound volumes of 'Ulysses,' 'Finnegans Wake,' 'Dubliners,' 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' standing in my mahogany library, a lot of feelings ran across my mind. Like: 'Damn, I should have read these books.' ") have already made my day and it's not even 8 a.m. yet.

Speaking of Molly Bloom

(oh were we? Well, actually, yes we were - haven't you been paying attention? Oh wait ... yes - Nightfly was listening!! Yay!) ... and speaking of the famous last passage of Ulysses:

yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another 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

I was walking in my neighborhood on a chill bright morning and saw a sign in a window and wondered: "Hmmm. Does Molly Bloom live there?"

The Books: "Finnegans Wake" (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

Joseph Campbell wrote, in regards to Finnegans Wake, "If our society should go to smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake." James Joyce worked on this, his last book, for 17 years. For many years during that time it was just known as Work in Progress. Because of the atomic bomb of Ulysses, people were, naturally, anxious to the point of apoplexy to see what Joyce would come up with next. The book cannot be said to be written in English - not strictly - although it's amazing how much sense it does make, if you surrender to it. The entire book is made up of puns, word association games, interweaving webs of connections - He said that since Ulysses, except for that last episode, was a "daytime" book, this one was going to be "nocturnal". It takes on the qualities of a dream. Where things can be nonsensical and yet logical at the same time. The entire thing is, apparently, a dream of our lead - if you can call him that - Earwicker. Joyce incorporated over 70 languages into the book - and, naturally, there are great "keys" out there, that track down all of Joyce's influences. There are sections in Polynesian, Dutch, Lithuanian - and many many more. Joyce's interest (obsession) in language was the main driving force here. I'm not sure that he felt this, specifically, but to me, one of the feelings I get from this extraordinary book (that starts mid-sentence, and also ends mid-sentence) is that we are all one. All languages come from the same pot. We all influence one another. There are no barriers. They may seem real (the barriers) ... but if you poke holes in them, you'll start to see the back and forth flow. This also goes along wtih the river imagery that makes up such a huge part of the book. The book is not strictly about anything - in the same way that you can't really point to the "plot" of Ulysses. Joyce was never into the usual structures. He wrote the book from 1922 to 1939 - a very rough patch in his life. His eyesight got worse, he had numerous operations - and there were times when he lost his sight completely. Hard to imagine. But I think it makes so much sense that his books, his mature books anyway - have so much to do with the SOUND of things, rather than the LOOK. Finnegans Wake is musical. It's actually a lot of fun, once you let go of your normal expectations. And that's what Joyce requires. It's like a big puzzle ... you feel like a rock star when you understand a paragraph, and can recognize 2 or 3 of the references. There's a little something for everyone here: ancient history, modern literature, psy