The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham
Authors: Kevin Birmingham
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Émile Zola’s
La Terre
describes a girl bringing her cow to mate with a bull on a neighboring farm: “She had to reach right across with her arm as she grasped the bull’s penis firmly in her hand and lifted it up. And when the bull felt that he was near the edge, he gathered his strength and, with one simple thrust of his loins, pushed his penis right in.”
An English publisher named Henry Vizetelly specialized in producing U.K. editions of realist fiction. Vizetelly & Company published translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and several of Zola’s novels, including
La Terre
. In 1884, the Irish novelist George Moore, who was having trouble getting his first novel circulated, turned to Vizetelly & Company to publish his next novel in a two-shilling edition, less than one-tenth of the inflated industry-standard price. Vizetelly boasted in the press that he had sold more than a million copies of French novels, including a thousand copies of Zola’s books every week. When Lord Tennyson, England’s poet laureate, condemned “the troughs of Zolaism” in verse, the outlines of a cultural divide were clear: Vizetelly’s cheap foreign books were arrayed against standardized three-volume novels, whose high prices bought cultural legitimacy.
The Vigilance Association, the successor to the SSV, organized a boycott against Vizetelly, mounted a publicity campaign that reached the floor of Parliament, and, in 1888, it pressed obscenity charges against him repeatedly for publishing Zola. Vizetelly pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months in prison. His stock of Zola novels was destroyed, and his publishing house—thriving only a year before—went bankrupt.
When Zola died in 1902, London’s literary journals remembered the novelist as a towering figure of nineteenth-century literature, but what printers and publishers remembered was the power of the vice societies and their willingness to crack down on risqué material even if it called itself art. It was Vizetelly’s prison sentence that was in the back of the publishers’ and printers’ minds when they began poring over everything Joyce wrote, from
Dubliners
to
Portrait
to
Ulysses
. Joyce could only have made things worse when he told George Roberts that the worst outcome of publishing
Dubliners
was that “some critic will allude to me as the ‘Irish Zola’!” No one wanted to be another Vizetelly.
—
MISS WEAVER, prim, fastidious, repeatedly mistaken for a Quaker, was willing to risk jail time. She was one of eight children in a devout Church of England family, and when she was not quietly listening to her father’s twice-daily prayers, she drove him frantic by climbing the trees, walls and cliffs around their Cheshire estate. The Weavers forbade dancing, shunned unnecessary luxuries, banished exotic vegetables like asparagus from their table and considered novels an idle pleasure to be avoided as much as possible. Miss Weaver openly devoured books from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Stuart Mill while concealing the novels from her parents and the servants. When she was nineteen, her mother caught her reading George Eliot’s
Adam Bede
. Jane Austen and the Brontës were irksome enough, so far as her mother was concerned, but Eliot was worse. George Eliot was, in fact, a woman who had been living openly with a married man, and
Adam Bede
is about a young woman who gives birth to an illegitimate child and leaves it in a field to die.
Mrs. Weaver told her daughter to go to her room and remain there until she was summoned. She must have anticipated a stern talk from her father, but when they finally called her downstairs, the man waiting to speak to her was the vicar of Hampstead. The reprimand from the Church of England was supposed to drive home a lesson about the hazards of novels, but instead it made reading a rebellion. And some writers were worth fighting for.
The first thing Miss Weaver heard about Mr. James
La Terre
describes a girl bringing her cow to mate with a bull on a neighboring farm: “She had to reach right across with her arm as she grasped the bull’s penis firmly in her hand and lifted it up. And when the bull felt that he was near the edge, he gathered his strength and, with one simple thrust of his loins, pushed his penis right in.”
An English publisher named Henry Vizetelly specialized in producing U.K. editions of realist fiction. Vizetelly & Company published translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and several of Zola’s novels, including
La Terre
. In 1884, the Irish novelist George Moore, who was having trouble getting his first novel circulated, turned to Vizetelly & Company to publish his next novel in a two-shilling edition, less than one-tenth of the inflated industry-standard price. Vizetelly boasted in the press that he had sold more than a million copies of French novels, including a thousand copies of Zola’s books every week. When Lord Tennyson, England’s poet laureate, condemned “the troughs of Zolaism” in verse, the outlines of a cultural divide were clear: Vizetelly’s cheap foreign books were arrayed against standardized three-volume novels, whose high prices bought cultural legitimacy.
The Vigilance Association, the successor to the SSV, organized a boycott against Vizetelly, mounted a publicity campaign that reached the floor of Parliament, and, in 1888, it pressed obscenity charges against him repeatedly for publishing Zola. Vizetelly pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months in prison. His stock of Zola novels was destroyed, and his publishing house—thriving only a year before—went bankrupt.
When Zola died in 1902, London’s literary journals remembered the novelist as a towering figure of nineteenth-century literature, but what printers and publishers remembered was the power of the vice societies and their willingness to crack down on risqué material even if it called itself art. It was Vizetelly’s prison sentence that was in the back of the publishers’ and printers’ minds when they began poring over everything Joyce wrote, from
Dubliners
to
Portrait
to
Ulysses
. Joyce could only have made things worse when he told George Roberts that the worst outcome of publishing
Dubliners
was that “some critic will allude to me as the ‘Irish Zola’!” No one wanted to be another Vizetelly.
—
MISS WEAVER, prim, fastidious, repeatedly mistaken for a Quaker, was willing to risk jail time. She was one of eight children in a devout Church of England family, and when she was not quietly listening to her father’s twice-daily prayers, she drove him frantic by climbing the trees, walls and cliffs around their Cheshire estate. The Weavers forbade dancing, shunned unnecessary luxuries, banished exotic vegetables like asparagus from their table and considered novels an idle pleasure to be avoided as much as possible. Miss Weaver openly devoured books from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Stuart Mill while concealing the novels from her parents and the servants. When she was nineteen, her mother caught her reading George Eliot’s
Adam Bede
. Jane Austen and the Brontës were irksome enough, so far as her mother was concerned, but Eliot was worse. George Eliot was, in fact, a woman who had been living openly with a married man, and
Adam Bede
is about a young woman who gives birth to an illegitimate child and leaves it in a field to die.
Mrs. Weaver told her daughter to go to her room and remain there until she was summoned. She must have anticipated a stern talk from her father, but when they finally called her downstairs, the man waiting to speak to her was the vicar of Hampstead. The reprimand from the Church of England was supposed to drive home a lesson about the hazards of novels, but instead it made reading a rebellion. And some writers were worth fighting for.
The first thing Miss Weaver heard about Mr. James
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