The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham Page A
Authors: Kevin Birmingham
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Joyce was that the entire first printing of
Dubliners
had been destroyed for being unprintably obscene. He had exiled himself from Ireland for over a decade and had, as Dora Marsden later wrote to Miss Weaver, a “reputation for quarrelling with all the world.” That was part of the allure. By the time Miss Weaver began reading
A Portrait
in
The
Egoist
, he was a man with an aura gathering around him, and the idea of the artist as an individual defying empires, churches and conventions developed in the monthly installments.
The opening scenes depicted a sensitive boy with feeble eyes hiding under a table and pasting inside his boarding school desk the number of days left until Christmas vacation. Dora Marsden’s writing was idealistic and yet prone to the abstractions it railed against. Joyce’s writing, on the other hand, had a quality Miss Weaver could not fully articulate, something she described vaguely as “a searching, piercing spirit,” a capacity for “scorching truth” and “startling penetration.” By the time she read about Stephen Dedalus’s struggle with his faith, his excursions into Nighttown and his flight from Ireland “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” as Stephen puts it, she was captivated. Despite his vulnerabilities, he would never ensconce himself in the upholstery. To read Joyce was to escape from family prayers, to climb the highest tree and to behold the disquieting panorama across the bluff and the river Weaver coursing below it.
Joyce’s publishing woes only enhanced his appeal, for one of the only emotions more powerful to Miss Weaver than her awe of artistic talent was her unbounded empathy for hardship. When Miss Weaver and Ezra Pound began searching for a publisher for Joyce’s
Portrait
, they got a stream of rejections—from Secker, from Jenkins, from Duckworth. Herbert Cape said he hoped Joyce would abandon the novel and start something new. Grant Richards sent the manuscript back to Miss Weaver without so much as commenting (privately, he called the manuscript “hopeless”). Pound sent it to Werner Laurie, Ltd., who he thought could tolerate frankness, but Laurie wrote back that publishing Joyce’s book in wartime London was “quite impossible”—he was so sure it would be banned that he wouldn’t even recommend other publishers. In January 1916, Pound prevailed upon Duckworth to reconsider, and the publisher sent back a withering evaluation of James Joyce’s first novel:
It is too discursive
, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent; indeed at times they seem to be shoved in one’s face, on purpose, unnecessarily. The point of view will be voted “a little sordid.” The picture of life is good; the period well brought to the reader’s eye, and the types and characters well drawn, but it is too “unconventional.” . . . At the end of the book there is a complete falling to bits; the pieces of writing and the thoughts are all in pieces and they fall like damp, ineffective rockets.
Pound was disgusted. “These vermin crawl over and be-slime our literature with their pulings,” he told Joyce’s agent. For Pound, the rejection of a writer like Joyce was the latest evidence that the Allies were fighting the wrong enemies. “You English will get no prose till you exterminate this breed . . . Why can’t you send the publishers’ readers to the Serbian front and get some good out of the war.”
Pound advocated for Joyce as if he were protecting someone who belonged to him. Joyce was a long-lost Imagist, a blessed Vorticist, a kindred spirit writing fiction just as Pound himself would have written it. His keen eye penetrated the people and objects around him and extracted, as Pound put it, “the universal element” inside them all.
A Portrait
gave him the feeling that he was reading something “absolutely permanent,” something that would never die, and finding that immortality in a
Dubliners
had been destroyed for being unprintably obscene. He had exiled himself from Ireland for over a decade and had, as Dora Marsden later wrote to Miss Weaver, a “reputation for quarrelling with all the world.” That was part of the allure. By the time Miss Weaver began reading
A Portrait
in
The
Egoist
, he was a man with an aura gathering around him, and the idea of the artist as an individual defying empires, churches and conventions developed in the monthly installments.
The opening scenes depicted a sensitive boy with feeble eyes hiding under a table and pasting inside his boarding school desk the number of days left until Christmas vacation. Dora Marsden’s writing was idealistic and yet prone to the abstractions it railed against. Joyce’s writing, on the other hand, had a quality Miss Weaver could not fully articulate, something she described vaguely as “a searching, piercing spirit,” a capacity for “scorching truth” and “startling penetration.” By the time she read about Stephen Dedalus’s struggle with his faith, his excursions into Nighttown and his flight from Ireland “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” as Stephen puts it, she was captivated. Despite his vulnerabilities, he would never ensconce himself in the upholstery. To read Joyce was to escape from family prayers, to climb the highest tree and to behold the disquieting panorama across the bluff and the river Weaver coursing below it.
Joyce’s publishing woes only enhanced his appeal, for one of the only emotions more powerful to Miss Weaver than her awe of artistic talent was her unbounded empathy for hardship. When Miss Weaver and Ezra Pound began searching for a publisher for Joyce’s
Portrait
, they got a stream of rejections—from Secker, from Jenkins, from Duckworth. Herbert Cape said he hoped Joyce would abandon the novel and start something new. Grant Richards sent the manuscript back to Miss Weaver without so much as commenting (privately, he called the manuscript “hopeless”). Pound sent it to Werner Laurie, Ltd., who he thought could tolerate frankness, but Laurie wrote back that publishing Joyce’s book in wartime London was “quite impossible”—he was so sure it would be banned that he wouldn’t even recommend other publishers. In January 1916, Pound prevailed upon Duckworth to reconsider, and the publisher sent back a withering evaluation of James Joyce’s first novel:
It is too discursive
, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent; indeed at times they seem to be shoved in one’s face, on purpose, unnecessarily. The point of view will be voted “a little sordid.” The picture of life is good; the period well brought to the reader’s eye, and the types and characters well drawn, but it is too “unconventional.” . . . At the end of the book there is a complete falling to bits; the pieces of writing and the thoughts are all in pieces and they fall like damp, ineffective rockets.
Pound was disgusted. “These vermin crawl over and be-slime our literature with their pulings,” he told Joyce’s agent. For Pound, the rejection of a writer like Joyce was the latest evidence that the Allies were fighting the wrong enemies. “You English will get no prose till you exterminate this breed . . . Why can’t you send the publishers’ readers to the Serbian front and get some good out of the war.”
Pound advocated for Joyce as if he were protecting someone who belonged to him. Joyce was a long-lost Imagist, a blessed Vorticist, a kindred spirit writing fiction just as Pound himself would have written it. His keen eye penetrated the people and objects around him and extracted, as Pound put it, “the universal element” inside them all.
A Portrait
gave him the feeling that he was reading something “absolutely permanent,” something that would never die, and finding that immortality in a
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