The battle over the U.S. publication of "Ulysses"

The intriguing court battle it took to get Joyce's book published in America

 

The Exiled Artist

Joyce had already left his homeland by the time he began writing Ulysses around 1914. His brilliant story collection Dubliners had already been published, followed by his autobiographical novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Joyce then turned solely to his monumentally ambitious retelling of the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey. Joyce, however, would have that epic unfold on a single day, June 16, 1904, in the lives of a tortured young artist Stephen and a kindly, passionate Dublin Jew named Leopold Bloom.

Given Joyce’s ancient inspirations and complex wordplay, Ulysses seemed unlikely to ruffle many feathers. In fact, as the novel grew longer and longer, it seemed that few people would even bother to read it.

However, although Joyce’s previous books had not sold very well, he did have an avant-garde following. It was also clear that while he had an interest in mythology, linguistics, and politics, he did not shy away from sexual and scatological matters, the kind of naughty stuff for which obscenity laws were written.

In 1920, after editor Margaret Anderson published a section of Ulysses in The Little Review, U.S. Postal officials seized copies of the literary magazine. Among the episodes which alarmed the likes of The Society for the Suppression of Vice was one featuring Leopold Bloom sitting on a Dublin beach, fantasizing about a fair maiden.

In 1921, Margaret Anderson was hauled into court. Copies of The Little Review featuring Ulysses excerpts were either confiscated or, in some cases, actually burned. On the grounds that the material might corrupt children or women (even though it was the woman Margaret Anderson who saw the brilliance in Ulysses), Joyce’s material was deemed obscene. His masterpiece, more than likely, would never be published in the U.S. or Britain, which similarly deemed the book offensive.

 

A Second Court Battle

One bit of good news for Joyce was that the battle over Ulysses garnered the book plenty of attention. Sylvia Beach, who owned the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, told Joyce it would be an “honor” to publish Ulysses, which she did in 1922.

Soon afterwards, smuggled copies were making their way into the U.S. The book, however, was still deemed legally “obscene” as the 1920s drew to a close, much to the chagrin of Bennett Cerf, who had started a little publishing business called Random House.

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