The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” by Kevin Birmingham (review)

Reviewers have greeted The Most Dangerous Book (mostly but not always in praise) with descriptions unusual for studies of Joyce: “thrilling,” “vivid,” “deeply fun,” “fast-paced,” “a gripping page-turner,” even “Hollywood-ready” with Brad Pitt suggested as Joyce.¹ (Benedict Cumberbatch? the Irish Michael Fassbender or Jonathan Rhys Meyers?) It is not hard to see why. Kevin Birmingham builds a dramatic narrative for a general reading audience around such topics as The Little Review’s conviction for mailing obscene material after it published the fireworks scene in Ulysses’s “Nausicaa” episode, Samuel Roth’s unauthorized serialized publication of Ulysses and the international letter of protest it provoked, and Judge John Woolsey’s late 1933 decision declaring Joyce’s novel not obscene. Existing scholarship might seem sufficient, but the struggles to write Ulysses, to get it published, and to legalize it in the face of official opposition and censorship come alive here in sentences that are brisk and crisp and chapters that weave together a large number of seemingly disparate strands into a coherent and propulsive account.

Underpinning the book is a great deal of research based on unpublished letters and documents in library collections (twenty-five archives in seventeen different institutions, Birmingham claims—15) and previous scholarship not only on Joyce but also on the various social, legal, and medical issues that he discusses. Even someone who has read many of the existing books and articles will discover much that is new.² The text itself, however, does not acknowledge or even indicate the existence of most of the earlier scholarly work—this is a trade book, not an academic one, and there are inevitable incompatibilities between the two forms. But that scholarly work is copiously recorded in the fifty-five pages of endnotes (eighty-six pages in the expanded online version).

For the most part, Birmingham organizes his “biography of a book” chronologically (2). (His study also presents “the story surrounding the novel”—15—placing it squarely within book history, which situates the author in a network of people involved in a book’s composition, production, distribution, and reception.³) Part I presents aspects of Joyce’s life in Dublin (opening with his visits to Dublin’s red-light district), his early stay in Paris and decade in Trieste, and his first work on Ulysses. Part II centers on his writing of Ulysses in Zurich and Paris and culminates in the Little Review trial. Part III deals with Ulysses’s life after its publication, especially its early reviews; attempts to publish it in the United Kingdom and to smuggle it into the United States; Roth’s unauthorized publication; and the second trial that legalized United States distribution.

Birmingham brings a large cast of characters vividly to life: Nora Joyce; Ezra Pound; Harriet Shaw Weaver; Sylvia Beach; Little Review editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; New York lawyer, art collector, and literary financial backer John Quinn; anti-pornography crusaders Anthony Comstock and John Sumner; Ernest Hemingway’s friend Barnet Braverman, appropriately named, who smuggled twenty-five copies from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, often one or two at a time tucked inside his pants; Samuel Roth; Random House owner Bennett Cerf and his lawyer Morris Ernst; and Judge John M. Woolsey. Personalities are concisely captured: Anderson, for example,

cut her teeth in the magazine business in 1910 as a staff assistant for The Dial, where she learned her way around the printing room before the editor’s unwanted advances compelled her to quit. She was there just long enough to know how heedless it was to start her own magazine. She was horrible with finances and deadlines. She knew little about layouts, marketing and publicity, and she had no money. What she had was conviction.

(72-73)

Sometimes, though, a memorable pithy snapshot produces a questionable pronouncement lacking any backup evidence: “Ezra Pound was a brilliant editor, a good essayist and...