The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses
Convinced that Joyce’s Ulysses contained “unmitigated filth and obscenity,” Sir Archibald Bodkin was determined in 1922 to burn all copies already in the UK and to ban importation of additional copies. Birmingham here tells the story of how Bodkin and his American counterparts (John Sumner and Anthony Comstock) lost the battle to keep Joyce’s explosive book out of readers’ hands. To be sure, Birmingham starts by recounting Joyce’s travails in simply writing the book. But others (including Ellmann, Gorman, and Bowker) have already examined that torturous composition process. What Birmingham delivers for the first time is a complete account of the legal war waged—chiefly by publisher Bennett Cerf and attorney Morris Ernst—to get Joyce’s masterpiece past British and American obscenity laws. Readers dismayed by the rising tide of pornography may view the obscenity laws breached for Joyce’s high art less dismissively than does Birmingham. But for readers who value Ulysses for the revolution it effected in fiction, Birmingham has chronicled an epoch-making triumph for literature. --Bryce Christensen