No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

send out others. The average selling price in Paris was 136 francs. In England and Ireland it was around £40. Though no publisher had risked their imprint for it, and bookshops were chary of stocking it, this was a notable literary event. Reviewers and critics responded. John Middleton Murry in The Nation and Athenaeum called it ‘a remarkable book of inspissated obscurities’ and Joyce ‘a half-demented man of genius who tore away inhibitions and limitations’. Arnold Bennett called Joyce an ‘astonishing phenomenon in letters’. The Observer’s reviewer said: ‘… the very obscenity of Ulysses is somehow beautiful and wrings the soul to pity.’ Virginia Woolf said it was the work of ‘a self-taught working man… egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating’. And George Bernard Shaw called the book obscene, foul-mouthed and foul-minded: ‘I am an elderly Irish gentleman and if you imagine that any Irishman much less an elderly one would pay 150 francs for such a book you know little of my countrymen.’ In fact, some Irishmen paid 350 francs for the deluxe edition.

Whatever this book was or was not, it was a literary happening. More than the thousand copies were needed. Harriet Weaver compiled extracts of reviews for publicity. Fan mail and comment came from far-off parts of the globe. By the end of 1922, Ulysses was Shakespeare and Company’s bestselling book. That year also, in England, T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf brought out Jacob’s Room; in New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and Damned and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz; in Paris, Marcel Proust published the Sodome et Gomorrhe sequence of his epic À la Recherche du temps perdu; and at the Gare de Lyon, a briefcase with the entire year of Ernest Hemingway’s writing was stolen and not retrieved.

Nora wants to leave

In March 1922, Harriet, responding to yet another request by Joyce for money, sent him £1,500. Which totalled £8,500 she had gifted him.6 Her original intention was to give him the means to write, but this stretched to help with living and medical expenses, Nora’s clothes, care for Lucia, the hotels where the family took holidays. Harriet agreed with Joyce that after his efforts with Ulysses he needed to take a holiday. Nora saw a different opportunity. She had had enough. Joyce had published his unreadable book, she was homesick for Ireland, she had not been back for ten years, she would take Harriet’s money and go home to her mother, Annie Barnacle, in Galway.

It was not a realistic escape. There was no place for Nora with her mother. Nora was born in Galway workhouse on 21 March 1884. Her father, a baker, was illiterate and an alcoholic. She had been left with her maternal grandmother, Catherine Healy, when she was two. She worked as a laundress when she was twelve and was a chambermaid in a Dublin hotel when she met Joyce.

Joyce begged her not to leave him. Ireland, he warned, was in turmoil, she would not be safe, he could not manage without her, the worry affected his eyes. Nora set off with Lucia and Giorgio at the end of March. Joyce collapsed in Shakespeare and Company, beseeched McAlmon to help him and in April wrote imploring letters to Nora:

‘My darling, my love, my queen: I jump out of bed to send you this. Your wire is postmarked 18 hours later than your letter which I have just received. A cheque for your fur will follow in a few hours and also money for yourself. If you wish to live there (as you ask me to send two pounds a week) I will send that amount (£8 and £4 rent) on the first of every month… Evidently it is impossible to describe to you the despair I have been in since you left. Yesterday I got a fainting fit in Miss Beach’s shop and she had to run and get me some kind of drug. Your image is always in my heart. How glad I am to hear you are looking younger! O my dearest, if you would only turn to me even now and read that terrible book which has now broken the heart in my breast and take me to yourself alone to do what you will! I have only 10 minutes to write this so forgive me. Will write again before noon and also wire. These few words for the moment and my undying unhappy love. Jim’

Ireland was a war zone. Annie Barnacle’s house was small. Nora’s children were unhappy there and within weeks the family was reunited in Paris to continue their chaotic life.

I have read pages 690 to 732

James Douglas, editor of London’s Sunday Express, did his worst for Ulysses on 28 May 1922. ‘Beauty and the Beast’, he headlined his swipe. This, he said, was ‘the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature’:

All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in this book’s flood of unimaginable thoughts, images, and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the holy name of Christ…

The law enforcers got involved on 12 December. In accordance with an act of 1876, a customs officer at Croydon airport intercepted and confiscated a posted copy of Ulysses. The importer ‘protested the seizure’ and called the book ‘a noteworthy work of art by an author of considerable repute which is being seriously discussed in the highest literary circles’.

The customs official sent the contentious noteworthy work of art to Sir Archibald Bodkin, Director of Public Prosecutions, with a request for his early opinion. Within days, Sir Archibald sent his report to the Home Office. He had not got on well with Ulysses:

As might be supposed I have not had the time, nor may I add the inclination to read through this book. I have however read pages 690 to 732. I am entirely unable to appreciate how those pages are relevant