No Modernism Without Lesbians, Diana Souhami [love books to read txt] 📗

Blast England, Blast Humour, Blast the years 1837 to 1900.’ Pound sent Margaret and Jane writings for the Review by T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford and above all himself: ‘I must have a steady place for my best stuff,’ he told them.

Then in February 1918, with his high recommendation, he sent them the first chapter of a manuscript, which he said he had no idea if they would publish because it would probably get them into difficulties with the censors. Margaret began reading Ulysses and said to Jane it was the most beautiful thing they would ever get. ‘We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.’

the literary masterpiece of our generation

Margaret Anderson called Ulysses ‘the literary masterpiece of our generation’. She and Jane Heap serialized the first episode in March and from then to 1920 published twenty-three instalments. They kept the text intact as written and persuaded the printer, paper suppliers and binders to push ahead without guarantee of payment. Four times, issues containing ‘Episodes’ were burned by order of the United States Post Office because of alleged obscenity. Few seemed to like this ‘most beautiful thing’. The New York Times called Margaret and Jane ‘purveyors of lascivious literature’.

The road to serialization was steeper than uphill. Neologisms like ‘the scrotumtighteningsea’ and irreverent reference to the British royal family and Roman Catholic Church were seen as gauntlets thrown for combat with the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Margaret’s Serbo-Croatian printer was perhaps oblivious to what was deemed obscene, but raids and seizures of the magazine by the United States Post Office became commonplace.

episodes 4, 8, 9 and 12

Episode 4 was seized in June 1918. Ezra Pound had told Joyce, ‘I suppose we’ll be damn well suppressed if we print the text as it stands. BUT it is damn well worth it.’ He went some way to editing out what might be perceived as obscenities, profanities and offensivenesses, but the vice squad had only to see the name James Joyce to want to seize and censor, ban and burn.

Ezra had made an editorial effort to sanitize the account of Leopold Bloom reading his newspaper on the lavatory:

he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read … that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right…

And he changed Joyce’s allusion to ‘the grey sunken cunt of the world’ to ‘the grey sunken belly of the world’ out of concession to mentionable body parts. Nonetheless, the magazine was confiscated by the Post Office.

So too was episode 8, ‘Lestrygonians’, in the January 1919 issue, in which Bloom recalled an early sexual experience with his wife, Molly:

High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Off that went to the bonfire, as did the May 1919 issue, which included the second half of episode 9, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, and the January 1920 issue containing the third instalment of episode 12, ‘Cyclops’.

episode 13 ‘Nausicaa’

Worse than confiscation came with episode 13, ‘Nausicaa’, where Leopold Bloom surreptitiously masturbates at the sight of Gerty MacDowell’s leg, while inside the church the choir sings Laudate Dominum omnes gentes and in the distance is a firework display:

And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back he had a full view high up above her knee no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirt-dancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!

the lesbian business

John Sumner, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was a conscientious suppressor. He ordered proprietors to remove indecent window displays, he arrested cross-dressers, watched plays and movies deemed dubious, sought out questionable books and magazines and personally supervised the burning of those labelled obscene by the courts. In the Washington Square Book Shop, he bought his ‘Nausicaa’ edition of The Little Review. Two weeks later, Josephine Bell, the shop’s proprietor, was arrested and charged for selling it to him. She had previously been indicted for writing a poem in praise of Emma Goldman and