Ulysses Unbanned: How one judge came through
A man runs around Dublin all day in June 1904. That’s the one-line description of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses that readers recently saw in a literary quiz in the New York Times. This minimalist ten-word summary of what many contend is a Modernist masterpiece is as good a short summary of Ulysses as you’ll find.
In June 1934 Americans who loved contemporary literature and liked a highball now and then were in heaven. Forget the Depression, Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933, and the next day a federal judge ruled that Ulysses was not obscene, unbanning a book that had been unavailable to the American public since 1922.
June 1934
It was a single man who made the call. District Judge John Munro Woolsey, who sat on the highest federal court in Manhattan. No jury was involved. His ruling, written on Thanksgiving Day that year, set a profound precedent for literary freedom in America. But the ruling itself was simple. Judge Woolsey gave FIVE REASONS ULYSSES ISN’T OBSCENE.
Unlike less literary explorations of sexual relations, Joyce’s novel HAD NO SUGGESTIVE TITLE.
Ulysses was TOO LONG TO BE CONSIDERED OBSCENE. 265,000 words. Edna O’Brien estimated it took Joyce 22,000 hours to write it. Marathon readings of Ulysses on June 16 usually last about 36 hours.
There’s NOT A SINGLE ILLUSTRATION in Ulysses. Lots of songs but no smut.
SEX. Judge Woolsey read Ulysses cover to cover before making his ruling. “The novel didn’t pander to base instincts – the first sex scene was several chapters in – any reader looking for such would have quit reading by then,” he wrote. “In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of the characters, IT MUST ALWAYS BE REMEMBERED THAT HIS LOCALE WAS CELTIC AND HIS SEASON SPRING,” wrote the Anglo Saxon jurist.
Ulysses was PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE, hardly a Times Square porn publishing outfit. Random House had published works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Frost, Emily Bronte and many more of the highbrow hacks favored by our friends 90 years ago who never let their drinking interfere with their reading. Nota bene: One of the founders of Random House who fought hard to get it unbanned was Bennett Cerf. The really witty guy on the television show What’s My Line. The attorney who won the case for Ulysses was Morris Ernst, who went on to co-found the American Civil Liberties Union.
With the publication of Ulysses Random House had a winner. There were 12,000 orders before it was even published and by June it had sold a healthy but not blockbuster 35,000 copies (at $3.50 a book). It’s estimated that Ulysses currently sells about a hundred thousand copies a year.
James Joyce (r) with Sylvia Beach (l) in Paris. She published Ulysses when it was still bnned in America. Ulysses was never banned in Ireland. But you couldn’t buy a copy there for decades after its publication 1922.
Judge Woolsey’s ruling that allowed Ulysses to be published and sold in America was appealed to the Second District Court of Appeals in New York. His ruling was upheld so the case of The US Versus One Book Called Ulysses never made it to the Supreme Court of the United States. Many people drank (legally at last) to that.
Indispensable to the gathering of most of these facts is the book: The Most Dangerous Book – The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham.
Full Disclosure. Judge Woolsey is a better man than me. I never read Ulysses cover to cover. However, I have read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man twice and Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners multiple times.