Pornography or Great Literature? A Groundbreaking Case

Shakespeare and Company’s 1922 edition of Ulysses.

“I think this is the most damnable slush and filth that ever polluted paper in print,” read the letter to Margaret Anderson, editor of the monthly literary magazine The Little Review. “There are no words I know to describe, even vaguely, how disgusted I am; not with the mire of his effusion but with all those whose minds are so putrid that they dare allow such muck and sewage of the human mind to besmirch the world by repeating it—and in print, through which medium it may reach young people. Oh my God, the horror of it.” The writer had just finished reading an excerpt from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which had reached America by being serialized in the New York-based Little Review, and he was one of many incensed at the four-letter words and sexual material in Joyce’s story of one day in the life of two Dublin friends. Similar reactions got the novel banned in 1921, sending it on a dozen-years-long legal journey befitting its epic structural template, Homer’s Odyssey. The journey culminated in a New York courtroom on December 6, 1933, 72 years ago today.

The journey began when Joyce’s friend the poet Ezra Pound recommended Ulysses to Anderson and her co-editor, Jane Heap. Upon reading the first sentence, Anderson exclaimed, “This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have. We‘ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.” The first installment went out without incident in March 1918. But the Post Office confiscated the January 1919 issue, taking offense at human sex scenes, fly sex scenes, and jabs at the king of England. The Post Office refused to mail three later issues despite Anderson’s deletion of material about incest and bestiality. But even without those passages, the magazine itself was suspect to the government. The Little Review had been called “a Publication of Anarchist tendency” in a 1918 Post Office document, and an issue had been banned as political sedition under the Espionage Act of 1917.

However, a selection the Post Office deemed suitable to mail was what first landed Ulysses in court. Anderson sent a copy of The Little Review’s July/August 1920 issue—which included a section of Ulysses in which the main character masturbates in his pants in the company of a young woman—to the daughter of a New York lawyer, in an attempt to drum up subscriptions. The daughter was horrified and complained to her father, who mentioned the matter to the local district attorney, Joseph Forrester. Forrester responded by prosecuting Anderson and Heap for publishing obscenity.

At a preliminary hearing on October 21, 1920, John Quinn, a lawyer for Anderson and Heap, played on the novel’s opacity. He argued that “an innocent person could not understand the sex allusions and therefore could not be corrupted by them.” The judge, citing “the episode where the man went off in his pants, which no one could misunderstand,” ordered that the editors be tried. They returned to court on February 21, 1921. After the district attorney furiously read one passage, Quinn interjected, “I offer Mr. Forrester in evidence as the defendants’ chief exhibit. Just look at him, still gasping for breath at the conclusion of his denunciation, his face distorted with rage, his whole aspect apoplectic. Is he filled with lewd desires? Not at all.” The judges had a hearty laugh, and then they convicted the editors anyway. Anderson and Heap were each fined $50 and forbidden to publish any more of Joyce’s novel. From that point on, Ulysses was as good as banned in America.

Joyce, for his part, had hoped for a more dramatic, publicity-stirring sentence. But infamy, not lack of fame, was his novel’s problem. American and British publishers alike refused to touch it unless he made extensive revisions, which he refused to do. In April 1921, when he bemoaned the book’s fate to Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, she offered to publish it. It came out on February 2, 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, in that bastion of elsewhere-forbidden sensuality. Much like other taboo products of France, the light-blue paperbound book, also banned in Canada, Australia, and Joyce’s homeland, Ireland, spurred a vigorous tourist trade: 30,000 copies were sold, mostly to Americans. Five hundred copies were confiscated in 1922 in New York alone. Those who applied for a license to import it legally were almost always turned down; a notable exception was a doctor who said he needed the book for “scientific purposes.”

Such was Ulysses’s fate for the better part of a decade. Then one night in early 1932, the 34-year-old president of Random House, Bennett Cerf, overheard Morris Ernst, one of America’s top censorship attorneys, say he’d like to lead the charge to legalize Ulysses. Ever ambitious, Cerf invited Ernst to lunch and asked, “If I can get Joyce signed up to do an American edition of Ulysses, will you fight the case for us in court?” Ernst jumped at the chance (“He loves publicity just as much as I do,” Cerf later wrote), on the condition that if they won, Ernst would earn royalties on the book in perpetuity. Joyce, disgusted with the recent bowdlerized, pirated copies of Ulysses circulating in America, signed an agreement with Random House, although he expected they would lose in court.

He underestimated his team. Ernst and Cerf immediately set about masterminding the entire case in advance. They decided the cheapest and most expedient way to initiate proceedings was to smuggle in a copy of the book, allow Customs to confiscate it, and then contest the seizure. Critical opinions were inadmissible in court, but anything within in the smuggled copy’s covers would be fair game. Ernst and Cerf pasted so many favorable clippings into their copy that, Cerf recalled, “By the time we finished, the covers were bulging.” On a hot May day in 1932, a Random House agent arrived on a New York dock from Paris with the book in his suitcase. The Customs men, hot and tired, were waving everyone through without inspection. When the agent’s suitcase was stamped without being opened, he cried, “I insist that you open that bag and search it.”

“It’s too hot,” the inspector said.

“I think there’s something in there that’s contraband, and I insist that it be searched,” the agent said.

The inspector angrily opened the suitcase and found the book. “Aha!” the agent yelled.

“Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in,” the inspector said. “We don’t pay any attention to it.”

The agent demanded that the book be seized until the chief inspector wandered over and humored him. So began The United States of America v. One Book Entitled Ulysses.

Enrst then stalled for months so that the case could appear before a judge known for his opposition to censorship, John Woolsey. Ernst’s job was to prove that Ulysses was legal under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which prohibited “importing into the United States from any foreign country … any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing, or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material,“ but allowed that “the Secretary of the Treasury may, in his discretion, admit the so-called classics or books of recognized and established literary or scientific merit.”

Ernst began by submitting a 56-page brief in October 1933. Drawing a parallel between the evolution of bathing suits and shifting literary styles, he argued that even if Ulysses had been obscene in 1919, it wasn’t according to the standards of the present. Besides which, he added, the book was simply too long to be smut; depictions of sex made up only a small fraction of its more than 700 pages, and there were no pictures. Woolsey spent a month reading Ulysses and heard arguments on November 25. Sam Coleman, the prosecutor, had marked 250 passages as obscene, but he refused to read them aloud in the presence of a woman, Ernst’s wife; Ernst, for his part, lauded Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique to the court. Puffing on a cigarette, Woolsey commented that “reading parts of that book almost drove me frantic,” and said he needed more time to ponder the situation.

On December 6 he returned with a groundbreaking decision. Judging the work as a whole, rather than as distinct parts, and according to contemporary morals, he found that all of Joyce’s passages about sex served to illustrate the character’s inner monologues. “In spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist,” he said, adding, “I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake … in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.”

Ernst phoned Cerf, and within 10 minutes Ulysses was rolling from Random House’s presses. The prosecutors appealed, but Woolsey’s decision was upheld and further appeal denied. Later scholars would point to the decision as paramount in relaxing censorship, but the social changes of the 1920s did most of the work. (In a bit of cultural synchronicity, the book was legalized the same week prohibition was repealed, simultaneously allowing the American public to get drunk and read Ulysses without fear of legal action.) The book, as a symbol of modernity, continued to the center of political and social debate and a litmus test of one’s cultural stance. Moralists focused on the book their outrage about the increase in sexual openness, while progressive critics deemed it a classic.

In the 1950s and ’60s the Supreme Court relaxed American obscenity laws, and today literary censorship tends to concern politics and national security rather than decency (although television and the Internet still frequently come under fire for sexual content). But for the generations able to read classics like Ulysses, or, as may be more common, able to pretend to have read Ulysses, Woolsey’s decision paved the way.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.