Abstract
Upon reading the first three episodes of Ulysses, Ezra Pound foresaw that Joyce’s novel would run afoul of censors on both sides of the Atlantic: ‘I suppose we’ll be damn well suppressed,’ he wrote to Joyce, ‘if we print the text as it stands.’1 Yet the risk of suppression, Pound added, was well worth running because of the brilliance of Joyce’s art. As foreign editor of The Little Review, Pound conveyed both opinions to Margaret Anderson in New York. According to Anderson, Pound praised Joyce’s work highly, but warned that ‘it would probably involve [them] in difficulties with the censors.’2 Anderson agreed on both counts. Upon reading the opening lines of the third episode (‘Proteus’) — ‘Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide’ — she declared, ‘This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have.’3 In the same breath she implicitly acknowledged that publishing Ulysses would involve a struggle with the censors: ‘We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.’
Chapter PDF
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Notes
Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 28.
Zechariah Chafee, Jr, Freedom of Speech (New York, 1920), p. 55, as quoted by
Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 97.
Letter to John Quinn, 3 Apr. 1918, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 147.
The ethereal, mystical nature of Pound’s eroticism has been elaborately documented by Kevin Oderman, Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986).
H. Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), p. 321.
For a fuller account of Pound’s Eleusinian interests, see Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1979).
The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol II: 1912–1922, ed. Nigel Nicholson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 551;
Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (London: Hogarth, 1978), entry for 26 Sep. 1922. Like Pound, Woolf was displeased by what she referred to squeamishly as ‘the p-ing of a dog’ in the ‘Proteus’ episode (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 234).
As quoted by Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), p. 497.
R.H.C. [A.R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers,’ New Age (28 Apr. 1921), p. 306.
‘Weaving, Unweaving,’ in A Star Chamber Quiry: A James Joyce Centennial Volume 1882–1982, ed. E.L. Epstein (New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 45.
John Middleton Murray, review of Ulysses, Nation & Athenaeum, xxxi (22 Apr. 1922), p. 124.
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Annual Report, 1919, as quoted by Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York: Scribner’s, 1968), p. 67.
Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), pp. 59–60.
Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 239.
Copyright information
© 1998 Paul Vanderham
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vanderham, P. (1998). Ulysses at War. In: James Joyce and Censorship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13778-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13778-7_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-13780-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-13778-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)