MOST DANGEROUS BOOK: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

Regarded by many as the greatest novel in the English language, Ulysses was banned as obscene, officially or unofficially, throughout most of the English-speaking world for over a decade. Being forbidden is part of what made Joyce's novel so transformative. It changed not only the course of literature in the century that followed, but the very definition of literature in the eyes of the law. This is the biography of that book, charting the development of Ulysses from the first tug of inspiration in 1906 when it was just an idea for a short story - a Homeric name appended to someone Joyce met in Dublin one drunken night - to the novel's astounding growth during and after World War One as Joyce wrote out its 732 pages in notebooks in more than a dozen apartments in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. It was serialised in a New York magazine, monitored and censored even by its most vocal advocate, modernism's unstinting ringleader, Ezra Pound. A portion was burned in Paris while it was still only a manuscript draft, and it was convicted of obscenity in New York before it was even a book. Joyce's woes inspired Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate running a small book shop in Paris, to publish Ulysses when everyone else including Virginia Woolf refused. Government authorities on both sides of the Atlantic confiscated and burned more than a thousand copies of the novel - the exact number will never be known. Other countries soon followed. Most copies came from Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach's Paris Bookshop, 'stacked like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar.' James Joyce lived in exile, his supporters on the edge of the law. This book tells the painful yet exhilarating story and its place as a masterpiece in world literature. Joyce refused to yield to the demands of burgeoning governments and markets, to the laws that restricted the circulation of literature and to the readers that made literature a professional option in the first place. The body was central to his work because he was a captive of both its erotic pleasures and its intense pains. He himself suffered from a swelling of the iris which brought about episodes of acute glaucoma almost to the point of blindness. He collapsed on city streets and rolled on the floor in pain during these recurrent 'eye attacks' and feared they would end his career. When Sylvia Beach launched an official protest against the piracy of Ulysses in 1927, 167 writers from around the world signed it and T. S. Eliot promoted Joyce throughout literary London and Samuel Beckett took dictation from Joyce when he couldn't see and several donors helped Joyce when times were bleak. It took a transformation of artists, readers, patrons, the publishing industry and the law to make modernism mainstream and until now the fight to publish Ulysses has never been told in its entirety. 434pp, paperback, photos.