THE TROUBLED BIRTH OF JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES
i was a patron for the irish repertory theatre, 22nd street, nyc and saw most of its productions several times.
i met frank mccourt there several times; a short snotty nosed type person. i read all his books; a great story teller; including his brother malachy who was sort of a pain in the ass. Angela's Ashes, a great story, more fiction than fact, and a product of mccourt's cynical, get even, mind, in my opinion. i had a few friends that were offended by angela's ashes.
I had a few indirect contracts with mccourt also; for example: my cousin: John Francis Mitchell, vice chairman of Motorola, and inventor of the cell phone, served on the board of the Limerick Foundation with mccourt. John mentioned that mccourt was a wierdo.
I was in the audience [irish rep theatre, nyc] when mccourt began reading aloud his proposed play: "how the irish got that way." Liam Neeson was one of the readers. Senator John Mitchell, per chance was sitting a few seats from me with his new and much younger wife. Nobel Laureate John Hume was there as well was there as well sitting up front. Hume was invited to come on stage and sing the tune: "the town i loved so well." what a great song and what a great voice from hume.
I remember mccourt starting to read his proposed play by stating as a leadoff biblical comment: "in the beginning was the word -- and the irish got it."
So I began to get curious: why have the irish succeeded so well in the arts. Of the 8 irish nobel laureates, 4 are poets and playwrights: heanney, becket, shaw and yeats. and then there is our cousin John Keane from listowel, and O"Neill and alas: james joyce.
So, i began to study Joyce and Ulysses. I have all of Joyce's works downloaded on my computer. I attended 3 courses on Joyce taught by renowned-emeritus professor peter adolph bien, literature, Dartmouth. I finally asked Bien why is Ulysses always ranked number one = great books of all time?
Bien said that Joyce really understood the human condition, and may have been the smartest person to ever live.
I also took a course on Joyce and Ulysses by two professors from St Pauls Academy, Concord, perhaps the highest endowed prep school in the country. I cannot recall the names of the teachers from St Paul's prep, but one, spent 3 years living in dublin, retracing the route taken by Leopold Bloom, during the eventful 16 June 1904 of the Ulysses story line.
Using advanced string editing software, i have counted many ways that Joyce used words, and pairs of words, and all sorts of combinations and poetic techniques. Those of you have read Ulysses will appreciate that his final chapter was a bitch to decipher.
here is recent review of the dirtiest book ever written: Ulysses.
James Joyce’s “Ulysses”
Dirty words
The troubled birth of a modernist masterpiece
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. By Kevin Birmingham.Penguin Press; 417 pages; $29.95. Head of Zeus; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IN 1922 a demure, middle-aged woman called Harriet Weaver visited several London bookshops with a bulky volume wrapped in paper under her arm. In time government officials would declare the book, entitled “Ulysses” and written by a little-known Irish author, James Joyce, to be “unreadable, unquotable and unreviewable”. British war censors became convinced that it was written in spy code. It was confiscated and burned on both sides of the Atlantic. Miss Weaver, a rich heiress who baffled her family by publishing and defending Joyce, was put under police surveillance. But as copies of the book burned, she printed more.
Few novels are as notorious as “Ulysses”. It is now considered one of the finest works of modernist fiction of the 20th century. Around 300 books of criticism, 50 written in the past ten years alone, have puzzled over it. But when “Ulysses” came out in 1922 it caused uproar. For a decade and a half—over twice the length of time it took Joyce to write the book—it was banned in America and Britain.
“The Most Dangerous Book”, by Kevin Birmingham, a literary historian at Harvard University, tells the story of how “Ulysses” was published in instalments in small literary magazines and then in private, limited print runs by dedicated patrons (most of them women). Mr Birmingham describes the multiple court cases, the legal wrangles and the extraordinary lengths men and women went to in order to smuggle it into Britain and America. In doing so, he offers a refreshing take on a tricky, exhilarating work.
“Ulysses” describes a day in the life of two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in Dublin in 1904. With no quotation marks or conventional structure it can be a tough read. Chapters switch between different styles, while hundreds of characters appear in its pages. The final chapter is written in unbroken stream-of-consciousness. Joyce’s characters swear freely, while he captures their every moment, no matter how base. Even other literary figures were shocked by it. D.H. Lawrence, whose own book, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, would go on to be prosecuted under obscenity laws, felt the final chapter was “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written”. Virginia Woolf, who wrote a novel partly inspired by the one-day narrative of “Ulysses”, dismissed it as “the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are”.
Even as “Ulysses” was breaking the rules, those rules were being tightened. Laws banning obscene books appeared in the mid-19th century, in response to rising literacy rates and urbanisation. A growing appetite for protecting public morality ensured that these laws were enforced. In 1912 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice prompted the police to arrest 76 people in America, rising to 184 by 1920, a record year for detentions. Joyce’s book was a perfect target. Even before it was published it was declared obscene; copies of the Little Review, a Chicago-based literary magazine which published extracts, were apparently torn apart by fallen women employed in reform programmes with the Salvation Army.
Mr Birmingham’s descriptions of the fight between these moral crusaders and the people defending Joyce’s work are thrilling. Joyce came under pressure to finish the book, in part because of the looming threat of legal action against it. With the eye of a novelist Mr Birmingham enlivens his story with details about these forgotten characters: how the judge who ultimately overturned the ban in America wore a tie when playing tennis and how the British lawyer who declared that the novel was “filthy, and filthy books are not allowed to be imported into this country” disliked cars, even as late as the 1950s.
In evoking the process of publishing “Ulysses”, Mr Birmingham also offers an astute portrait of the book’s creator. Joyce’s failing eyesight—the likely result of syphilis caught as a young man—and his various operations to improve it are described in detail. If Mr Birmingham occasionally slips into academic jargon, at other moments he almost seems swept up in his own Joycean prose. Few books about publishing manage to be this gripping. Like the novel which it takes as its subject, it deserves to be read.
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