The more unlikely hero is Judge John Woolsey who, in The United States of America v. One Book Called "Ulysses", lifted the ban. Few would have predicted that the saviour of Modernism's masterpiece would have been a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the theologian and preacher who said things like "the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you." Superficially, Woolsey was a stuffy establishment man who always wore a tie when he played tennis with his wife. It took him two months to read Ulysses — "just about the hardest two months of my life" — something he didn't need to do; lesser judges would have counted up the profanities and upheld the ban. Once he'd read the book and heard the lawyers' arguments he concluded that it shouldn't be prohibited because it wasn't "dirt for dirt's sake" and wrote in his 1933 judgment:
That was a watershed moment for free expression in America and Britain, where the ban was lifted a few years later. Thanks to that victory, writes Birmingham, "works containing the extremities of experience — rapture and pain — went from being contraband to being canonical".
Yet the tide of censorship is not bound to ebb. You cannot read The Most Dangerous Book without thinking of The Satanic Verses. When it comes to freedom of speech, we have swapped the rule of law for mob rule. Salman Rushdie paid a higher price for publishing a controversial book in 1988 than Joyce did in 1922. He was sentenced to death by a foreign tyrant, living in hiding and in fear for nearly a decade, while two of his translators were murdered. Joyce's reputation may have taken a temporary knock, but at least Molly Bloom got her day in court.
Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers . . . When such a great artist in words, as Joyce undoubtedly is, seeks to draw a true picture of the lower middle class in a European city, ought it to be impossible for the American public legally to see that picture?
That was a watershed moment for free expression in America and Britain, where the ban was lifted a few years later. Thanks to that victory, writes Birmingham, "works containing the extremities of experience — rapture and pain — went from being contraband to being canonical".
Yet the tide of censorship is not bound to ebb. You cannot read The Most Dangerous Book without thinking of The Satanic Verses. When it comes to freedom of speech, we have swapped the rule of law for mob rule. Salman Rushdie paid a higher price for publishing a controversial book in 1988 than Joyce did in 1922. He was sentenced to death by a foreign tyrant, living in hiding and in fear for nearly a decade, while two of his translators were murdered. Joyce's reputation may have taken a temporary knock, but at least Molly Bloom got her day in court.
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