Introduction—
The Polemics of Our Portraits

"I hold this book to be the most important expression which the modern age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape." When we read T. S. Eliot's tribute to Ulysses , written in 1923, one year after the publication of both Ulysses and The Waste Land , we are apt to be moved as much by the gravity of his pronouncement as by the sweep of his praise. Eliot, not one given to hyperbole, unreservedly embraced Joyce's tour de force and correctly prophesied its influence on his own and subsequent generations of writers.^[1] Just as he had been instrumental in getting Joyce's early work published, Eliot in 1923 contributed mightily to the advancement of Joyce's fledgling reputation when he began, in effect, writing the literary history of his generation. Indeed, in his praise of Joyce's "mythical method," Eliot himself was constructing a myth that would celebrate Ulysses and The Waste Land as the major achievements of high modernism. In "Ulysses , Order, and Myth," Eliot read Ulysses through the prism of his own poem and found in Joyce's novel the spiritual malaise and cultural desiccation evoked in The Waste Land . Richard Poirier correctly declares that Eliot's essay "more aptly describes Eliot's methods and ambitions in the poem than Joyce's book" (6). Implicit in Eliot's lavish praise of Ulysses were the promotion and defense of his

own difficult poem, which exhibited more chillingly than Joyce's book "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy" of modern life (Eliot, "Ulysses " 201).

Eliot championed Ulysses while others puzzled over it or condemned it. His enthusiasm for the novel was in large part reactive (in his essay, he specifically rebuts Richard Aldington's charge that Ulysses was formless and a "libel on humanity"), and we may appreciate his bravado even if, in hindsight, we fault his conclusions. Others—many others—damned Ulysses more ardently than Eliot praised it, with far less appreciation of Joyce's aesthetic gifts. In the years just after its appearance, Ulysses was appropriated by readers of varying degrees of sophistication in the service of one or another moral, political, religious, or artistic crusade. As Eliot suggested, Ulysses became a symbol not only of modern art but of the modern age, and Eliot's praise notwithstanding, it suffered more often than prospered under the weight of that association in the early years of its reception.

We must understand the controversy that enveloped Ulysses during the 1920s and 1930s as a demonstration of both its real and its symbolic powers of provocation. Readers praised or denounced it for what it was (as much as they could construe this) as well as for what it represented (often determined without the benefit—or burden—of having read it). It was difficult to separate Ulysses from the aura of notoriety surrounding it, a task made more difficult by the novel's obscurity (particularly in the years before the publication of Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's "Ulysses" in 1930) and by its unavailability. American readers in particular often viewed Ulysses as symptomatic of a host of social, cultural, and political changes they deplored. Judgments for or against Ulysses frequently reflected a critic's own hope or anxiety over an

age in which, as Marx had prophesied, all that was solid seemed to be melting into air. Ulysses became a cultural nexus over which critics with opposed ideological perspectives did battle.

In America, allegations that Ulysses was both obscene and blasphemous heightened interest in it and created controversy even before it was permitted to be published in 1933. Moralists and ideologues from various quarters found in Ulysses an amorphous but still attractive target for their suspicions and outrage. Three issues of the Little Review , which serialized Ulysses from 1918 to 1920, were seized and banned by the U.S. Post Office, and in September, 1920, the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice lodged an official complaint against its editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. In February of 1921, Heap and Anderson were convicted of publishing obscenity, fined fifty dollars, and prohibited from publishing additional chapters from Ulysses . It was not until Judge John M. Woolsey's historic decision lifting the ban on Ulysses on December 6, 1933 (upheld by the District Court of Appeals on August 8, 1934) that Ulysses could be legally published and sold in America.

Woolsey, moved by attorney Morris L. Ernst's argument that Ulysses was a classic and not obscene by 1933 standards, detected not the "leer of the sensualist" in the pages of Ulysses but a "somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women." In his oft-quoted final observation, Woolsey declared "that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac" (quoted in Moscato 310–12). Ernst had successfully legitimized the novel before the judicial authorities, as Eliot and Gilbert had before the artistic community, by downplaying the novel's subver-

sive or potentially offensive elements and emphasizing its artistic integrity and moral seriousness. As a result, in the same week that Prohibition was repealed, Random House received the legal right to publish Ulysses in America, prompting The Nation to warn tongue in cheek against the spectacle of American "streets ... filled with young men and maidens drunk upon immoderate drafts of Mrs. Bloom's meditation" (quoted in Moscato 7). Ulysses would appear in England in 1936 but would not be legally available in Ireland until decades later.

Of course the controversy over Ulysses in America, far from having ended, would begin in earnest after the ban on the novel was lifted. Rather than relying on innuendo or guilt by association, its detractors could now cite damning evidence from the text itself. While in 1934 Eliot declared Joyce's work "penetrated with Christian feeling" (After Strange Gods 48), a more typical response, especially among practicing Catholics, was that of Francis Talbot, S.J. In an essay entitled "Ulysses the Dirty" published in the same year, Talbot charged that only a lapsed Catholic "with an incurably diseased mind could be so diabolically venomous toward God, toward the Blessed Sacrament, toward the Virgin Mary" (quoted in Moscato 17). The classicist Paul Elmer More would also dispute Eliot's reading of Ulysses , writing in 1936 that the "realization of art in Ulysses is a creation of ugliness, a congeries of ugly pictures expressed in the speech of Dublin's gutters" (On Being Human 79). In a retort directed specifically at Eliot, More fulminated, "I don't see what Ulysses has to do with Royalism, AngloCatholicism, and Classicism!" (quoted in Wilson, Triple Thinkers 12). Controversy swirled not only around the allegations of obscenity and blasphemy in Ulysses , but also around the novel's alleged bent toward solipsism and despair.

It would oversimplify matters to attribute the uproar over Ulysses entirely to critical shortsightedness or hysteria. It was, of course, Ulysses itself that inflamed opinion. Eliot implied that the politics of Ulysses were essentially conservative; the "mythical method" was a "step toward making the modern world possible for art" ("Ulysses " 202). But middlebrow critics less subtle and discerning than Eliot (and far less implicated in the novel's defense) discovered in Ulysses a discomfiting challenge not only to aesthetic tradition but to long-held and dearly cherished moral, religious, and political beliefs. In the hearts and minds of many, Joyce, in the spirit of Baudelaire, had offered Ulysses to "épater le bourgeois." The objections lodged against Ulysses in the years just after its publication dramatically remind us how truly provocative a book this was. By reading Ulysses through the eyes of Joyce's contemporaries, our own understanding of the novel is deepened.

Richard Brown argues in Joyce and Sexuality that, among other politically offensive elements in Ulysses , Joyce's bold challenge to the repressive sexual norms of his day was underplayed just before and after the novel's publication in order to avoid legal challenges and broaden its appeal. Contradicting contemporary critics such as Clive Hart who continue to portray Ulysses as morally neutral or equivocal, as depicting, in Hart's phrase, a "morally static universe," Brown argues for the "polemicism" implicit in all of Joyce's work, particularly in its challenge to prevailing sexual codes and behaviors (3). "Joyce's fiction would have less stature, less a sense of centrality to the intellectual life of our century, less 'modernity' in our estimation, did it not respond to this felt importance of sexuality and sexual change" (4).

Brown's case is bolstered by Joyce critics who have addressed themselves more directly to Joyce's politics, par-

ticularly Dominic Manganiello in Joyce's Politics , Richard Ellmann in The Consciousness of Joyce , Robert Scholes in "Joyce and Modernist Ideology," and G.J. Watson in "The Politics of Ulysses ." While I will discuss their work in more detail in chapter 1 and especially in my conclusion, let me say here by way of summary that all these critics offer a portrait of Joyce as an artist more politically engaged than detached. They agree that Joyce maintained an interest in socialism, anarchism, and Irish nationalism beyond the documented years of his involvement (1906–1907) and that both the form and the content of Joyce's work reflect a fundamental sympathy for democratic and socialist ideas. In their estimation, Joyce was hardly the withdrawn, complacent, bourgeois writer caricatured by critics on both the left and the right. "His obliquity was in the service of a point of view, an idea," maintains Ellmann, and that idea was socialism (Consciousness 78). Ellmann, Scholes, Watson, Manganiello, and Brown try to locate Joyce more accurately in the ideological currents of his time, while recovering some of the subversive political elements—in Ulysses in particular—omitted or controverted by Joyce critics past and present.

Although perhaps no novel before it had been so difficult to read, Ulysses was not so abstruse that it resembled only an ink blot upon which critics projected shape and meaning. Certainly, polemicists from one camp or another used Ulysses as a whipping boy to express their outrage on a number of concerns. "It is only natural," writes R. M. Adams, "that different groups ... should see Joyce under the aspect of their own particular phobias and fixations; this is often the case of the strong finger of prepossession at work on the wax nose of perception" (34). "[Joyce] is a good writer," said Gertrude Stein. "People like him because he is incomprehensible and any-

body can understand him" (quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce 529). Still, the perception of Ulysses as a threat, magnified though it was by the fanaticism and hysteria of the 1920s and 1930s, was fundamentally a correct one. Behind or beyond its technical challenges, Ulysses presented moral and ideological ones, and often it was the novel's harshest critics who understood these best. Joyce acknowledged that Wyndham Lewis's savage attack on Ulysses in Time and Western Man in 1927 was the best hostile criticism he had ever received. But, he continued, "allowing that the whole of what Lewis says about my book is true, is it more than 10% of the truth?" (quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce 596). His work was not "trivial," as some had accused; it was, he claimed, "quadtrivial." Joyce's trademark coyness and elusiveness, his impish spirit and Dedalian cunning, should not lead us to conclude that his work consisted only of unfathomable paradoxes or lacked moral purpose. "Whether we know it or not," writes Richard Ellmann, "Joyce's court is, like Dante's or Tolstoy's, always in session" (James Joyce 5). One aspect of Joyce's "polemicism" was to challenge in his art the strident polemicism of his age. History in all its manifestations was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, though he would not resort to the theory or doctrine so fashionable in his time. Such a posture only infuriated ideologues from the twenties and thirties who called increasingly for a propagandistic art.

Nowhere was there more public debate over Ulysses than in the United States, where a highly politicized critical community often viewed with suspicion and outright hostility the aesthetic innovations introduced by European modernists. During the twenties and thirties, Ulysses was at the center of a broader debate about the social or political utility of literature. One's opinion of the

novel became something of a litmus test defining a critic's position in the cultural tug-of-war taking place at the time. For the purposes of this study, Ulysses casts a beam under which we may scrutinize a period in American cultural history when polemics dominated literary debate. Since Joyce's reputation was largely built around Ulysses , this review of the novel's reception reminds us how Joyce's ostracism during the two decades after its publication and his rapid canonization after his death occurred against the backdrop of a sometimes fierce ideological struggle among American intellectuals.

My study begins by examining the early response to Ulysses among American Marxists and fellow travelers. I include in my discussion the furor that erupted over Ulysses among Stalinist ideologues in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, in part to accentuate the more restrained response among Party members and fellow travelers in the United States. I proceed in chapter 2 to consider the rancor Ulysses provoked among New Humanists and antifascist liberals during the 1930s and early 1940s. I note the irony that critics as different in taste, temperament, and politics as Van Wyck Brooks and Paul Elmer More were allied in their contempt for Joyce. Even more ironically, their harsh and reactionary criticism of Ulysses resembled in its fury and even in its language the denunciations of the modernists issuing from ideologues on the left.

In my third chapter, I examine those independentminded Marxists who, gravitating toward the more liberal cultural perspective of Trotsky during the 1930s, read with fascination and general sympathy the work of Joyce and other modernists. Incensed by attacks on Ulysses from both left and right, Edmund Wilson, James T. Farrell, Dwight Macdonald, and others would rise to Joyce's defense. Wilson's favorable introduction to Ulysses in

Axel's Castle (1931) would prove enormously influential in securing Joyce's future reputation.

The polemical warfare of the twenties and thirties would not be silenced until the ascendancy of the New Critics in the years after World War II. Through their efforts, considered in chapter 4, critical attention began to focus not on the ideology of Ulysses but on its technical and linguistic intricacies. Although the New Critics gave Joyce's work the close aesthetic scrutiny it had always demanded, they tended to disregard those elements in it that had earlier provoked such controversy. Nonetheless, the New Critics tutored a generation of readers and teachers who would find in Ulysses an inexhaustible mine for research and speculation.

In chapter 5, I take up the problem Joyce posed for his Catholic readers and document the ways in which they have frequently muted his anti-Catholicism. I examine the influence of T. S. Eliot's early appraisal on later Catholic critics, in particular on Hugh Kenner, and so draw a connection between the characterization of Joyce as an abiding Catholic and his portrayal as a political reactionary. Finally, in my conclusion, I explore the dual trajectories of Joyce criticism (from Eliot to Kenner et al., from Wilson to Ellmann et al.) over the question of Joyce's political consciousness.

Although I concentrate almost exclusively on the reception of Ulysses , occasionally I refer to criticism of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , and Finnegans Wake , particularly when the discussion of these texts coincides with or reinforces points made about Ulysses. Aside from my examination of Soviet critics in chapter 1 and a brief discussion in my conclusion of the English and Irish reception of Ulysses , my focus throughout is on the American cultural scene.

One of the more difficult challenges of a study such as this involves setting its boundaries. I have concentrated on the early history of Joyce criticism in America, opting to include those critics who were most directly involved in ideological disputes over Ulysses . I have had to omit or mention only in passing a number of American critics who made significant contributions to Joyce studies in the early years, including Harry Levin, Stuart Gilbert, Richard M. Kain, William Troy, William York Tindall, and S.L. Goldberg. I mean not to slight their contributions but rather to mine the rich vein of polemical criticism that is more central to the concerns of this book.

My greater regret is that I have not had time or space in these pages to extend my study into more contemporary critical debates over Ulysses . My book has a more limited and episodic scope, the better, I hope, to amplify and critically evaluate a fascinating period in American cultural history. But as I point out in my conclusion, some of the early controversies over Ulysses resonate in later debates about the novel, while the larger issues raised by its appearance seventy years ago reemerge around other, more contemporary versions of avantgarde literature or art. Current critical debate over Ulysses and Finnegans Wake once again involves disputes among theoretically aligned readers, this time neo-Marxists, poststructuralists, and feminists. Joyce continues to be a totemic cultural figure, as polymorphous, if not always as perverse, as ever. The trajectory of his career and reputation in America offers us a running, albeit implicit, commentary on the state of our criticism and our culture. In short, Joyce's books continue to read us. I offer here only one chapter in this ongoing metacritical narrative.