Suppression of The Little Review for printing Joyce’s Ulysses

Today’s guest post is by Cooper Casale and Sean Latham (see full bios below)

Editorial introduction: One hundred years ago today … Proceeds from the performance of The Emperor Jones (see our November 1, 1920 post) were placed in support of the Little Review. According to the New York Times, (in a piece possibly written by Times theater critic Alexander Woollcott):

In October the Little Review was arrested for the publication of an instalment [sic] of “Ulysses” . . . This suppression destroyed the business of the October issue and financially prevented the publication of the next issue. To gain immediate relief and to prevent the censor from winning the case without a judicial decision, if possible, the Little Review took over the performance of “The Emperor Jones” given at the Provincetown Playhouse the night of Dec. 9.

– “Books and Authors,” New York Times, 26 December 1920, p. 44.

Sometime in December 1920, the legal publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States came to an abrupt and dispiriting end. For nearly three years, the fearless editors of a small New York-based monthly called the Little Review had been publishing the novel serially, often waiting months at a time as the typescripts made their way from Joyce’s ever-shifting homes in Zurich and Paris to the Greenwich Village apartment that served as the magazine’s ramshackle headquarters. There, two queer women—Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap—played an essential role in developing the radical literary experiments that would later be called modernism. As committed anarchists who had welcomed Emma Goldman and fought against her extradition, they openly rejected the status quo in art, literature, life, love, and politics. The Little Review’s masthead proclaimed frankly that they were “making no compromise with the public taste”—a mission on which the editors wagered their fortunes and freedom.

The founding editor, Margaret Anderson, possessed a talent for publicity and had once pitched a tent on the shore of Lake Michigan, insisting that the magazine had driven her into poverty and thus needed an infusion of cash. Shortly afterward, in September 1916, she published an issue with thirteen blank pages, proclaiming it “a Want Ad” for the kind of genuinely new forms of art she had so far been unable to locate. This clever bit of advertising caught the attention of Ezra Pound, who proposed joining the magazine as “Foreign Editor” and brought with him the idea of publishing a new novel by an obscure Irish novelist who was better known for his struggles with the censors than for his actual writing. Anderson and Heap themselves never met Joyce and communicated with him almost exclusively through Pound and a prominent New York attorney named John Quinn, who provided legal advice as well as financial support. 

Editorial Note: NY1920 posted a sneak preview of the Ulysses / Little Review censorship for the anniversary of Anderson and Heap’s arrest on October 21, 1920.

This unlikely group together published the first draft of Ulysses, a book that would fundamentally change the novel by shattering the idea that art must answer to any law other than its own. But there was a problem: for the altogether rotten boys club of modernism, femininity—and especially queer women—proved an irksome obstacle. “Most of the ills of American magazines are,” Ezra Pound writes, “due to women” (qtd. In Birmingham 84). Quinn admired Margaret Anderson’s beauty in the same breath that he suggested she needs “a firm hand” from Pound to eliminate the “ills” of her magazine (qtd. In Birmingham 91). These men treated the editors actually doing the hard of producing the magazine as, at best, an inconvenience and their prejudice must have been exhausting. Yet for decades, in the story around the publication of Ulysses, these were the good guys.

Of course, it’s much easier to charge the bad guys—the judges, prosecutors, and conservative boot-lickers who targeted the novel—of provincialism and stupidity. Which is to say, we still read Pound’s poetry in English classes, but we confidently wag our fingers at influential men like Postmaster Albert Burelson, who claimed the Espionage Act of 1917 gave him authority to sift through the mail without congressional oversight. Burelson, who was described by the president’s advisors as “the most belligerent member of the cabinet,” ran a Postal Service that worked closely with a powerful NGO called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice that sought to root out any work deemed dangerous to public morals (qtd. In Birmingham 111). At the same time, the Post Office also created a vital network for modernist invention, since it allowed avant-garde magazines like the Little Review to cheaply reach a national audience. Anderson could distribute two thousand copies of their magazine to subscribers across the country for just $3.33. All she had to do was ensure her magazine escaped the detection of men like Burleson, a balancing act that she sustained for six challenging years. 

Editorial Note: NY1920 reported on the Vice Society in our May 17, 1920 post about James Branch Cabell’s novel Jurgen.

Even before publishing Ulysses, Anderson and Heap had already run into conflicts with the censors and just before Joyce’s novel began to appear, the United States Post Office in New York seized and burned the Little Review’s October 1917 issue. It contained a story in which a soldier impregnates and then abandons a girl; although such a plot was hardly scandalous, Quinn believed the magazine had been almost fatally tainted by its association with anarchism and what he crudely called “that old slut Emma Goldman” (qtd. In Birmingham 116). In the face of legal persecution and Quinn’s grave doubts, Anderson and Heap nevertheless pressed ahead with the planned publication of Ulysses.

Throughout the serialization that began in March 1918, they ardently defended the novel both in public and private, often penning editorials that supported the irregular installments in the face of doubtful, sometimes even furious subscribers. One correspondent from Chicago, for example, decried it as “damnable, hellish filth from the gutter of a human mind born and bred in contamination” (qtd. In Birmingham 189). On occasion, Anderson had little choice but to cut a few lines (unbeknownst to Joyce), including the graphic description of Leopold Bloom’s trip to the outhouse. As the novel progressed, however, modest edits like this became impossible and the Post Office refused to mail three separate issues they judged obscene. Still, the editors persisted, aware that both state and federal authorities were monitoring them closely—and running out of patience.

Then, in July 1920, a New Yorker named Ogden Brower decided to pass a few idle moments by leafing through his teenage daughter’s magazines and he came across the July-August issue of The Little Review. It contained part of the thirteenth chapter of Ulysses, known as “Nausicaa,” which features Bloom silently masturbating while watching a young woman on a public beach at nightfall. Brower’s daughter claimed the magazine had been sent to her unsolicited and the outraged father contacted the district attorney’s office. This, in turn, set in motion a coordinated sting operation that led, a month later, to arrest warrants for Anderson and Heap as well as Josephine Bell, the owner of the Washington Square Bookshop where copies of the magazine were for sale. At a preliminary hearing in October, fourteen of the sixteen pages from the installment were entered as evidence of the magazine’s obscenity and the judge ordered the editors be held on bail of $25 ahead of a criminal trial.

It took nearly five months to put out  the September-December issue of the Little Review in which Anderson and Heap concisely explain that “publication has been…complicated by our arrest on October fourth: Sumner vs. Joyce. Trial, December thirteenth.” (Anderson and Heap 2). Even with the power of the government now turned on them and facing the possibility of incarceration, the editors nevertheless included the next installment of Ulysses. It was the last that would appear. Although the trial would be delayed until February, this marked the last time readers in the United States would be able to legally purchase Joyce’s novel until January 1934. 

Anderson and Heap, despite their fury and their courage, were caught in the courtroom between two groups of men, arguing amongst themselves about what exactly made women so dangerous. Quinn’s defense of the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses depended on his ability to prove Gerty MacDowell unattractive. If she couldn’t arouse the male reader, the argument went, or inspire lewdness in the female reader, then the magazine wouldn’t be obscene. After all, Quinn argued, if a mother warned her son against a woman who “stinks,” is “flatulent,” and who “makes noises when she eats and discharges other natural functions,” the mother was really doing a moral service. (qtd in Birmingham 169).  According to this logic, the defendants were actually trying to encourage chasteness and moral virtue.

When the more obvious passages were entered into evidence, however, even the judges blushed as they struggled to read the passages in front of the women who had actually published them. In yet another display of misogyny, the court rejected Quinn’s defense and agreed that Anderson and Heap must have simply not understood what they were publishing. They were sentenced to what Judge McInerney considered “a very lenient” penalty of ten days in prison or a fine of one hundred dollars. As the women left the courtroom to be fingerprinted, Heap heard a young man shout “That chapter was a bit disgusting.” She shouted back defiantly, “Is it a crime to be disgusting?” The women escaped imprisonment only because a supporter—a woman named Joanna Fortune—agreed to pay the fine (qtd in Birmingham 196).

News of the trial was slow to cross the Atlantic and Joyce gave little thought to the enormous sacrifices Anderson and Heap had made on his behalf. The Little Review began a steady descent toward its eventual closure as patrons began to withdraw their support, the subscription price increased sharply, and censors kept a careful watch. Meanwhile, in Paris, a furious Joyce struggled to accept the fact that his book had effectively been banned in most of the English-speaking world before he had even finished writing the thing. In casting around for alternatives, he turned to another queer woman, Sylvia Beach, whose tiny Parisian bookshop championed Ulysses. Like the Little Review before it, Shakespeare & Company became a publishing house, advertising firm, and business office that dedicated itself to producing Joyce’s novel no matter the legal or financial cost.

References/ Further reading

Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years War: An Autobiography (Covici, Friede, 1930)

Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Penguin, 2014)

James Joyce, The Little Review Ulysses, edited by Mark Gaipa, Sean Latham, and Robert Scholes (Yale, 2015)

Joe Hassett, The Ulysses Trials: Beauty and Truth Meet The Law (Lilliput Press, 2018).

Clare Hutton, Serial Encounters: Ulysses and The Little Review (Oxford UP, 2019)

Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Ulysses: The Trials of Ulysses (NYU Press, 1998)

– Cooper Casale and Sean Latham, December 9, 1920

Cooper Casale holds an MFA in poetry from Georgia College & State University. He is a PhD student in English Literature at The University of Tulsa. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, The American Journal of Poetry, New South Journal, Three Rooms Press, Chiron Review, and DMQ Review. Twitter: @Cooper_Casale

Sean Latham is the Pauline McFarlin Walter Endowed Chair of English at the University of Tulsa where he serves as Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly . He is the author or editor of ten books, including Am I a Snob?, The Little Review Ulysses, and The World of Bob Dylan. Twitter: @seanplatham. 

TAGS: literature, law, art, gender, periodicals, magazines, publishers, author, modernism, censorship