United States v. One Book Called Ulysses

Every June, Bloomsday is celebrated in Dublin, Ireland, and other cities around the world. Bloomsday is a celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, whose events took place on June 16, 1904. Ulysses was, of course, famously banned in the United States from its 1922 publication until 1933.

Published in Paris by American expatriate Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922 — Joyce’s fortieth birthday — Ulysses is one of the world’s most important novels, a masterpiece of modernist thought and linguistic virtuosity. 

A reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey, the book takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904, and tells the story of three characters: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Bloom’s wife, Molly. Ulysses brims with wordplay, symbolism, and historical and literary allusions. It is also bawdy, raunchy, and occasionally disgusting.

Prior to 1922, Joyce published excerpts of the book in a Chicago-based magazine called The Little Review, published by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. An April 1920 excerpt, the so-called “Nausicaa” section, depicted Bloom masturbating on a beach as a young woman, Gerty MacDowell, flashes him a bit of thigh while watching fireworks with her friends.

Subscribers complained, and the US Postal Service began seizing and destroying issues of the magazine. A month later, Heap and Anderson were arrested and charged under the Comstock Act, an 1873 law forbidding the distribution of “obscene, lewd or lascivious” publications through the mail.

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After a trial in February 1921, the pair was fined one hundred dollars and ordered to stop releasing excerpts of Ulysses. For the next ten years, the book remained unavailable in the United States. Then, in 1932, Bennett Cerf had an idea. With partner Donald Klopfer, Cerf had founded the publisher Random House five years earlier, and he needed a bestseller, which he thought Ulysses could become. 

There had been a few editions of Ulysses since Sylvia Beach’s, only one of which was produced in America: a 1929 pirated version by the king of counterfeits, Samuel Roth, over which Joyce had sued, claiming a violation of his “right of publicity.” Cerf was eager to put out an authorized edition. How, though, could he circumvent the Comstock Act?

Enter Morris Ernst.

Ernst was the general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union and a Joyce fanboy who was delighted to accept Cerf’s case. His strategy was to bring a copy of Ulysses into the country and have it seized by US Customs agents as a violation of the Tariff Act of 1930, which prohibited the import of materials having to do with abortion, treason, threats of harm, or a lottery. It also criminalized “obscene matter.”

The strategy worked. Ulysses was seized, Random House was charged, and the case ended up before Judge John Munro Woolsey of the Southern District of New York. The government’s argument was three-fold:

1. Ulysses contained too much sex and “unparlorlike” language,
2. It was blasphemous, and
3. It provoked coarse thoughts and desires.

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Ernst emphasized the book’s quality and cultural significance. He submitted copies of positive reviews by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser and noted that T. S. Eliot intended to teach the book in his course at Harvard. Admitting that the book “contain[s] occasional episodes of doubtful taste,” he said they represent a minor percentage of the text and argued that the book must not “be judged on the basis of isolated passages.”

Woolsey was sympathetic. He agreed that

"reading ‘Ulysses’ in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts, but that its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women."

Deciding that Joyce’s novel contained “no dirt for dirt’s sake,” he ruled that it may be admitted into the United States.

Woolsey handed down his decision on December 6, 1933. Within minutes, Random House’s typesetters began work. A print run of ten thousand copies was issued on January 25, 1934, and it was a hit. Woolsey’s opinion appeared at the front of the book, and Joyce supplied a publication history.

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Yet there was one last hurdle: an appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. That appeal was heard by a panel of three judges: Billings Learned Hand, one of America’s greatest jurists; his cousin, Augustus Noble Hand; and the prosaically named Martin Manton.

Augustus Hand wrote the court’s opinion, which was delivered on August 7, 1934. Learned Hand joined it, while Judge Manton dissented. Augustus acknowledged that some passages in Ulysses “are of a vulgarity that is extreme,” but he insisted that others “are of beauty and undoubted distinction,” while “the book as a whole has a realism characteristic of the present age.” Then he lowered the boom on the prosecution:

"It is settled, at least so far as this court is concerned, that works of physiology, medicine, science, and sex instruction are not within the [Tariff Act], though to some extent and among some persons they may tend to promote lustful thoughts [. . .] We think the same immunity should apply to literature as to science [. . .] The question in each case is whether a publication taken as a whole has a libidinous effect. The book before us has such portentous length, is written with such evident truthfulness in its depiction of certain types of humanity, and is so little erotic in its result, that it does not fall within the forbidden class."

Bottom line: Books could not be banned on the basis of a dick joke here or there but must be evaluated in their entirety.

The case opened the floodgates on literary litigation in the twentieth century. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer — all found their way into courtrooms, and all were, like Ulysses, exonerated.

Book challenges are again flourishing in the twenty-first century. Some are just now working their way through the court system. Will the courts uphold the bans? Or will judges apply the lessons of Ulysses to keep as many books as possible in circulation?

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