The Perversion of Book Banning
On the Ulysses of James Joyce
The Clark Quarterly, November, 1931
While Ulysses was still banned, Otis Ferguson hunted down a copy and reviewed it for The Clark Quarterly.
“As is usual,” he wrote, “official stupidity has triumphed and James Joyce’s fine experiment in English is poison to the authorities of every country where the language is spoken… To anyone who has read the work, it is perfectly obvious that the ULYSSES cannot be classified [as pornographic]. No person less perverted than an authorized censor of public morals would dream of doing so.”
I love this particular line: “One must bring to the ULYSSES an erudite as well as an agile mind, else much of the flavor will stay in the book.”
Published by Clark University in ClarkNOW, accessed 4/26/2024, https://clarknow.clarku.edu/2024/03/13/on-the-ulysses-of-mr-james-joyce/
Ulysses suffered multiple cases of being burned, first in its serialized form in America in 1918 and then its its manuscript form in Ireland in 1922.
And in Canada.
And in England in 1923.,
It was labeled obscene and effectively banned in the United States in 1920 and officially banned in England in 1929. (The ban was overturned in court in 1931.)
Did you know you can read a copy as it appeared in “The Little Review”? I remember it coming with other tidbits from the magazine, my favorite being one of the letters to the editor objecting to its publication, and it listed off authors the complainant felt worthy and asked why they’d bother instead with the likes of James Joyce. I thought it would be interesting to list those authors here. Only, I’m not sure if I dreamed the whole thing. Flipping through my copy, I see that each section is forwaded with a copy of the table of contents from that edition of The Little Review, and in the middle, they have color copies of all the covers, but I haven’t found the letter I so fondly remember.
It’s in there somewhere. It has to be.
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