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Jan. 17th, 2015 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatStarted reading The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle Over James Joyce's Ulysses. This is the story of how various people fought to get the book published and distributed around the world. The book was banned in Europe, the US and various other countries. Copies were burned in Paris, France, and if you were found with a copy in the UK - you were fined. Ernest Hemingway helped a French independent publisher, Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company smuggle copies into the US. At that time, the way independent books got distributed was through the US Postal Office which sent them to subscribers. But Arthur Comstock who instigate the Comstock Act, which at that time dictated obscenity law and held a great deal of power in the 1930s - provided the postal service with the power scan mail and books for obscenity and fined anyone shipping these materials. It was enacted in 1875.
Joyce, an Irish writer and a modernist, fought to get all his novels published. He came up with the idea of Ulysses after he received the first of many rejection letters for Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. And it was painful for him to write and read, since he was going blind at the time and underwent over 17 eye surgeries without the benefit of anesthetic to prevent or forestall it. He suffered from irisitis - a condition that caused his irises to dilate. He was always in pain. Wore thick glasses and often used a magnifying glass to read.
Joyce's view of writing - was that he would rather have just one person read his book a million times, than a million people read his novels. He wrote for that one person.
And to him art was a powerful thing, the freedom to create it - worth fighting for and devoting his life to.
Because of James Joyce's battle to distribute Ulyssess, the Comstock Act was rewritten and overthrown, and today, I can perform a production of The Vagina Monologues.
One of the early founders of Random House and the founder of the ACLU joined forces to fight the courts and the law to get the book published. And the book itself was inspired by a woman, and various woman enabled others to read it and fought to get it distributed.
I've only read the Introduction, and already I find the story inspiring. If he could publish his novels, half-blind, in pain, and with the world against and just few hardy souls fighting for it - several of which didn't even like his writing style.
Than so can I, and so can you. If there is a will there is a way.
Also, feel a bit validated for my college obsession with Joyce's novels.
Joyce, an Irish writer and a modernist, fought to get all his novels published. He came up with the idea of Ulysses after he received the first of many rejection letters for Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. And it was painful for him to write and read, since he was going blind at the time and underwent over 17 eye surgeries without the benefit of anesthetic to prevent or forestall it. He suffered from irisitis - a condition that caused his irises to dilate. He was always in pain. Wore thick glasses and often used a magnifying glass to read.
Joyce's view of writing - was that he would rather have just one person read his book a million times, than a million people read his novels. He wrote for that one person.
And to him art was a powerful thing, the freedom to create it - worth fighting for and devoting his life to.
Because of James Joyce's battle to distribute Ulyssess, the Comstock Act was rewritten and overthrown, and today, I can perform a production of The Vagina Monologues.
One of the early founders of Random House and the founder of the ACLU joined forces to fight the courts and the law to get the book published. And the book itself was inspired by a woman, and various woman enabled others to read it and fought to get it distributed.
I've only read the Introduction, and already I find the story inspiring. If he could publish his novels, half-blind, in pain, and with the world against and just few hardy souls fighting for it - several of which didn't even like his writing style.
Than so can I, and so can you. If there is a will there is a way.
Also, feel a bit validated for my college obsession with Joyce's novels.