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Jan. 22nd, 2015 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat[Did laundry down in the basement. Meet someone new every time. Although there are a few regulars. Also there's a lady who sorts out all the glass and plastic bottles from the recyclables every Thursday night. I'm guessing to return them for cash? Apartment building living is quite different than Brownstone living.]
The Most Dangerous Book: Battle over James Joyce's Ulysess - seems to be in equal parts, medical horror story, thriller, historical account of the modernist movement and censorship laws, biography, and the story of a book.
I'm amazed by the things I'm learning both about Joyce's intent behind Ulysses, and his personal life.
While he was writing the novel - which he did on the floor of his flat, in scraps of paper, in a notebook, and at times word by word - literally uncovering one a day, he was suffering intense pain from iriditis - a condition brought on by glaucoma. This is 1918. Their treatment back then was either medical - atropine (a drug taken from belladona, deadly nightshade, and proven to be effective in small doses, larger ones were considered toxic and side effects ranged from intense headaches, dizziness, fatigue, and hallucingations) or surgery which was basically slicing open the eye, extraction a portion of the iris to drain the liquid and patching it back up. The book describes the procedure in graphic detail.
Joyce avoided this procedure as long as possible and used atropine instead (it didn't work) and in large doses. Eventually he collapsed, and the doctor state they had to drain it or he'd lose the eye completely. So it was performed while he was conscious.
And doped up on atropine and cocaine. After the surgery, he had a nervous breakdown.
My god.
And his life was consumed with writing Ulysses. He talked about it incessantly. And his daughter's earliest memory of her father - is Joyce sitting on the floor surrounded by pens, pencils, crayons, scraps of different colored sheets of paper, and red slashes through them. He had it organized by sections in the Odyssey. His ambition was to write the journey of an ordinary man in search of himself, his home, his life through the space of one day. Minute by minute. Each word precise. He wanted to change the world with his book - to convey consciousness, to convey the idea of being in the body. Joyce stated that a mind without a body is not a mind. He had notes in Greek, Roman, mathematical equations, graphs, charts. Talk about driven.
And the sacrifices he made for his novel.
Then, when he finally completed it? When his friends began to publish chapters in The Little Review (Joyce's novels were first published in serial format in magazines because they couldn't do it another way) - along came the US Post Office to confiscate it. Margaret Anderson was anticipating the arrival of this literary masterpiece - on the subscribing public - and when it finally arrived, the US Post Office burned it. And here? The writer, Birmingham, launches into a history of the US Post Office and how through it the federal government increased its power. This was during the war, they had expanded powers to confiscate or burn anything that could be espionage or considered espionage. Irish writers were in particular a target, since the Irish Nationalists were siding with Germany in hopes that if Germany won the War, Britain would be forced to let Ireland form its own Republic. James Joyce wasn't interested in the War or the politics. But his book was unfortunately confiscated and destroyed simply because he was Irish. So it wasn't initially due to obscenity, although that was another reason.
Think about this for a minute. You are going blind, you suffer painful eye surgery, your family is literally eating hand-to-mouth, you finally get some benefactors to help, and you sacrifice almost everything to write this book. You kill yourself to get chapters done for publication. You've been working for three years. Then finally you release a few to be read, and the damn post office burns it? Why? Because they can and they think it is either obscene or treasonous?
Enough to make me appreciate the internet.
The Most Dangerous Book: Battle over James Joyce's Ulysess - seems to be in equal parts, medical horror story, thriller, historical account of the modernist movement and censorship laws, biography, and the story of a book.
I'm amazed by the things I'm learning both about Joyce's intent behind Ulysses, and his personal life.
While he was writing the novel - which he did on the floor of his flat, in scraps of paper, in a notebook, and at times word by word - literally uncovering one a day, he was suffering intense pain from iriditis - a condition brought on by glaucoma. This is 1918. Their treatment back then was either medical - atropine (a drug taken from belladona, deadly nightshade, and proven to be effective in small doses, larger ones were considered toxic and side effects ranged from intense headaches, dizziness, fatigue, and hallucingations) or surgery which was basically slicing open the eye, extraction a portion of the iris to drain the liquid and patching it back up. The book describes the procedure in graphic detail.
Joyce avoided this procedure as long as possible and used atropine instead (it didn't work) and in large doses. Eventually he collapsed, and the doctor state they had to drain it or he'd lose the eye completely. So it was performed while he was conscious.
And doped up on atropine and cocaine. After the surgery, he had a nervous breakdown.
My god.
And his life was consumed with writing Ulysses. He talked about it incessantly. And his daughter's earliest memory of her father - is Joyce sitting on the floor surrounded by pens, pencils, crayons, scraps of different colored sheets of paper, and red slashes through them. He had it organized by sections in the Odyssey. His ambition was to write the journey of an ordinary man in search of himself, his home, his life through the space of one day. Minute by minute. Each word precise. He wanted to change the world with his book - to convey consciousness, to convey the idea of being in the body. Joyce stated that a mind without a body is not a mind. He had notes in Greek, Roman, mathematical equations, graphs, charts. Talk about driven.
And the sacrifices he made for his novel.
Then, when he finally completed it? When his friends began to publish chapters in The Little Review (Joyce's novels were first published in serial format in magazines because they couldn't do it another way) - along came the US Post Office to confiscate it. Margaret Anderson was anticipating the arrival of this literary masterpiece - on the subscribing public - and when it finally arrived, the US Post Office burned it. And here? The writer, Birmingham, launches into a history of the US Post Office and how through it the federal government increased its power. This was during the war, they had expanded powers to confiscate or burn anything that could be espionage or considered espionage. Irish writers were in particular a target, since the Irish Nationalists were siding with Germany in hopes that if Germany won the War, Britain would be forced to let Ireland form its own Republic. James Joyce wasn't interested in the War or the politics. But his book was unfortunately confiscated and destroyed simply because he was Irish. So it wasn't initially due to obscenity, although that was another reason.
Think about this for a minute. You are going blind, you suffer painful eye surgery, your family is literally eating hand-to-mouth, you finally get some benefactors to help, and you sacrifice almost everything to write this book. You kill yourself to get chapters done for publication. You've been working for three years. Then finally you release a few to be read, and the damn post office burns it? Why? Because they can and they think it is either obscene or treasonous?
Enough to make me appreciate the internet.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-23 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-23 03:06 am (UTC)Was a little worried that I was boring everyone with my "Most Dangerous Book" posts.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-23 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-23 09:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-24 03:29 am (UTC)I found out about it - reading the New Yorker Book Editor's list of 2014 Best Books of the Year. And one of the Editors listed "The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle Over James Joyce's Ulysses" as amongst the best books of 2014. I hadn't heard of it before then.
Birmingham has definitely done his research.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-23 09:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-24 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-24 11:11 am (UTC)