Book Review entire novel (he declined the prosecu-tor’s request that he follow the so-called Hicklin rule, which allowed a factfinder to consider only those isolated passages the government deemed obscene), 7 and with his lengthy explication of the avant-garde creative task Joyce set for himself. In contrast, Martin Manton, dissenting judge in the 2-1 decision of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the district court, 8 refused to read the book, reaching his decision based solely on the complained-of passages. And Manton refused to quote even one word of the novel in his dissent. Birmingham cannot resist adding parenthetically, “A few years later, Manton would go to prison for taking bribes.” 9 Birmingham’s greatest achievement is the almost cinematic presentation that enriches his story as it marches, mean-ders, and storms its way to the titular battle for Ulysses . But even this richness is only the objective, external battle for Ulysses . Equally compelling is the subjec-tive, internal story of the struggle to actually get the novel written. For one thing, Joyce was obsessively inclusive, constantly revising (usually by adding to) his book. Few readers will suppress a smile when they read of one such addi-tion. Sensing that he needed solitude at one point, his wife took their children on a trip. During that time “he wrote alone and talked to the cat. ‘Mrkgnao!’ said the cat. He wrote it down.” 10 For those unfamiliar with Ulysses , the skeletal outline of the story is pat-terned after the course of events in Homer’s Odyssey , with lower middle class Dublin characters substituted for Homer’s mythological and demigod ros-ter, and what was for Odysseus a ten-year journey is in Ulysses condensed into one day — June 16, 1904 — a day widely known ever since as Bloomsday. (The Odyssean character in Ulysses is Leopold Bloom.) Joyce’s all-consuming focus on Ulysses exacerbated the penury that had long burdened his family; he was able to ignore such mundane concerns only through the seemingly superhuman efforts of his wife, the former Nora Barnacle. Joyce’s serious physical ail-ments were another aspect of their often grueling existence. Birmingham’s description of the eye surgeries Joyce endured will unsettle many readers. Then there were ailments actually caused by the various treatments. His utter dependence on and devotion to Nora, in this and all aspects of their relationship, is perhaps best epitomized by noting that the date on which he chose to set his modernist epic was the day of his first sexual encounter with her. Nora was Joyce’s lifeline, but the people whose determination, courage, and sacrifice ultimately made the legal-ization of Ulysses a reality are of equal note, and Birmingham gives them their stroll on the stage: Anderson and Heap, Adrienne Monnier, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Ezra Pound, John Quinn (a wealthy New York lawyer and patron of modernism), Ernest Hemingway, Barnet Braverman (enlisted by Hemingway to smuggle copies of Ulysses into the U.S. from Canada, and whom Birmingham cleverly refers to as a “booklegger”), and arguably the most essential (and most severely put-upon by Joyce) performer in this cast, Sylvia Beach. 11 Birmingham’s pronouncements on artistic freedom will chafe some readers but, agree or not, the fact that you have the freedom to decide for yourself should resonate more deeply after read-ing this book. The Ulysses case did not settle the issue of censorship decisively or finally. It was not until 1957 in Roth v. United States that the U.S. Supreme Court expressly repudiated the Hicklin rule, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was widely banned and prosecuted in the 1960s until the Supreme Court held that it was not obscene. But the Ulysses decisions changed the way issues of obscenity and censorship are treated in our legal system. Birmingham’s master-ful tale of how that change came about and, more importantly, what it came out of, is an education and an enjoyment that all readers will savor for one reason or several. You should exercise your right to read it. Endnotes: 1 Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: The Penguin Press 2014), p. 338. Hereafter, “Birmingham.” 2 Birmingham, p.13. 3 Id . at 108-109. 4 See id . at 111-113, 173. 5 The specific procedural basis for Judge Woolsey’s decision was cross-motions for what we now know as summary judgment. (This was five years before the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were adopted.) The citation is United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 5 F. Supp. 182 (SDNY 1933). 6 See id . at 308-311. 7 Under the so-called Hicklin rule, the prevailing standard in obscenity prose-cutions at the time, “federal law allowed juries to determine that a book was obscene by examining isolated passages rather than the work as a whole. Moreover, the Hicklin standard mea-sured a book’s obscenity by its most sus-ceptible audience, not by its acceptability to the community at large.” Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1994), p. 149. 8 The words “by James Joyce” were added to the caption in the appellate court. The citation is 72 F.2d 705 (2d Cir. 1934). 9 Birmingham, p. 334. 10 Birmingham, p. 100. 11 Sylvia Beach, an indispensable figure in the literary culture of the 1920s, was the owner and proprietor of a bookstore-cum-lending library in Paris that served as mailing address, gathering place and much more to numerous writers and artists. Thomas Joseph Byrne , of Yorktown, is a retired attorney who has been clerk to four judges (state and federal), an attorney in law firms in Washington, DC, and Lansing, MI, a prosecutor in both Michigan and Virginia, and the first statewide gang attorney for the Virginia Commonwealth Attorneys’ Services Council. 20 VIRGINIA LAWYER | October 2014 | Vol. 63 www.vsb.org