§ When he
wrote
Calypso Joyce was struggling to find someone to
publish his new novel, just as he had with earlier fictions
.
In Britain and America, publishers and printers could be
prosecuted and sentenced to prison at hard labor for violating
obscenity laws. In his painfully protracted negotiations with
George Roberts over
Dubliners, Joyce had refused to
remove even single words as the price for getting his book into
print. The experience evidently hardened his resolve to
represent human reality as he saw it, without bowing to
conventional morality, so
Ulysses took up sexuality and
bodily functions with a vengeance. Ezra Pound, who acted as a
literary editor at Dora Marsden's magazine
The Egoist in
London and Margaret Anderson's
The Little Review in
Chicago, helped Joyce place serialized installments of his new
work in both periodicals, but he felt that Joyce was taking
unnecessary risks, both in terms of alienating his readers and
in terms of endangering his publishers.
In a 29 March 1918 letter to Joyce, Pound explained why he had
decided to excise the squirm-inducing parts of
Calypso:
"I suppose we’ll be suppressed. The Egoist printers wont set up
the stuff at all.... Section 4. has excellent things in it; but
you overdo the matter.... The contrast between Blooms interior
poetry and his outward surroundings is excellent, but it will
come up without such detailed treatment of the dropping
feces.... Perhaps an unexpurgated text of you can be printed in
a greek or bulgarian translation later. / I’m not even sure
“urine” is necessary in the opening page. The idea could be
conveyed just as definitely. / In the thing as it stands you
will lose effectiveness. The excrements will prevent people from
noticing the quality of things contrasted. / At any rate the
thing is risk enough without the full details of the morning
deposition. / If we are suppressed too often we’ll be suppressed
finally and for all, to the damn’d stoppage of all our stipends.
AND I cant have our august editress jailed, NOT at any rate for
a passage which I do not think written with utter maestria."
Thus the version of Calypso published in The
Little Review in June 1918 contains an obvious gap.
Bloom experiences a fullness and "a gentle loosening" in his
belly, decides that it is "Too much trouble to fag up the
stairs to the landing," and then goes out "into the garden,"
but his visit to an outhouse there is entirely elided. He
reads some of the story, and then suddenly he is standing in
sunlight again: "In the bright light he eyed carefully his
black trousers: the ends, the knees, the houghs of the knees."
No details of his defecation and urination are included.
When Sylvia Beach offered to publish the whole novel, Joyce
felt that he could truly "print anything now." Restoring the
censored paragraphs, he put Bloom inside the dusty old
backyard "jakes" and wove together details of him reading with
details of him relieving himself:
Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his
paper, turning its pages over on his bared knees....
Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and,
yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last
resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves
quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight
constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big
bring on piles again...
Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm
above his own rising smell....
He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling
his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had
written it and received payment of three pounds, thirteen and
six....
He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself
with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned
himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and
came forth from the gloom into the air.
These sentences are striking not only for representing the
universal human experience of using the toilet in the morning,
but also for associating evacuation with reading and writing.
Joyce would later make the linkage comically unforgettable in
the Shem the Penman chapter of
Finnegans Wake (1.7),
where the unspeakably "low" artist makes ink out of his own
feces and urine. But it is already on his mind in
Calypso as
Bloom reads his way to relief and wipes himself with Beaufoy's
writing. He seems to be suggesting that excremental matters
belong in print because the most elevated intellectual
activities take place in dialogue with the lowest corporeal
functions. This linkage may make a bit more sense today, and
defecation may have lost some of its power to shock, but the
passage is still arresting, even disturbing. Getting the novel
published by Sylvia Beach, in Paris, was not the end of Joyce's
troubles. He still faced bans, confiscations, and immolations in
the UK and the US, and more than a decade passed before an
American judge ruled that the novel is not obscene.
Thanks to John Glendening for pointing out, in a personal
communication, that "Print anything now" applies not only to
Beaufoy's writing but also to Joyce's. To my knowledge, no one
has yet remarked on this––in print, at least.
