The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in 1934. The U.S. thus became the first English-speaking country where the book was freely available. Although Ireland’s Censorship of Publications Board never banned Ulysses, a customs loophole prevented it from being allowed into Ireland. It was first openly available in Ireland in the 1960s.
Critical reception
In 1922, Ezra Pound wrote, “All men should ‘Unite to give praise to Ulysses’; those who will not, may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders.” He claimed that in writing Ulysses, “this super-novel”, Joyce surpassed Gustave Flaubert, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry James, and Marcel Proust, concluding that, besides François Rabelais, he “can think of no other prose writer whose proportional status in pan-literature is not modified by the advent of Ulysses”.
In a 1922 review in The Outlook, the British novelist Arnold Bennett expressed his lack of admiration for Joyce detailing one day in 700 pages. He wrote, “Given sufficient time, paper, childish caprice, and obstinacy, one might easily write over seven thousand pages about twenty hours of life.”
Bennett also opposed Valery Larbaud’s view that Joyce elaborately planned and organized the day he wrote about. He wrote that Joyce “apparently thinks there is something truly artistic and high minded in playing the lout to the innocent and defenseless reader. As a fact, there isn’t … After all, to comprehend Ulysses is not among the recognized learned professions, and nobody should give his entire existence to the job.” Bennett acknowledged that Joyce’s “verbal method can be justified” since he is “trying to reproduce the thoughts of personage”, but called the details “trivial and perfectly futile in the narrative”.
In April 1922, writing in The Nation and Athenaeum, English writer John Middleton Murry called Joyce “a genius of the very highest order, strictly comparable to Goethe or Dostoevsky…Ulysses is, fundamentally (though it is much else besides), an immense, a prodigious self-laceration, the tearing away from himself, by a half-demented man of genius, of inhibitions and limitations which have grown to be flesh of his flesh…Mr. Joyce has made the superhuman effort to empty the whole of his consciousness into it…[But he has become] the victim of his own anarchy….[Joyce] is the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky…This transcendental buffoonery, this sudden uprush of the vis comica into a world where in the tragic incompatibility of the practical and the instinctive is embodied, is a very great achievement.”
The next month, in the Sunday Express, newspaper editor James Douglas called Ulysses “the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature. … All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ—blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.”
In a 1922 review in The New Republic, literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote, “Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie … in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama.
Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy. Since I have read it, the texture of other novelists seems intolerably loose and careless; when I come suddenly unawares upon a page that I have written myself I quake like a guilty thing surprised. … Who else has had the supreme devotion and accomplished the definitive beauty? If he has really laid down his pen never to take it up again he must know that the hand which laid it down upon the great affirmative of Mrs. Bloom, though it never write another word, is already the hand of a master.”
In a 1922 review in The New York Times, Joseph Collins wrote, “Ulysses is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century. … It is likely that there is no one writing English today that could parallel Mr. Joyce’s feat, and it is also likely that few would care to do it were they capable. …
When a master technician of words and phrases sets himself the task of revealing the product of the unconscious mind of a moral monster, a pervert and an invert, an apostate to his race and his religion, the simulacrum of a man who has neither cultural background nor personal self-respect, who can neither be taught by experience nor lessoned by example, as Mr. Joyce has done in drawing the picture of Leopold Bloom, and giving a faithful reproduction of his thoughts, purposeful, vagrant and obsessive, he undoubtedly knew full well what he was undertaking, and how unacceptable the vile contents of that unconscious mind would be to ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and how incensed they would be at having the disgusting product thrown in their faces.
But that has nothing to do with that with which I am here concerned, viz., has the job been done well and is it a work of art, to which there can be only an affirmative answer.”
In 1922, the writer and Irish nationalist Shane Leslie called Ulysses “literary Bolshevism … experimental, anti-conventional, anti-Christian, chaotic, totally unmoral”. In the same year, Sisley Huddleston wrote in The Observer: “I confess that I cannot see how the work upon which Mr Joyce spent seven strenuous years, years of wrestling and of agony, can ever be given to the public. …
This is undoubtedly an obscene book; but that, says Mr Joyce, is not his fault. If the thoughts of men and women are such as may be properly described as obscene then how can you show what life is unless you put in the obscenity.” Molly Bloom’s monologue, Leslie wrote, is “the vilest chapter according to ordinary standards, in all literature. And yet its very obscenity is somehow beautiful and wrings the soul to pity. Is that not high art?
I cannot, however, believe that sex plays such a preponderant part in life as Mr Joyce represents. He may aim at putting everything in, but he has, of course, like everybody else, selected carefully what he puts in. Has he not exaggerated the vulgarity and magnified the madness of mankind and the mysterious materiality of the universe?”
In a 1923 review, Virginia Woolf wrote, “Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster.” In The Dial the same year, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” He added that Joyce was not at fault if people after him did not understand it: “The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs.”
In his 1930 book-length study of the novel, Stuart Gilbert said that the “personages of Ulysses are not fictitious” but that “these people are as they must be; they act, we see, according to some lex eterna, an ineluctable condition of their very existence”. Through these characters Joyce “achieves a coherent and integral interpretation of life”.
In Axel’s Castle (1931), Edmund Wilson noted that Ulysses attempts to render “as precisely and as directly as it is possible in words to do, what our participation in life is like—or rather, what it seems to us like as from moment to moment we live”.
Addressing the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, the writer and communist revolutionary Karl Radek called Ulysses “a heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema camera through a microscope”. Writing in America magazine that year, Francis X. Talbot vehemently decried Judge Woolsey’s recent decision that Ulysses was not obscene, adding, “Only a person who had been a Catholic, only one with an incurably diseased mind, could be so diabolically venomous toward God, toward the Blessed Sacrament, toward the Virgin Mary.”
In Irish Literary Portraits (1935), John Eglinton characterized Ulysses as an act of revenge: “I am convinced that the only person concerned in the narrative who comes out as a real hero is the author himself. What kind of hero after all is brought to mind by the name Ulysses if not a hero long absent from his kingdom, returning, after being the sport of the gods for ten years, in triumph and vengeance?
And it was after nearly as many years of absence as Ulysses from the country ‘which belonged to him’ that Joyce turned up again for us in Dublin, with a vengeance! … Endued … with the elemental diabolism of Ulysses, he was transfigured.
A thousand unexpected faculties and gay devices were liberated in his soul. The discovery of a new method in literary art, in which the pen is no longer the slave of logic and rhetoric, made of this Berlitz School teacher a kind of public danger, threatening to the corporate existence of ‘literature’ as established in the minds and affections of the older generation. …
Our Romano-Celtic Joyce nurses an ironic detachment from the whole of the English tradition. Indeed, he is its enemy. … It must have seemed to him that he held English, his
