Kevin Birmingham on James Joyce's 'Dangerous Book'

The best nonfiction book I've read in months is Kevin Birmingham's "The Most Dangerous Book," a "biography of a book" that tells the story of James Joyce's influential novel "Ulysses," including the long battle to publish the book and make it widely available.Although "Ulysses" is now considered one of the classic novels in the 20th century, and almost from the beginning was considered an important book by many critics and other writers, the book's frankness about sex and bodily functions caused it run afoul of censorship in both the U.S. and Great Britain. The long novel's plot describes its characters' thoughts and actions on June 16, 1904, going into great detail. Joyce included incidents and thoughts that many other novelists at the time would have omitted because Joyce wanted to offer a more complete picture.Although Joyce was a writer who described life in greater detail than any other novelist before his time, he himself suffered from eye troubles that left him almost completely blind, a situation comparable to Beethoven's deafness. Birmingham's book describes Joyce's condition in heartbreaking detail, and offered the first definitive evidence that Joyce's eye troubles were caused by syphilis.Birmingham's book goes into detail about the long struggle between censors and the book's defenders. During the Prohibition era, some copies of "Ulysses" had to be smuggled into the U.S., as if they were bottles of bootleg liquor. The book also puts the book into perspective by describing the birth of modernism, and there are fascinating sections about the poet Ezra Pound (an early Joyce champion) and writer Ernest Hemingway, who was Joyce's drinking buddy in Paris. Many of Joyce's most important early supporters were women who also supported feminism and radical politics. Impressively, Mr. Birmingham has even suffered for his research. The biography on his official web sites notes his Harvard Ph.D. in English, and also says, "He was a bartender in a Dublin pub featured in 'Ulysses' for one day before he was unceremoniously fired."One of the questions for my interview came from James Joyce blogger PQ, who maintains a Finnegans Wake blog and a personal blog. One of PQ's most popular articles is "16 Reasons Why James Joyce is the Greatest Writer Ever."Sandusky Register: There have been many books about "Ulysses," but you managed to create a stir when you proved that James Joyce had syphilis. In general, do books about Joyce and Ulysses have too much opinion and not enough research? Kevin Birmingham: Only a small fraction of Joyce-related research is biographical, and I think this is partly due to the monumental stature of Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce. Ellmann's work can easily make people think that all of the major features of Joyce's life must have been covered. I don't think I've worked harder than other Joyce scholars. I just think I was skeptical about different things.Sandusky Register: Have you gotten any static from Ezra Pound fans over your assertion that he's famous for the wrong reasons and was a great editor but not a great poet?Kevin Birmingham: A little bit. My sense, though, is that there's a generational shift happening with Ezra Pound's legacy. I don't know many people under 40 who deeply admire his poetry, but this is just my impression--and he's a crucial figure of modernism no matter what. Part of my point is that his essays deserve much more attention.Sandusky Register: I found Ulysses very hard to read at first but eventually became fascinated with it and wanted to find out as much as I can about it. Is this a common pattern?Kevin Birmingham: This happens all the time — and it's been happening since the first chapters of "Ulysses" began to circulate. Virginia Woolf didn't like it at first but eventually recognized its importance. W. B. Yeats felt the same way before declaring it a work of genius. If you're put off by "Ulysses," you're in great company. But give it some time. Its alchemy works slowly but deeply.Sandusky Register: Robert Anton Wilson once called James Joyce a more important writer than Shakespeare. He wrote that Joyce invented the "New Yorker" story with "Dubliners," then made conventional narration obsolete with "Ulysses," replacing one point of view with multiple realities, appropriate for quantum mechanics and other ways of looking at reality that arose in the 20th century. Hyperbole, or is there something there? Kevin Birmingham: There's actually quite a bit of scholarly work done on the relationship between Joyce's writing and the emergence of quantum mechanics and relativity. So I think there's something there, though it's difficult to tell how much. I never really thought of "Dubliners" as "New Yorker" fiction, though there is a genetic lineage extending from Joyce to Hemingway (who cut his teeth on "Dubliners") to hardboiled writers like Dashiell Hammett to the spare New Yorker-style writers that emerged in the 50s and 60s. It's an important lineage, but I'd rather not pit Joyce against Shakespeare. Some questions are better left untouched.Sandusky Register: My final question comes from James Joyce blogger PQ. Who is the man in the brown macintosh in "Ulysses"?Kevin Birmingham: Oh, that's easy. It's the fox's buried grandmother in disguise.Other author interviews also are available. Kevin Birmingham