94 Years Ago

Did you celebrate Bloomsday on Thursday? Yes, yes, yes? You needn’t have read the book. In many Bloomsday celebrations, huge chunks of the book, the incomparable “Ulysses,” are read for you and to you. It’s a perfectly good way to experience the Odyssean slog without having to, you know, do the work.

And work it is and always has been. In the 1920s, it was work just to get hold of “Ulysses,” because the Post Office Department burned any copies arriving on these shores. It had been serialized in an American magazine called The Little Review starting in 1918, but the Review went on trial on obscenity charges after it published the masturbation episode, and the Postal Service burned copies of the magazine, too.

The book and its Irish author, James Joyce, had their American champions from the outset, however. One of the biggest was Joseph Collins, who reviewed “Ulysses” in The New York Times. Dr. Collins was a prominent New York neurologist, but he also wrote books and wrote about books.

He wrote this in The Times on May 28, 1922, when “Ulysses” was first published as a book (although it was banned in the United States until 1933):

“A few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend ‘Ulysses,’ James Joyce’s new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it — even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it — save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.”