A first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses that was intercepted and impounded by the British Post Office on government orders in 1933 had a peculiar provenance.
The ground-breaking book was banned in Britain for nearly 14 years following its publication in Paris in 1922. The copy seized by the post office in 1933 was sent from Dublin to a London bookseller. The sender was Davy Byrne, proprietor of the well-known city-centre pub that still bears his name. He was also a character in the book.
Byrne was selling the book for £3-0-0 sterling, equivalent to about £280 or about €322 today. His business card bearing the pub’s address, 21 Duke Street, was enclosed with the book, along with the publisher’s errata slip and excerpts of favourable newspaper and periodical reviews. All the items are retained in the Royal Mail Archive in London.
The seized book was one of a limited first edition of 1,000 copies, published by Shakespeare and Company, some 750 of which were printed on handmade paper and numbered 251 to 1,000. It is numbered 895. (Number 955 from the same first-edition print run was offered for sale for €32,750 by De Búrca Rare Books, Dublin, this year).
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Davy Byrne was selling the book to Jacob Schwartz, a New York-born dentist turned London bookseller. Based initially at 20 Bloomsbury Street, he founded the Ulysses Bookshop on Bury Street, between Piccadilly and Pall Mall. He was nicknamed The Great Extractor by Samuel Beckett because of his earlier profession and his ability to acquire rare books and manuscripts.
He was credited by the Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann with eliciting from Joyce the comment that he expected his books “to keep the critics busy for 300 years”, among other claims. He also appears as Dr Jacob Schwartz among the acknowledgments in the first Joyce biography, published in 1939 by Herbert Gorman with help from Joyce and his brothers Stanislaus and George. Neither biography mentions the Schwartz-bound Ulysses first edition confiscated by the post office.
The British government had banned the importation of Ulysses within a year of its publication in Paris on February 2nd, 1922, Joyce’s 40th birthday. The chief legal adviser to the cabinet, Ernley Blackwell, sent a confidential letter from the Home Office in Whitehall to the postmaster general on January 10th, 1923, informing him that a copy of Ulysses “printed abroad” had been detained by a customs officer at Croydon Aerodrome “as being indecent”.
Blackwell wrote that the secretary of state at the Home Office (home secretary nowadays) had consulted the director of public prosecutions and had advised the board of customs and excise that the book was “obscene” and that “it should be forfeited under section 42 of the Customs Consolidation Act, 1876, and that any further copies that may be imported into this country should be similarly dealt with”.
As chief legal adviser to the British cabinet, Blackwell had been involved in the prosecution of Roger Casement for “high treason” after the 1916 Rising and had authorised the circulation of Casement’s notorious Black Diaries.
The British ban on Ulysses was copper-fastened in a warrant signed by the home secretary, John Gilmour, on March 27th, 1933, a few months before the US ban on publication of the book was lifted. This warrant, sent “to the Postmaster General and all others whom it may concern”, said: “I hereby authorise and require you to detain and open and produce for my inspection any postal packets which may be observed in the course of transmission through the post and which are reasonably believed to contain a copy or copies of a book entitled ‘ULYSSES’ by James Joyce: AND FOR SO DOING this shall be your sufficient Warrant”. (Emphasis in the original.)
Davy Byrne’s “Moral pub”, as Joyce calls it in Ulysses, still stands and thrives at its 1904 location, 21 Duke Street, between Grafton Street and Dawson Street, the address on Byrne’s printed business card.
About a dozen pages of Ulysses are set in the pub, which also features in Joyce’s Dubliners short story Counterparts. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom enters the pub on June 16th, 1904 for a lunchtime sandwich of Gorgonzola cheese, flavoured with mustard, and a glass of Burgundy wine.
In this “nice quiet bar” Bloom admires the craftsmanship of the countertop’s curved and planed oak while he talks intermittently to Davy Byrne and to one of the customers, Nosey Flynn. But he spends most of his time there musing about food and drink and about his wife, Molly, as she was when they first met and courted on the Hill of Howth, and about her adulterous present.
Byrne, a Wicklow man, bought the pub in 1889 and built up a clientele that included prominent politicians and writers, most notably Joyce, Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, Tom Kettle, Liam O’Flaherty, Pádraic O Conaire, FR Higgins and William Orpen, according to Vivien Igoe in her 2016 book The Real People of Joyce’s Ulysses. Byrne died in 1938 and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Bloom’s assertion in the novel that Davy Byrne “stands a drink now and then” is corroborated in one of the many witticisms attributed to Joyce’s sometime friend Oliver St John Gogarty, who is the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.
Gogarty’s biographer Ulick O’Connor has recounted how Byrne was having a drink in the Lamb Doyle pub in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains when Gogarty, who was one of his regular customers, walked in after a day’s hillwalking. Byrne hailed him, saying that he often served him from behind the counter in his own pub and offered to stand him a drink. “Yes, they also stand who only serve and wait”, was Gogarty’s instant, biblical reply, O’Connor wrote.
The Royal Mail Archive file, titled “Seditious, obscene and libellous publications sent through the post”, also contains a number of letters from people seeking permission to bypass the ban on Ulysses. In 1930 a Manchester medical doctor and justice of the peace, Mr S Herbert, sought permission to import a copy “for a special psychological study”. The Home Office told the Post Office that “in the circumstances no objection will be raised to his obtaining a copy for his private use”.
In 1932 the Home Office told the Post Office to inform a Miss V Browning of the Museum of Ipswich that a copy of the book had been detained “under Post Office regulations”. It advised: “You might add that it is an offence under Section 63 of the Post Office Act, 1908, to send indecent works through the post and that persons who do so render themselves liable to prosecution”.
An instruction was sought in 1933 for the disposal of a two-volume edition of Ulysses published by The Odyssey Press of Hamburg, Paris and Bologna. It was addressed to someone in Forest Gate, east London, and was seized “as being of an indecent nature”. (The English novelist, critic and Joycean Anthony Burgess has recalled: “As a schoolboy I sneaked the two-volume Odyssey Press edition into England, cut up into sections and distributed all over my body”.)
A Trinity College Dublin graduate, E Haigh MA, employed as director of studies on the County Borough of Eastbourne Education Committee, asked the board of customs and excise in 1933 if he might legally import the book “from a critical survey of modern writing point of view”. The customs commissioners replied that “having regard to your status as Education Secretary and to the purpose for which the book is required, they would, in the special circumstances, raise no objection to its importation”.
They added, however, that “in the case of certain postal importations, the administration of the law in regard to this class of book rests with the Postal Authorities, with whom you are advised to communicate if the volume is to be dispatched to you by post”.
An exception was also made for a Desmond McCarthy of Wellington Square, London. A Cambridge graduate, literary critic and first World War veteran, he sought permission in January 1934 to import a copy “for a series of lectures to the Royal Institute in March”. A reply on behalf of the home secretary said that “in the circumstances stated in your letter, no objection will be raised to you importing a copy of the book”. It added: “The Board of Customs and the Postmaster General have been informed accordingly.”
The British ban was not lifted until November 1936, a month after the London-based Bodley Head company had published 1,000 copies of an unabridged edition. The Post Office had failed or had declined to intercept a copy that the company’s managing editor, Allen Lane, had mailed from Paris to his London office in a registered package boldly inscribed: “This parcel contains a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce.”
The Home Office cancelled the 1933 warrant in a confidential letter to the Post Office director general on November 12th, 1936. The letter said that the home secretary had considered “whether any action should be taken in regard to the edition of this book which has recently been published in England” and had consulted the Attorney-General, “who has decided that no action should be taken”.
