Modernists Aplenty! NYT Reviews Kevin Birmingham's Recent Book on Ulysses

There are so many reasons to get your Modernist on: the latest of which is Kevin Birmingham's most recently published, and possibly dangerous book, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses. Got a pen? Take down all the relevant data from this review at NYT:

Kevin Birmingham’s new book about the long censorship fight over James Joyce’s “Ulysses” braids eight or nine good stories into one mighty strand. It’s about women’s rights and heroic female editors, about World War I, about anarchism and modernism, about tenderness and syphilis, about how literature can bend an era’s consciousness, about moral panic and about the Lost Generation and the tent it pitched at Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore. It isolates a great love story, that of Joyce and Nora Barnacle, one that comes with a finger-burning side order of some of the most cheerfully filthy correspondence in literary history.

The best story that’s told in Mr. Birmingham’s “The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ ” however, may be that of the arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer. Mr. Birmingham, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, appears fully formed in this, his first book. The historian and the writer in him are utterly in sync. He marches through this material with authority and grace, an instinct for detail and smacking quotation and a fair amount of wit. It’s a measured yet bravura performance.

Here he is on what it was like for Harriet Shaw Weaver, an early Joyce patron from a religious family, to confront his vertiginous prose: “To read Joyce was to escape from family prayers, to climb the highest tree and to behold the disquieting panorama across the bluff and the river Weaver coursing below it.”

He nails a bedrock truth about “Ulysses,” to wit: “For all its obscurities, Joyce’s book is more sentimental than erudite, more elemental than cerebral.” Those erotic letters between Joyce and Barnacle? Mr. Birmingham correctly singles them out as “one of the secret headwaters of modern literature” before pushing further to note about them, and about Joyce: “He wanted people to read novels as carefully, as ardently and as sleeplessly as they would read dirty letters sent from abroad. It was one of modernism’s great insights. James Joyce treated readers as if they were lovers.”

Read more at NYT.