![]() Of his comrades’ attitude towards Joyce and ‘dirty books’, Burgess writes: ‘I have never felt inclined to condemn people who look for dirt in literature: looking for dirt, they might find something else. His commanding officer only knew of Joyce because of his ‘dirty book’. ![]() Burgess remembers reading about Joyce’s death while he was cleaning windows in the army mess hall in 1941. Specifically, the censors in America objected to the Nausicaä episode of the novel, in which masturbation and sexual fantasy are depicted.ĭespite the banning of Ulysses coming to an end in Britain in 1936, the novel maintained a reputation. The novel was banned on its publication in 1922 in both the United States and Britain because of content deemed obscene. Whatever the truth of Burgess’s first encounter with Ulysses, it is clear that the logistical difficulties in reading it formed part of the experience. In Little Wilson and Big God, he claims a teacher ‘had brought it back from illiberal Nazi Germany in the two-volume Odyssey Press edition’, while in Here Comes Everybody, his critique of the works of Joyce, he recalls his acquisition of the novel: ‘As a schoolboy I sneaked the two-volume Odyssey Press edition into England, cut up into sections and distributed all over my body’. He first read Ulysses as a school boy, though his recollections of the event are inconsistent. ![]() Reading Ulysses by James Joyce was perhaps the first time that Anthony Burgess had experienced forbidden literature.
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