Truth before beauty: how John B Yeats and James Joyce made case for Ulysses

Powerful ideas that fuelled the victory of James Joyce’s Ulysses over the law of obscenity were incubated in two Dublin debating societies. The key insight into the impetus behind the law’s effort to stifle Joyce’s prose was memorably articulated by John Butler Yeats – known as “JBY” – in a 1920 letter to the lawyer defending the publishers of an episode of the novel. The then 81-year-old father of the poet perceived that “[T]he whole movement against Joyce and his terrible veracity, naked and unashamed, has its origin in the desire of people to live comfortably, and, that they may live comfortably, to live superficially.” JBY’s insistence on the importance of self-knowledge to a life fully lived is an overwhelmingly powerful argument for the value to society of truthful writers like Joyce.

These ideas about the societal value of truth were nourished in the Law Student’s Debating Society of Dublin where, on the night of November 21st, 1865, JBY delivered the prestigious annual address of the Society’s Auditor. Instead of committing himself to the tradition of the profession that an advocate’s duty is to advance a client’s point of view, he challenged the received understanding of the purpose of legal education and debate. The purpose of the Society, he insisted, must be pursuit of “truth for its own sake”. A “restless craving for truth”, the young auditor maintained, would lead the members of the society “to desert their mimic debates and devote their faculties and energies, in real debate, to the attainment and promotion of truth”.

It is no surprise that JBY soon abandoned the law for the career as artist and writer that brought him to New York where he was befriended by John Quinn, the lawyer who would defend Joyce’s prose in 1920. In formulating the defence of Joyce he sent to Quinn, JBY conceded that “I shrink a good deal when sometimes he strips off the covering of sentiment that long convention and easy good nature have woven around women and sexual love,” but nonetheless “admire him for his courage ....” Joyce’s “sin, in the eyes of his enemies,” JBY wrote, is that his “unflinching veracity” shatters the dream that “the world is a smiling garden”.

JBY’s emphasis on Joyce’s veracity focuses on precisely the quality that Joyce himself urged as the essence of art in an address he gave to a college debating society as a student in Dublin almost 35 years after JBY gave his career-changing talk on the importance of truth to another debating society in the same city. Joyce’s talk on “Drama and Life” before the University College Dublin Literary and Historical Society on January 20th, 1900 carved out a position in opposition to what he perceived as the devotion to beauty animating WB Yeats’s Abbey Theatre. Employing the name of one of Hinduism’s heavenly worlds, Joyce declared that “Beauty is the swerga of the aesthete” but “truth has a more ascertainable and more real dominion. Our art is true to itself when it deals with ’truth’ and literature must deal with ‘life – real life’.” Sounding the note that would guide his writing – and lead him into conflict with the law – the young student proclaimed, “Life, we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, and not as we apprehend them in the world of faery”.

Fearful of being branded as a “champion of sex literature”, John Quinn ignored arguments based on the beauty and truth of Joyce’s writing. His clients were convicted of a crime for publishing what was eventually recognised as the greatest English language novel of the twentieth century. However, arguments similar to those articulated in Dublin debating societies in 1865 and 1900 eventually prevailed in the judicial decisions by federal courts in New York in 1933 and 1934 that transformed the law of obscenity and freed Joyce’s beautiful and truthful novel from the censor’s shackles. The arguments of JBY and James Joyce are more important than ever in a world in which truth is an increasingly endangered species.

[ The Ulysses Trials: Beauty and Truth Meet The Law by Joseph M Hassett is published by Liliput Press, at €25Opens in new window ]