A tall black-bearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner of Elvery’s elephant-house showed them a curved hand on his spine.
“In all his pristine beauty,” Mr. Power said. Mr. Daedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:
“The devil break the hasp of your back!”
But Stephen has a bitter quarrel with his father since his mother’s death, and anyhow finds no sympathy in him for the intellectual sophistication which is one of the chief causes of unrest. The book rises to a scream of dreadful pain when we come on Stephen drunk in Mabbot Street in company with Bloom, a bawd-mistress and several harlots, two English private soldiers, and a whole fantastic crowd of the imaginary characters of Stephen’s brain: dying away in a monstrously droned account of the trivialities of lust and obscenity to which early middle-age has brought Bloom and his wife.
It is quite right that Ulysses should be censored since its chief public in England could at the best of times be only an obscene one: and it is not an obscene book, but on the contrary perhaps the least obscene book ever published: that is why it is censored. And there is every reason why Shakespeare’s sonnets should be censored at the same time, and more strictly, because the public even blinds its eyes to the painful history that the sequence gives and makes it ‘extravagant flattery of a patron’ or an ‘academic exercise.’ Joyce is read as obscene instead of successfully past obscenity: Shakespeare instead of being read as past lust is not even read as lusting.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Obvious punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.