Frederick Lang, the Brooklyn College English professor who has been banned from the classroom for refusing to inflate his grades, writes with some comments about the case of John Bonnell, the Macomb Community College English professor who has been repeatedly suspended for his alleged use of off-topic profanity in class. Bonnell's most recent suspension took place last summer, after a woman student complained about his explication of a passage from James Joyce's story, "The Boarding House." Lang writes:

I've been following John Bonnell's story with keen interest, partly because I identify with his plight. As you know, I have also been the victim of complaints from students to whom I was teaching Joyce.

Joyce's fiction has been complained about before, even prior to its publication. Indeed, Bonnell's experience as a teacher of Joyce recalls Joyce's own experience when he was trying to have "The Boarding House" published, along with the other Dubliners stories. In both cases, the issue was language. Grant Richards, who was to publish the book, objected to the word "bloody." Eager to have his book published, Joyce was willing to make a concession. On June 23, 1906, he wrote to Richards, "I shall delete the word 'bloodyÇ' wherever it occurs except in one passage in The Boarding House."

Richards still refused to publish Dubliners. Joyce eventually found someone who said he would, George Roberts of Maunsel and Co. But he, too, wanted Joyce to omit material, including passages from "The Boarding House." Perhaps one such passage was that containing the word "screw." Bonnell's student complained because he had said that "screw" was a reference to sexual intercourse. However, according to the OED, "screw" didn't acquire that meaning until later in the century. However, to Irish readers, "good screw" would have had a double meaning. It was slang for a high salary and also for "prostitute."

I've always regarded Polly as a "good screw" as a successful prostitute, selling sexual favors for the lifetime security of marriage. (For Bob Doran, as we learn in Ulysses--banned in America till 1933 for being "obscene"--the marriage, not surprisingly, will turn out to be miserable.)

I don't think that Bonnell's student would have been any happier with my interpretation than she was with his. She reminds me of the publishers Joyce encountered who were horrified by his use of slightly vulgar language and double entendres. Actually she is even less enlightened than they were, for she, hard as it is to believe, apparently wasn't aware until Bonnell told her that "screw" could refer to sex.

She reacted hostilely to a fact because she was offended by it; Bonnell, like a Greek messenger, was blamed for the information he gave. Whenever a complaint like hers is taken seriously by a college administration, the greater the danger that the relatively recent liberation of both mind and body Joyce helped achieve will be brought to an end.