“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing

a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

 

So begins James Joyce’s masterpiece, “Ulysses.” Boston Irish readers know that Bloomsday is the annual celebration of “Ulysses” and James Joyce's life and legacy. Joyce chose June 16 for the entire novel to honor the day in 1904 that he first stepped out in Dublin with Nora Barnacle.  Bloomsday in Dublin should really be named Bloomsweek with dozens of free and ticketed events in and around Dublin: scene reenactments, concerts, readings, films, art exhibitions, singalongs. Whether you have attempted to read “Ulysses” or not, making the pilgrimage to a Dublin Bloomsday is worth it.

I was a late bloomer when it came to actually reading “Ulysses.” I started when the Covid 19 lockdown had begun. Reading the book in Dublin, where all of the scenes take place, was an advantage. When I got stuck (a common occurrence) I could walk to the location of a particular chapter to get a sense of the place.  From the Martello Tower in Sandycove to Glasnevin cemetery, from Sweny's Chemist to Davy Byrnes on Duke Street, from the James Joyce Center on Eccles street, to Temple Bar, Dublin is a walkable wonderland for Joyce scholars, fans and newbies.

 

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.  In the particular is contained the universal,” wrote Joyce

 

During the lockdown, Dublin’s city center felt abandoned.  We were living on Dame Street at the time across from the Old City Hall.  During my solo walks around Dublin to get unstuck from Joyce’s challenging prose, I became familiar with a small fox that apparently lived on the grounds of Dublin Castle.  Furtively at first and then, as the weeks passed, with increasing boldness, he would trot from Cork Hill to College Green, scanning the urban streetscape for scraps. The fox always darted away before I could capture a picture, a fact that makes the fox’s existence unprovable. Like the fox I was searching for scraps, literary remnants of Joyce’s Dublin. 

 

“Ulysses” traces the adventures and misadventures of Leopold Bloom in and around Dublin in a structure inspired by Homer’s “Odyssey.” Bloom’s journey becomes intertwined with that of Stephan Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego, first introduced in Joyce’s first novel, “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.” Ten years after the death of his 11-day-old son Rudy, a still-mourning Bloom inadvertently becomes a surrogate father figure to Stephen.

 

The reputation of “Ulysses” as ‘challenging’ intimidates many, including me. All 18 of the chapters are written in different literary styles and have unique colors and themes associated with them. The book contains more than 30 thousand unique words compared to twenty thousand for “Moby Dick” or four thousand for “The Great Gatsby.”  In our age of Google, it is easy to look up vocabulary, expressions, events, place names, or obscure references. I learned that O’Connell Street was Sackville Street up until 1924.  The character Buck Mulligan is based on the real- life Oliver St. John Gogarty, a frenemy and one-time roommate of Joyce in the Martello Tower in Sandycove, the location of the opening scene in “Ulysses.” Gogarty had a fascinating life as a poet, doctor, rebel, senator, and immigrant to the United States.  There are countless “research rabbit holes” that you can explore while reading “Ulysses,” called “The book about everything,” but it is not necessary to research everything; part of the experience is letting the language wash over you. For those who have tried to read the book but abandoned it, try again!  If I can read it, anyone can.   

 

Historical and Biographical Context 

 

Jim left Ireland 1902 for Paris to study medicine (a course of study he quickly abandoned) driven by the desire to escape the shackles of the twin tyrannies of Irish life:  the British Empire and the Catholic Church. He blamed the Church for his mother’s misery of constant pregnancies. In 1903 he was summoned back from the continent to his mother’s deathbed.  She begged her first born son to pray for her but having left the faith, Joyce’s integrity would not allow him to do it. For the rest of his life Joyce felt guilt but not regret for not acceding to his mother’s dying wish. Joyce’s complex relationship with the Church is expressed when Stephen Dedalus is asked why he does not become a Protestant. He replies:

 

“I said I lost the faith not that I had lost self respect.”

 

Joyce lingered in Dublin after his mother’s death long enough to meet Nora Barnacle in 1904 on Nassau Street near Finn’s Hotel where she worked as a chambermaid. After a brief courtship, Nora and Jim sailed to Europe in 1904.  After a stop in Paris they moved to Pola and then Trieste, a cosmopolitan multilingual city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Gifted with languages, Jim found work as a tutor with Berlitz to generate some income to support his literary ambitions and his growing family. His early poems were praised by Ezra Pound. Some critical (though not financial, it must be noted) success with “Dubliners” and “Portrait of an Artist” gave him the confidence to start writing “Ulysses” in earnest in 1914 just as the world was blundering into the disaster of  World War I. Joyce moved his family to Zurich in 1915 guessing that neutral Switzerland would be a safer location for a pacifist to sit out the war. 

While Joyce wrote “Ulysses,” the greatest bloodletting in history as well as Ireland’s convulsions of becoming an independent state (the Easter Rising, revolution, partition and civil war) occurred. He addresses none of this head-on but some lines from “Ulysses” suggest he was ruminating about then- current events:

 

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

•••

“Countries have the governments they deserve.”

•••

“The world would be better off if it were governed by the women in it.

‘Force, hatred, history, all that,’ says Bloom: ‘That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life. Love.’”

 

The Joyce family was in a perpetual state of indebtedness, kept barely afloat by a wealthy British sponsor and Jim’s dutiful younger brother Stanislaus, who had moved to Trieste to help his financially struggling brother. Even so, Jim found the money or credit to attend the opera frequently and to carouse with his literary friends. 

After the war Joyce was lured back to Paris by Ezra Pound and finally finished the book there in 1921 after 7 years labor. Excerpts of chapters were published serially in the US and Britain but full publication was suppressed as the book was deemed obscene by censors. The two women who published excerpted chapters in New York were imprisoned.

Joyce fell in with a Parisian literary crowd that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Austin Clarke, and other members of the ‘lost generation’ who spent hours writing, reading, drinking, arguing, and engaging in all manner of bohemian shenanigans. Joyce and his cadre of literary rebels were deconstructing language in a similar way that Picasso and his Cubist acolytes were deconstructing painting.

They gathered at Shakespeare and Company, a lending library/ bookstore/ flophouse for starving writers and artists who had come to Paris after the war, attracted by low rents and (for Americans) by the lack of Prohibition.  The founder of Shakespeare and Company was Sylvia Beach, an American lesbian daughter of a Princeton Presbyterian Minister who had moved to Paris to study French literature during the war.  

Beach met Joyce at a poetry reading soon after the Joyces’ arrival from Zurich.  He lamented that his ‘booook’s’ publication was being suppressed. Beach offered to publish “Ulysses” in her bookstore at considerable financial risk to herself.  Published on Joyce’s 40th birthday, the book was met with both acclaim and condemnation. It was banned in England until 1936 and in the United States until 1933. Denounced in Ireland by the Catholic Church, the Irish Free State did not even bother to ban it. Very few Irish people of Joyce's own generation read it. Perhaps in part because of the ban, the book gained an edgy caché and became widely read with pirated copies and later when the bans were lifted. Joyce died in 1941 when he was back in Zurich escaping another world war.

 

Bloomsday Begins

 

Bloomsday was first celebrated in 1954 when Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, Anthony Cronin, Tom Joyce (a cousin of James Joyce), and others visited the Martello Tower at Sandycove and Davy Byrnes on Duke Street.  On the first Bloomsday, overindulgence by participants meant that it did not progress further than Davy Byrnes, but the tradition was begun.

Today, the number and geographic spread of Bloomsday events make it impossible to attend all of them.  You will just need to pick a few and surrender to the winds of fate.  You will encounter clutches of smiling people in period dress, bow ties, walking sticks, straw hats and monocles.  If you enjoy a drink you will have ample opportunity to fortify yourself with pints (or Joyce’s preferred tipple, absinthe) well before noon. Serendipity will play a role in your path across Dublin. The friendly couple from Seattle whom you met at Glasnevin cemetery in the morning for the reenactment of the ‘Hades’ chapter might reappear hours later at a reading of a new novel on Nora Barnacle at the Alliance Francaise on Dawson Street. 

Like long-lost friends you might adjourn to Davy Bynes for a sing along with straw-hatted Joyceans, including a friend from Chicago whom you met last year and who has lived in Dublin for 25 years. You might then fall in with a crew of Trinity professors on their way to the Molly Bloom Soliloquy. It's all part of a continuum that mimics the stream of consciousness of Joyce’s prose. 

See bloomsdayfestivale.ie/

To complete your Bloomsday, the Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the final chapter of  “Ulysses,” – ‘Penelope’ – is a must see.  The finale takes place in Meeting House Square in the heart of Temple Bar where you can hear the last affirming words:

 

 “yes I said yes I will Yes” – Molly Bloom

 

The only logical conclusion to your day is to enjoy one last pint across Eustace Street at the Norseman Pub, the oldest pub in the neighborhood. Its beautiful windows are described by Joyce in “Dubliners.”  While you are there, you can buy a copy of a new novel, “Temple Barred,” written by stalwart, multi-decade-tenured bartender and Dublin’s newest novelist, William Monks.  If you are lucky, Bill might even sign a copy for you!  My review of Bill’s novel appears separately in this edition of Boston Irish.

 

Art and Fun in Times of Strife

 

Joyce stayed focused on writing his novel even as the world order collapsed. In our own time, intergenerational alliances, the rule of law, and systems of trade and diplomacy are being destroyed or threatened.  A Tufts student was abducted without charge by ICE, US residents and citizens have been sent to detention centers or to a gulag in El Salvador.  A judge was arrested. USAID and the Department of Education have been largely dismantled by an unelected billionaire. Universities, law, and the media are under attack by our own government. And genocide is being brazenly and cruelly conducted in plain sight and funded by the US.  

In this context, one might reasonably ask if a ramble around Dublin with an improvised gang of slightly boozy literary nerds in straw hats is an acceptable indulgence. Fair question, but maybe we need to make a bit of room for escapes (with Bloomsday, a Red Sox game, a concert, whatever) from the outrages of our world and return to them with different perspectives and renewed purpose.

 

Happy Bloomsday!