Next week several hundred Joyceans will gather in Dublin (Trinity and UCD) for the biannual International James Joyce symposium. It will be a great joy to be back once more in Dear Dirty Dublin in this, the centenary year of the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses — a book which, although never officially banned in Ireland, could still only be purchased with great difficulty when the first symposium took place in the capital in 1967 just months after 7 Eccles Street — fictional home to Leopold and Molly Bloom —
was demolished.
Author Hugh McFadden recalled attempting to buy Ulysses in 1962, first in Hodges Figgis, then in Fred Hanna’s, and finally at George Webb’s on the quays: “It was possible to purchase a copy there, on request, if one seemed to have reached the age of majority, provided one made the request in a suitably quiet and grave voice. It would be retrieved from a back room and furnished in a brown-paper bag, rather like a ‘carry-out’ reluctantly slipped by a ‘curate’ to a regular at the side door of McDaid’s after hours, it having been ascertained first by the tetchy ‘curate’ that the coast was clear.”
Paul Durcan recalled going off to buy it as a young fella at the Joyce Tower in Sandycove where poet Michael Hartnett was serving time as curator. He remembered Hartnett as “the Chinese-eyed curator” who “offered to share with me/A carafe of vodka left over/From a literary soirée of the night before./It was the day after Bloomsday./Monday, 17 June 1963″.
This was from the poem, Ulysses, which describes the 18-year-old Durcan taking the 46A bus to the tower following a row with his father who refused to give him 21 shillings to buy his first copy of Joyce’s great novel. His father was shocked at this “outrageous sum of money” for such a “notoriously immoral book” and vowed, “I’ll not be party to subsidising that blackguard/Bringing works of blasphemy into this house”.
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However, unlike many parents of the time, he relented and followed his son to the tower where he bought the novel from the “ever-courteous” curator who agreed to “wrap the green, satanic novel” in brown paper “which the night before had ferried bottles of vodka”. Durcan snr took the trouble to read Ulysses before passing it on to his son who admits he “found it as strange as my father/And as discordant”. It was not until four years later “When a musical friend/Gave me my first lessons/That Ulysses began to sing for me.”
‘Witchery of words’
For Durcan, as for many, Ulysses is an acquired taste and its linguistic pyrotechnics demand an unprecedented level of reader engagement. It does, however, repay our commitment in spades. As the New York Herald put it in a review printed in April 1922: “it is this compelling display of verbal virtuosity that will keep many a reader reading on and on and on, even when the sense escapes him. There is in Ulysses a witchery of words that woos.”
Back at the time of the first symposia (1967 and 1969), the visiting Joyceans were looked upon with suspicion by Dubliners (and even by Dublin Joyceans) who were dubious of foreign critical witchery and an attempt to remove Joyce from his Irish contexts. Donagh MacDonagh fretted that the “sunny Jim Joyce of Dublin has become the Yams Yoyce of international scholarship” while Mary Manning claimed that “criticism in this field is no longer criticism, it is vivisection. Only you wouldn’t do it to a dog.”
In The Irish Times, Quidnunc (Seamus Kelly) was dismissive of the first symposium which took place at the Gresham. He wrote of “Joyce posers (or symposers)”, who “were at it again hot and heavy on Thursday night”. He expressed bemusement that Joyce was attracting so many misguided literary tourists: “But an Englishman or an American cannot possibly understand it, no more than they could make sense of a family joke. The bould Jamsie Joyce was writing for Irishmen and for nobody else. I wish the Americans would learn that simple fact. They would be happier if they did.” Joyce would be “vastly annoyed if he had the gift of clairvoyance to foresee that his books would take on the veneration which is accorded to the Talmud. Joyce is now a money-spinner for Dublin hoteliers and if he revolves in his Zurich grave I shall not be very much surprised.”
I, on the contrary, would be very surprised indeed. Joyce would be delighted that his novel was at the centre of American critical attention in the 1960s and even more delighted that today Irish critics have caught up with their American and continental counterparts and that his Irish readership is growing steadily. Like all great literary works, Ulysses continues to be relevant in changing times. Published at the end of the first World War in a Europe traumatised by conflict and straight after the Spanish flu, 100 years later, its extraordinary evocation of ordinary life — of the need for justice, dignity and mutual respect — is as pressingly necessary today as it has ever been.
John McCourt is president of the International James Joyce Foundation and author of Consuming Joyce 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland (Bloomsbury)
