Odd, half remembered things come to light when you turn out cupboards. Dublin is still a city of some quality, despite the daft "developers", the mad millionaires. And those who believe that before the Sixties all was Stygian gloom of mood, spiritual oppression and cultural despondency, might take heart in this little paradox. In the midst of the Civil War, in an issue that mourned, in a leading article in Irish, the killing of Michael Collins, there was room for a warm reception to the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses.
In the Sept 22nd, 1922 issue of the four page weekly The Separatist, tabloid size, motto clearly under the masthead "To break the connection with England
Tone.", four columns to the page, the Editor was able to give a column and a half to a review of this book with such opinions as "Ireland at present will probably not love Mr Joyce. But Mr Joyce has done her honour. No Englishman could have written this book, even if one had the wit to conceive the plan of it. Dublin is all over it, its idiom, its people, its streets, and its ways, its atmosphere, and its intellectual daring. Wilde, Shaw, Moore, Synge, Joyce! Could a country produce five artists of this calibre with certain common intellectual attitudes, if these did not really represent the mind of the country?"
Earlier, the reviewer had said: "Mr Joyce has taken the English language and has used it as it never before was used, and used it triumphantly; he has massed it and manoeuvred it as one masses men at army manoeuvres and does it successfully. He has taken the old, decorous, staid, mould of English prose, broken it up completely and remoulded it into a thing which is Continental rather than English. He has put into Ulysses not a story merely, but an epoch, the comedy and tragedy of many lives, and of the people of his own generation. I make the assertion, after reading this, that Mr Joyce loves Ireland, especially Dublin . . . not . . . in any `wrap the green flag' sense. But Ireland is all through him and in him and of him.
The water does give warning that some of it is not for the squeamish, but contends that Molly Bloom's soliloquy "seems to me to be the achievement of a master, one of the really big things in modern literature." All this in the middle of the tragedy, the shot and shell of the Civil War. The reviewer was the editor, the indomitable and entirely admirable P. S. O'Hegarty. Not a Dubliner, by the way. From Cork.