James Joyce scholars and the Irish tourist industry are both gearing up for 16 June, the centenary of the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, set out on his odyssey through the bars and brothels of Dublin. We can expect a deluge of new books and monographs to explain or ‘deconstruct’ Joyce’s abstruse version of the Homeric legend, told in a stream of consciousness babble of ancient and modern languages — which, as he rightly foresaw, would ‘keep the professors busy for centuries’.
The modern celebration of ‘Bloomsday’ started in the late 1940s with convivial Dublin literary men who wanted to honour a book still virtually prohibited because of its sexually explicit passages, especially the final monologue of Molly Bloom, the Penelope of the story. Soon ‘Bloomsday’ was adopted by the Irish Tourist Board, who also introduced conducted tours of Joyce’s favourite Dublin pubs and even a night-time display of passages from Ulysses picked out in pink electric lightbulbs. There was a growing movement to enshrine James Joyce as an Irish national hero, with ‘Bloomsday’ replacing St Patrick’s Day as the annual feast.
As an antidote to the academic pedants and to the patriotic blarney, I have just read James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist (Davies-Poynter, 1985) by Stan Gebler Davies, a friend and fellow contributor to this magazine during the 1970s and 1980s. Because it offended literary academia and Irish political correctness, the book disappeared from print and I obtained a copy only thanks to two friends of Stan who found it on a bookstall in County Cavan.
Stan Gebler Davies loved Joyce’s writing up to and including Ulysses, which he always said needed no glossary. But sharing Joyce’s delight in wine, women and classical music, not to mention jokes and quarrels, he also regarded his subject as a bit of a conman or ‘chancer’, who survived by sponging off his rich women admirers and by gulling the avant-garde who did not dare admit they were baffled by his later books, such as Finnegans Wake.
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