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Gordon Bowker on James Joyce, Slightly Foxed Issue 42

A Blooming Miracle

I first encountered James Joyce on the banks of the Suez Canal, a bleak and unpromising setting for any meeting. In one direction lay desert, scorching and soulless, in the other the silhouettes of ships heading majestically like silent ghosts towards ports and harbours unknown. After some years of travel I was returning to England and the prospect of a life among books and sleepy dons, far removed from dismal and dangerous places.

I had acquired the newly published Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, a shrewdly chosen collection which gathered together most of the poets who can still set my pulses racing – Lawrence, Owen, Sassoon, Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice, whose poignant ‘Prayer before Birth’ and deliciously preposterous ‘Bagpipe Music’ were undoubted coups de foudre. But the most incomprehensible piece of nonsense in the anthology was a poem called ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ by ‘James Augustine Joyce’. The short profile introducing the poem was the first I ever knew of the life of this strange Irish genius.

So my discovery of Dublin’s Dante was not by the usual route, via A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners (they came shortly afterwards), but by way of this extract from the bizarre and labyrinthine Finnegans Wake, the interior monologue of the slumbering Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker of whom the mysterious Mr O’Reilly is one of several incarnations.

Back in England, waiting to start university, I was browsing in a provincial bookshop when my eye fell on ‘Ulysses by James Joyce’, which I had wrongly imagined to be banned. It was a reprint of the beautifully designed 1936 Bodley Head de luxe edition, with an olive-green cover and Eric Gill’s iconic Ulyssean bow running along the spine. And despite its reputation as

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I first encountered James Joyce on the banks of the Suez Canal, a bleak and unpromising setting for any meeting. In one direction lay desert, scorching and soulless, in the other the silhouettes of ships heading majestically like silent ghosts towards ports and harbours unknown. After some years of travel I was returning to England and the prospect of a life among books and sleepy dons, far removed from dismal and dangerous places.

I had acquired the newly published Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, a shrewdly chosen collection which gathered together most of the poets who can still set my pulses racing – Lawrence, Owen, Sassoon, Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice, whose poignant ‘Prayer before Birth’ and deliciously preposterous ‘Bagpipe Music’ were undoubted coups de foudre. But the most incomprehensible piece of nonsense in the anthology was a poem called ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ by ‘James Augustine Joyce’. The short profile introducing the poem was the first I ever knew of the life of this strange Irish genius. So my discovery of Dublin’s Dante was not by the usual route, via A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners (they came shortly afterwards), but by way of this extract from the bizarre and labyrinthine Finnegans Wake, the interior monologue of the slumbering Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker of whom the mysterious Mr O’Reilly is one of several incarnations. Back in England, waiting to start university, I was browsing in a provincial bookshop when my eye fell on ‘Ulysses by James Joyce’, which I had wrongly imagined to be banned. It was a reprint of the beautifully designed 1936 Bodley Head de luxe edition, with an olive-green cover and Eric Gill’s iconic Ulyssean bow running along the spine. And despite its reputation as an ‘indecent’ book it was unbowdlerized. I now know that Joyce refused to see it published otherwise. It cost a healthy slice of my student grant but was, I thought, a necessary extravagance for any real student of literature. I still have that copy with its marginal pencillings and endpaper notes, indicating that I must have read it more than once over the years before acquiring a paperback edition, now well-thumbed. One strange thing that quickly caught my eye was that page 7 was nothing but a list of forty-odd errata with corrections. Modern scholars claim to have found very many more. This is perhaps not surprising. Joyce was a compulsive neologist, his pages teeming with verbal conjurations, word puzzles and odd spellings which must have been a nightmare for the printers. In Finnegans Wake (see SF No. 22), an even more elaborate confection of strange coinages, Joyce and his friend Paul Léon found over 600 which the poor Faber typesetters had misread. (That was in 1940. By 2011, scholars claimed to have detected thousands of misprints.) But there are other aspects of Ulysses which can baffle the unwary reader. Joyce did not rewrite the story of the Greek hero and his adventurous return from Troy to Ithaca. This is the story of a day in the life of the distinctly unheroic Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, his cuckolding wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, a student in search of an artistic dream and a father-substitute. If there is a tenuous connection to the Greek myth in its eighteen chapters it is not immediately evident. But, on reading, some parallels do begin to emerge. Bloom is the Ulysses figure; his wife Molly is the book’s Penelope, and Stephen its Telemachus. Of course, Bloom’s perambulations are not, like Ulysses’, across perilous oceans but around the comparatively peaceful streets of Dublin during one day, 16 June 1904, now celebrated as ‘Bloomsday’. But in some fashion the plot does echo the homeward voyage of the Greek hero, with the mythical Sirens, Cyclops, Calypso, Circe and other perils and temptations represented by their equally threatening, alluring and seductive prosaic counterparts. The book opens with a comically satirical episode set on the roof of the Martello tower at Sandycove just outside Dublin. The main players are Stephen and Buck Mulligan, an irreverent poet, modelled on Joyce’s impious and manipulative friend Oliver St John Gogarty. Mulligan mocks Dedalus for having renounced his Catholic faith and refused to kneel at the bedside of his dying mother, despite her pleas. Also in the tower is an Anglo-Irishman called Haynes who has noisy nightmares and, ominously, carries a revolver, and who represents the fanatical nationalism from which Joyce wished to escape. The progress of our heroes takes us from the Martello tower to a school classroom, a seaside strand, Bloom’s kitchen, a funeral, a busy newspaper office, a restaurant, a couple of pubs, a brothel, a cabman’s shelter and, finally, to the Blooms’ bedroom where Molly is allowed to voice her sometimes lascivious dreamtime thoughts, a chapter usually referred to as the ‘Penelope’ episode. Joyce had caught and frozen the life and consciousness of the capital of British Ireland on a single day at the turn of the twentieth century, complete with British bobbies, soldiers, red pillar-boxes and a resident Viceroy. ‘I want’, he said, ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.’ It is evident from the outset that there is more to Ulysses than meets the eye. For those who enjoy literary puzzles it is a cornucopia rich with allusions – to Catholic liturgy, the Bible, Shakespeare and a whole library of other works. One chapter includes a lively debate about Hamlet’s relation to the biographical Shakespeare; in another there’s a surreal drama of sado-masochistic fantasies in a Dublin brothel which prefigures the modern Theatre of the Absurd; and in yet another a discussion about procreation conducted in a fireworks display of English literary styles from Chaucer to the popular press. This stylistic virtuosity, with which Joyce began toying in A Portrait of the Artist, often left the dullest critics baffled. A passage attempting to recapture his earliest childhood memories, couched in the style of a sentimental Victorian novel, prompted one of its more simpleminded critics to describe it as ‘scrupulously pumped out 19thcentury bilge’. But T. S. Eliot saw it for what it was – ‘marvellous parody’ from a ‘subtle, erudite, even massive’ mind. Joyce enjoyed creating obscurity, famously telling a would-be French translator of Ulysses, ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it’ll keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.’ But one is not obliged to probe for deep meanings in this or any other of Joyce’s novels in order to enjoy them. He was a fine singer and both his poetry and his prose have a musical quality, as if deliberately written to be sung. So his prose is often better listened to than read. Ulysses is also a book to dip into like a poetry anthology, just to enjoy the satire, savour the language and delight in the symphony of sound the words produce. It is the approach to his work which many of his most sympathetic early critics recommended and it remains the best advice on how to tackle the novel. Joyce was probably the first novelist to use in any sustained fashion the stream of consciousness, a prose version of the dramatic soliloquy which enabled him to enter into a character’s thoughts or switch from one consciousness to another. Occasionally, for effect, he shifts from first- to third-person narrative or to dramatic dialogue. This can take the reader from the thought-stream of the philosophical Stephen to the more prosaic mind of Bloom preoccupied with his morning ablutions, the dreams of an adolescent girl couched in the language of the cheap romance, and finally to Molly Bloom’s famous meditation. It is a merry-go-round: two men’s meandering steps around the city and one woman’s meandering thoughts around her psyche, with many Dublinesque characters dancing in and out. The book itself had an unusually adventurous career. Joyce conceived it originally as a short story while working briefly as a bank clerk in Rome in 1906. Over the next sixteen years it was written and rewritten, but it ran into trouble almost as soon as parts of it were published. Episodes were printed serially in two magazines – the Egoist, edited in London by Harriet Shaw Weaver, who became Joyce’s patron, and the Little Review, edited in New York by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson. Heap and Anderson were prosecuted and fined for publishing one extract considered obscene by the American courts, and Weaver was unable to find a printer willing to risk prosecution by setting it up in type. Ulysses was finally rescued by another intrepid woman, Sylvia Beach, whose Left Bank English-language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, was a favourite haunt of British, American and French writers in post-war Paris. Finally, on Joyce’s fortieth birthday, 2 February 1922, the first uncensored edition appeared under the Shakespeare and Company colophon. But in America it was banned until 1934 when even the climate in Britain had begun to change. A small deluxe edition was published in England in 1936 by the dashing young Allen Lane, who somehow managed to outmanoeuvre the Home Office and avoid prosecution, though it did not appear in a trade edition until December 1937. By that time Lane had left Bodley Head to launch Penguin Books, which, 23 years later, almost to the day, published the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This time the Home Office pounced and that book became the centre of a celebrated court case. Ulysses had a mixed reception. Catholic reactions were hostile; the Sporting Times declared, ‘It is enough to make a Hottentot sick’; Virginia Woolf ’s first reaction, tempered later, was ‘An illiterate, underbred book’, the work of ‘a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’; while W. B. Yeats called it ‘the work of an heroic mind’. For Joyce this was the book of his life in several ways. It incorporated real characters he knew and real events in which he had taken part. It also marked the passage of a superb creative imagination from writing lyrical verse, clever short stories and a revealing autobiographical novel to its penultimate and most sophisticated expression. Furthermore, it celebrated the day on which Joyce first walked out with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, his chief model for Molly Bloom. Joyce never returned to Ireland after writing Ulysses, fearing his reception in so devoutly Catholic a country. But, as he said, and as his friends recognized, that was the focus of his genius, especially Dublin. Returning to an Ireland no longer British but now dominated by narrow-minded nationalists and an unforgiving Church would have meant returning to a different place from the one that had inspired him. Probably no city has been so celebrated in English literature apart from Dickens’s London. But unlike Dickens’s London, Joyce’s Dublin is still largely recognizable and you can easily retrace the footsteps of the various characters and visit most of the scenes in the novels and stories. Consequently the city attracts many Joyce enthusiasts as well as those puzzled professors, especially on ‘Bloomsday’. As with many great writers there’s an industry of scholarship focusing on Joyce and shelves of books attempting to explain his fiction or exploring his life and times. But, like those of most great writers, the best books about Joyce are those he wrote himself.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 42 © Gordon Bowker 2014


About the contributor

Gordon Bowker has written biographies of Malcolm Lowry, Lawrence Durrell and George Orwell. A major biography of Joyce appeared in 1952, which some considered the last word on the author. Gordon Bowker was foolhardy enough to challenge that view with his James Joyce: A Biography (2011).

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