One Hundred Years of James Joyce's 'Ulysses'

"One Hundred Years of James Joyce's 'Ulysses'

Edited by Colm Toibin

(Penn State/Morgan Library, 167 pages, $45)

'Ulysses," published a century ago, has two, coexisting reputations: one for being difficult to read, on account of its modernist techniques; another, at first glance contradictory, for its exposure and celebration of ordinary life on a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904. Anthony Burgess called his first study of Joyce "Here Comes Everybody," which may be read as an allusion to (among other things) the novel's perambulating anti-hero, Leopold Bloom, a lonely walker in the city. Bloom is a Dubliner, a Jew, a husband and father, a racehorse-fancier, a cuckold -- an Everyman, though not the kind that every man would wish to be.

In similar vein, "Ulysses" is open to every interpretation. Say anything you like about it and you'll find agreement from somebody. In the authoritative overview of the novel with which he introduces "One Hundred Years of James Joyce's Ulysses" -- published to accompany an exhibition of the same name now at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York -- Colm Toibin quotes the English critic Terry Eagleton, who claims that Joyce's novel inscribes Dublin "on the cosmopolitan map." But, says Mr. Eagleton, "Ulysses" also suggests "with its every breath just how easily it could have done the same for Bradford or the Bronx."

Who would argue with that? Mr. Toibin, for one. And a number of the authors in this collection of 10 illustrated essays and one interview (with the Joyce collector and donor Sean Kelly). Anne Fogarty tells us that "Ulysses is inextricably, umbilically linked to Dublin." In her persuasive anatomy of Bloom's odyssey, and the research materials Joyce drew on to shape it, she shows how the events of what is now called Bloomsday are placed with deliberateness of purpose on the streets and in the pubs and newspaper offices of the Irish capital. Setting "Ulysses" in Dublin was tantamount to a political act. The gestation of the novel fits into the drawn-out struggle for Irish Home Rule (for which 1922 is, coincidentally, an important date).

Next in line is John McCourt, who picks up the "Everycity" theme again. He asserts that while there is but a single mention in the novel of Trieste, one of Joyce's many adopted homes, we "should not be fooled: the city and its variegated cultures are present in the very sinews of the book." Joyce himself believed that, via Dublin, he could "get to the heart of all the cities of the world." Including Trieste, and maybe even Bradford or the Bronx.

Many people have been fooled by "Ulysses," or acted as fools in the face of it: claiming to have read it when they haven't; racing through its complex structure to reach Molly Bloom's soliloquy in search of titillation: "yes I said yes I will Yes"; calling it the most important novel in the English language, when it could plausibly be declared a literary dead end. Foolish legal authorities in Britain and America tried to suppress it, thereby enlarging its appeal.

Joyce himself was apt to play the holy fool, a near-blind wanderer across Europe. The final words of "Ulysses" are not, in fact, Molly's triple Yes but "Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921," recording the time span and locations of its composition. Joyce had half a dozen languages on his tongue but scarcely a cent in any currency in his pocket. Stanislaus Joyce wrote that his brother had "failed as a poet in Paris, as a journalist in Dublin, as a lover and novelist in Trieste, as a bank clerk in Rome." It took nine obstinate years of accumulating rejections to get his first book of prose fiction, "Dubliners," into print. The eventual publisher in 1914 was Grant Richards, who had first accepted it in 1905, only to be forced to ditch the plan because of objections by fastidious printers.

Yet failure may be suffered in style. Hemingway and others in Paris noted Joyce's taste for expensive restaurants. The French translator of his first novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," vacated her apartment so that the author and his family could move in. The cities where Joyce wrote "Ulysses" are all treated in this book. Also honored are the various Americans who made life, work and fame possible. First, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who serialized early portions of his scandalous book. Then Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare and Company, who published him. Equally important is John M. Woolsey, the U.S. district judge who in 1933 declared "Ulysses" not obscene, hence fit to be placed on sale in America. While the book contained many "dirty words," none of it was dirt for dirt's sake, he said. Publication in Britain, where the authorities once came close to arresting F.R. Leavis for recommending "Ulysses" to Cambridge students, soon followed.

Innovative works of literature are customarily slow to gain recognition. I was interested to learn from Catherine Flynn's essay on Joyce in Paris that Andre Gide described "Ulysses" as "a sham masterpiece." It seems a bit unfair of Ms. Flynn to trot out yet again Virginia Woolf's snobbish first impressions -- "the book of a self-taught working man . . . ultimately nauseating" -- when she refined her view (under T.S. Eliot's influence) shortly afterward. In 1920 Woolf conceded that "what I'm doing is probably being better done by Mr. Joyce." Leonard Woolf tried to find a publisher for the apparently unpublishable novel, the couple having recognized that their own Hogarth Press wasn't up to it.

The task fell to Miss Beach. In her charming memoir, she recalled first meeting the author at a lunch party. Trembling, she asked: "Is this the great James Joyce?" They shook hands -- "that is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw." She gave Joyce "everything I can spare," including, eventually, all the publishing rights to his novel, from which she could have made a fortune for her bookshop, the only thing she cared for more than she did "Ulysses."

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Mr. Campbell's memoir, "Just Go Down to the Road," was published last month." [1]

1. 'A Sham Masterpiece'?
Campbell, James. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 16 June 2022: A.15.