No text for you to puzzle through here, just a little map to help you place Mr. Bloom on his travels through this neighborhood south of the Liffey, near Trinity College and the old Westland Row train station (long since known as the Pearse Station, named after heroes of the 1916 uprising).

New readers are often surprised by the level of street detail in Ulysses, especially once they learn that Joyce wrote none of the novel in Dublin. It was all written in Europe, with Joyce’s memory (and a good number of reference books and maps) the source.  For some details, Joyce would write to friends back in Dublin for details, and especially his Aunt Josephine.

Blooms travels get a little confusing in this episode, which has a heavy, drugged, disorienting feel to it – we thought the map would help to orient you, figuratively and literally.

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[cf. Gabler 58: 1-4; 1922 68: 1-4]

…Meanwhile, back in Bloom’s world…

We’ve skipped away from the “Nestor” episode & Stephen’s classroom for a moment to check in on Leopold Bloom  in the “Lotus Eaters” episode.  In the book, these two episodes (#2 and #5 in order) are separated by two others, #3 “Proteus,” and #4 “Calypso.”  We’ve taken the liberty of combining them here because they take place at the same time of day – 10 am – and Joyce built these two chapters to show coincidences between what Bloom and Stephen are experiencing at the same time in the same city. There are other similar pairings in the book (Telemachus and Calypso take place at the same as well, for instance), but we wanted to introduce you to the characters before we started messing around with the jump cuts.  Eventually, we will make it possible for a reader to go straight through the novel in the order dictated by the printed codex, but for now, we wanted to use this format to show an alternative path.

Bloom is on the move, but we don’t yet know why.  He’s not near his house any more, though.  He thinks to himself that he “could have given that address too,” but we don’t yet know what he’s talking about.  Be patient – we’ll find out soon!

One of the things that’s interesting (if you’re a literature nerd) about these few short lines is hard to see in our comic format.  The voice that begins the chapter sounds a lot like a typical narrator’s, like the voice in “Calypso,” [“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish...”]  referring to Bloom in the third person.  But then, without any punctuation or warning, there’s a thought from Bloom’s consciousness (“could have given that address…”).  We’ve made the point before, but the quick shift of narrative perspective is typical of Joyce’s work, and it can make it difficult to figure out exactly whose voice is talking to you.

And note that the narrator says, in the very first sentence, that Bloom is walking “soberly.”  This is the “Lotus Eaters” episode, which is all about the different ways that people medicate themselves.  Bloom, like his Homeric ancestor, is sober.

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In the ‘Ithaca’ episode of Ulysses, Bloom, looking in the mirror, reviews the books stacked on two shelves. Among them is Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Stark Munro Letters which Bloom borrowed from the Capel Street Library on Whitsun Eve, Saturday 21 May 1904. The book was due back on 4 June, and is by now thirteen days overdue.

Bloom thought of the book earlier in the day, in the ‘Calypso’ episode, while discussing Paul de Kock’s book with Molly. Bloom realised he must get the book renewed or the library will write to his guarantor, Kearney (who may be the Mr Kearney from the story ‘A Mother’ in Dubliners). In ‘Eumaeus,’ as he reached into his pocket, he felt the copy of Sweets of Sin which reminds him that the book he borrowed is out of date.

The Stark Munro Letters is ostensibly a series of letters written by J Stark Munro, a young medical graduate, to a friend about his experiences in his first medical practice. The book was based on Doyle’s own experiences as a young doctor. Doyle’s The Tragedy of Korosko was in Joyce’s Trieste library.

It was also from the Capel Street Library that Miss Dunne, Blazes Boylan’s secretary, borrowed Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Miss Dunne doesn’t like it as she thinks there’s “too much mystery business in it,” and she thinks she’ll return it and get a book by Mary Cecil Hay instead. Hay (ca. 1846-1886) wrote sentimental novels with titles like Old Myddelton’s Money, Back to the Old Home, A Wicked Girl, and Nora’s Love Test.

According to his brother Stanislaus, Joyce borrowed regularly from the Capel Street Library. The librarian, ‘Old Grogan,’ was concerned about some of the books Joyce was reading, and even warned John Joyce that his son was reading Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Joyce would send his brother to the library to get books for him, and would give him a list of books he wanted in order of preference, in case his first choice was out.

On one occasion, Joyce had put Hardy’s Jude the Obscure second or third on the list, but finding it hard to make out Joyce’s scribble, Stanislaus thought it was called Jude the Obscene. He was fully prepared to demand the book out loud from Old Grogan if it came to it, but Joyce’s first choice book was available and so Stanislaus didn’t have to ask for it. Joyce thought it was hilarious when he heard of Stanislaus’ misreading. Joyce said he would have loved to have been there when Stanislaus asked Old Grogan for Jude the Obscene.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Joyce, Stanislaus: My Brother’s Keeper, edited with an Introduction by Richard Ellmann, Preface by TS Eliot, London: Faber & Faber, 1958.

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The James Joyce Centre is delighted to announce that we are now taking bookings for our Bloomsday Festival 2013 programme.

We’ve scheduled a week of of engaging and inspiring events, from staples like the traditional Bloomsday Breakfast and walking tours, to brand new theatre, live music, talks and other special events.

CLICK HERE to view all of our events. And CLICK HERE to book you tickets! You can also book tickets over the phone by calling us at +353-18788547 or by dropping into the Centre at 35 North Great George’s Street, Dublin 1.

We’ve also expanded our programme to include a comprehensive listing of many other Bloomsday events taking place across the city throughout June. You can view them on our website HERE.

We look forward to welcoming you at the James Joyce Centre this June!

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Partly because of the poor reception of his new work, Joyce proposed to Harriet Weaver that James Stephens might take over and finish work on the book. He didn’t mention this to Stephens until much later and, in the end, the proposal came to nothing.

Joyce had already written to Harriet Weaver on 12 May suggesting that he might hand over work on Part II of his book to someone else, but he concluded that letter by saying that there was no ‘waster’ wasteful enough to take on such a project. On 20 May, however, he wrote that he was considering James Stephens for the role.

Up to this point, there had been little contact between Joyce and James Stephens. At least as early as 1909, Joyce had read works by Stephens in the Sinn Féin newspaper, to which Stephens was a regular contributor. Apparently they met and went drinking together in Dublin in 1912, when Stephens told Joyce he hadn’t read a word of his. Though Stephens thought Chamber Music was pleasant, he called Dubliners ‘unpleasant,’ and after Ulysses was published he claimed that Joyce had written the same book three times and hadn’t developed at all as a writer.

Apart from what he had read in Sinn Féin, Joyce does not seem to have been familiar with Stephens’ writing. In his letter of 20 May 1927, he mentioned that he had started reading Stephens’ Deirdre the day before, but this seems to be all he has read. It is hard to say what Joyce saw in Stephens’ work that made him think Stephens would be able to do anything with Work in Progress. Joyce claimed that Stephens would not give the book the same time or effort that Joyce was giving it, but he adds that this might not be a bad thing for the book, or for him.

Joyce’s hope was that if Stephens agreed to maintain certain essential points, he would show him the basic strands so the pattern could be completed. Perhaps most of all, Joyce liked the idea of the initials ‘JJ&S’ (standing for James Joyce & Stephens, but also John Jameson & Sons, the Dublin whiskey makers) appearing under the title of the book.

At the end of May 1927 Joyce remarked on coincidences between him and Stephens, including that Stephens was born on the exact same day as him, and that Stephens’ name was made up of Joyce’s first name and the first name of Stephen Dedalus. Even so, it was some time before Joyce broached the subject with Stephens, and Stephens thought the whole thing had more to do with the coincidence of birthdays than anything else.

After discussing the idea with Stephens in July 1929, Joyce was reassured that Stephens would do everything he could. But Stephens also told Joyce that Anna Livia Plurabelle was the ‘greatest prose ever written by a man,’ and insisted that Joyce would finish the book himself. In November 1929 Joyce spent most of a week with Stephens explaining Finnegans Wake to him, after which Stephens promised to continue the work if Joyce himself could not.

Joyce sent Stephens telegrams in 1935 and 1936 wishing him many happy returns for ‘our’ birthday, but nothing more came of the idea of him completing Finnegans Wake. And it now seems that Stephens wasn’t born on 2 February 1882 after all.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Finneran, Richard J: ‘James Joyce and James Stephens: The Record of a Friendship with Unpublished Letters from Joyce to Stephens,’ in James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, Spring 1974, 279-292.

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, edited by Stuart Gilbert, London: Faber & Faber, 1957; vol. III, edited by Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

The post On this day…20 May appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

The article, ‘Home Rule Comes of Age,’ was written in Italian and published in Il Piccolo della Sera. It was the second of nine articles on Irish affairs that Joyce wrote for the Piccolo, starting from March 1907. The irredentist readership of Il Piccolo della Sera, the audience Joyce was aiming his article at, was familiar with Irish relations with Britain.

In this article, Joyce sarcastically greeted the coming of age of attempts to achieve Home Rule for Ireland. The first Home Rule Bill (the Government of Ireland Bill 1886) had been introduced by Gladstone’s government on 8 April 1886. Joyce’s article starts with a dramatic account of how Gladstone’s four-hour speech proposing the Bill was received on the streets of Dublin. Joyce himself was only four years old at the time, but doubtless his father witnessed the scenes and told Joyce about them.

After two months of debate the Bill was defeated in June by 341 votes to 311, and Gladstone’s government collapsed. Gladstone’s second attempt came in 1893 and this time the Bill was passed by the House of Commons but defeated in the Lords.

Now, twenty-one years after the first Home Rule Bill, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, had proposed the Irish Council Bill on 7 May 1907. The Bill would have given Ireland a very limited version of Home Rule, in spite of which it was initially supported by the Irish Parliamentary Party.

Looking at the history of Home Rule from this perspective, Joyce drew two conclusions. First, that it was no longer the forces of British Conservatism that were the greatest threat to Ireland. That threat Joyce saw as coming from the combined forces of Liberalism and the Catholic Church. Second, Joyce claimed that the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had supposedly pursued Ireland’s interests in Westminster for nearly thirty years, was now effectively morally bankrupt. During those thirty years, Irish taxes had increased by 88 million, and 1 million people had left the country. In the meantime, the Party’s deputies had enriched themselves.

In preparing and writing this article, Joyce made use of his reading of the Sinn Féin newspaper, edited by Arthur Griffith. Griffith, incidentally, held anti-Semitic views and published several anti-Semitic articles in Sinn Féin. He also supported the anti-Semitic campaign against Jewish businesses in Limerick in 1904.  It is interesting to note that anti-Semitic campaigns in Ireland coincided with the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893.

Birrell’s Irish Council Bill, which prompted Joyce’s article, was abandoned by the Government in June 1907 after Nationalists withdrew their support for it. A third Home Rule Bill, introduced in April 1912, was passed in May 1914 but was suspended for the duration of the First World War. After the war, the situation in Ireland had changed dramatically and had gone well beyond the terms of the Home Rule Act of 1914.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Joyce, James: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Kevin Barry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

The post On this day…19 May appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

Though Joyce had started writing Ulysses in 1914, by May 1918 he had only just completed a final draft of the ‘Hades’ episode, and the ‘Proteus’ episode had only just appeared in print in the Little Review. On 18 May, he wrote to Harriet Weaver setting out where he was with Ulysses and his plans for its publication.

The serialisation of Ulysses had been announced in the Little Review in January 1918, and ‘Telemachus’ appeared there in March. It was followed by ‘Nestor’ in April, and ‘Proteus’ in May. These episodes were also supposed to appear in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist magazine, but Weaver was having difficulty with her printers who were refusing to print Joyce’s text. Joyce suggested she could get her magazine printed in Paris by George Crès but Weaver rejected the idea.

In his letter of 18 May 1918 Joyce told Weaver that he regretted that she could not accept Crès’ offer. He said he feared that she has lost money on his book. To try to compensate for that, he offered to consider the money she had already paid for the serial rights in Ulysses as advances on royalties for the book, and offered her the book rights.

Now that three episodes had been published in America, Joyce was considering offering Ben Huebsch the possibility of publishing the ‘Telemachia’ in a cheap paperback edition under the title Ulysses I. Joyce thought this might be a way of keeping people who were interested in his writing from forgetting that he existed.

He went on to tell Weaver that the second part of the book, the ‘Odyssey,’ would have eleven episodes (in the final version there are twelve episodes), and that the final part, the ‘Nostos,’ would have three episodes. Of these seventeen episodes, Joyce had finished six, but was unable to say how much of the book was really written. He claimed that some of the other episodes were already in their second draft, but that this meant little since he had spent about 200 hours revising the second draft of ‘Proteus’ before he was satisfied with it.

Nonetheless, Joyce told Weaver that he hoped the book would be completed by the summer of 1919. In fact, it would take him two and a half years longer than that to finish the book, and much of what he had already written and published in the Little Review would be subject to a great deal of revision before it appeared in its final form in 1922.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, London: Faber & Faber, 1957.

Norburn, Roger: A James Joyce Chronology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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The reason for this was that the husband of one of Joyce’s typists was so disgusted by what he read that he burnt the manuscript his wife was typing. Joyce had already sent the original of the manuscript to Quinn and had no other manuscript of his own from which to reconstruct the burnt parts, so he had to ask Quinn to send him the missing pages.

Joyce felt that Circe herself was punishing him for what he had written, and he called it the ‘cursed’ Circe chapter. Most of the typists Joyce was using were helpful amateurs, but the results were not always helpful. In one case, the typist couldn’t bring herself to type in certain words, and so she left gaps where the words had to be filled in afterwards. Another could only type an hour or so each evening after getting a full-time job. In fact, Joyce claimed that ‘Circe’ had been typed on so many different kinds and colours of paper, and on so many different typewriters that it was a horrible thing to behold!

One typist had to give up typing the episode when her father, Dr Livisier, a famous Paris doctor, had a heart attack, and after this incident the manuscript was given to Mrs Harrison to type. At six o’clock on 8 April 1921 Mrs Harrison arrived at Joyce’s apartment in an agitated state to inform him that her husband, who worked at the British Embassy, had burnt part of the manuscript.

Apparently, she had left some pages on a table where her husband found them. After reading them, he tore them up and burnt them. Joyce told Quinn that this was followed by hysterical scenes in the house and on the street. From what she was able to tell him, Joyce couldn’t make out how much had been destroyed. Mrs Harrison told him she had hidden the rest, and she left, promising to return in an hour with everything.

As it happened, she didn’t return until the next day, leaving Joyce in suspense overnight. When she arrived with the package containing the remainder of the manuscript, Joyce realised that luckily only about six or seven pages had been destroyed. They covered the later part of the episode, from the time Bloom leaves Bella Cohen’s brothel to the beginning of the quarrel with the soldiers.

In addition to the ‘Circe’ manuscript, Joyce had also given Mrs Harrison copies of the Little Review and of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ typescript to help her in preparing the typescript of ‘Circe.’ Despite writing to her, Joyce still hadn’t got these back three weeks later, and he was trying to track her down where she worked in the hope that her husband hadn’t burnt these things too.

Since Joyce had already sent the manuscript to John Quinn in New York, he had only his notes to work from to try and reconstruct the missing pages, and so he wrote to Quinn asking him to send the relevant pages back. Perhaps fearing the curse of Circe, Quinn instead had photostats made of the pages and sent them to Joyce on 17 May.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, edited by Stuart Gilbert, London: Faber & Faber, 1957; vol. III, edited by Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

Norburn, Roger: A James Joyce Chronology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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What happens to the alternate possibilities of history once they have been superseded by events?  What would have happened if the famous “pisspot” never fell on Pyrrhus’ head, or if Julius Caesar was never killed?  And what difference does it make to this classroom of boys, who just want to hear a good ghost story or go outside to play.

Stephen doesn’t try to bring his students along for his meditiations on history, and instead pushes forward into the next lesson, which is a recitation of Milton’s “Lycidas.”  “Lycidas” was written as a memorial to a fellow student of Milton’s at Cambridge, one  Edward King, who drowned when the ship he was traveling in sank in the Irish Sea.  Edward King was born in Ireland, and was traveling back to Ireland to visit his home when he died. He was a rival of Milton’s, though they were also friends – and another candidate for Stephen’s list of disappointed possibilities.

Back in the first episode we heard about another drowned man – the one whose body Mulligan expects will appear in the harbor today .  Mulligan himself  has saved a drowning man, which Stephen sees as one of the differences between them – for all of Mulligan’s bluster and lack of loyalty, he is brave.  But without getting into an elaborate game of chase-the-symbol (just google “drowning man in Ulysses” if you do”), let’s just say that the connection between these drowned men seems to speak to how death forecloses possibilities – which is a grim thought when standing in front of a room of schoolchildren.

Note that the boys are supposed to be reciting this poem from memory – Stephen observes that the boy he calls on is cheating by looking at his book, which is hidden (poorly) behind the “breastwork” of his satchel.

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The Feis Ceoil is an annual celebration of Irish musical talent with competitions in various categories including singing. In 1903, the Feis Ceoil tenor singing competition was won by John McCormack. The prize was a year-long scholarship to study in Italy. Shortly after his return to Ireland in 1904, McCormack persuaded his friend Joyce to enter the Feis Ceoil.

In preparation, Joyce started taking lessons from Benedetto Palmieri, the best singing teacher in Dublin, but he soon switched to Vincent O’Brien who was less expensive than Palmieri. Joyce had moved into rooms at 60 Shelbourne Road where he hired a piano to rehearse for the competition. Joyce sang in a concert given by the St Brigid’s Panoramic Choir on Saturday 14 May 1904, and two days later he sang at the Feis Ceoil.

The set pieces for the singing competition in 1904 were ‘No Chastening’ by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), and ‘A Long Farewell,’ a traditional song arranged by Moffat. According to the review of the competition in the Irish Daily Independent on 17 May, “Mr. Joyce showed himself possessed of the finest quality voice of any of those competing…”

Part of the competition was to sing at sight from a previously unseen music score, and at that point Joyce simply walked off the stage. It seems that the judge, Professor Luigi Denza, had intended to give Joyce the gold medal but, when Joyce refused the sight-reading test, Denza could not place him among the medal-winners. However, at the end of the competition, the second-placed singer was disqualified and Denza awarded the third-place medal to Joyce. Joyce gave the medal to his Aunt Josephine and today it is owned by the dancer Michael Flatley.

In 1909 while Joyce was visiting Dublin he paid a visit to Charles Wilson, secretary of the Feis Ceoil, to try and promote Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer’s settings of Joyce’s poems by having singers at the Feis Ceoil sing them, but nothing seems to have come of it.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

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