He was too sick, with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, to take part this year. He died a few days after the reading.
When June 16 arrived this year, he was in the hospital. He insisted that the Bloomsday reading at the Cliff Dwellers Club downtown go on without him. His friends sent him a videotape.
Two days later, he lost consciousness, but not before he videotaped a reply, mustering a smile and the words “Thank you.”
Various writers attempt, each year, to answer the question.
… “St. Joyce has replaced St. Patrick in the new, post-Catholic Ireland,” the columnist and critic Fintan O’Toole once quipped to me.
That doesn’t explain the many who will gather in American cities to observe Bloomsday. There will be dramatic readings, broadcast on the Web, in various theaters up and down New York’s Broadway and special commemorations at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library, where the autographed manuscript copy of “Ulysses” is housed. Many will listen to the readings and lectures because they’ve never read the apotheosis of high modernism. In fact, the book may grow more inaccessible each year, since most young readers lack the grounding in the classics that Joyce took for granted in his future audience.
Declan Kiberd, the most original of contemporary commentators on Joyce, speculates that the enduring appeal of “Ulysses” rests in the author’s egalitarian impulse that transformed the ordinary into the epic; that ended in quiet fellowship between the petty bourgeoisie Bloom and the poet, Stephen Dedalus; with Molly’s deathlessly erotic monologue and the realization that she loves Leopold still…
Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.
My book was closed;
I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
On the floor.
I have left my book,
I have left my room
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom,
Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair.
Barrett changes the words in the first stanza a little:
Lean out your window
Golden-hair
I heard you singing
In the midnight air.
Barrett makes of this poem (which, in its pull toward the passion of art and away from the chill anxiety of intellect, has much in common with the Yeats poem about Fergus that echoes through Ulysses) a very private chant. His notes go nowhere; he ventures only one or two changes. His song is musing, minimalist, hesitant, circular, self-absorbed, even though the poem’s content is clearly celebratory, the speaker energized by the fire of the woman’s singing to throw away his book, leave his room, and beg her to lean from her window, so he can see her.
Barrett isn’t going to the woman. He isn’t going anywhere. He even brings his voice down, decisively, in the last line, as if to close out any possibility of release from his trance.
**************************
With Bloomsday coming up, UD ponders not only the generativity of art, the way Joyce’s work sings through the work of Syd Barrett, Samuel Barber, Kate Bush, John Cage, Jefferson Airplane, and many others (to note only his musical influence), but also the suffering of the artist, the suffering out of which art emerges. Stephen Dedalus, on June 16, 1904, is going the way of Barrett, after all, drinking himself to an early grave if he doesn’t watch out… Like Barrett, he’s acting outrageously, self-destructively, getting into fights…
And certainly part of what our hero Bloom attempts to convey to Stephen is how deadly intellect, understood as a kind of arrogant self-absorption, can be to the creation of art. Art’s passion is a human passion, and Dedalus isn’t human enough yet. Hasn’t loved. Holds himself aloof from humanity. Bloom humanizes Stephen by embodying for him the capacity for selfless love. Bloom barely knows Stephen, but intuits, as a compassionate and perceptive human being, the depth of his suffering. He follows him around late at night in Dublin, worried that Stephen will get into trouble.
Stephen duly gets into trouble, and Bloom gets him out of it, takes him to his home, gives him hot chocolate, talks to him late into the night, escorts him out of the house (Stephen politely declines Bloom’s invitation to stay the night), and watches with him, from the yard, the quiet spectacular starry sky. This night sky watching produces one of the most famous lines from Ulysses:
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
The line incorporates much of what one loves in Joyce’s prose: Neologisms (Nightblue is a kind of partner to skyblue; and, no, night isn’t black, or it’s not always black. Night and day aren’t always all that different; in Key West, I was amazed at how white clouds appeared in the sky late into the evening…Heaventree is heavenly. We might also hear lemontree. ). Assonance (humid nightblue fruit). Metaphor (The constellations make trees; each star is a fruit on the tree). Alliteration (heaventree, hung, humid.)
More deeply, there’s something exhilarating about the implicit humanizing, naturalizing, worlding, call it what you will, of the entire universe in this sentence. The distant, enigmatic, intimidating stars which make us feel small and transient are in this sentence gathered into our earth, made an extension of our trees and forest, our earthly garden. There’s a sort of heady insolence about this Romantic gesture, this pulling of the heavens down to earth, this re-sizing of the cosmos to fit us. This is Walt Whitman, claiming the universe, embracing all in his human arms.
More than anything, perhaps, we love the way this famous line seems ineffably balanced, as the stars seem balanced on the heaventree; somehow in the very composition of the sentence, in its smooth stately self-control, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.
But of course this is the power of the artist, the power of art, that we’re registering. To be lifted up by a perfect phrase or sentence is to hear the piper in the Cambridge garden and follow him. It is to hear the woman singing through the gloom and follow her.
Barrett and Dedalus — and Bucky Wunderlick, the rock star in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street (a character in part inspired by Barrett) — these people, these fictions, draw our attention not so much to our own experience of aesthetic rapture, as to the cost to the artist of aesthetic creation.
This year, she’s reading parts of the Sirens chapter from Ulysses — the one that begins with hoofirons and ends with farts.
The reading is open to the public and jointly sponsored by the Harvard Club of Washington and American Independent Writers. Details here.
Sirens is the most musical chapter of the novel — and the novel is full of music. Little bits of two songs are featured in UD‘s reading. The songs are:
… UD, as always, treats you to a series of posts about James Joyce and his novel, Ulysses.
Here’s something from an article in Thursday’s Guardian:
If you’re going to read any of Ulysses then it might as well be the racy bits at the end. And so it was with a fabulously rare first edition of the James Joyce novel which today sold for £275,000, the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition.
The astonishingly well-preserved and previously lost edition of the book, bought surreptitiously in a Manhattan bookshop despite it being banned in the US, was sold to a private buyer in London on the opening day of one of the world’s biggest antiquarian book fairs.
… The more salacious bits are in the last episode, where Molly Bloom’s long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy ends in her orgasmic “yes I said yes I will Yes”.
This first edition is unopened – apart from that last episode. The copy is number 45 of the first 100 and is printed on fine Dutch handmade paper.
The dealer who made the sale, Pom Harrington, said the book was one of only four copies of that first edition print run, all signed by Joyce, which had been unaccounted for. “In terms of collectability, Ulysses is considered to be the number one 20th-century book. This is such a find and it is in such fabulous, pristine condition.”
Throughout the 1920s the book was banned in the UK and the US and any import or sale involved a degree of subterfuge.
This copy was sold at the subversive Manhattan bookshop Sunwise Turn, an eclectic shop where patrons could also pick up Peruvian fabrics or the mystic teachings of Gurdjieff. It was bought by a Mrs Hewitt Morgan and then passed down the family, stored in its original box, unopened and away from the light.
“The colour is amazing – this lovely Aegean Sea, Greek flag blue which would normally have darkened into a more dirty blue but because it has been in a box it is a complete thing of beauty,” said Harrington….
Here’s a bit from the racy, salacious, orgasmic section. We’re inside the head of Molly Bloom, an attractive Irish woman in her thirties who’s in bed at night, lying beside her sleeping husband. She’s had rough sex a few hours earlier with one of her lovers, her singing partner — she’s a performer — Blazes Boylan, and she’s thinking back to that.
yes when I lit the lamp yes because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure
Ulysses is notorious for its difficulty, but really, how – er – hard is this? No punctuation, true, but Joyce is capturing the endless stream of her half-asleep consciousness as she drifts off, so punctuation wouldn’t be realistic. As you read, though, ain’t it pretty clear where the periods, commas, and question marks go? Let’s paraphrase, with punctuation.
When I lit the lamp I was amazed to realize that he must have had three or four orgasms with me. What an enormous penis he has! Erect, it was so enormous I thought it would explode. Since I believe the size of men’s noses indicates the size of their penises, I’m surprised his nose is so small.
I’d gone to a lot of trouble to perfume and dress myself for him, but he just threw me down and did me.
And really – his penis was so hard and big. Like iron, like a crowbar. He must have eaten a dozen oysters — oyster being an aphrodisiac — to get that sexually aroused.
He sang during some of this. And he sang well.
But back to his penis. It was so big it totally filled me up. Afterwards, he must have eaten a whole sheep.
As for my anatomy: Why did God make women with a big hole in the middle of them? Men are so determined to get in there and drive it up in you – they’re like horses panting away. It’s quite bestial, not human at all, and the vicious look in his eyes as he was at it so disconcerted me that I half-shut mine.
Considering how big his penis is, he doesn’t produce that much come. Which is just as well, since I don’t want to get pregnant.
It’s quite annoying to me that men get all the pleasure.
… gets an up close and personal look in today’s Forbes, which proclaims it Scam Capital of America.
Prominent among its scams: Diploma mills.
There’s the diploma mill that sold 10,000 phony college degrees to buyers in 131 countries… The Internet diploma mill was run by Dixie and Steven Randock, both now serving three-year sentences. Degrees included those purportedly from Harvard University. The ringleaders’ partners in crime were, of course, their customers. One was a Spokane deputy federal marshal seeking a promotion who knew what he was getting–and got convicted for it.
When UD visited it, she thought of the much more famous Martello Tower on the Irish coast, the tower in which James Joyce briefly lived. He made it the setting of the opening scene of Ulysses.
The last time UD was in Ireland, she stood on top of the tower and looked out over the snotgreen sea.
In Key West, she stood below the tower, looking at Florida’s sky-blue sea. She chatted with one of the gardeners at the Key West Garden Club about how most of the planting around the tower was only a few years old. “Last hurricane really wiped us out. Only the biggest palms survived.”
But even as she spoke with the gardener, UD thought of Stephen Dedalus waking up in his tower to begin his journey through one day and one night. She heard Buck Mulligan sayThe aunt thinks you killed your mother. She heard Dedalus say Someone killed her.
UD‘s head it simply swirls with that novel, and she’s not alone. Every year hordes of people all over the world honor Ulysses on Bloomsday, June 16, the day the story takes place.
Yesterday was Bloomsday, an event UD has in the past celebrated in very high style (see her posts about it); but this covid year has meant a much quieter commemoration. As in, she stood for around five minutes late last night in her new garden (dedicated to Mr UD‘s sister, whose willingness to buy our share of our country house freed up funds for the project)
and thanked whatever gods there be for James Joyce, forUlysses, for the late night scene in Bloom’s garden when two damaged sensitive men pee together.
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.
I have said that the mad, sad world should never settle us into despondency; but, you know, easy to say that when you’ve been blessed by – those same gods? – with a silly, high-spirited disposition. Art and nature are, however, there for all of us, sorrowful and euphoric.
**********************
I mean, man oh man. Listen to Saul Bellow read the end of Henderson the Rain King (start at 37:30) and try not to weep with joy.
Breakfast and shopping at the Sanibel Farmers Market; a walk through Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge (we’ll see whether the federal shutdown has messed things up there), and then the regular daily grind: shelling, birdwatching, swimming. As for the nightly grind: There’s tending to our vast dark sky,the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
It’s been a way arty week for UD: A local production of The Drowsy Chaperone featuring her cousin; Bloomsday in Chestertown; piano/violin duets at my place with my friend Annie (Saint-Saens, The Swan; Schubert, Serenade; a stab at Mozart, Sonata No. 7); and, at the moment, a photography exhibit in DC – ‘eighties pix of The Smiths. (Here’s the book.) UD was dragged here
by her sister the Morrissey fanatic. (The photographer is the woman in the black dress/black shoes.)
The duets were initially nerve-wracking and then exhilarating. UD – a hopeless amateur at the piano – has never tried actually performing with another person, and Annie is a serious violinist. But UD accepted her invitation to play some pieces together, and it went pretty well. More importantly, UD experienced the great and somewhat astonishing pleasure of creating with another person celestial harmonies. She found herself thinking about a line from Albert Schweitzer — he recalls that when he was young something as simple as the two-part harmony in the song In The Mill by the Stream “thrilled me all over, to my very marrow, and similarly the first time I heard brass instruments playing together I almost fainted from excess of pleasure.”
But how constant and intense can anything be for twenty years straight? UD, for instance, figures she can maintain constant and intense interest in… let’s take something she’s intensely interested in, as interested as this guy, bigshot trustee of the University of Northern Iowa, was in grand theft. So we just had Bloomsday, and UD‘s a James Joyce freak and she read from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the Irish Embassy and the Cosmos Club and spent time preparing all that and talking endlessly with fellow Joyce people and reading and rereading various passages from Ulysses…
Okay so I’d say UD managed to sustain constant and intense interest in Bloomsday, this summer, for around, say, two weeks… How much more difficult to sustain constant and intense guilt for twenty years over your assiduous theft of millions of dollars from innocent people!
You say guilt is different from interest?
Then let’s look at perhaps the most intensely guilt-ridden figure of our time — Franz Kafka. Kafka certainly majorly dragged his ass around Prague, but we also have it on good authority that he was fully capable of having a good time. A reviewer of Kafka’s diaries says that they fail to give the reader a sense of “the humorous and light-hearted Kafka, the man who walked around in the day and earned the respect, fondness, and love of his friends and coworkers.”
Let’s say that – we can only give a rough estimate here – Kafka spent around half of his time feeling guilt; and of the time he felt guilt, let’s say that only about a quarter of that was intense and constant.
And, you know, Kafka did something with that guilt. He wrote guilt-ridden stories like The Judgment to work through it or whatever. This guy, Mr University of Northern Iowa, felt unremitting dripdripdrip guilt over stealing from people for twenty years but not only did he not write one of those quirky weird-prairie short stories about it, he didn’t, say, turn himself in to the authorities, or stop stealing.
