THE NAME'S JOYCE: JAMES JOYCE

A BLOOMSDAY REFLECTION

“Well, you shouldn’t have been looking through that keyhole in the first place.”

(Sylvia Beach and James Joyce in the original Shakespeare and Company bookshop.)

Ten years ago or so, wandering along the Seine around breakfast time, I heard a lone voice reciting aloud and, following it to its source, found an embarrassed young woman sitting on a hard chair declaiming to indifferent French pedestrians from a text that I recognised, eventually, as James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I was never a Joyce scholar but this was a passage I knew. Someone used it to explain the meaning of onomatopoeia - words that sound like what they describe – and the explanation stuck.

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Could there be a more vivid evocation of steel-shod horses cantering on stone?

Unfortunately, this reader didn’t really get the music of it. I’m not sure anyone would at that hour. But she’d been roped into participating in a non-stop 24-hour reading of the entire text of Ulysses to celebrate the day in the life of Leopold Bloom which Joyce anatomizes; June 16^th, thereinafter known as Bloomsday.

Today, in fact.

Nothing took me past Shakespeare and Company this morning, but I’m fairly sure the tourists lining up to tick it off their list of 100 Paris Sites were not there to celebrate Joyce – if, indeed, they knew who he was. And I’m not aware of much in the way of celebration elsewhere in Paris. But there wasn’t much either last year, the centenary of its publication. James Joyce doesn’t belong in the era of TikTok and Chatgpt.

In Dublin, no doubt, glasses of Guinness and shots of the best Irish are being raised to the old devil. Not that Joyce cared for either, his favourite tipple being champagne, bought with the money he squeezed from the hapless Sylvia Beach, who once observed resignedly that “the pleasure of working for James Joyce would be mine but the profit would be his.”

There was a time when every back=packer getting off the train at the Gare du Nord had a copy of Ulysses. It was the book you had absolutely promised yourself you’d read - and where better than in a café on the banks of the Seine? Some even got through a few pages before the urge dissipated. (If it’s any consolation, readers in Joyce’s time did no better. The leaves of the first edition are uncut, and, among surviving copies, an embarrassingly large number remain so beyond the first couple of chapters.)

I’ve been luckier in finding places to read it. For a while I lived on the outskirts of Dublin, in Dun Laoghaire, a short walk from the Martello Tower where the book begins.

“Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned Introibo ad altare Dei…”

And there it was, the actual tower. And the text Mulligan recites to mock the still pious Stephen Dedalus is the opening of the Catholic mass, in the shadow of which I was brought up.

I will go unto the altar of god…

…. but spoken not over a chalice of the blood of Christ but a dish of soapy water!

No wonder Joyce didn’t dare go back to Ireland.

On June 16th 1924, Joyce was in hospital in Paris, his eyes bandaged after the latest of many surgeries. He’d been sent a bouquet of white and blue hydrangea flowers; the colours of the Greek flag, used on the cover of the first edition of Ulysses , which was published from Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare and Company bookshop, a few doors down the street from where I’m writing this. In his notebook, he scrawled despairingly “Today 16 June 1924 twenty years after. Will anybody remember this date?”

Sadly, not around here, it seems. There is a tiny plaque on the site of the original shop – not, however, an official one, but erected by the James Joyce Society of Sweden and Finland. Some walking tours stop by the shop, but most, hungry for Hemingway, push on for Montparnasse.

But Joyce, who was an irascible bugger, would not have welcomed the coach-party popularity accorded to lesser talents. We should think of his achievement on the same scale that of Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul’s in London. Inscribed in a circle of black marble on the main floor, it says LECTOR SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE. ‘Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.’