James Joyce and the genesis of Ulysses

Richard West

James Joyce scholars and the Irish tourist industry are both gearing up for 16 June, the centenary of the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, set out on his odyssey through the bars and brothels of Dublin. We can expect a deluge of new books and monographs to explain or 'deconstruct' Joyce's abstruse version of the Homeric legend, told in a stream of consciousness babble of ancient and modern languages — which, as he rightly foresaw, would 'keep the professors busy for centuries'.

The modem celebration of `Bloomsday' started in the late 1940s with convivial Dublin literary men who wanted to honour a book still virtually prohibited because of its sexually explicit passages, especially the final monologue of Molly Bloom, the Penelope of the story. Soon 'Bloomsday' was adopted by the Irish Tourist Board, who also introduced conducted tours of Joyce's favourite Dublin pubs and even a night-time display of passages from Ulysses picked out in pink electric lightbulbs. There was a growing movement to enshrine James Joyce as an Irish national hero, with 'Bloomsday' replacing St Patrick's Day as the annual feast.

As an antidote to the academic pedants

and to the patriotic blarney, I have just read James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist (DaviesPoynter, 1985) by Stan Gebler Davies, a friend and fellow contributor to this magazine during the 1970s and 1980s. Because it offended literary academia and Irish political correctness, the book disappeared from print and I obtained a copy only thanks to two friends of Stan who found it on a bookstall in County Cavan.

Stan Gebler Davies loved Joyce's writing up to and including Ulysses, which he always said needed no glossary. But sharing Joyce's delight in wine, women and classical music, not to mention jokes and quarrels, he also regarded his subject as a bit of a conman or 'chance?, who survived by sponging off his rich women admirers and by gulling the avant-garde who did not dare admit they were baffled by his later books, such as Finnegans Wake.

During the 1970s, when he was working on Joyce's biography, Stan Gebler Davies was at loggerheads with the Fianna Fail government of Charles Haughey, now disgraced by disclosures about his corruption. Haughey had at first been accused of running arms from the Republic to the Northern Ireland IRA, whom Stan detested. As the son of a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia, Stan identified Patrick Pearse's belief in blood sacrifice and the purity of the Celtic race with Nazi ideology, and Pearse's 1916 rebellion with Hitler's Munich putsch.

Stan Gebler Davies's Spectator articles so enraged the Haughey administration that he found himself denounced to the IRA as a British agent. Undeterred by threats, Stan stood as a Unionist candidate for the West Cork constituency in which he was then living.

Quite apart from the Ulster question, Stan

detested the way that Haughey and his cronies were destroying Joyce's Dublin, pulling down the old Georgian streets and squares to make way for ring roads, car parks and glass-and-concrete office blocks. He especially mourned the passing of the North Dublin tenement blocks which Sean O'Casey had celebrated in plays such as Juno and the Paycock and The Shadow of a Gunman, the definitive satire on the 1916 uprising. O'Casey's simple, powerful writing was so much more comprehensible than Joyce's that many phrases and even whole speeches have entered into the popular Irish language.

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist set out to strip its subject of the national mythology it has attracted over the years. Gebler Davies acknowledged that the Joyces of Cork were as poor as many Irish families in the 19th century, but insisted that they were the 'deserving poor' — who deserved the misfortune incurred through fecklessness.

Joyce's father, John Joyce, was one of a long line of bankrupts, but he was also

the kind of character of whom it is said, particularly in Ireland, that there was nothing wrong with him that marriage couldn't cure. Many women have been nailed to that particular cross. John Joyce's choice was no exception.

Joyce's parents were forced by creditors to move from Cork to the Dublin suburb of Rathgar — 'the first of many displacements which were to follow one after another at decreasing intervals, accompanied by the raising of mortgages, the birth of children, and the complaints of unpaid landlords.' Each time the Joyces moved to a cheaper district, the neighbours welcomed them, for 'the Irish like nothing better than to see their putative superiors dragged down to their own level. It is part of the destructive instinct of the race.'

Gebler Davies wrote with special sympathy of the two most important people in James Joyce's life: his brother Stanislaus and his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle. He explained how Joyce's first sexual encounter with Nora, on 16 June 1904, inspired both Ulysses and 'Bloomsday'. The discovery that Nora shared his lively interest in sex was the source of their happy marriage and also Joyce's obsessive jealousy that his Penelope might have granted similar favours to other suitors.

Whether or not she had read, let alone understood, Ulysses, Nora refused to hear any talk about 'that book', especially her Molly Bloom monologue. When Joyce and his friends started to celebrate 16 June in the 1920s, she would ask in her Galway brogue, 'What's so special about that date anyway?'

Unlike the great majority of Joycean scholars, Stan Gebler Davies saw the real joke in 'Bloomsday'. He also argued that Joyce was in no way a father of the modern Irish Republic. He knew and detested Pearse, both for his politics and for his antipathy to the English language, the indispensable tool of any Irish writer. Joyce abominated Pearse's 1916 uprising, the subsequent civil war and the Irish Free State, which he never visited and often referred to as the 'Irish Free Fight'.