Joyce · 1904
Bloomsday
On the afternoon of Thursday the sixteenth of June 1904, James Joyce, twenty-two years old, son of a Cork-emigrant father, then a struggling teacher and unpublished writer, walked out from Finn's Hotel on Leinster Street, Dublin, with a chambermaid he had met for the first time six days earlier, twenty-year-old Nora Barnacle of Galway. The walk took them along the south bank of the Liffey to Ringsend. The afternoon, by Joyce's later testimony to his biographer Stanislaus, was the day his real life began. Eighteen years later, on the second of February 1922, his fortieth birthday, he published in Paris *Ulysses*, the seven-hundred-and-thirty-page novel of a single day in Dublin, set on the sixteenth of June 1904 and following the wandering of a Dublin advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom around the city through eighteen episodes from morning to night. By the centenary of the day in 2004, *Bloomsday* (the sixteenth of June, every year) was being marked in Dublin as a public-cultural festival of the city, in Trieste and Zurich and Paris where Joyce had written the book, and in literary commemorations on every continent. The day Joyce had picked for his novel because it was the day he had walked out with Nora Barnacle had become the only date in modern fiction that the world reads on its own calendar.
It is a quarter past four on the afternoon of Thursday the sixteenth of June 1904, on the kerb outside Finn's Hotel at the junction of Leinster Street and South Frederick Street, in central Dublin, in late spring sun. He is twenty-two years old. He is James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, on the second of February 1882, son of John Stanislaus Joyce of Cork (rate-collector, drinker, raconteur, ruined gentleman) and Mary Jane Murray of Longford. He is in a dark suit with a frayed cuff. He is, in the literal sense, a poor man with no income; he is in the metaphysical sense a writer who has so far published one short essay in a Dublin literary monthly. He is twenty minutes early for an appointment.
Nora Joseph Barnacle, twenty years old, born in Galway on the twenty-first of March 1884 to a baker and a needlewoman, working since the autumn of 1903 as a chambermaid at Finn's Hotel on Leinster Street, comes out of the side door of the hotel at half past four. She is in the dark uniform of the hotel staff with a clean white apron. She has met him for the first time on the tenth of June, on Nassau Street, on her own afternoon off; he had taken her for a sailor's daughter on first sight because of her stride. He had asked to walk out with her. They had agreed today. She had stood him up four days ago on the fourteenth, at Merrion Square, and he had written her, the following morning, a abject postcard from his lodging at 60 Shelbourne Road. She had written back. They had agreed today.
He thinks: I have been walking the streets of this city for three years looking for a way to write it. I have not found the way. I have written the Stephen Hero manuscript and the manuscript is not the way.
He thinks: Nora is from Galway. Nora speaks Irish. Nora has the country I have not yet got into the page.
He thinks: if she walks out with me this afternoon I will leave the country with her in October. If she does not walk out with me this afternoon I will leave the country alone in November and I will not write the book.
He thinks: the book has to have, when I finally write it, the body of one ordinary day in this city. This city is the city. The day will have to be one of the days of this summer because the days of this summer are the days that have been put before me.
He thinks: if she walks with me today, today will be the day.
She walks with him. They go east along Leinster Street to Trinity College, around the front of the College, down Westmoreland Street to O'Connell Bridge, along the south quays past the Custom House, across to the south bank, along by Ringsend to the strand at Sandymount. They are at the strand at six. He kisses her hand. By his own letter to Stanislaus, written in Trieste twelve years later, the walk was the most consequential afternoon of his life and the moment, looking back, that he understood the use he could make of one ordinary Dublin Thursday for the book the city had been waiting for him to write.
He left Dublin with Nora on the eighth of October 1904 by the night boat to Holyhead. They lived in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris for the next thirty-seven years. They had two children. They were married, finally, in 1931 in London, twenty-seven years after the afternoon at Finn's. Ulysses was begun in Trieste in 1914 and finished in Paris in October 1921. It was published by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company on the second of February 1922 in a first edition of one thousand copies; the book was an immediate cause célèbre of European modernism, banned in the United States as obscenity until the famous United States v. One Book Called Ulysses judgment of Judge John M. Woolsey in 1933. Joyce died in Zurich on the thirteenth of January 1941, fifty-eight years old; Nora outlived him by ten years and is buried beside him in Fluntern Cemetery on the Zürichberg.
The first organised public commemoration of Bloomsday was in 1954, on the fiftieth anniversary, when Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Brian O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien) and others retraced the route of the novel through the city in a small private hire-car driven by John Ryan; the photographs of that 1954 walk, in the Irish Times archive, are the founding image of every Bloomsday since. By 2004, the centenary of the day, the Dublin tourism board had built Bloomsday into a multi-day public-cultural festival; the day is now marked, in some form, in every English-speaking university and in many continental cities. The convention of the day is that the participant takes a breakfast of grilled mutton kidney and tea (the breakfast Bloom takes in episode four of Ulysses), wears period costume of 1904, and walks part of the route of the novel through Dublin between Sandymount and the National Library. The afternoon at Finn's is, by Joyce's private intention, the personal pivot of the festival; it is on Joyce's wedding to Nora in 1931 that he gave her, as the wedding present, a copy of Ulysses with the inscription to my Nora, who is in this book whether she knows it or not, and without whom there would be no book at all. The book has not been out of print in any major language for over a hundred years.