Bloomsday

A great book is sometimes commenced not at a writing-desk but on a pavement, in the half-hour during which a young man waits to see whether a young woman will come out of a side door. The work that follows will look, to later readers, like the product of decades of European exile, of libraries in Trieste and Zurich and Paris, of a learned mind welding Homer to Dublin. In truth its first foundation is laid in the few minutes during which the writer stands at a kerb in Leinster Street and finds out whether his life is going to begin.

THE YOUNG MAN AT THE KERB

He is twenty-two. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, on the second of February 1882, son of John Stanislaus Joyce of Cork, rate-collector and ruined gentleman, and Mary Jane Murray of Longford, now three years dead. He has been a National University man, a medical student in Paris for a winter, briefly a bank clerk, presently a part-time teacher and the author of one short essay in a Dublin monthly. He owes money in several quarters of the city. His suit is dark, the cuff frayed, his eyes already weak behind their lenses. The manuscript he is calling Stephen Hero sits in his lodgings at 60 Shelbourne Road, and he knows, with the cold honesty of his trade, that it is not yet the book.

For three years he has walked the streets of this city looking for a way to write it. He has paced Sandymount strand, the quays, North Great George's Street, Eccles Street, the brothels of Tyrone Street, in the conviction that Dublin is a subject of European magnitude and that no Irishman has yet given it its body. He has not found the way. The way will not come from the desk.

THE TENTH OF JUNE

Six days ago, on Nassau Street, on her afternoon off, he saw a tall young woman with the reddish-brown hair and the country stride of the west. He took her, on first sight, for a sailor's daughter. He spoke. She answered in the soft accent of Galway: Nora Joseph Barnacle, twenty years old, baker's daughter from Bowling Green, chambermaid these eight months at Finn's Hotel on Leinster Street. He asked if she would walk out with him. She said yes. They named the fourteenth, Merrion Square, six o'clock.

She did not come. He walked home along the canal, sleepless, and the following morning wrote her a postcard from Shelbourne Road, in the contrite register of a man who has understood that a refusal is also an answer. She wrote back. They named another day. They named today.

THURSDAY, THE SIXTEENTH OF JUNE

The afternoon is mild, late spring tipping into summer, a sky of high cloud over the Liffey. He has come up from Shelbourne Road early, the way the anxious always come early. The clock on Trinity has gone the quarter past four. The side door of Finn's, in the railed area off Leinster Street, is shut. Trams clatter past on the South Frederick Street junction. He stands on the kerb. He has been here twenty minutes. He will give her, he tells himself, until five.

Inside the hotel she is finishing the upper rooms, the strip of white apron over the dark uniform, the bed-linen folded as she has been trained to fold it. She is not, by her own later admission, a reader; she has not heard of Yeats; she has never been told, and would not believe if she were, that the man on the pavement outside is going to make her name a date on the European calendar. She is twenty. She has come out of Galway after a beating from an uncle for walking with a Protestant boy. She has had, in the small economy of her own life, to learn what it costs to walk out with someone, and what it costs not to.

THE HINGE

He stands. He thinks, in the disorderly way of a man whose interior life runs always slightly ahead of his outer one, that the book will have to be the body of one ordinary day in this city. Not a saga. Not a chronicle. The single shape of one Dublin Thursday, lifted clear, set down on the page entire, with its breakfast and its funeral and its newspaper office and its public house and its strand at evening, so that a reader in Bohemia or in Bombay might walk it. He has not yet got the day. The day must be one of the days of this summer, because the days of this summer are the days that have been put in front of him. Silence, exile and cunning, he has already told himself, will be the writer's three weapons; but exile is a thing one has to begin, and a man does not begin exile alone, not at twenty-two, not when his mother is a year in the grave and his father is drinking down what is left of the house in North Richmond Street.

If she does not come out of the side door, he will go home tonight to Shelbourne Road and he will draft, before the week is out, the letter that takes him to a Berlitz post on the Continent in the autumn, alone. He will write, in that case, a different book; or no book; he does not yet know. If she does come out of the side door, he will leave Ireland with her in October. The day she comes out will be the day he has been looking for. The day will be this day. The work will be the work of this day. He does not formulate it cleanly even to himself; it sits in him as a kind of pressure behind the breastbone, the way the right key sits in a lock half a turn before it is felt to turn. He looks at the door. The trams pass. Half past four strikes from somewhere over towards College Green.

The door opens. She comes out.

THE WALK TO RINGSEND

They go east along Leinster Street, past the railings of Trinity, around the front of the College and down Westmoreland Street to O'Connell Bridge. The Liffey is at the half-tide, brown, slow, smelling of the brewery and the sea. They take the south quays past the Custom House, past Butt Bridge, out by the gasworks towards Ringsend. The city falls behind them. He talks; she listens; she answers in her own time, without hurry, in the unbookish Galway voice that he will, in seventeen years, transcribe almost without alteration as the closing soliloquy of the longest novel of the century. At Sandymount strand, where the tide is well out and the sand is ribbed and grey, he kisses her hand. It is six o'clock. By a letter he will write to her from Trieste in 1909, the gesture by which she answered him on the strand that evening made me a man. He does not, on the kerb at Leinster Street, know that he has just dated the central day of Ulysses. He knows only that he is no longer alone.

THE DEPARTURE

On the eighth of October 1904 they leave Dublin together on the night boat to Holyhead, unmarried, with almost no money, on the strength of a Berlitz post that turns out, on arrival, not to exist. They take Trieste, then Pola, then Trieste again. He teaches English to the merchants of the Austro-Hungarian port; she keeps the house and bears him Giorgio in 1905 and Lucia in 1907. He drafts Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1914, in a room above a tobacconist's in the via Donato Bramante, he opens a school exercise book and writes the opening of a novel he is calling Ulysses. The day is to be the sixteenth of June 1904.

PARIS, 1922

He finishes the book in Paris in October 1921. Seven years of work, eighteen episodes, seven hundred and thirty pages, a Dublin Thursday rendered hour by hour from the breakfast kidney in the kitchen at 7 Eccles Street to the soliloquy of Molly Bloom in bed at two in the morning. Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, 12 rue de l'Odéon, brings out the first edition of one thousand copies on the second of February 1922, his fortieth birthday. The book is seized by the United States customs as obscene; it is burned by the postal authorities; it is, by Judge John M. Woolsey in the Southern District of New York in December 1933, finally admitted to the country in the judgment that Ulysses is a sincere and honest book. By then it has already done the work for which it was written. A Dublin Thursday in 1904, lifted clear and set down entire, is in the hands of readers in Tokyo and Buenos Aires and Berlin.

THE RETURN

On the fourth of July 1931, in a registry office in Kensington, twenty-seven years after the afternoon at Finn's, James Joyce married Nora Barnacle, for the sake of their children's English inheritance rights. He gave her, as a wedding present, a copy of Ulysses. He died in Zurich on the thirteenth of January 1941, in his fifty-ninth year; she outlived him by ten years and lies beside him in Fluntern Cemetery on the Zürichberg, the city below, the lake below that. In June 1954, on the fiftieth anniversary of the day, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Brian O'Nolan and the publican John Ryan hired a horse-cab and retraced the route of the novel from the Martello tower at Sandycove through the city; the photographs are blurred, the men are drunk by midday, and the thing is begun. By the centenary in 2004 the day was a civic festival of Dublin, with breakfasts of grilled mutton kidney, straw boaters, public readings on Sandymount strand, parallel walks in Trieste and Zurich and Paris and Sydney and New York. The book has not, in any major language, been out of print.

The decisive afternoons are seldom recognised as decisive at the time. A young man stands twenty minutes early on a kerb. A young woman comes out of a side door, or does not. Empires are not at stake; only a life, and the book the life will or will not write. The Joyce who walked east from Leinster Street that Thursday with a Galway chambermaid did not know that he had just chosen the calendar date by which the twentieth century would learn to read his city. He knew only that the door had opened. In Fluntern, on the Zürichberg, the bronze figure of him sits on a bench with a book on his knee and one leg crossed, looking down at Zurich and, past Zurich, at a long brown river running between low quays in another country, on an ordinary Thursday afternoon.