0:00

Music They

0:28

would on occasion arrive into

0:30

MacDades. They were literally

0:32

students and graduates who'd

0:34

come to seek out those who knew him or

0:37

those who knew those who knew him or

0:40

at worst I suppose those who knew more about

0:42

him than they did and they were a sort of industry,

0:45

the Joyceans. And if you knew enough about

0:47

James Joyce you could sometimes drink for

0:49

free. Paddy Kavanagh had strong feelings

0:52

on the

0:52

James Joyce industry. Who killed

0:55

James Joyce? I said the commentator.

0:58

I killed James Joyce for my graduation.

1:01

The same poem later asks us and

1:03

did you get high marks, the PhD?

1:06

I got the B.Lit and my Master's degree.

1:08

Did you get money for your Joycean knowledge?

1:11

I got a scholarship to Trinity College. I

1:13

made the pilgrimage in the Bloomsday Swelter

1:16

from the Martello Tower to

1:18

the cabbies shelter.

1:20

And there

1:21

Paddy Kavanagh was telling the truth. He did

1:23

indeed make the pilgrimage. Today

1:26

we're exploring the Bloomsday of 1954, the first

1:28

of its kind and scenes

1:32

that will be replicated this week. Each

1:34

June more of us dive into

1:36

Ulysses. You see it, it starts rising

1:39

up the podcast charts, RTE's

1:41

brilliant radio production and the book

1:43

moves to the front of the shop. By the

1:45

way, Hodges Vigas did a beautiful centenary

1:48

edition last year. There's still a few of them sitting

1:50

by the door. And you see other things

1:53

happen too around this time of year. The

1:55

very talented Andy Mack on Instagram

1:58

at andymackmc.

1:59

has painted James Joyce

2:02

and Nora Barnacle onto power boxes

2:04

on Nassau Street opposite the side entrance

2:07

to Trinity College Dublin. I love

2:09

those painted power boxes across the city,

2:12

taking something just incredibly dull, you

2:14

know, from the streetscape and adding colour.

2:16

And it was on that street that they first met on

2:18

a June day in 1904. I

2:22

must stuck him for a Swedish sailor, his

2:24

electric blue eyes, yachting cap and plimsolls,

2:27

but when he spoke, well then I knew

2:29

him at once for just another Dublin jackine

2:32

chatting up a country girl.

2:34

That chance encounter would change

2:36

both of their lives. They arranged a

2:38

date, she ghosted him, as

2:40

we say now, but after what was originally

2:43

planned they did actually step out for the first time

2:45

on the 16th of June 1904 and that day would

2:48

be immortalised

2:50

in literature.

2:51

That's the day on which Joyce said his

2:54

epic. We call it Bloomsday.

2:57

The Dublin of Joyce's day, as Seamus

2:59

Dean noted, prided itself on

3:02

its reputation for wit,

3:04

good conversation, malicious gossip,

3:06

auditory, drama and journalism and

3:09

all of that is there within the book

3:11

and more besides all human life is

3:13

in it. And if the city's publicans

3:16

or grave diggers or the chief of the fire

3:18

brigade or the brothel madames or

3:20

the printers, the actors, the shopkeepers

3:23

and the drunks, if they wondered if they'd be

3:25

in it, well they pretty much all were. In 1954

3:29

on the 50th anniversary of the day

3:31

on which the book was set, a gang

3:33

of interesting

3:34

people amongst them, Patty Cavanagh,

3:36

said about marking the occasion. Just

3:39

over three decades after publication, it's

3:41

a little confusing, the book was published in 1922

3:43

but it's set on a day in 1904, you know, many

3:47

people were wondering on that 50th anniversary,

3:50

should the day be marked and how to do it? The

3:53

Irish Times told readers on that day that

3:55

only time will prove whether or not Ulysses

3:57

is one of the world's great novels when the

3:59

On the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday comes around,

4:02

Leopold Bloom either may be forgotten, or

4:05

may stand in stony effigy as high

4:07

as Nelson stands today.

4:09

Well, by Bloomsday 100, Nelson was gone.

4:14

And Leopold Bloom is seemingly everywhere.

4:16

A plaque on Clambrassal Street around the corner

4:18

from me captures the best of Irish

4:20

wit. It marks the birthplace of someone

4:23

who never walked the earth. Where in Joyce's

4:25

imagination, we're told, was born

4:27

Leopold Bloom. In Temple Bar,

4:30

James Early's beautiful murals wrap

4:32

themselves all around Blooms, a

4:34

stunning piece of work. And

4:37

from a family with a long tradition of making

4:39

stained glass windows, they nod their hat

4:41

towards early studios as

4:44

much as Joyce. And a few

4:46

on Friday would nod their own straw

4:48

boaters towards it. But none

4:50

of those characters James Early painted on the wall

4:52

in Temple Bar

4:54

are wearing such

4:55

a thing. Why are we all going

4:57

around dressed in some costume? Are

4:59

we winding up the spirit of the great modernist

5:02

Joyce? Paddy's Day for middle class people,

5:04

one friend christened it. But look,

5:06

Bloomsday has its own history and traditions,

5:09

separate from Joyce and the book.

5:12

In some ways, I always think Bloomsday, as we

5:14

celebrate it, owes more to 1954 than 1904.

5:17

And you'll see it walking

5:20

around town or stumbling around town on Friday.

5:22

Some make for the Tower, some do

5:25

the

5:25

pilgrimage that Paddy Cavanagh

5:27

himself did. Some go to Sweeney's Pharmacy

5:30

and buy lemon soap, as Leopold does

5:32

in the book. Some go to Glass-Nevin

5:34

Cemetery. Others make it no further

5:36

than Davey Burns. But today we're

5:38

going back to 1954. Roddy

5:40

Doyle once caught a controversy by

5:43

saying Ulysses could have done with a good edit. It's

5:46

a real privilege to chat to him this weekend at

5:48

the Dark E-Book Festival. Tickets for that

5:51

are almost gone, but the last of them up are available

5:53

from the festival. A live episode that

5:55

promises to be a very, very special

5:58

one. Paddy Town meets Bloomsday.

6:00

weekend.

6:12

A few weeks before the 16th

6:14

of June 1954, the

6:17

writer and poet Anthony Cronin remembered

6:19

being approached by Brian O'Nolan,

6:22

better known as Miles Nagopaline,

6:24

better known as Flann O'Brien.

6:27

There was something top secret about what O'Nolan

6:30

was planning.

6:31

All he would do was ask him, was he interested

6:33

in a jaunt,

6:35

or Dublin jaunt, on the forthcoming day

6:37

of Your Man's Book.

6:39

Your Man was James Joyce and the book was Ulysses.

6:42

Cronin remembered that there was a kind of top secret

6:45

air all about it, how O'Nolan

6:47

wouldn't say much more.

6:49

There were, he felt, too many,

6:51

quote, chancers and intriguings and

6:53

go betweens and Johnny come latlies of all descriptions

6:56

in the pub we were in. But plans

6:58

were in motion and no better

7:00

man than Brian O'Nolan

7:03

or Miles to make it happen. It's

7:05

easy to see the appeal of the

7:07

idea of going around on a June day in 1954 to

7:09

Miles Nagopaline.

7:11

He knew it was all a

7:13

little bit silly and was sometimes dismissive

7:15

of the kind of cultish following that was beginning to

7:17

grow around Joyce. Perhaps the true

7:19

fascination of Joyce he'd written a few years earlier

7:22

was partly his attraction for Americans.

7:25

But for a man who wrote under several pen names himself,

7:28

mixed fact and fiction with ease and enjoyed

7:31

the absurd, the relationship between

7:33

Dublin itself and Joyce interested him

7:35

too.

7:36

He remembered how a friend had once sat at

7:39

dinner with someone who appeared in Ulysses

7:41

and raised it with him. How can I be

7:43

a character in fiction, he demanded, if

7:45

I'm here talking to you? That incident

7:48

may be funny, Miles wrote,

7:49

but its curiosity is this. Joyce

7:52

spent a lifetime establishing himself

7:54

as a character in fiction.

7:55

Joyce created, in Narcissus

7:58

Fascination, the ageless, and

8:00

deadless.

8:01

Beginning with importing real characters into

8:03

his books, he achieved the magnificent

8:05

inversion of making them legendary and

8:08

fictional. It is quite preposterous. Thousands

8:10

of people believe that there once lived a man

8:13

named Sherlock Holmes, Miles wrote. So

8:15

this great book in which

8:17

real people are fictionalised

8:20

with plenty of sprinklings of the Dublin

8:22

of its day,

8:23

I suppose Miles was wondering, could it be pulled back

8:26

out again? Could the fictionalised characters

8:28

be made real? Could a gang of people

8:31

each adopt someone from the book and

8:33

traverse the streets of Dublin on the same day 50

8:36

years later, in a kind of theatrical

8:38

tribute to it?

8:41

In 1954, Joyce's Ulysses

8:44

was still a very recent thing, of

8:46

course. It was a kind of living thing.

8:48

And when BBC Radio broadcast a version

8:50

of it in that year, it was front page

8:52

news in Ireland that a Dublin solicitor

8:54

complained to the BBC that, quote, he

8:57

had been libelled in one episode of the broadcast.

9:00

The BBC replied that the person

9:02

in the episode, the whom Joyce gave

9:04

a name similar to your own, was described

9:06

as a money lender. And we do not feel

9:08

that anyone could reasonably identify this person

9:11

with yourself. The idea of RT

9:13

Radio broadcasting the thing was still a long

9:15

time off. But it's kind of funny, isn't it, that people

9:17

were still

9:18

getting upset at references to themselves,

9:21

real or imagined, in the book 30 years

9:24

after it was published.

9:25

Anthony Cronin, setting the scene,

9:27

insisted that it would be wrong to say

9:30

that in 1954, Joyce

9:32

was a neglected figure in Ireland. He

9:34

was, in many quarters, seriously disproved

9:37

of. Hate it might not be too strong

9:39

a word to describe the attitude. Not

9:41

only the church and the devout disproved

9:43

of him. Politicians fear to make any

9:46

reference to a notorious blasphemer.

9:49

And in that very year, Sean McBride,

9:51

the Minister for External Affairs, had

9:53

pointedly refused to open a James

9:55

Joyce exhibition in Paris. The

9:58

gathered soldiers of Bloomsday in 1950

9:59

1954 included Anthony Cronin,

10:02

a young emerging poet and writer

10:04

who would pen one of the finest memoirs at

10:06

that time dead as doornails. There

10:09

was John Ryan, editor of Envoy

10:11

magazine, an author of another fabulous

10:14

memoir, Remembering How We Stood.

10:17

Ryan, thankfully, brought along his

10:19

Super 8 camera, recording the moving

10:21

images of the day, and he later recalled

10:24

the experience.

10:25

This was the first Bloom's Day

10:28

that we ever celebrated, and

10:30

here you have Tony Cronin and Myles

10:33

Nogoffeleen. That's Myles in the background

10:35

there being helped into the cab. And

10:38

this is Goggin's pub which is near where

10:41

I live. That's one of the joys,

10:43

that's Tom's joys. Myles

10:46

Nogoffeleen again, Patrick

10:50

Cavanagh in the background. Cavanagh was a poet,

10:52

Myles was a comic writer, Tom

10:55

Joyce was a dentist, and

10:58

as far as we could discover never had read

11:00

anything of Joyce.

11:02

Paddy Cavanagh, pissed. Myles

11:05

Nogoffeleen, pissed and

11:07

pissing against the wall of a Martello tower.

11:10

Tom Joyce, Dublin dentist, and

11:12

crucially, it's all in the name,

11:14

a Joyce. There was A.J. Leventhal,

11:17

a friend not only to Joyce but to Samuel

11:19

Beckett as well, a Dublin Jew

11:22

from Clombbrassel Street. Leventhal had

11:24

famously once gone to the GPO in

11:26

response to a request from Samuel Beckett to

11:29

measure the height from the ground to the arse

11:31

of the Kukulan statue.

11:33

Beckett makes reference to the statue in a work and

11:35

he wanted Leventhal to check this all-important

11:38

detail for him. Like a good friend,

11:40

he actually did it.

11:42

Cronin also makes a very important

11:44

point about this first Bloom's Day. It

11:46

isn't just the case of who was there, it's

11:49

also interesting who wasn't.

11:51

The outing was carefully planned by

11:54

its principal organizer, Brian

11:56

O'Nolan, otherwise known as

11:58

a novelist, Flan O'Brien. otherwise

12:01

as an Irish Times columnist Miles

12:03

Nagopaline.

12:07

There were, I think, no more than six

12:09

people involved, including myself

12:12

and, of course, Patrick Kavner.

12:19

Brendan Behan, viewed by Patrick

12:21

Kavner as a reprehensible figure,

12:24

was not invited to take part.

12:28

All the participants represented

12:31

one or other aspect of Joyce's great

12:33

book, Ulysses. The

12:35

critic, A.J. Leventhal, being

12:38

Jewish, represented Bloom. I,

12:41

as a young poet, was his surrogate offspring,

12:43

Stephen. Miles stood

12:45

in for the ordinary Dubliners of the story. Kavner was Homer, present as an

12:47

inspiration throughout. We

12:53

were to retrace

12:55

the root of the funeral procession that ascended to

12:57

Hades, with which Bloom's adventures begin,

13:01

with the stop-off at Sandymount

13:03

Strand. But

13:06

by the time we reached the Strand, things

13:08

had begun to get rather disorganised.

13:12

And amidst these men of letters and

13:14

the literary pope was still very much a man's space, there was

13:16

a photographer, the brilliant Eleanor Wiltshire,

13:19

Limerick Bourne, Eleanor Tuck, really

13:21

beautiful iconic images of Dublin

13:23

in the 1950s and 60s, like the high-rise towers of Ballymun

13:25

and kids skipping below them, the

13:29

decaying Georgian buildings between

13:31

the

13:31

canals. She felt that she was capturing Dublin at a key moment in time.

13:34

Actually, some of her pictures are

13:37

on display at the moment in Temple Bar,

13:40

in the National Photographic Archive. She

13:42

was a brilliant photographer. And

13:44

at a time when Kavner described the children take delight

13:47

in levelling the city, violently

13:50

tear down the walls, Wiltshire

13:53

was a great photographer of the built landscape.

13:56

She captured Dublin, and

13:58

then she was a great photographer of the built landscape.

14:00

right at a moment in time before the

14:02

developers got us. But she was

14:04

also a fantastic photographer

14:06

of people.

14:07

And most of her images were taken on a camera

14:09

she held at waist level. Those photographs

14:12

often didn't even know they were being snapped.

14:16

And we owe her a lot for her presence there at that bloom

14:18

state. At the Martello Tower in Sandy

14:20

Cove, they were in good spirits from

14:23

the very beginning.

14:24

And remembering Cabinet that day, Cronin

14:26

recalled that, even on the journey out, he

14:28

seemed to have been absorbing refreshment by

14:30

some secret chemical process, known

14:33

only...