Feeding the gulls in Dublin

June 16^th - Bloomsday – the day that is forever associated with James Joyce's Ulysses. The day he met,  in Nassau Street, Nora Barnacle, chambermaid at Finns Hotel who was to become his lover, wife, life-long companion and muse.

 Ulysses, the novel - though that is scarcely what it is - takes place over that one day in Dublin in 1904.

Joyce's Dublin is still there despite the changes and you can follow the paths taken by his two protagonists as they make their way from opposite sides of the city and eventually, by chance, meet in the Holles Materrnity Hospital.

 The solicitous Leopold Bloom is enquiring of a woman he knows who has been three days in labour while the impetuous Stephen Dedalus is getting drunk with the medical students.  Having met Stephen's father at the funeral of Paddy Dignam, Bloom's concern for young Dedalus is such that he later rescues him from a beating by two soldiers in Bella Cohen's bordello.

Last year, we made our way in from Dalkey where Joyce / Dedalus taught at school and lived in a Martello tower, following him on his  day off  into the city to the National Library.

(Blog 6th April 2013)

Eccles Street

This year we came from the north of the city from Eccles Street.  No.7, the home of Bloom and his unfaithful, but loving. wife Molly, no longer exists but the rest of the Georgian frontage with the fanlights over the doors, is still there.

49 Lower O'Connel Street - Lemon's shop sign is still there

In O'Connel Street, you can still see Graham Lemon's sweet shop - “a sugar-sticky girl shovelling scoops of creams for a  christian brother. Some school treat.”, where Bloom is given a free newspaper – a throwaway - which gives rise to much misunderstanding and malice.
 A twenty-to-one outsider called Throwaway did win the Gold Cup in 1904.

The racing mad populace of the Dublin pubs think he has backed the horse and resent him for it but Bloom is quite unaware of it all.
We followed his meanderings around the city centre before and after the funeral - the shops, pubs, meeting places, offices and public places of Joyce's remembered city.

 Joyce left in 1904, ran off with Nora, and only returned briefly on four occasions, the last in 1912.
Although the Dublin of 1904 is the setting, the themes, thoughts, connections, literary and mythological links, symbolism, and archetypes found in Ulysses are universal and timeless.  It could be set in any city in any country yet because James Joyce wrote it, it had to be and still has to be, Dublin in 1904.

Davy Byrne's pub is still as popular as it was in Joyce's day.
Bloom muses...
"Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now and then . But in a leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once".
 After a glass of wine there, he continues his perambulations around the Dublin streets.
 He feeds the gulls with a couple of Banbury cakes bought from an old woman's stall for a penny.

We couldn't get Banbury cakes so had to make do with croisants – three for 2 Euros!

 Further down Bachelors Walk, the Ormond Hotel, where he had a late lunch in the back room to avoid meeting his wife's lover, Blazes Boylan, is sadly dilapidated.

Ormond Hotel

Mabbot Street, the entrance to “Night-town”, the red light area where Bloom and Dedalus end up is still there if now thoroughly respectable.  The site of Bella Cohen's house of ill repute seems to have become the glass fronted tower of an asset management company, but then Bella was just managing her assets in 1904.

Mabbot Lane

Joyce's Dublin cannot survive for ever but with careful planning and preservation, we should be able to follow Bloom, Molly, Blazes Boylan, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan about their city for years to come......and feed the seagulls at O'Connel Bridge.

Dublin

A trip to Dublin is always a treat for a Joycean.  Best is 16^th June but any time will do.

Just to wander in the footsteps of Bloom and Dedalus is distraction enough while LotH is off to Grafton and Henry Streets to try and rescue the Irish economy single-handedly.

We stayed at Dalkey with superb views over Sandycove and Dublin Bay, at the top of the hill where Joyce taught at Clifton School. 

 Dublin Bay with the Martello tower in foreground

To climb the narrow winding stair of the Martello tower is to hear Buck Mulligan’s voice from the gun emplacement.

“Come up Kinch. You fearful Jesuit”

 A quick trip on the DART train took us to the heart of Dublin and shoe leather did the rest.

 

To visit Sweney’s chemist shop and buy  lemon scented soap, pause at the National Library before taking coffee at Bewley’s on Grafton Street just by Thornton’s where Blazes Boylan bought peaches and pears for Molly…..Grand stuff.

A diversion to St Stephen’s cathedral allowed me to pay homage to Jonathon Swift whose jaundiced view of humanity belied his deeply held beliefs and quiet charity.

Returning home and reading Milo O’Shea’s obituary in The Times brought another Joycean trip but this time down the years.

In 1968, we boarded a bus to the next city to see a film banned by the local council.

“Ulysses” had suffered more cuts than a Chinese torture victim and continuity, always a difficulty with Joyce, was almost lost but, to this day, Leopold Bloom has Milo O’Shea’s face and I could never see T.P.Mckenna on television, usually playing a doctor, without hearing him intoning

“Introibus ad altare Dei”

over his shaving bowl on the parapet of the Martello tower above the “snot-green sea”.

 

 LotH is keen for a return trip.  There must be at least one shop left unpatronised, so, hopefully, it will be June16th, 2014….but it will still be Milo O’Shea having a glass of Burgundy and gorgonzola in Davy Byrne’s pub and picking over the book stalls at Merchants Arch.

The ineluctable modality of the memory!!

  Merchants Arch








Night-town but never as J.J. knew it!