Ulysses and me – Frank McNally and his long relationship with Joyce’s greatest book

I first read Ulysses as a pretentious teenager, newly arrived in Dublin. It was the winter of 1981 when the weather, economic conditions and hatred of my job all blended well with the masochism involved in the exercise. I read the book mainly to say I’d read it, but there were long periods when my mind was absent and only my finger followed the text.

Then, sometime in the mid-80s, I saw Eamon Morrissey’s show Joycemen at the Peacock Theatre. He was still best known then as the “Minister for Hardship” from Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, but he brought Ulysses alive, belatedly alerting me to the fact that it was laugh-out-loud funny in parts, and in other parts achingly sad.

A year or two later, working my way around Australia, I spent June in Sydney and was first exposed there to the phenomenon that is Bloomsday. It emerged that even in that famously outdoor culture, many eccentrics retreated indoors on their wintry June 16ths to celebrate a book set in 1904 Dublin. Morrissey turned up too – Eamon, not the Smiths singer – so I saw his show again.

By the time I reread Ulysses in the 1990s, therefore, the nearest thing it has to a plot was broadly familiar and the effort more rewarding than before. Since then, I’ve maintained the average of one full reading per decade and each time is better.

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That’s partly why I went back to the Peacock Theatre in Dublin last weekend to see the start of Barry McGovern’s marathon performance of the text, still in progress as we speak. I was in the theatre for two full days and 206 pages. But there was no masochism involved. It was never less than riveting.

Nowadays, especially in June, I can’t escape Ulysses. The condition is exacerbated by being a columnist known to mention Joycean events, so that strangers often approach hoping for plugs of this or that. And this year’s centenary of publication has inspired a bewildering range of projects.

But just as he did to Leopold Bloom in 1904, Joyce seems to have knitted me into a vast web of characters wandering around the streets of Dublin in midsummer.

Already this week, for example, I have bumped into Vincent Altman O’Connor, whose ancestor “Altman the Saltman” is a likely model for Bloom. Then there was Patrick Callan, my Dublin 8 neighbour who told me about his Joyce Symposium talk on Reuben J Dodd and the 1954 Ulysses libel case but gave equal billing to a mention of our local football team, St Pat’s, and the teenage prodigy it recently sold to Udinese for “half a million”.

There was also John Shevlin, official Joyce Doppelgänger and Temple Bar milliner, now the subject of a short film Mr Joyce visits the President on Bloomsday by Toronto Joycean Godfrey Jordan (I met him too).

While chatting to Shevlin about hats - the film has him fitting one on President Michael D Higgins - I mentioned my suspicion that I have the largest head in Ireland. Whereupon he whipped out the measuring tape he always carries for emergencies and wrapped it around my cranium (it’s officially enormous).

I even met Michael D this week, briefly, at Áras an Uachtaráin’s (early) Bloomsday party. Surrounded by serious Joyce scholars, I was slightly mortified to see that an important-looking textual exhibit on Ulysses, arranged in 19 panels along one whole wall, was from an Irish Times feature headlined “Ulysses for Cheats” by Frank McNally, who recommended skipping chapters.

In part-atonement on Monday, I also helped launch a new version of the masterpiece, The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses, in a panel discussion during which I hastened to explain that I did not myself skip any of it. At the centre of the new book is a facsimile of the 1922 edition, complete with its many errors. But this is surrounded by wide margins to facilitate Joyce’s own corrections on one side and later emendations on the other, as well as extensive footnotes. There are also maps, pictures, the author’s “schemas”, and explanatory essays for each chapter by some of the world’s greatest Joycean minds. The whole extraordinary thing was edited by Catherine Flynn, a brilliant Corkwoman (via Berkeley University, California), who wears her great scholarship of Joyce lightly.

Speaking of light, the book certainly isn’t – it weighs 3kg. But it’s a magnificent and beautifully laid-out piece of work. It is also, by scholarly standards, a bargain at €37.50. This reflects the publishers’ brave decision to aim it at the general reader, whose ascent of literary Everest may benefit from its vast array of support mechanisms but who is also free to ignore them all and go straight to the famous text itself.