Multiple Joyce – Frank McNally on how the author is general, all over Ireland

There’s no escaping James Joyce these days – even, as Felix Larkin (Letters, Monday) has pointed out, in the debate about Gaza.

Yes, that “Garrett Deasy” whose name featured among the 600 academics calling for a boycott of Israeli universities last Saturday was the ghost of a bigoted schoolmaster in Ulysses, under whom Joyce’s alter ego works for a time.

He was based on a real-life Francis Irwin: a northern unionist, which makes the Hibernian pseudonym Joyce gave him slightly odd.

And as immortalised in fiction, he too was a letter writer, although Joyce borrowed that part of the story from a friend in Trieste, Henry Blackwood Price, another Ulsterman, whose actual belief in a cure for foot-and-mouth disease Deasy echoes.

Liberal outlook — Brian Maye on Sheelagh Murnaghan, an indomitable presence in NI politics

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Change of tune – Alison Healy on not being a songbird

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‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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“I hope you will not regard me as an enthusiast,” Price wrote of it in his original letter, using a word that has changed meaning a lot in the intervening century. Nowadays an enthusiast is someone who likes gardening or golf, and is certifiably harmless. But in ancient Greece, an enthusiast was divinely possessed. And in more recent centuries it meant a religious fanatic, impervious to reason. The pejorative meaning lingered into Joyce’s lifetime.

Whether the Garrett Deasy who signed Saturday’s mass letter was an enthusiast of any kind, or just a satirist, is unclear. In any case, the keynote of his Ulysses persona – aside from the foot-and-mouth campaign – was anti-Semitism.

Having just paid Stephen Dedalus his wages, he runs after him to share a joke about how Ireland is the only country never to have persecuted the Jews. “Do you know why?” he asks, with a phlegmy laugh: “Because she never let them in.”

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Here’s more of it. When I met Frank MacGabhann to discuss his film script about the Catalpa Escape (Diary, November 2nd) recently, he was wearing a specially commissioned T-shirt with the logo of “The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice”.

That upstanding organisation flourished in Frank’s native city from 1873 until 1950. Its work is depicted in the logo’s diptych which, on one side, has a gentleman in top hat and tails burning books while, on the other, a lawman hauls a handcuffed author of filth off to jail. Frank’s T-shirt is unquestionably satirical. But its appearance in Dublin was accidentally well-timed, because one of the NYSSV’s most famous actions is the subject of a play running all this week in Dún Laoghaire’s Pavilion Theatre (and for one night later in the month – November 21st – at the Town Hall, Galway).

“The United States vs Ulysses”, by Colin Murphy, tells the story of the obscenity trials in 1921 and 1933 that first banned, then unbanned, Joyce’s novel.

The Dublin run includes a post-show discussion on Thursday (already booked out, alas) in which Irish Independent columnist Sarah Carey will interview lawyer and Irish Times columnist Senator Michael McDowell, and author of The Ulysses Trials, Joseph Hassett.

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You may remember that the film Titanic revolves around a story about a diamond necklace that went down with the ship.

Well, it’s thanks to the aforementioned Joseph Hassett that I know of another piece of jewellery sunk with the doomed vessel and itself perhaps worthy of cinema.

An “ancient seal ring”, it had been sent to America by Lady Gregory. The intended recipient was John Quinn, patron of the arts and the lawyer who unsuccessfully defended Ulysess in 1921.

Among his other talents, Quinn was a lothario, his “reputation as a pursuer and conqueror of women” matched by an unwillingness to commit to any. In his own estimation, he “succeeded in remaining a bachelor” only by “great foresight, courage, and iron determination”.

On a 1912 visit to New York, poor Lady Gregory – by then a 60-year-old widow – seems to have fallen for him hard.

“My John, my dear John, not other people’s John. I love you ...”, she wrote after returning to Ireland in March.

Then she sent the ring, mailed on the unfortunate ship that left Queenstown on April 11th. “Perhaps I am as well off without [it],” Quinn later confided in the painter Augustus John.

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There is another phantom engagement of sorts at the heart of Dance First, which I saw at the Irish Film Institute on Sunday.

The movie is mostly about Samuel Beckett, imagining he turned up in Stockholm (which in real life he didn’t) to collect his Nobel Prize in 1969 and then had a long reckoning with his past backstage.

But the inevitable Joyce is a big subplot, as is his daughter Lucia. Beckett meets her at a time when she is poised somewhere between the “giddiness” that, searching hard for a euphemism, he identifies, and the “medically mad” diagnosis given by her father.

A tragicomic relationship ends with her happily announcing Beckett’s proposal of marriage, forcing him to clarify that the event has happened only in her imagination. A furious Lucia, not having a ring to throw at anyone, has to make do with a chair.