Rock of ages – Ray Burke on Molly Bloom, Gibraltar and Galway

Twice in Molly Bloom’s celebrated cadenza at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses she recalls being kissed “under the Moorish wall” in Gibraltar by a young sweetheart named Harry Mulvey.

Why Gibraltar? And why Harry Mulvey? The answer to both questions may lie in Galway.

Molly says that Harry Mulvey gave her a Claddagh ring that “must have been pure 16 carat gold because it was very heavy”. This suggests a link to Galway where the prototype Claddagh ring was created by local goldsmith Richard Joyce around the year 1700.

Galway is also where James Joyce’s partner and muse, Nora Barnacle, was born, reared, and courted by a neighbour named Willie Mulvagh. And Galway city contains a well-known Moorish wall at its landmark 16th-century Spanish Arch, under which Nora and Mulvagh might have kissed early in the 20th century.

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Gibraltar-born Molly was Marion Tweedy before she married Leopold Bloom. One of their wedding presents was a Connemara marble clock from county Galway. The Gibraltar childhood and adolescence that Joyce created for her may have been because he always considered Galway to be a Spanish city.

“You only have to close your eyes to this irritating modernity for a moment to see in the dim light of history the Spanish city”, he wrote after visiting Galway in 1912.

His observation was published in an Italian newspaper, but his article contains the word Spain, Spanish or Spaniard 11 times.

Joyce’s obsession about Nora’s teenage Galway lovers fuels much of his writing. The real Willie Mulvagh, her last Galway boyfriend, was an aspiring accountant in a local mineral water company. Eight years after Joyce and Nora had begun living together, he asked her: “Can your friend in the soda water factory... write my verses?”

Molly’s interior monologue that fills the last episode of Ulysses (without punctuation and with only a slight pause between its eight marathon sentences) is based on Nora Barnacle’s speaking and writing style.

“Do you notice how women when they write disregard stops and capital letters?”, Joyce asked his brother Stanislaus in a 1906 letter accompanied by a note from Nora that illustrated his point. “And no stops ... a few simple words”, as Molly says.

Molly Bloom shares the initials of another of Nora’s lost and lamented Galway lovers. Michael Bodkin, who died aged 20 when he was courting Nora, haunts the final pages of Joyce’s short story The Dead in the same way that Harry Mulvey haunts much of the second half of Ulysses. Only about one-tenth of the words in The Dead mirror Nora’s relationship with the doomed Michael Bodkin, but they up-end the entire thrust and tone of the story, linking it forcefully to Galway even though it is set predominantly in a house on Usher’s Island on Dublin’s quays.

Outside Dublin, the only places in Ireland where Joyce spent any time were Wicklow (in early childhood), Kildare (for schooling), Cork and Mullingar (both briefly) and Galway (twice). Galway was the only place west of the Shannon that he visited and he spent more time there than anywhere else in the weeks before he left Ireland for the last time in 1912.

A lifelong city dweller, Joyce must have taken from Nora and from Galway the pastoral flow of words that he gave to her alter ego Gretta Conroy in the throes of her grieving for her lost Galway love in The Dead. “We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel”, she cries to her husband, “like the way they do in the country”.

In a letter to Nora in 1909, when he was visiting Dublin while she stayed in Trieste with their two young children, Joyce wrote: “I leave for Cork tomorrow morning but I would prefer to be going westward, towards those strange places whose names thrill me on your lips, Oughterard, Claregalway... Oranmore, towards those wild fields of Connacht in which God made to grow ‘my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower’”.

“I was a Flower of the mountain”, Molly remembers in the final lines of Ulysses, " yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used... and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I though well as well him as another...”.

Molly’s musings take place at the end of a long midsummer day in Dublin: June 16th, 1904. It was on that day – 120 years ago this month – that Joyce and Nora went “out, together, walking” for the first time.