Sir, - Please forgive the pedantry. In reviewing certain "salutary" mores arising from Naomi Wolf's latest book, Promiscuities (May 3rd), Kevin Myers remarks: "In this year of 1997, it [sex] surrounds us, as it surrounded the citizens of Dublin in the year of 1903, when Ulysses was written."
Joyce in fact wrote the substance of his best known novel between August 1914 and late 1921 while residing in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, setting its action in Dublin on Thursday, June 16th, 1904. This date commemorated Joyce's first courtship with Nora Barnacle, the young chambermaid from Galway who had caught his attention in Nassau Street six days before, and who would bear him a son and daughter and eventually marry him in London in 1931.
While much of Ulysses is frankly and humorously concerned with sexuality, it is also in view of its date, a multifaceted examination - and poignant affirmation - of the marriage relationship. In its penultimate episode, Leopold Bloom is after a most eventful day (culminating in his befriending Stephen Dedalus) reunited with his wife, Marion (Molly), in their bed she following her intimate and often erotic reveries on men (including her lover, Blazes Boylan), concludes with fond memories of Poldy, to whose amours, as they reclined among the rhododendrons on Howth Head, she acquiesced, breathing the most positive word in the English language, "Yes."
Ulysses can thus be read as a modernday epitalamium, a kind of bridal song. - Yours, etc.,
High Road, Letterkenny, Co Donegal.