“An Illiterate Underbred Book”: Ulysses and Bloomsday at 100

An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. — Virginia Woolf, on James Joyce’s Ulysses

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Self-portrait of an artist as a young girl ?

Why Ulysses? Why do I go back to it? It’s so long. It’s messy. I like long, messy books. My life-long search for an Irishness I could really get behind surely explains in part why I dip into Ulysses when I am feeling discouraged as a writer. I saw/heard the moment I read the first page of “Telemachus” that the language and sound of Joyce’s work was already in my ear, maybe in the way light opera was in Joyce’s. The New York Irish are so embarrassingly Irish, with their shitty, right-wing politics, meat-headed anti-intellectualism, and disinterest in art. I’m generalizing. About what I come from so fully and adore. It’s also me. But I found this “Father said” culture itchy even as a girl. I recognized as I started to write, garbage usually, on a daily basis, that my Irish beloveds were full of lyric and charm. Not lucky charm not gift of gab, but really music. There had to be more to us, as I came to see myself as an artist as a young woman coming of age in New York City.

My grandmother, Mary Madigan, who only went as far as second grade before circumstance require that she quit school to crochet piecework in what she called both “the lace factory” or “the lace school,” but her manner of speaking was loaded with incredible Hibernian rhythms and emphases and “turns” (of phrases) my ear found legit poetic. Born in the year 1900 in the Norwest of Ireland, she came to New York at the age of 25. She had been American for 45 years by the time I hit 20. There was poor person music and peculiar attention to detail in her talk. Whether obtained through DNA or osmosis.I seemed to have some myself,

I had found a copy of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in my parents’ meager home library and I read it on Rockaway, Beach 98th, during the summer following my junior year of high school. Something in the way Mary Madigan spoke was there too. A few years later I bought a copy of Dubliners in Books and Company on Madison Avenue with waitressing money. It was only a matter of time before I got to Ulysses.

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USELESS

If memory serves, it was my second year of college when I entered Professor Michael O’Loughlin’s Ulysses seminar at Purchase College. Purchase was a relatively small school at the time, and the school attracted lots of very smart artists who didn’t have money. It also attracted young writers and literature students who had bounced out of other schools, or had knocked around New York or the world for few years before throwing down with college.

I, who had not bumped around at all. I had ridden nearly every one of New York City’s subway lines — BMT, IND, IRT! and had read a lot of books and worked a few jobs by the time I began college just after turning 18, but I had never been on a plane. I had been a good French student who dropped the ball on fluency. I knew I was a writer, but I often found myself intimidated by the slightly older, far more confident writers/literati in my humanities courses. So I was a little nervous about this “upper division” class led by the tweedy looking British lit scholar from Yale.

The class was mostly assembled before the guy leading it came in. The first student I noticed saw as I entered the room on the afternoon of the first class was a big and tall guy, Averill, who sat smoking a cigarette and nursing a “tall boy” Bud. T’was in the late 70s, in the days of green blackboards.

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