Quote of the Day (James Joyce, With a Comic Take on a Most Serious Subject)

“-How’s Willy Murray those times, Alf?

-I don’t know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel street with Paddy Dignam.  Only I was running after…

-You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?

-With Dignam, says Alf.

-Is it Paddy? says Joe.

-Yes, says Alf. Why?

-Don’t you know he’s dead? says Joe.

-Paddy Dignam! says Alf.

-Ay, says Joe.

-Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff.

-Who’s dead? says Bob Doran.

-You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.

-What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five…What?….And Willy Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim’s…What? Dignam dead?

-What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who’s talking about…?

-Dead! says Alf. He’s no more dead than you are.

-Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.” —Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

Today is “Bloomsday,” named for Leopold Bloom, the everyman hero of Ulysses. All over the world, James Joyce aficionados are celebrating by reading, often in its entirety, this novel covering a single day in the life of this Dubliner and two people in his life: his wife Molly and the young man he’ll encounter in his contemporary Odyssey, Stephen Dedalus.

A college professor of mine once joked, “You wouldn’t believe how much it opens some people’s eyes once they realize that dashes in James Joyce represent quotation marks.” The author would definitely have chuckled—partly at the thought that he could flummox readers with the simplest of challenges to typographical conventions, and partly because, for all the deeply serious content of this novel, so much of it is the product of his wildly funny sensibility.

This dialogue sequence, from the “Cyclops” episode of the book, is a good example of Joyce’s antic muse. The arch highlight of this exchange in Barney Kiernan's pub —“They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow”—preserves in fiction a one-liner by the author’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, told at home.

The dialogue illustrates Joyce’s gift for capturing the rhythms of speech—his “ear,” if you will. Hearing it spoken—preferably, by someone Irish—helps you appreciate its laugh-out-loud moments. (I urge you to click on this YouTube audiobook link of the chapter, read by Dubliner Tadhg Hynes, so you can better understand what I’m talking about.)

How did Joyce develop his ear? I think some of it represented a heightened aural sense that functioned as compensation for his severe visual impairment. His gift for mimicry was paralleled by his talent for music. 

As Natalie Kopp observed in this 2015 post from the blog “Musical Geography,” Joyce was “himself was an amateur musician, playing piano and singing. His father had been a tenor, and for a short while Joyce, too, aspired to the same career.”

The exchange among Joe Hynes, Alf Bergan, and Bob Doran (awakening, in utter incomprehension, from having passed out at the bar) also highlights Joyce’s challenge to traditionally sacred subjects—not just to Mother Church, but here, to death itself.

It took a celebrated film funnyman to pay tribute to a writer whose comic gifts are often overshadowed by his reputation for obscurity. The Oscar-winning script for Mel Brooks’ The Producers borrows the name of Joyce’s Irish-Jewish protagonist Leopold Bloom for his own mild-mannered accountant. I think Joyce would have relished Brooks’ alteration of earthy, even raunchy, humor with sly literary allusions.

(Michael Sherman’s blog, “My Journey With James Joyce,” offers up his take on other Joyce gems, including this passage from Ulysses’ “Nestor” episode:

"—Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

—Iago, Stephen murmured.")

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on “Every Life’)

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”—Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on Secrets)

“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.” —Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

A short sentence, as far as Joyce was concerned—but illustrative of the way he loved to play with words.

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, With an Irish View of ‘Revolutions in the World’)

“The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.” —Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

Appreciations: Kirk Douglas at 100: Hollywood’s Driven Ulysses

The first time I recall seeing Kirk Douglas on the big screen was in early elementary school, at a former depot station that my hometown was trying to determine how to re-use. As part of that effort, the city replayed, on a temporary basis, old family-oriented movies (e.g., Disney’s Johnny Tremain, Kidnapped) that were cheap to rent and wouldn’t compete with the cinema just down the street.

Fifty years later, I can’t recall how much the Douglas feature, Ulysses, resembled its source material, The Odyssey. But the choice of the title character said much about Douglas’ own personality and career: resourceful, indomitable, possessed of an iron will that carried all before him.

In later years, Douglas would remember his co-star on other films, John Wayne, as a “personality star” who more or less played himself from project to project. But surely, Douglas—born 100 years ago yesterday in Amsterdam, N.Y.—infused the characters he played with his own charm, complexity and intensity.

You could not take your eyes off him, and for reasons other than that famous cleft chin that female film watchers (and, by his own admission, female co-stars) could ever get enough of. As great stars do, he could hold the screen with his gaze. He could be cajoling or intimidating, with one often tumbling immediately after the other.

But these different behaviors derived from the same ineradicable hunger, as this child of Jewish immigrants—“the ragman’s son,” in the title of his first autobiography—grasped all too well. And a mass audience understood, too. Filmgoers might find his characters cruel and hateful at times, but in recognizing their source, glimpsed their flawed humanity, too.

Like his contemporary and frequent co-star, Burt Lancaster, Douglas burst onto the Hollywood scene immediately after WWII. That massive conflict exposed Americans to a darkness in the world they had only dimly perceived before Pearl Harbor. It also prepared filmgoers for a cinema that acknowledged this reality and actors who could embody it.

Film noir, the genre of tough guys trying to survive in a dangerous, treacherous world, furnished an ideal vehicle for both Lancaster (The Killers) and Douglas (The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Out of the Past). Both actors could have used their muscular physiques simply to star in the kind of superhero roles often associated with Victor Mature and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they were interested far more in how that kind of strength lent their characters simultaneously a foothold and a vulnerability in a violent, corrupt environment, especially in boxing (Lancaster again, in The Killers; Douglas, in his first Oscar-nominated role, Champion).

Uninterested in playing conventional superheroes, Douglas was drawn more often to obsessives. Their desires and wounds translated into quests that could lift those around him—or, if they could not go along with his journey, upend them utterly. That carried over into many different characters in many different genres—athlete, policeman (Detective Story), reporter bent on a scoop (Ace in the Hole), movie producer (The Bad and the Beautiful), depressed painter (Lust for Life), slave who defies an empire (Spartacus), and modern-day rebellious cowboy (Lonely Are the Brave, a personal favorite of the actor). 

One of Douglas’ obsessions, after playing the role on Broadway, was bringing Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to the big screen. After trying for more than a decade, only to be told that he had now become too old to play the part of psychiatric-institute rebel Randall McMurphy, Douglas passed the property along to son Michael, who produced the Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson in the role that Kirk had coveted.

Yet Douglas couldn’t turn away from this character who, like himself, defied the odds. More than 20 years after he played the role, he found a character with strong similarities to it: a feisty former baseball coach confined to an eldercare institution who finds himself in opposition to its administrator (Elizabeth Montgomery) in the TV movie Amos. 

In his personal life, Douglas has survived much as he has aged: a double-knee replacement, heart surgery to install a peacemaker, a helicopter crash that killed others on board, and a massive stroke that necessitated nearly endless rehabilitation. In 1996, still less than a year after the stroke, he accepted an honorary Oscar for his 50 years in the movies. He looked into the audience. "I see my four sons," he said. "They are proud of the old man!"

As well they should be. 

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on Escapes)

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”― James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

This Day in Literary History (Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and the Irish Literary Revival)

February 2, 1922—On the morning of his 40^th birthday, James Joyce was presented with the first copy of his novel Ulysses, by his friend Sylvia Beach, owner of the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Co. As my college friend Steve was good enough to remind me recently, the great event occurred on Groundhog’s Day.

Only 1,000 copies of the book were printed in that initial run, but news about its extraordinary nature soon spread. Not everyone was pleased. At least a few Irish citizens, for instance, were so annoyed by Joyce’s modernist masterpiece that they probably wished that he, like the groundhog, had instead chosen to hibernate a while longer. One of those was Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the artistic directors of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre and a longtime patron of writers.

In one chapter of Joyce’s novel, for instance, he had referred to her as an “old hake”--an Irish term for a gossipy woman. She would also have read (or, at least, heard) a line about “our peasant plays,” an unmistakable reference to the type of material that she, William Butler Yeats, and John Millington Synge had staged at the Abbey. Synge himself, dead 13 years, came in for a jab. Shakespeare, one of Joyce’s characters notes, was the “chap that writes like Synge.”

It’s been months since I saw Woody Allen’s very fine Midnight in Paris, but now I’m a little chagrined that he didn’t get around to depicting Joyce among the 1920s notables that Owen Wilson encounters on his nocturnal excursions. With his deteriorating eyesight, his drinking and his fine tenor voice (so fine that many, including wife Nora, felt he should have been a singer rather than a writer), Joyce would have made as distinct an impression as any of the culturati in the final cut of the movie, even Ernest Hemingway.

“Jim” Joyce (as the young American called him) and Hemingway had something else in common besides their Paris days: they frequently bit the hand of anyone kind enough to help them when they were starting out. Hemingway’s works are littered with the victims of his numerous literary assassinations: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harold Loeb, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos, to name just a few.

At least let’s give Joyce credit for this much: those whom he attacked had plenty of opportunity to prepare themselves for what he might say.

Take Yeats, for instance. The great poet and friend of Lady Gregory is believed to have met Joyce only twice. The first and more memorable of the two encounters occurred in October 1902. The conversation might have taken an inexorable turn for the worst when Yeats, slightly annoyed by Joyce’s suggestion that the folklore-derived plots of Yeats’ plays evidenced the poet’s deterioration, pointed to a page in one of Joyce’s short stories and countered that he had “got that from somebody else who got it from the folk.” Joyce, already certain that he was sui generis, insisted that it came from his own mind.

As Joyce got up to go, he turned to Yeats and asked how old he was. On being told 36 (one year younger than he actually was), the 20-year-old Joyce responded: “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.”

Joyce, in other words, was already demonstrating a youthful arrogance perhaps only exceeded by Orson Welles at the time of Citizen Kane: the kind that led Herman Mankiewicz, the filmmaker's collaborator on that classic, to crack, "There but for the grace of God, goes God."

One month after Yeats had his encounter with Joyce, the poet arranged for the young man to meet Lady Gregory. You have to ask yourself why Yeats did something so preposterous -- and to someone who was his friend, for heaven's sake--when his own encounter with this young welp turned out to be so unsatisfactory. The only explanation I have is that misery loves company.


Early in 1903, Lady Gregory arranged for the Daily Express to send Joyce books to be reviewed. This would help alleviate his money problems while getting his name before the public. One of the books the editor of this publication mailed Joyce was Lady Gregory’s own Poets and Dreamers. I'm sure there was an expectation that Joyce would go easy on it.

You get an idea of the tone of the subsequent review in this phrase: “in the fullness of its sterility.”

Oh, did I forget to mention that Lady Gregory was not happy one bit about this?

Perhaps Joyce felt the aid he received was not commensurate with his genius. Perhaps he hated the feeling of being beholden to anyone. At the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, vows to “forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race.” That’s a grandiose ambition, but, because it acknowledges no influences or creative forbears, it’s also filled with isolation and alienation.


So, as novelist-critic Thomas Flanagan wrote in his essay collection There You Are, Joyce managed, in Ulysses, to accomplish "an Irish rebellion of the deepest and the subtlest kind, a rebellion within the word, within language itself." It was an act of separation not merely from the "acquired speech" of Stephen's English dean of studies, nor even from the Roman Catholic Church from which Joyce famously fell away, but also from Gregory, Yeats, and the other Protestant lights of the Irish Literary Revival.

Ironically, for all of Joyce’s attempts to pick a fight with Lady Gregory, he  shared with her a highly developed ural sensibility--or, if you will, an ear for dialogue. It would serve both exceedingly well throughout the rest of their careers.

Lady Gregory's attempt to capture the spoken cadences of Irish peasants represented an important advance in a country where previous writers had settled for thick and awkward dialect that turned people into caricatures. And in Ulysses, almost by way of compensating for what he could no longer see, the visually impaired Joyce created dialogue and interior monologues ("stream of consciousness") that caught ordinary Dubliners on a seemingly ordinary day that his prose made extraordinary.