On Saturday, June 16, devotees of James Joyce will be celebrating Bloomsday. More than 100 years ago, on June 16, 1904, Mr. Leopold Bloom and young Stephen Dedalus separately wandered the streets of Dublin, crossing paths with teachers, priests, medical students, journalists, a woman in labor, publicans, bar maids, drunks, rabid Irish jingoists, sentimental babysitters and at least one adulterer, “Blazes” Boylan, not to overlook Stephen’s shiftless father, Simon, the mourners at Paddy Dignam’s funeral and the whores of the phantasmagoric Nighttown. Eventually, Mr. Bloom rescues Stephen from a Nighttown brawl, and the pair return to 7 Eccles St., where Mrs. Bloom — nee Marion Tweedy and known as Molly — will eventually fall asleep after, yes, the most famous stream-of-consciousness reverie in all of modern literature.
That, in a nutshell, is the action of “Ulysses” (1922), generally regarded as the greatest 20th-century novel in English. Of course, there’s a little more to the book than that, as generations of readers, critics, scholars and exegetes well know. Chapters loosely update episodes of Homer’s “Odyssey”; the language sings throughout; narrative conventions are ignored or revolutionized; literary and social taboos are violated (one scene takes place in an outhouse); and the whole book shifts constantly between interior monologue and outward events, between the starkest realism and the subtlest symbolism. “Ulysses” is arguably the most carefully wrought novel ever written — every word, down to its spelling, is there for an artistic reason.
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
It is also a highly autobiographical book, which is why James Joyce’s life has attracted so much attention, starting with the outstanding reminiscences of his school friend Constantine Curran, the transcribed conversations with Frank Budgen, a memoir by his much put-upon younger brother Stanislaus and an early biography by Herbert Gorman. All of these were dwarfed, however, by Richard Ellmann’s monumental “James Joyce,” published in 1959 (revised in 1982) and judged by novelist and Joycean Anthony Burgess, as well as by many readers, as the finest literary biography of the century.
Since then, all other biographical writing about Joyce has had to contend with the looming presence of Ellmann’s book. One major critic, Hugh Kenner, strongly lamented its influence, feeling that it had improperly shifted attention away from the work to the life, making the biography, in effect, a fuller, more straightforward version of “Ulysses” and even, to some extent, of the earlier Bildungsroman, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916), and the short story collection, “Dubliners” (1914).
Most readers who come to Gordon Bowker’s “new biography” will thus want to know: Does this book replace Ellmann? It doesn’t, but it does offer a less awestruck, more warts-and-all account of the writer’s life and character. Hitherto best known for his biographies of Malcolm Lowry and Lawrence Durrell, Bowker writes clearly and forcefully, acknowledges the work of earlier scholars and critics, and generally shies away from any extended analysis of the literary works themselves. His focus, then, is almost strictly on Joyce the human being, the scion of a dysfunctional family, a bohemian misfit at University College Dublin, a Berlitz schoolteacher in Trieste, and, finally, an acclaimed, if sometimes controversial, writer-genius in Paris and Switzerland. He was an excellent amateur tenor, too.
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