I thought Bloomsday was last bank holiday weekend in Phoenix Park?
No, that was Bloom, Ireland’s largest gardening festival. Bloomsday is a celebration of James Joyce’s literary masterpiece, Ulysses, named after its anti-hero, Leopold Bloom, and based on his all-day peregrinations around Dublin on June 16th, 1904.
So it’s been celebrated annually since 1904?
Not quite. The novel is set then but was first published in Paris in 1922. The first mention of a celebration is in a letter from Joyce received by his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver on June 27th, 1924, which refers to “a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day – 16 June”. Adrienne Monnier, the partner of Ulysses’ publisher Sylvia Beach, celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first Bloomsday in 1929 with a Déjeuner Ulysse at the Hôtel Léopold near Versailles.
So it’s been celebrated annually since the 1920s?
Again, not quite. Joyce may be a national treasure today but he spent most of his life in exile and Ulysses, although not banned, was not available in Irish bookshops or libraries until the 1970s. When Joyce died in Zurich in 1941, Joseph P Walshe, the secretary of the Department of External Affairs in Dublin, asked the Irish envoy, “Did he die a Catholic?” and instructed him not to attend the funeral.
In 1954, however, the writers Flann O’Brien, late of this parish, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, together with publisher and publican John Ryan, Joyce’s cousin Tom Joyce and AJ Leventhal, a lecturer in French at Trinity College, set out on an all-day pilgrimage in two horse-drawn cabs, starting at the Martello tower in Sandycove and continuing in Davy Byrnes pub on Duke Street (where Bloom eats a Gorgonzola sandwich with a glass of burgundy). But the inebriated party got no farther than the Bailey pub, which Ryan owned. The drunken spectacle is immortalised in video, including some public urination on Sandymount Strand.
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So it’s been celebrated annually since 1954?
Er, not quite. On Bloomsday in 1967, Kavanagh, O’Brien and Ryan “rescued” the door from 7 Eccles Street, the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, which was being demolished to make way for the Mater Private Hospital, and placed it in the Bailey Pub. “I declare this door shut,” Kavanagh reportedly said. The door was later donated to the James Joyce Centre, which in 1994 organised the first weeklong Bloomsday Festival.
Right. So it’s been celebrated annually since 1994?
Yes! It’s an ideal opportunity to dress up in your Edwardian finery, eat offal and listen to reams of rich and ribald prose. This year’s highlights include a two-hour walking tour leaving James Joyce Centre, 35 Great George’s Street North, at 11am daily until the 16th and Jim Norton reading from Ulysses on June 16th at 11am at the James Joyce Tower & Museum.
