In 1933, when it was finally unbanned in the US, the language of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was described by a leading American Jesuit priest as “scummy, scrofulous, putrid, like excrement of the mind. The words are listed in the dictionary, but never in the writings or on the tongue of anyone except the insane, or the lowest human dregs. The critics said how brave. The sexual neurotics said how lovely. The normal person said I’m sick.”
So wrote Fr Francis X Talbot, then literary editor of Jesuit publication United States.
“Only a person who had been a Catholic, only one with an incurably diseased mind, could be so diabolically venomous toward God, toward the Blessed Sacrament, toward the Virgin Mary. But the case of ‘Ulysses’ is closed,” he wrote.
“All the curiosity caused by the extraneous circumstances of its being banned is over. It has now subsided into just a book. It will be discussed, undoubtedly, in the little literary pools of amateurs and young Catholic radicals. But for the most part it is in the grave, odorously,” he wrote. Fr Talbot, it appears, got that wrong.
Not all Jesuits think the same, among them Fr Brendan Staunton SJ, chaplain at Dublin’s Pro Cathedral. He has invited former RTÉ actor and radio producer Gerry McArdle to arrange readings from James Joyce to mark Bloomsday on Thursday next at St Kevin’s Oratory in the Cathedral.
Among the planned excerpts are some from Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both of which were also on the Vatican’s index of banned books before that practice was ended in 1966 by Pope Paul VI.
Thursday’s event, which begins at 11.30am and should last about an hour, is the first such reading of Joyce in the Pro Cathedral and will include the (in) famous hell fire sermon from the Portrait as well as excerpts from Ulysses about Fr Conmee, a Jesuit priest who was on the staff at Clongowes Wood College Co Kildare and Belvedere College in Dublin when Joyce attended both.
Main reader is Gerry McArdle, who plays Buck Mulligan in the celebrated — often described as definitive — 1982 RTÉ recording of Ulysses. He will be aided and abetted by singer Raphael Kelly, who is well known in Dublin music circles — All are welcome.
