Sunday Miscellany have recorded a live show from the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire to mark a century of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Listen to a pair of pieces from the show here - the remainder will feature in a special Ulysses edition of Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday 19 June.
Listen above to United States versus One Book Called Ulysses, by Colin Murphy
It is 1932 - the age of jazz - and Prohibition. Ulysses has been found obscene by the American courts. You can't buy it lawfully - all you can get are contraband copies of the Paris edition or pirated excerpts published by an actual pornographer. Then a young publisher, Bennett Cerf, spots in Ulysses an opportunity to make his name. He visits Joyce in Paris, secures the rights, and hires a leading lawyer, Morris *Leopold* Ernst.
If Bennett Cerf spends thousands of dollars producing an edition of Ulysses, only to have it seized and destroyed, it could bankrupt him - not to mention landing him in jail. So Morris Ernst comes up with a brilliantly simple strategy: spend sixty francs on a single copy of Ulysses in France, attempt to smuggle it (badly) into the US, have it seized as obscene, and then challenge that in court. By a quirk of US law, it is the item smuggled that is put in the dock, not the smuggler - and so the case will become United States Versus One Book Called Ulysses.
Now, that I know about this case at all is due to a chance encounter during lockdown. I was on my daily ramble along the Royal Canal when, at Cross Guns Bridge, I bumped into - in the two-metre-distant sense - Des Gunning. Cross Guns achieves fleeting fame in Ulysses: Leopold Bloom's carriage pauses there en route to Paddy Dignam's funeral, and Bloom gazes along the canal, observing a man working on a barge, the Bugabu; perhaps another case of Joyce being ahead of his time for, indeed, you can often see a Bugaboo there today, being pushed one-handed by an exhausted new parent carrying perhaps an oat-milk latte in the other.
Not only does Des Gunning mark Bloomsday, but he and his fellow travellers have taken to gathering a month *after* Bloomsday to mark Paddy Dignam's month's mind. Des had a lockdown project idea - an online reading of the judgement in the Ulysses case. A judgement is undramatic, I said - the drama is in the argument. Are there court reports? Could we reconstruct the court room conflict?
Listen below to February the Second by Tim Carey
On the morning of February 2, 1922 Sylvia Beach stood on a platform at the Gare de Lyon in Paris waiting for the first copies of Ulysses to arrive on the Dijon express train. She had gone to enormous lengths to get Joyce a copy of his book on this day, because February 2nd was his birthday and it was a matter of great significance to Joyce that his masterpiece Ulysses was published on February 2nd, 1922, his 40th birthday.
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February 2nd is also significant for me. But my February 2 was a Friday in 1979. I was 12 years old and had been living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. My main concern in the run up to February 2nd was not the publication of one of the world's greatest novels but that I was going to miss the latest episode of the new hit comedy series, Mork and Mindy, starring Robin Williams. Because on Thursday February 1 I began a journey to Ireland and, I was pretty sure, Ireland did not have Mork and Mindy on TV.
On the morning of 1st February I sat in the backseat of a station wagon. In the front was my mother and my step father of 4 years. In the back was my 16 year old brother Dan and 14-year-old sister Mary Kate who had an intellectual disability. I remember the conversation was normal, as if we were driving to the mall. But that journey was the last time our family was together. It was the last time that the word 'family’, as in a family unit, would sit comfortably with me for many years.
Colin Murphy and Tim Carey's scripts were recorded at the recent Sunday Miscellany Live at Pavilion Theatre, marking a century of Joyce’s Ulysses. Listen to the full programme from that event on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday, June 19th from 9.10 pm here – funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media - featuring writers Declan Kiberd, Joseph O’Connor, Emer O’Kelly and more.
