Ulysses in Nighttown

My brief mention of James Joyce’s Ulysses on Monday reminded me that I possessed, hidden somewhere deep in a file or cupboard, a theatre programme dating from 1958. And, with a little digging, I found it.

The theatrical production which the programme describes was entitled Ulysses in Nighttown, and it was, as the name suggests, a stage adaptation of Ulysses – or at any rate parts of it, chiefly the section set in Nighttown.

The particular production of the play which I saw was mounted at the Rooftop Theatre in Greenwich Village, and it opened on 5 June 1958. I must have seen it soon after that.

Ulysses in Nighttown was conceived, the programme tells us, by Burgess Meredith, who was a well known actor from the 1930s on but subsequently became much more famous (e.g. as the trainer in Rocky and as Penguin, the arch enemy of Batman). The play was, however, ‘dramatised and transposed’ by Marjorie Barkentin. ‘Transposed’, I suppose, because the Nighttown sequence of Ulysses is already in dramatic form. And ‘dramatised’ because the play version begins, like the book, in the Martello tower. (I was in the very room only last summer, I’ll have you know, and I have a James Joyce mug for my coffee to prove it.) The play ended (as I recall), with part of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. But there was also, again if my memory does not deceive me, a final coda, perhaps transported from earlier in the text, in which Leopold Bloom sees his dead son Rudi, and calls out his name, in distress.

Why have I kept this programme? Because I have never seen any theatrical production which matched this one, that’s why. OK, so I was young and relatively easily impressed. But you have to admit that this was one hell of a show. I live in hope of seeing something more impressive before I die, but things are not looking hopeful.

Why was Ulysses in Nighttown so memorable? Well, apart from the obvious fact that it was based on one of the most durable novels of the twentieth century, one key factor was that it starred Zero Mostel as Bloom.

Now Zero Mostel was never a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart type movie star, but he was, I venture to suggest, a connoisseur’s actor. He won three Tonys for three Broadway shows in a row, so he knew how to do the job. And he seemed to me then, as now, a natural for Bloom. Whom he made, of course, funny. (Not that Mostel had to distort anything to do that, because Ulysses is full of humour.) It turns out that Mostel won an Obie for this particular performance, and no one can be surprised at that.

Subsequent performances of this play do not seem to have been plentiful. The original production came to London in about 1959 or 1960, when it did not set the town on fire, and it was revived on Broadway in 1974, again with Mostel in the lead and Burgess Meredith directing. There was also an Irish production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990. And, er, that seems to be about it.

No doubt one of the reasons why the play is seldom performed is that it calls for a large cast. My programme lists 16 performers, who between them play 62 named characters. Far too many, in other words, for most producers today. A cast list of more than about five scares the poor devils to death.

It was this theatrical experience which encouraged me to spend a bit more time reading Ulysses than I had done up to that point – though I was certainly well aware of Joyce and had been somewhat stunned by picking up a copy of Finnegans Wake. And the main purpose of this post is to encourage you to have a look at the book, if you have not done so already.

Ulysses is quite unlike any other novel of my acquaintance in that it is probably not a good thing (in my opinion) to start at the beginning and read through to the end. A passing acquaintance with the structure of the book will provide a little illumination, and after that the best plan, I believe, is to dip into it at random.

You could do a great deal worse than to start by reading the Nighttown episode. In my Penguin edition, which runs to some 700 pages in total, Nighttown begins on page 425, and you can recognise it because the text is set out as if it was a play script. Which, of course, it is.

Now -- who says I don't appreciate literary fiction? It just has to be good, that's all. And I mean genuinely good, not just good according to the professors of English literature.

Blooms of Dublin is Anthony Burgess's musical version of Ulysses by James Joyce

good puzzle would be cross dublin without passing a pub

 

The Joyce Project

https://www.joyceproject.com/1

A Year of Ulysses Reading

 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/111r-lrNUdxNt4wjD_cOuBQB17kGNEJwyPibDL2hhOBI/htmlview?pli=1

Joyce's book of the dark, Finnegans wake

Jung on Joyce

 

A Chinese Translation of Finnegans Wake

Corrections of Misprints in FINNEGANS WAKE

Tilly

Hugh Kenner's Dublin's Joyce: A Reassessment

In the mid-1950s James Joyce was still a figure that intimidated most academics. The Dublin about which he wrote obsessively seemed as distant and foreign as Tolstoy's St. Petersburg. Dubliners had a gritty edge that directly challenged post-World War II optimism. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man made stylistic leaps and presented thematic challenges that disrupted the normal course of reading. Ulysses was a book that far more scholars owned than read. And neither New Criticism nor old Historicism seemed suited to illuminate what, if anything, was going on in Finnegans Wake. All that changed with the publication of Hugh Kenner's Dublin's Joyce. With energy, humor, and erudition, Kenner offered incisive views of each of Joyce's works, and made a convincing argument that they could not only be read but enjoyed by a wide range of individuals. Kenner's writing irrevocably changed the way we read the canon of James Joyce. Nonetheless, it seems appropriate, nearly fifty years after the book's appearance, to inquire into its continuing critical worth.

When I asked the three young critics whose essays follow this brief introduction to write about Dublin's Joyce, I do not think that I consciously had any specific model in mind, and I did not give them a template for their critiques. Of course, subconsciously I expected them to produce exactly the sort of essay that I would have written--and, in fact, did write ten years ago--confirming all of my views and vindicating all of my beliefs. Thank God, none of them did that.

Instead they have offered, in voices uniquely their own, sharp analyses and rigorous reappraisals. Readers already aware of their work will hardly be surprised. David Gardiner, Lauren Onkey, and Joseph Kelly are excellent representatives of a well read, articulate, and insightful generation just now beginning to make its mark on critical studies. They are full of exactly the sort of self-confidence that young scholars need, especially when confronting the critical heritage of Joyce studies. I have read with interest and profit their evaluations of Kenner's impact. And if I come away not agreeing with everything that [End Page 134] they say, I certainly do not agree with everything that Kenner opines. The consistent thread in all of their studies is the sense of déjà vu that Kenner's work produces, and, if for no other reason than to remind us of our intellectual antecedents, it is a good policy to revisit periodically such criticism.

Of course, these young critics do more than that. David Gardiner's essay presents a thoughtful and enthusiastic recapitulation of the structure of Dublin's Joyce. In language that celebrates Kenner's impact on Joyce criticism, Gardiner gives a good overview of Dublin's Joyce. It respectfully acknowledges the debt that current readers owe to Kenner's early work, and at the same time sets the book in critical perspective.

Lauren Onkey's assessment takes a more edgy tone. With an eye toward current trends in critical thinking, she raises useful questions about the interpretive limitations that contemporary readers, unaccustomed to Kenner's style and unsympathetic to his epistemology, will find in Dublin's Joyce. That is not to say that Onkey simply dismisses Kenner's early work, for she gives a balanced sense of its continuing value within the historical perspective that she assumes.

Joseph Kelly begins with an account of first meeting Kenner, and then goes on to show how the personal and the public always coalesce. Using an allusion to Chapman's Homer as a subtle evocation of Keats's exuberance, Kelly nicely captures the enthusiasm that Kenner can evoke, but he does more than simply venerate an older critic. With a deft understanding of how context always informs comprehension, Kelly underscores the significant impact that Kenner's writing had and still has upon Catholic readers of Joyce

Ulysses - First Edition

RTÉ Radio - Reading Ulysses

https://www.rte.ie/readingulysses/episodeguide.html


Introduction
Joseph O'Connor, Edna O'Brien and Gerry O'Flaherty recall the events and characters of this day and explore why James Joyce's fictionalised events of an ordinary day should become such a literary masterpiece.
Episode 1 Telemachus
Stephen breakfasts at the Tower in Sandycove.
Episode 2 Nestor
Stephen teaches in Dalkey.
Episode 3 Proteus
Stephen walks along Sandymount Strand.
Episode 4 Calypso
Blooms has breakfast at 7 Eccles Street.
Episode 5 Lotus Eaters
Bloom goes to the Post Office on Westland Row and then buys some soap at Sweny's.
Episode 6 Hades
Bloom Attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam.
Episode 7 Aeolus
At the offices of The Freeman's Journal, Bloom and Stephen cross paths.
Episode 8 Lestrygonians
Blooms eats lunch in Davy Byrnes.
Episode 9 Scylla and Charybdis
Discussions about Shakespeare at the National Library.
Episode 10 Wandering Rocks
Dublin's citizens go about their day.
Episode 11 Sirens
There is music at the Ormond Hotel where Bloom stops for food.
Episode 12 Cyclops
The Citizen holds fort in Barney Kiernan's Pub.
Episode 13 Nausicaa
Bloom watches Gerty MacDowell on Sandymount Strand.
Episode 14 Oxen of the Sun
Blooms goes to visit Mina Purefoy at Holles Street Hospital, and then joins the Medical Students.
Episode 15 Circe
Stephen and Bloom go to Nighttown.
Episode 16 Eumeus
A sober Bloom looks after a drunken Stephen at the Cabman's Shelter.
Episode 17 Ithaca
Bloom and Stephen go back to Eccles Street where they talk.
Episode 18 Penelope
Molly Bloom recalls her day.
The music of Ulysses
In the final programme of the series, Barry McGovern and Bernard Clarke discuss the music of Ulysses.

Finnegans Wake - text analysis

http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/fw-3.htm

Genetic Joyce Studies

http://www.geneticjoycestudies.org/

Wake Resources

http://finwake.com/ - Annotated Text

http://www.rosenlake.net/fw/FWconcordance/ - Concordance of Finnegans Wake

http://fweet.org/ - Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury

Joyce reading Joyce

The best paragraph about cricket ever written - Finnegan's Wake

Kickakick. She had to kick a laugh. At her old stick-inthe-block. The way he was slogging his paunch about, elbiduubled, meet oft mate on, like hale King Willow, the robberer. Cain-maker’s mace and waxened capapee. But the tarrant’s brand on his hottoweyt brow. At half past quick in the morning. And her lamp was all askew and a trumbly wick-inher, ringeysingey. She had to spofforth, she had to kicker, too thick of the wick of her pixy’s loomph, wide lickering jessup the smooky shiminey. And her duffed coverpoint of a wickedy batter, whenever she druv behind her stumps for a tyddlesly wink through his tunnil-clefft bagslops after the rising bounder’s yorkers, as he studd and stoddard and trutted and trumpered, to see had lordherry’s blackham’s red bobby abbels, it tickled her innings to consort pitch at kicksolock in the morm. Tipatonguing him on in her pigeony linguish, with a flick at the bails for lubrication, to scorch her faster, faster. Ye hek, ye hok, ye hucky hiremonger! Magrath he’s my pegger, he is, for bricking up all my old kent road. He’ll win your toss, flog your old tom’s bowling and I darr ye, barrackybuller, to break his duck! He’s posh. I lob him. We’re parring all Oogster till the empsyseas run googlie. Declare to ashes and teste his metch! Three for two will do for me and he for thee and she for you. Goeasyosey, for the grace of the fields, or hooley pooley, cuppy, we’ll both be bye and by caught in the slips for fear he’d tyre and burst his dunlops and waken her bornybarnies making his boobybabies. The game old merri-mynn, square to leg, with his lolleywide towelhat and his hobbsy socks and his wisden’s bosse and his norsery pinafore and his gentleman’s grip and his playaboy’s plunge and his flannelly feelyfooling, treading her hump and hambledown like a maiden wellheld, ovalled over, with her crease where the pads of her punishments ought to be by womanish rights when, keek, the hen in the doran’s shantyqueer began in a kikkery key to laugh it off, yeigh, yeigh, neigh, neigh, the way she was wuck to doodle-doo by her gallows bird (how’s that? Noball, he carries his bat!) nine hundred and dirty too not out, at all times long past conquering cock of the morgans.

re: Joyce

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

—Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher's tone:

—For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.

—Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?

He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

—The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!

He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.

—My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:

—Will he come? The jejune jesuit!

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

Finnegans Wake

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur — nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-linsfirst loved livvy.