February 2, 1922: James Joyce Publishes "Ulysses"

February 2, 1922: James Joyce publishes Ulysses, which, in 1999, was called, by Time magazine and some other lists, the best novel of the 20th Century.

It was published on the author's 40th birthday. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. On June 16, 1904, he had his first date with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway. That date became the day on which the events of Ulysses took place -- known to the book's fans, in honor of the character of Leopold Bloom, as "Bloomsday."

Finding opportunities in Ireland, still controlled by Britain, limited, James and Nora chose exile. He taught English in Trieste, Italy, then worked in a bank in Rome, then back to his teaching job in Trieste. He returned to Dublin in 1912, to introduce his son Giorgio to his family, but was disillusioned by his professional prospects there. He left, and never returned to his hometown. 

He spent World War I in Zürich, in neutral Switzerland, and finally got published, with The Dubliners in 1914 and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. That year, the Easter Rising occurred, beginning the Irish War of Independence. He wanted Ireland independent, but not through violence, and stayed away from the cause. After the war, he moved to Paris, where he befriended publisher Sylvia Beach, who paved the way for the publication of Ulysses, first by sending chapters to magazines, and eventually by publishing it in full book form.

It was titled Ulysses because Joyce intended it as a modern retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, where the lead character was named Odysseus in Greek, translated as Ulysses by the Latin-speaking Romans. But, as the TV show Seinfeld would be said to be, 70 years later, it was really a story about nothing, pretty much just people talking, with a few sex acts thrown in. Indeed, Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann described Leopold Bloom, the Odysseus stand-in, as "a nobody," who "has virtually no effect upon the life around him." 

Ulysses had begun to be serialized in 1918, even though Joyce didn't finish it until 1921. It was declared obscene by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and was immediately banned in Britain for perceived obscenity. Beach published Ulysses in full in Paris, but the book was only available in America in bootleg form until 1934, when the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses that the novel was not too obscene to be allowed in the country.

But the sales of Ulysses in countries where it had been allowed stoked Joyce's ambition. He said he wanted to write the most difficult book in the English language. In 1924, with Finnegan's Wake, he may have succeeded.

His vision was beginning to fail. Already wearing thick glasses, he was completely blind in his left eye by 1930, and began wearing an eye patch as well as glasses. He moved to London with Nora and their children, but it was only there, in 1931, that he and Nora actually got married. They went back to Paris, where he began helping Jews escape from the Nazis. They fled France before the Nazi invasion, and returned to Zürich. There, James Joyce died on January 13, 1941, a little short of his 59th birthday.

Nora outlived James by 10 years. Their son Giorgio, a singer, died in 1976, at 70. Their daughter Lycia, a dancer, was diagnosed as schizophrenic, was committed in 1951, and lived under psychiatric care until her death in 1982, age 75. Giorgio's son, Stephen James Joyce, worked with charitable organizations. With his death in 2020, Joyce's bloodline died out.

On March 14, 1967, a film version of Ulysses premiered, directed by Joseph Strick, and starring Milo O'Shea as Leopold Bloom, Barbara Jefford as Molly Bloom, Maurice Roëves as Stephen Dedalus, Sheila O'Sullivan as May Golding Dedalus, T.P. McKenna as Buck Mulligan, and Fionnula Flanagan as Gerty MacDowell. The film takes place in Dublin, but in what was then the present day.

Every year, on June 16, the anniversary of Bloomsday, Joyce fans -- in Dublin, New York, and elsewhere -- commemorate the novel by doing pub crawls to Irish-themed bars and reading selections from the novel. As with Sauk Centre, Minnesota and Sinclair Lewis, Dublin seems to love its favorite literary son more than he loved his hometown.

I had never read Ulysses, but I had a plan: I was hoping that, on June 16, 2004, the 100th Anniversary of Bloomsday, it would be available at the East Brunswick Public Library in my New Jersey hometown, and I would read it then. It was available, and I took it out. The clerk gave no reaction, so either she didn't know the significance of the date, or she didn't know about the book's salacious content.

I got 8 pages into the thing, and decided that I hated it. I could not get into it at all. I took it back the next day, and have never tried it again. Nor do I intend to. Anybody who wants to call it a great novel, they are free to do so. But count me out.

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February 2, 1922 was a Thursday. Baseball and football were in the off-season. There had yet to be a major professional basketball league. The NHL season was underway, but no games were scheduled. Therefore, there were no scores on this historic day.