3 Bloomsday hacks
Reading Ulysses will take 22 hours. These will take 3 minutes.
16 June 2025 Portland OR - Ninety-one years ago this Spring Americans who loved contemporary literature and liked a highball now and then were in heaven. Sure the Depression had dropped on them, but Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933, and the next day a federal judge ruled that Ulysses was not obscene, unbanning a book that had been unavailable to the American public since it was published in Paris in 1922. By June 1934, many would drink to that. Legally in both instances.
Ulysses didn’t meet the metrics of obscenity
One man made the call to let adventurous American readers read Ulysses: District Judge John Munro Woolsey, who sat on the highest federal court in Manhattan. No jury was involved. His ruling set a profound precedent for literary freedom in America. Judge Woolsey gave five reasons why Ulysses isn’t obscene.
Unlike less literary explorations of sexual relations, Joyce’s novel HAD NO SUGGESTIVE TITLE.
Ulysses was TOO LONG TO BE CONSIDERED OBSCENE. 265,000 words. Edna O’Brien estimated it took Joyce 22,000 hours to write it. Marathon readings of Ulysses today usually last about 36 hours.
There’s NOT A SINGLE ILLUSTRATION in Ulysses. Lots of songs but no smut.
SEX DELAYED. Judge Woolsey read Ulysses cover to cover before making his ruling. “The novel didn’t pander to base instincts – the first sex scene was several chapters in – any reader looking for such would have quit reading by then,” he wrote. “In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of the characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring,” wrote the Anglo Saxon jurist.
Ulysses was PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE, hardly a Times Square porn publisher. Random House had released works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Frost, Emily Bronte and many more of the highbrow writers who don’t get banned, they get assigned in English class.
The Joy of Sex (1972) is still banned in some jurisdictions. As for Ulysses, if a book store doesn’t have it, it’s not because it’s been banned.
The second-best biography of James Joyce is by Edna O’Brien
Her biography of James Joyce (1999) is reputedly one of the best; a lively introduction to the writer, his works and his life. When the manuscript was submitted to the prickly Joyce estate for approval, no changes or deletions were requested. O’Brien wrote of his early years in Dublin, “He was notorious in the bars, an arrogant young man in frayed clothes, white rubber shoes and a yachting cap, eager to parry, to dissimulate to discuss Euclid or Acquinas or Nelly the Whore and to warn adversaries that he would lampoon them in his satirical verses.”
The best James Joyce biography by consensus is the one written by Richard Ellman.
Ulysses was 265,000 words long. Edna O’Brien’s bio of the author is a trim 55,000 words. Here’s a piece I wrote last July when O’Brien died.
Edna O’Brien on Joyce. “His imagination was meteoric, his mind ceaseless in the acruing of knowledge…” Salman Rushdie in 2014 summarizes Ulysses in 51 words (see below).
The elevator pitch for Ulysses
A man runs around Dublin all day in June 1904. That’s the one-line description of James Joyce’s novel that readers saw last year in a literary quiz in the New York Times. This minimalist ten-word summary of what many contend is a Modernist masterpiece is concise, true, but with just a bit more depth, here is Salman Rushdie’s recap.
“Middle aged, cuckolded advertising salesman walks around Dublin for the day, leches after club-footed girl at beach, goes to red light district, gets even more drunk, meets young guy, brings him home in the middle of the night, maybe tries to pimp out his wife to young guy. The end.”
Name the character and the film.
The Producers (1967). Gene Wilder played Leopold “Leo” Bloom. Why Mel Brooks named this accountant after the character in Ulysses is…intriguing. If you watch closely you’ll see that the date on Max Bialystock’s office calendar is June 16.
Join us for a belated Bloomsday
On June 19 at Kells Restaurant in Portland (112 SW Second Ave.) the Portland Hibernian Society will hold its annual Bloomsday celebration at Six P.M. All are welcome.
Stephen Rea as Leopold Bloom.
DISCLAIMER - Though I hold a leadership position with the Portland Hibernian Society, any opinions given at Gallagher’s Celtic Corner are strictly those of the author and no one else.
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