Bloomsday Revisited

Martha’s Vineyard Times, June 21, 2001: “Bloomsday Revisited” by Dawn Aberg.

The literati so rarely give themselves something to celebrate, beyond the birthdays of dead authors.  Maybe that’s why June 16 is such a beloved date for fans of words.  Bloomsday. The date on which the events of James Joyce’s Ulysses unfold.

According to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellman, the author seized on June 16 as a tribute to his wife Nora.  It was, after all, on just such a Dublin Thursday in 1904 that he fell in love with her.

Perhaps because of the paucity of literary feast days, a rich tradition of Bloomsday celebrations has grown up in the last century.  Year after year, with varying degrees of polish and sobriety, Joyce’s dense, punny word games and searing social insights have been shared among his admirers.  By 1982, the tradition was formalized with public readings in Dublin and at Symphony Space in New York City.

As is our Island wont, local observances of the holiday have taken on a special character. Over the last 23 years, Vineyarder John Crelan has produced and directed an eclectic, shifting mix of Joyceana, for a Bloomsday that changes every year.  He eschews the more academic tradition of staid public reading, veering instead in the direction of interspersed performance bits, poetry and prose laced with music, songs which Joyce himself sand and admired.

No two Crelan Bloomsdays are identical.  Last summer, 20 performers combined to present a complex, vaudevillian show.  This past Sunday night’s performance at the Katharine Cornell Theatre was a simpler evening, not exactly a quiet one (there is a deliciously boisterous quality to these performances), but certainly more relaxed, under a heavy summer rain.

And yes, astute reader, last Sunday was June 17, not, therefore, Bloomsday proper.  However as all good Joyce fans know, Bloomsday runs into the wee hours of the morning of the 17^th, with Molly Bloom musing on life, love, and adulterous marriage well past midnight, in one of the most famous soliloquies in English literature. 

 Thus last Sunday seven players spun out their tributes to Joyce one by one, with selections that revealed lesser known aspects of  the author’s work (his radical political vision, for instance) as well as monologues based on its prototype: Homer’s Odysseus, proper.

Dublin born David O’Docherty opened the evening with a prologue of old, modal Irish tunes played on the tin whistle and a low pitched reed flute.  In good Irish tradition, he mixed his music with storytelling and humor.  “If you listen carefully,” he suggested, “you will hear fairy wings among the raindrops.”

Some tunes had names that were stories in their own right, as in “We Only Drink to Forget We’re Alcoholics.”  But whatever its title, each air was granted its own remarkable introduction.  “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now,” was one such launch into a tin whistle ditty.

Cahal Stephens, who has participated in every Crelan Bloomsday since 1989, performed a little known Joyce piece, a newspaper article written in Trieste in 190.  “The Last Fenian” not only gives a history of the radical tradition of Irish politics.  It conveys a sense of the fierceness of Joyce’s political critique, his gleeful reflections on the haplessness of the Irish political spirit.  “In Ireland, at just the right moment,” Joyce wryly noted through Mr. Stephens’ voice, “an informer always appears.”

Music in the program underscored the close connection between music and words in Joyce’s work.

Singer Michael Calmes, accompanied ably by John Whiteside, performed classic 19^th century Irish songs, songs Joyce himself was known to sing.  With a clear sweet arc into his higher range, Mr. Calmes hung notes in the air in a classic Irish tenor style.  But it was with a Benjamin Britten arrangement of “The Last Rose of Summer,” based on the traditional Irish air “Groves of Blarney,” that Mr. Calmes stole the audience’s heart.

 Then it was on to Ulysses itself.

Boston actress Pam Rogers gave us this year’s Molly Bloom, the randy wife of Leopold.  Ms. Rogers exuberantly pressed through the last pages of her famous soliloquy right up to the novel’s ineffable last line:  “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

And Donal O’Sullivan handsomely portrayed her tormented alienated husband. As Bloom, he presented the flirtation with Gertie MacDowell, a pretty girl he comes to discover is lame.  “Jilted beauty,” Mr. O’Sullivan mused in character. “A defect is ten times worse in a woman.”  His mental peregrinations bring him back to the point where Molly leaves us:  the moment in which the two not so much fell in love, as realized they could not escape each other.

By far the biggest treat of the evening was a last minute addition to the program, a wildly dramatic performance of Joyce’s poem “Gas from a Burner” by Gerry Yukevich.  Dr. Yukevich stormed into the theater precisely as the feisty and scatology-prone Joyce would have done, slicing through lines the author had scratched out in a train station, an angry response to yet another publisher’s rejection.  A scathingly ambivalent diatribe on Irish character, the poem is a good example of why James Joyce does not endear himself to the Celtic sentimentalist crowd, either in this country or in Ireland.

 But for those folks who love a heretical romp through the darker side of Celtic tradition as their brand of Irish, stay tuned, Martha’s Vineyard.  Same time, next year, but with no “same” about the ever-changing show.  Be there for yet another Bloomsday. “Glory-O, Glory-O to the bold Joycean men,” to paraphrase a lyric. Don’t miss it.