But all is changed in Ireland: Mother Church is going through an agonizing reappraisal, the Irish censor hardly knows what to do with his idleness and priggishness is as rare as chastity.
If you’d been in Dublin on June 16 this year, you might have observed people parading through the streets in garb more appropriate to the year 1904. Many a tourist wondered if he/she had gone into a time warp–but there was an explanation, and the explanation is that Dublin has caught on.
June 16, as you know, is Bloomsday, the day on which Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, wandered the city and had adventures while Stephen Dedalus, young intellectual and artist in his 20s, wandered and adventured, too. James Joyce tells the story in “Ulysses,” and if you have a few years to spare, you’ll drift slowly into that day in Dublin, 1904. Wave goodbye to family and friends, for you may never emerge again.
So because of “Ulysses,” Dublin, for a day, celebrates a book that many promise to read as soon as the kids are grown. The Joyce industry in Dublin burgeoned after New York joined the celebration more than 25 years ago. At the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on upper Broadway (which has since closed) the owners invited people in to read “Ulysses,” start to finish. Then Isaiah Sheffer invited various actors and literary types to read the book at Symphony Space, again on upper Broadway, which is a high IQ plateau. Of course, word of what the Yanks were up to drifted across the Atlantic. There was always that little tension between Dubliners who know their Joyce, for Jaysus’ sake, didn’t they live and breathe the air, didn’t they walk the streets, and the Yank professors–what the hell did they know with their unreadable disquisitions that would drive you to drink?
Nevertheless, the Joyceans kept coming. Of course, there were Yeatsians, too, but they were confined to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, where there was bonhomie and lubrication. Yeatsians are said to be a better class of people than the Joyceans, and there is talk they might have it out some day on the Great Bog of Allen, a great battle to determine whether Ireland should go up or sideways.
But there’s a younger generation that doesn’t give a fiddler’s fart about the foregoing, and on the evening of Bloomsday 2001 you would have found them at St. Anne’s Church, an Anglican church if you don’t mind, on Kildare Street. They were up there before the altar of God reading from a new novel, “Yeats Is Dead.” Fifteen writers had contributed each a chapter. Roddy Doyle started it, a chapter one packed with murder and all kinds of skulduggery. And as each of Ireland’s brightest writers–the likes of Conor McPherson, Anthony Cronin, Joseph O’Connor–weighed in, the Ireland we all knew and loved–who gets the farm, the priest and the housekeeper, the terrible English, goodbye Johnny dear–drifted into the Celtic twilight, forever.
Twenty-five years ago the book they were reading up there would have been banned outright. Here in the presence of the Plain People of Ireland and the dead generations, these writers were presenting a tale the likes of which you’d never hear in such sacred confines–unless, of course, you were reading the Old Testament. Here, if you listened to these chapters, was the New Ireland with fornication rampant (and diverse ways of doing it), blasphemy (no respect for the Sacred Heart, not a thought of eternal damnation), politics (lechery and larceny on the highest levels). Every one of the seven deadly sins is committed with gusto and there’s simply no respect for authority, no veneration for James Joyce.
There was suffering connected with this novel–that of the one who had to write the last chapter, where you had to sort out a plot that became more and more entangled, where each new writer liked to murder and dismember characters from previous chapters. Each writer set out to outdo his or her predecessors in villainy and murder and all sorts of perversions, and it was the task of the chapter 15 writer to sort out the carnage. I was the writer of chapter 15. But it was God’s work. Of every copy sold a pound was donated to Amnesty International.
There are still giants of another generation in Ireland who have suffered the censor’s lash. John Montague travels the land, singing, and Seamus Heaney digs, digs and sings.
Walk the streets of New York and you’ll discover that most courageous of novelists, Colm Toibin. You’ll run into Colum McCann, now deep into a novel that ranges from the horrors of the Battle of Stalingrad to the world of ballet in New York. The young Irish writers are traveling, beyond the reach of censor and dogma.
How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree, Tulsa, Dubrovnik?
