Festivals
All Sons of Kings
By RONALD BR YDEN
ORTY-FOOT Gentlemen Only,' said the sign r behind the bath-huts on the promontory, staring north to the port named for Leary, High King who received St. Patrick at Tara, across the bay to Clontarf where aged Brian Boru broke the power of the Danes on Good Friday, 1014. Steps shelved down through the rock to the green sea-pool called simply by its depth—forty feet at high tide—where, on the morning of June 16, 1904, plump Buck Mulligan plunged like a usurping seal. This afternoon a bald, elderly gentleman, wearing a tiny vandyke and costume of similar proportions, lowered himself with dignity into the water, and shortly hung the wet black scrap on a rock; he kept his back to the hore road and the curious strollers circling the whitewashed tower on the headland above, from which a disembodied voice boomed seaward in German, like an oracle. It was one of the two records James Joyce made in his life- time, reading a German introduction to Ulysses, brought here with his cane, wallet, manuscripts and death-mask, to furnish a museum in the Martell° fort he shared as a bachelor with St. John Gogarty. On a strip of salt-yellowed lawn below, dignitaries of Church, State, Irish letters and arts, milled with American scholars and English journalists, gathered twenty-one years after Joyce's death, forty after the first publi- cation of his masterpiece, to enrol him at last among the tall gods of Ireland.
'I see we've the new Minister of Justice here,' said a young poet scornfully. 'That's a change.' His predecessor, apparently, had been involved in banning the play based on the Night-Town sequences. 'Mind you, though, the one mistake in Ellman's book is saying that Ireland banned Ulysses. We never did, you just never found it above the counter. I've seen a few displayed the last week or so. Ellman's not here, is he?' His eyes darted over the crowd outside the marquee. Literary names, one or two in the black con- spiratorial hats one thought had died out with Chesterton, greeted each other warily, with the slightly acid intimacy of people who have known each other too well too long: Frank O'Connor, back from California in Western shirt and neck- string; Sean O'Faolain, home from lecturing at Princeton; Padraic Colum—no, he was in New York, supposed to be rallying the Joyceans there. The younger writers watched them, mut- tering privately to each other, now and then breaking out in sardonic laughter.
There was no sign of John Huston, with whom the idea of restoring the tower was reported to have originated. 'He wrote a cheque—I suppose you might say that's where' it all started.' But there, enshrined in rugs and young poets like a Leinster missal, was Sylvia Beach herself, tiny, white-curled, sharp as a needle. 'I can't remem- ber who reviewed it at the time in the Spectator. But I remember who did it in the New States- man—Mr. Aldous Huxley. He thought it was a very dull book. He was mixed up with all those Bloomsbury people, of course; Virginia Woolf had decided that Joyce was underbred.' She had provided most of the exhibits from her Paris bookshop—early, small editions, records of liti- gation, photographs of Joyce with people she .had introduced him to, sitting round cafe tables on the Left Bank. It seemed if anything more her triumph than his—not only to have vindi- cated him to the world, but to have known him, Hemingway, Svevo, Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and still to be there, lionised and fussed over by young men crouched awkwardly at her feet, smiling back at them shyly; the Presbyterian minister's daughter who had published the greatest, dirtiest book of her time, and lived to reap the honours forty years later on the mythi- cal anniversary she had christened Bloomsday.
She was so real she worried you about the rest of it. Wasn't this all, strictly, what Daniel L Boorstin would have categorised as a pseudo- event : a publicist's creation, concerned not with fact but with 'image'? Was there really a new, cosmopolitan, enlightened Ireland to which that vexed, exiled ghost could be brought home? There were smells of machine-oil: last night there had been a fashion show at the Anna Livia Boutique of dresses called 'Finnegan' and 'Plurabelle,' this evening there was a dramatised version of the novel, said to be the kernel of a Twentieth Century-Fox script to be filmed by a Mr. Jerry Wald. What had they and the CIE tours of Leopold Bloom's odyssey of Dublin and the empty yellow hansoms which were supposed to have brought out visiting celebrities from Dun Laoghaire, to do with the modern Dublin we had driven through, of ten-foot television aerials and Burton tailoring and formica-countered soda-bars thundering out Presley arid Adam Faith along O'Connell Street?
But where does image-making begin? To someone seeing Dublin for the first time, as I was, it seemed impossible that this wasn't just another provincial English city, with its Chel- tenham squares and Birmingham banks and Bournemouth villas. The listed regulations in the bars and trim little parks still referred to the displeasure of Victoria Reg. and Imp., the faces in the National Gallery were our faces, bewigged and better fed. Was there a genuine difference behind the eccentric lettering on the booths which called themselves 'Telefon,' the small black English police-cars labelled `Gardai'? How much was reality, ,how much myth, in those dusty National Museum cases of greedily docu- mented injustice: Casement's cloak, Michael Powell's boots, the faces of the Pearses, Con- nolly, Kevin Barry ranged in battering accusa- tion?
I suppose I had had the answer three months earlier, at another pseudo-event three thousand miles away. On March 17, I had stood on Fifth Avenue, barred from crossing Manhattan by a quarter of a million people—policemen, pipers, drum-majorettes—parading up the island in plastic green trilbies, rosettes and badges say- ing 'Kiss Me, I'm Irish.' On the sidewalks another two or three million watched and cheered, green- wearing Negroes and Puerto Ricans and Italians and Jews, standing outside the corner bars with green-tinted beers. I'd just finished reading Theo- dore White's Making of the President, with its historical analysis of how the Irish, as the first, only English-speaking immigrants to America, had made themselves the guardians and leaders of later corners, organising that immigrants' vote against the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant ascendancy which had triumphed in the presence of a Boston Irish ward-heeler's Roman Catholic grandson in the White House; and there before my eyes was the evidence of that power within the most powerful nation in the world. And the sources of that power were images — songs, names, a few yellowing pamphlets, a bullet- sieved tunic: images which had to be made in Ireland.
But in Dublin one saw the price of being authors of a world-race. In a noisy pub off Grafton Street late at night, the young poets groaned at the load on their shoulders of that generation of Titans—Synge, Yeats, O'Casey- whose shadows darkened any path they might take. The Establishment could not, should not, have Joyce too. 'Of course, it's not Ulysses that matters, it's Portrait of the Artist. You have to live in Dublin to know what a liberation it is, reading it for the first time—it's the trap we all still grow up in, and he opened the door.' It was Stephen Dedalus arguing with Mr. Deasy 'We are all Irish, all king's sons.'
'Alas,' Stephen said.
But the capture had been accomplished. The rebel and heretic had been netted, brought home, made respectable. 'Joyce's Joy and Tears,' cried a Monday paper above a review of the drama- tisation of Ulysses, going on to speak of its 'humour and poignancy.' Icarus, the great escaper, had been fetched back from exile, yoked with the other giants in the emperor's smithies where the patterns which make the Irish a reality are forged and projected out into the world; come home to join the old Father- Artificers. ,
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