Joyce started writing Ulysses in 1914 in Trieste. On 16 June 1915, he wrote to his brother Stanislaus that he had finished the first episode of Ulysses. He would work on the novel in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris under strenuous circumstances. After Ulysses was published on 2 February 1922 (Joyce’s 40th birthday) in Paris, some of Joyce’s friends and many admirers began to mark the 16th of June as ‘Bloomsday.’
On 16 June 1924, Joyce was in the hospital, his eyes bandaged after having surgery on them (this was one of the dozen of such procedures he would have in his lifetime). Friends had sent him a bouquet of white and blue hydrangea flowers. White and blue, the colours of the Greek flag, were the colours chosen by Joyce for the cover of the now-iconic cover of Ulysses. Joyce despondently scrawled in his notebook: ‘Today 16 June 1924 twenty years after. Will anybody remember this date.’
As it happened, that day saw the first recorded celebration of Bloomsday, just two years after the novel’s publication. We are not too sure of the details, but Joyce’s long-time patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, wrote a letter to Joyce informing him that ‘a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day — 16 June’ had gathered in Dublin.
The first major celebration of Bloomsday came in 1929. Adrienne Monnier, the partner of the publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach, published the French translation in February. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first Bloomsday, she organised a ‘Déjeuner Ulysse’, a luncheon at the Hôtel Léopold (appropriately enough) near Versailles that June. The event, however, took place a little late, on the 29th rather than the 16th.
No further Bloomsday celebrations were recorded up to Joyce’s passing in 1941. Sadly, Joyce marked Bloomsday in 1940 by fleeing occupied-Paris.
The first Bloomsday celebrated in Ireland was in 1954 on the 50th anniversary when the writers Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien as well as a few others visited the Martello Tower at Sandycove (where the beginning on the novel takes place) and Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street (where Bloom eats a gorgonzola sandwich with a glass of burgundy), reading parts of Ulysses and drinking a great deal as they went. They intended to end in the infamous Monto or ‘Nighttown’ district from the ‘Circe’ episode, although due to the prevailing social mores of the time (and the excessive drinking), they did not make it past Davy Byrne’s.
Slowly but surely, Bloomsday grew in Ireland and beyond. It was first celebrated in the United States in 1962 at the Gotham Book Mart in New York. The James Joyce Society of New York delievered a full-length reading of Ulysses, a tradition that is still carried on. That same day, the Martello Tower at Sandycove was opened to the public as the James Joyce Tower & Museum, with Sylvia Beach on hand at the opening ceremony.
On Bloomsday 1967, Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, and James Ryan ‘rescued’ the door from No. 7 Eccles Street (which was being demolished to make way for the Private Mater Hospital) and placed in the Bailey’s Pub on Duke Street. ‘I declare this door shut,’ Kavanagh was reported to have said. The door stayed in the Bailey’s for decades until it was moved to the James Joyce Centre in the 1990s, where it remains.
This ‘rescuing’ notwithstanding, Bloomsday celebrations were rather muted in the 1960s and 1970s, having become synonymous with ‘academics’ and ‘experts’ who ‘drove away’ ordinary Dubliners. Moreover, Ireland still had its fair share of weariness of Joyce, who clashed with the conservative elements of Irish society that proved pervasive, not the least of which were enforced by the Catholic church.
The centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982 helped to change this attitude towards Bloomsday. Increased publicity, commemorative material, and special events helped to enliven Irish people’s interest in Ulysses and Joyce. Among other events, RTÉ released a 30-hour reading of the novel and a bust of Joyce was unveiled in St. Stephen’s Green. A massive cidywide reconstruction of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode involving 150 actors in period costume took place. The James Joyce Centre was opened with Lord Mayor Alexis FitzGerald Jr. handing over the keys of No. 35 North Great George’s Street to Senator David Norris.
By the late-1980s, Bloomsday was an established annual event — with complications. On one Bloomsday, for example, there were only 66 visitors to the James Joyce Tower & Museum, half of which were a school group supposed to be at the Maritime Museum, which was closed! Despite this seeming disinterest, every year saw some new anniversary or publication which linked in the festivities, and it continued to grow and grow. In 1994, the first Bloomsday Festival, the weeklong celebration we know today, was organised on behalf of the city of Dublin by the James Joyce Centre.
Today, Bloomsday is one of Dublin’s (and the world’s) most iconic literary and cultural celebrations.
