EDNA O’BRIEN WAS a young pharmaceutical student in the Dublin of the 1950s who instead craved to be a writer.

Dismissing her own ability, she later wrote: “I did not know how I would achieve this and I safely say that my ambition outdistanced my talent.”

The catalyst for change came when she stumbled on Introducing James Joyce, a fourpence well-thumbed book in one of the many dusty secondhand bookshops that then dotted the city.

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On reading it, she remembered how “I saw that literature was not mysterious lofty stuff but the rough and tumble of everyday life.” Going one better than that, Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange would maintain that “if ever there was a writer for the people, Joyce was that writer.”

Ulysses, Joyce’s story of one day in the life of the Irish capital, is about everyday life and the people of a city. Love, lust, anger, jealousy, pride and all human feeling are contained within a book written in a rambling flow of consciousness, in which the city of Dublin itself emerges as a central figure. 

Traditional narrative plot is lost, as are chapters as readers were accustomed to them. Instead, we are treated to a series of episodes that play out in private and public across the city of Dublin on 16 June 1904. 

It is a book that divided opinion instantly, to one reviewer it was little more than “literary Bolshevism. It is experimental, anti-conventional, anti-Christian, chaotic, totally unmoral.”

The reviewer was at least half right, in that it is experimental and anti-conventional by design and not by accident. To the reviewer of one British publication, it was a work “that appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic”.

Other reviews were glowing; to T.S Elliot, “it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” 

His father’s son

Joyce, born at 41 Brighton Square in Rathgar in 1882, was deeply shaped by his father John Stanislaus Joyce, a proud and uncompromising Parnellite (today buried near to Charles Stewart Parnell in Glasnevin Cemetery).

John was somewhat chaotic, struggling financially and with alcoholism. It is a testament to the difficulty of Joyce’s childhood financially that so many plaques dot Dublin on both sides of the Liffey marking family homes, as John and his family endured “flits by moonlight as they moved house again and again to avoid landlord and bailiff.” 

There is undoubtedly much of Joyce writing about his own father in the words of his character Stephen Dedalus, who tells us in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that his father was “a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past.”

In spite of his father’s failures, he retained a tremendous and deep affection for him, recalling that “hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books came from him”, and that “the humour of Ulysses is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin’ image.”

A writer in exile

At 22 and 20, Joyce and his beloved, Nora Barnacle, left Dublin behind them in the winter of 1904. They had, in the words of her biographer Brenda Maddox, “tremendous courage.  But so had 37,413 other people from Ireland that year.”

Still, this exile was different. While Joyce was gone from the island of Ireland, Irish society would remain his fixation as a writer. Perhaps he needed the comfort of distance to grapple with it.

Joyce began writing Ulysses in 1914. Over the next seven years, life would bring him from Trieste to Zurich and onwards to Paris.

In the latter, he would meet the American bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach, who presided over the influential Shakespeare and Company at 12 Rue de l’Odéon, Paris VI. Ernest Hemingway remembered the bookshop fondly:

On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living.

Beach encouraged, nurtured and financially supported writers. In a bookshop where the lending library was consistently busier than the till it reflected her own generosity of spirit.

Beach agreed to publish Ulysses, thus ensuring that the city of Paris – and her name – would forever be synonymous with the masterpiece. Before this, Joyce had serialised parts of the work in The Little Review, an American literary journal.

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Outrage at depictions of sexual acts had led to the publishers of that journal being fined $50 each for giving space to “indecent matter.” The decision of Beach to publish the full work was a brave one.

A moment in time

It seems remarkable that a book so detailed in his descriptions of a city – from funeral homes to public houses, and from pharmacies to the printing rooms of newspapers – should have been written so far from home. 

Ulysses, Joyce scholar David Pierce noted, “furnishes us with so much information that Joyce believed, somewhat fancifully, if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt using the information contained in his novel.” His attention to detail in recreating the city can seem even obsessive, from street characters to trams and the lingo of the locals.

He joked that he had “the mind of a grocer’s assistant” for recalling detail, but more than anything it reflects the labour of love and attention to detail of years of study.

Our protagonists are not particularly important people in the life of the city, nor are they perfect people if such a thing exists.

Instead, they are everyday people concerned with work, relationships, how others see them and how they see themselves. We are brought into the minds of these people as they traverse the city Joyce called the “Hibernian Metropolis.”  To Edna O’Brien, “no other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recreated a city.”

A banned book?

None could deny that Ulysses was explicit. George Bernard Shaw, who was no prude, wrote to Sylvia Beach having read pieces of it that:

I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30 and force them to read it, and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity.

He nonetheless acknowledged it was accurate, telling her “I have walked those streets and know those shops and have heard and taken part in those conversations.”

The book encountered real opposition internationally, leading to the courtrooms and the United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, where Judge John M. Woolsey concluded that Ulysses could be admitted to the United States.

Unlike most critics of the book, he had taken the time to read it. Some Irish eyebrows were perhaps raised by his observation that “in respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.”

The book was never banned in Ireland, despite the presence of an incredibly active Censorship of Publications Board, who banned literature with such zeal that critics wondered if they could possibly be reading everything put before them.

Despite this, the book was not widely available in the country until the second half of the twentieth century, Charles Eason, of the famous Dublin bookshop, would inform the writer George Russell in 1926 that “as to James Joyce, I need not tell you we have not got his Ulysses, nor have we got any other work of his.”

Today, monuments adorn the real buildings that Joyce’s characters passed through in his mind on that June day in 1904. A house on Clanbrassil Street, where the character Leopold Bloom was supposedly born, carries a plaque which tells us “Here, in Joyce’s imagination, was born in May 1866 Leopold Bloom.”

Fact and fiction meet, just as in the book.

Dublin has embraced Joyce and is increasingly grateful that he gave the Liffeyside city its place in literary history. It is a book that has encouraged others to write, and a book that reminds us that everyday life is a story worth telling.

Donal Fallon is a historian and the presenter of the Three Castles Burning podcast.