Celebrating Bloomsday in 2015: from Stephen Fry to high-brow high teas

Sixty-one years after the first official Bloomsday celebration, events taking place across the city this week show a vibrant and evolving Irish literary scene. With literary salons, an evening with Stephen Fry, a Joycean pub crawl and a street party among the highlights, there is a distinctly international feel to this year’s programme, which runs from today until the anniversary proper on June 16th.

Although the term literary salon has more than a whiff of hipster about it, its origins lie in 17th-century France. Artists and the general public mingled in informal settings to discuss art and literature, expanding on Horace’s view of the arts as existing “either to please or to educate”.

A series of salons that began in April in the James Joyce Centre in Dublin seems to be meeting this brief. A Feast of Epiphanies, organised by the centre and independent publisher Tramp, considers the works of Joyce in relaxed evening events that give audience members the chance to sit down to high tea with a bunch of contemporary writers and discuss the literary master.

The first event with Roddy Doyle, Oona Frawley and Kevin Power was a sell-out success. The second, taking place this evening to tie in with the Bloomsday celebrations, is also sold out. It features authors Belinda McKeon, Dermot Bolger and Paul Murray, who will be interviewed by children’s author and journalist Anna Carey.

No room for VIPs

Sarah Davis-Goff, co-founder of Tramp, says the series aims to break down perceived barriers and create a friendly environment where writers can sit easily with readers around a meal: “Nobody is on a podium around the dinner table. Anne Enright said in a recent interview that there’s no VIP room in the arts here. That’s such a wonderful way to phrase it; Ireland is a great place to try out an idea like this.”

With literary festivals running all over the country at this time of year, there can be a repetitive feel to some events. The same names appear on different billings, the same formats are used – an author reading from their work, a Q&A, a book signing. How does the Irish scene compare to literary events in other cultural hubs? Belinda McKeon has lived in New York for much of the last decade. Based in Brooklyn, the Longford author says that the scene she’s familiar with across the water is “also quite local and small.”

Launches aren’t a big deal in New York, according to McKeon, with the focus more on readings and panel discussions. “The panels tend to be curated around themes, and are generally of a pretty high quality,” she says. “The quality of speaker is also high because of the fact that so many writers live in the New York area. The kind of people you might travel to a festival to hear are often reading at a Tuesday-evening event in the local bookshop, which is nice. But the festival circuit doesn’t really exist in New York in the same way as in Ireland. The number of festivals [here] has gone through some kind of nuclear manipulation in the last few years.”

Another noticeable change in the time McKeon has been away is the rise in the number of Irish writers: “There are more writers now, and there are more young writers. At readings and launches, I’m struck that a large number turn up to support one another. Or maybe they’re turning up to check one another’s new novels out, I don’t know.”

Gavin Corbett, whose third novel Green Glowing Skull came out last month, says the literary landscape in Ireland has completely changed since he published his first book in 2003: “My first novel fell out quietly, and at that stage there didn’t seem to be any ‘scene’ for people like myself starting off. I didn’t know any writers 12 years ago and I didn’t know how I’d go about meeting them. [Now] there are more writers and more books being published by independent Irish publishers. There are launches to go to almost every week, events organised by Stinging Fly and Gorse journal, salons and soirees in the Irish Writers Centre and other places.”

Corbett is reluctant to describe this altered landscape as a “scene”, however, concerned it might suggest a homogeny: “[especially] in terms of people exchanging ideas and all writing about the same themes and in a stylistically similar way.

“I think every emerging writer in Ireland right now is wary of being bracketed together in a ‘scene’. It allows for people who perceive themselves as being outside that scene to collectively criticise those inside it.”

Value of events

What do Ireland’s more established writers think of these new types of literary events? Dermot Bolger is looking forward to this evening’s event but says he’s not sure what to expect: “At my age it’s just nice to get out in the evenings. When they had the first Irish Franco Literary festival in Dublin Castle some years ago I came by pushbike, did a morning reading there, then cycled to Mountjoy prison to do a pre-arranged reading and talk to prisoners, then lashed back on the bike to take part in an afternoon event in Dublin Castle.”

Bolger says the value of literary events, irrespective of format, is in connecting writer and reader and allowing ideas to be shared. In this evening’s event, Bolger’s own writings on Joyce and more recent publications such as Dubliners 100 will be used as the basis for discussions.

Davis-Goff says she’s hoping for an exchange of ideas and opinions. “Joyce is famously difficult,” she says. “But he can also be bawdy and hilarious. An event like this is a great way to show off this dichotomy. Belinda, Paul and Dermot have all spent time with certain aspects of Joyce’s work, perhaps more than many of us, and I believe their insights are going to be unique and smart.”

Discussions are also likely to be spirited and irreverent, if McKeon’s views on the Bloomsday celebrations are anything to go by: “Not very important at all. It’s an invented holiday. Just like on other holidays, writers are more likely to be actually writing, or worrying about something they’re meant to have finished writing, than larking about in hats, eating gorgonzola or whatever it is.”

There’s no gorgonzola, or offal for that matter, on the salon’s high tea menu, which includes Teeling Whiskey glazed ham, Skellig white chocolate scones and salmon rillettes on homemade Guinness bread. Guests will be welcomed to the Joyce Centre and ushered to seats at one of three round tables. Each table will have a writer and the interviews will take place between courses.

“We wanted to see if we could do something that allowed readers to take a more active role in the whole thing,” says Mark Traynor, managing director of the Joyce Centre. “Sitting at the table with an author and being able to directly engage with them was a simple way of doing that.”

A simple format but ideas that will no doubt be more complex. According to Bolger, both Bloom and Joyce give Dubliners different legacies. “Bloom is the sort of patriot who does essential, unglamorous things, like starting credit unions, because a nation is not built by stunts but by the due instalments plan,” he says. “As a writer I’m proud to share the same city as Joyce. But as a citizen I’m also proud to share the same city as Bloom.”

Fry interview

Another sell-out at this year’s festival is Senator David Norris in conversation with the British writer and comedian Stephen Fry. The planning for this and other events began a year ago, according to Traynor, who says David Norris helped to facilitate the evening with Fry.

When it came to who might interview Fry, Traynor says he “thought of David, dismissed it as being a bit mad because he isn’t a professional broadcaster, but then everyone I spoke to thought it would be incredible. The basic premise is that we get these two funny, articulate guys together and see where it leads. The start point will of course be Joyce but just as the world of Ulysses is vast and boundless, the conversation is free to go wherever it goes.”

Norris, often seen in a straw hat at this time of year, says the Bloomsday celebrations have become “a mass event, good natured, well behaved, full of nostalgia and with more than a nod in the direction of the great book.” What does he say to sceptics who view Bloomsday, and by extension Ulysses, as being for a literary elite? “The same boyos have been saying for years that Bloomsday and my participation in it have vulgarised and popularised the whole thing. They can’t have it both ways.”

Traynor encourages anyone who thinks that Joyce is for an elite to try reading groups and other Joycean forums, whether online or at places like the centre: “Joyce is hard. Life is hard. Anyone can give it a go and if they get stuck there’s a community of people out there who can help. That for me is the great irony of Joyce’s later, more opaque works – their supposed difficulty makes them incredibly democratic in that it draws people together who help each other figure out the tricky bits.”

As for Norris, he says he has no particular approach in mind for the Fry interview: “I shall have a conversation with him about life, love, James Joyce, Irish literature and his wonderful riposte on being asked when he knew he was gay – that when he was born he looked back at the womb and said ‘I am not going back up there in a hurry.’” Sounds like just another ordinary literary Q&A.

For a full programme of events go to http://bloomsdayfestival.ie/programme/

Favourite Joyce quotes

“Bloom’s words to Stephen in the cabman’s shelter [in Ulysses], when they amiably agree to disagree about life, and Bloom says: ‘I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. All these wretched quarrels, supposed to be about honour and flags. It’s money at the back of everything, greed and jealousy.”

Dermot Bolger

“Finnegans Wake, and the line ‘over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow’. Only joking: I haven’t actually read Finnegans Wake, and I just googled that quote, but that’s what everyone is going to do, isn’t it? Out of the Joyce works I have read, which is everything but the Wake, I like the line in ‘The Dead’ where Gretta gives out about being forced to wear galoshes by Gabriel. ‘Guttapercha things’. Did you know entire essays have been written on the symbolism of the galoshes? I mean, they’re wellingtons… “

Belinda McKeon

“Ulysses is my favourite Joyce work. It’s such a massive work in every way, and it’s much, much bigger than the pages that contain it. So are Portrait and Finnegans Wake, but Portrait is a drier work than Ulysses, and the Wake is a headache. I love that I don’t understand every line, that I regularly have to scurry to the reference books. But even the lines that seem plain contain allusion. Almost every sentence is a hyperlink to some other area of knowledge. It’s perhaps because publishers didn’t know what to make of Joyce that he wasn’t edited, and so occasionally you find sloppy writing in his work. For that reason – for the reason that it makes him look ordinary – I’m fond of this passage from ‘The Dead’: ‘Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket… [Then, two lines later] ‘He walked rapidly towards the door.’”

Gavin Corbett

“I don’t have a favourite. In Tony Cronin’s words, ‘James Joyce is unique among writers in that all his works are masterpieces.’ I love each and every one of them in their different ways and looked at globally they constitute one continuous ever-extending work.”

Senator David Norris