Bloomsday is still well over a month away, even allowing for festival inflation. But among Joyceans, there was an outbreak of preseason excitement just over a week ago, and from an unexpected source: the television quizshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
As a retired IT analyst, Roman Dubowski, attempted to become only the seventh person to win the full £1 million (€1.16 million), the deciding question he faced was this: “Used since 1876, which trademarked logo is described in the James Joyce novel Ulysses and depicted in works by Manet and Picasso?”
The four possible answers were (a) Bass Ale, (b) The Famous Grouse, (c) Coca-Cola, (d) Stella Artois. And in common with every Joycean anorak watching, Dubowski knew it was (a), although just to be on the safe side he used his 50-50 lifeline to eliminate the Grouse and Stella from inquiries.
Then, a little disappointingly, he revealed it wasn’t because of Ulysses he knew the right answer. Instead, he’d seen Édouard Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère once and “distinctly” recalled Bass’s red triangle among the bottles.
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This may be another example of a picture being worth a thousand words. Not that Joyce devoted a thousand words to Bass, exactly. He did, however, make it a small subplot of Ulysses, so the total probably runs to a few hundred.
In general, as it could hardly not have been in depicting 1904 Dublin, Ulysses is saturated with alcohol. That last word is sometimes claimed to be from an Arabic term meaning “body-eating spirit”, which might be apt for its effects on many people. Alas, it’s also an etymological myth.
Indeed, as Joycean detective Senan Molony has explained in an entertaining talk on drink (the talk was on drink, that is, not Senan) in Ulysses, the word derives from “al kohl” and originally referred to a fine black powder used as eyeliner. Thus, even more aptly for Irish readers, the Arabic roots of “alcohol” can be said to mean “the black stuff”.
And the black stuff gets plenty of references in Ulysses, but so does the amber stuff that helped create the ITV quizshow’s latest millionaire.
For a start, Bass is implicated in a pun Leopold Bloom admiringly attributes to his wife Molly, viz: “She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you’d think he was singing into a barrel. Now isn’t that wit?”
Bloom goes on to note that “Big Ben” is known for consuming prodigious quantities of “number one Bass”. This only improves the pun, he thinks: “Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.”
Later comes the passage that inspired the Millionaire question: “During the past four minutes or thereabouts he had been staring hard at a certain amount of number one Bass bottled by Messrs Bass and Co at Burton-on-Trent ... which was certainly calculated to attract anyone’s remark on account of its scarlet appearance.”
Today, that might sound like product placement. But, in fairness to Joyce, elsewhere in the book and counterbalancing ITV’s Millionaire a century in advance, he warns that the value of your investment in Bass can fall as well as rise.
Reprising the subject of Dollard, Bloom reflects: “Big ships’ chandler’s business he did once. Remember: rosiny ropes, ships’ lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh home ... Number one Bass did that for him.”
Then there is William ‘Billy’ Bass, the brewery owner, who also gets a cameo in Ulysses thanks to the most famous horse race in literary fiction.
Bass’s prolific mare Sceptre was favourite for the 1904 Ascot Gold Cup, run the same day Ulysses is set. But the race was won by the 20-1 outsider in the field of four, Throwaway.
And because the innocent Bloom is wrongly assumed to have backed the winner, this later contributes to an outbreak of anti-Semitism at Barney Kiernan’s pub (aka “the Court of Appeal”) over pints of the black stuff. There, at least, Bass is an also ran.
As for the Ulysses brand, clearly, that continues to thrive. Joyce would have enjoyed being part of ITV’s million-pound question, even if in supplying the answer he was not the Manet-in-the-gap. As a lover of puns (I hope he forgives that last one), he would also have been delighted that the prize was won by a Dub, or at least a Dubowski.
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Speaking of Dubliners and people whose names end in -ski, readers may recall my recent mention here of Jas Kaminski, a former Irish Times colleague, who I said now lived in Ljubljana.
In fact, he lives in Belgrade. The confusion arose via a friend of Jas who had visited Slovenia recently and got his Balkan capitals mixed up. But I should have known anyway, because Kaminski has remade his name for running the Belgrade Irish Festival, an annual March event that, in an already-Hibernophile city, is helping to turn the Serbian capital into Dublin on the Danube.
