The Real People of Joyce’s Ulysses: A Biographical Guide by Vivien Igoe (review)

Abstract

The Real People of Joyce’s Ulysses: A Biographical Guide, Vivien Igoe, (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2016), 380 pages. Vivien Igoe has long been associated with Joycean activities in Dublin. Indeed, she was one of a small group of people who, through their promotion of Joyce’s life and work, could be said to have played a significant part in the modernisation of Ireland that took place between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. James Joyce became then a token of what made Irish culture interesting and important to the rest of the world. At that time Vivien worked for Bord Fáilte, the Irish Tourist Board, and the Board’s role in this process should not, of course, be overlooked. Early in 1954, Terence Sheehy, its director, went to the United States and conducted a survey on what Americans, and especially Irish-Americans, thought about Ireland as a holiday destination. Lovely scenery, ancient churches and castles, golf and fishing – all these were significant. But, among the younger, collegeeducated cohort, which – thanks in large part to the GI Bill of Rights – had become socially significant, he found that the name of James Joyce was the leading attraction. On his return from this trip, Bord Fáilte acted. Through Ireland of the Welcomes, then a first class, exceptionally well-designed and well-written magazine; and the weekly newsletter of the Department of Foreign Affairs, which was distributed by most Irish embassies, Irish literary culture, and especially Joyce, was widely promoted. This at a time when many, or even most, Irish people were antagonistic towards, or at least sceptical about, the claims being made for the status of Joyce. There were hopes at the time of establishing a James Joyce Society but this did not come about. In 1961 the Martello Tower at Sandycove, where Ulysses opens, had been purchased by Michael Scott, with the help of others, notably John Huston, whose deep interest in Joyce would eventually lead to the making of his last, memorable film, based on Joyce’s short story, The Dead. The tower eventually passed into the hands of Bord Fáilte and Vivien Igoe became its first curator. Soon afterwards, the first James Joyce International Symposium was held in Dublin in 1967, with a second one two years later in 1969. These events managed to be both highly scholarly and slightly risible. The local reaction to Margaret Solomons’s lecture on ‘The Phallic Tree in Finnegans Wake’ entered Joycean folklore. Nowadays, most Dubliners take Studies • volume 107 • number 425 128 Spring 2018: Book Reviews such things in their stride and that that is so is due not least to people like Vivien Igoe and her fellow-pioneers from those years. We are all in their debt. Vivien remains greatly involved in Joycean goings-on. She has already published James Joyce’s Dublin Houses & Nora Barnacle’s Galway, which reached a second edition in 2007, as well as other local guides. Her latest book, under review here, which has had a long genesis, can be seen as the culmination of deep interest and many years of assiduous research. She has been aided in writing it by the vast new resources that have been opened up by digitisation, even though full utilisation of these can remain a challenge. What she attempts is an exhaustive biographical dictionary of real people, either as themselves, or as the inspiration or model for characters in the works of Joyce. The title specifies Ulysses, but the writings of Joyce are, of course, in effect one long continually evolving work of art, from the very simplest of beginnings up to the extraordinary complexities of Finnegans Wake, a text which has a disconcerting tendency to return to the simple origins from which it ultimately springs. Critics and biographers of Joyce are well aware of the intricate manner in which his life and the lives of his family, friends and associates are worked up into something quite new in literature. Butreaderssometimesneedtorecallthatthebooksare,intheend,literature. They are not autobiography, they are not history.The habit of modern novelists simply to transcribe the events of their own lives immediately into ‘literary fiction’ has meant that some readers, coming fresh...