Enduring Dublin of James Joyce

Bloomsday is becoming a major cultural festival on the Irish calender. Philippa Stockley takes a tour of Joyce's Dublin
WHAT BEI'I ER TIME for a first visit to Dublin than on Bloomsday, 16 June, the day (with the Irish habit of threatening to blur into a week) rapidly becoming a pivotal national cultural festival. Bloomsday celebrates James Joyce, focussing on Ulysses, and following the day-long walk the central character, Leopold Bloom, took round the city. Many co-ordinated events reflecting the story happen throughout the day, with encouragement to dress in Edwardian costume.
Courtesy of Aer Lingus, I was gently set down in an Ireland drenched with bright sunlight. My laconic cabdriver took me on the scenic route to my hotel, pointing out his favourite landmarks (mainly pubs) but also the captivating buildings and Georgian terraces of Dublin. 1 fell in love with the impossibly tall, silver, curliqued lamp-posts, the shamrock green pillar boxes and green-liveried buses, and when we drove through the wide streets crossing the Liffey, all dappled in sunshine, I thought of Paris and Amsterdam. Here was a city where it seemed more than reasonable for life and literature to get hopelessly jumbled up together.
In my hotel, Glenogra House, I studied the long list of events which the Irish Tourist Board had kindly supplied, and set out to join the Literary Pub Crawl, which happens every evening in season. About 30 people from Ireland and abroad met in the Duke pub, Duke Street, one of four pubs with literary connections we were going to visit. Derek and Martin, two actors, dressed with a passing nod at things Edwardian, devoted three hours to an accurate and colourful account of Irish literary history interspersed with songs and funny, well acted pieces by Behan, Joyce and O'Casey, while we meandered through the twilit streets. They encouraged us to use as well as admire the pubs and, bearing in mind that an Irish measure is much more generous than ours, by the end of the evening we had coagulated into a cheerful straggle in the last port of call. Having always dreaded the idea of anything with the word "guided" in front of it, I enjoyed myself immensely.
The next day was Bloomsday proper. It kicked off, where Bloom starts his own peregrinations, in the sweet village, Sandycove. I took the DART train around Dublin Bay, to which a solitary ferry clung. Sandycove had made a big effort. There was bunting, vintage cars and horse-drawn carriages. There were women with hats, gloves and antique lace and men with stripey blazers and straw hats. The latter ambled around the streets and ended up in David Byrne's restaurant, The South Bank, which was holding a "Bloomsday Breakfast". Laughter bounced out of the room awash with parasols and furbelows; plates of green giblet soup, liver, bacon and kidneys flew to and fro, a ukulele played. To my surprise, there were Derck and Martin, glasses in hand, giving even more spirited render
ings of Joycean texts to general approval.
Gently, people drifted _ around the bay to the Martello tower, a once-stalwart defence againstNapoleon, with canons on top, now the Joyce Museum which Sylvia Beach opened in 1962. Joyce lived here for six days and it features in the first chapter Ulysses. The museum holds many Joyce treasures, and was hosting special performances and readings for Bloomsday. Derek and Martin gave this one a miss, saving themselves for lunch in Davy Byrne's Bar in Duke Street, where Bloom stopped off for gorgonzola sandwiches and claret. The place was a wall of bodies and fancy dress spilling out onto the pavement where entertainers held a sizeable crowd spellbound, so 1 walked on to the next stop on my itinerary.
The tone so far had been quite light, faithfully interspersed with lots of eating and drinking, but inside the august portals of the James Joyce Centre, a splendid Georgian House in a fine terrace, were things more scholarly. About 100 people sat in a vast drawing room with a fine plastered ceiling. Joyce's nephew, Ken Moynihan, spent an hour telling the writer's history, with detail, humour and some poignancy. We then set off on a fascinating walking tour of places associated with Joyce. In need of refreshment, I strolled along the quays to the Ormond Hotel. In a packed lecture room there were serious readings from Joyce's works, and ensconced in the bar, where the waitresses wore Edwardian dress, were the indefatigable duo Derek and Martin, come to listen to the other performers, who greeted me cheerfully, their enthusiasm undiminished.
Events and broadcasts went on unflagging into the evening, but as I sauntered around the city, it seemed to me that Dublin itself celebrated and evoked Joyce's hooks, just as it is true the other way around; street performers in Grafton Street, the geniality of passers by, the close agglomeration of beautiful buildings, all made the scheduled happenings seem merely a prismatic glitter of a greater whole.
The Irish do not celebrate life by half; it was great slabs of quirky life that Joyce transmogrified into Ulysses. Tottering out of a nightclub in the very small hours, where the young clientele seemed blissfully unaware of the slice of national history that had gone
on all day, I thought that even so they were part and parcel of it, that maybe a scribbler in a corner was marking them out, players in a future Irish masterpiece.
The Irish Tourist Board can supply details of Bloomsday and other events: tel: 0171 493 3201 James Joyce Tower and Museum, Sandycatv,Tel (01) 280 9625 _lames Joyce Centre, 35 North Great George's St, Dublin I tel: (01) 873 1984 Aer Lingus Resertrationstel: 0181 899 4747