On June 16, in Dublin, Republic of Ireland, there are almost exactly seventeen hours of daylight: the sun rises just before 5 in the morning and sets just before 10 at night. For reference, the city is about 550 miles closer to the North Pole than Minneapolis. It was on this date in 1904 that the novelist James Joyce went on his first date with the woman he would marry, Nora Barnacle. When Joyce's father later learned her name, he quipped, "She'll never leave him." They went out walking. It was about all Joyce could afford. Thinking about it on June 16, 2019, it seems pretty attractive. I remember reading that Paul Westerberg, front man of the Replacements, went for walks with his first girlfriend in Minneapolis's Lakewood Cemetery for the same reason. There is another consideration: when you're poor, the outdoors is almost the only place you can be alone. The long June evenings in Dublin must have been perfect for it. Louis Menand describes the enchantment:
Joyce's Beatrice [the allusion here is to Dante's love, who was also one of the guides in his Divine Comedy], of course, was Nora. She came from Galway, and was working as a chambermaid at Finn's Hotel, in Dublin, when he saw her walking along Nassau Street in a manner suggesting she was approachable. "Sauntering" is how Joyce later described it. He duly approached, and asked her for a date. She agreed, but stood him up. He sent her a note. "I went home quite dejected," it said. "I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me--if you have not forgotten me!" This time, they did meet. They walked to Ringsend, on the south bank of the Liffey, where (and here we can drop the Dante analogy) she put her hand inside his trousers and masturbated him.
Joyce was sufficiently taken to commemorate the evening by setting the events of his novel Ulysses on June 16, 1904. The book is among many other things a mock epic, a 20th-century version of Homer's Odyssey that includes, for example, a laundry receipt, the date of which (if memory serves) is one reason we know it is June 16, 1904, a Thursday. No laundry receipts in Homer. Also, Penelope has been true, fending off suitors like a champion as her husband, who might reasonably be presumed dead, takes years finding his way back to Ithaca, whereas Leopold Bloom's peregrinations around Dublin on June 16, 1904, are designed to keep him away from home, since he knows his wife, Molly, has arranged a mid-afternoon tryst in his bed with one Blazes Boylan. Bloom's general attitude toward this might be described as discouraged resignation. He works as an advertising canvasser, a notably un-Homeric occupation, and is a man not of action but of gentle decency and many sorrows. He is the reason Joyceans around the world celebrate today as Bloom's Day, or Bloomsday.
It would be fun to speculate about what the chambermaid from Galway made of the young James Joyce, but we don't have to wonder. Describing their meeting on Nassau Street, she said: "I mistook him for a Swedish sailor--his electric blue eyes, yachting cap and plimsolls. But when he spoke, well then, I knew him at once for just another Dublin jackeen chatting up a country girl." He was more than he appeared to be. Happy Bloomsday!
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