the first bloom(sday)
bloomsday, the ancient celtic fertility festival, has not always been about watching theatre majors strut around in period sportswear, or listening to music majors strum the celtic harp, or (worst of all) enduring english majors as they grab you by the shoulder and tell you how to read ulysses is to see the face of god. indeed, bloomsday used to be about lowbrow carousing under the pretense of discussing highbrow literature. take for example this account of the first bloomsday:
The day was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morning, Brian O’Nolan [Flann O’Brien] was already drunk. This day was the fiftieth anniversary of Mr. Leopold Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin, which James Joyce had immortalised in Ulysses .
To mark this occasion a small group of Dublin literati had gathered …just below the Martello tower in which the opening scene of Joyce’s novel is set. They planned to travel round the city through the day, visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Nighttown.
Sadly, no-one expected O’Nolan to be sober…The rest of the party, that first Bloomsday, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young critic Anthony Cronin, a dentist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce’s cousin represented the family interest, and John Ryan, the painter and businessman who owned and edited the literary magazine Envoy.
Kavanagh and O’Nolan began the day by deciding they must climb up to the Martello tower itself, which stood on a granite shoulder behind the house. As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoisted himself up the steep slope above O’Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fearful that O’Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet’s enormous farmer’s boot, the others hastened to rescue and restrain the rivals.
With some difficulty O’Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the others. Then they were off, along the seafront of Dublin Bay, and into the city. In pubs along the way an enormous amount of alcohol was consumed, so much so that on Sandymount Strand they had to relieve themselves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses… Eventually they arrived in Duke Street in the city centre, and the Bailey, which John Ryan then ran as a literary pub.
They went no further. Once there another drink seemed more attractive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long vanished pleasures of Nighttown.
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from: flann o’brien, an illustrated biography by costello and van der kamp (1987)
pictured above on the first bloomsday: john ryan, anthony cronin, brian o’nolan (flann o’brien), patrick kavanagh & tom joyce; (1954). source.







