ULYSSES AND THE JOYCE OF GOOGLING

We've just had the first Bloomsday after the expiry of  European copyright on James Joyce’s work. June 16^th – as even non-Joyceans know – is the  day in which James Joyce set his Ulysses – and the date on which he and his wife Nora Barnacle had their first “date” in 1904.

    I’ve never been a Joycean. I’ve hardly ever got beyond a few pages of Ulysses before putting the book down and promising to give it another go some other time. But last year on Bloomsday I picked the book up yet again, and just one random passage – and the ramifications thereof –  brought it home to me in a flash … (and I use that word advisedly) … why so many people – not all of them academics – love delving ever deeper into Joyce’s masterpiece.

    Now, the erudite Joyceans amongst you will have to indulge me while I bring the other 99 per cent of the population the fruits of my amateur investigations. We start on Sandymount Strand, where Leopold Bloom meets a brazen strap who shows him her knickers. But enough of that sort of thing; during his more salacious mental meanderings on this occasion, Bloom briefly remembers a “poor Mr O’Connor” whose wife and four daughters died after eating polluted shellfish from that very strand.

    So who was this unfortunate gent? Was he a literary invention?  I put the book down and picked up my trusty laptop. And within minutes what had started as a brief aside soon brought onto the stage Michael Collins, Peter Pan and Micheal Ó Suilleabháin, author of the Blasket Islands classic “Fiche Bliain ag Fás”. And there are also cameo roles for W.B. Yeats and even Michael Jackson amongst many others.

    It turns out that Joyce’s “poor Mr O’Connor” was James O’Connor, an old Fenian, who was a journalist with the United Irishman when terrible tragedy befell his family in June 1890. His wife and four of his daughters died, despite the efforts of two doctors – in their home at Seapoint Avenue after eating shellfish they had collected from the seashore at Blackrock. Sewage pollution was blamed.
    But one daughter, Moya, survived, and at the age of 18, when her father remarried, she went to London and joined the civil service. While there, she met and married Crompton Llewellyn Davies, a successful barrister. Moya Llewellyn Davies had grown up an ardent republican, and her husband too supported Sinn Fein. They came to know Michael Collins in London, and when the War of Independence began, they were both well placed to give him useful intelligence from within the establishment.
    They moved to Ireland and bought Furry Park House in Killester (it’s now an apartment complex) – which became a safe house for the IRA. Collins himself stayed there – and it is rumoured by some that he and Moya had a “fling”. Other historians say that Moya was a fantasist in that regard, and a nuisance, too, in the eyes of some of Collins’s colleagues.
    But she did smuggle guns for the IRA in her car, for which she was imprisoned. She is mainly remembered today for translating, along with George Thompson, Fiche Bliain ag Fás into English. 
    But what of Yeats, I hear you cry? We go back to James O’Connor to bring him in: he was one of the pall-bearers who carried the coffin of the great Fenian John O’Leary in 1907. And what kind of Ireland, according to the poet, was buried in that same funeral? That’s right: romantic Ireland. It’s still dead and gone. More than ever now.
    Crompton Llewellyn Davies, meanwhile, was rumbled as a spy and lost his job – quite a comedown for someone who had once been a confidante of Lloyd George.
    Crompton, by the way, had several nephews, and it was these Llewellyn Davies boys – George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nico –who inspired J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. He used to stay with that branch of the family and took a keen interest in the boys, we’re told. He unofficially adopted them after their father’s death, and paid for their education from the proceeds of  Peter Pan, a huge stage hit in its day. Barrie’s biographers have argued as to whether his keen interest in the Llewellyn Davies boys was an unhealthy one. Some argue that it was indeed unnatural for an adult man to spend so much time playing with young boys; others say that he was an innocent in matters of sex generally – his own marriage to the actress Mary Ansell remained childless. One of the Llewellyn Davies boys was adamant in later life that nothing untoward ever took place.
    But aside from all that, there is also the theory of  “the curse of J.M. Barrie”: many of those who had dealings with him came to tragic ends, starting with the childhood death of his older brother David in a skating accident. And the writer Anthony Lane pointed out that Arthur Lewellyn Davies died from cancer in 1907, his wife Sylvia died three years later; their son George was killed in Flanders 1915, and Michael drowned while swimming at Oxford.
    Which brings us – one way and another – to Michael Jackson – who called his house Neverland.
    To uncover all these connections took mere minutes of browsing the internet. But I must go back to Ulysses now and read a few more lines. God knows what else I might find. Or should that be “Google knows”?
    One wonders what Joyce would have done with such a tool at his disposal. Maybe he’d never have written a line.

 ENDS 

 Éanna Brophy