Joyce's Creative Process and The Construction of Characters in Ulysses Becoming The Blooms

Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses:
Becoming the Blooms

Luca Crispi
ABSTRACT
This book is both a study of how James Joyce created two of the most iconic characters in literature—
Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy Bloom—as well as a history of the genesis of Ulysses. From a genetic
critical perspective, this book explores the conception and evolution of the Blooms as fictional
characters in the work’s wide range of surviving notes and manuscripts. At the same time, it also
chronicles the production of Ulysses from 1917 to its first edition in 1922 and beyond. It engages with
the textual archive of Ulysses, including the exciting, recently-discovered manuscripts now in the
National Library of Ireland. The book excavates the raw material and examines the creative processes
Joyce deployed in the construction of the Blooms and so the writing of Ulysses. Framed by a contextual
introduction and four bibliographical appendices, the seven main chapters are a critical investigation of
the fictional events and memories that constitute the ‘lives’ of the Blooms. Thereby, it is also a
commentary on Joyce’s conception of Ulysses more generally. The book analyses how the stories in the
published book achieved their final form and discloses previously unexamined versions of them for
everyone who enjoys reading Ulysses. This book demonstrates the various ways in which specialist
textual work on the genesis of Ulysses directly intersects with other critical and interpretive readings.
Keywords: James Joyce, Ulysses, creativity, manuscript studies, genetic criticism, character studies,
narratology,creative writing
BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Print publication date: 2015 Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Content
Front Matter
Title Pages
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Conventions
Manuscript Collections
Kinds of Manuscripts
Individual Ulysses Manuscripts
Transcriptional Conventions
Joyce’s Abbreviations
Quotations and Citations
Epigraph
1 Introductory Contexts
2 Boylansday
3 The Genesis of Leopold Bloom
4 Marion Tweedy—Becoming Molly
5 The Courtship of Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy
6 Married Life
7 Life Goes On
8 7 Eccles Street
End Matter
Appendix 1 A Brief Overview and Glossary of the Kinds of Ulysses Manuscripts and Documents
Appendix 2 A Census of the Extant Ulysses Manuscripts by Episodes
Appendix 3 A Chronological List of Extant Ulysses Manuscripts and Typescripts
Appendix 4 A Chronological List of Ulysses in Proofs: June 1921 to January 1922 (Paris)
Bibliography
Index
Title Pages
University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online
Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of

Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms
Luca Crispi
Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Title Pages
Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Joyce’s Creative
Process and the Construction of Characters in
(p.iv)
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© Luca Crispi 2015
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Dedication


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) For Rita, who makes the sun shine bright
Page 1 of 1
(p.vi)
(p.vii)
Acknowledgements


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.vi) (p.vii) Acknowledgements

I don’t take umbrage when some people refer to the ‘Joyce Industry’, because we are indeed an
industrious group of readers and scholars, especially those of us who are interested in textual
and historical issues in Joyce’s works. This book would not have been possible, either
conceptually or practically, without relying on the ground-breaking work and insights of several
previous generations of Ulysses genetic critics, in particular A. Walton Litz, Hans Walter Gabler,
Phillip Herring, Michael Groden, and others. My primary debt of gratitude is to Daniel Ferrer
who has been this book’s godparent. He rigorously read every chapter, often more than once,
challenging my procedures and claims, and consistently encouraging me to write a better book.
Continuing the familial metaphor, the book has also had four ‘uncles’ who read it at crucial
junctures and offered their friendly critical guidance: Derek Attridge, Finn Fordham, Terence
Killeen, and Geert Lernout. Many other friends and colleagues were generous enough to read
earlier versions of several of these chapters, including Elizabeth Bonapfel, Joe Brooker, Ron
Bush, Tim Conley, Ronan Crowley, Vincent Deane, John Gordon, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Fritz
Senn. Each in their own way has left a tangible imprint on the form and content of my work: I
thank you all individually and collectively for your support and advice. I also want to thank all
the speakers and students who have given me productive feedback on my work in progress
when I presented it at the UCD James Joyce Research Colloquia and at the Dublin James Joyce
Summer Schools since 2010, in particular Anne Fogarty and Sam Slote. I have been fortunate to
have had the friendship and encouragement of Alexis and Marilena Léon, and am grateful for
their many kindnesses. Finally, I echo Stephen Dedalus’ epiphany when he thinks to himself:
‘Dublin. I have much, much to learn’ (U-G 7.915). Luckily, I have had the good fortune to have
been befriended by many Dublin Joyceans and have learned much from them over the years,
particularly Frank Callanan, Adrian Hardiman, and Vivien Igoe.
This book is founded on decades of work in Special Collection Libraries and would not have been
possible without the active assistance of the staff in each institution. I want to thank Michael
Basinski and James Maynard of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at
Buffalo, The State University of New York, who have provided me with unprecedented access to
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(p.vi)
(p.vii)
Acknowledgements
their incomparable Joyce collection. I also want to thank all the helpful staff of the National
Library of Ireland’s Main and Manuscript Reading Rooms, including Catherine Fahy, Gerard
Long, Gerard Lyne, Colette O’Daly, Colette O’Flaherty, and, of course, the indispensible Tom
Desmond, but most of all I am most grateful to Brendan O’Donoghue, former Director of the
NLI, who brought me to Dublin to work on their newly discovered cache of Joyce manuscripts in
2003. It was while working at the NLI that this book got its start, though in a quite different
guise. Helen (p.viii) Melody and Zoe Wilcox have also graciously accommodated my repeated
requests to see Joyce’s manuscripts in the British Library.
Earlier versions of small sections of Chapters 1 and 3 appeared in the Journal of Modern
Literature, and Appendices 2–4 appeared in a more dynamic form online in Genetic Joyce
Studies.
At OUP, I want to thank Jacqueline Baker, who supported this work from the onset, Rachel Platt
for her assistance throughout, Matthew Humphrys for managing the book’s production so
effectively, Sarah Cheeseman, whose keen eye caught both small and large errors, and Ela
Kotkowska, whose editorial diligence and enthusiasm for Ulysses made the book finally
presentable.
It is no accident that the chapters on the early love stories of the Blooms’ courtship and
marriage were the starting points of this book. Its genesis reflects my life with Rita, who inspires
my daily life and work with never ending love, wisdom, and refined critical insights. I would not
have persevered with this book—or been as happy as I am—without her boundless support and
smiling presence: this book is dedicated to you now and forever. Janette Saadé opened up her
most loving and supportive home to me, and much of this book was written in the warmth and
sunshine of her gracious company. Although she will not read this book, it would never have
been written without the love of literature that my mother, Laura, instilled in me as a young
man. I think of her often and am confident that she would have been proud of it, even though
she never really enjoyed reading Ulysses.
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(p.xi)


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.xi) Abbreviations and Conventions
Abbreviation: Full Citation:

GJS Genetic Joyce Studies: Electronic Journal for the Study of James Joyce’s
Works in Progress, available online and cited by issue.
JJA The James Joyce Archive, eds. Michael Groden et al., 63 volumes (New York:
Garland, 1977–8); cited by volume and page number(s). The Ulysses volumes
are numbered 12 to 27.
JJON James Joyce Online Notes, available online and cited by issue.
JJQ James Joyce Quarterly.
JSA Joyce Studies Annual.
LI, LII, LIII Joyce, James, Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York:
Little Review Viking, 1957; reissued with corrections 1966); vols. II and III, ed. Richard
Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966).
Joyce, James, Ulysses [23-part serial.] The Little Review V.11–VII.3 (March
1918 through December 1920). Cited as Little Review by date, issue, and
page number(s); also see the digital version of the magazine on the Modernist
Journals Project online.
SL Joyce, James, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New
U York: Viking, 1975; London: Faber, 1975).
Joyce, James, Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922. Cited by page
and line number(s). [There are numerous reprint editions available, including
online; see the Modernist Versions Project. I used Ulysses: A Facsimile of the
First Edition Published in Paris in 1922 (Washington: Orchises, 1998), which
is a photo-reprint of copy number 784 of 1,000 of the first Shakespeare and
Company edition.]
UCSE Joyce, James, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Prepared by Hans
Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. 3 vols. New York:
Garland, 1986.
Page 1 of 2
(p.xi)

U-G Joyce, James, Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York: Garland,
1986; this edition is also published by Viking and Bodley Head. Cited by
episode and line number(s).
Page 2 of 2
(p.xii)
Manuscript Collections


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.xii) Manuscript Collections

BL British Library
Buffalo Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State
University of New York
Cornell Cornell Joyce Collection, Cornell University Library’s Rare Books,
Manuscripts, and Archives
Harvard Modern Books & Manuscripts Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard College
Library
Huntington Huntington Library
NLI National Library of Ireland
Princeton Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University
Library
Rosenbach Rosenbach Museum & Library
Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at
Austin
Page 1 of 1


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
See Appendix 1 for further information on the kinds of Ulysses manuscripts.
Abbreviations: Full Citations:

MS Manuscript
NB Notebook
NS Notesheet
Pl Placard Proof (a.k.a. ‘galley proofs’)
PP Page Proof
Rosenbach MS Mixed Faircopy by Episode
TS Typescript
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(p.xiii)


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.xiii) Individual Ulysses Manuscripts

The manuscript abbreviations in the book have been rendered as simply as possible: by holding
library, kind of manuscript (manuscript, typescript, proof, notebook, etc.). For example, as
follows:
Full Citation: Abbreviated Citation:

Buffalo ‘Sirens’ Manuscript MS V.A.5 Buffalo MS 5
Buffalo ‘Lestrygonians’ Typescript MS V.B.6 Buffalo TS 6
Harvard ‘Calypso’ First Placard Pl 6.i
Buffalo ‘Calypso’ First Page Proofs PP 4.1
National Library of Ireland Notebook 36,639/05A NLI NB 5A
British Library Manuscript
BL Notesheets:

BL NS British Library ADD MS 49975, ff. 6–29. Notesheet entries are cited by
episode name and Herring sheet and entry number(s), for example: ‘BL
‘Penelope’ NS 3.33’.
See Phillip F. Herring, ed. Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ Notesheets in the British Museum
(Charlottesville: Published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of
Virginia by the University Press of Virginia, 1972).
Buffalo Manuscripts
All manuscripts and notebooks are cited by their abbreviated manuscript number, page number,
and recto or verso as needed. Unless otherwise indicated, all notebook entries are from pages
Page 1 of 6
(p.xiii)
with the same episode heading as that in which the note was used. For further information on
the Buffalo manuscripts, see Luca Crispi, The UB James Joyce Catalog (Buffalo: The University at
Buffalo, The Poetry Collection, 2010). Available on the Poetry Collection’s website.
Buffalo Draft Manuscripts:

Buffalo MS 3 MS V.A.3: Complete Later Draft of the ‘Proteus’ (3) Episode (1917)
Buffalo MS 5 MS v.a.5: Partial Later Draft of the ‘Sirens’ (11) Episode (1919)
Buffalo MS 6 MS v.a.6: Partial Later Version of Scenes and Texts for the ‘Cyclops’ (12)
Episode (1919)
Buffalo MS 8 MS v.a.8: Earlier Version of the Scenes and Fragmentary Texts for the
‘Cyclops’ (12) Episode (1919)
Buffalo MS 9 MS v.a.9: Holograph Draft of an Addition to the First Placards for the
‘Cyclops’ (12) Episode (1921)
Buffalo MS MS v.a.10: Partial Draft of the ‘Nausicaa’ (13) Episode (1920)
10
Buffalo MS MS v.a.11: First Copy Book of the Earlier Draft of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (14)
11 Episode (1920)
Buffalo MS MS v.a.12: Second Copybook of the Earlier Draft of the ‘Oxen of the
12 Sun’ (14) Episode (1920)
Buffalo MS MS v.a.13: First Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (14)
13 Episode: ‘I’ (1920)
Buffalo MS MS v.a.14: Second Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (14)
14 Episode: ‘II’ (1920)
Buffalo MS MS v.a.15: Fourth Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (14)
15 Episode: ‘IV’ (1920)
Buffalo MS MS v.a.16: Sixth Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (14)
16 Episode: ‘VI’ (1920)
Buffalo MS MS v.a.17: Seventh Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (14)
17 Episode: ‘VII’ (1920)
Buffalo MS MS v.a.18: Eighth Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (14)
18 Episode: ‘VIII’ (1920)
Buffalo MS MS V.A.19: Partial Early Draft and Notes for the ‘Circe’ (15) Episode (1920)
19
Buffalo MS MS V.A.20: Faircopy Manuscript of the ‘Messianic Scene’ for the ‘Circe’ (15)
20 Episode (1921)
Buffalo MS MS V.A.21: Partial Later Draft of the ‘Eumaeus’ (16) Episode (1921)
21
Buffalo MS MS V.A.22: Faircopy Manuscript of the Final ‘Sentence’ of the
22 ‘Penelope’ (18) Episode (1921)
Page 2 of 6
(p.xiii)
Buffalo Notebooks:

Buffalo NB MS V.A.2.a [VIII.A.5.]: Early First-Order Notebook for Drafts and Notesheets
2a (1918). Cited by manuscript page number and Herring’s notebook page
number. See Herring, Phillip, Joyce’s Notes and Early Drafts for ‘Ulysses’:
Selections from the Buffalo Collection (Charlottesville: Published for the
Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the University of
Virginia, 1977).
Buffalo NB MS V.A.2.b [V.A.2.]: Later Second-Order Notebook for Drafts, Typescripts
2b and Proofs (1921). Cited by manuscript page number and Herring notebook
page and entry number. See Herring, Phillip, Joyce’s Notes and Early Drafts
for ‘Ulysses’: Selections from the Buffalo Collection (Charlottesville:
Published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the
University of Virginia, 1977).
Buffalo Typescripts:
Buffalo TS 1 MS V.B.1: Partial Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Nestor’ (2) Episode for the
Little Review and Ulysses (1917)
Buffalo TS 2 MS V.B.2: Partial Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Proteus’ (3) Episode for the
Buffalo TS MS V.B.3.a.i [V.B.3.b.]: Partial Earlier Typescript of the ‘Calypso’ (4) Episode
3.a for the Little Review and Ulysses (1918)
Buffalo TS MS V.B.3.b. [V.B.3.a.]: Partial Later Typescript of the ‘Calypso’ (4) Episode
3.b for the Little Review (1918)
Buffalo TS 4 MS V.B.4: Partial Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Hades’ (6) Episode for the Little
Review and Ulysses (1917)
Buffalo TS 5 MS V.B.5: Complete Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Aeolus’ (7) Episode for the
Buffalo TS 6 MS V.B.6: Complete Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Lestrygonians’ (8) Episode
for the Little Review and Ulysses (1917)
Buffalo TS 7 MS V.B.7: Complete Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Scylla And Charybdis’ (9)
Episode for the Little Review and Ulysses (1918)
Buffalo TS 8 MS V.B.8.a.i [V.B.8.a.]: Partial Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Wandering
Rocks’ (10) Episode for the Little Review and Ulysses (1919)
Buffalo TS 9 MS V.B.9: Complete Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Sirens’ (11) Episode for the
Buffalo TS 10 MS V.B.10.a.i [V.B.10.a.]: Partial Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Cyclops’ (12)
Episode for the Little Review and Ulysses (1919)
Buffalo TS 11 MS V.B.11.a.i [V.B.11.a.]: Complete Printers’ Typescript of the
‘Nausicaa’ (13) Episode for the Little Review and Ulysses (1920)
Buffalo TS 12 MS V.B.12.a.i [V.B.12.a.]: Complete Printers’ Typescript of the ‘Oxen Of The
Sun’ (14) Episode for the Little Review and Ulysses (1920)
Page 3 of 6
(p.xiii)
Buffalo Typescripts:

Buffalo TS 13 MS V.B.13.e–i: Several Partial Printers’ Copies of the Typescript (with First
and Second Overlay) of the ‘Circe’ Episode for Ulysses (1921)
Buffalo TS 14 MS V.B.14.a.i [V.B.14.a.]: Complete Typescript of the ‘Eumaeus’ (16) Episode
for Ulysses (1921)
Buffalo TS 15 MS V.B.15.c–h: Several Composite First, Second, and Third Typescripts of
the ‘Ithaca’ (17) Episode (1921)
Buffalo TS 16 MS V.B.16.a.i and b.i [V.B.16.a. and V.B.16.c.]: Complete Printers’ Typescript
of the Second Part of the ‘Penelope’ (18) Episode for Ulysses (1921). Cited by
Joyce’s pagination along with the Huntington typescript.
(p.xiv)
(p.xv) National Library of Ireland Manuscripts

All National Library of Ireland manuscripts and notebooks are cited by their abbreviated
manuscript number, page number, and recto or verso (as set out here). For further information
about some of these manuscripts, see Peter Kenny, Joyce Papers 2002 (Dublin: The National
Library of Ireland, 2002), as well as Luca Crispi, ‘A First Foray into the National Library of
Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts: Bloomsday 2011’, GJS, Issue 11 (Spring 2011).
NLI Draft Manuscripts:

NLI MS 7A MS 36,639/07/A: Earlier Proto-draft of the ‘Proteus’ (3) Episode (1917), pp.
[1r]–[5r]
NLI MS 7B MS 36,639/07/B: Earlier Manuscript, Fragmentary Texts, and Notes of the
‘Sirens’ (11) Episode (1917–19), pp. [5v]–[10r]
NLI MSS 8A– MSS 36,639/08/A–C: Complete Earlier Draft of ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ (9)
C Episode (1918) in 3 Copybooks
NLI MS 9 MS 36,639/09: Partial Later Draft of the ‘Sirens’ (11) Episode (1919)
NLI MS 10 MS 36,639/10: Scenes and Fragmentary Texts for the ‘Cyclops’ (12) Episode
(1919)
NLI MS 11A MS 36,639/11/A: Third Copybook of the Earlier Draft of the ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ (14) Episode (1920)
NLI MS 11B MS 36,639/11/B: Fourth Copybook of the Earlier Draft of the ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ (14) Episode (1920)
NLI MS 11C MS 36,639/11/C: Third Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ (14) Episode: ‘III’ (1920)
NLI MS 11D MS 36,639/11/D: Fifth Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ (14) Episode: ‘V’ (1920)
NLI MS 11E MS 36,639/11/E: Ninth Copybook of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ (14) Episode: ‘IX’ (1920)
Page 4 of 6
(p.xiii)
NLI Draft Manuscripts:

NLI MS 11F MS 36,639/11/E: Final Loose Sheets of the Later Draft of the ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ (14) Episode: (1920)
NLI MS 12 MS 36,639/12: Intermediary Draft of the ‘Circe’ (15) Episode (1920)
NLI Quinn NLI MS 36,958: Later Draft of the ‘Circe’ (15) Episode (1920)
MS
NLI MS 13 MS 36,639/13: Proto-draft Manuscript of the ‘Ithaca’ (17) Episode (1921)
NLI MS 14 MS 36,639/14: Draft Manuscript of the ‘Penelope’ (18) Episode (1921)
NLI Notebooks:

NLI NB 3 MS 36,639/03: Early ‘Subject’ Notebook for Drafts (1917)
NLI NB 4 MS 36,639/04: Later Notebook (1921)
NLI NB 5A MS 36,639/05/A: Later Notebook (1921)
NLI NB 5B MS 36,639/05/B: Later Notebook (1921)
(p.xvi) Other Manuscript Collections

Cornell MS 56A Cornell Joyce MS 56A & B: Partial Earlier Draft of the ‘Nausicaa’ (13)
&B Episode (1919–20). Unlike the Buffalo and National Library of Ireland
manuscripts, the Cornell manuscript is cited by Joyce’s pagination, with
verso pages numbered in square brackets.
Cornell ‘Oxen Partial Intermediary Draft for the Rosenbach Manuscript (1920)
of the Sun’ MS
Harvard Placards
Huntington TS Huntington HM MS 41122: Printer’s Copy of the Typescript of the
‘Penelope’ (18) Episode (1921); cited by Joyce’s pagination.
Princeton Placards and Page Proofs
Rosenbach MS See Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, intro. Harry Levin, pref. Clive
Driver, colour facsimile, with editorial apparatus in volume III (New York:
Faber and Faber Ltd., with the Philip H. & A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation,
1974). Since these are individually numbered loose sheets, the Rosenbach
MSS ‘Telemachus’ through ‘Eumaeus’ episodes are cited by episode and
Joyce’s folio number. Since Joyce wrote the ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’
episodes in copybooks, these are cited by episode and Joyce’s page number
(and unpaginated versos are numbered in square brackets). Furthermore,
Joyce wrote ‘Ithaca’ in two separate copybooks, alternating between them
when he sent one section of a copybook to be typed. These manuscripts are
referred to here as the Blue and Green copybooks and are arranged in the
following order:
Page 5 of 6
(p.xiii)
Rosenbach Manuscript: Ulysses Text:

‘Ithaca’ Blue MS I, pp. 1–9 U 618.01–634.16; U-G 17.01–524
‘Ithaca’ Green MS I, pp. 1–8 U 634.17–645.17; U-G 17.525–849
‘Ithaca’ Blue MS II, pp. 9–17 U 645.26–658.02; U-G 17.858–1268
‘Ithaca’ Green MS II, pp. 8–21 U 658.13–672.30; U-G 17.1279–773
‘Ithaca’ Blue MS III, pp. 17–32 U 673.01–689.14; U-G 17.1774–2332
Texas Final Page Proofs
(p.xvii) The Ulysses Proofs:

I have followed the UCSE convention of referring to the various placard and/or page proof
manuscripts by levels, which is a relatively clear way of representing the production of the book
in its final phase. Nonetheless, I have specified the actual document I am referring to in the
manuscript header, the footnotes, and the appendices. See Appendices 1 and 4 for detailed
information on these manuscripts.
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(p.xviii)
Transcriptional Conventions


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.xviii) Transcriptional Conventions
Kind of Change: Symbols:

Additions Matched set of nested caret marks: base âdded text^ text.
Further additions on same Matched sets of nested caret marks: âdded ^further added
manuscript text^ text^.
Further additions on a Matched sets of nested caret marks, with plus sign for later
subsequent manuscript addition: âdded ^+later added text+^ text^.
Deletions Matched set of angled brackets: <deleted text>.
Revisions Combination of angled brackets and caret marks: ^<deleted
text> new text^.
Revised text that was then Angled brackets around caret marks: <âdded text^>
deleted
Illegible or partially legible Appear in square brackets: [text]
word(s)
Page 1 of 1


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Abbreviation: Character’s Name:

BB Blazes Boylan
LB Leopold Bloom
MB Molly Bloom
RB Rudolph Virag Bloom
SD Stephen Dedalus
Page 1 of 1
(p.xix)
Quotations and Citations


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.xix) Quotations and Citations

All direct quotations from Ulysses are from the 1922 Shakespeare and Company edition (U),
followed by citations from the 1984/86 Gabler reading text edition (U-G). Any textual
discrepancies between the editions are indicated as follows: (U citation; see U-G citation, or U-G
citation; see U citation). If the differences between the texts are significant to the argument,
they are explained in the text, or in an explanatory footnote.
All quotations from the Little Review are accompanied by the relevant Ulysses references. The
direct quotations from the manuscript are essential to the argument. They are cited by the
identifying manuscript information. Otherwise, as is often the case, when a quotation from a
manuscript is identical to its appearance in Ulysses, it is derived from the published text of
Ulysses, and the relevant manuscript is merely referenced.
All the manuscript transcriptions are my own, though I have also relied on the left-hand pages of
UCSE when relevant. Abbreviated manuscript citations are arranged by episode in each section
header. These section headers set out the dates Joyce worked on the manuscript, the kind of
manuscript, the manuscript name, and the page number(s). Individual manuscript citations are
provided in the footnotes, with the JJA reference when relevant. For further information, see the
various Appendices and the guide to the abbreviations.
Page 1 of 1
Epigraph


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Epigraph
(p.xx) (p.xxi)
… we are powerfully reminded that Joyce’s focus on substance in Ulysses is very selective
indeed, that Ulysses omits most things, that the observable part of the book is only a tiny
fragment, and that most of it is, in fact, one huge gap to be filled by the reader.
Clive Hart, ‘Gaps and Cracks in Ulysses’, JJQ 30/3 (Spring 1993), 427–37: 436
(p.xxii)
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Introductory Contexts


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Luca Crispi
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter sets out the basic contexts for the book: the centrality of manuscript studies in the
critical debates about Joyce’s works, especially since the intervention of genetic criticism and
the discovery of a wide-ranging collection of previously unknown manuscripts that were
acquired by the National Library of Ireland since 2000; the book’s aims, methodologies, and
critical approaches; a survey of how Joyce constructs the impressions of Leopold and Molly
Bloom for the reader to discover; disentangling the multiple perspectives on the characters; an
overview of the contentious conceptual and practical issues that surround character studies in
fiction; and a description of the principles and practices of genetic criticism.
Keywords: genetic criticism, character studies, critical perspectives, fictional characters, character traits
Indeed, the book is a mosaic of small details artfully chosen and arranged so that we are
obliged to accept, Leopold, Molly, and Stephen, as well as their fellow Dubliners, as real
people. So overwhelming is the total effect that one dismisses as unimportant such
omissions as the hours between “Cyclops” and “Nausicaa” and may not even be aware of
such factual inconsistencies and mystifications, deliberate or not, as Robert M. Adams has
set forth in Surface and Symbol […]. Yet if Ulysses is full or careless and of imperfectly
realized details (in contrast with those upon which he exercises such evident care), which
any minute study will bring to light, it is still full of seemingly casual details which fit
together to make some of Joyce’s important points.1
Much like Ulysses, this book started off as something quite different from what it has become.
Its original impetus was an effort to redress the fact that, even though many more documents
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and much more information about how Joyce wrote Ulysses have come to light since 2000, this
information has been primarily of interest to specialist textual scholars and historians of the
book. Therefore, one of my goals all along has been to find a critical frame that makes the
information about the genesis of Ulysses more accessible and more relevant to a broader range
of critics and readers. But as I was writing the book it became evident that an investigation of
the textual archaeology of Ulysses also reveals a narratological genealogy of Leopold Bloom and
Marion Tweedy Bloom as the book’s central characters. In fact, it is an exemplary work of
narrative fiction for the study of the creative construction of characters, particularly because the
numerous surviving documents of its production allow genetic readers to trace in detail their
elaboration over many years.
This book demonstrates how the study of the often multiple, usually tentative stages in the
gestation of the stories about the Blooms can inform our understanding of how the characters
became the ones we ‘know’ in the published work. In this respect, my genetic critical approach
has sought to uncover the gradual, complex, and often unexpected ways in which the writer
wove the narratological patterns that serve to construct the characters in the work. Ultimately,
the patterns that are uncovered are part of a dual creative and interpretive dynamic between
what the writer has done and what the reader does when she encounters the stories about these
characters in the published work. Derek Attridge has set out the (p.2) dynamic between the
traces of the writer’s creative labour that persist in the text and the reader’s (and re-reader’s)
ongoing interpretative activity most precisely:
It is something of a truism that a literary work is a temporal event rather than a static
object, but one that can point in two distinct properties of the work: as having its origin in
a series of creative acts whose final product, though produced in time, gives an illusory
appearance of statis; or as emerging only in the act of reading, which transforms the
apparently static body of the words on the page into a temporal performance. […] The
challenge is to think both these temporalities together. The literary work does not come
from nowhere, and a sense of its having been written in a temporal process is part of our
understanding of it. […] All this means that the temporality of creation, as a
retrospectively constituted element in interpretation, is part of our understanding of any
literary work. And yet the writtenness of the work remains unrealized until it is read, read
in a singular enactment of its potential that puts into play many (but never all) of the
possibilities encoded within it.2
When possible, this book probes the moments when Joyce established certain facts and events in
the characters’ lives as well as their overall narratological function in the definite form readers
know in Ulysses. Even without knowing the specific details that the analysis of the surviving
manuscripts uncovers, critical readers generally presume that both the facts about the lives and
the ways in which the characters act and interact only gradually took the form they did in the
published work. Common sense suggests that Joyce determined some elements of the narrative
earlier than others, but what may be more surprising to some is the basic fact that he only
established many of the seemingly fundamental facts in the biographies of his characters at
relatively late stages in the creation of the text.3 It is from this type of historical perspective that
the material evidence of the writer’s work contributes to more grounded and nuanced debates
about our understanding of the character’s functions in the text-in-process and in Ulysses. For
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example, Joyce’s creative process indicates that the representation of the storytelling dynamic is
a more foundational aspect of Ulysses than the elaboration of individual characters, even
Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy.
Almost from the start, manuscript studies have been central to the critical debates about Joyce’s
works, especially since the intervention of genetic criticism in the more traditional fields of
material bibliography, textual studies, and editing. This trend has most recently been
reinvigorated by the discovery of a wide-ranging collection of previously unknown manuscripts
that were acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 2000, 2002, and 2006. Therefore, this
book builds upon a vibrant tradition of work in modernist textual and theoretical studies, but
takes (p.3) a distinctive look at the material and the practice of textual scholarship in relation
to literary criticism. Traditional textual studies of Ulysses (including much of my own work) have
investigated the genesis of a particular scene or episode in one manuscript, or else the evolution
of a scene or an episode over several manuscript levels. Though founded on the fruits of both
these approaches, Becoming the Blooms is a categorically different endeavour because it focuses
on the construction of the central characters of Ulysses and analyses the genesis and evolution
of their life-stories across all the relevant episodes in all of the relevant surviving manuscripts
and note repositories. From the perspective of material textual analysis, this book investigates
the many twists and turns of Joyce’s creative process in relation to his various overarching
methods for the construction of narrative subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Ulysses.
Furthermore, this is also a study of the ways in which knowledge is produced, presented, and
communicated through narrative modes of dialogue, memory, thought, and action, and of how
these components of the story are mediated by the different styles, specifically in relation to the
representation of characters. Put succinctly, this is an analysis of one of the most fundamental
features of Joyce’s project in Ulysses: how the stories about the Blooms are established and how
this information is circulated in the narrative and thereby presented to readers.
With some exceptions that are better left aside, towards the end of the twentieth century there
was a general critical consensus about how Joyce wrote Ulysses. This broad understanding was
based on decades of research on the then known manuscripts by many critics, the most
influential of whom are A. Walton Litz, Hans Walter Gabler, as well as Michael Groden, whose
‘Ulysses’ in Progress helped to crystalize a certain vision of the trajectory of Joyce’s work in
three interrelated ‘stages’.4 A significant amount was already known about the material creative
process that culminated in the 1922 first edition of Ulysses. For example, by the mid-1980s the
most basic facts about the status of the Rosenbach manuscript in the compositional history of
the book were established, although there continues to be fundamental disagreements about the
impact this mixed faircopy has on the possibilities of producing a critically edited text. In fact, so
much was known about how Joyce wrote Ulysses that textual scholars were also able to say quite
a lot about what they did not know based on the evident lacunae in the manuscript record, and a
solid familiarity with Joyce’s general writing practices, especially with Finnegans Wake.
While the cruxes of the debates were well established—even when they could not be resolved
based on the available evidence—that sense of unanimity all changed at the start of this century.
Although certainly interesting as an object of study in its own right, the appearance of a
previously unknown ‘Circe’ manuscript in 2000 was not surprising given the evidence from
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Joyce’s letters and the extant textual record.5 In general, this manuscript tended to confirm
rather than disrupt (p.4) what we thought we knew about Joyce’s work on Ulysses. But then,
another, more comprehensive acquisition of a further large cache of new manuscripts (again by
the National Library of Ireland) transformed the critical landscape. This collection of
manuscripts contained sibling manuscripts that filled out the textual record of the already
known manuscripts (most of which are in the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries,
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York), but there were also manuscripts that
scholars could not have surmised existed, particularly in the state in which they do. Among
other things, it contained the earliest known Ulysses notebook and draft,6 as well as two
manuscripts that chronicle a crucial, relatively late phase of Joyce’s work on Ulysses in 1921.7
These manuscripts provide a wealth of further information about the ways in which certain
individual episodes were written, but they also require a thorough re-evaluation of some of the
basic tenets of our understanding of the genesis of Ulysses. This work is an ongoing scholarly
and critical endeavour. Although the previously known manuscripts helped guide and shape our
appreciation of the newer ones, it has taken over a decade to begin to coordinate our
interpretations of what these manuscripts are and how they alter our understanding of how
Ulysses was written—and correspondingly our conception of the book itself. Working in close
collaboration with the staff of the National Library of Ireland and other Joyce scholars from
around the world, in 2003–4 I prepared a major exhibition of the newer manuscripts for the
ReJoyce centenary celebrations in Dublin that opened on Bloomsday, 16 June 2004, placing them
in the context of what was already known, and indicating the potential cultural and critical
significance of the new discoveries. Digital resources were central to the endeavour of
demonstrating the importance of these manuscripts to a much broader audience that was
interested in Ulysses and, more specifically, in the creative processes that produced the work.
Afterwards, I turned my attention back to the more specialist work of the material bibliographer
and textual scholar, working to catalogue as well as contextualize these newer NLI documents
by elucidating how they relate to the several other collections of Joyce manuscripts in Europe
and the United States. This information was quite interesting and innovative, but primarily
resonated in the relatively small community of Joycean textual scholars. Therefore, I sought to
find a way to show how this sort of specialist work intersects in fundamental ways with more
general critical and interpretative readings of Ulysses.
Aims and methodologies

It is clear that the manuscripts document (sometimes radically) different conceptions of both the
details and the contours of Ulysses from 1917 to 1921, but the (p.5) problem remains how to
make that information generally accessible and relevant to the wider audience of readers and
critics who are interested in the book as it variously appears in print. At first, I focused on the
ways in which the new information illuminates Joyce’s processes of storytelling in Ulysses. But
because this is a foundational structure of Ulysses, it quickly became clear that there are simply
too many disparate stories, and that they are told in too many different ways in the book. The
breakthrough came when I started looking specifically at the various tales told of Leopold and
Molly and how they evolved over the years and on many different extant documents. It then
became evident that through the study of the elaboration of these central characters I could
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frame a critical discussion of Joyce’s creative methodology and his evolving conception of his
work.
About midway through the composition of Ulysses in October 1918, Joyce famously complained
to his friend, Frank Budgen, that ‘Stephen no longer interests me to the same extent. He has a
shape that can’t be changed’.8 Leopold and Molly Bloom, on the other hand, were completely
new characters, and were therefore blank canvases that Joyce could shape and construct in any
way he chose. He obviously had to invent the life-stories of the Blooms for Ulysses, and the
manuscripts that survive document how he did this. Although usually elided, the context of these
often-quoted lines is significant to Joyce’s understanding of characterization in Ulysses. Budgen
tells the story of his conversation with Joyce in this way:
Technical considerations, problems of homeric [sic] correspondence, the chemistry of the

human body, were secondary matters. If Bloom was first it was not that the others were
unimportant but that, seen from the outside, they were not a problem. At about the time of
the publication of the Lestrygonians episode [in the Little Review] he said to me: ‘I have
just got a letter asking me why I don’t give Bloom a rest. The writer of it wants more
Stephen. But Stephen no longer interests me to the same extent. He has a shape that can’t
be changed.’ Bloom should grow upon the reader throughout the day. His reactions to
things displayed in his unspoken thoughts should be not brilliant but singular, organic,
Bloomesque.9
The close readings in the chapters that follow shed a great deal of light on how Joyce
constructed such a ‘singular, organic, Bloomesque’ character like Leopold Bloom, and,
correspondingly, how Joyce’s work on Marion Tweedy Bloom, particularly in the later stages of
writing the ‘Penelope’ episode, prompted him to give Bloom the semblance of more personal
depth, specifically by elaborating the few stories that are told about him as a young man. In
general, this book documents the genesis of Leopold and Molly as fictional characters (that is, as
the representation of the structures of their individual narrative subjectivities and lives) in the
most basic ways as Joyce wrote Ulysses, and so how these narratological patterns develop in
corresponding ways for the reader to discover as the events and recollections on 16 and 17 June
1904 unfold in the book.
(p.6) This book has two related aims that depend on an understanding of narrative construction
that are central to its title and methodology. It analyses the multi-faceted ways in which Joyce
constructed the characters of Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy as an integral aspect of the
overall construction of the text of Ulysses. On the one hand, this work explores the invention and
evolution of the Blooms as fictional characters in so far as these processes are documented in
the material traces of the text in Joyce’s surviving notes and manuscripts. On the other hand, it
also explores the production of the text of Ulysses from about 1917 to the book’s first
appearance on 2 February 1922 (and in subsequent printings and editions when relevant). Just
below the surface of my analyses of the fictional lives of these characters—and more obviously in
the apparatus and appendices that frame it—is a bibliographical examination of the documents
that are the precondition of the book we know as Ulysses. Both the construction of its central
characters and the construction of the book are contained in the idea of becoming the Blooms.
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As far as it is possible to determine such coordinates, this book examines the ways in which the
many stories about these characters got their start and then how they evolved through the
elaborate creative processes of narrative storytelling; these are the conceptual and textual
foundations of Ulysses. The book is comprised of close critical readings of the processes of
creative production (the genesis of the work; that is, its incremental, evolutionary development
over at least seven years and thousands of pages of manuscripts), rather than focusing solely on
the product of the creative endeavour (the published book in isolation). By taking account of the
various ways in which Joyce developed the fictionally biographical aspects of the Blooms
alongside the more generally symbolic and/or thematic features of Ulysses, this book also
explores and illustrates a genetic critical methodology. In general, it reveals the ways in which
specialist textual work on the evolution of Ulysses directly intersects with more general critical
and interpretive readings of the book.
The Genesis of Characters at the ‘Conjunction of Vision and Technique’

The issues about characters in fictional narratives have been and remain problematic. Reflecting
on an earlier, crucial juncture in the debate about the status of fictional characters, Rawdon
Wilson wrote: ‘The nearest any critic has come to a comprehensive analysis is, I believe, W. J.
Harvey’s Character and the Novel which still remains the most thorough and the most
thoughtful study of the problem.’10 In this pivotal work, Harvey claims:
I shall try to describe what might be called the raw material of character rather than the
technique of characterization. But even here language may betray us if it suggests a
process of manufacture; a more appropriate metaphor is that of conception, (p.7)
gestation, birth and growth—more appropriate because more mysterious. As critics we
can never do more than guess or hint at what happens with the conjunction of vision and
technique.11
This book takes Harvey’s metaphoric understanding of this concept literally: it is specifically
concerned with the ‘raw material of character’. To dispel the ‘mysterious’ qualities Harvey
attributes to such an approach, I have in fact situated my work at the ‘conjunction of vision and
technique’ to show how this more traditional perspective on narrative characterization can be
transformed when readers and critics do know more about how Joyce actually constructed (or to
use Harvey’s phrase ‘manufactured’) Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy. I analyse the various
ways in which these processes are inherently interrelated by looking at the textual raw material
Joyce used: his notes and the different manuscript versions of the stories that lead to their
published forms in the Little Review and Ulysses. By investigating how Joyce articulates and
executes his plans and thereby how he actually develops his creative technique, this book charts
the development of Joyce’s more general ‘vision’ of Ulysses. The evidence and this approach,
therefore, also allow me to make certain claims about Joyce’s technique of characterization
more generally.
One of the ways to explain my aims and methodology is to say that I have deliberately
concretized the metaphor that some critics are concerned with a character’s ‘gestation, birth
and growth’.12 In fact, to help frame the complex kinds of information that underpin my work, as
far as is possible, I have charted the gestation and growth of these fictional characters’
biographies from their birth to the early hours of 17 June 1904, and thereby analysed the
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writer’s evolving ideas about his characters and the work in which they appear. From this
perspective, genetic criticism can indeed do more than offer guesses and hints about the
construction of Leopold and Molly Bloom as characters.
Even with the wealth of manuscript information that is currently available for a critical
assessment of the text, a caveat has to be set forth from the start: we simply do not have a
complete material record of the evolution of Ulysses. Therefore, when other documents do turn
up they will almost certainly alter what we think we know about the genesis of the stories of
Ulysses. Nonetheless, much can still be gleaned from the textual record that we do have.
Initially, I compiled a dossier of the information about the various stages of Joyce’s elaboration
of the characters’ development and the creation of the lives they are supposed to have lived.
Then I critically correlated this information in a linear account that takes into consideration
when and how the stories that constitute their lives attained the form they have in the published
work. Finally, I analysed what this process of construction can mean for our understanding of
the characters and of Ulysses more generally.13
(p.8) Therefore, on the one hand, this book is an account of the events that constitute the lives
of these characters and the experiences they are supposed to have had, of the various
relationships they establish over the years (with a particular emphasis on the stories of the
Blooms’ love for one another that are a central pillar of the narrative of Ulysses), and of the
evolution of these relationships, including the profound challenge that Molly’s rendezvous with
Boylan poses for their marriage. On the other hand, this is also a commentary on what this
information can reveal about an understanding of the Blooms as fictional characters and so of
the meaning of Ulysses more generally. What will become clear from the examples that follow is
that Joyce’s execution of the various scenarios often did not accord with his prior plans. Instead,
he altered and amplified them in the process of writing. Predictably enough, the account that is
uncovered indicates that the genesis of Ulysses was a much more complex and dynamic process
than most readers and critics tend to imagine.
The most obvious general conclusion that comes from critically reading the tales told in Ulysses
is that what readers often feel is a deep and detailed foundation to stories about the Blooms is in
fact a scanty narrative; this too should not be surprising about any literary work of art. In
general, Ulysses merely gives the illusion of totality and completeness. How Joyce’s text
manages to create this illusion is a complex issue that is at the core of the debate about the
conjunction of vision and technique. While some readers may expect that the events and
experiences that constitute the life-stories of the Blooms were something fixed and necessary,
this is not an accurate understanding of the way in which Joyce (or most artists, for that matter)
work. He almost always added to and transformed much of what is usually considered to be the
foundational material about them as characters at various relatively late stages in the
production of the book. In fact, many of the details that readers may consider basic and
fundamental to the Blooms’ lives as characters in Ulysses were afterthoughts—or at least were
included in the text as afterthoughts—that were added to give texture to what was otherwise a
quite skeletal narrative that was focused primarily on the events of 16 June 1904, the most
significant of which is Boylan’s arrival at 7 Eccles Street, as well as the thoughts and memories
that occur to Leopold and Molly Bloom throughout the day.
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Since the stories about Leopold and Molly function as primary narrative foundations of Ulysses,
this work proceeds by means of close critical readings of the tales told about them in the texts
that form the book. A reader—or, more likely, a careful re-reader—of Ulysses can in fact account
for a myriad of factual details that constitute the so-called real lives of Leopold and Molly
Bloom.14 In this respect, it is well known that Joyce worked to ensure that there are enough
verifiable facts about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Dublin and Dubliners (both fictional and
real) to give Ulysses a strong semblance of facticity. My book makes manifest the common-
sensical view that Joyce had to invent the life-stories of the Blooms, and (p.9) that he did so
non-sequentially, over an extended period of time, from at least 1917 to the end of January 1922.
Constructing impressions of Leopold and Molly

There is only so much that readers can know about a character in any fictional work, but Ulysses
purports to represent its characters as fully as possible within the confines of the book. The
scenes—or, better yet, what should be understood as the ‘situational contexts’—that the writer
creates to reveal some sense of unity about the character and their character traits necessarily
serve to determine the parameters of a reader’s understanding of all the characters and the
work as whole. This understanding is accomplished in several highly nuanced ways in Ulysses:
through the narrative description of the actions and interpersonal interactions that a character
has with other characters, through the development of their manner of expressing themselves to
others in conversation (most often rendered as dialogue), and through the development of the
characters’ thoughts, feelings, and memories (rendered as narrated monologue). As the reader
experiences the complex interactions of these discursive fields in Ulysses, she slowly develops a
sense of the unity of the character’s identity, as far as that is relevant and possible in the
context of narrative fiction. Especially in a work like Ulysses, there is an inherent tension
between the degrees of stability either the writer or the reader wants to assign to any character.
Most obviously, Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy Bloom remain interesting to us as readers
precisely because we are both encouraged to believe that we can come to know them quite well
and also because, as we quickly discover, they resist such a comprehensive understanding in
various different ways.
Joyce’s conspicuous use of the descriptive qualifiers (adjectives and adverbs)—‘Stately, plump’
and ‘displeased and sleepy’, for example—at the start of ‘Telemachus’ has a determining impact
on how we understand Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus (U 1.01 and 12; U-G 1.01 and 1.13),
not just in this first episode, but thereafter throughout the book. Mirroring this effect, the way in
which Joyce introduces the Blooms in the fourth episode, ‘Calypso’, sets the parameters for how
readers come to relate to them as individuals and as a couple in Ulysses. In fact, from his first
appearance, Leopold Bloom seems to become one of the most sharply delineated and fully
rendered characters ever presented in fiction. According to Holbrook Jackson in an early review:
To read the novel is to spend the day in the company of this person from the time he rises
in the morning and gives his wife breakfast in bed to the time of retiring to his bed late at
night, whither his wife has already preceded him. You spend no ordinary day in his
company; it is the day of the most embarrassing intimacy. You live with him minute by
minute; go with him everywhere, physically and mentally; you are made privy to his
thoughts and emotions; you are introduced to his friends and enemies; you learn what he
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thinks of each, every action and reaction of his psychology is bare with Freudian nastiness
until you know his whole life through and through; know (p.10) him in fact better than
you know any other being in art or life—and detest him heartily. The creation of Bloom is
an achievement of genius.15
This book examines the techniques Joyce developed to create the impression that a reader can
come to ‘know him [Bloom] in fact better than you know any other being in art or life’. It
investigates how Joyce created this impression and what effects such an impression has on our
appreciation of Ulysses as a work of art. It also interrogates what these techniques tell us about
the ways in which these aspects of the narrative function. For example, the vividly precise,
realistic third-person description of his bodily presence in the opening lines of ‘Calypso’ firmly
establishes this as a principal aspect of who he is as a character:
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick
giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried
hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine
tang of faintly scented urine.
(U 53.01–4; U-G 4.01–5)
Except for two minor changes, Joyce did not alter this description of Bloom in any substantial
way from its appearance in the earliest known version of ‘Calypso’ that he wrote in February
1918.16 If Joyce included these material, tangible aspects of his character traits to help define
Bloom’s relation to world, then just a few lines later the reader is afforded another mode of
understanding Bloom through the style of narrated monologue in the midst of third-person
narration:
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right.
He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat
there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. ^Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry.^
(emphasis added; U 53.10–13; U-G 4.11–14)
Whereas we are introduced to ‘Mr Leopold Bloom’ by name at the very start of ‘Calypso’, the
person who (we can only presume on an initial reading of Ulysses) is the mistress of the house is
obliquely referred to ten lines later in the third person: ‘She didn’t like her tray full’. It seems
that not just ‘Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen’ (U 53.05; U-G 4.06).
Bloom is also thinking about how his wife usually takes her breakfast. The paragraph begins
with a representation of what readers will come to recognize as Bloom’s distinctively staccato
thought patterns, and then the reader is told something about her likes and dislikes. These lines
are followed by an almost anthropomorphic description of the kettle, and this is how the
paragraph ended in the Little Review version of the episode that appeared in June 1918.17 Then,
as indicated here, when Joyce revised the typescript for Ulysses three years later,18 he added
several (p.11) sentences that represent Bloom’s thoughts about his own breakfast that further
frames the scene.
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After his fleeting reflections and movements around the kitchen, another ‘she’ immediately
takes centre stage and Bloom’s interview with the cat occupies him and the reader for about a
page (see U 53.13–54.20; U-G 4.14–48). Then, without any indication that the subject may have
changed, Bloom’s thoughts apparently return to the discerning tastes of his peckish wife: ‘She
might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in
a way’ (U 54.22–3; U-G 4.50–1). In case the reader was still in doubt about the physical form of
the famished female in the room upstairs, we read about her ‘sleepy soft grunt’ that answers
‘Mn’ in reply to her husband’s question about whether she wants something out of the ordinary
for her breakfast (see U 54.24–9; U-G 4.52–7). Adept at understanding her wishes after more
than fifteen years of marriage, Bloom thinks: ‘No. She didn’t want anything’ (U 54.30; U-G 4.58).
In contrast to the very physical and sexualized way she is described lying in bed, Molly only has
a disembodied voice throughout Ulysses. This is the case even though the body, specifically her
body, dominates her thoughts in ‘Penelope’. As Bloom brings his wife her breakfast, we read
that
He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her
nightdress like a shegoat’s udder. The warmth of her couched body rose on the air,
mingling with the fragrance of the tea she poured.
(U 61.11–13; U-G 4.304–7)
We also read what ‘Mr Bloom said’ when he speaks to the cat (U 53.16; U-G 4.17), but yet the
narrator avoids using ‘Molly said’ every time she speaks with her husband, preferring to repeat
the more indistinct ‘she said’ eight times (U 60.01 and 04, 61.09, 20 and 32, 62.01, 62.25, and
63.11; U-G 4.260, 263, 302, 311, 314, 326, 331, 343, and 380). In fact, Molly is only named in
Bloom’s thoughts in the fourth episode of Ulysses and, tellingly, the first time is when he thinks
of the new garters he has recently given her (U 54.30; U-G 4.97). Conversely, she calls him by
name twice in ‘Calypso’, though both times she uses her loving diminutive: ‘Poldy’ (U 59.25 and
60.09; U-G 4.246 and 268). On the one hand, the people (most of them men) who talk about
Molly throughout the day are well aware of her first name. On the other hand, even when they
know it, no one in Ulysses calls Bloom by his full first name, Leopold, except the narrator on rare
occasions.
The only direct representation of any sort of interaction between Molly Bloom and another
character in the novel occurs midway through ‘Calypso’ (U 59.26–60.11 and 61.09–65.13; U-G
4.246–70 and 4.302–81); everything else that readers discover about her is mediated either
through memories, gossip, or the so-called stream of consciousness style that is the hallmark of
the final episode of Ulysses, ‘Penelope’. It is an odd book indeed where the central female
character is an active agent in only one full scene, which is interrupted halfway through, and
takes up less than a hundred lines of just one episode. Nonetheless, readers come to feel that
they know Molly very well by the end of the book. Arnold Bennett wrote that (p.12)
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The latter [‘Penelope’] (forty difficult pages, some twenty-five thousand words without any
punctuation at all) might in its utterly convincing realism be an actual document, the
magical record of inmost thoughts thought by a woman that existed.19
According to an Irish reviewer, A. J. (‘Con’) Leventhal, the matter was simple enough: ‘we are
amazed at the concentration of the author on female psychology. I do not know whether the
psychology is true. [… But] Molly Bloom, however, sounds real’ (emphasis added).20
Uncovering the various methods Joyce employed to create his seemingly larger-than-life yet also
realistic characters may be one of the most productive ways to investigate some of the radical
innovations he introduced in Ulysses. This book documents and analyses precisely how Joyce
constructed (and therefore presents) an impression of these characters as integral fictional
‘subjects’. I have also explored the different ways in which Joyce assembled the expansive and
elastic network of intersubjective associations that connect the many characters in Ulysses. As a
later critic put it, somewhat exaggeratingly:
About some of the characters—Bloom, for example—we are told everything, from their
thoughts to the tram tickets in their pockets. And as the two hundred or so characters file
across the pages, the whole of Dublin with its smoky streets seems to rise.21
Founded on material textual analyses, the overriding concern of this book is an investigation of
how Joyce redefined the discursive and psychological foundations of an individual character’s
consciousness and explored the potential of a textual intersubjective consciousness among
multiple fictional characters in Ulysses. Although these techniques and advances have long been
recognized as quite radical aspects of modernist literature, the specific methods Joyce used to
achieve these effects across intertextual and intratextual matrices are now being scrutinized in
greater depth and detail. Therefore, I hope that this work will help to define and further
encourage the debates about these pivotal technical and conceptual issues.
Most critical readings of Leopold and Molly (especially the more ideologically charged positions,
whether mythical or archetypal, formalist or structuralist, Marxist or post-Marxist, postcolonial
or materialist, gender or queer, historicist or psychoanalytic, post-structuralist or otherwise)
have tended to treat them and the narrative in which they are embedded as more or less fixed
and stable. Based on the characters’ presentation in Ulysses, these readings presume that it is
possible to make singular over-arching claims about what they think, feel, and do, and,
therefore, critics can argue about what they ‘stand for’. This book emphasizes a different
trajectory. It focuses on the more general fluidity of their composition (that is, most
fundamentally, their conception and constitution) until the juncture when Ulysses was published
as a book.
(p.13) Becoming the Blooms assembles material textual evidence to both support and
sometimes contest decades of critical insights that rely on the impression that these characters
are represented as fundamentally stable and fully-rounded fictional characters in the published
work. This book returns to their more fluid status in the creative process, uncovering a much
more ample field for a broad range of critical understandings of these complex artistic creations.
By exploring in detail crucial aspects of how Joyce wrote Ulysses, this work should provide a
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firmer grounding for further critical readings or re-readings. Most generally, it shows the ways
in which the creative process of constructing the narrative (and more specifically its characters)
establishes an impression of stability and depth in the published work that readers and critics
can variously interpret, thus paradoxically opening possibilities for both fixing as well as
unhinging its narratological implications on several levels and in several directions, including
gestation, birth, and growth.
Disentangling Multiple Perspectives

While it is often difficult to do so adequately, I have sought to disentangle at least three
perspectives on the stories about the Blooms in Ulysses: that of the writer, the character, and
the reader. Correspondingly, from the perspective of the writing process, I have also traced four
different temporal axes: 1) when Joyce wrote the stories, 2) when the characters are meant to
have fictionally lived these experiences, 3) the often multiple times when one or more characters
remembers or recounts the experiences, and 4) the reader’s (and re-reader’s) various temporal
experiences of encountering the stories about the characters’ lives in Ulysses.
In general, everything that readers discover about the Blooms in Ulysses is represented as 1)
being directly experienced by them on 16 June 1904, 2) by means of the characters’ memories of
their experiences, 3) by means of the other characters’ stories about the Blooms’ lives, or else 4)
as information about the characters that is mediated through the varied, eclectic, and
idiosyncratic narrative styles of the book’s different episodes. Most of the close readings and
analyses that follow are based on the Blooms’ memories and their reflections on their past, as
well as the insights that the other Dubliners provide. Therefore, to reconstruct the stories about
them in Ulysses I have separated Joyce’s construction of three distinct strands of the storytelling
process, each of which differently impacts the reader’s understanding of the experiences and so
also their understanding of the characters: 1) Leopold’s and Molly’s distinct personal memories
of some of the experiences in their lives, 2) the couple’s often shared memories of other
experiences, and 3) the tales other characters recount about the Blooms in the novel.
The first kind comprises those private stories that the Blooms have not revealed to one another,
and that are also not known by anyone else in the Dublin of Ulysses. With the second kind of
stories, I have tried to distinguish those aspects that are told in a consistent way by both
husband and wife from those stories that are told differently (sometimes even in a contradictory
manner) by the Blooms. (p.14) In both these kinds of stories, the various contexts in which
Leopold and Molly remember these seemingly same stories are crucially important. When and
how they recall an event in their lives reveals as much about the meaning of the experience to
them (and so in a related manner to the reader) as the actions and situational contexts of the
scenes in which the writer has placed them. In coordination, these modes determine the
parameters of how readers can comprehend the experiences and so understand the characters.
The third kind of storytelling in Ulysses is most often presented as (usually malicious male)
gossip about Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy Bloom, individually and as husband and wife.
Here it is necessary to take into account which character tells the story and to whom, the
context of where and when the story is told, as well as the specific stylistic structure and
thematic arc of the episode in which the story is being related. All three forms of storytelling
require analogous though distinct forms of critical scepticism about the information that is
presented about the Blooms in the narrative.
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Given the fragmentary experience of encountering information about the lives of the Blooms in
Ulysses, the reader encounters and interprets the stories in two basic modes. When reading the
book from cover to cover only bits and pieces of the information about their lives are presented,
and most often in a non-sequential manner, thus challenging the reader’s ability to comprehend
and reconfigure the often disconnected information into a coherent account. On a later reading
(whether in a linear re-reading or not), the reader will further order, contextualize, and interpret
the information provided, and thereby construct a more inclusive and cohesive rendering of the
lives of the Blooms. What a critically-interpretative genetic approach to their lives reveals is that
trying to re-read the stories in the book in a linear chronological mode—that is, reconstructing
their biographies as best we can—is a much more confounding endeavour, especially when one
also tries to take into account the piecemeal manner in which Joyce wrote and re-wrote what
purport to be the same stories, often in different episodes, over several years, and on different
manuscripts.
Furthermore, from the reader’s perspective, there are at least three related, but distinct
chronological axes that have to be taken into consideration when trying to disentangle the tales
told of Molly and Leopold as well as the other characters in Ulysses. First, in the most manifest
and public sense, characters are conceived in fictional works when a reader initially discovers
them on the page, and then the characters (and her understanding of them) evolve as the stories
about them unfold in the work. Furthermore, the reader’s understanding of the characters
develops as she continues to read the work, sometimes more than once. Second, if the character
is meant to have a semblance of real life in the fiction, then he or she is conceived in narrative
time and develops in the same way as real people do, and so the fictional biography can be
reconstructed in a linear chronological (virtually biographical) mode. As noted earlier, by
following this procedure, John Henry Raleigh and Peter Costello correlated the stories of the
Blooms in a manner that is pointedly different from the way that they are recorded in Ulysses.
Most obviously, we discover and follow the growth and maturation of Stephen Dedalus in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and then in Ulysses in both these (p.15) ways—that is,
textually and chronologically—even though Joyce was specifically drawing our attention to the
problematic nature of the confluence of these narratological issues in both these works. Finally,
in the most fundamental way, a fictional character is only conceived when the writer creates him
or her, and then he or she develops in the most tangible manner as the writer’s ideas develop
and mature. This third temporal axis consists of reading how Joyce conceived and wrote the
stories in Ulysses. Like the others, this too is a variant of the textual approach, but it is not as
readily available to most readers of Ulysses. Although this kind of genetic information is not
evident to readers of the various published reading-text editions of Ulysses, a significant
proportion of the record of the genesis of Ulysses from about 1918 onwards is recorded in the
left-hand pages of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition.
Joyce’s work obviously involved several kinds of aesthetic and practical decisions in a variety of
different and at times distinct modes. Broadly speaking, he had to decide both the general
contours of the situational contexts in which he placed the characters as well as the precise
details about the experiences they undergo. As I discuss in detail throughout this book, Joyce
purposely transformed both these aspects of the stories at many different stages in the
development of Ulysses—and for a wide variety of reasons. He also had to decide how the
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various characters acted and reacted in the situational contexts in which he placed them, and
these aspects of the stories also evolved over time. Furthermore, Joyce had to determine how
the characters reflect, mainly through their memories, on both their roles in the situational
contexts, and also on the import of their experiences on their lives. And it is here that we see the
ways in which the Blooms became the characters we read about in Ulysses. Finally, Joyce had to
decide how to present these scenes to the reader. As he determined these experiential and
narrative contexts for the characters’ actions, Joyce’s decisions also had the effect of defining
some of the parameters of the reader’s understanding of the characters’ multi-faceted
motivations and desires.
Close readings of the ways in which Joyce constructed the characters in the Ulysses manuscripts
reveal that he often altered both when and where events happened in their lives. As we will see,
the process by which he established the temporal and spatial coordinates of the events in the
characters’ lives was a complex endeavour. Obviously, there were occasions when the elements
of the scenes remained fluid, others when they became stabilized at least temporarily, and then,
of course, there is always the inevitable juncture when the elements are anchored in the text as
readers know them in the published works. Since these stages can be critically differentiated
from one another, the significance of these variations opens up further contexts for critical
interpretations.
There are clearly instances in which the natural chronology of human life determined when
certain events could take place in the lives of the fictional characters in Ulysses. Otherwise, the
earlier versions of many of the events in the Blooms’ lives confirm that Joyce usually was not
overly committed to establishing these temporal coordinates in a very precise manner as he was
writing the specific scenes for the book. He was often more motivated to connect events in his
characters’ lives with (p.16) historical events than he was with precisely determining when
they are supposed to have taken place in Leopold and Molly’s lives as such. Following the
patterns of memory more generally, Joyce specifically emphasized both the Blooms’ tendency to
date (and misdate) the events in their lives by associating them with other, both personal and
historical, events.
Overall, the strictly linear unfolding of the events that occur on 16 June 1904 is usually more
stable and fixed than the moments when earlier events in the Blooms’ lives took place. Joyce
clearly worked to interpolate the linear progression of the events of the day in Ulysses—
specifically Bloom’s odyssey around Dublin as a counterpoint to Boylan’s journey to the Blooms’
home—with the various ways in which the Blooms remember earlier times in their lives. In this
way, their memories of the past come to function as a cyclical counterbalance to the linear,
forward movement of the day’s events in Ulysses. Both Leopold and Molly are nostalgic about
earlier times in their lives. As Bloom puts it, he is: ‘Happy. Happier then’ (U 148.27; U-G 8.170).
For Molly these happier times were her adolescence in Gibraltar, but for both of them it was the
earlier days of their love, marriage, and parenthood, specifically before the death of their only
son, Rudy.
Similarly, Joyce’s avowed—though variously contestable—commitment to a certain mode of

realistic verisimilitude about the historical Dublin of 1904 in Ulysses makes analysing the
changing spatial coordinates of where the scenes in the Blooms’ lives took place in the
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manuscript versions of these stories particularly problematic. At times, Joyce was committed to
a specific site where an event took place when he started to write a scene, but more often than
not he either initially left the location generally vague, or changed where it happens, sometimes
more than once. Readers who are aware of this tendency should question the essentiality of
specific places where an event took place as a necessary determinant of its meaning in the book.
Furthermore, the prior (tentative) location may also alter our understanding of why a scene in
fact takes place where it does in Ulysses. Of course, as Joyce made decisions that specified an
ever-more precise geographical location for the scene, the topographical features of Dublin (and
its fictionalization in Ulysses) determined the ways in which Joyce was able to construct the
spatial parameters of the scene.
The Construction of Characters and Character Traits

There is an obvious intrinsic ambiguity in the English term ‘character’ that has profound
implications for literary studies. Among other definitions of the term, it signifies the fictional
people in a narrative that only exist within the covers of a book, no matter how ‘real’ they may
seem to be during the experience of reading. Character (as a human property) also signifies the
actions and motives of these ‘paper people’;22 that is, their distinctive efforts to accomplish
things, as well as (p.17) their seemingly unique psychological make-up, or, in other words,
what they do and say, think and feel. To begin with, let it suffice to state that I use the term
‘character(s)’ to signify the fictional persons that are depicted in Ulysses, and when necessary
‘character traits’ to discuss the elements that constitute their fictional subjectivity as it is
represented in the book, as well as the assumptions and judgements readers make about the
information they are given about these elements.
When some readers maintain that art imitates nature, they often presume that narratives are
descriptive of human nature and the world and, according to some critics, even prescriptive in
the sense of purportedly being a guide to living.23 Treating characters as if they were analogues
of human beings has encouraged some writers and readers to probe moral issues from
perspectives that are more often than not ideologically determined from the onset. But, for other
readers, art is an autonomous creative production that bears only an abstract relation to the
world, one that should merely be formally analysed without reference to what it may say about
the reality that is experienced outside the covers of a book. For such readers, characters are
primarily functions of the text and so pose essentially aesthetic questions that should not be
confounded with ontological and ethical ones. Most readers and critics are content to situate
themselves somewhere between the epistemological, ontological, and existential divide of the
humanist and formalist approaches to the problem of narrative characters. Approaching the
study of characters primarily either as analogues of human beings or as functions of a textual
system has failed to provide an adequate and comprehensive formulation of the ‘nature’ of
fictional characters in works of art. Such a solution may not be possible. Nonetheless, other
approaches that merge the most fruitful aspects of these critical stances may encourage a better
understanding of the role of characters in narrative fiction.
For at least the past fifty years, virtually all studies of fictional characters in narratives have
begun or ended with a similar lament about the problematic state of the concept in literary
criticism. For example, in an appendix to Character and the Novel entitled ‘The Retreat from
Character’, W. J. Harvey wrote:
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If the common reader supposes the creation of interesting, lively and lifelike characters is
one of the chief concerns of the novelists, he is likely soon to be disabused of such notions
by modern criticism. Modern criticism, by and large, has relegated the treatment of
character to the periphery of its attention, has at best given it a polite and perfunctory nod
and has regarded it more often as a misguided and misleading abstraction.24
(p.18) Unfortunately, Harvey’s significant intervention in the field was itself generally
neglected.25 He recognized the dichotomy at the core of the critical exploration of character in
fiction between the mimetic potential of narrative to reproduce a semblance of the human
condition and the necessity to focus on the distinctively textual aspects of the work of art as an
artificial construct.
Literary criticism has relegated the study of characters to the periphery primarily because of the
inherent philosophical difficulties that such analysis faces. Therefore, character remains one of
the most controversial and least well-defined terms and concepts in literary criticism. As has
often been noted, character will remain a problematic concept because of its epistemological
dependence on our changing understanding of the perception of reality and what is generally
referred to as human nature. It will remain impossible to conceive a coherent and convincing
methodological approach to the concept of character in narratives as long as the concept
remains ontologically ambivalent.
In 1979 Wilson restated the problem in this way: ‘For several reasons—not least of which is the
absence of a thoughtful critical tradition—character is much more difficult to talk about than
most other literary concepts.’26 Then, in a review of the field in 1986, John Frow wrote that it is
‘perhaps the most problematic and the most undertheorized of the basic categories of narrative
theory’.27 Not much has changed since then, because a fundamental issue in the study of
narrative characters is that it relies on some form of analogy between the ways in which
fictional characters think and behave and the thoughts and actions of human beings. In 2009
Mieke Bal diagnosed the problem in this way: ‘That no satisfying, coherent theory of character is
available is due to this anthropomorphic aspect.’28 In fact, currently many critics would consider
such a theory as undesirable as it is problematic. The study of fictional characters in literary
criticism is now viewed with even more scepticism than it was in 1965, for example, because
philosophical accounts about the determining role of personality in human character and moral
actions seem less tenable than ever. For example, Gregory Currie wrote in 2010 that ‘recent
work in social psychology has not been kind to notions of character and personality, which have
come increasingly to look like remnants of a superstitious past’.29 Furthermore, current
research in empirically-based psychological (p.19) studies has also undermined age-old
conceptions about the role of what has been understood as human character.30
It was virtually untenable to maintain a firm belief in the concept of character long before
Freud’s critique of a singular unified self and after its further elaboration by Lacan and others.
Furthermore, it is that much more difficult to do so following recent debates in social psychology
and ethics. To many it appears as a naïve remnant of folk-psychology that flies in the face of an
overwhelming amount of empirical and conceptual evidence. The arguments for character (as a
property) appear tautological to these critics: an agent’s behaviour over time explains our
understanding of his or her character, and our notions of character serve to explain an agent’s
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behaviour. In other words, behaviour is an indicator of an agent’s desires and motives (his
‘intention’, if you like), and our belief in an agent’s character is an indicator of why he behaves
in certain ways.
Given the related ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic issues that such an
investigation inherently entails, the persistently ambiguous state of the study of fictional
character in narratives seems unavoidable. The debate about the nature of fictional characters
can be traced to Aristotle’s definition of the mimetic potential of art and the conceptual
problems that such an investigation faces have evolved according to the corresponding changes
in the conceptions of reality since then. Although I do not pretend to offer a history of the
problem of character here, it is obvious that both the issues and the critical reactions have
remained the same over the past two millennia. According to this paradigm, I suggest that there
has only been a limited range of conceptions of Leopold and Molly as literary characters and an
equally limited number of responses to the ‘problem of character’ in fictional narratives, and in
Ulysses, in particular.
Although these positions usually tend to blend into one another in a wide array of combinations,
as fictional characters Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy have generally been treated in the
following ways: 1) as semi-biographical products of Joyce’s memories of the people he knew and/
or either heard or read about in his life in Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, Paris, and elsewhere; 2) as
autonomous entities that are analogous to human beings that, according to some critics, can
shed light on how readers do or should live their lives; 3) as solely the product of the writer’s
creative imagination, completely artificial constructs that only serve narrative ends; and 4) as
functions of the text that are incarnations of ideas and points of view.31 Although these positions
are only rarely adopted in extreme forms, when pursued in isolation they each do a disservice to
the complexity of literature and literary criticism in general and in regard to Joyce’s works in
particular. Nonetheless, in various guises at different moments in my work, I have taken up all
of these positions in part, hopefully to some advantage.
(p.20) Ulysses is a foundational narrative with respect to the study of the construction of
characters in modernist fiction. This is because of its complicated commitment to a certain
realist strand in the history of literature, and also because of its pioneering literary
experimentation, particularly with the interrelated issues of narration and subjectivity. The
writer’s decisions about the construction of his characters in the elaboration of the text are
some of the prerequisites for the reader’s recognition of this coherence. As distinguishable and
comprehensive totalities, narratives provide the opportunity to explore the viability of
attributing coherent character traits to fictional persons. Therefore, by analysing the writer’s
creative decision-making processes (as they are documented in the manuscripts) and
disentangling the various elements that led to the establishment of the multi-faceted networks of
the characters’ actions and motives, this exploration of the textual history of Ulysses will provide
a rich arena for the study of the problematic issues associated with the range of claims that can
be made about characters in Ulysses and in narrative fiction more generally. The writer’s
patterns of constructing these personalities—their desires and motivations, decisions and
actions—and the corresponding ways that readers interpret them should provide a better-
informed critical understanding of the persistent and complex issues of character in narrative
fiction. Furthermore, reading the raw material that forms the often different versions of the
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stories about the situations in which the writer placed his characters as they evolved, changed,
and stabilized, over and over again, until they were frozen in the matrix of the published book
for the reader to discover, allows critics to explore the more ample textual fields that produced
the character. The often different narrative contexts about the characters in the manuscript
versions serve to determine the several parameters that underlie readers’ understandings of the
characters in the published work.
The analyses and conclusions in the chapters that follow are concerned primarily with Joyce’s
creative construction of Leopold and Molly as fictional characters in Ulysses. I have purposely
not engaged with the more general, conceptual questions about what a fictional character is,
should, or even can be—or, for that matter, what character analysis is, should, or can be as a
field of study—because that is the subject of another book. Rather, the core of this book is an
inductively empirical descriptive study of the manifest methods Joyce employed in the
construction of two of the most iconic characters in modern literature.
Inevitably, my work intersects with some of the fundamental issues in narratology, aesthetics,
ethics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. This comprises questions about the concept of
‘character as such’, as revealed through thoughts, actions, and character traits, as well as
identity, time, place, causality, desire, sexuality, and specific and general moral questions. But it
does so only in so far as these and other related issues pertain to the main concern of this book:
an exploration of the creative process of constructing fictional characters in a literary work of
art that purports to represent a rhetorical semblance of reality. Nonetheless, I presume that the
material evidence put forward and the analysis of these conceptual issues specifically in Joyce’s
work will afford some further insights into the ways in which these philosophical problems have
been framed and our general understanding of them both in art and, if considered appropriate
by some, in life more generally.
(p.21) Towards this end, I have adopted certain heuristic devices to study these processes and
issues in a controlled manner. These include the conventional narrative principles that the
characters in Ulysses—especially Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy Bloom—are analogous in
certain respects to human beings, whose full histories are contained in the various texts that
comprise the book; when not determined by other stylistic considerations, that the actions of
these characters in general are demonstrably related to a set of relatively sensible motivations,
which the reader is encouraged to discover; and that the manner in which the information is
imparted to the reader is indicative of an overarching, though variously interpretable, meaning
related to the characters’ personality and the literary work as a totality.
Traditionally, our notions about character and character traits in life and fiction have been
intertwined. In fact, our conceptions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity (as well as our
conceptions about how we tend to define ethical behaviour) have been and continue to be
shaped by their representations in narrative fiction. Works like Ulysses—and, even more clearly,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—encourage the view that these concepts can be
understood as analogous in various degrees, but they also focus the reader’s attention on the
hazards of maintaining uncritical perspectives on the equivalence or correspondence of these
related but distinct concepts. Regardless of their explanatory force outside of their fictional
contexts, narratives encourage readers to commit themselves to an overt belief in a discernible
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coherence between desire-driven motivations and actions, which in effect amounts to what is
commonly understood as character and character traits. Although some of our common-sensical
notions about narrative and human character and character traits as such may ultimately be
considered indefensible on theoretical as well as on practical grounds, the fact that readers are
afforded the opportunity to reflect on other human beings through their figuration as fictional
characters is one of the principal pleasures literature affords. By design, Ulysses provides a
sufficient variety of perspectives on certain character traits to allow readers to reconstruct a
relatively coherent understanding of its characters. The most engaging literary works of art
encourage us to believe that the narrative stories that unfold in a book imitate the world we live
in; this is their mimetic potential and relevance, as well as the source of much of the satisfaction
and fulfilment that literature can provide. Throughout history, narratives have helped readers
explore and define their understanding of the world and their fellow human beings. Narratives
will continue to do so regardless of the philosophical and critical debates about the status of
characters in art and what we variously understand as human character that have and will
continue to resurface and then recede temporarily.
In his ground-breaking Lots of Fun at ‘Finnegans Wake’, Finn Fordham has investigated the
complex issue of ‘character’ construction in Joyce’s last work and has discovered that
The radical unravelling of character is a consequence of Joyce’s rewriting procedures.

Initially, Joyce drafted particular characters that are peculiar in being dehistoricized, their
social contexts unspecified, as a rule absurd, with inconsistent mixing of historical (p.22)
allusion. They are carriers of Joyce’s exercises in style, rather than self-consistent entities.
[…] Over time, rather than becoming more specific, they proliferate, change name, sex,
nation, class, period. Any clue to naturalistic context that might be provided […] is quickly
qualified and elaborated rapidly in revision, by incorporating some element from another
conflicting historical framework. The consequent multiplication of temporal and spatial
contexts means that the delineating limits of character blur. It is through revision that
character is refracted and multiplied, stretched across incompatible and incongruous
realms.32
Fordham’s analysis makes it clear that there are as many similarities as there are differences in
Joyce’s efforts to construct characters in the writing and rewriting processes of Ulysses and
Finnegans Wake. As I discuss throughout, Joyce often wrote the stories in Ulysses without
anchoring them to a specific character or establishing where and when the events took place. It
was only as he further elaborated the stories in the rewriting process that he ascribed them to a
specific character (though he sometimes reassigned the story to yet another character), and
embedded them in a specific place and particular time, though these too were often malleable.
Most often Joyce’s primary concerns were the contours and the specific language of the stories
in Ulysses, while the character or characters involved in them (or simply their names) were little
more than notional markers, placeholders that function primarily to provide a stronger sense of
realistic verisimilitude to the narrative. Unlike in Finnegans Wake, in Ulysses it was only through
revision that characters were established and their life histories and traits unified, but that was
rarely Joyce’s principal goal.
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There are many examples in the subsequent chapters of the ways in which, on the one hand,
Joyce purposely explored and elaborated the emotional range, and at times even the pathos, of
the events in a character’s life as well as their reactions. On the other hand, there are a
relatively equal number of examples when Joyce diminished or simply eliminated information
that he had written (more often than not for specific stylistic reasons that determine the
episode). Whichever trajectory Joyce followed, this further contextual and factual information in
the prior manuscript versions often offers a different understanding of the complex drives that
prompt a character to act or react in the ways in which they do in the situational contexts in
which Joyce places them.
Joyce’s work on Ulysses documents a two-fold trajectory that engages with the tradition of
literary realism in different ways. The first trajectory shows how his work encourages readers to
invest a certain degree of ‘reality’ in the characters in Ulysses that conforms with more
traditional forms of literary realism at the same time as the work’s experimental features
redefine these aspects of the narrative. The other trajectory documents the writer’s willingness
to abandon more overt descriptions that establish a certain depth of character development, and
thereby present a semblance of balance and range of experiences and emotions. This latter
stance demonstrates a disregard for seemingly intrinsic or essential attributes of a character
(p.23) in favour of a minimalist, archetypal representation of the features of individual
subjectivity, such as is often thought to be the case in Finnegans Wake.
Tracing those instances in Ulysses when Joyce purposely diminished the emotional register in
later versions enriches our understanding of the potential range of the relationships between
these characters. While the earlier, more expansive versions of other scenarios in Ulysses
document an at least temporary investment in elaborating a greater psychological depth and
range for his characters, Joyce’s willingness at times to jettison some of these aspects for
stylistic reasons is emblematic of his drive towards minimalist representations of subjectivity
and intersubjectivity that are fundamental to the more general late-modernist trends of
narrative fiction, such as we also find in Finnegans Wake and in many of Beckett’s works, for
example. The interplay between both these trajectories demonstrates one of the most significant
aspects of Joyce’s pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century modernist literature.
It has long been argued that what we commonly understand as character (as a property) is less
of a conditional determinant on the fictional characters’ actions than the variations in the
situational contexts in which the writer has placed them. That is, what a character does or says,
or is represented as thinking or feeling, in specific, particular situations is more revealing about
who they are—whatever that may variously mean in the context of fictional narratives—than any
sort of more generally psychological description or analysis. Correspondingly, the characters’
decisions and reactions in these situational contexts come to define the ways in which readers
can interpret the characters’ desires and motivations. If this is so, analysing the ways in which a
writer constructed the situational contexts that frame his characters’ actions and reactions may
be a more effective tool in elucidating the ways in which we understand the characters than
starting from any form of essentialist notions about their character as such. Crucially, this issue
is merely a component of the more fundamental question that this book addresses: whether
Joyce’s characters—any and all of them (except for Stephen Dedalus, for obvious reasons, and
Leopold and Molly Bloom, but only in some limited ways)—are actually integral to the stories
Page 20 of 27
being told in Ulysses. Furthermore, Joyce included most of the minor characters simply to
elaborate the stories he was telling of Leopold and Molly rather than to develop them as multi-
dimensional, fully-rounded characters in their own right. In fact, he only gradually determined
the semblance of subjective and intersubjective psychological and emotional complexity in his
fictional characters as we know them in Ulysses. In what follows, I try to show how, as Joyce
revised both the events in Leopold and Molly’s lives and their roles in them, he correspondingly
changed the characters’ as well as the prospective readers’ perspectives on these events. In this
way, he altered the characters and precisely what Ulysses was at various stages.
Genetic Critical Close Readings

It is unlikely that many writers in English have had their literary remains exhumed and
submitted to post-mortem examination to the degree that Joyce’s have been during the
past few years. Almost no piece of nonepistolary prose that Joyce wrote has (p.24)
escaped publication. […] Much might better have been left unearthed, for all the help it
has been to significant scholarship. At the same time, however, much of the most valuable
criticism has come as a result of the scraps Joyce left behind him. If Joyce is worth serious
consideration as man and artist, it is certainly not because of the startling originality of
what he had to say. ‘What oft thought but ne’er so well expressed’ better describes his
contribution to modern literature. To examine the workings of the man’s creative
consciousness, therefore, for what it may reveal of his method of composition is highly
profitable.33
This is how Marvin Magalaner described the situation in Joyce studies in 1962, about fifteen
years before the publication of the sixty-three-volume primarily black-and-white photo-facsimile
of all of the then known manuscripts in the James Joyce Archive, and forty years before the
discovery of the newer Ulysses manuscripts that have once again reinvigorated Joycean textual
studies, and are now at the National Library of Ireland.34
As I have indicated, this book’s methodology can be broadly described as a form of genetic
criticism in that it is founded on critical readings of the creative processes that engendered the
text, rather than on critical readings of just the products of the creative endeavour in isolation:
the published versions of the work. What constitutes the critical analysis of the genesis of the
text (that is, its incremental, evolutionary development) is variously defined and practised.
Nonetheless, a methodical understanding of the historical, material, as well as textual aspects of
Joyce’s manuscripts is a necessary foundation for genetic studies to be an effective tool in the
interpretation of his works. The necessary foundation of the genetic critical approach is an
examination of the verifiable information that is documented in the necessarily partial material
traces of the work’s evolution, but that is emphatically just one of its registers. Based on the
insights that this textual information provides, genetic critical readings then put forward both
specific and more general interpretative arguments about the larger context of the creative
process; and it also explores the impact that this evolution has on the meaning of the work we
recognize as Ulysses. It is therefore important to be aware of the fact that since Ulysses has had
several distinct but sometimes overlapping instantiations, it has therefore had different sorts of
readers at each juncture of its evolution and various publications. Simply put: since Ulysses has
been a different work at each phase of both its private and public manifestations, its possible
significance first to the writer and then to its readers has been different and will also continue to
Page 21 of 27
alter over time. In fact, paying attention to how the work is continuously transformed as new
readers take up the book is yet another fruitful aspect of the genetic critical endeavour.
The variously distinct material instantiations of Ulysses in manuscript and in print are fixed and
at least temporarily ‘finalized’ at each particular juncture in the history of its production and
dissemination. This is most obviously the case when Ulysses appeared as a published work: first
in parts in the Little Review, from March (p.25) 1918 to September-December 1920, then as
the Shakespeare and Company first edition of the book that appeared on 2 February 1922, and
its history continues to the present day with variously commendable editions and printings. On
the one hand, I have focused on the textual variations in the published work from its initial Little
Review partial serialization to the seminal first edition, and then to Hans Walter Gabler’s
1984/86 critically-edited text. On the other hand, I have emphasized the fact that the published
work is intrinsically embedded in the creative processes that produced it; that is, the text of
Ulysses has its origins and foundations in all of its manuscripts. In fact, I argue that the various
publications are just—more or less significant, depending on the critic’s perspective—moments
in the history of the book that the multi-faceted project of genetic critical readings
encompasses.35 So, the genetic critical endeavour involves disentangling the text’s many
different versions to better understand what it signifies in the several published public works.36
Although these material, historical, and textual facts are specifically recorded in the apparatus
and appendices that frame this book, we can begin by distinguishing several general phases of
Joyce’s work on Ulysses. While these phases of Ulysses in process are historically distinct, as
phases in the creative evolution of the work, they are better understood as a series of gradated
innovations rather than as discontinuous breaks with what Joyce had already accomplished.37
What is now generally considered to be the first phase consists of the earliest known traces of
the work that Joyce wrote from at least 1917 to 1920, a period which also coincided with the
publication of the first fourteen episodes of the work in the Little Review. The second phase
encompasses Joyce’s continuing work on Ulysses after it had been suppressed in the United
States to the pivotal juncture when Sylvia Beach agreed to publish the work in Paris in the
spring of 1921. This was a period when all of Joyce’s creative attention was focused on the last
four episodes, ‘Circe’ through ‘Penelope’. In very broad strokes, the final phase consists of
Joyce’s rush to finish as well as further revise all the episodes of the book from the summer of
1921 to just days before the work finally appeared. Even though this genetic information is not
evident to readers of the reading-text editions of Ulysses, much of the work of documenting the
evolution of Ulysses from about 1918 onwards is recorded in the left-hand pages and multi-
faceted apparatus of Gabler’s UCSE. Nonetheless, it is impossible to fully comprehend the
complex dynamics of the composition process without a relatively thorough understanding of the
material documents (preferably the manuscripts themselves, though digital and print facsimiles
can suffice for certain aspects of the analytical work).
(p.26) Although our understanding of these facts continues to evolve, textual scholars are able
to determine with some precision when Joyce worked on the different Ulysses manuscripts.
Therefore, what this book tries to demonstrate is that the information about when and how a
certain facet of the narrative became a part of the text can both substantiate and further
illuminate our critical understanding of the book. The manuscripts document the material and
Page 22 of 27
textual form the stories had at various particular phases in the evolution of Ulysses. They are a
documentary record of when and how Joyce shaped and altered the stories about the Blooms as
he wrote and rewrote specific situational contexts (as well as similar or related versions of these
scenes in other episodes). The manuscripts also show when and how the various aspects of the
stories about the characters attained the fixed forms they have in the published works. These
material records allow us to isolate the text of Ulysses at particular points in time during the
work’s at least seven-year genesis, thereby permitting critical genetic readers to discriminate
between those features of the work that Joyce had already set in place and those that were yet
to come, of course, without privileging the earlier ideas and texts over later ones, or vice versa.
Set alongside Joyce’s often exaggerated or imprecise accounts of his work in his correspondence
with friends, other writers, patrons, publishers, and others, the manuscripts offer the most
reliable documentary evidence about when and how the Blooms became the characters they are
in the published work. While readers of Ulysses are not necessarily aware of the broader horizon
of the text’s genesis, understanding the various transitional moments in the creative process
illustrates how the work became what it is and also elucidates Joyce’s evolving conception of his
characters and the work overall. The analyses in the subsequent chapters interpret the
significance of the evolution and transformation not just of individual words and phrases but
sometimes entire storylines that are radically different or are simply not part of the published
book.
In general, by focusing on the creative processes of a text’s production, a critic can bracket the
pretence that the work as we have it in its various published forms was timeless and necessary,
and thereby avoid essentializing interpretations of the novel and, more particularly, its
characters. By investigating the actual multiple material instantiations of the text, we see what
Ulysses actually was at various stages along the way. This form of genetic criticism also explores
what the work could have been and, therefore, it situates the published work in a much wider
textual and contextual environment. One of the strengths of genetic readings as a form of
critical interpretation is their ability to destabilize categorical interpretative accounts about the
work that are based solely on the evidence of a seemingly singular, unitary, published work.
Genetic readings, therefore, contest the sometimes-monolithic interpretations that the more
traditional approach promotes. Instead, this kind of work seeks to broaden the understanding of
the field of specifically genetic literary criticism by bringing together philologically-grounded
and more theoretically-informed perspectives in a synthetic approach to textuality and narrative
that should demonstrate its effectiveness as a central critical interpretative tool in Joyce studies
and more widely.
(p.27) This form of genetic criticism is primarily founded on an assemblage of the verifiable
information that is documented in the necessarily partial material traces of a work’s evolution.
Although some literary critics may not valorize this more objective aspect of genetic criticism,
even at a time when historical and material textual approaches have assumed—once again—a
central position in Joyce studies, and more generally in modernist studies, by being as rigorous
they can be in terms of the evidence it marshals, the various genetic modes of literary criticism
should encourage a multiplicity of perspectives and foster a broad range of readings and
interpretations.38 In fact, the close genetic readings that follow show both the general fluidity of
the stories about the characters, often over many years—and so the instability of the characters
Page 23 of 27
as agents in the stories as the situational contexts that included them developed—as well as
when and how the various stories became anchored in the text in Ulysses, thereby determining
the stories and continuously limiting the possibilities for the characters’ lives to change further.
This kind of knowledge about the text can be the foundation of myriad critical perspectives and
interpretive insights that would not be possible without access to the information about Joyce’s
creative work on the many versions of the texts that together produced Ulysses. Precisely
because genetic readers take account of the dynamic relationship between the stories in the
manuscripts and the published work, they are able to contribute what amounts to a different
range of critical commentary on the published work. By following this dynamic we simply have
more versions of Ulysses to study and read. As such, we are fortunate to have inherited a wider,
even more complex textual canvas for our critical interpretations as well as for our enjoyment as
readers.
Notes:
(1) Carl Niemeyer, ‘A Ulysses Calendar’, JJQ, 13/2 (Winter 1976), 163–93: 163.
(2) Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 103–4. I have only
investigated in a limited way the various roles a reader might adopt when she encounters the
stories in Ulysses because I believe that a proper study of this fundamental aspect of the writer–
reader dynamic (as well as a study of the complex typology of readers) is best left for another
book. My primary interest in this book is an analysis of the ways in which Joyce elaborated his
ideas as he was writing Ulysses.
(3) Since they are precisely the subjects of this investigation, I am not placing the terms life,
biography, factual, and other related terms in scare quotes when they refer to what are
obviously fictional elements of novelistic characters.
(4) Michael Groden, ‘Ulysses’ in Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). The
publication of the James Joyce Archive and Ulysses: A Critical Synoptic Edition was the
summation of decades of research on the Ulysses manuscripts.
(5) NLI Quinn MS.
(6) NLI NB 3 and NLI MS 7.
(7) NLI MSS 13 and 14. For further information about the Ulysses manuscripts in the National
Library of Ireland’s ‘Joyce Papers 2002’, see Peter Kenny, Joyce Papers 2002 (Dublin: The
National Library of Ireland, 2002), as well as Luca Crispi, ‘A First Foray into the National
Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts: Bloomsday 2011’, GJS, 11 (2011).
(8) Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, [1934] 1972), 107.
(9) Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 107.
(10) Rawdon Wilson, ‘The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term’, Critical Inquiry, 5/4
(Summer 1979), 725–49: 737.
Page 24 of 27
(11) W. J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 31.
(12) It is significant that these are also Joycean motifs about the artist’s creativity that run
throughout his works from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Finnegans Wake.
(13) The manner in which the multi-faceted textual material is understood as constituent parts of
the genesis of the work is ultimately a matter of critical interpretation as well. Therefore, I have
set out precisely how I construe the bibliographical status of the various Ulysses manuscripts in
the several appendices at the end of this book.
(14) John Henry Raleigh in The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: ‘Ulysses’ as Narrative
(Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1977) and Peter Costello in Leopold Bloom:
A Biography (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981) have both related the stories of the Blooms in
ways that are different from how they are recorded in Ulysses.
(15) Holbrook Jackson, To-Day, June 1922, ix, 47–9; reprinted in Robert Deming, James Joyce:
The Critical Heritage, vol. 1: 1907–1927 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 198–200:
199.
(16) Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ MS, f. 1.
(17) Little Review, V.2, p. 39.
(18) Buffalo TS 3.a, p. [1r]; see JJA 12: 270.
(19) Arnold Bennett, ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses’, Outlook (London, 29 April 1922), 337–9; reprinted
in Deming, Critical Heritage, vol. 1, 219–22: 211.
(20) Lawrence K. Emery [pseud.], ‘The Ulysses of Mr. James Joyce’, Claxon (Winter 1923–4), 14–
20; reprinted in Deming, Critical Heritage, vol. 1, 292–6: 295.
(21) G. W. Stonier, ‘Leviathan’, New Statesman and Nation, xii, No. 294 (10 October 1936), 551–
2; reprinted in Deming, Critical Heritage, vol. 1, 247–9: 249.
(22) This is Mieke Bal’s insightful description of fictional characters in Narratology: An

Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (3rd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009),
112.
(23) The proponents of this tradition include, among others, Leslie Fiedler and Declan Kiberd.
See, for example, Fiedler’s ‘Bloom on Joyce; or, Jokey for Jacob’, Journal of Modern Literature,
1/1 (1970), 19–29, and Kiberd’s ‘Ulysses’ and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber and
Faber, 2009).
(24) Harvey, Character and the Novel, 192. Not that the state of the field was much better before
Harvey’s book (or since, for that matter). He goes on to complain that ‘if I wish to refer my
students to a wise and substantial general treatment of character in fiction there is little to
which I can direct them since E. M. Forster’s deceptively light treatment of the subject more
Page 25 of 27
than thirty years ago. What has been said about character since then has been mainly a stock of
critical commonplaces used largely to dismiss the subject in order that the critic may turn his
attention to other, allegedly more important and central subjects—symbolism, narrative
technique, moral vision and the like’, 192.
(25) According to Rawdon Wilson, ‘W. J. Harvey’s book, for example, is seldom mentioned
(Patrick Swinden’s recent study of character in the novel gives Harvey one reference), although,
from the vantage of an overview, it remains one of the most provocative and, in its emphasis
upon “constitutive” elements in character, one of the most correct’, ‘On Character: A Reply to
Martin Price’, Critical Inquiry, 2/1 (Autumn, 1975), 191–8: 192. Later Wilson wrote that ‘[t]he
nearest any critic has come to a comprehensive analysis is, I believe, W. J. Harvey’s Character
and the Novel which still remains the most thorough and the most thoughtful study of the
problem’, ‘The Bright Chimera’, 737.
(26) Wilson, ‘The Bright Chimera’, 730.
(27) John Frowe, ‘Spectacle Binding: On Character’, Poetics Today, 7/2 (1986), 227–50: 227.
(28) Bal, Narratology, 113.
(29) Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 186.
(30) See, for example, John M. Dorris, Lack of Character: Personality and Behavior (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
(31) I have adapted Rawdon Wilson’s categories in ‘The Bright Chimera’ to fit the history of Joyce
studies and how I see my work fitting within this tradition.
(32) Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at ‘Finnegans Wake’: Unravelling Universal (Oxford: Oxford
(33) Marvin Magalaner (ed.), A James Joyce Miscellany: Third Series (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1962), xii–xiii.
(34) Digital images of these manuscripts are available on the National Library of Ireland’s online
catalogue, according to the copyright laws in different countries.
(35) For an elaboration of this line of argumentation, see Jean-Michel’s Rabaté’s discussion of the
‘genreader’ in James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001).
(36) This approach is obviously equally useful to an analysis of the transitions from ‘Work in
Progress’ to Finnegans Wake. See Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (eds), How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans
Wake’ (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).
(37) Obviously, the three very broad phases I outline here are made up of many other intrinsic
phases, which further scholarship will help to distinguish and elaborate.
Page 26 of 27
(38) For an excellent overview and survey of early work in the field, see Jed Deppman, Daniel
Ferrer, and Michael Groden (eds), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Page 27 of 27
Boylansday


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Boylansday
16 June 1904
Luca Crispi
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.003.0002

This chapter explores some of the most basic ways in which Joyce presents Leopold and Molly
Bloom as fictional characters through the synecdochic representation of Molly’s lover, Hugh
‘Blazes’ Boylan. It also explores the book’s overlapping narrative temporalities by arguing that
the time of the couple’s adulterous rendezvous establishes a distinctive third temporal
dimension alongside the progressive linear trajectory of the day, and the contrapuntal cyclical
movement of the couple’s memories of what were so often earlier, happier times. There are
many reasons why 16 June 1904 in Ulysses could be considered ‘Boylansday’, but one of the
book’s many triumphs is that it subverts the more traditional narrative expectations about
characters and events so that Ulysses will always be ‘Bloomsday’: the day of Leopold and Molly
Bloom. It is from this perspective that readers must come to understand Leopold Bloom as the
‘unconquered hero’ of Ulysses.
Keywords: adultery, plot, hero, character representation, narrative temporality
Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan is in effect little more than a caricature of a novelistic character. In fact,
the various ways in which Joyce constructed Boylan as a Lothario figure through the repetition
of specific metonymic and synecdochic motifs based on his appearance and attire make him
merely a stock figure with no depth or substance. Nonetheless, he plays a major role as a
protagonist in the unfolding of the plot of Ulysses, and helps to determine some of the most
basic ways in which Joyce represents Leopold and Molly Bloom. Therefore, this book about the
construction of the most complex and richly depicted characters begins by analysing the
Page 1 of 41
Boylansday
minimalist and fragmentary representation of the third member of the love triangle on 16 June
1904. Furthermore, this chapter also explores the proposition that Boylan and the affair are
significant only in so far as they impact the Blooms as a couple and individually.
The story of Boylan’s rendezvous with Molly is a constant and fundamental narrative
preoccupation in Ulysses from ‘Calypso’ to ‘Penelope’, and its climax actually occurs in ‘Sirens’.
Nothing in the Blooms’ lives (and so in the book) will be the same after Leopold actively
concedes that Boylan’s assignation with Molly will take place precisely because there is nothing
he can or will do to avert it. Joyce sums up Bloom’s attitude towards the affair in this way:
‘Prevent. Useless: can’t move’ (U 65.06; U-G 4.448) and ‘Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must’ (U
159.30; U-G 8.592). His passivity in these highly personal matters is an intrinsic aspect of his
representation as a character and so as the ‘unconquered hero’ of Ulysses (U 254.07–8; U-G
11.342). As I will discuss more fully, although it is commonly celebrated as Bloomsday, there are
many reasons why the day in Ulysses could rather be considered Boylansday. But one of the
book’s many triumphs is that it subverts the more traditional narrative expectations about
characters and events so that Ulysses will always be Bloomsday: the day of Leopold and Molly
Bloom.1 It is from this perspective that readers must understand Leopold Bloom as the
unconquered hero of Ulysses.
Alongside Leopold’s momentous proposal on Howth,2 from a genetic perspective, Molly’s

romance with Boylan is one of the oldest and most consistently (p.29) represented stories in
Ulysses. The stories about these two men in Molly’s life are parallel foundational pillars of the
book. In fact, the adulterous affair was already well established as an event that occurs on 16
June 1904 on the earliest known Bloom manuscripts: the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft,3 as well as the
Rosenbach ‘Calypso’, ‘Hades’, and ‘Lestrygonians’ manuscripts. While Boylan only has minor
speaking parts in two episodes, it is clear that he had a central role in Joyce’s conception of the
novel’s plot since at least 1918; that is, over four years before the book was first published.
Boylan’s minimalist though central characterization is as fully developed on the early versions of
these episodes as it is in Ulysses. Whereas Leopold Bloom is on the margins of the scene on the
earlier ‘Sirens’ draft, Boylan already has his starring role in Ulysses as the ‘conquering hero’ (U
254.06; U-G 11.340). It took another year, and the continuing elaboration of the stories about
Bloom, before Joyce balanced this narrative structure by establishing him as the book’s
‘unconquered hero’ (U 254.07–8; U-G 11.342). Then, in 1919–20 Joyce reinforced the essentially
stock characteristics that serve to identify Boylan in the middle episodes: ‘Wandering Rocks’, as
well as the various later drafts of ‘Sirens’, ‘Cyclops’, ‘Nausicaa’, and ‘Circe’. Nonetheless, as I
discuss in Chapter 8, Joyce only elaborated the most important aspect of Boylan’s role in the
book—that is, the representation of Leopold and Molly’s reactions to the affair in ‘Ithaca’ and
‘Penelope’—during the last phases of writing Ulysses in 1921.
Alongside these issues about Boylan’s characterization, this chapter also explores how the time
of Boylan’s arrival at 7 Eccles Street establishes a distinctive third temporal dimension in
Ulysses.
Page 2 of 41
Boylansday
Must see him [Nannetti] about Keyes’s par. Eat first. I want. Not yet. At four, she said.
Time ever passing. Clockhands turning. On. Where eat? The Clarence, Dolphin. On.
For Raoul. Eat. If I net five guineas with those ads. The violet silk petticoats. Not yet. The
sweets of sin.
(emphasis added; U 250.07–10; see U-G 11.187–90)
For obvious reasons, Molly and Boylan remain unnamed in Bloom’s thoughts at this climactic
moment in ‘Sirens’, but in the most basic sense Boylan is the primary catalyst of the events in
the life stories of Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy Bloom on Bloomsday. Whether he is trying
to avoid thinking about his wife’s adulterous affair in the earlier episodes, or to confront it more
or less directly in ‘Sirens’, Bloom’s obsession with the time of the couple’s tryst—‘At four, she
said.’—functions as a third temporal dimension in Ulysses. The next lines—‘Time ever passing.
Clockhands turning. On.’—connect the time of the rendezvous with the two other temporal and
narrative dimensions of the book: the progressive linear trajectory of the day, and the
contrapuntal cyclical movement of Bloom and Molly’s memories of what were, more often than
not, happier times (both individually and as husband and wife). In fact, the time of Boylan’s
rendezvous with Molly is the most significant narrative juncture in the day. It intersects and
ruptures the other temporal dimensions in the lives of the Blooms and in Ulysses. Although
prepared for from the start of Bloomsday in ‘Calypso’, this narrative event effectively moves (p.
30) the centre of the book from its structural and stylistic turning point in ‘Wandering Rocks’ to
the next episode, ‘Sirens’, in the pivotal scene in the Ormond in which Bloom passively confronts
the climactic moment in the storyline of 16 June 1904, before he re-establishes himself as the
‘unconquered hero’ of their home on 17 June 1904 in ‘Ithaca’.
Boylan on the earlier ‘Sirens’ manuscript
Active Dates: Kind of Manuscript: Manuscript:
7. ‘Aeolus’:
January–May 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, f. 12
11. ‘Sirens’:
Late 1917–Early 1919 Earlier Draft and Fragments NLI MS 7B, pp. [7v]–[14r]
17. ‘Ithaca’:
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Blue MS III, p. 27
Mid–Late December 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl III-12.i
18. ‘Penelope’:
Late–31 January 1922 Fifth Proof Level Texas PP 44.1 & Texas PP 45.1
In a recent essay, Margot Norris makes a convincing case that Boylan is a ‘minor or flat
character’ in part because he is represented as a caricatured role player: he is dubbed ‘the
conquering hero’ of Ulysses (U 254.06; U-G 11.340).4 In fact, he is primarily a mediated
presence, so that the reader’s understanding of him is structured by the other characters’
perspectives of him as well as by the different narrative voices that frame the various episodes.5
Boylan’s representation is static: he is a stock figure in costume, a player in a theatrical
Page 3 of 41
Boylansday
performance in which he has the role of the ‘gallant’ seducer (see U 219.03; U-G 10.329). The
manuscripts document the way in which Joyce constructs Boylan as a character by means of
metonymic and synecdochic tropes—for example, his clothes and hair—and the manuscripts also
show that it is no accident that Boylan never develops beyond the most rudimentary form in
Ulysses. While there is little doubt that Joyce purposely does not present him as a rounded
character in any significant way, the recently discovered earlier ‘Sirens’ draft requires that we
nuance at least in part our understanding of Boylan as a character in Ulysses. Blazes Boylan
features much more (p.31) prominently as an active character in the earlier draft of ‘Sirens’
than Leopold Bloom does. As Daniel Ferrer was the first to note, Bloom is more conspicuous in
his absence than in his presence at the Ormond Hotel.6 Similarly, whereas the Dublin men who
feature in the earlier draft of the episode are generally as they appear in Ulysses, Bloom only
plays a very small part. As far as is known, the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft documents some of Joyce’s
initial efforts to find a style and a voice for Bloom as the book’s central character.
Based on very slight extant textual evidence, over thirty years ago Rodney Wilson Owen
presciently wrote ‘that the first third of “Sirens” was earlier and more complete than the rest’.
Furthermore, he states that while he is
not trying to argue that the first section of ‘Sirens’ was actually drafted before Joyce left
Trieste in 1915; one would suppose, though, that the notebook [Buffalo NB 2a]
correspondence and relative lack of later additions to the first section indicate that
Simon’s flirtation with the barmaids, his piano playing, and the presence of both Bloom
and Blazes Boylan, were part of the original nucleus of the episode, and as such might
have existed in Trieste in a short sketch, an outline, or a compilation of notes.7
Nonetheless, the National Library of Ireland’s earlier ‘Sirens’ draft came as a surprise to most
Joyce textual scholars. A relatively significant amount was already known about the genesis of
Ulysses, nonetheless, the discovery of this particular manuscript caused a major reassessment of
some of the basic facts in the history of the book’s evolution. It is the earliest known draft of an
episode to feature Leopold Bloom and, unexpectedly, it proves that ‘Sirens’ is one of the earliest
episodes of Ulysses. Joyce probably wrote it in Zurich in late 1917 and early 1918, based on an
even earlier missing version, as the second part of a manuscript copybook that also contains the
(clearly unrelated) earliest known proto-draft of ‘Proteus’.8 The ‘Sirens’ portion is the earliest
version of most of the first half of the published episode (U 246.36–259.17; U-G 11.98–540),
though the text is considerably different from the next extant version.9 As such, it is a crucial
document in our understanding of the development of Joyce’s early ideas about Leopold and
Molly Bloom, and of Ulysses more generally. Therefore, it is worthwhile to contrast this earlier
draft version with the radically different one Joyce wrote a year later, which is much closer to
the episode as it appears in Ulysses.10 Whereas the narrative action in the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft
is generally similar, it has none of the stylistic dimensions that readers of Ulysses expect from
the episode. But the breakthrough Joyce made at a later stage on the manuscript’s final pages—
especially in the disconnected fragments in which he explored the workings of the presentation
of Bloom’s thoughts—made it possible for him to write (or probably rewrite) the early Bloom
episodes (p.32) from ‘Calypso’ through ‘Lestrygonians’ as we know them in Ulysses. By the
time Joyce returned to ‘Sirens’ about a year after he finished writing its earlier draft, Leopold
Bloom had become a much more well-defined character and the book a much more experimental
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work, but the representation of Boylan’s role remained virtually the same. He is always featured
with his characteristic straw hat, fashionable quiff, fancy socks, and shoes.
Unlike the episode’s stylistic presentation, the storyline on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft that features
the Dublin men at the Ormond Bar is remarkably similar to the one in Ulysses, though there are
some notable differences as well. The earlier draft is much closer in style and tone to a
Dubliners short story than it is to its radically altered later versions, which suggest that Joyce
was following an earlier conception of the episode. The narrative of the first part is a fairly
straightforward description of the scene at the Ormond Bar, with dialogue and some musical
elements, but little of the psychological depth readers expect from ‘Sirens’. The ‘fugal’ (or varied
contrapuntal) narrative style of the episode as it is known from later versions—where events
occurring in different places and the various thoughts of the characters are rendered
simultaneously—is not part of the episode at this stage. But the next portion of the manuscript,
which is comprised of a variety of fragments (of descriptive scenes, dialogue, and interior
monologue), marks the multi-faceted beginnings of the episode’s stylistic breakthrough.11
The story at the Ormond Hotel begins with the banter between the barmaids at the blinds of the
pub as they watch the viceregal cavalcade pass by down the quays (see U 246.36–259.17; U-G
11.98–540). The young women’s overt sexuality seems to be the most basic point of the story at
this stage. Then, quite early in this version of the events, Simon Dedalus makes his first
appearance in any known Ulysses manuscript as he walks into the Ormond Bar preening his
‘rocky thumbnails’.12 As in Ulysses, Lenehan enters next and asks whether ‘Mr Boylan’ has been
in looking for him.13 Although this is the first mention of Boylan in any surviving document for
Ulysses (and it is not made explicit), it seems certain that Joyce had already established his role
as Molly’s suitor. In this earlier draft Lenehan asks Miss Kennedy whether Boylan has been in
and then she relays the question to Miss Douce.14 While Joyce inverts the barmaids’ roles later
on, the interaction between them is identical and the answer is the same: ‘No. He was not’.
Joyce added Lenehan’s poorly received joke to the scene, but his interactions in the pub
continue in the main text much as they do in Ulysses when he relates the story of meeting
Stephen Dedalus to his father.
None of the interpolations about Bloom are part of the story on the episode’s earlier draft, but
Boylan’s entrance is presented in virtually the same way as it is in Ulysses:
Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode. Yes, gold from
anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard and knew and hailed him:
(p.33) — See the conquering hero comes. […]
— And I from thee …
— I heard you were round, said Blazes Boylan.
He touched to fair Miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw. She smiled on him. But sister
bronze outsmiled her, preening for him her richer hair, a bosom and a rose.
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Boylan bespoke potions.
— What’s your cry? Glass of bitter? Glass of bitter, please, and a sloegin for me. Wire in
yet?
Just as in Ulysses, on the earlier draft the narrator pointedly names him as ‘Blazes Boylan’ the
first time he is introduced, and continues to refer to him in this way in the direct speech markers
almost a dozen times. His name is one of the most basic facts of his representation from the
start and can be traced to one of the earliest extant notebooks for Ulysses, which Joyce compiled
in 1918 while in Zurich, so more or less when he was writing the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft. It
appears just below Joyce’s transcription of a poem by J. F. Byrne in the midst of several pages of
notes on Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée.15 This is the context in which the note
appears:
Antiphates — blasphemer
accuser
— curser ^(Blazes)^16
According to Phillip Herring, only the first line comes from Bérard. So it is unclear what
prompted Joyce to note the second and third lines. Nonetheless, the layout of the notes indicates
that Joyce only associated the epithet in the third line with his character for Ulysses at a later
stage when he added the name in the margin of the notebook. Then he crossed through the
entire line in crayon, presumably when he incorporated it in one of his working drafts.
Nonetheless, the character’s name was always ‘Blazes’ Boylan (or just Boylan) until mid-1921,
when Joyce christened him ‘Edward’ on the Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ manuscript.17 He only became
the ‘^<Edward> Hugh^ (Blazes) Boylan’ we know in Ulysses about six months later on the
episode’s first proof level,18 and Joyce finally gave him his middle initial ‘E.’ (possibly to
maintain an oblique trace of the Edward that he had removed) after he had revised the episode’s
third and final proof levels at the end of January 1922 (U 683.27; U-G 17.2141). There is no
manuscript record of this final change, which indicates that Joyce must have sent a note or
telephoned the printer to ensure that this precise change was made, literally just days before
Ulysses appeared. So much for his other names; as we will see, he is always Blazes Boylan to the
Dubliners (p.34) in Ulysses. At about the same time as Joyce gave the lover a proper first name
in ‘Ithaca’, on the fifth and final proof level of ‘Penelope’, he added the fact that he expects to be
called Hugh rather than Blazes by Molly. When she thinks of the few letters she has received,
Joyce has her recall the one Boylan sent her that day and thinks: ‘his wasnt much and I told him
he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan’ (U 709.27–8; U-G 18.735–6),19 and later in
the episode she complains about his disrespectful slap on her bottom. At the last possible
moment Joyce complicated the incident by adding her admission: ‘because I didnt call him
Hugh’ (U 726.10; U-G 18.1369–70).20 He added all of these references to Boylan just days before
Ulysses was published. So, clearly, Boylan’s dislike of his well-known nickname took a very long
time to mature as a motif in the book.
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Returning to the barroom scene on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft, the storyline is remarkably similar
to how it appears in Ulysses. All the attention turns towards Boylan as he enters the Ormond. He
is already ‘the conquering hero’, he has his signature straw hat, and Miss Douce is attracted to
him as she ‘preened ^rising^ herself at leisure’.21 Otherwise, Joyce had already written most of
the rest of the scene virtually as it appears in all of the subsequent versions. Boylan orders
drinks and asks whether the wire is in yet with news of the Gold Cup race. Lenehan says that it
is not, Boylan asks the time, and in this version he wonders if it is still ‘Half three’. As will soon
be made clear, he is overly concerned about the time, but not just because of the race results.
On the next page of the episode’s early draft, Boylan tells of meeting Bantam Lyons in Grafton
Street who was ‘^<talking> rambling^ about some horse’. Lenehan gives his prediction and
Boylan tells him that he ‘put a bit on her [Sceptre]’.22 Much as it is represented in Ulysses, he
tantalizingly admits: ‘Not for my own fancy, you know. Friend of mine.’23
Joyce then built up the rest of the scene between Lenehan and Miss Douce, again much as it
appears in Ulysses. He also emphasizes Boylan’s interest in the time and barroom clock, which
is running fast. Lenehan presses Miss Douce to snap her garter, which she does reluctantly, but
with the purpose of attracting Boylan’s attention: ‘Let’s hear the time, he [Lenehan] said. He
[Boylan] has an appointment he can’t miss.’ The flirtation is only partially successful: Boylan and
Douce exchange smiles as she performs her trick. But, then he throws back his drink and we
read: ‘I’m off, Blazes Boylan said brusquely’, with Lenehan trailing close behind. The scene ends
with ‘Come on ^<Lenehan> to blazes^, Blazes Boylan, said’,24 just as Ben Dollard and Father
Cowley make their way into the Ormond. Although a good deal of what we know from Ulysses is
also missing (or not yet written), and the presentation is transformed on the later draft, so far
this version almost exactly follows the action and the dialogue of the published text of ‘Sirens’,
but without Bloom on the margins of the group of men in the scene.
(p.35) Next Ben Dollard and Bob Cowley enter the bar discussing the rent Cowley owes his
landlord and then Simon convinces Dollard to sing. The song ‘Love and War’ brings up memories
of the past and specifically a particular night when the song was played. Father Cowley recalls
the night as well and asks about a certain ‘Marie Fallon’. This earlier draft reveals how Joyce
quickly changed her name to ‘Marie Powell’. As I discuss more fully in ‘A Daughter of the
Regiment’ in Chapter 4, the surname Powell immediately connects this Dublin prima donna to
the stories of Ulysses, because ‘Major’ Malachi Powell forms part of the historical background of
Major Brian Tweedy, and therefore also of Molly.25 So, with just a change of name, a very
significant storyline begins to emerge.
At various later junctures Joyce made several other transformative additions: he included a
reference to the song lyric ‘My Irish Molly O’ that he connected with another bit of information
about ‘a soldier’s daughter ^from rock of Gibraltar^’.26 Only now does Molly, who is pointedly
described as ‘a buxom piece’, become the main topic of the men’s conversation. This draft shows
how much of Molly’s background was already in place at this relatively early stage in the
genesis of Ulysses in 1918. While some of her life story may have been conditioned by the real-
life prototypes of Marion Tweedy, Joyce only slowly grouped the various threads together and
then set them into place as he kept writing and rewriting ‘Sirens’. Molly is explicitly mentioned
in another addition on this page in a separate bit of the story when Bloom comments to himself
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that she ‘has a devil of a quick eye to notice if anyone is looking at her’. Separately, Cowley
asks: ‘what became of her Simon? I never see her name is she still alive’. Simon replies that she
is indeed ‘alive and kicking’—but that she has married.
What is most provocative about this developing storyline is that these few additions mark the
end of the continuous narrative of ‘Sirens’ on the earlier draft (see U 246.36–259.17; U-G 11.98–
540). Joyce simply ran out of background information about the Blooms just as Dollard is about
to start his song. The episode just stops in the middle of this manuscript page.27 Joyce then drew
a line separating everything that came before, and only then introduced Bloom, already seated
alone at the restaurant of the Ormond Hotel.28 The disjunction between the parties at the
Ormond is particularly conspicuous in this version of the scene: there is a convivial crowd on
one side and then there is Bloom, the outsider, who observes the others ‘in silence’.29 The
manuscript suggests that the transition to Bloom may (p.36) have been initiated by Joyce’s
addition: ‘My Irish Molly O’. What follows is the earliest known representation of Bloom’s
interior monologue in any surviving manuscript. Then, piece-by-piece, phrase-by-phrase, on the
final pages of this manuscript Joyce developed the point of view and thought patterns that
readers come to know as characteristic of Bloom’s perspective.30
For example, Joyce continued Bloom’s sexualized reverie about the barmaids at the beerpull for
a few lines and then stopped once again.31 The remainder of the manuscript is composed of
further, non-consecutive fragments.32 Though it is not possible to precisely date when Joyce
wrote the various fragments that comprise this portion of the manuscript, the haphazard way in
which he only sometimes separated them suggests that he was writing some of them for the first
time. For example, the second fragment describes the coincidence of Simon Dedalus singing an
aria from Martha as Bloom is about to write to his own ‘Martha Clifford’.33 The first full
fragment on this manuscript page is just one of several snatches of malicious (specifically male
Dublin pub) gossip about Bloom and Molly that appears in this draft, but Joyce actually ended up
using it for a scene in ‘Cyclops’ (see U 321.16–20; U-G 12.1566–9).34 It could be that Joyce came
to feel that any sort of clash between Bloom and the other Dubliners at the Ormond might be
psychologically too traumatic a narrative event for Bloom at this crucial and difficult part of his
day. Joyce may also have come to realize that it was structurally too complex and demanding
from a narrative perspective to have Bloom confront his repressed feelings as well as confront
the other men—who, in some of the fragments at least, may know about Boylan’s impending
rendezvous with Molly—all in just one episode. So, as he elaborated his still expanding
conception of the novel, he shunted off the more aggressive aspects of ‘Sirens’ and focused
instead on the episode’s musical and stylistic aspects. Although they were probably intended as
part of just one barroom scene, at some later stage (or stages) Joyce decided that the various
external disputes would happen later in the day, in another episode, and elsewhere.
The rest of the manuscript is made up of disconnected fragments, several of which are directly
about the Blooms and their early-married life.35 One of them is the story about the Blooms being
in the ‘clothes line too when they lived in Holles Street’ that we read about in ‘Sirens’. Since it is
remarkably similar to how it appears (p.37) in Ulysses, it may not be the first time Joyce had
written the men’s exchange about the Blooms. What interests us here is Simon Dedalus’s
memorable reply:
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—Ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs ^Marion^ Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions.
(see U 258.11–12; U-G 11.496–7)36
As we can see in this transcription, when Joyce initially wrote the scene, it was more
appropriately about ‘Mrs Bloom’, but Joyce tellingly added her full first name, rather than the
seemingly more socially correct form: Mrs Leopold Bloom. Appearing in a middle episode of
Ulysses, it is a clear repetition of the way that Boylan addressed his letter to Mrs Bloom that
morning, but as far as is known Joyce had not yet written the corresponding scene in ‘Calypso’.
It seems that its appearance in the earlier draft of ‘Sirens’ may be the first time Joyce settled on
the idea that this is how some of the Dublin men in the book refer to her, and only later assigned
it specifically to Boylan. Although without further evidence it is not possible to determine the
precedence of these references to ‘Mrs Marion Bloom’, once Joyce has set this moniker in place,
it becomes a recurring motif throughout Ulysses.
A short fragment that Joyce squeezed in the middle of the following page is also exemplary of
the stylistic innovations that the episode underwent on its way to Ulysses. Joyce tagged this
fragment with the overt stage direction ‘(<He thought>)’,37 but by simply, though determinedly,
crossing it out, the new version of the text plunges the reader into Bloom’s thought processes as
he ponders his life. He then wonders: ‘If she then I would be different then. But she has? Or has
she?’38 That is, Bloom asks himself how different their lives would be if Molly did not keep her
rendezvous with Boylan. Afterwards, Joyce dispersed and dissimulated this crucial scene in
various other episodes of Ulysses, presumably because it could not be part of ‘Sirens’ for the
same sort of psychological and structural reasons I have already indicated. I believe that, given
the importance of this question for Bloom that day, such a direct, unqualified statement of his
fears as a husband, father, and as a man would simply have been out of place in ‘Sirens’ once
Joyce had written (or rewritten) more of the Bloom-oriented episodes in the first half of Ulysses.
Correspondingly, such a rendering of Bloom’s complex and conflicted subconscious desires does
make sense from the perspective of ‘Circe’, but as far as we know Joyce only started elaborating
that episode, as we know it in Ulysses, long afterwards in mid-1920.
Several of the fragments here are explicitly from the perspective of a third-person narrator on
Bloom in the Ormond and describe his observations and thoughts. In the additional text in the
margins, Joyce slowly developed and refined Bloom’s interior monologue, and thus he began to
explore the workings of Bloom’s mind and to present them directly to the reader, thereby giving
‘Sirens’ the sense of immediacy that is a hallmark of the episode in Ulysses. The transition from
the state of the episode on this draft to the next is a crucial phase in the evolution of Ulysses. As
it developed, Joyce presumably realized two major points that altered (p.38) the course of the
novel. On the one hand (at a later stage after writing the first part of this draft), it appears that
Joyce decided that the two-sided approach to ‘Sirens’ was too simplistic for such a pivotal
episode in the work, possibly because it isolated Bloom too obviously at this delicate juncture in
his day. Also, Joyce must have realized that it was precisely the musical style of the episode that
allows Bloom to be both on the margins (both structurally and socially) of what was happening
in the Ormond and yet not completely cut-off from human camaraderie. When Joyce returned to
‘Sirens’ a year later, he was well on his way towards creating the characters of Leopold and
Molly Bloom as we know them in Ulysses.
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‘Bold hand’: Blazes Boylan in ‘Calypso’
4. ‘Calypso’:
February 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 9–10 and 12–13
June 1918 Serial Publication Little Review V.2, pp. 50 and 52
Mid-June–2 August 1921 Second Proof Level Buffalo PP 5.1
Late August–2 September 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl IX.i
Before he returned to ‘Sirens’, Joyce wrote or rewrote (probably more than one version) of the
other early episodes in which Boylan appears: ‘Calypso’, ‘Hades’, and ‘Lestrygonians’. There are
no pre-Rosenbach drafts of these episodes, but should some of these earlier drafts (or notes for
these episodes) come to light, they would certainly alter our view not only of Leopold and Molly,
but also of Joyce’s development of Boylan as a character as well. In contrast to what one would
expect in a more traditional novel, Boylan’s only real import in Ulysses is in the way his affair
impacts the Blooms individually and as a couple (and structurally how the timeframe of the
rendezvous intersects with the other temporal dimensions in the book). Even in his most central
role as Molly’s lover, he is merely a stock figure with no depth as a character, and this mode of
representing him was a purposeful strategy that Joyce established before he wrote any of the
other episodes in which Boylan features.
Midway through ‘Calypso’, as Bloom is returning from the butcher’s shop with his breakfast,
images of Milly and Molly help him to overcome the apocalyptic thoughts that a passing dark
cloud conjure in his mind. He is reassured to remember past and future moments of familial
happiness:
To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her ample
bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.
Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the
brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind.
(U-G 4.237–42; see U 59.18–22)
(p.39) But such sunny thoughts are soon dispelled when he confronts the reality of his current
domestic situation: his bright young daughter is no longer at home to greet him and his wife will
soon share their warm bed with another man. As the stories stand in Ulysses, the appearance of
the post in ‘Calypso’ presents the first clues about the adulterous couple’s upcoming
rendezvous:
Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered them. Mrs Marion
Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs Marion.
(U-G 4.243–5; see U 59.23–4)
As I show in the discussion of the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft in the previous section, this first allusion
to ‘Mrs Marion Bloom’ in Ulysses may in fact be an echo of the seemingly inappropriate way that
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Joyce had already figured Molly in that episode. In a reversal of the way a reader comes across
this motif in the book, in ‘Sirens’ it is a token of the disrespectful way that Joyce wants to
present how in general the Dublin men in Ulysses (not just Boylan) refer to Molly. Nonetheless,
like most of the scenes that refer to him, this first oblique reference to Boylan is virtually
identical on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript to how it will subsequently appear in print in
1918 and then again in 1922,39 which demonstrates that Joyce’s conception of Boylan was fixed
from start to finish. As the narrative soon makes clear, the parental dynamics of the Bloom
household are already set out: the father has received a letter from their daughter in Mullingar,
but the mother just a card. Yet the third item of post throws a spanner into the entire family
structure. This is first suggested by Bloom’s muted reaction to the letter addressed to ‘Mrs
Marion Bloom’ when he thinks: ‘Bold hand’. Bloom dutifully gives his wife her post, laying the
card and letter ‘near the curve of her knees’, as he lets just enough of the morning light into
their bedroom. Still his ‘backward eye’ catches her secreting away Boylan’s letter to her as she
tucks it under a pillow to read later (U 59.34; U-G 4.246). Molly brusquely shares her daughter’s
report of the arrival of their birthday gifts, curls up snugly in bed, and then asks for her tea,
giving clear instructions to her obliging husband, who makes some effort to tidy up her ‘soiled
linen’ (U 60.06–7; U-G 4.265–6).
Temporarily reassured, in the kitchen ‘Poldy’ finds the teapot emitting ‘a plume of steam from
the spout’ and so he sets about preparing Molly’s light breakfast and his own more substantial
fare. As he sits there on his own, Bloom opens Milly’s letter and skims over it: ‘Thanks: new tam:
Mr Coghlan: lough Owel picnic: young student: Blazes Boylan’s seaside girls’ (emphasis added;
U 60.21–3; U-G 4.281–2). Although a first-time reader would not be aware of it, the name and
last phrase remind Bloom of the note his wife is reading upstairs in bed at the same time. He
thinks of earlier, happier times with Milly and Molly as he carefully prepares all the items on the
breakfast tray, turns over the kidney smouldering in the pan, and then brings the tray up to his
wife. She reproaches him for taking so long with it; all of this further frames the tone of the
relationship between husband and wife for the reader. The patterns of the couple’s interaction
were already established on the (p.40) episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, including Molly’s
languid movements on the bed, the way Bloom ‘looked calmly down on her bulk and between
her large soft bubs, slopping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder’ (U 61.11–12; U-G
4.304–5),40 and the way he detects the note from the unnamed Boylan that she has just read. In
the face of his wife’s complaint, Bloom enters the bedroom with her breakfast tray. He inspects
the scene and questions her:
A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the act of going he
stayed to straighten the bedspread.
— Who was the letter from? he asked.
Bold hand. Marion.
— O, Boylan, she said. He’s bringing the programme.
— What are you singing?
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— Là ci darem with J. C. Doyle, she said, and Love’s Old Sweet Song.
Her full lips, drinking, smiled.
(U 61.14–20; U-G 4.308–15)
These scenes did not change in any way from their first known version on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript to their appearance in Ulysses.41 Although Bloom knows the answer, he
nonetheless asks his wife who sent the letter (addressed in such a seemingly unusual manner).
These are the first concrete facts about Molly’s profession in Ulysses, and they also provide
some oblique indication that she and another man will be meeting in their home later in the day.
A careful reader might also presume that this Boylan is the same man that Milly mentions in her
letter to her father. Furthermore, Molly’s commanding tone in contrast to Bloom’s obliging and
caring manner are already fundamental aspects of their domestic relationship.
They discuss various things: Dignam’s funeral as well as that troubling word Molly cannot make
out in the book she is reading (see U 61.25–63.08; U-G 4.319–77). Then she smells something
burning in the kitchen and, in response, Bloom quickly stumbles out of the room. Then, having
rescued his breakfast, he sits down to eat alone and only now reads Milly’s letter in full. The text
of the letter in Ulysses is barely changed from its earliest version on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript.42 As opposed to the abbreviated sketch he read before, this is the full version of the
relevant part of what Milly wrote:
There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or
something are big swells he sings Boylan’s (I was on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan’s)
song about those seaside girls. Tell him silly Milly sends my best respects.
(U 64.01–4; see U-G 4.406–9)
It must be unsettling for Bloom to deal with the fact that the two women in his life are
concerned with this other man, and this goes a long way to explain why earlier on he elided the
context of Milly’s bloomer about Boylan’s name. As it turns out, the first time he is named in
Ulysses it is as ‘Blazes Boylan’ and it is by Bloom, (p.41) though it is presented as a name he is
merely repeating.43 Obviously, the fact that he is known by this sobriquet (and in particular by
the Blooms’ daughter) is fundamental to the way in which Boylan is represented throughout
Ulysses, but ‘silly Milly’ at least tries (though unsuccessfully) to refrain from using his nickname.
Shortly after reading Milly’s letter, Bloom thinks of Boylan again in a reverie that blends
together many of the issues that are on his mind that morning. The Little Review version of the
scene reads:
Seaside girls. Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers’ pockets, singing. Swurls, he
says. Pier with lamps, summer evening, band.
Those girls, those girls,
Those lovely seaside girls.
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Milly too. Young kisses: the first. Far away now past. Mrs. Marion. Reading lying back
now, counting the strands of her hair.
(see U 64.33–65.04; U-G 4.439–45)44
In the first paragraph, about two years later, Joyce initially added ‘jarvey off for the day’ to his
visual depiction of Boylan on the (missing) typescript for Ulysses, presenting a further distinctly
unflattering aspect of the image of him long before he is introduced in person. Later, Joyce
added ‘Friend of the family’ on the episode’s second proof level,45 which further complicates our
impression of the Blooms’ family dynamic. And, finally, he added ‘smiling, braiding’ to the
description of Molly and her hair on its fourth proof level at the end of the scene.46 Again, this
too serves to condition the early impressions the reader has of Molly as Mrs Leopold Bloom. In
fact, all of these elements present the prospect of the upcoming rendezvous in a disreputable
light. The next paragraph goes on to conflate Bloom’s regrets about the sexual situations both
his daughter and wife face, but he concludes pacifically: ‘Prevent. Useless: can’t move’ (U 65.06;
U-G 4.448). Bloom’s passivity in these situations is an intrinsic aspect of his characterization in
Ulysses.
Then, as Bloom is sitting comfortably on the jakes, he thinks about the various odd things Molly
is prone to say at her toilette. In the Little Review we read:
Morning after the bazaar dance when May’s band played Ponchielli’s dance of the hours.
Explain that: morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then night hours. Washing
her teeth. That was the first night. Is that Boylan well off? He has money. Why? I noticed
he had a good rich smell off his breath dancing. No use humming then. Allude to it.
Strange kind of music that last night. The mirror was in shadow. She rubbed her
handglass briskly on her woolen vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into. Lines in
her eyes. It wouldn’t pan out somehow.
Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then, black with daggers and eyemasks.
Poetical idea; pink, then golden, then grey, then black. Still, true to life also. Day: then the
night.
(see U 67.10–21; U-G 4.525–36)47
(p.42) Here Bloom recalls Molly questioning him about the significance of the movement of
time in Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda, which he explains to her and then thinks of it again in
the next paragraph. This imagery and chain of thoughts reinforce the cyclical motif that
underlies so much of the narrative movement of Ulysses, and, correspondingly, Bloom thinks of
his own situation: ‘Still, true to life also’. Then, more painfully, he remembers that Molly had
asked him about the music after meeting and dancing with Boylan. Bloom thinks, ‘That was the
first night’,48 and then remembers the exchange between them about her prospective suitor.
Her question about Boylan’s finances casts Molly’s motives further into doubt, which seems to
be the point of ‘No use humming then. Allude to it’. But Bloom’s confirmation that Boylan ‘has
money’—rather than some other, more critical comment about him, such as he reveals
elsewhere—also frames the scene in a conspiratorial manner between wife and husband. Bloom
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then pictures Molly’s shapely form as she peers at herself in the mirror and notices that she too
is aging; this idea also echoes the thematic of the dance of the hours. This scene is an early
indication of Bloom’s tendency to distance himself from the disturbing thoughts about his wife’s
adultery that culminates in the opposite attitudes in ‘Sirens’ and ‘Circe’. Though, as far as we
know, Joyce only fully elaborated the couple’s reaction to the event in ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’ in
1921, very little of the presentation of Molly and Blazes’ affair changed in the earlier episodes
from 1918 to 1922.
A first sighting of Blazes Boylan in ‘Hades’
6. ‘Hades’:
March–May 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 8–9
September 1918 Serial Publication Little Review V.5, p. 20
Late August–2 September 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl 10.i
6–15 September 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl 10.ii
6–19 September 1921 Third Proof Level Buffalo PP 6.1
The men in the carriage on the way to Glasnevin cemetery report Boylan’s first actual
appearance in the book, and this triggers the return of Bloom’s dark thoughts about Molly and
her lover. This entire scenario is typical of Boylan’s representation throughout Ulysses. Although
his rival remains unnamed, Bloom thinks of the rendezvous: ‘He’s [Boylan is] coming in the
afternoon. Her [Molly’s] songs’ (U 89.12; U-G 6.190). Just at that moment, the carriage passes
Boylan as he is coming out of the Red Bank restaurant on D’Olier Street, and we read: (p.43)
— How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow in salute.
— He doesn’t see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?
— Who? Mr Dedalus asked.
— Blazes Boylan, Mr Power said. There he is airing his quiff.
Just that moment I was thinking.
Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the white disc of a straw
hat flashed reply: passed.
(U 89.14–21; see U-G 6.192–9)
Two things are clear: once again, the other characters mediate Boylan’s presence, and he is
always figured by means of synecdoche. Here, simply by what become his characteristic
markers: his straw hat and fashionable quiff, and elsewhere, as we will see, by his fancy socks
and shoes.49 Like much of the description of Boylan, Joyce had written this first near-encounter
between Bloom and Boylan by 1918, and then only made slight modifications to the scene before
it appeared in Ulysses. Nonetheless, Joyce made a more substantial alteration to what follows on
several subsequent manuscripts. Bloom’s instinctive response—to look at his fingernails while
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the other men try to get Boylan’s attention—is already present on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript,50 as is his question about what people see in a man like that:
Is there anything more in him that they she sees? ^Fascination. Worst man in Dublin.^
That keeps him alive. They sometimes feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that.
(see U 89.23–5; U-G 6.201–3)
Bloom realizes that a woman’s admiration must invigorate someone like Boylan and concedes
that women have an instinct about such men, but wonders why ‘they she’ (that is, why any
woman and Molly in particular) would be attracted by ‘a type like that’. What is most striking is
that Joyce only added Bloom’s commonplace answer as well as the scathing condemnation of
Boylan on the third proof level for Ulysses almost three years later: ‘Fascination. Worst man in
Dublin’.51 Bloom is presumably just repeating to himself a commonly-held opinion of Boylan in
Dublin, but if this is also his personal opinion, then it is the most contemptuous comment he
makes about his rival anywhere in Ulysses. This is a disturbing revelation, whatever Bloom’s
motives may be: ‘Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity’ (U 684.09; U-G 17.2155), which is how
the narrator of ‘Ithaca’ lists them. One way to account for Bloom’s sensibilities here is to
consider the profound transformation Ulysses underwent after Joyce wrote ‘Circe’ in 1920.
Whereas Bloom’s thoughts about Boylan in ‘Hades’ at this juncture were critical but generic in
1918, Joyce intensified Bloom’s perverse interest in Molly’s affair when he revised the scene in
1921.
(p.44) In keeping with the theme and style of the episode, Bloom’s thoughts revert to the more
general ill effects of aging. He is proud that, as far as his wife is concerned at least, ‘The shape
is there still’ (U 89.29; U-G 6.207). Molly’s voluptuous form is a defining feature of her
representation in Ulysses. In ‘Penelope’ we read that she is proud of it as well: ‘its because they
were so plump and tempting in my short petticoat they excite me a bit sometimes’ (U 726.19–20;
U-G 18.1378–9). Bloom’s pleasant sexual thoughts in ‘Hades’ passed quickly in the Little Review
version to his ‘satisfied’ reaction in the next line (U 89.31; U-G 6.209),52 but Joyce interrupted
the transition between the thought and the effect as he revised the episode’s now missing
typescript for Ulysses. He embedded these temporarily gratifying memories in a painful context
by specifying a recent, particular time when he noted his wife’s shapely form. It was the first
night Boylan and Molly met, which is also a direct further repetition of his memory in ‘Calypso’.
Joyce amplified Bloom’s thoughts with an addition on a now missing typescript page of the
episode for Ulysses: ‘The shape is there still. ^Shoulders. Hips. Plump. Night of the dance
dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks behind^’ (see U 89.29–30; U-G 6.207–8). Nonetheless,
Bloom’s reaction to the altered context of his recollection produced no noticeable change in his
outward composure, effectively masking his inner turmoil: still ‘satisfied, [he] sent his vacant
glance over their faces’ (U 89.31–2; U-G 6.209–10).
The rest of the scene, where the men question Bloom about the concert tour, was as it appears
in Ulysses as early as 1918 on the Rosenbach manuscript.53 Jack Power is clearly one of the
many Dubliners in Ulysses who already know about Boylan’s management of Molly’s concert
tour:
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Mr Power asked:
— How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?
— O very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It’s a good idea, you see …
(U 89.33–6; see U-G 6.211–14)
As best he can, Bloom tries to evade the men’s questions, but he nonetheless goes on to describe
some of the plans for Molly’s tour, which must be a disturbing topic of conversation that day in
particular, especially when it keeps cropping up, often unexpectedly. Then, as he tries to
distance himself from the troublesome conversation and the thoughts it provokes, Joyce added
another connection with Molly in Bloom’s thoughts. In the Little Review version, Bloom sees an
anonymous bootlace vendor who had been ‘struck off the rolls’ (U 90.16; U-G 6.232).54 He
comments to himself on how the man has fallen in the world, but has still managed to maintain
some of his dignity in poverty. This seems to have been the principal point of the scene at the
time. Then three years later, on the episode’s first proof level, Joyce assigned the man an office
‘in Hume street’ (U 90.16; U-G 6.231).55 On the second proof level, Joyce directly connects the
man with Bloom’s thoughts about Molly by adding: ‘Same house as Molly’s namesake, Tweedy,
crown solicitor for Waterford’ (p.45) (U 90.17; see U-G 6.233–4).56 Presumably, Joyce was
trying to emphasize the fact that the more Bloom tries to distract himself from the painful
thoughts about his home life, the more other associations bring Molly back to his mind again
and again. He then recalls Power’s epithet for her—‘madame’—and thinks about the time of day
and imagines Molly and Mrs Fleming (the Blooms’ cleaning woman) tidying the house, preparing
for Boylan’s visit. Unlike so much else that Joyce changed as he wrote Ulysses, this scene
remained virtually the same from its first appearance on the Rosenbach ‘Hades’ manuscript in
1918.57 Molly then fades from Bloom’s thoughts during the funeral, for a while at least, though
the encounter with Menton brings back pleasant memories of their courtship in Matt Dillon’s
Garden.58
Darker thoughts of Blazes Boylan in ‘Lestrygonians’
Active Dates: Kind of Manuscript:

Manuscript:
8. ‘Lestrygonians’:
January–July 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, f. 4
January 1919 & February- Serial Publication Little Review V.9, pp. 40–1 & Little
March 1919 Review V.10–11, pp. 61–2
Late August 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl 16.i
Early–19 September 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl 17.ii
At midday, as Bloom hungrily walks around Dublin, his wide-ranging thoughts conjure up his
most dreaded fear, but he tries to reassure himself: ‘No, no. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t
surely?’ (U 147.05; U-G 8.106). The idea that Boylan might pass on the clap to Molly is
unbearable: ‘Think no more about that’ (U 147.07–8; U-G 8.108–9). In keeping with the episode’s
theme of redirection, Bloom continuously tries to distract himself and sublimate these painful
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ideas, but Molly never really leaves his thoughts for long. His misunderstanding about the word
‘parallax’ reminds him of Molly’s conundrum about ‘metempsychosis’ that morning, and the
memory pleases him:
Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballastoffice. She’s right after all. Only big
words for ordinary things on account of the sound. She’s not exactly witty. ^Can be rude
too. Blurt out what I was thinking.^
(U 147.12–15; see U-G 8.114–16)
(p.46) This is an exemplary instance of one of the ways in which Joyce elaborated Bloom’s
ambivalent feelings about Molly as he continued to write Ulysses. Additions such as this
represent a purposeful strategy to represent Leopold’s reaction to his wife’s character traits.
While, initially, Bloom is more pleased with her wit on the Rosenbach manuscript version of the
scene,59 Joyce added Bloom’s pointed criticism of his wife as he revised the episode’s first proof
level.60 It seems that this was originally one of Bloom’s failings before it became Molly’s: ‘LB
told not to mention smthg [something]: out with name’.61 This is just one of many examples of
the way Joyce reassigned notes from one character to another as he wrote his text. Then Bloom
thinks of better times, like the pleasant evening of the Glencree dinner, ‘Milly’s tubbing night’,
their early-married life with friends like Citron, the night of Goodwin’s concert, and other
similarly agreeable memories.62 All of this reminds him that in the past he was ‘Happy.
Happy’ (U 149.19; U-G 8.200). Running into his old friend Josie Breen also brings back earlier
memories of his courtship. ‘Lestrygonians’ is filled with Bloom’s both joyful and more troubling
memories of his life with Molly.
However much Bloom tries to suppress his thoughts on 16 June 1904 about the most significant
event in his life, they return. Here, his astronomical ruminations bring Molly’s encounter with
Boylan back to him. As he thinks of the moon, on the Little Review version of this memory,
Bloom remembers that she had mentioned that it was now new, and this evokes a vivid
recollection of the way he watched the moonlight romance between the soon-to-be lovers two
weeks before (it was on 29 May in 1904 to be exact); their fingers sought each other out on a
lovely evening as she sang Moore’s ‘The Young May Moon’:
The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight exactly there is a new moon.
Walking down by the Tolka. She was humming: The young May moon she’s beaming, love.
He other side of her. Elbow, arm. He. Glowworm’s lamp is gleaming, love. Touch. Fingers.
Asking. Answer. Yes.
Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must.
(see U 159.25–30; U-G 8.587–92)63
This is how the text appeared in January 1919, and Joyce only added the line linking the scene to
‘a Fairview moon’ on the episode’s second proof level in 1921 (U 159.26; U-G 8.588–9).64 From
the start, the memory provokes a sense of resignation in Bloom about the inevitability of the
affair that fixes his attitude towards the matter: ‘Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must’. He tries once
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again to put these thoughts out of his mind, but they return nonetheless. Later in Davy Byrne’s
pub, Nosey Flynn seems determined to discuss Molly and he pointedly asks Bloom:
— Wife well?
— Quite well, thanks … . […]
— Doing any singing those times? […]
(p.47) Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman. Still better tell him. Does no
harm. Free ad.
— She’s engaged for a big tour end of this month. You may have heard perhaps.
— No. O, that’s the style. Who’s getting it up? […]
— Getting it up? he said. Well, it’s like a company idea, you see. Part shares and part
profits.
— Ay, now I remember, Nosey Flynn said, putting his hand in his pocket to scratch his
groin. Who is this was telling me? Isn’t Blazes Boylan mixed up in it?
A warm shock of air heat of mustard hauched on Mr Bloom’s heart. He raised his eyes and
met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands
moving. Two. Not yet. […]
— Yes, he said. He’s the organiser in point of fact.
(emphasis added; U 164.07–165.03; see U-G 8.763–97)
This is a precise textual echo of the interaction between Bloom and M’Coy when they bump into
each other in ‘Lotus Eaters’, and it causes Bloom to recall a scene with Molly that morning that
is not otherwise presented in Ulysses:
— That so? M’Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who’s getting it up?
Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and. No book.
Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady and fair man. Letter. Cat
furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.
In fact, just as in ‘Hades’, Molly’s upcoming concert tour seems to be a recurring topic of
conversation for the Dublin men in Ulysses that day, and Bloom is forced to discuss its details.
Although Flynn has little sense of the discomfort he is causing Bloom, the mere mention of
Boylan’s name makes Bloom both physically and psychologically uneasy. He searches for a clock
and is reassured to think that Boylan has not arrived at Eccles Street: ‘Two. Not yet’.65 Nosey
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Flynn will not drop the subject and introduces a new storyline about Boylan’s management of
the boxer, Myler Keogh:
— He had a good slice of luck, Jack Mooney was telling me, over that boxing match Myler
Keogh won again that soldier in the Portobello barracks. By God, he had the little kipper
down in the county Carlow he was telling me … […].
(p.48) — For near a month, man, before it came off. Sucking duck eggs by God till further
orders. Keep him off the boose, see? O, by God, Blazes is a hairy chap.
(U 165.06–13; U-G 8.800–8)
Boylan’s good luck backing a winner is probably the last thing Bloom wants to talk about; nor
does he want to hear that he is a ‘hairy chap’ (either figuratively or literally). So, as he savours
his lunch and looks around Davy Byrne’s while the other men discuss the Gold Cup, yet again
Bloom tries to distract himself. A few minutes pass as he drinks his glass of Burgundy, and
thinks about his day and then about when he can return home: ‘Then about six o’clock I can. Six,
six. Time will be gone then. She …’ (U 166.18–19; see U-G 8.852–3).66 This is another of Bloom’s
dissimulating recognitions of when Boylan and Molly will have consummated their affair. His
satisfying lunch helps him to try to banish the disturbing fact that in a few hours everything will
have changed for the Blooms and he will go home to confront the couple’s future marital
relations. All sorts of thoughts about food fill his mind as he looks around the pub shelves, but
they too bring back the upcoming rendezvous:
Yes but what about oysters. Unsightly like a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open
them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters.
Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red bank this morning. Was he oyster old
fish at table. Perhaps he young flesh in bed. No. June has no ar no oysters.
(U 166.29–34; see U-G 8.863–8)
How people first began to eat oysters reminds Bloom of when the men in the carriage caught
sight of Boylan earlier in the day as he was coming out of the Red Bank restaurant in D’Olier
Street. Then Bloom wonders whether Boylan had been eating oysters in anticipation of his tryst
with Molly: ‘old fish at table. Perhaps he young flesh in bed’. His thoughts pointedly break down
as he tries to find ways to account for this unsettling idea. Once again, Bloom thinks of all sorts
of other things to distract himself from these thoughts. Many half-articulated ideas crowd his
mind, until he notices two flies stuck on the pub’s windowpane. In the episode’s climax, the last
drops of wine bring forth his most treasured memory of his passion for Molly: the momentous
day of his proposal that I discuss in ‘Lovemaking on Howth’ in Chapter 5. Those pleasant
thoughts of the past only last a short while and he thinks, ‘Me. And me now’ (U 168.07; U-G
8.917). As a further distraction to help pass the time that day, he then decides to visit the
National Museum on Kildare Street to inspect the naked goddesses, but that errand will bring
problems of its own. In the meantime, while Bloom is out of earshot, Nosey Flynn tells Davy
Byrne a story about Bloom and Molly when Byrne asks about Bloom’s mourning attire:
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— It’s not the wife anyhow, Nosey Flynn said. I met him the day before yesterday and he
coming out of that Irish farm dairy John Wyse Nolan’s wife has in Henry street (p.49)
with a jar of cream in his hand taking it home to his better half. She’s well nourished, I tell
you. Plovers on toast.
— And is he doing for the Freeman? Davy Byrne said.
Nosey Flynn pursed his lips.
— He doesn’t buy cream on the ads he picks up. You can make bacon of that.
(U 168.37–169.07; U-G 8.949–56)
The Blooms’ lives are a recurring subject of gossip and the stories usually centre on Molly’s
physical allure and Leopold’s status as a Dublin man, and here Flynn goes on to state that Bloom
is a Mason. Then Tom Rochford, Paddy Leonard, and Bantam Lyons walk into the pub as Bloom
is about to leave, which prompts Lyons to tell the other men that Bloom is the one who gave him
the tip on Throwaway for the Gold Cup. On his way along Duke Lane, Bloom thinks about what
he expects to earn on his commission for ads and ponders: ‘Could buy one of those silk
petticoats for Molly, colour of her new garters’ (U 172.04; U-G 8.1061–2). But then, as dark
thoughts cloud his mind again, he reconsiders: ‘Today. Today. Not think’ (U 172.05; U-G 8.1063).
Bloom tries to come up with other plans for Molly, but these inevitably also involve Boylan: ‘Tour
the south then. What about English watering places? Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside
girls’ (U 172.06–8; see U-G 8.1065–6). Everything Bloom thinks about at this ‘very worst hour of
the day’ (U 157.09; U-G 8.494) brings back thoughts of the impending affair, and he has to
confront his fears as the episode ends:
Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.
His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right.
Is it? Almost certain. Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Yes, it is. The walk. Not see.
Not see. Get on.
Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his eyes. Handsome building.
Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?
Didn’t see me perhaps. Light in his eyes. […]
No didn’t see me. After two. Just at the gate. […]
Afternoon she said.
I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. Freeman. Where did I? Ah, yes.
Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where?
Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.
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His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call
tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.
Safe!
(see U 174.33–175.21; U-G 8.1168–93)67
This scene remained virtually unchanged from the Little Review to the publication of Ulysses on
2 February 1922. Once again, Boylan is only identified by his fashionable attire: his straw hat,
trousers, and shoes that are his markers throughout Ulysses. Much like his psychological
behaviour all morning, when almost face to face with his rival, Bloom comes up with various
strategies to avoid seeing Boylan and being seen by him. When he has almost reached the
National Museum gate, (p.50) Bloom once more vaguely recalls that Molly had said he was
coming in the afternoon. On the one hand, this is the third indirect mention in ‘Lestrygonians’ of
what time Molly said Boylan would visit her. On the other, if Bloom is worried about whether
Boylan is following him here, he takes the initiative himself in ‘Sirens’ a few hours later.
Eyeing a ‘young pullet’ in ‘Wandering Rocks’
10. ‘Wandering Rocks’:

January–February 1919 Composite Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, ff. 9–11
and 12–13
February 1919 Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 8, p. [7r]
25 August–5 September First Proof Level Harvard Pl 25.i
11. ‘Sirens’:
Late 1917–Early 1919 Earlier Draft NLI MS 7B, p. [8v]
June 1919 Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 9, p. [7r]
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, p. [4r]
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iii.a
Boylan features in two interrelated scenes in ‘Wandering Rocks’ that not only provide some
more information about him (U 218.07–219.10 and 220.07–33; U-G 10.299–336 and 10.368–96),
but effectively serve to establish the context to gauge his later appearance in the Ormond Bar in
‘Sirens’, and so in Ulysses more generally. The extant genetic evidence indicates that Joyce only
included these scenes in ‘Wandering Rocks’ after he had written the earlier version of Boylan’s
appearance in ‘Sirens’, and also that (like all the earlier scenes that involve Boylan) these texts
were virtually identical on the episode’s earliest known manuscript as they are in both the Little
Review and Ulysses.68
Boylan’s errand at the grocers—to order a gift basket to be sent to Molly, as readers find out in
‘Penelope’—is the first time he actually gets to play his role in the novel, though it is a bit part
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with just a few speaking lines. Most obviously, from the start the scene is sexualized, and these
motifs are further reinforced throughout the novel: (p.51)
The blond girl in Thornton’s bedded the wicker basket with rustling fibre. Blazes Boylan
handed her the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper and a small jar.
— Put these in first, will you? he said.
— Yes, sir, the blond girl said, and the fruit on top.
— That’ll do, game ball, Blazes Boylan said.
She bestowed fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe shamefaced peaches.
Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the fruitsmelling shop, lifting
fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red tomatoes, sniffing smells.
While in the shop, Boylan makes a call to his office, where he speaks to his secretary, Miss
Dunne, who is the focus of a later section in ‘Wandering Rocks’ (U 220.07–33; U-G 10.368–96).69
The two sections could not be more different. The earlier one is primarily dialogue and third-
person description, with no attempt to provide any sense of depth or complexity about arguably
one of the most significant characters in Ulysses, while the other section helps the reader to
understand several aspects of Boylan’s character, though only tangentially, by providing some
access to the thoughts and opinions of his secretary. In this way, as Margot Norris makes clear,
‘we have learned more about Miss Dunne’s interiority than Boylan ever displays in the novel’,70
even though she has no other role in Ulysses. Rather than developing Boylan’s character, these
scenes emphasize his caricatured presence and his representation via synecdoche and
metonymy.
In general, these scenes paint a distinctly unfavourable image of Boylan as he addresses the
young shop girl ‘roguishly’ (U 219.10; U-G 10.336), and then goes on to deal brusquely with Miss
Dunne. From the start, the narrator establishes the fact that Boylan is commonly known about
town by his nickname. He is named ‘Blazes Boylan’ eight times in this section and three more
times in the rest of the episode, but as I have discussed, for about two more years Boylan does
not have a proper name in the work. So, a reader of Ulysses in the Little Review, for example,
would not know him in any other way. Nothing he says or does in his section in ‘Wandering
Rocks’ is to his credit. He proffers a white lie so that his parcel will be delivered before he
arrives: ‘It is for an invalid’; he charms a ‘young pullet’ (this snippet is tellingly the only
purported bit of Boylan’s interior monologue that is represented in Ulysses), only to ogle ‘the cut
of her blouse’ twice; and then he pilfers a flower to round off his getup (U 218.30, 219.01, and
08–9; U-G 10.322, 327, and 329). The emphasis of the scene is clearly on Boylan’s physical
attire, and these elements are the foundation of his synechdochic, and more generally
metonymic, representation: his ‘new tan shoes’, ‘gold watch’, and the ‘merry money in his
trousers’ pocket’, as well as the ‘red flower’ he picks up and puts ‘between his smiling teeth’ in
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this scene (U 218.15, 20, 32, 219.09; U-G 10.307, 312, 324, 335).71 These markers not only fix
Boylan as a one-dimensional (p.52) character, but they also develop descriptive echoes of him
elsewhere in the text that make him immediately recognizable, even if as nothing more than a
type.
Young Patrick Dignam also sees Boylan as he makes his way across the city: ‘In Grafton street
Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff’s mouth and a swell pair of kicks on him and he
listening to what the drunk was telling him and grinning all the time’ (U 241.17–19; U-G
10.1150–2). As always, his clothes serve as markers of the man. The focus is yet again on his
attire when Boylan reappears at the end of ‘Wandering Rocks’:
By the provost’s wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes and socks with
skyblue clocks to the refrain of My girl’s a Yorkshire girl. Blazes Boylan presented to the
leaders’ skyblue frontlets and high action a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a
rakish angle and a suit of indigo serge. His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute but
he offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and the red flower between
his lips.
(U-G 10.1240–7; see U 243.31–7)
Here too Boylan is represented by his mannerisms and costume as he moves ‘jauntily’ in his ‘tan
shoes and socks with skyblue clocks’, and as he presents his ‘skyblue frontlets and high action a
skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle’. This section reinforces how Boylan is
always figured, though some of these specific elements compositionally predate the description
of him in ‘Wandering Rocks’. For example, already on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft, Boylan’s shoes
‘creaked smartly’ as he entered the Ormond.72 Furthermore, standing about with his hands in
his pockets is precisely how Bloom pictured Boylan to himself at the start of the day in ‘Calypso’:
‘Hands stuck in his trousers’ pockets’ (U 64.33; U-G 4.439), a pointedly sexualized image. Also,
the straw hat was already his signature feature in ‘Hades’ and ‘Lestrygonians’, both of which
episodes Joyce had written before this version of ‘Wandering Rocks’.
Later in Ulysses, both Lydia Douce and Molly wonder where Boylan picked up his newest
distinctive marker: the red flower. Miss Douce’s thoughts only first appear on the ‘Sirens’
typescript for the Little Review (U 255.08–9; U-G 11.366),73 which Joyce wrote about six months
after he wrote the corresponding scene in ‘Wandering Rocks’. But he included Molly’s question,
‘who gave him that flower he said he bought’ (U 693.22; U-G 18.125), over two years later on the
third proof level of ‘Penelope’.74 With this other white lie to Molly at the end of the book,
Boylan’s behaviour is put into question yet again. In these ways, Joyce established the context
for—and then reinforced—the kinds of motifs that readers are most likely to recall about Boylan,
both on a (p.53) first reading and subsequent re-readings; this is precisely how Joyce
constructed the caricature of his character.75
The other Boylan section with Miss Dunne not only unequivocally dates Ulysses on ‘16 June
1904’ (U 220.14; U-G 10.376), but also establishes the timeframe of the next episode, ‘Sirens’,
which in a more fundamental way is the crucial temporal juncture in the unfolding of the entire
book rather than ‘Wandering Rocks’. As Miss Dunne is about to hang up the phone, she says:
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— Mr Boylan! Hello! That gentleman from Sport was in looking for you. Mr Lenehan, yes.
He said he’ll be in the Ormond at four.
(U 220.31–2; U-G 10.394–5)
She is notably the only person in Ulysses who calls him ‘Mr Boylan’. More importantly, as I
discuss further in the next section, Boylan’s meeting with Lenehan in the Ormond coincides with
the time of his appointment with Molly. Though presented in an oblique way, this is the first
indirect mention of the time of the lovers’ rendezvous in Ulysses, but it will become a recurrent
motif. In fact, it is alluded to in various ways half a dozen times in ‘Sirens’. That Boylan is
expected at 7 Eccles Street ‘at four’ is one of the most notable new elements that Joyce added to
the later ‘Sirens’ draft. Interestingly, Joyce only added this prior mention of the time in
‘Wandering Rocks’ on the episode’s first proof level;76 that is, over two years after he had
written the later ‘Sirens’ draft where he makes the point explicit: this is typical of one of the
ways writers establish foreshadowing for the reader.
The ‘unconquered hero’ makes his entrance in ‘Sirens’

Manuscript:
11. ‘Sirens’:
Early 1919 Later Draft NLI MS 9, pp. [1r], [2v], [3v], [4v]–[5v], [6v], [9v], and
[10r] & Buffalo MS 5, pp. [3r], [5r], [6r], and [8r]
June 1919 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 1–2, 11, 18, and 20
June 1919 Typescript for the Buffalo TS 9, pp. [7r] and [14r]
Little Review
28 September– First Proof Level Harvard Pl 31.i.a
Early October
1921
As I discussed in the previous section on ‘Sirens’ in this chapter, by the time Joyce wrote the
later ‘Sirens’ draft, the episode had undergone the stylistic makeover that makes it so
distinctive. Although Joyce continued to refine the text at every (p.54) subsequent juncture, the
later ‘Sirens’ draft demonstrates that, by this stage, the episode had already achieved the formal
structure and thematic characteristics that closely resemble its published instantiations.77 Much
of the narrative and language of the episode’s earlier draft remained as it was previously, but as
usual Joyce expanded and reworked it extensively. Besides incorporating Bloom into the scene
at the Ormond as an essential part of the story from the start of the episode, Joyce’s other
preoccupation at this stage was the reordering of the words and phrases he had already decided
upon. It was one of Joyce’s principal concerns on the earlier draft and it continued to be so at
every subsequent stage. Furthermore, he established many of the episode’s most recognizable
elements, like the aquatic motifs associated with the Ormond Bar and its barmaids. There are
also many newer musical allusions that were not on the earlier draft, and Joyce added still more
on this and subsequent manuscripts.
While Joyce transformed the style, he retained much of the narrative action—in particular,
Boylan’s set piece in the barroom—though there are also other notable differences between the
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narratives on the earlier and later ‘Sirens’ drafts. For example, Joyce reassigned some of the
dialogue between the barmaids and Simon Dedalus, as well as between Lenehan and Boylan,
which is typical of the instability of much of the characterization in these stories on the pre-
Rosenbach drafts of ‘Sirens’ and ‘Cyclops’. Not only had Joyce not fully worked out who said
what to whom in these scenes, but also he still had not even finally determined who would be
present in these episodes, particularly in ‘Cyclops’.78 Moreover, Joyce only established Bloom’s
itinerary across the Liffey and along Wellington Quay on the later ‘Sirens’ draft. It was also on
the later draft that he fixed for the first time Bloom’s various reasons for stopping at the
Ormond Hotel:
Must see him [Nannetti] for that par. Eat first. I want. Not yet. At four she said. ^Time
ever passing. Clockhands turning. On.^ Where eat? The Clarence, Dolphin. Walk on. For
Raoul. Eat. If I make five pounds. Those ads. Not yet. The sweets of sin.
(see U 250.07–10; U-G 11.187–90)79
This ‘At four, she said’ is the first direct reference in any extant text to the exact time of
Boylan’s appointment with Molly in the Blooms’ home, and it is clearly framed as part of a
conversation that is otherwise not in Ulysses. Like the lovers’ sex scene (and, for example,
Haines’s speech in Irish to the milkwoman in ‘Telemachus’), Leopold and Molly’s troubling
interview that morning about Boylan’s visit is (p.55) another highly significant narrative
moment that Joyce specifically elides from the stories that are directly presented in Ulysses.
After having picked up a book for Molly in Merchant’s Arch in ‘Wandering Rocks’, in ‘Sirens’
Bloom wants to have his supper and thinks of nearby restaurants, but he is also acutely
conscious of the time. He thinks of the upcoming meeting in all four times in the later ‘Sirens’
draft and yet more often in the published texts. Bloom is thinking about his work and about
getting Molly a present, which he sensibly decides to postpone for both practical and personal
reasons. While some aspects of the plot were already established on the episode’s earlier draft,
Joyce added completely new ones as well. For example, the narrative of the barmaids and the
men in the Ormond is already virtually identical to how it appears in Ulysses on the episode’s
earlier draft, though Joyce continued to refine its stylistic presentation at almost every stage.
Conversely, Bloom’s errand for stationery to write to Martha Clifford first appears on the later
draft,80 as does his (now third) sighting of Boylan:
he saw a hat on Essex bridge riding a jaunting car. Again. ^^Coincidence^ Funeral.
Museum. Third.^ Jingling, it jaunted from the bridge to Ormond Quay. Again. Follow. Risk
it. Follow ^Go quick^. Four, she said.
(see U 253.07–10; U-G 11.302–5)81
Although these lines are generally similar to the subsequent versions, this is a more direct echo
of Bloom’s earlier memory of Molly’s answer than the clipped version that appears in Ulysses:
‘At four. Near now’. Most obviously, Joyce dropped the syntactic marker indicating that the
statement is reported direct speech: ‘she said’. In all the versions including Ulysses, this scene is
also the first explicit mention of the fact that following Boylan at that crucial juncture of the day
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in his life is the main reason Bloom decides to have his supper in the Ormond. Here Bloom
thinks: ‘Follow. Risk it. Follow ^Go quick^’. Furthermore, once again, it is Boylan’s visual
markers—specifically, the hat that recurs in all the previous mentions of him in the earlier
episodes—that identify him.82 This is also the first mention of Boylan’s jingling jaunting car, a
motif that Joyce continued to emphasize as he added to the later draft and then on subsequent
manuscripts as well.
The precise wording of welcome as Boylan enters is exactly as it appears on the earlier draft and
then in print, but the interpolation when Bloom sees Boylan and meets Goulding is new to the
later draft. It is worthwhile to compare the following versions:
The Later Draft:
— See the conquering hero comes.
(p.56) Between the car and the barwindow went Mr Bloom, catwalking. See me ^<he>.
He^ might. The seat he sat on. Warm. Towards Richie Goulding’s legal bag lifted aloft
saluting.83
The Collateral Faircopy:
—See the conquering hero comes.
Between the car and windows of the bar went Bloom, catwalker. See me he might. The
seat he sat on. Warm. A hecat walked towards Richie Goulding’s legal bag, lifted aloft,
saluting.84
The Typescript:
— See the conquering hero comes.
Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered hero. See me he
might. The seat he sat on: warm. Black wary hecat walked towards Richie Goulding’s legal
bag, lifted aloft, saluting.
(U 254.06–9; U-G 11.340–3)85
The most significant alteration between the earlier versions and the typescript is that Joyce
introduces the pointed contrast between Boylan as the stereotypical ‘conquering hero’
dramatically being announced as he walks on stage, and Bloom who—in spite of everything that
he confronts, as well as what he chooses not to—is signalled as the ‘unconquered hero’ of the
book, who is ‘warily walking’, following in the other man’s shadow. Besides the relatively late
inclusion of this major thematic statement, the text is quite similar in each case, but it is typical
of the wide range of changes to the wording and imagery that Joyce made at each stage
throughout the composition of ‘Sirens’. Bloom’s obsessive interest in Boylan and his feline
manner were already on the later draft, but Joyce modified the presentation of these aspects of
his character on both subsequent manuscripts.86
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Furthermore, his encounter with Goulding was almost as it appears in Ulysses on the episode’s
later draft. Nonetheless, Joyce made similar rounds of varied changes on both the Rosenbach
manuscript and whatever document followed it. This was the source of the typescript, and some
of the changes have substantial implications on how the text variously stands in print.87 As the
story continues on the later ‘Sirens’ draft, Bloom once again thinks of the time and fixates on
being near Boylan at this crucial hour:
Father Cowley in the sheriff’s doorway. Avoid. Goulding a chance. Hello where are you off
to? ^Something to eat^ Where. Ormond. Diningroom. Can’t see me there. ^Hear^ Sit
tight. Still be near and hear: At four. I’ll join you. Come along.88
(p.57) Although the elements are generally similar, once Joyce rearranged them, this is how
the scene appears on the typescript and so in the first edition of Ulysses:
Not yet. At four he. All said four.
Cowley’s red lugs and Adam’s apple in the door of the sheriff’s office. Avoid. Goulding a
chance. What is he [Boylan] doing in the Ormond? Car waiting. Wait.
Hello. Where off to? Something to eat? I too was just. In here. What, Ormond? Best value
in Dublin. Is that so? Diningroom. Sit tight there. See, not be seen. I think I’ll join you.
Come on. Richie led on. Bloom followed bag. Dinner fit for a prince.
(U 254.18–25; see U-G 11.352–9)89
I have called attention to the newer first line of this scene because it highlights the importance
of understanding the source of the text that readers use as the basis of their critical
interpretations, which can be radically different, even contradictory, depending on the published
edition that a reader relies on. The later draft makes it clear that this further mention of the
time and Bloom’s desire to ‘be near and hear’ is meant to represent thoughts that pass through
his mind as opposed to the subsequent sentences that represent what he is supposed to say to
Richie Goulding: ‘Still be near and hear: At four. I’ll join you. Come along’.90 But all the
subsequent versions of these lines problematize such a straightforward reading.
The ‘Not yet.’ that first appears on the Rosenbach manuscript, and is repeated on all other
versions, is a clear verbal and thematic echo of Bloom’s thoughts about the time of the
rendezvous in ‘Lestrygonians’ (U 164.34; U-G 8.791, which Joyce wrote a year before he added
this repetition of the line here), but he had also already included two prior echoes of this phrase
in ‘Sirens’ on the later draft as well (U 250.07 and 10; U-G 11.187–8 and 190).91 So, in effect,
this is an example of the way in which earlier phrases are repeated for thematic reasons in
‘Sirens’ without a clear association with a specific character’s consciousness. Joyceans have
attributed this narrative device to the ‘arranger’, and the repeating ‘as said before’ references
later on in ‘Sirens’ are another clear example of the ways in which this technique works (U
258.34, 260.06, 265.13, and 15; U-G 11.519, 569, 761, and 763).92 Such narrative virtuosity is a
stylistic mechanism that readers come to expect and even take for granted in ‘Sirens’ and the
other, later episodes of Ulysses.
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(p.58) Setting aside the ‘Not yet.’, which appears in all the versions, the other lines are
significantly different in the Gabler edition of Ulysses; there it reads: ‘Not yet. At four she. Who
said four?’ (emphasis added). The pronouns are clearly different in these two published
versions: the ‘he’ becomes a ‘she’ in the Gabler edition, which obviously is a substantive
transformation. Furthermore, the last sentence is phrased as a question in the Gabler edition,
whereas it is a direct statement in all the prior printed editions: ‘All said four’. Obviously,
various interpretations of these differing lines are possible depending on which version of the
text someone is reading. As a now recurring motif, the emphasis of ‘At four he. All said four’ in
the first edition of Ulysses could imply that everyone—including whoever ‘he’ may be—knows
that Boylan will be arriving at Molly’s door at four. This underscores the autonomy of the
‘arranger’ as a textual presence that can interpolate detached statements such as this. It also
calls attention to the ways in which Dublin gossip is a major feature of Bloom’s paranoia about
his wife’s adultery, and Joyce intensified this aspect as he continued to elaborate the episode. As
I discuss in the next section and at the start of Chapter 8, this narrative thread reaches its
climax in ‘Cyclops’ (U 306.13–19; U-G 12.996–1002), and is then parodied in ‘Circe’ (U
525.29–528.15; U-G 15.3738–816).93
The textual evidence explains why these lines are different in print. They first appear in another
form on the Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ manuscript: ‘Not yet. At four ^<he> she^. Who said four?’. That
is, Joyce originally wrote ‘At four he’, but subsequently changed the pronoun to ‘she’, which is
the final reading on its Rosenbach manuscript. Understood most generally, the Gabler edition is
primarily founded upon this manuscript, therefore, its readings take precedence over all the
other subsequent versions.94 Since there is no textual referent to which man is supposed to
speak that line, it could be that the masculine pronoun was meant to prompt the question that
follows: ‘Who said four?’—which may refer both to when the wire is coming in and the time of
Boylan’s assignation. Later (on a missing document), Joyce must have changed his mind again
because it was typed as ‘At four he. All said four’. This is how it appears in all the editions of
Ulysses until the 1984 Gabler edition. The change obviously alters the logic and meaning of
these coordinated sentences from the way in which they first appeared in the Little Review in
1919, and make a considerable difference to how we read and interpret these lines. Although
this may appear to be a minor example, it highlights the fundamental issue that critics must
understand the constitution of the text they rely on for their interpretations.
On the one hand, the unrevised version of the text on the Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ manuscript could
suggest that someone else—a man—has also said what time the lovers are to meet, which
triggers the question of who that might be. Joyce then changed the pronoun to ‘she’ as he
revised the Rosenbach manuscript. This new (p.59) formulation serves to emphasize the echo
of Bloom’s repeating memory of the absent conversation, and calls the reader’s attention to that
narrative gap: did Molly really say what time Boylan was coming even though it is not in
Ulysses? While this is an interesting possibility in its own right, I maintain that the version Joyce
settled on—the one on the typescript, which appeared in the Little Review and in every edition of
Ulysses before 1984—is more compelling. A reading of this version of the text would claim that
the ‘arranger’ states that an unnamed, generic man has said what time Boylan will be arriving,
indicating that this has become common knowledge for the reader in the world that Joyce has
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created in Ulysses. Arguably, just by having been repeated so often it has become an established
narrative fact that everyone knows, leading to the conclusion: ‘All said four’.
Returning to the story of Bloom following Boylan on the later ‘Sirens’ draft, the scene there is
much more explicit than it is in the published text, and is more clearly focused on Bloom’s desire
to see what Boylan is doing and saying before the paramour heads off to meet Molly. Bloom
notices the time and wonders if Boylan could have forgotten the appointment, but the idea that
Boylan was going to be late on purpose was something Joyce added in the margin of a page of
the episode’s later draft almost exactly as it appears in Ulysses: ‘Perhaps a trick. Not come.
Whet desire. I couldn’t do’ (see U 255.20–1; U-G 11.392–3).95 Analogously, Bloom’s awareness
that Boylan has left the Ormond is also on the later draft, though Joyce continued to revise the
phrasing until it became: ‘Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He’s off. Light sob of breath Bloom
sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He’s gone’ (U 257.09–10; U-G 11.457–8).96
None of the storyline about what happens after Boylan leaves the Ormond is on the earlier
‘Sirens’ draft. It first appears on its later draft, but it is hard to imagine that this was the first
time Joyce wrote so much of this material, especially since it remained relatively stable from the
later draft to the published works. For example, on the later draft, the text recycles many of the
key elements of the Blooms’ interaction that morning almost exactly as they appear in print:
‘Mrs Marion. Met him pike hoses. Smell of burn. Of Paul de Kock. Nice name he’ (U 258.15–16;
U-G 11.500–1). Similarly, Boylan’s odyssey towards 7 Eccles Street was already a well-
established motif on the later draft, virtually as it appears in Ulysses. For example, the thematic
of Tutto è sciolto is set in place on the later draft, as is Bloom’s resignation as the event is
unfolding at home. Furthermore, Bloom’s imaginative rendering of the way Molly greets Boylan
at the door is also already on the later draft, though Bloom is more critical in its first rendering.
There he thinks that Boylan ‘can’t sing for nuts’,97 rather than for ‘tall hats’ (U 263.11–12; U-G
11.688). The scene describing Boylan’s continuing journey at U 265.13–18 (U-G 11.761–6) is
almost identical on the later draft to how it appears in print. Bloom’s fragmented (p.60)
thoughts about Molly discovering his clandestine correspondence are also evident on the later
draft much as they appear in Ulysses: ‘If she found out. Card in my high grade ha. No, not tell
all. Useless pain. If they don’t see. Woman. Sauce for the gander’ (U 268.12–14; U-G 11.876–
7).98
Boylan’s arrival is also similar on the later draft to how it appears in Ulysses. As usual, it is
based on a description of the ‘dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan’,99 but Joyce only added the
reference to his ‘socks skyblue clocks’ on the episode’s first proof level (U 271.01–2; U-G 11.977–
8).100 Bloom’s final image of Boylan as Paul de Kock knocking ‘with a loud proud knocker with a
cock’ on the front door is also on the later draft (U 271.10; see U-G 11.986–7),101 as is the
description of how he imagines Molly opening the door (U 272.31–2; U-G 11.1046–7). When
Bloom notices Miss Douce looking at herself in the mirror at the Ormond Bar, he thinks of how
Molly does the same thing before she answers the door. The text was as ambivalent about which
side of her face Molly prefers on the later draft as it is in Ulysses. Joyce wrote as an addition:
‘Molly likes left(?) side of her face best’, which he changed to ‘Is that best side of her face?’ and
that is how it appears in print.102 Bloom’s thoughts about his paternal legacy are also on the
later draft much as they appear in print, though he thinks of himself as ‘Last of my name’ rather
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than ‘race’ as it reads in Ulysses. He wonders whether the time for another son has really
passed and his final ruminations on this subject form an apt segue to some of the scenes in the
next episode: ‘He bore no hate. I too. No hate. Why hate? Or love? Rudy, if he had lived. ^Love
one another.^’ (U 273.14–15; U-G 11.1066–9).103
The unnamed Boylan in ‘Cyclops’
12. ‘Cyclops’:
Mid-June 1919 Earlier Fragmentary Texts Buffalo MS 8, pp. [4r], [11r],
and [22r]
Summer 1919 Later Fragmentary Texts Buffalo MS 6, p. [4r] & NLI
MS 10, p. [3v]
September–October 1919 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 32
Early October 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl 35.ii
10 October–3 November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Buffalo PP 19.1
(p.61) Given the close textual and thematic correspondences between ‘Cyclops’ and ‘Sirens’, it
is not surprising that Boylan would resurface in the conversations in Barney Kiernan’s pub in
‘Cyclops’, even though he is not among the drinkers at the bar. In the episode’s earlier proto-
draft (which is not a continuous draft but a collection of assorted, sometimes interrelated,
fragmentary scenes), Boylan’s name pops up tangentially in an exchange between Alf Bergan
and Ned Lambert about an otherwise unknown ‘Tommy […] and his great invention’, which
leads to a discussion about the recently departed Paddy Dignam:
— How is Tommy these times and his great invention, Stagger the World.
— I don’t know, Alf Bergan ^said^. I saw him just now on Essex Bridge with Paddy
Dignam. Boylan is going to …
— You what? Ned Lambert ^<said> cried^. With who?104
There is no context for this exchange in the textual history of Ulysses and so it is unclear what
this gadget might be or what Boylan might have to do with it. In fact, the story and Boylan soon
disappear without a trace. By the time Joyce wrote the Rosenbach ‘Cyclops’ manuscript,105 all
mention of Tommy and his ‘Stagger the world’ have disappeared and the cast of characters has
been reshuffled. The tangential question about Tommy is now about Paddy Leonard, whom Joyce
renamed Willy Murray (spelled ‘Willie’ until the fourth proof level),106 probably to avoid
confusion with the other, recently departed Paddy (U 288.09–29; UG 12.310–30).
Although Boylan is unnamed, rumours associated with him are also part of another, unrelated
scene on the earlier ‘Cyclops’ proto-draft. It begins like this:
— He has shows in the Tivoli, —— said, and it was he got up that <match between>
Keogh-Bennett boxing match. I heard he made a hundred quid over it, laying the odds. He
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spread the report Myler was on the beer and by God he was training all the time. Did you
see that match?
— I did not.107
In an episode filled with malicious gossip, it is pointedly unclear who is taking part in the
conversation, but Joyce had already established that this story must also be about Boylan when
Nosey Flynn told Bloom about it in ‘Lestrygonians’. This is why Boylan is simply being alluded to
here as ‘he’. At the earlier stages of this episode’s development, Joyce often did not bother to
identify the speakers of the dialogue on these fragmentary building blocks. He simply marked at
least one of the absent names with a typical long dash to be filled in later, and the other name,
the subject of the conversation, is conspicuously left ambiguous with just a masculine pronoun.
This is exemplary of Joyce’s general tendency to work up the various other components of
scenes—such as, the specific language of the dialogue; that is, the voices in Ulysses—before he
assigns the exchange to specific characters. Then, (p.62) as I show throughout this book, he
will often reshuffle the characters (or at least their names) for a wide range of reasons. Overall,
Joyce’s creative process demonstrates that storytelling takes precedence over characterization
in Ulysses. This is certainly not a new critical insight. Robert M. Adams made a similar point in
1962 about the characters in Ulysses in his pioneering and still essential study of the book. He
writes:
It may seem strange to describe Joyce, whose tissue of social fact is so richly woven as a
sparse author. But, in the matter of individual characterization, and in Ulysses
particularly, he writes a very bare prose indeed. Here are a whole grouping of men who
are scarcely distinguished from one another […] if we are not told, we should not know
who was speaking at any given point, and if we meet a group of these men in the street,
we should not be able to distinguish one from the others […] Joyce’s abstention from
exterior description leaves them almost completely uncharacterized. Upon this neutral
background, the small, telling fact sometimes stands out as if etched on fire.108
Returning to the scene in ‘Cyclops’, Joyce clearly named Boylan as the central character on its
Rosenbach manuscript, only to further complicate the identification again on the episode’s
fourth proof level:
— Talking about violent exercise, says Alf, were you at that Keogh-Bennett match?
— No, says Joe.
— I heard ^<Boylan> So and So^ made a cool hundred quid over it, says Alf.
— Who? Blazes? says Joe.
And says Bloom:
— What I meant about tennis, for example, is the agility and training of the eye.
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— Ay, Blazes, says Alf. He let out that Myler was on the beer to run up the odds and he
swatting all the time.
— We know him, says the citizen. The traitor’s son. We know what put English gold in his
pocket.
— True for you, says Joe.
And Bloom cuts in again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the blood, asking Alf:
— Now, don’t you think, Bergan?
— Myler dusted the floor with him, says Alf.
(see U 304.32–305.11; UG 12.939–55)109
This is a typical example of the ways in which Joyce uses the all-pervasive network of Dublin pub
gossip in Ulysses to structure some of the storytelling. Virtually linked as one extended
conversation, here Bergan repeats the rumour Nosey Flynn broached about Boylan in Davy
Byrne’s pub several hours earlier. Although Joyce named Boylan clearly on all the intermediary
manuscripts, two and half years later he dissimulates his identity by having him referred to as
‘So and So’, forcing Joe Hynes to put forth his well-known nickname: ‘Blazes’. In Ulysses, the
conversation is interrupted by the hyperbolic description of the ‘historic and hefty battle’ (p.63)
(U 305.16–306.04; UG 12.960–87), only to revert to Boylan and further rumours about him, this
time explicitly linking him to Molly and so to Bloom as well:
— He knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he’s running a concert tour
now up in the north.
— He is, says Joe. Isn’t he?
— Who? says Bloom. Ah, yes. That’s quite true. Yes, a kind of summer tour, you see. Just a
holiday.
— Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn’t she? says Joe.
— My wife? says Bloom. She’s singing, yes. I think it will be a success too. He’s an
excellent man to organise. Excellent.
(U 306.05–12; UG 12.988–95)
There was no mention of Boylan and Molly’s concert tour in any of the proto-draft versions of
the scene before the Rosenbach ‘Cyclops’ manuscript, but once Joyce included the scene it
remained exactly as it appears in Ulysses. This is the fourth time someone has brought up the
concert tour to Bloom, but it must certainly be the most trying for him. In fact, Bloom evades
naming Boylan outright, though he heroically manages to concede him his good points all the
same. After Bloom’s valiant efforts to put a brave face on it, the narrator breaks in with an
explanation that the other men in Dublin surely would not be able to supply:
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Hoho begob says I to myself, says I. That explains the milk in the cocoanut and absence of
hair on the animal’s chest. Blazes doing the tootle on the flute. Concert tour. Dirty Dan the
dodger’s son ôff Island bridge^ that sold the same horses twice over to the government
to fight the Boers. Ôld Whatwhat. I called about the poor and water rate, Mr Boylan. You
what? The water rate, Mr Boylan. You whatwhat?^ That’s the bucko that’ll organise her,
take my tip. ’Twixt me and you Caddareesh.
(U 306.12–19; UG 12.996–1002)
This diatribe begins as an attack on Bloom’s sexuality, but Joyce has the narrator extend his
criticism to include Dublin rumours about the dodgy financial dealings that Boylan’s father is
still remembered for with these additions on the episode’s second proof level as indicated
earlier.110 Here we learn that unflattering sobriquets run in the family, though being known as
‘Dirty Dan’ is probably worse than ‘Blazes’. This extended attack has its origin in a tangential
addition to a scene on the earlier ‘Cyclops’ proto-draft that is generally made up of a long
catalogue of racial and sexual accusations against Bloom that Joyce later dispersed throughout
the episode:
— Is that how he got to marry her?
— Commend me to a jewman [illegible word]
— I see, says ——. That explains the milk in the cocoanut & the absence of hair on the
animal’s chest.111
Although he first structured this passage as a dialogue, once again Joyce did not bother
assigning any of the speakers’ names, signalling one of the gaps with the (p.64) recurring dash
he uses to stand in for a character, only to be filled in later with a proper name. But, once Joyce
had developed the myopic narrator’s voice and perspective, he assigned this passage to him, and
continued to emphasize the bitterness of the narrator’s statements. Joyce pointedly placed Mr
Daniel Boylan in Islandbridge on the fringe of Dublin city centre and included an imitation of his
manner of speaking over two years later on the episode’s second proof level.112 The narrator’s
hostile comments about the men are followed by a brief parodic interpolation about Molly that
was embedded in a string of stories about the Blooms’ married life that Joyce subsequently
rearranged:
Pride of Calpe’s rocky mount, the ravenhaired daughter of Tweedy. There grew she to
peerless beauty where loquat and almond scent the air. The gardens of Alameda knew her
step: the garths of olives knew and bowed. The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of
the bountiful bosoms.
(U 306.20–3; UG 12.1003–7)
Joyce wrote this paragraph twice before he set it where it stands in Ulysses.113 In its original
context it was intended as a defence of Molly, introduced with the tagline, ‘Thus did they speak
of her: the ravenlocked daughter of tweedy’, though in each version it concludes with a typically
sexualized representation of her. Corresponding to the way Boylan is represented in Ulysses,
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Molly is usually mediated through gossip and figured through the synecdoche of her breasts.
Though there is still a lot more to discover about Leopold and Molly’s reactions to the affair that
day, for now, like Ulysses, this book will start again with other beginnings: the early lives of the
future Blooms.
Notes:
(1) Joyce had already made this thematic and conceptual move clear in his notes for Exiles,
which he compiled from 1913 to 1915, at a crucial preliminary juncture in the prehistory of
Ulysses: ‘the centre of sympathy appears to have been aesthetically shifted from the lover or
fancy man to the husband or cuckold’, James Joyce, Exiles: A Play in Three Acts (New York:
Viking, 1951), 115.
(2) I discuss the agency of the marriage proposal in greater detail in ‘Lovemaking on Howth’ in
Chapter 5.
(3) NLI MS 7B.
(4) Margot Norris, ‘Don’t Call him “Blazes”: Hugh E. Boylan’s Narrative Caricature’, JJQ, 48/2
(Winter 2011), 229–49.
(5) The way in which Joyce primarily represents Boylan through mediated perspectives is
analogous to how Molly is represented in Ulysses.
(6) Daniel Ferrer, ‘What Song the Sirens Sang … is No Longer beyond All Conjecture: A
Preliminary Description of the New “Proteus” and “Sirens” Manuscripts’, JJQ, 39/1 (Fall 2001),
53–67.
(7) Rodney Wilson Owen, James Joyce and the Beginnings of ‘Ulysses’ (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI
Research Press, 1983), 67.
(8) NLI MS 7A.
(9) The later draft of ‘Sirens’ is composed of two sibling manuscripts: NLI MS 9 and Buffalo MS
5.
(10) I wrote a version of the argument about the significance of the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft in
Crispi, ‘A First Foray’, GJS, 11.
(11) NLI MS 7B, pp. [10r]–[14r].
(12) See NLI NB 3, p. [1r]: ‘Simon’.
(13) NLI MS 7B, p. [7v].
(14) Joyce spelled the name as both ‘Douse’ and ‘Douce’ on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft, but she is
firmly Miss Douce on the episode’s later draft and thereafter.
(15) Victor Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1902).
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(16) Buffalo NB 2a, p. [7v]. See Phillip F. Herring, ed. Joyce’s Notes and Early Drafts for
‘Ulysses’: Selections from the Buffalo Collection (Charlottesville: Published for the
Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the University of Virginia, 1977), 14.
Joyce reminded himself of the reason for Boylan’s nickname on a much later notebook as well:
‘BB swears’ (NLI NB 4, p. [8r]).
(17) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS III, p. 27.
(18) Harvard Pl III-12.i; see JJA 21: 125. Joyce noted the name ‘Hugh’ on BL ‘Penelope’ NS 5.61,
though it is not clear that he had Boylan in mind when he did so.
(19) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 249.
(20) Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 268.
(21) NLI MS 7B, p. [8v].
(22) Joyce had established the story of Lenehan’s tip on Sceptre by 1918 on the Rosenbach
‘Aeolus’ manuscript (see f. 12; U 123.19; U-G 7.388–9), if not sooner.
(23) NLI MS 7B, p. [9r].
(24) NLI MS 7B, p. [9v].
(25) For further information, see Andrew Tierney, ‘ “One of Britain’s fighting men”: Major
Malachi Powell and Ulysses’, JJON (December 2013).
(26) NLI MS 7B, p. [10r].
(27) NLI MS 7B, p. [10r].
(28) It might be that at this stage Joyce planned that ‘Sirens’ would function with two
perspectives, much like ‘Nausicaa’ in fact does, though, as far as we know, Joyce only wrote that
episode about a year later. That is, ‘Sirens’ would have been composed of a Dubliners-like bar
scene with dialogue first that is counter-balanced by Bloom’s interior monologue in the second
half of the episode. It is even possible that Joyce could have planned that the latter part of the
episode would take place at exactly the same time as the first half, more like some of the various
interpolations in ‘Wandering Rocks’ function, rather than the more traditional sequential
timeframe of the episode in ‘Nausicaa’.
(29) NLI MS 7B, p. [10r].
(30) Since there are no early (pre-Rosenbach) drafts of the ‘Calypso’ to ‘Lestrygonians’ episodes,
it is not possible to gauge how much (if any) of Bloom’s interior monologue style Joyce had
already developed by 1917. Nonetheless, the fragments on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft are at the
very least clearly still tentative attempts to develop Bloom’s characteristic inner voice in that
episode.
(31) This scene is on NLI MS 7B, pp. [10r]–[10v].
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(32) NLI MS 7B, pp. [11r]–[14r].
(33) NLI MS 7B, p. [10v].
(34) NLI MS 7B, p. [10v]. Based on the state of the ‘Cyclops’ proto-drafts that survive and other
interpretive considerations, I presume that Joyce had not yet envisioned what became episode
twelve at this stage (at least not as we know it from Ulysses), and that it both materially and
conceptually grew out of Joyce’s continuing elaboration of ‘Sirens’. I discuss the interface
between these two sibling episodes more fully in ‘A New Life in the City Arms Hotel’ in Chapter
7.
(35) Since they deal with the Blooms after they married, I discuss some of these fragments more
fully in ‘Memories of Lombard Street West’ in Chapter 6 and in ‘A New Life in the City Arms
Hotel’ in Chapter 7.
(36) Emphasis added; NLI MS 7B, p. [11r].
(37) NLI MS 7B, p. [11v].
(38) NLI MS 7B, p. [11v].
(39) Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ MS, ff. 9–10.
(43) As I discuss in the previous section, presumably Joyce had already established ‘Blazes’ as his
signature name on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft.
(45) Buffalo PP 5.1; see JJA 22: 234.
(46) Harvard Pl IX.i; see JJA 17: 177.
(48) Further reinforcing the symmetry between the affair and the marriage, Joyce elaborated
several different first-night scenarios in the courtship of Leopold and Molly Bloom, which I
discuss in ‘Leopold and Molly’s First Meetings’ in Chapter 5.
(49) The U-G text of ‘Hades’ includes the description of Boylan’s ‘spruce figure’ that appears on
the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript (f. 8; U-G 6.199), but since that collateral manuscript was
not used to prepare the episode’s typescript it accordingly does not appear in any prior edition
of Ulysses. This epithet functions as a proleptic marker of the description of Boylan later on in
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‘Sirens’, but, as we saw, Joyce had already written that part of the later episode before the
Rosenbach ‘Hades’ manuscript.
(50) Rosenbach ‘Hades’ MS, ff. 8–9.
(52) Little Review V.5, p. 20.
(53) Rosenbach ‘Hades’ MS, f. 9.
(55) Harvard Pl 10.i; see JJA 17: 208.
(56) Harvard Pl 10.ii; see JJA 17: 216. A Henry R. Tweedy was Crown solicitor for County
Waterford and had offices at 13 Hume Street. Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Thom’s, 1904), 2029. Unless otherwise specified, hereafter
all references to Thom’s are to the 1904 edition.
(58) I discuss Leopold and Molly’s memories of that fateful day in ‘Leopold in Love’ in Chapter 5.
(59) Rosenbach ‘Lestrygonians’ MS, f. 4.
(61) NLI NB 5A, p. [4v].
(62) I discuss these various happy memories in the Blooms’ life together in Chapters 6 and 7.
(63) Little Review, V.9, pp. 40–1.
(64) Harvard Pl 17.ii; see JJA 18: 119.
(65) Although quite vague, this is the first mention of what time Molly expects Boylan. When and
how Molly tells her husband this significant detail has caused some debate over the years.
Richard Ellmann was the first to note that readers are not given the information about the time
of the rendezvous in ‘Calypso’, ‘The Limits of Joyce’s Naturalism’, Sewannee Review, 63 (1955),
567–75: 569. More than twenty years later, Hugh Kenner and Fredrick V. Wellington analysed
the implications of the fact that the scene in which Molly and Bloom exchange their itineraries
for the day is not narrated in Ulysses. Here as well, readers must piece together the information
as they make their way through the book. Ulysses only slowly divulges the details until Bloom
first gives us the exact time in ‘Sirens’.
Kenner and Wellington argue that Leopold and Molly had a third (un-narrated) conversation
before Bloom leaves the house—between the narrative action of ‘Calypso’ and ‘Lotus Eaters’—in
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which she tells him when Boylan is due and he tells her that he will be dining out and intends to
see a play at the Gaiety. See Kenner, ‘The Rhetoric of Silence’, JJQ, 14/4 (Summer 1977), 382–
94, and Wellington, ‘A Missing Conversation in Ulysses’, JJQ, 14/4 (Summer 1977), 476–9.
Also see Margaret McBride’s rebuttal of this hypothesis in ‘At Four She Said’, JJQ, 17/1 (Fall
1979), 21–39, as well as her further elaboration of her argument in ‘At Four She Said II’, JJQ,
18/4 (Summer 1981), 417–31.
(66) In ‘Aeolus’, Bloom considers returning home and thereby scuttle the affair, but his response
is always the same: ‘I could go home still: tram: something I forgot. Just to see before dressing.
No. Here. No’ (U 119.01–2; U-G 7.230–1).
(67) Little Review, V.10-11, pp. 61–2.
(68) If Joyce’s patterns of composition are as consistent as is generally believed, the evidence
suggests that he put together the episode at least in part from earlier textual fragments that he
had yet to integrate into his work. It is quite possible that he had written one or both of the
scenes that feature Boylan in ‘Wandering Rocks’ maybe months (or possibly years) before he
included them in this episode (at least as we know it in Ulysses).
(69) See Rosenbach ‘Wandering Rocks’ MS, ff. 12–13.
(70) Norris, ‘Don’t Call him “Blazes” ’, 235.
(71) In fact, as an addition on the episode’s typescript for Ulysses, Joyce reinforced the contrast
between Boylan’s usual concern with his appearance by adding that on Bloomsday in particular
he was ‘got up regardless’ (Buffalo TS 8, p. [7r]; U 219.04; U-G 10.330; see JJA 13: 13). Joyce
further underlined this aspect with a specific touch on the episode’s first proof level: on 16 June
it seems Boylan wore ‘his tie a bit crooked’ (Harvard Pl 25.i; U 219.04–5; U-G 10.330–1; see JJA
18: 249).
(72) NLI MS 7B, p. [8v].
(73) Buffalo TS 9, p. [7r]; see JJA 13: 64.
(74) Harvard Pl A.iii.a; see JJA 21: 181. The following simple note probably inspired this later
echo: ‘BB’s flower’ (Buffalo NB 2b, p. [3v]; see Herring, Notes and Early Drafts, 6.39). On the
‘Penelope’ draft, Joyce considered having Molly remember him dressed differently, presumably
on another day, in ‘that other the herringbone tweed one’, but crossed it through and his other
costume disappeared from Ulysses (NLI MS 14, p. [4r]).
(75) Joyce reminded himself to include Boylan’s fashion accessories in ‘Penelope’ with at least
two notes: ‘BB’s ties’ (NLI NB 5A, p. [17v]) and ‘Silk socks BB’ (BL ‘Penelope’ NS 4.79).
(77) This later draft of ‘Sirens’ also documents another transformation of the episode that is as
momentous as it is problematic: the imposition of the so-called fugal structure on the episode,
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and the development of the episode’s overture (see Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver; 6 August
1919; SL 242). Although the conceptual note ‘Repeat | episodes | phrases’ signals the conceptual
origin of the overture on the episode’s later draft (NLI MS 9, p. [1r]), its first extant version is as
part of the Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ manuscript (ff. 1–2). This is unsurprising, since it is supposed to
recap a full range of the episode’s motifs, and also indicates that Joyce wrote it after he had
written the episode in full at least twice.
(78) I discuss the changing cast of characters in ‘Cyclops’ more fully in ‘A New Life in the City
Arms Hotel: 1893–4’ in Chapter 7.
(79) Emphasis added; NLI MS 9, p. [2v].
(80) The stationery shop was previously called Tobin’s (NLI MS 9, p. [3v]), but presumably after
Joyce looked it up he changed it to the historically accurate Teresa Daly’s establishment at 1
Upper Ormond Quay (see Thom’s, 1563).
(81) Emphasis added; NLI MS 9, p. [4v].
(82) Joyce considered including a reference to ‘BB’s flower’ as an addition on the margin of the
episode’s later draft (NLI MS 9, p. [4v]), but decided against it, and only the women in Ulysses
notice Boylan’s new metonymic reference.
(83) NLI MS 9, p. [5r].
(84) Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ MS, f. 11.
(85) Emphasis added; Buffalo TS 9, p. [7r]; see JJA 13: 64.
(86) Joyce may have prepared the Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ manuscript at least in part from the
episode’s later draft, but the Rosenbach manuscript is a collateral document in the production of
the published text. The typescript was made from a missing document, and different copies of
this typescript were used to set both the episode’s Little Review and Ulysses texts. I consider the
textual differences on the Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ manuscript version to be only interesting as (more
often than not abandoned) variants.
(87) Although this scene is different on the later draft and the Rosenbach version, once set on
the typescript, Joyce made no further changes to them.
(88) Emphasis added; NLI MS 9, p. [5r].
(91) NLI MS 9, p. [2v].
(92) David Hayman writes: ‘I use the term “arranger” to designate a figure or a presence that
can be identified neither with the author nor with his narrators, but exercises an increasing
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degree of overt control over increasingly challenging material’, ‘Ulysses: The Mechanics of
Meaning (new, rev. and expanded edn, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 84. Joyce
began instituting the workings of the ‘as said before’ motif as he was finishing the later ‘Sirens’
draft, but at that stage the repeating phrase only referred to Boylan’s identifiers: his creaking
shoes and jaunting progress to Eccles Street (NLI MS 9, p. [10r]; see U 265.13 and 15; U-G
11.761 and 763). Joyce included the more radical reference in ‘Sirens’ to what was ‘said before’
about Bloom’s breakfast in ‘Calypso’ on a subsequent missing document, which first appears as
part of the main text on the Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ manuscript (ff. 18 and 20). Later, Joyce added
the second reference on that manuscript, and then refined it on the episode’s typescript (Buffalo
TS 9, p. [14r]; see U 265.13 and 15; U-G 11.518 and 567; see JJA 13: 71).
(93) For example, Joyce pointedly connects the exact time of Molly’s tryst with Boylan with the
accusations made against Bloom by Mrs Yelverton Barry in ‘Circe’: ‘He made improper
overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink
time’ (U 441.08–10; U-G 15.1021–2).
(94) See UCSE, volume 3, 1741, for a discussion of the editorial process and decisions involved in
establishing this portion text in the 1984 edition.
(95) NLI MS 9, p. [5v].
(96) While the kind of flower Boylan sports is not named in Ulysses, it was distinctly red in
‘Wandering Rocks’, though it is ‘bluehued’ here. On the later ‘Sirens’ draft, Joyce considered
making it a ‘hyacin[th]’, but crossed it through before finishing the word, then wrote
‘narcissus’ (NLI MS 9, p. [6v]), which can be blue, though that sort of specificity also fell away.
(97) NLI MS 9, p. [9v].
(98) See Buffalo MS 5, p. [3r]; see JJA 13: 37.
(99) Buffalo MS 5, p. [5r]; see JJA 13: 41.
(100) Harvard Pl 31.i.a; see JJA 19: 61.
(102) Joyce cleared up the issue of which side of her face Molly thinks is best two years later. On
a missing document between its draft and the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript, he wrote ‘the
left side of my face the best’ (U 711.14; U-G 18.798), which was presumably based on the
following note: ‘left side face better’ (NLI NB 5B, p. [7r]).
(105) Rosenbach ‘Cyclops’ MS, f. 32.
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(106) Harvard Pl 35.ii; see JJA 19: 160. See ‘John asks is that a good God to take Willie
Dignam’ (BL ‘Cyclops’ NS 1.07).
(107) Emphasis added; simplified transcription; Buffalo MS 8, p. [11r]; see JJA 13: 103.
(108) Robert M. Adams, Surface and Symbol (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1962), 51.
(109) Emphasis added; Buffalo PP 19.1; see JJA 25: 47.
(113) NLI MS 10, p. [3v] and Buffalo MS 6, p. [4r]; see JJA 13: 134.d.
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The Genesis of Leopold Bloom


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
1866–86
Luca Crispi
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.003.0003

The manuscripts document how Joyce constructed the fragmentary narrative of the few
recurring memories about the first twenty years of Leopold Bloom’s life before he met Molly
Tweedy. In fact, Joyce established the semblance of a richer earlier life history of Leopold by
only later adding specifically dated details about him, thereby merging the overtly realist
tradition with the more experimental narrative modes of Ulysses. The compositional patterns
revealed are typical of the ways Joyce constructed the fragmentary lives of his characters. On
the one hand, Joyce developed an idea in a later episode and then added a foreshadowing of the
fact or theme in the late stages as he revised earlier episodes, but, on the other hand, he also
tended to scatter references to a new fact or idea more or less at the same time in various
episodes, thereby establishing an overarching coherence within the book.
Keywords: fragmentary narrative, construction, compositional patterns, realist, experimental, narrative modes
Before Bloom: meet the parents

Rudolph Virag’s travels
5. ‘Lotus Eaters’:
February–May 1918 Mixed Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 5b
July 1918 Serial Publication Little Review, V.3, pp. 41–2
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7. ‘Aeolus’:
January–May 1918 Collateral Faircopy for the Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 19
Mid-May 1918 Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 5, p. [10r]
October 1918 Serial Publication Little Review V.6, p. 40
8–Late August 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl 14.iii
15. ‘Circe’:
Late Spring 1920 Earlier Draft Buffalo MS 19, p. [11r]
December 1920–January 1921 Mixed Faircopy for the Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 39
16. ‘Eumaeus’:
January–February 1921 Later Draft Buffalo MS 21, p. [4r]
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-Draft NLI MS 13, p. [11v]
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Blue III MS,
p. 21
Whereas the story of Leopold Bloom starts true to epic form in medias res at 8 a.m. on 16 June
1904 when Bloom is 38 years old, his life as a character begins with the stories of the lives of his
parents and ancestors that are scattered throughout Ulysses. Though the information is given
obliquely, the first details about Bloom’s Hungarian father, Rudolph Virag Bloom, are presented
in ‘Lotus Eaters’. According to the version of the scene in the Little Review, shortly after (p.66)
collecting Martha Clifford’s letter at the Westland Row post office, and a meandering
conversation with C. P. M’Coy, Bloom sees an advert for the play Leah featuring the actress Mrs
Bandmann Palmer, and we read:
Hello. Leah tonight: Mrs. Bandmann Palmer. Like to see her in that again. Poor papa! How
he used to talk about Kate Bateman in that! Outside the Adelphi in London waited all the
afternoon to get in. Year before I was born that was: sixtyfive. And Ristori in Vienna. What
is this the right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No. The scene he was always
talking about where the old blind Abraham recognises the voice and puts his fingers on his
face.
Nathan’s voice! His son’s voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his father to die of
grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his father and left the God of his father.
Every word is so deep, Leopold.
Poor papa! Poor man! I’m glad I didn’t go into the room to look at his face. That day! O
dear! O dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was the best for him.
(see U 73.21–34; U-G 5.194–209)1
As far as the fictional biography of Rudolph Bloom’s son is concerned, the most important fact
readers can glean from this scene is the year of Leopold’s birth: 1866. Typically, Bloom tends to
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date (and also misdate) the events in his life by correlating them with other personal and
historical events, though in this case Bloom’s associations are partially erroneous. As some
historical research makes clear, Bloom is thinking of two different real actresses who both
played the lead role in Leah about forty years apart. On the one hand, both in real life and in
Ulysses the popular American actress Millicent Bandmann-Palmer did play in Leah at the Gaiety
in Dublin the week of 16 June 1904.2 But, on the other hand, Bloom recalls a story of his father,
who waited to see Kate Bateman, another famous actress, in Leah in the Adelphi theatre in
London in 1865, the year before Leopold was born. Actually, Bateman appeared in Leah at the
Adelphi in October 1863, a fact Joyce probably knew, given all the accurate historical detail that
structures this passage and Ulysses more generally.3 Joyce’s decision to re-date the year of the
performance to have it take place in the ‘Year before I was born’ is just one instance when Joyce
was willing to let his telling of a story warp historical detail.4
(p.67) Furthermore, once readers are able to piece together the story of Bloom’s father’s exile,
conversion, and marriage, the play has obvious resonances that relate to the story of Rudolph
Virag and Ulysses more generally. Briefly summarized, the play is about Leah, the leader of a
band of wandering Jews, who have fled from religious persecution in Hungary. Along the way,
they stop in an Austrian town where she falls in love with a Catholic boy named Rudolf, but
Rudolf’s father, Nathan, a convert from Judaism, eventually breaks off the romance between the
two lovers. It seems that the important facts readers are to gather from this passage in ‘Lotus
Eaters’ are: 1) this is the first time in Ulysses that we learn the year of Leopold Bloom’s birth; 2)
the fact that Rudolph Virag was not yet in Dublin in 1865, the year before Bloom was born; and
3) the thematic link between Rudolph Virag Bloom’s life and the play Leah.
Although embedded in Bloom’s interior monologue, this passage is the first bit of concrete
information we are given about Bloom’s well-travelled father. Though the facts are given in a
stylistically different mode, Rudolph Virag’s birthplace, Szombathely, Hungary, is only revealed
in ‘Circe’.5 Adding another layer of depth to the complex portrayal of the father and son
relationship in Ulysses, in that episode a spectral figure of Bloom’s grandfather simply declares:
‘(Heels together, bows) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely’ (U 481.18; U-G 15.2312).6 We
simply do not know when, or precisely why, Joyce decided that this particular town would be the
Blooms’ ancestral homeland, but the first time it appears in the textual record of Ulysses is on
the Rosenbach manuscript of ‘Circe’.7 Joyce wrote this version of the episode in Paris at the very
end of 1920, more than two years (p.68) after ‘Lotus Eaters’ had appeared in the Little Review,
but still a full year before the book was finally published. Therefore, as far as we know, Joyce
only fixed the site of Virag’s birth about six years after he had begun to write Ulysses and three
years after he had settled on the place and manner of the elder Bloom’s unexpected death. In
other words, according to the textual record, Bloom’s father died before he was born.
After this first mention of Szombathely in late 1920, Joyce worked out the itinerary of Rudolph
Virag’s migration across the continent to London and then to Dublin. The travels are first
recorded on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft that Joyce only wrote about eight months before Ulysses was
published:
And looking back in a retrospective?
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An old man, he had boasted of his ^<deed> deeds^, of business cunning; ^how he came
penniless, ^had fallen on his feet, held on when given an inch taking an ell,^ how won his
way in various cities, Szombathely, în Vienna, Budapest^ in Florence, in London, in
Dublin.^ A child Bloom, he remembered, he had run with fingers over the map of Europe,
Dublin, Florence, Vienna, Budapest, Szombathely, asked for [descriptions] which his
father freely conceded in all capitals
(see U 676.25–677.02; U-G 17.1905–15)8
Reading this scene in ‘Ithaca’, we also discover that Leopold’s grandfather, who is a spectral
figure in ‘Circe’, had seen ‘Maria Theresia, empress of Austria, queen of Hungary’ (U 676.29–30;
U-G 17.1909–10),9 which Joyce must have added on a missing document because it first appears
set in place on the Rosenbach manuscript version of this scene.10 After first sketching this
particular memory, Joyce only determined that the passing on of this bit of familial lore between
generations took place in 1872, when Bloom was exactly ‘aged 6’, on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript.11 Purposely adding the specificity of when the exchange between father and son
took place, this concrete detail helps to create the semblance of a richer life for Leopold Bloom,
something that readers who primarily appreciate the more realistic strand in Ulysses seem
eager to find in it (and in traditional linear narratives more generally). This is one of the ways in
which Joyce’s work seeks to merge the realist tradition that constitutes a distinctive aspect of
his art and the more fragmented and experimental mode of his modernist storytelling in Ulysses.
(p.69) Rudolph Bloom’s suicide
Mid–28 June 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl 9.i
30 June–2 August 1921 Second Proof Level Buffalo PP 5.1
6. ‘Hades’:
March–May 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 13–14
September 1918 Serial Publication Little Review, V.5, pp. 18, 20, 23, and 26–7
9. ‘Scylla and Charybdis:
Autumn 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, f. 16
Although there are a few more facts to unravel about Bloom’s Hungarian family in ‘Ithaca’, for
now let us return to that initial thread of this story about Rudolph Virag Bloom in ‘Lotus Eaters’.
As usual, Joyce revised and amplified this passage more than once. The first time was on the
episode’s (now missing) typescript for Ulysses in early 1921, when he added another bit of
accurate historical detail that appears set on the episode’s first proof level:
Hello. Leah tonight: Mrs Bandman Palmer. Like to see her in that again. ^Hamlet she
played last night. Male impersonator.^ Poor papa! […]
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(U 73.21–3; see U-G 5.194–7)12
As well as having the leading role in Leah, Bandmann-Palmer did in fact also play Hamlet at the
Gaiety the week of 16 June 1904, and so she was indeed a male impersonator. It seems that
here, at least initially, Joyce was primarily concerned with adding further realistic historical
details that also serve to reinforce the complex question of gender roles in Ulysses. But, then on
the second proof level, he made yet another addition to this scene:
Hello. Leah tonight: Mrs Bandman Palmer. Like to see her in that again. Hamlet she played
last night. Male impersonator. ^Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed
suicide.^ Poor papa! […]13
Among other things, this addition further strengthens the structural parallels in Ulysses to
Shakespeare’s works, but it also introduces, in a comic vein, the sombre issue of ‘Death by
misadventure’ that becomes a topic of conversation in the next episode, ‘Hades’ (U 93.32–3; U-G
6.364). When we piece together Bloom’s fragmentary thoughts here, it seems that he is
pondering the bizarre idea that Ophelia committed suicide because she discovered that she was
in love with a woman. (p.70) Reading ahead in Ulysses, in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ the character
of John Eglinton (William Kirkpatrick Magee) remarks that ‘I hear that an actress played Hamlet
for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin’ (U 190.16–17; U-G 9.517–18), and then
specifically mentions the contemporary far-fetched theory put forward by Edward Vining that
Hamlet was a woman in Shakespeare’s play.14 This is an exemplary instance of Joyce’s
interlinking of historical facts with thematic and conceptual associations to build multi-faceted
networks of signification across Ulysses. Specifically here in ‘Lotus Eaters’, Joyce is also relying
on the re-reader’s familiarity with Stephen’s Hamlet theory that he presents in ‘Scylla and
Charybdis’, as well as with Bloom’s interest in cross-dressing that features prominently as a
motif in ‘Circe’. Tracing the evolution of this linguistic and thematic network, we discover that
the first extant rudiments of Eglinton’s comments were already on the Rosenbach ‘Scylla and
Charybdis’ manuscript that Joyce had written by late 1918,15 about three years before he made
these various corresponding additions to ‘Lotus Eaters’. Therefore, the addition to Bloom’s
interior monologue in the earlier episode in the book functions as an oblique foreshadowing of
the already established theme in the later one.
Thus, the presentation of Bloom’s interior monologue in ‘Lotus Eaters’ is a pivotal instance of
the way Joyce constructed the expansive and elastic network of intersubjective associations that
underlie how the thoughts of various characters are represented. Taken together, these
representations explore the many ways in which textual memories function in Ulysses.16 In
Ulysses (and then even more so in Finnegans Wake), Joyce both redefines the discursive and
psychological foundations of an individual character’s consciousness and also explores the
potentiality of a textual intersubjective consciousness between multiple fictional characters.
Although these are techniques that have long been recognized as radical aspects of modernist
literature, the specific methods Joyce uses to achieve these effects across intertextual and
intratextual matrices have only begun to be scrutinized in detail. As the genesis of Ulysses is
studied in greater depth and detail, the debate about these central technical and conceptual
issues will be further redefined and elaborated.
Page 5 of 46
More specifically here, following only the logic of the associations in the published text, readers
of Ulysses would be correct to presume that it was Bloom’s thoughts about Ophelia’s suicide that
prompted him to think of his own father’s death, but reading the work genetically shows that
Joyce actually worked the other way round: the more basic description of Leopold Bloom’s
thoughts about Virag’s suicide prompted Joyce several years later to reinforce an already
complex intertextual parallel to Shakespeare’s plays, as well as introduce an intratextual
parallel to another, contextually unrelated scene in Ulysses. On the one hand, some of Joyce’s
efforts in the late stages of writing and revising Ulysses were focused on adding Shakespearian,
Homeric, and other literary and (p.71) historical allusions, thereby providing the foundation for
some critics and readers who claim that Ulysses is an exemplary modernist epic on these
grounds. On the other hand, Joyce was experimenting with the possibilities of narrative form as
well as questioning the limits of representing subjectivity and consciousness in fiction. Because
of its ability to create networks of meaning across intertextual and intratextual planes,
storytelling is the bedrock of Ulysses and, therefore, of this study.
Although this brief mention in ‘Lotus Eaters’ in the Little Review in July 1918 was the first time
readers encounter the story of Rudolph Virag’s life and death, the first time Joyce most likely
wrote about them was sometime before 1917 on the (probably several) earlier, now lost pre-
Rosenbach drafts of ‘Hades’. In a memory that further reinforces the Homeric intertextual
parallels with Ulysses, as the funeral cortège passes a dog’s home on the way to Glasnevin
cemetery, according to the episode’s Little Review version, Bloom remembers his father’s final
instructions about his dog: ‘Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. He took
it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are’ (see U 87.22–4; U-G 6.125–8).17
Joyce continued to enrich and expand the thematic connection between father and son as he
revised Ulysses by later adding yet another allusion to Rudolph Bloom’s death as part of the
men’s conversation in the carriage in ‘Hades’. Again according to the episode’s Little Review
version, Bloom gives an ambiguous reply to whether he would be joining Molly on her concert
tour: ‘Well no, Mr. Bloom said. I am not sure, that is’ (see U 90.01–2; U-G 6.216–17).18 Bloom’s
reasons remain unclear to most of the men in the carriage (and at this point to most first-time
readers as well), but when Joyce revised the scene over three years later on the second proof
level for Ulysses, the anniversary of his father’s death (Bloom’s ‘private business’) is specifically
given as the ostensible reason why he will definitely not be going along with Molly on her
concert tour:
— Well no, Mr Bloom said. ^<I am not sure, that is.> In point of fact I have to go down to
the county Clare on some private business.^
(see U 90.01–2; U-G 6.216–17)19
In this way, Joyce fundamentally altered the motivations that underlie this scene over five years
after he had first worked on the earliest surviving version of ‘Hades’, but just shortly after he
had made the several related rounds of additions to ‘Lotus Eaters’ about his father’s suicide that
I have already discussed.
Page 6 of 46
Some readers of Ulysses may have missed these subtle references to Rudolph Virag Bloom’s
premature death so far, but the subsequent discussion of suicide by the other men in the
carriage in ‘Hades’ presents an unmistakable version of the story. This is how it reads the first
time it appears in print:
—But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the suicide.
Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.
(p.72) —The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.
—Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We must take a

charitable view of it.
—They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr Dedalus said.
—It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.
Mr Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham’s large eyes. Looking
away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent. Like Shakespeare’s face. Always a
good word to say. […]
He looked away from me. He knows.
That afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The room in the hotel
with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight through the slats of the Venetian blinds. The
coroner’s ears, big and hairy. Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then
saw like yellow streaks on his face. Verdict: overdose. The letter. For my son Leopold.
No more pain. Wake no more.
(see U 93.05–34; U-G 6.335–65)20
The other Irishmen’s views on suicide have prompted Bloom to vividly recall the painful scene of
his father’s death by a premeditated overdose. Furthermore, we have another complex network
of realistic and literary allusions in Bloom’s thought that Martin Cunningham’s face resembles
Shakespeare’s, again merging the realist and modernist strands in Ulysses. On the one hand,
Matthew Kane, on whom the character of Cunningham is partially based, was well known
amongst Joyce’s father’s acquaintances to have had a face that looked like Shakespeare’s, a fact
that Joyce had already alluded to in Cunningham’s previous appearance in ‘Grace’ in
Dubliners.21 On the other hand, this further reference reinforces the complex and nuanced
associations about Virag’s suicide to Shakespeare’s works that Joyce only added later to ‘Lotus
Eaters’ (as I discussed earlier). Here the embedded fictionally realistic associations in Bloom’s
thoughts are grounded in several layers of intertextual and intratextual frames.
Although almost certainly written much earlier, the basic structure and most of the details of the
carriage scene were already present on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript version that Joyce
Page 7 of 46
wrote in 1918,22 and this is also how it appeared in the Little Review. If the story is still not clear
enough, there is the following scene about midway through the episode in the Little Review:
All walked after.
Martin Cunningham whispered:
—You made it damned awkward talking of suicide before Bloom.
—Did I? Mr Power whispered. How so?
—His father poisoned himself, Martin Cunningham said. Had the Queen’s hotel in Ennis.
—O God! Mr Power said. First I heard of it. Poisoned himself!
(see U 98.04–11; 6.525–32)23
(p.73) This later conversation confirms what was only alluded to in the earlier scene: that
Martin Cunningham is not only a kind man, but also a friend of the Blooms, and someone who
knows certain facts about the family, while the other characters—Jack Power and Simon Dedalus
—are unaware of the suicide and are inclined to maliciously gossip about a delicate topic such as
suicide, which was still taboo in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Ireland. Joyce merged in various
graded ways historical fact and fiction to construct the lives of these characters. In general, our
understanding of Joyce’s practice of interweaving historical social fact in his fiction has not
developed much in the past fifty years since Robert M. Adams wrote:
The liberal use which Joyce made of ‘pilings’—figures drawn from real life, upon whose
more or less buried support he created the structures of his fiction—give us good occasion
to appreciate the mingled subtlety and boldness with which he controlled his materials.
No general rules seem to cover the complex transformations which he now and then
imposed on his materials; sometimes we find him elaborately circumstantial about the
surroundings of an imaginary character; sometimes he presents only those few elements
of a real character which make it seem not only imaginary but, actually caricatured. He
divides, he multiplies, he subtracts; he draws freely upon the resources of his
encyclopedic memory, and, upon the memories of his friends and relations, and upon his
vast undirected store of miscellaneous reading. The unevenness of his practice in matters
of fact is most likely to throw a reader off balance because he never explains, and because,
in the matter of individuating detail he is remarkably sparing.24
For example, there has been some confusion and debate about the representation of the facts in
Ulysses surrounding Rudolph Bloom’s last occupation and eventual suicide. In ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ (U 393.02–17; U-G 14.1043–60), it seems that the Blooms’ ‘family firm’ in the early 1880s
was as traders and door-to-door salesmen in imitation diamonds and trinkets. Even though these
fictional facts are skewed through the episode’s hyperbolic styles, based on what we know of
Rudolf Bloom’s circumstances, it is quite unlikely that he would have had the means to buy a
relatively large concern like the Queen’s Hotel in Ennis by 1885. Based on biographical
speculation, Peter Costello suggests that these fictional facts may have been inspired by the
Page 8 of 46
story of Joyce’s maternal grandfather’s second wife’s father, William O’Donohoe, a hotel owner
who committed suicide,25 but there is simply no evidence for that connection to the stories of
Rudolph Virag Bloom. The documentary evidence is more convincing. As I discovered in 2010,
the Saturday, 6 October 1917 issue of the Weekly Irish Times contains the following notice:
Isaac Marshall, proprietor of Queen’s Hotel, Ennis, committed suicide during Monday
forenoon. He had been missed in the house, and the body was found in the coach-house
suspended from a beam. He was quite dead. At the inquest Mrs Marshall said that she
never knew him to be strange, and he had nothing to trouble him. A verdict (p.74) of
suicide during temporary insanity was returned. Mr Marshall was a native of Yorkshire,
who was married to a Clare lady, and he purchased the hotel lately.26
More often than not, Joyce gathered information for his work from the books and newspapers he
was reading and this source text provides a more definite foundation to account for these
particular facts about Rudolph Virag Bloom’s fictional life and death. While in Switzerland, Joyce
must have read this notice in the newspaper (or some other source that reported the same facts
of the fatality) and later transferred it into his working notes. Under the heading ‘Jews’ in the
‘Subject’ Notebook (one of the earliest extant notebooks for Ulysses), Joyce wrote: ‘Isaac
Marshall, m. [married] Yorkshire lady, bought Queen’s Hotel, Ennis, hanged himself from beam
in coachhouse’.27 He later crossed through most of the note in blue crayon, and ‘Queen’s Hotel
Ennis’ in orange, presumably after he had made use of these notes in one (or more) of his drafts.
In this case, Joyce’s fidelity to the historical connection in his source material about a suicide in
the Queen’s Hotel prevailed over the fictional implausibility that a relatively impecunious recent
immigrant to Ireland could have acquired such an establishment. By connecting the Bloom
family to County Clare primarily because of the source material, Isaac Marshall’s death
established a fundamental narrative and somewhat surprising geographical matrix in Ulysses.
Without this further paratextual source information, the book does not provide sufficient
information to explain these fictional biographical facts in a convincing way.
This is an exemplary instance of Joyce’s reliance on historical detail as the foundation of his
fiction. Here, the reported facts of the occupation, marriage, and death of an actual person
(whom Joyce, presumably, did not know) became the basis for the fictional life of one of his
characters, but Joyce then also moulded these facts to suit his artistic ends. He noted the fact
that a man with a seemingly Jewish name had bought an Irish establishment in Ennis, County
Clare, and that he committed suicide by hanging. On the one hand, Joyce’s note elides the fact
that the real Isaac Marshall was an English emigrant, which creates an odd parallel with
Rudolph Bloom’s peregrination from Hungary to Ireland. On the other hand, in the historical
account, the wife was Irish, whereas she is a ‘Yorkshire lady’ in Joyce’s note. Then, when Joyce
used the note to write Ulysses, he also altered the mode of the suicide for reasons that are not
entirely clear at present, but further research may elucidate the transformation of this aspect of
the story. What is equally compelling is that this note indicates that Joyce had decided to
attribute these same historical facts to the fictional life and death of Rudolph Virag Bloom by the
end of 1917 at the very latest. In other words, Joyce had more clearly determined the
coordinates of the father’s life and death in Ireland four years before he had worked out the
place and other various circumstances of his birth and early life in Hungary.28
(p.75) Rudolph Virag Bloom’s conversion and new name
Page 9 of 46
6. ‘Hades’:
March–May 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, f. 38
Late August–2 September 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl 12.i
February-March 1919 Serial Publication Little Review, V.10-11, p. 59
January–February 1919 Composite Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 40
12. ‘Cyclops’:
Early October 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl 37.ii
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, p. [4v]
August–Late October Faircopy for Rosenbach Green MS II, pp. [16v]–17 &
1921 Typescript Rosenbach Blue MS III, p. 20
Late–30 January 1922 Third Proof Level Texas PP 42.1
18. ‘Penelope’:
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl C.iii.a
Late–31 January 1922 Fifth Proof Level Texas PP 45.1
We only know a bit more about Leopold Bloom’s father. For example, there are the fictional
facts of his religious conversion from Judaism to Protestantism, which Joyce only added to the
stories of Ulysses after March 1921. They make their first appearance on the manuscripts of
‘Ithaca’, but then Joyce also added a further reference to them on the first proof level of
‘Lestrygonians’, about four months before Ulysses was published. This storyline is typical of one
of the ways Joyce wrote. He would develop an idea in a later episode as he continued to shape
and amplify the work, and then would return to add a foreshadowing of the fact or theme in the
late stages of revising an earlier episode. In this case, the original context of the information
about the father’s conversion was part of a long question-and-answer text block in ‘Ithaca’ that
asks: ‘Prove that he [Bloom] had loved rectitude in his earliest youth’. According to the account
in Ulysses, while in high school, in 1880 Bloom admitted to Percy Apjohn his ‘disbelief in the
tenets of the (p.76) Irish (protestant) church’, which was ‘subsequently abjured by him’ (see U
669.03–7; U-G 17.1636–40).
None of the various stories about the Blooms’ several conversions was on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-
draft. The fictional facts about Leopold’s religious convictions simply appear on the episode’s
subsequent Rosenbach manuscript (probably having been first written on a now lost document).
A short time later, as he further revised its Rosenbach manuscript in the early summer of 1921,
Page 10 of 46
Joyce first established the story about the father’s conversion to Protestantism with the
following addition:
disbelief in the tenets of the Irish (protestant) church ^(to which his father Rudolf Virag
(later Rudolph Bloom) had been converted from the Israelitish faith and communion in
1865 by the Society for promoting Christianity among the jews)^ […].29
Clearly, Rudolph Virag was converted the same year he arrived in Ireland, the same year he
married, and just one year before Leopold was born. But, more importantly, the Society’s active
role in Rudolph’s conversion is significant in the telling of the story. In fact, the textual record
confirms that it was this prior reference to it here in ‘Ithaca’, episode 17, that prompted Joyce to
subsequently add further facts about his father’s association with this particular Society in
‘Lestrygonians’, episode 8. As it appeared in the Little Review,30 the scene when Bloom passes
the Society’s premises at 45 Molesworth Street on his way to the National Museum after his
light lunch at Davy Byrne’s reads: ‘They say they used to give pauper children soup to change to
protestants. Why we left the church of Rome’ (U-G 8.1071–4; see U 172.13–16). Then, to enhance
and balance the further information about Rudolph Virag Bloom’s conversion that Joyce had only
recently added in ‘Ithaca’, at about the same time he also added the following lines on the first
proof level of ‘Lestrygonians’: ‘[…] protestants în the time of the potato blight. Society over the
way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same bait.^ Why we left the church of
Rome’ (U-G 8.1072–4; see U 172.14–16).31
Correspondingly, the fact that Rudolph Virag had changed his name to Bloom by deed poll is
first mentioned as one of the men’s many scurrilous remarks in Barney Kiernan’s pub in
‘Cyclops’. Martin Cunningham, who otherwise seems to be well disposed towards Bloom in
Ulysses, describes him as ‘a perverted jew […] from a place in Hungary and it was he drew up
the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that in the castle’ (U 323.09–11; U-G
12.1635–7). Jack Power then asks: ‘Isn’t he a cousin of Bloom the dentist?’ (U 323.12; U-G
12.1638),32 and so to resolve the confusion, Cunningham tells the other men: (p.77)
— Not at all, says Martin. Ônly namesakes.^ His name was Virag. The father’s name that
poisoned himself. He changed it by deedpoll, the father did.
(U 323.13–14; see U-G 12.1639–41)33
The scene was unchanged from the Rosenbach ‘Cyclops’ manuscript in mid-1919 until Joyce
made this addition on its second proof level over two years later. The Bloom family’s change of
name is also referred to in ‘Circe’ (U 432.17; U-G 15.740–1), but we only find the physical proof
of the deed poll from the press clipping notice in the second drawer of Bloom’s desk in
‘Ithaca’ (U 675.18–19; U-G 17.1866–7). The copious drawer also already contained other
mementos of Bloom’s early life, including his birth certificate that names him as ‘Leopold Paula
Bloom’ (U 675.07; U-G 17.1855), as well as the suicide ‘letter addressed in large handwriting To
My Dear Son Leopold’ that troubles him all day (see U 675.32; U-G 17.1881), which I will return
to later. There we also find the ‘hagadah book where a pair of horn spectacles folded still
showed the prayers for seder night’ and ‘a photo card of Ennis’ (see U 675.29–32; U-G 17.1878–
80). Joyce added both items to the drawer in the left margin of the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft.34 He
Page 11 of 46
probably first worked out the idea of the notice with this fragmentary note: ‘Notice of change of
Name. I, R.V. [Rudolph Virag] now reside, formerly of hereby give notice that I have assumed
and intend henceforth upon all occasions & at all times’,35 which he added on the proto-draft
that he was writing in the summer of 1921, but then he elaborated it much more fully on the
episode’s subsequent Rosenbach manuscript.36
In fact, Joyce worked out most of Bloom’s relatively few (and notably all sad) memories of his
father on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft. Variously altered, revised, and much expanded, Bloom’s
reminiscences of his father became part of the several related question-and-answer text blocks
at U 676.07–677.13 (U-G 17.1856–1926). The recent discovery of the episode’s proto-draft
enables us to further distinguish when Joyce conceived and incorporated the various elements of
Bloom’s memories. For example, after the mention of the suicide letter, the next question-and-
answer block on this page was probably inspired by another note Joyce gathered from his
storehouse: ‘LB reproaches self re [regarding] RB’.37 This is an earlier and very rudimentary
version of the question of whether Bloom felt any ‘remorse’ for his attitude towards the ‘beliefs
and practices’ of the ‘old man […] when drugs had begun their work resorted to against
neuralgia’. But yet the more optimistic answer that appears in the proto-draft is not available to
readers of Ulysses: ‘No, he suspected that there were one or two secrets on the otherside which
would be told him triumphantly in the years time to come […]’ (see U 676.07–24; U-G 17.1887–
1904).38 This sentimental (and even transcendent) expression of Bloom’s faith and doubts
enriches our understanding of Bloom’s (p.78) relationship with his father, and reveals a more
spiritual side to Bloom that is mostly elided from Ulysses.39
At least two representative items of the family’s stories are clearly absent from the version on
the proto-draft: an old photograph and the suicide note. Among the many other varied objects
that clutter ‘Ithaca’, these missing mementos have distinctive personal and familial value for
Leopold Bloom. The first is the ‘indistinct daguerrotype of Rudolph Virag and his father Leopold
Virag executed in the year 1852 in the portrait atelier of their (respectively) 1st and 2nd cousin,
Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar, Hungary’ (U 675.27–9; see U-G 17.1875–6).40 This very specific
account of the photograph first appears in ‘Ithaca’ on the Rosenbach manuscript by the end of
October 1921, probably several months after Joyce had already put it in the drawer on the proto-
draft (see U 675.25–33; U-G 17.1873–81).41
In contrast to the example of the story of the father’s conversion I discussed earlier, in this case
Joyce had already written about the Virags’ photographic studio in ‘Lestrygonians’ before he
added this reprise later in ‘Ithaca’. In the midst of his tender memories about Milly’s childhood
when he too was ‘happier’, Bloom thinks, ‘Now photography. Poor papa’s daguerrotype atelier
he told me of. Hereditary taste’ (U 148.30–1; see U-G 8.173–4). Joyce added this to
‘Lestrygonians’ on the episode’s second proof level,42 a month and a half before he wrote about
the inherited disposition in ‘Ithaca’. Joyce also has Molly echo the idea that Bloom had sent Milly
to work in the photographer’s shop in Mullingar ‘on account of his grandfather’; this was
something Joyce added to the third proof level of ‘Penelope’ in November 1921 (U 716.28; U-G
18.1005).43 Typical of the ways in which writers work generally, together these are
representative examples of the often slow and meticulous ways in which Joyce tended to pepper
Page 12 of 46
Ulysses with new facts or ideas in a short period of time, thereby establishing the sense of an
overarching coherence to the stories told in the book.
The other significant part of the family history that was missing from the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft is
the words of the father’s suicide note. Joyce only added this question-and-answer text block on
the episode’s third and final proof level,44 just a week (or two at most) before Ulysses was
published. Although the suicide note is first mentioned in ‘Lotus Eaters’, it is only in ‘Ithaca’ that
Bloom finds the ‘envelope addressed: To My Dear Son Leopold’ (U 675.32–3; U-G 17.1881). The
narrator then asks: (p.79)
What fractions of phrases did the lecture of those four whole words evoke?
Tomorrow will be a week that I received… it is no use Leopold to be… with your dear
mother… that is not more to stand… to her… all for me is out… be kind to Athos,
Leopold… my dear son… always… of me… das Herz… Gott… dein…
(U 676.01–6; see U-G 17.1882–6)45
This transformation of the story of the father’s death completely alters our understanding of the
specific reasons that motivated Rudolph Bloom to take his own life. Until then, the stories in
Ulysses would probably have suggested that more mundane events, such as the old man’s
growing infirmity and money worries, had prompted this desperate act. But this newly added
version of the suicide note is the first indication that the father had committed suicide from the
sorrow brought about by the loss of his beloved wife. The fragmentary context here is
fundamentally ambiguous, just as it is in the almost identical note that inspired it.46 The note
itself provides no verifiable context for whatever Rudolph Virag may have received the week
before he died. This too may have been a vague idea Joyce had stored away for years, but it was
only at this very late stage that he found an opportunity to incorporate it in the fabric of stories
—and by doing so he greatly intensified the emotive texture of Ulysses.
The way in which Joyce changed the framework of this narrative not only has a direct impact on
this specific storyline, but also on our thematic and symbolic understanding of Ulysses more
generally. Although decades of readers and critics have tended to directly link this earlier family
tragedy with the sorrow Leopold and Molly feel for the loss of their only son, Joyce in fact only
developed the ground for this possible connection between the stories as he rushed to get the
book published. By creating a more ample web of associations between what were separate
stories, Joyce further established an intratextual connection that substantially enriches the
intersubjective bonds within the Bloom family, as well as the affective resonance of Ulysses more
generally. A genetic reading of this kind of story explores how Joyce correspondingly
constructed the textual and fictional subjective spheres of Ulysses as well as the rhetoric of
intersubjectivity in the book. Thus, we can better delineate and comprehend the various ways in
which these related discursive spheres operate contrapuntally in the text.
It is quite probable that Joyce only gradually (and at a quite late stage) settled on the premise
that it was his wife’s death that drove Rudolph Bloom to commit suicide. There is an oblique
reference to this possibility (if that is what it is) that some readers may miss in ‘Hades’. When
Page 13 of 46
Bloom is about to leave Glasnevin cemetery, he recalls: ‘Last time I was here was Mrs Sinico’s
funeral’ (U 110.22–3; U-G 6.996–7).47 This fact was already on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript that (p.80) Joyce wrote in mid-1917.48 But then, in August 1921, as part of a longer
addition on the first proof level, Joyce inserted a reference to Bloom’s father: ‘Last time I was
here was Mrs Sinico’s funeral. ^Poor Papa too. The love that kills. […]^’ (U 110.23–4; U-G
6.996–7).49 This is quite an ambiguous chain of associations. Certainly, Mrs Sinico’s funeral
could have reminded Bloom of his father’s death, but the idea that he could possibly have known
that Emily Sinico’s lovelorn state was the cause of her death, as the short story suggests, and
then associated it with the heartbreak that impelled his father to commit suicide seems far-
fetched, even for the ways in which the related networks of meaning in Joyce’s works operate.
Regardless, this is another clear example of how Joyce is pushing the limits of textual
consciousness in Ulysses.
Nonetheless, Joyce made the facts of the suicide explicit during a final moment of revision,
literally two days before Ulysses appeared, by adding ‘his father must have been a bit queer to
go and poison himself after her still poor old man I suppose he felt lost’ to Molly’s thoughts in
‘Penelope’ on the episode’s (and the book’s) final proof level (U 718.07–9; U-G 18.1061–2).50
There are many interesting reasons why Joyce may have wanted Molly to comment on her
father-in-law’s suicide, and why he may have wanted to have this information only appear in the
last episode of the book, but practically speaking this was also the only place left where he could
still fit in such a direct statement of the matter as the production of Ulysses finally neared its
end. Luckily, Joyce also managed to find just the right place to embed this new fictional fact in
Molly’s rambling thoughts. Although he only gradually built up Molly’s reminiscences about Sir
John Martin Harvey’s production of The Only Way on the episode’s earlier manuscripts, her
thoughts about how its principal character gives up his life to save his lover’s husband is a
fitting context in which to include her reflections on why her husband’s father had killed himself.
Mrs Ellen Higgins Bloom
15. ‘Circe’:
Late Spring 1920 Earlier Draft Buffalo MS 19, p. [3v]
July–December 1920 Intermediary Draft NLI MS 12, p. [3v]
17. ‘Ithaca’:
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Green MS I, p. 1
Except for a few other brief mentions elsewhere in Ulysses, and his ghostly appearance in
‘Circe’, this is all we ever learn about Rudolph Virag Bloom. But if we (p.81) know relatively
little about Bloom’s father, the information about his mother is even scantier. Bloom is not a
typical Irishman (at least in terms of their literary representations) in at least one obvious way.
Unlike Stephen Dedalus, quite specifically, Leopold rarely thinks of his mother or her death,
though when he does it is with genuine sadness. A likely explanation for Bloom’s seeming
disregard towards his mother could simply be that she only assumed her role in Ulysses (and so
in Bloom’s thoughts about her) at a late stage in Joyce’s elaboration of the narrative. Thinking of
his own graveplot in ‘Hades’, Bloom recalls that his ‘poor mamma’ is also buried in Glasnevin
Page 14 of 46
beside her grandson, Rudy Bloom (U 107.06–7; U-G 6.863).51 As far as we know, Joyce only
assigned Bloom’s mother a specific name—‘Ellen Bloom’—in 1920 as an addition on the recently
discovered ‘Circe’ intermediary draft that he wrote shortly after he arrived in Paris (U
417.15; U-G 15.282).52
But the most detailed and informative description of Bloom’s mother first appears on the
Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ manuscript where we read about ‘Ellen Higgins, second daughter of Julius
Higgins (born Karoly) and Fanny Higgins (born Hegarty)’ (U 634.28–9; U-G 17.536–7).53 In this
version of her life-story, Joyce initially names her ‘Margaret’ (either mistakenly or
inadvertently), but he subsequently changed her name back to Ellen to match what he had
already written in ‘Circe’ as well as elsewhere in ‘Ithaca’ (U 673.21; U-G 17.1795). Furthermore,
it is only as an addition on the Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ manuscript that Joyce first assigned her a
maiden name: Higgins. We also discover that Bloom had an aunt, Ellen’s older sister, about
whom we know nothing else in Ulysses. Furthermore, Bloom’s maternal grandfather was born
Julius Karoly (only later Higgins). He was presumably a Hungarian Jew who, like Rudolph Virag,
changed his name and religion in exile. Finally, we also find out that Bloom’s maternal
grandmother was a Hegarty, named Fanny no less. There are no extant note sources for any of
these facts, and all these details simply appear, just as they are in Ulysses, on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript by the end of October 1921. Gathering all the information that is
provided in Ulysses, we can say that Bloom could not be technically Jewish since both his mother
and grandmother were surely Irish and presumably Catholic.54 Bloom explicitly tells Stephen
Dedalus how he understands his religious status in ‘Eumaeus’. Recounting his misadventure
with the Citizen in ‘Cyclops’ he says: ‘He called me a jew, and in a heated fashion, offensively.
So I, without deviating from plain facts in the least, told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew
too, and all his family, like me, though in reality I’m not. That was one for him’ (emphasis
added; U 597.24–7; see U-G 16.1082–5).
(p.82) The main detail about Ellen Higgins Bloom that remained in flux is the date of her death.
Already by 1918 Joyce had decided that she would have passed away before 16 June 1904. But
as late as 1921 in his notional chronology of some of the events in Ulysses, he considered having
her death occur in 1890;55 that is, about two years after Leopold and Molly had married. Joyce,
however, never put this idea into practice. As we saw in the discussion of Rudolph Bloom’s
suicide, it was only at the start of 1922, just a month before Ulysses appeared, that Joyce settled
on the day, month, and year of Ellen Bloom’s death. On 21 June 1886 Ellen Higgins Bloom died
of an unknown illness in Dublin. Since her husband was unable to return to Dublin, her son must
have seen to the funeral arrangements, just as he would have to do yet again just a week later in
Ennis for his father’s. This must have been a truly tragic month in the young Leopold Bloom’s
life, though Joyce does not explore this facet of his fictional biography in Ulysses. Although I
have shown the textual and thematic reasons why Joyce was more concerned with the later lives
and deaths of Bloom’s parents, there simply is no further information about when either
Rudolph Virag or Ellen Higgins Bloom were born, and so their ages when they died. One could
argue that, whereas parents give their child life in the real world, it is their death in the
narrative that gives a character life in a novel.
A Sketch of Leopold as a Young Man

Leopold’s birthdate and baptism
Page 15 of 46
January 1919 Serial Publication Little Review, V.9, p. 31
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, p. [4r]
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Rosenbach Green MS I, p. 1
Typescript
29 December 1921–Early January Second Proof Level Harvard Pl III-9.ii & Harvard Pl
1922 III-10.ii
Believe it or not, we actually know very little about Leopold Bloom as a young man, but as I
show here, the reason for this can be traced to how Joyce wrote Ulysses. The most glaring
omission in the story of his life is his date of birth. While we find out that Leopold was certainly
born in 1866,56 it may be surprising to realize that we are never told on what precise day or
month this momentous event (p.83) took place. There is in fact no straightforward evidence
about when it is supposed to have taken place on any extant manuscript or note. It is unlikely
that Joyce did not at some point ponder this question, so one would expect there to be some
reference to it somewhere, unless not revealing this fact in Ulysses is precisely the point. From
this perspective, in ‘Ithaca’ we read that the great event was signalled by ‘a star (2nd
magnitude) of similar origin but of lesser brilliancy which had appeared in and disappeared from
the constellation of the Corona Septentrionalis about the period of the birth of Leopold
Bloom’ (U 653.22–5; U-G 17.1123–6). Joyce only added the question and answer as a whole on a
(now missing) page of episode’s first typescript, and continued to amplify and revise it on its
subsequent typescripts and proofs. The context for the inclusion of this fact in ‘Ithaca’ is
obviously the narrator’s more general interest in astral phenomena in this episode. However,
there was already a textual precedent for making such connections. Stephen weaves a theory
about the appearance of a nova in the stellar constellation of Cassiopeia and the birth of William
Shakespeare (U 201.23–6; U-G 9.928–31) in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, and Joyce found an
opportunity to repeat this ‘fact’ in ‘Ithaca’ when he first wrote about
the appearance of a star (1st magnitude) of exceeding brilliancy dominating by night and
day (a new luminous sun generated by the collision and amalgamation in incandescence of
two nonluminous exsuns) about the period of the birth of William Shakespeare over delta
in the recumbent neversetting constellation of Cassiopeia
(U 653.18–22; U-G 17.1119–23)
While this is a clear example of the way in which Joyce recycled motifs from earlier episodes in
later ones, what is more pertinent to the argument here is that Joyce only added the
corresponding connection between the appearance of another nova and Bloom’s birth on the
episode’s second proof level. The irony of the correlation between stars signalling the birth of
the great writer and that of Leopold Bloom was evident from the start, but Joyce continued to
specifically undermine the special status of the later sign in the rest of the addition:
Page 16 of 46
and of other stars of (presumably) similar origin which had (effectively or presumably)
appeared in and disappeared from the constellation of Andromeda about the period of the
birth of Stephen Dedalus, and in and from the constellation of Auriga some years after the
birth and death of Rudolph Bloom, junior, and in and from other constellations some years
before or after the birth or death of other persons
(U 653.25–30; U-G 17.1126–32)57
Still, the nova T Coronae Borealis did in fact appear in Corona Septentrionalis on 12 May 1886
and faded quickly, though these general facts do little to help us date exactly when Bloom was
born. I suppose this stellar event could support Peter Costello’s more speculative claim that
Bloom was born ‘at six in the morning of 6 May 1866’,58 but such extreme precision seems more
indicative of the semi-factual irony that pervades ‘Ithaca’ rather than anything else. Both
Costello and Raleigh presume that Bloom’s birthday was meant to coincide with the date of the
(p.84) Phoenix Park murders on 6 May 1882,59 though that is a symbolic connection that
cannot be established by the text. If Joyce expected that the information about this astral sign
would help readers deduce Bloom’s exact birthdate, he only added this cosmological marker and
symbol just about a month before Ulysses was published.60 It is worth repeating that until that
very late stage there was no reference to even the month when Leopold was born, and the day of
his birth remains a mystery.
In contrast, for what it is worth, we are explicitly told the exact date when Molly Tweedy was
born: 8 September 1870.61 Since we know so much else about Bloom, it is certainly odd that this
most basic of all facts about his life will simply remain unaccounted for in Ulysses. The
undocumented beginning of Bloom’s life in the text brings into sharp focus fundamental
questions concerning an author’s intentions and the reader’s expectations about characters and
narratives, especially in modernist or post-modernist fiction. What facts or other information
about them should be considered thematically or structurally necessary for the text to convey
and the reader to know? Besides Ulysses, works like Tristram Shandy and Midnight’s Children,62
for example, have also challenged the narrative tradition that invests such critical importance in
the moment of birth of its characters. These works refuse to privilege such supposedly originary
narrative events and resist providing a framework of purported historical precision about the
birth of its principal fictional character, thereby specifically calling attention to the writer’s
primary generative function in art and, correspondingly, to the artifice of applying such
anthropomorphic principles to fictional characters. Although this is a highly suggestive issue
with this pivotal modernist text, for better and for worse, we may never be able to determine if
this narrative lapse (whether deliberate or not) is meaningful to our understanding of Leopold
Bloom and of Ulysses.
The few stories there are about Bloom’s childhood are scattered throughout Ulysses, but they
tend to be grouped together in just a few episodes—‘Lotus Eaters’, ‘Lestrygonians’, ‘Circe’, and
‘Ithaca’—and certain particular themes in his life are emphasized in each of those episodes that
are most often determined by their stylistic structures. In general, Joyce added almost all of the
information about the young Leopold Bloom quite late. For example, he only wrote all the details
we are ever given about Leopold’s earliest schooldays in 1921. His belated interest in this aspect
of the tales told in Ulysses suggests that Joyce was purposely enhancing the (p.85) account of
Page 17 of 46
Leopold’s boyhood in the year before Ulysses was published to balance the much richer and
more extensive discussion of Molly’s youth that he was also constructing in ‘Penelope’ more or
less at the same time.
The earliest event in Leopold’s life in Ulysses about which we know anything at all is his baptism
in ‘the protestant church of Saint Nicholas Without, Coombe’ (U 635.04; U-G 17.543). For over
five hundred years, the church was housed in the north transept of St Patrick’s Cathedral, and
so was nearby the Bloom family home at 52 Clanbrassil Street.63 According to Ulysses, this basic
sacrament in the young man’s religious life was performed by a certain ‘reverend Mr Gilmer
Johnston M. A.’ (U 635.03; U-G 17.542). Even though Joyce may have been mistaken about the
clergyman’s first name (or simply not known or else invented it), Vivien Igoe has discovered that
a Reverend Albert Edward Johnston was indeed curate of this church in 1887–8.64 Even this
inexact detail in Ulysses shows that Joyce must have at least tried to ascertain the correct facts
to fill in the historical context for his fiction.
Although we do not know precisely when Joyce conceived the story of Leopold’s baptism, it
appears well established on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft.65 There the question was put more simply:
‘Was he baptised’. There was no question mark here, and Stephen was not part of the narrator’s
equation at this stage. Furthermore, the answer in this version was also different from the
account we get in Ulysses in number, location, and tone:
Twice. First, in church. Second, under pump at Santry by some schoolfellow in ^friendly^
jest at his former religion. In both cases the water being poured at the same time as the
words were spoken.
(see U 540.01–8; U-G 17.540–7)66
Though the tenor of the story is probably meant to be humorous in this earlier version, the
primary emphasis here is more obviously on the bullying maltreatment that Leopold receives
from his ‘friend’ at school because of his familial and cultural heritage. In later versions (and
then in Ulysses), Joyce clearly diminished the more mocking tone of this scene. He also
specifically elided its overtly racist undercurrent. Possibly for stylistic reasons, in Ulysses the
‘second’ baptism is simply represented as a decontextualized childhood prank, thereby lessening
the more obviously bigoted implications that are evident on the proto-draft version.
Joyce also added and altered many of the more concrete aspects of the story of Leopold’s various
baptisms that we know from Ulysses on later manuscripts, but as is so often the case he did so in
a complex manner. For example, although he did not make any attempt to locate where the
‘first’ baptism took place on the proto-draft, the reverend is specifically named on the later
manuscript.67 On the (p.86) other hand, Joyce only identified the church where it took place as
he revised the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript,68 where it is named in one of several additions
in the left margin of the page. Therefore, to provide the curate with a partially historically
accurate name, Joyce must have already settled on where Bloom’s baptism took place before he
wrote the later manuscript, but he chose not to include that particular fact at that stage.
Similarly, the generic ‘some schoolfellow’ of the proto-draft also became the several, more
Page 18 of 46
specific ‘James O’Connor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick’ (U 635.04–5; U-G 17.543) on the
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.69
Similarly, where the dunking happened was something else Joyce added in the margin of the
Rosenbach manuscript, but when he did so he relocated the traumatic event even further out of
the city centre. Joyce moved the incident from the village pump in Santry on the proto-draft to
the one in Swords by the time it next appears in the text, and that is where we know the story
takes place in Ulysses.70 It could simply be that Joyce decided to omit the places where both
‘baptisms’ happen in the later version, but having specified the name of the church in one
addition, he decided to further balance the text by also specifying the place of the ‘second
baptism’ as well. Thereby, he clearly transferred the setting of the scene without any marked
disruption to the narrative integrity of the work, even though the world of Ulysses has been
topographically altered. One of the major claims made about Joyce’s aesthetic revolves around
the writer’s supposed commitment to the specific locations where events happen in Ulysses, but
here we have one of the many examples of the fluidity of place that is inherent in the fictional
spatial reality of the text before it becomes the book.
Furthermore, whereas two of the young lads, James O’Connor and James Fitzpatrick, are
otherwise unknown in Ulysses (as well as in the drafts and notebooks), Philip Gilligan was
already part of the stories of Ulysses since 1918. Long before he is incriminated in the malicious
baptismal prank in Swords, Bloom thinks of this schoolmate along with other friends in
‘Lestrygonians’ as he tries to puzzle out when various events in his life took place. Readers of
the episode in the Little Review learned that someone Bloom knew, named ‘Phil Gilligan’, died in
1894, the year of the ‘big fire at Arnott’s’ (see U 148.14–17; U-G 8.156–9).71 That is all readers
could have known about this character before Joyce wrote and revised the stories of Bloom’s
youth in ‘Ithaca’ in 1921. Evidently, Joyce already established the year of this particular friend’s
death before any other facet of his life. In fact, it was only three years after Philip Gilligan enters
Ulysses and about six months after (p.87) Joyce implicated this particular friend in Leopold’s
country dunking that we find out how and where he died. The narrator’s listing of those now
‘defunct’ on 17 June 1904 further on in ‘Ithaca’ tersely gives us the final facts in his short life:
‘phthisis, Jervis street hospital’ (U 657.18–19; U-G 17.1253–4).72
Bloom’s unpleasant memory about the prank in Swords is the most significant story related to
Philip Gilligan, but as is so often the case Joyce conceived it separately from any individual
character. He only subsequently anchored it to the name of a character with some (quite minor)
semblance of reality in the world of Ulysses. This is one of many examples that I discuss in other
chapters of the way in which, in general, the stories Joyce wrote for the book take precedence
over the fictional characters (that is, the representation of the fictional structures of individual
subjectivities) that participate in the stories. While so much remains fluid in the evolution of the
narrative, in this case we have an instance that demonstrates one of the ways in which Joyce
worked to connect and enhance the variously distinct stories around a relatively small cast of
characters. By doing this, he thereby provides Ulysses with the sense of narrative unity and
coherence as well as a depth of character that many readers tend to think is fundamental to the
work.
Page 19 of 46
Finally, the unlikely and erroneous idea that Leopold also needed to be re-baptised in the
Catholic Church to marry Molly also first appears on the Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ manuscript.73 For
whatever reason, Joyce decided that it would be an interesting trick of fate to have both Stephen
and Leopold baptised by the same Reverend Charles Malone, who was in fact the curate at the
Church of the Three Patrons in Rathgar from 1876 (U 635.06–8; U-G 17.545–7).74 If Joyce was
trying to strengthen the sense of symmetry in this question and answer by naming all the
various places where Bloom was baptised, then the place where it happened was most likely the
guiding reason for including this supposed other baptism, rather than any purported
sacramental requirement.
In all of these various attempts to specify where these stories took place, Joyce was trying to
sustain a sense of realistic narrative coherence and therefore encourage the readers’ willingness
to suspend their disbelief in the fictionality of Ulysses. At the same time, the purported unity and
realistic verisimilitude of this work of art also encourage readers to investigate both the
integrity and the distinct gaps in the historical record, as well as in the textual fabric of the
novel. Rather than demonstrating Joyce’s overall commitment to a realistic representation of
historical possibility in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Dublin, this further critical reading reveals
the fundamental artifice of the work. As the creative processes of writing and reading that are
the foundations of the narrative become more evident, they are also revealed to be that much
more complex.
(p.88) Leopold’s schooldays
July 1918 Serial Publication Little Review, V.3, pp. 38 and 42
Mid–28 June 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl 8.i
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
November 1919–January 1920 Draft Cornell MS 56A, p. 27
February–March 1920 Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 11.a, p. [19r]
25 October–Early November 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl 41.ii
23–25 November 1921 Fifth Proof Level Texas PP 23.3
14. ‘Oxen of the Sun’:
February–March 1920 Earlier Draft NLI MS 11A, p. [5r]
15. ‘Circe’:
December 1920–January 1921 Mixed Faircopy Rosenbach MS, f. 54
17. ‘Ithaca’:
March–August Proto-draft NLI MS 13, pp. [3r], [4r], [7r], [10r], and [11r]
1921
Page 20 of 46
17. ‘Ithaca’:
August–Late Faircopy for Rosenbach Blue MS I, pp. [1v] and 6–9 & Rosenbach
October 1921 Typescript Green MS I, p. 1 & Rosenbach Blue MS II, p. 16 &
Rosenbach Green MS II, p. 15
October 1921 First Typescript Buffalo TS 15.c, pp. [4r], [45v], [92r], and [118v]
for Ulysses
Mid–Late First Proof Harvard Pl III-9.i
December 1921 Level
29 December Second Proof Harvard Pl III-8.ii & Harvard Pl III-9.ii & Harvard Pl
1921–Early Level III-10.ii
January 1922
Like so much of what is presented in Ulysses, readers are only provided with disconnected,
brief, and fragmentary bits of information about Leopold Bloom’s life as a young man. From
these scattered clues, readers are encouraged to piece together a coherent narrative history
about this and other characters in the book. As I demonstrate throughout, this process in fact
mirrors Joyce’s process of constructing the stories about his characters as well. Although it does
not necessarily need to be so, the ways in which Joyce conceived and wrote his work leave their
mark on the ways in which it is read. Therefore, this study sets out to correlate the material and
temporal dimensions of both the interrelated processes of writing and reading. For (p.89)
example, when we read Ulysses in a linear manner, the first information we come across about
the young Leopold Bloom is when he recalls a relatively late-adolescent memory of his days in
high school in ‘Lotus Eaters’ (U 69.13–14; U-G 5.42–3). I will return to this story later.
Conversely, the reader only encounters the story of Bloom’s earliest childhood recollection
towards the end of Ulysses, twelve episodes later in ‘Ithaca’, and that memory serves to connect
him with his Hungarian origins. It is the moving scene where, ‘aged 6’, Leopold recalls his father
tracing out his continental travels for him: ‘Rudolph Bloom (deceased) narrated to his son
Leopold Bloom (aged 6) a retrospective arrangement of migrations and settlements in and
between Dublin, London, Florence, Milan, Vienna, Budapest, Szombathely’ (U 676.26–8; U-G
17.1906–8).75 As I discuss in the section on Rudolph Virag, this reversed geographical and
cognitive map of Leopold’s origins is one of the few intimate memories Bloom has of his father.
Nonetheless, Joyce only fixed this story at a specific moment in the narrative time of Bloom’s life
—1872—in the summer of 1921, therefore at a relatively late stage in the development of
Ulysses. Similarly, from a chronological perspective, the next story we read about Bloom’s
childhood was added even later on the episode’s typescript.76 It describes the ‘sporadic’ though
enduring interest in the question Bloom presumably first asked himself in 1874 (aged 8).
Echoing the popular song, he is known to have asked himself: ‘Where was Moses when the
candle went out?’ (U 681.19–22; U-G 17.2067–70). This story in Ulysses probably had more to do
with Joyce’s interest in including a reference to that particular song than it does with when it is
supposed to have occurred in Leopold’s boyhood. Nonetheless, by providing some sort of precise
date, Joyce creates a sense of reality for the young man’s early life. Tangential as these stories
are, this is virtually all that we find out about his home life before he goes off to school.
The first we read of Leopold out in the world on his own is in ‘Lotus Eaters’ when he recalls the
days he spent at Mrs Ellis’s Dame School (U 74.17–25; U-G 5.231–7). On Bloomsday, shortly
after getting rid of M’Coy, Bloom turns down Cumberland Street to find a safe place to read
Page 21 of 46
Martha Clifford’s letter. In the Little Review version of this scene, Bloom simply reflects on the
‘Ruins and tenements’ at the back of Meade’s Westmoreland Street timber yard and then just
opens her letter.77 But, as Joyce revised the episode’s (now missing) typescript for Ulysses
three years later, he made several additions to this scene, two of which were specifically related.
These additions establish a general context about children’s games in which Joyce inserts
Bloom’s memory about his own youth. This new storyline was not intrinsic to the earlier version
of the scene. In the new scene, all of a sudden there is much more going on in this secluded
spot. The narrator describes how Bloom steps over a hopscotch-court, ‘With careful tread’ and,
happy with himself, he (p.90) thinks, ‘Not a sinner’. Then, as Joyce revised the episode’s
typescript for Ulysses, he simply included ‘a squatted child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw
with a cunnythumb’ in the scene (see U 74.19; U-G 5.231). Seeing this youngster at play triggers
an evanescent reminiscence about his own childhood: ‘And once I played marbles when I went
to that old dame’s school. She liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis’s.’ (U 74.24–5; U-G 5.236–7).
Although this fleeting memory is the first reference to Bloom’s schooldays readers come across
in Ulysses, Joyce had already written a bit more about them at the other end of the book in
‘Ithaca’. Here too we see how Joyce places echoes in earlier episodes after he had included the
new idea or plan in a later episode. The first time in the genesis of Ulysses that the stories about
Bloom’s early years at school come up is in answer to the straightforward question in ‘Ithaca’:
‘Did they find their educational careers similar?’ (U 635.09–14; U-G 17.548–54). Unlike
Stephen’s more comprehensive education, we find out that Leopold had just attended a ‘dame’s
school’ before going on to high school (U 635.11; U-G 17.550). This specific reference first
appears on the Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ manuscript at about the same time when Joyce was adding
the related reference to Mrs Ellis’s dame school on the typescript for ‘Lotus Eaters’.78
Besides this straightforward fact, there is just one further, quite minor story about Bloom’s
young schooldays in ‘Ithaca’. Joyce wrote it at least several months before all the other
references to those years elsewhere in ‘Ithaca’ and in ‘Lotus Eaters’. Nonetheless, the earliest
version of this more pungent story about Bloom’s memories is merely the first instantiation of
several other, older ideas that were already contained in his notes. Bloom’s life-long curiosity
with the smell of his feet provides the basic context for the first specific reference to where he
went to school.79 As he is getting ready for bed in the early hours of 17 June 1904, Bloom takes
off his pierced sock, picks at his feet, and ‘gently’ peels off a broken piece of his ‘great
toenail’ (see U 664.34–7; U-G 17.1485–91).80 With relish Bloom raises the hyponychium to his
nostrils and is satisfied by its aroma. Then on the episode’s typescript we read:
Why with satisfaction?
Because the odour inhaled corresponded to other odours inhaled of other ungual
fragments, picked and lacerated by Master Bloom, pupil of Mrs ^<Jowett’s> Ellis’s^
juvenile school, patiently each night in the act of brief genuflection and nocturnal prayer
and ambitious meditation.
(see U 665.01–5; U-G 17.1492–6)81
Page 22 of 46
In quite a Proustian fashion, on the episode’s proto-draft Bloom recalls other such scenes
‘fifteen, 20, 30 yrs before, when as a boy’ he knelt to pray before going to (p.91) bed.82 This
scene was also inspired by another seemingly propitious note that Joyce may have conceived
years before: ‘LB’s nail same smell as 20 yrs ago’.83 On the proto-draft version of the scene,
Joyce simply left a blank for the proprietress’s proper name following ‘Miss’.84 On the next
version, it seems Bloom attended a certain ‘Mrs Jowett’s juvenile school’ (emphasis added).85
As I have indicated in the transcription, several months later on the episode’s first typescript,
Joyce changed the schoolmistress’s name from Jowett to Ellis (presumably after he had named
Bloom’s school in ‘Lotus Eaters’). Joyce must have changed the name here after he had
established that Bloom attended Mrs Ellis’s school in the related scene in ‘Lotus Eaters’ in June
in 1921, but why he chose either of these names is not clear, since according to Thom’s
neither a Mrs Jowett nor a Mrs Ellis seems to have actually had a primary school in Dublin
around the time, but that may not have been his point after all. This change was clearly more
about maintaining the internal coherence of Ulysses rather than gesturing towards an historical
Dublin outside of it.
That is all we know about Bloom’s primary school education before he headed off to the quite
real Erasmus High School at 40 Harcourt Street,86 which was just a short walk from his home.
We are never told what year Bloom entered high school, but Joyce was very precise about the
fact that he left it in 1880, when Leopold was fourteen (U 655.24; U-G 17.1195).87 Bloom’s
interest in science is fundamental to the way his character is represented, and so he was quite
lucky to find teachers who encouraged this inclination at high school. In ‘Lotus Eaters’, when
Bloom recalls a picture he once saw of a man floating on his back reading a book with an open
parasol in the Dead Sea, he tries to remember Archimedes’ law.88 All the details of Bloom’s
conundrum just as they appear in Ulysses were already on the earliest version of the episode,
and this is how it appeared in print the first time:
Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of the body in the water is equal to the
weight of the what. Or is it the volume is equal to the weight? It’s a law something like
that. What is weight really when you say the weight?
(see U 69.11–15; U-G 5.39–44)89
But then, Joyce only added the fact that Bloom had been taught this law in high school by his
science master, a certain Mr Vance,90 on the episode’s first proof level, (p.92) about four years
after the contours of the scene were fully established. Based on the available evidence, it
appears that Joyce built up this story about Mr Vance at one go from just three previously
unconnected notes (that I have highlighted in bold font), and these few details did not change at
all in Ulysses. This is typical of one of the ways in which Joyce managed to integrate new but still
fully integrated additions into an already well-established context from his storehouse of notes:
It’s a law something like that. ^Vance in High school cracking his fingerjoints,
teaching. The college curriculum. Cracking curriculum.^ What is weight really when
you say the weight?
(see U 69.13–15; U-G 5.41–4)91
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Joyce took the words in bold from the same page of one of his notebooks,92 but there the odd
habit of ‘cracking finger joints’ was assigned to a certain ‘M’Clusky’, about whom we know
nothing else in Ulysses. Besides the alliteration, we also do not know what inspired Joyce’s
association of this trait with the school’s curriculum, but it is just this kind of transformation of
static, seemingly unconnected notes that exemplifies this aspect of Joyce’s artistry in creating
secondary and tertiary characters in Ulysses.
Although Leopold may not have excelled in high school, in ‘Nausicaa’ we find out that Mr Vance
did manage to teach him something besides a half-remembered law of physics. It seems it was
this same Mr Vance who also taught him the mnemonic acronym for the colours of the spectrum:
roygbiv (that is, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). But this is what Joyce
originally wrote as he added this fact to the episode’s second and fifth proof levels, respectively:
Best time to spray plants too in the shade after the sun. ^Some light still. Red rays are
longest. Roygbiv ^+<Reynolds> Vance+^ taught us: red, orange, yellow, green, blue,
indigo, violet.^
(see U 359.10–13; U-G 13.1074–6)93
Bloom’s musings about sunlight on Sandymount Strand as he looks out at the Bailey lighthouse
on Howth Hill as night approaches seems to have been just the right place to add a flourish
about his scant knowledge of science. Joyce made a round of additions on the second proof level,
but it was only a month later after the text had been set twice more in proofs that he changed
the clever teacher’s name to Vance. Thereby, he consolidated the protagonists in stories about
Bloom’s time in high school and it became the story we know in Ulysses. This is just one of many
examples of Joyce writing a story attributed to some otherwise unknown character, but then
later, when the storyline is more fully established, he simply reassigns it to one of his stock cast
of characters, thereby giving Ulysses a sense of narrative cohesion and integrity. As I show in
subsequent chapters, the (p.93) accumulation of these kinds of instances supports my
contention that in general the stories and the storytelling process in Ulysses are more
fundamental to the narrative structure of the work than the individual identities of the
characters or the parameters of the time and place of the events (either intratextually or in their
reference to historical Dublin).
Bloom’s meandering thoughts in ‘Nausicaa’ about the effects of light and the causes of fire as he
looks out over Howth also help him remember something else he may have learned from Mr
Vance in school. Presumably still perturbed about not having been able to accurately recall the
law that accounts for a body’s buoyancy in water that first came up in ‘Lotus Eaters’, he tries to
remember the story about ‘that wise man what’s his name with the burning glass’ (U 360.35–
361.01; U-G 13.1137–40). Joyce added Bloom’s discovery—‘Archimedes. I have it!’—on the
typescript for Ulysses about six months before he added the line about the light spectrum I
discussed earlier.94 Then, at the same time on the second proof level, he also added
‘Archimedes. I have it! ^My memory’s not so bad.^’ in ‘Nausicaa’ (U 361.02; U-G 13.1142),95
thereby tying up several loose ends. This is a clear example of the way Joyce pointedly worked to
reinforce some newer elements across several episodes in his evolving text, and is also an
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example of how Joyce strove to establish the confluence of personal and textual memory in
Ulysses.
As we also discover in ‘Nausicaa’, while in high school, Bloom also found out about the female
anatomy in the way boys usually do. Thinking about Gerty and other ‘seaside girls’, he recalls:
‘Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school drawing a picture of Venus with all
his belongings on show. Call that innocence? Poor idiot! His wife has her work cut out for
her’ (U 354.35–355.01; U-G 13.909–11). This adolescent memory was already on the ‘Nausicaa’
draft,96 and Joyce never changed it. Although we know nothing else about this Wilkins (even
whether he was the drawing master or just one of Bloom’s fellow students), a real Mr William
Wilkins became the headmaster of Erasmus Smith high school in 1880, just when Bloom was
leaving, which was certainly something Joyce could have known or found out if he had wanted
to.97
Joyce reminded himself to add a story in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ about Leopold’s time in school with
the following direct note: ‘High school’.98 Therefore, in a parody of Charles Lamb’s style, the
episode’s narrator evokes a moving image of Bloom as a young student. As Bloom’s memories
come flooding back ‘in retrospective arrangement’, he ponders the unanswerable question:
‘What is the age of the soul of man?’. Joyce added this formulation in the left margin of the
episode’s earlier draft to supplement the more general questions he already had in place: ‘Hath
the soul not the virtue of the chameleon that clothes itself with the hue of its surrounding?’. The
answer on the earlier draft is a rudimentary version of the scene that we are familiar with in
Ulysses: (p.94)
Leopold is no more the staid <man> of publicity agent as he sits there. He is young
Leopold of a score of years back. And as such, he beholdeth himself as in a mirror within a
mirror. That figure of then îs seen,^ walking on a nipping morning from the old house in
Clanbrassil street to the high school, his satchel of books and a hunk of brownloaf.
(see U 392.37–393.06; U-G 14.1041–8)99
But Bloom did more than just study and think about sex in high school. On the ‘Ithaca’ proto-
draft we learn that he excelled on the parallel bars, even though ‘^Maybe ring weight lifting
was beyond his strength^’.100 The scant version on the episode’s proto-draft may have been the
first time Joyce wrote about this aspect of the young man’s athletic ability.101 Nonetheless, he
amplified it on a subsequent (missing) manuscript by contrasting Leopold’s strength with his
courage, but after that this story remained exactly as he wrote it on the Rosenbach manuscript:
Had any special agility been his in earlier youth?
Though ringweight lifting had been beyond his strength and the full circle gyration beyond
his courage yet as a High school scholar he had excelled in his stable and protracted
execution of the half lever movement on the parallel bars in consequence of his
abnormally developed abdominal muscles.
(U 634.12–16; U-G 17.519–24)102
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As we discover further on in ‘Ithaca’, Bloom’s greatest achievement in high school was clearly
the triumphant pissing contest that we read about as he and Stephen commune in the back
garden of Eccles Street. On the episode’s proto-draft, in answer to the generic question ‘How?’
we read that Bloom ‘easily had hit the third brick of the wall âgainst all comers of the whole
strength of the college, 250^’.103 Unlike the story about Bloom’s gymnastics, here Joyce only put
this scene together in a complex and disjointed manner on the proto-draft, revised it on one or
more missing manuscripts, as well as on the Rosenbach manuscript,104 and then continued to
add to it on both the episode’s first and second proof levels until it achieved its final form in
Ulysses:
Similarly?
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar:
Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate
alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of
attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the
institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate (p.95)
hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical
pressure.
(U 655.20–7; see U-G 17.1191–8)105
Although both of these stories of Bloom’s prowess in high school were on the earliest surviving
version of ‘Ithaca’ that Joyce only wrote in 1921, they appear to be late executions of even
earlier, half-articulated plans. Unlike the Leopold Bloom of 1904, he was not a loner in high
school. He had several childhood friends, and there are scattered references to them in the
book. For example, the first mention of his mates that readers come across in Ulysses is in
‘Lestrygonians’. As Bloom thinks about how exciting it must be for the pigeons to be able to fly
over the Bank of Ireland building on College Green, he remembers the frolicking time he spent
climbing trees as a child with Percy Apjohn and Owen Goldberg. They even gave him the
nickname ‘Mackerel’ (U 154.33; U-G 8.405). There are no known notebook sources for this entire
paragraph, all of which Joyce added to the second proof level of ‘Lestrygonians’,106 but Joyce
had already written about this gang in ‘Circe’ about a year before, and so this is merely a reprise
here.
Later on in Ulysses, Apjohn and Goldberg are conjured up in ‘blue and white jerseys and shorts’
as part of the group of young revellers in ‘Circe’ celebrating the end of high school; these were
Bloom’s ‘Halcyon Days’ (see U 512.16–25; U-G 15.3325–36). The list of youngsters first appears
on the Rosenbach ‘Circe’ manuscript (as does Bloom’s nickname ‘Mackerel’).107 Joyce added the
first mention of Goldberg and Apjohn in ‘Ithaca’ on its Rosenbach manuscript.108 At the start of
the episode, the narrator informs us that Bloom had spent other evenings when he ‘discussed
similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations’ with his friend Owen Goldberg and a Turnbull
brother around Clanbrassil Street in 1884, and then the following year with Percy Apjohn
further out of the city centre (see U 620.20–6; U-G 17.46–53).109 Later, Joyce continued to revise
this question and answer on the first typescript.110 As ‘Ithaca’ proceeds, we read that five years
before Bloom’s memorable nocturnal deliberation on Dolphin’s Barn Road with Percy Apjohn in
Page 26 of 46
1885, he also ‘divulged his disbelief in the tenets of the Irish (protestant) church’ (U
669.02–3; U-G 17.1635–7), one of his boldest youthful revelations that I discussed earlier in
relation to the stories about Rudolph Virag Bloom’s conversion.
Such happy days would soon pass. As Bloom thinks back on ‘companions now in various
manners and different places defunct’ in ‘Ithaca’ (including Phil Gilligan), we learn that Percy
Apjohn was ‘killed in action, Modder river’ (U 657.17–18; U-G 17.1252–3). This was the site of a
Boer War battle that took place on 28 November 1899. Joyce catalogued Apjohn along with
everyone else on this morbid list as part (p.96) of a new question and answer that he added on
the episode’s second proof level about a month before Ulysses was published.111 Fortunately,
Percy left a memento of the young Leopold. As Bloom curls up in bed about to fall asleep in the
early hours of 17 June 1904 in his familiar posture, with the ‘right hand resting on the bridge of
his nose’, he realizes that he is in the same ‘attitude depicted in a snapshot made by Percy
Apjohn’ (see U 688.30–2; U-G 17.2315–17), presumably taken many years before. Joyce added
the details about this photograph in the left margin of the episode’s proto-draft at least six
months before he worked out how and where Bloom’s youthful companion died.112 And this is all
we know of young Leopold’s friends.
In ‘Ithaca’ we also read about the kinds of writing assignments Bloom undertook in school:
essays on various subjects or moral apothegms (e. g. My Favourite Hero or Procrastination

is the Thief of Time) composed during schoolyears, seemed to him to contain in itself and
in conjunction with the personal equation certain possibilities of financial, social, personal
and sexual success.
(U 638.05–9; U-G 17.643–7)
Joyce only incorporated this description of Bloom’s adolescent essays as an addition to the
episode’s first typescript,113 and then he added the titles of his proverbs on the second proof
level;114 again, these are very late stories about Leopold Bloom as a young man. All the
information we are given about Bloom’s other literary juvenilia also appears in ‘Ithaca’.
Although they are on a relatively late manuscript, it is impossible to know when Joyce first
conceived them. For example, we are given a few lines of his first piece of original verse.
Practical man that he is, young Leopold Bloom wrote the verses in response to an advertisement
in the Shamrock Illustrated Magazine:
What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him, potential
poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering of three prizes of
10/–, 5/– and 2/6 respectively for competition by the Shamrock, a weekly
newspaper?
An ambition to squint
At my verses in print
Makes me hope that for these you’ll find room.
If you so condescend
Then please place at the end
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The name of yours truly, L. Bloom.

(U 630.22–31; U-G 17.392–400)
The following note was probably the prompt for this story on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft: ‘verses for
occasion’.115 The poem appears almost exactly as it does in Ulysses on the episode’s proto-
draft,116 and although Joyce added the question, ‘When had he written them?’ in the margin of
the manuscript, the specific date (p.97) ‘at the age of 11 in 1877’ was something that only first
appears on the Rosenbach manuscript.117 Bloom’s poetic ability as a younger man was in
evidence as well in the anagrams that he made on his name:
What anagrams had he made on his name in youth?

Leopold Bloom
Ellpodbomool
Molldopeloob
Bollopedoom
Old Ollebo, M. P.
(U 631.01–6; U-G 17.404–9)
These creations also appear on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft almost exactly as they do in Ulysses, but,
typical of the way Joyce worked with this document, this question and answer appears on an
earlier page of the manuscript,118 but later in the episode. As for the beautiful valentine he later
wrote his fiancée, it only first appears on the Rosenbach manuscript.119 All of these examples of
Leopold’s creative ability remained virtually unchanged until Ulysses:
What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he (kinetic poet)
sent to Miss Marion (Molly) Tweedy on the 14 February 1888?
Poets oft have sung in rhyme
Of music sweet their praise divine.
Let them hymn it nine times nine.
Dearer far than song or wine.
You are mine. The world is mine.
(U 631.07–13; see U-G 17.410–16)
Leopold Comes of Age

(p.98)
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February–March 1920 Earlier Draft NLI MS 11A, pp. [5r]–[6r]
15. ‘Circe’:
July–December 1920 Intermediary Draft NLI MS 12, pp. [21r]–[23v]
July–December 1920 Later Draft NLI Quinn MS, f. [13r]
July–December 1920 Mixed Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, ff. 49, 51b, and 53
January–May 1921 First Typescript Buffalo TS 13.h, p. [10r]
16. ‘Eumaeus’:
January–February 1921 Revised Earlier Draft ‘Eumeo’ MS, p. [18v]
February–Early December 1921 Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 14.a.i, p. [27r]
13–Late December 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl III-5.ii
11–Mid January 1922 Third Proof Level Buffalo PP 38.1
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-Draft NLI MS 13, pp. [5r]–[5v] and [15r]
August–Late October Faircopy for Rosenbach Blue MS II, p. 14 & Rosenbach
1921 Typescript Green MS II, pp. 17–18
29 December 1921–Early Second Proof Harvard Pl III-11.ii
January 1922 Level
As Robert M. Adams pointed out over fifty years ago, the eight years from Bloom’s graduation
from high school in 1880 until his marriage ‘are largely unaccounted for’ in Ulysses.120 If there
are just a few stories about Leopold’s early years, there are even fewer about him as a young
man, and they are about 1) his adolescent sexual awakening, 2) his apprentice employment and
interests, and 3) his more determined political views before he married. On the one hand, the
paucity of stories about these years in the young man’s life can be explained by the fact that
Joyce simply ran out of time to further develop this aspect of his character’s life as he rushed to
get Ulysses published. On the other hand, the absence of recollections about this relatively long
period of Bloom’s life also serves to throw into pointed contrast the much fuller account that
Joyce presents of the two years of Leopold and Molly’s courtship. In the most basic sense, the
stories Joyce created about their love for one another that I discuss in the later chapters of this
book are the narrative foundation of Ulysses.
Joyce only wrote the stories of Leopold’s youth in 1921 and scattered them in different episodes.
He probably wrote them then to counterbalance the richer early life he was creating for Molly at
about the same time in ‘Penelope’.121 But the tales of Leopold’s adolescent sexual peccadillos
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that he wrote were almost all for ‘Circe’ and they have a longer textual history. These stories
create a more ample and complex perspective on Bloom’s sexuality that resonates throughout
the book. For example, at the start of 1921 Joyce added the story about Bloom’s proclivity to
masturbate in public that first appears on the second ‘Circe’ typescript,122 but he had already
established the motif in the episode on its previous drafts at least a year earlier. After ‘A
DEADHAND’ scrawls ‘Bloom is a cod’ (U 468.01–2; U-G 15.1870–1), an odd assortment of
characters demand to know what he had done ‘in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrak’, ‘under the
Ballybough bridge’, and ‘in the (p.99) devil’s glen’ (U 468.03–6; U-G 15.1873–8), to which all
Bloom can do is plead, with ‘three tears falling from left eye’: ‘Spare my past’ (U 468.10–11; U-G
15.1880–1). His appeal goes unheeded and, midway through the episode, Bella Cohen declares,
‘The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds’ (U 503.23–4; U-G 15.3025–6). The
vague references Joyce added to the typescript both reinforce structural motifs in an earlier
episode in the book and set up later elaborations of these ideas in ‘Circe’. By the start of 1920,
Joyce had already established that in ‘Nausicaa’ Bloom masturbates as he illicitly watches Gerty
McDowell on Sandymount strand. Then, about six months later, he included this story about
similar youthful indiscretions in ‘Circe’. Together they situate what Bloom does on 16 June 1904
as one of a series of such incidents in his life. Thereby, they provide a sense of deeper insight
into Leopold Bloom’s psychological state and further unify the structure of the stories in the
book.
While most of the impossible adventures that follow Bella’s incantation are hallucinations, they
elicit a heartfelt confession about Bloom as a young man. In what becomes a quite bathetic
scene, the Nymph from the print that hangs over the couple’s marital bed in 7 Eccles Street and
the Yews that have come to life from the wallpaper in the brothel cross-examine Bloom. Among
other transgressions, they reprimand Bloom about public masturbation, which, he soon reveals,
began in his adolescence. It seems that prompted by his ‘youth’ and stimulated by the
springtime ‘fauna’—after all, ‘It was pairing time’—our ‘precocious’ Leopold ‘sacrificed to the
god of the forest’ in a glade beside the Poulaphouca waterfall while on an excursion with his
classmates from the high school (see U 512.28–513.08; U-G 15.3339–51). Pitifully, he had
already tried to exonerate himself by pleading, ‘I was in my teens, a growing boy. A little then
sufficed, a jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies’ cloakroom, […] even a pricelist of their
hosiery’ (see U 512.10–14; U-G 15.3318–22). Joyce wrote the rudiments of this scene as a long
addition on the episode’s intermediary draft.123 At that stage, the scene was comprised of just
six blocks of dialogue between Bloom, the Yews, and the Nymph, who we are told ‘looks down at
him with Marion Bloom’s glance but softer’,124 though Joyce dropped that particular description
by the time the scene appears on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript. He had also already
established both the accusation and Bloom’s ready-made excuse. They ask, ‘Who profaned our
silent shade?’, and he replies, ‘I was only sixteen. The heat. The summer. The tipsycake’ (see U
512.24–31; U-G 15.3334–42).125
This then brings forth another, more revealing confession that also first appears on the
intermediary draft. Bloom admits that he was attracted to the girl next door, Lotty Clarke.
According to Ulysses, it seems she lived within eyeshot, so Leopold borrowed his father’s opera
glasses and peered at the ‘flaxenhaired’ beauty while she was at ‘her (p.100) night toilet
through illclosed curtains’ (U 513.13–14; U-G 15.3355–6). She was no mere passive player in this
Page 30 of 46
youthful courtship. In fact, in her efforts to further infatuate him, ‘She rolled downhill at Rialto
bridge to tempt me [Bloom] with her flow of animal spirits. She climbed their crooked tree’ and
Leopold looked up her skirt. But, he remonstrates, ‘A saint couldn’t resist it. The demon
possessed me. Besides who saw?’ (U 513.15–17; U-G 15.3355–9). More to the point, Bloom had
his reasons: ‘Simply satisfying a need. (With pathos.) No girl would when I went girling. Too
ugly. They wouldn’t play…’ (U 513.23–4; see U-G 15.3365–6).126
The basic story of Bloom’s peeping at Lotty Clarke was already on the intermediary draft,127 and
once Joyce wrote it on the Rosenbach manuscript it remained virtually unchanged in Ulysses.128
But Joyce wrote other snippets of a story about Bloom’s adolescent sexual desires on the
intermediary draft of ‘Circe’ that he did not include in the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, and
so they do not appear as such in Ulysses. For example, in an addition in the left margin of the
page that was presumably a new story, Bloom proclaims:
I respect real virtues whenever I set eyes on artless blushes I always looked away. A girl
was standing before the monkey cages in the zoo watching a lustful chimpanzee. Her
hands were crossed at her gown I stared at them with meaning. She blushed deeply,
artlessly I looked away. (loudly) I respect true modesty.129
While vociferously defending his moral rectitude, at the same time Bloom also reveals an
indiscreet experience he had at the Dublin zoo, but for whatever reason Joyce decided not to
include it in such an overt way in the tales told of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Obviously, this
highlights one of the basic questions about the interpretative mandate of this kind of textual
analysis. If Joyce wrote a story about a character that does not appear in Ulysses, what is its
narratological status in relation to the life-stories that are in the final text? Since they do not
appear in the published work, these other stories are relevant to our reading only in so far as
they document possibilities that Joyce explored, but for various reasons abandoned. Like all of
the myriad smaller changes that I discuss throughout this book, but in a more extreme form,
they reveal the more extensive potential of the text before the writer’s decisions continued to
shape it as the book it became. While a reader of Ulysses may not be aware of the abandoned or
variant textual material that I analyse here, the different versions of the stories that Joyce wrote
were clearly instrumental to how he understood and constructed his characters and his work.
Uncovering these other layers of the text—even those that are clearly not part of the published
book—places Ulysses in the more fluid creative environment in which Joyce conceived it over the
many years of its genesis.
We read about another of Bloom’s early sexual interests in ‘Circe’. Grandfather Virag asks
provocatively, ‘Who’s dear Gerald? Dear Ger, that you? (U-G 15.2461–2; see U 485.30–1). The
solution to these incriminating questions comes later in the episode when Bloom confesses to
Bella: (p.101)
It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in

the High School play Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by
sister’s stays. Now Gerald gilds his eyelids. Cult of the beautiful.
(see U 503.07–11; U-G 15.3009–13)130
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This story first appears as part of a long scene Joyce inserted within the sequence of pages of
the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, which indicates that Joyce had written it somewhere else
beforehand, and he only slightly added to it on the proofs for Ulysses. It is just one of the many
indiscretions that are revealed in this episode that serve to create Bloom’s sexual identity in the
book.
Significant as cross-dressing is as a structural motif in ‘Circe’, the encounter Bloom has when he
enters Nighttown is more important in his life-story. Late at night on 16 June 1904, Bridie Kelly,
the prostitute with whom he had had his first sexual relations, accosts him. She recognizes him
after many years, he remembers his ‘first night, the bridenight’, and she responds, ‘Hatch
Street. Any good in your mind?’ (U 420.04–7; U-G 15.361–4). Joyce had set out her fortuitous
appearance on the earlier ‘Circe’ draft,131 but that makes sense because he had already written
the more complete story of Bloom’s previous encounter with her on the earlier ‘Oxen of the Sun’
draft (U 393.20–33; U-G 14.1063–77).132 In a parody of Charles Lamb’s style, the context of this
revelation in ‘Oxen’ is Bloom’s failure to produce a male child. The note that inspired the moral
tale is telling as well: ‘Never know who’s yr [your] son. Instance 20 yrs [years] ago. Wise father
knows his own child’.133 The problematic issue of paternity is a fundamental principle in Ulysses
(and Joyce’s works in general), and he reprises it once again here in a different but resonant
context.
While the scene and most of the details stayed the same from the earlier draft of ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ to Ulysses, the first time this ‘bride of darkness, a daughter of night’, this ‘child of shame’,
appears, she is named ‘Bridie Cullen’, not ‘Bridie Kelly’.134 This is ironic since from the start the
narrator emphasizes that Bloom ‘will ever remember the name’. This is one of many examples of
how stories are more likely to remain the same while the names of the protagonists in them are
often less stable. Nonetheless, the moral of the story was consistent: ‘No, Leopold the name and
memory solace thee not. That illusion of strength is taken from thee and in vain. She dare not
bear the babe of ^<light> day^’ (see U 393.31–3; U-G 14.1074–6).135
Another group of stories about Leopold as a young man are about the few jobs he had before he
married. It is difficult to determine how much veracity we should attribute to the stories we only
read about in ‘Circe’, but that is where Bloom reveals his earliest professional ambition.
Unsurprisingly, given the overall tenor of the episode, the job of his dreams is linked to a fetish.
Bloom confesses (p.102) that ‘(Murmurs lovingly.) To be a shoefitter in Manfield’s was my
love’s young dream’ (U 497.08–9; see U-G 15.2814–15). His youthful goal ‘to lace up crisscrossed
to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly small, of Clyde Road ladies’ at the
fashionable shop, first appears on the Rosenbach manuscript exactly as it does in Ulysses (U
497.09–11; U-G 15.2815–17).136 At the start of his hallucination about lacing Bella Cohen’s
shoes, Bloom tells her about having ‘served his time’ in the mail order room at Kellet’s (U
497.01; U-G 15.2806), a draper’s shop on South Great George’s Street.137 This was an older
story and first appears on the later draft,138 and was prompted by the following note: ‘LB
unlaces her boot, learnt to make knots tying parcels for mail order business’.139 The sexual
nature of the story is clearly the central issue, not Joyce’s desire to fill in the account of
Leopold’s younger professional life. At this stage in the development of Ulysses in 1920, he was
not yet purposely working to construct a more complete life for Bloom. In fact, this story simply
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serves to provide a context for Bloom’s proud boast about his ability to tie a good knot for Bella
Cohen’s ‘unfastened bootlace’ in ‘Circe’.
More importantly, one of Bloom’s first jobs was to work for his father as a door-to-door salesman
hawking imitation jewellery to housewives. Joyce was vague about when this happened until the
typescript of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ for the Little Review, by which time he had changed the more
generic ‘some year or so gone over’ to the more precise ‘a year’ from high school (U 393.06; U-G
14.1049).140 Therefore, he firmly situated this story in 1881. This information also comes from
the recollection that includes the description of Bloom walking to school on a chilly Dublin
morning, as well as the revelation about his first sexual encounter. On the earlier ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ draft, Leopold appears with ‘â case of bright trinkets^’ in hand:
Or it is the same, a brace of years ^<more> later^, in its first hard hat ^(that was a
day!)^, already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, êquipped^ with a
large notebook for orders, a scented handkerchief, a ^<bundle of stuff> sample^
^peeping^ and many compliant smiles for ^<the worried> any young^ housewife,
reckoning on her fingertips. The scent, the smile, and, most of all, the dark eyes brought
many a commitment home ât dusk^ to ^<the aging> father^ Rudolph.
(simplified transcription; see U 393.06–17; U-G 14.1048–60)141
With such a successful entrepreneurial start in life, things looked good for young Leopold Bloom
and the account of his life in Ulysses for 1882 is on a firmer footing, but only slightly. In ‘Circe’,
the spectre of Virag reminds his grandson that he had higher ambitions after high school.
Affirming Bloom’s lifelong interest in the complexities of religion and science, his father rebukes
him by saying, ‘You intended to devote an entire year to the study of the religious problem and
the summer months of 1882 to square the circle and win that million’ (emphasis (p.103) added;
U 484.04–5; see U-G 15.2399–401). That is how the facts appear in the first edition of Ulysses
and that is how they remained until the Gabler edition. Nonetheless, when Joyce prepared a list
of errata for the 1926 second Shakespeare and Company edition, he instructed the printers to
change the year from ‘1882’ to ‘1886’, but that change was never incorporated.142 He
presumably wanted the change made to accord with the other version of the story that he had
written for ‘Ithaca’ in which Leopold’s investigation takes place in 1886. By moving the story
forward four years, Joyce has it take place during the traumatic summer when both of Bloom’s
parents pass away and just before he meets Molly, rather than taking place in the more sedate
context of his transition from high school to manhood. But it is unlikely that Joyce paid that
much attention to this aspect of the temporal implications of the story.
In ‘Ithaca’ we read that Bloom has become reticent to make complicated calculations because,
following in the footsteps of Archimedes amongst others, ‘some years previously in 1886 when
occupied with the problem of the quadrature of the circle’ he had read about the virtually
infinite possibilities of π (emphasis added; see U 652.08–9; U-G 17.1071–2). This is how Joyce
wrote the story on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript,143 about a year after he had written in
‘Circe’ that Bloom was at work on this problem in 1882, but on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft Joyce was
less concerned about determining any sort of date. There it simply read: ‘He had once vainly
tried to solve the problem of the quadrature of the circle […]’.144 In general, Joyce does not
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seem to have been particularly interested in establishing when particular events happen to
Bloom in these years and in this case he was clearly imprecise about his dates.145
Given the turbulent events in Ireland that year, it is not surprising that 1882 was also a signal
year in the awakening of Bloom’s political consciousness. In the list of events on the Rosenbach
‘Ithaca’ manuscript that are meant to ‘Prove that he loved rectitude from his early youth’, the
narrator states:
To Daniel Magrane ând Francis Wade^ in 1882 during a juvenile friendship (terminated
by the premature emigration of the former) he had advocated during nocturnal
perambulations ^+the political theory of colonial ^(e.g. Canadian)^ (p.104) expansion
and+^ the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, expounded in The Descent of Man and
The Origin of Species.
(see U 669.07–12; U-G 17.1640–5)146
Except for their brief appearance here, Daniel Magrane and Francis Wade are otherwise
unknown in Ulysses. Possibly they are new friends Bloom met after high school, but we will
never read anything more about them. This Magrane was always destined to leave Ireland, it
seems, but Joyce only added Francis Wade to the late-night conversation on the Rosenbach
manuscript. The logic of the sentence’s construction must have prompted Joyce to add another
member to the cast of characters (or at least a name) in this story because Magrane was set
apart as ‘the former’ of Bloom’s obviously two boon companions. This indicates the often-slight
nature of the prompts for the inclusion of some of the lesser characters in Ulysses. In the earlier
version, Bloom only discussed his more advanced ideas on Darwin with his friends. Then, in a
further addition on the third proof level,147 Joyce expanded Bloom’s horizon by including his
other ideas for a possible solution to the political situation in Ireland. Furthermore, he only
specifically linked Bloom’s ideas to the model of British colonial expansion in Canada as an
addition to that addition. This is exemplary of how Joyce continued to expand and define Bloom’s
political views.
Joyce continued the wide-ranging catalogue of Bloom’s youthful political ideas on the Rosenbach
manuscript with a story that took place three years later:
In 1885 he had publicly expressed his adherence to ^the collective ând national^
economic programme advocated by James Fintan Lalor, John Fisher Murray, John Mitchel,
J. F. X. O’Brien and others,^ the agrarian policy of Michael Davitt, the constitutional
agitation of Charles Stewart Parnell (M. P. for Cork City), the programme of peace,
retrenchment and reform of William Ewart Gladstone (M. P. for Midlothian)
(see U 669.12–17; U-G 17.1645–51)148
As he revised the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce emphasized Bloom’s views on Home
Rule by expanding Bloom’s political allegiances from the original list of Davitt, Parnell, and
Gladstone to include these other figures. Joyce seems to be further specifying Bloom’s
allegiances by associating them with this even wider range of figures, but the diversity of their
political positions ends up making such allegiances irreconcilable, which itself was not an
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uncommon stance among Irish nationalists of the period. The next and last item in the list of
Bloom’s politically minded deeds in this question and answer was the first one Joyce wrote. It is
the story of when Bloom climbed a tree to see the procession welcoming the Marquess of Ripon
and John Morley. This story first appears on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft, whereas the others first
appear on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript. At the start of February 1888, safely perched
atop a tree on Northumberland Road, Bloom witnessed the massive torchlight procession that
greeted several prominent British (p.105) and Irish Home Rule supporters as they entered
Dublin, including George Frederick Samuel Robinson, the first Marquess of Ripon, and ‘(honest)
John Morley’, the first Viscount Morley of Blackburn, Chief Secretary for Ireland at the time,
amongst others.
This is probably a first draft of the question and answer as it appears on the proto-draft:
In his youth had he loved justice
He had climbed into the fork of a tree on Northumberland road to wait to see the entry
into the city of Viscount Ripon and John Morley.149
Although Joyce first included this story in 1921, the following note suggests that he had
conceived it many years before: ‘LB in tree to see entry’ (see the words in bold in the
transcription).150 The foundation of the story was as simple as that. Joyce probably knew exactly
which ‘entry’ into the city he intended and just needed this slight prompt to compose the scene,
but we cannot be sure. In Ulysses, this becomes:
in support of his political convictions, [Bloom] had climbed up into a secure position amid
the ramifications of a tree on Northumberland road to see the entrance ^(2 February
1888)^ into the capital of a demonstrative torchlight procession ôf 20,000 torchbearers,
divided into 120 trade corporations, bearing 2000 torches^ in escort of ^<Viscount> the
marquess of^ Ripon and (honest) John Morley
(see U 669.18–23; U-G 17.1651–6)151
Joyce only dated the memorable procession (and made the other changes indicated here) on the
second proof level, just a month before Ulysses was published. The dating of the incident is
illustrative of an aspect of Joyce’s complex aesthetic agenda. He must have been aware that an
informed reader of Irish history would know that the occasion at which these distinguished men
were in fact given the freedom of the city actually took place on 1 February 1888. Nonetheless,
with this minor change in date, Joyce has moved the historical event forward one day to coincide
with his own (and presumably Stephen’s) sixth birthday.152 But at the same time (and on the
very same manuscript) that Joyce misrepresents the historical record in this way for aesthetic
and presumably personal reasons, he also clarified and corrected some of the other details he
supplied. He only added the specific and historically accurate information about the procession
on the same proof page on which he incorrectly dates the event (U 669.21–2; U-G 17.1655–6).153
At the same time, Joyce also included the fact that, by 1888, George Robinson had been made a
(p.106) Marquess in recognition of his service negotiating the Treaty of Washington in 1871;
he was a mere Viscount on all of the previous versions of the answer. That day was one of
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Bloom’s few overtly political actions and it marks his transition from the young and carefree
bachelor to his roles and responsibilities as a traditional bourgeois Irishman and soon-to-be
husband and father.
The narrator of ‘Eumaeus’ recalls Bloom’s more radical political views as well. Joyce added the
start of the scene on the recently discovered ‘Eumeo’ manuscript, which is currently in a
private, anonymous collection. Joyce wrote it on a verso page of the episode’s earlier draft in red
ink and then subsequently revised it in bright blue ink, all based on notes from two different
repositories:
^<Though> In point of fact^ they didn’t see eye to eye in everything a certain analogy
there undoubtedly was as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the same
train of thought. And at young man’s age â sneaking sympathy^ Mr Bloom recalled
Davittite pledges and even went a step further than Michael Davit in his views in
retrospect when the evicted tenants question bulked largely in people’s view
(see U 610.22–36; U-G 16.1579–93)154
As is often the case, Joyce worked directly from his notes to create this scene (as indicated by
the words in bold font). He relied exclusively on notes from a ‘Eumaeus’-headed page to
construct it and its prompt may have been this other provocative conceptual note: ‘Davittite
LB’,155 which Joyce moulded into a humorous anecdote about Bloom’s earlier, more zealous
political views. He continued to expand the scene as he usually does at almost every juncture.
Besides the clichés Joyce added to give the story more stylistic texture—like ‘it goes without
saying’ and ‘some of which would not hold water’—he characterizes Bloom’s ideas as ‘ultra’, but
modified our sense of his commitment to such causes by adding that he maintained this position
without ‘contributing a copper’.156 But Joyce only began to date Bloom’s views with additions on
the typescript,157 though in a characteristically ambiguous manner, with phrases such as
‘roughly some score of years ago’ when the evicted tenant’s question was ‘then at its inception’.
Then he continued to provide some further historical context on the third proof level by dating
Bloom’s crusading ‘in the Buckshot Foster days’.158 While Joyce made Bloom ‘a backtothelander’
on the second proof level (U 610.36; U-G 16.1593),159 he undermines this by adding that it was
after ‘realising his mistake’ that he was ‘subsequently partially cured of’ his political activism.
Bloom’s interest in political matters continued until he married. In ‘Ithaca’ we discover that
among the items in the second drawer of his desk is (p.107)
a sealed prophecy (never unsealed) written by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the
consequences of the passing into law of William Ewart Gladstone’s Home Rule bill of 1886
(never passed into law)[.]
(U 673.14–16; U-G 17.1787–90)
Joyce wrote this almost as it appears in Ulysses on the episode’s proto-draft.160 But everything
was not just serious business for young Leopold; he had some fun as well. In ‘Circe’ his father
reminds him of the ‘night they bring you home drunk as dog’—‘Nice spectacles for your poor
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mother!’—but Bloom defends himself by saying, ‘Only that once’ (see U 416.28–417.05; U-G
15.265–79), which was in fact Joyce’s most basic idea for the scene: ‘LB memory of only
spree’.161 These few incidents are the entire record of his youth and adolescence, but the stories
of the amorous courtship and married life of Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy are a much richer
reservoir of incidents and memories for the couple in Ulysses.
Notes:
(2) All the editions of Ulysses prior to 1984 spell the character’s name as ‘Bandman Palmer’ as
did Joyce on the Rosenbach ‘Lotus Eaters’ manuscript (f. 5b; U 73.21), which is presumably how
it appeared on the episode’s (missing) typescripts, and as it was set on all the proofs for the first
edition of Ulysses. Presumably someone ‘corrected’ Joyce’s spelling of the real actress’s name
because it appears as ‘Bandmann Palmer’ in the Little Review. This collateral revision seems to
be the basis of the change in U-G. Ellmann writes that Joyce had a long-standing interest in this
particular actress; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (new and rev. edn, New York: Oxford
(3) See Sam Slote, ‘Notes’, in Joyce, Ulysses: Based on the 1939 Edition (Richmond, Surrey: Alma
Classics, 2012), cited throughout by its U-G reference: 5.194–7.
(4) Joyce similarly contorts the date of the Phoenix Park murders in Ulysses so that it does not
occur in the year he—and presumably Stephen Dedalus—were born. Both Myles Crawford and
Bloom claim that the murders took place in 1881, whereas they occurred in 1882 (see U 130.29
and 585.01; U-G 7.632 and 16.608). The manuscripts document Joyce’s deliberations on the
representation of the date. On the Rosenbach ‘Aeolus’ manuscript (f. 19), Crawford says: ‘That
was in eightyone, time of the invincibles, murder in Phoenix Park, before you were born’. Joyce
later revised the year of the murder on the typescript for the Little Review to read ‘That was in
eightytwo, time of the invincibles, murder in Phoenix Park, before you were born’ (emphasis
added; Buffalo TS 5, p. [10r]; see JJA 12: 295; and see the Little Review, V.6, p. 40). In
‘Eumaeus’, Bloom is also confused about the date. On the episode’s later manuscript, he claims
that they occurred in ‘eightyone’ (Buffalo MS 21, p. [4r]; see JJA 15: 329), and that is how it
appears in Ulysses, though Joyce subsequently modified the mistaken fact in the episode’s
characteristic manner. Presumably to re-establish the corresponding mistake, Joyce revised
Crawford’s claim in ‘Aeolus’ as follows on the episode’s third proof level: ‘That was in
^<eightytwo> eightyone, sixth of May^, time of the invincibles, murder in Phoenix Park,
before you were born Î suppose^’ (emphasis added; Harvard Pl 14.iii; see JJA 18: 57). This
change specifies both the correct day and month of the incident, but purposely misrepresents
the year once again.
(5) Discussing the background of this central character, Robert M. Adams has argued that
‘Leopold Bloom is a magic lantern Jew, as he is a cut-out Hungarian. Or to speak more
analytically, Leopold Bloom’s Hungarian characterization was a surface to which Joyce tried (not
very successfully) to find a foundation’, Adams, Surface and Symbol, 106.
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(6) The grandfather, ‘Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely’, who emerges from the chimneyflue and exits
with his head under his arm, was initially named ‘Litpold Virag’ on the earlier ‘Circe’ draft, and
is an amalgam of various aspects of different characters in Ulysses, which makes sense in the
context of ‘Circe’ (U 481.17–491.15; U-G 15.2311–639). The initial description on the earlier
draft reads: ‘^<Henry Flower> Litpold Virag^ | Bloom’s double, wearing Stephen’s hat, Buck
Mulligan’s primrose vest, and a brown mackintosh under which he holds a ^<dulcimer> book in
two tomes^’ (Buffalo MS 19, p. [11r]; see JJA 14: 223 and Herring, Notes and Early Drafts, 225).
As in Ulysses, the elder Virag is obsessed with the carnal aspects of the scene in Bella Cohen’s
brothel, although his further obsession with Christ’s genealogy was something Joyce only added
later. Bloom also thinks of his grandfather in ‘Nausicaa’: ‘tephilim no what’s this they call it poor
papa’s father had on his door to touch’ (U 361.16–17; U-G 13.1157–8).
(7) Rosenbach ‘Circe’ MS, f. 39.
(8) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 13, p. [11v]. This transcription indicates how Joyce
constructed this question and answer with various piecemeal additions. Although generally
similar to the version in Ulysses, Joyce transformed much of it. For example, the central addition
here is barley recognizable in its published form, but is clearly based on the following
fascinating note: ‘Ul. [Ulysses] beggar given an inch takes all (jew gets [on])’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS
11.65). As Herring points out, this note may in part be based on Joyce’s reading of the Butcher
and Lang translation of the Odyssey, though the commentary surely is Joyce’s interpretation.
Phillip F. Herring (ed.), Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville:
Published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the University Press of
Virginia, 1972), 466. See Homer; S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (eds), The Odyssey of Homer:
Done into English Prose (2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 1879).
(9) See BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 4.105.
(10) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue III MS, p. 21.
(11) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue III MS, p. 21.
(12) Simplified transcription; Harvard Pl 9.i; see JJA 17: 85.
(13) Simplified transcription; Buffalo PP 5.1; see JJA 22: 244.
(14) See Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 9.518.
(15) Rosenbach ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ MS, f. 16.
(16) A more complete examination of issues such as how the reader encounters these characters
—specifically their thoughts, motivations, and actions—still needs to be undertaken.
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(21) James Joyce, Dubliners: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, Margot Norris (ed.), text
edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
2006), 135, ll. 242–3.
(22) Rosenbach ‘Hades’ MS, ff. 13–14.
(24) Adams, Surface and Symbol, 50.
(25) Peter Costello, James Joyce: Years of Growth, 1882–1915: A Biography (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1992), 31.
(26) Weekly Irish Times, 6 October 1917, ‘News of the Week in Ireland’, 3.
(27) NLI NB 3, p. [9r].
(28) It is quite likely that another, though as yet undiscovered, source text served as the prompt
for Joyce’s decision to establish the Virags in Szombathely, Austro-Hungary.
(29) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS II, pp. [16v]–17.
(30) Little Review, V.10-11, p. 59.
(31) Simplified transcription; Harvard Pl 19.i; see JJA 18: 142.
(32) The first reference to ‘Mr Bloom’s dental windows’ is in ‘Wandering Rocks’ when Armidano
Artifoni passes his office windows at 2 Clare Street (see U 240.17; U-G 10.1115; Thom’s, 1810).
Frank Budgen wrote out this section on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript in January–
February 1919 (f. 40), about six months before Joyce wrote this other reference to Bloom’s
namesake in ‘Cyclops’. The scene in ‘Wandering Rocks’ also remained unchanged from its
Rosenbach manuscript to Ulysses.
(33) Rosenbach ‘Cyclops’ MS, f. 51 and Harvard Pl 37.ii; see JJA 19: 212.
(34) NLI MS 13, p. [4v].
(35) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 12.62–5.
(37) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 14.01.
(38) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 13, p. [4v].
(39) The question-and-answer block that follows in Ulysses describes Rudolph Bloom’s impolite
table manners in old age (see U 677.08–13; U-G 17.1921–6). Joyce relied on his notes for some of
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the father’s traits: ‘RB took drugs’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 3.80) and ‘Jews cannot eat milk meat’ (BL
‘Ithaca’ NS 3.52).
(40) This note was probably the direct impetus of this story: ‘Virag – Szesfehervar –
Photoatelier’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 15.72).
(43) Harvard Pl C.iii.a; see JJA 21: 278. I discuss Bloom’s plan to send Milly to Mullingar to work
in a photographer’s shop more fully in ‘Milly Bloom’ in Chapter 6.
(44) Texas PP 42.1; see JJA 27: 199.
(45) Like Joyce’s misspelling of ‘daguerrotype’ (see U 675.27; U-G 17.1875), he only realized his
numbering error after the first edition was published and indicated the corrections on the 1922
errata for Egoist edition. That is, he instructed the printers to change the number of words of
the address in the suicide note from ‘four’ to ‘five’ in the question for the second printing of
Ulysses (see BL ADD MS 57356, f. [30v]; see JJA 12: 208).
(46) See NLI NB 5B, p. [12v].
(47) Emily Sinico is one of the central characters in Joyce’s short story ‘A Painful Case’ in
Dubliners.
(50) Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 259.
(51) I discuss the short life of Rudy Bloom in Chapter 6.
(52) NLI MS 12, p. [3v].
(53) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS I, p. 1.
(54) The only evidence for Ellen Bloom’s religion is in ‘Circe’, where she appears with a distinctly
Catholic Angus Dei medallion, crying out ‘Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all at all’ (U
417.21–3; U-G 15.289–90). Joyce had established most of this description as an addition on the
episode’s earlier draft (Buffalo MS 19, p. [3v]; see JJA 14: 208 and Herring, Notes and Early
Drafts, 214). See Shari Benstock, ‘Is He a Jew or a Gentile or a Holy Roman?’, JJQ, 16/4 (Summer
1979), 493–7.
(55) NLI NB 5B, p. [10v].
(56) Joyce clearly maintained that the story of Ulysses begins in 1866, the year Leopold Bloom
was born. This is the first year in the chronology he compiled in 1921 (NLI NB 5B, p. [10v]).
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(57) Harvard Pl III-9.ii; see JJA 21: 80 and 77.
(58) Costello, Leopold Bloom: A Biography, 9.
(59) Raleigh, Chronicle, 15.
(60) Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 9.928. In Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back, John Gordon
uses more precise scientific information about the appearance of the nova to argue that Bloom
was born on 12 May 1882 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 138–40. Although
the argument is one of the most ingenious in Gordon’s fascinating book, the date of Bloom’s
birth remains unknown based on the information in Ulysses.
(61) The narrator in ‘Ithaca’ unambiguously states that Molly was born on that date (U 687.25–6;
U-G 17.2275–6), though this cannot be read as a fully reliable pronouncement, as I discuss in
‘Molly’s Birthdate’ in Chapter 4. In general, very little can be taken at face value in this
ostensibly fact-laden episode.
(62) Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Ian Campbell Ross
(ed.) (rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009), and Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1981).
(63) Although there is ongoing debate about this question, Joyce does not specify if the Blooms
are supposed to have lived in Clanbrassil Street Upper or Lower.
(64) Vivien Igoe, The Characters in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin:
Lilliput Press, forthcoming 2016); s.v. Johnston, Rev. Gilmer.
(65) Although Joyce wrote the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft in mid-1921, there is no precise way of telling
how much earlier Joyce had first conceived and elaborated the scene. I presume it was a
relatively early idea.
(66) NLI MS 13, p. [4r].
(70) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS I, p. 1. Raleigh writes that ‘There is some logic for Joyce
having chosen Swords, a village north of Dublin, for the baptism of his hero. “Swords” is an
anglicized [sic] corruption of “Sord,” meaning a pure well, and, in this instance, one which St.
Columcille (Columbanus) is said to have blessed’, Raleigh, Chronicle, 39.
(72) Added on Harvard Pl III-10.ii; see JJA 21: 92.
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(74) Igoe, A Biographical Dictionary; s.v. Malone, Rev. Charles.
(75) This recalls Stephen Dedalus’s exercise in situating himself in the universe at the start of A
Portrait: ‘Then he read the flyleaf from bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was
he: and he read down the page again. What was the universe?’, James Joyce, A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, John Paul
Riquelme (ed.), text edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 2007), see I.298–318.
(76) Buffalo TS 15.c, p. [118v]; see JJA 16: 188.
(78) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS I, p. 1. A very clear note presumably inspired both of these
coordinated references in different episodes: ‘LB at Dame’s school’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 4.104).
(79) See BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 2.18: ‘his soles ache’.
(80) Having taken off his boots when he first entered 7 Eccles Street that evening, it seems
Bloom must have put them back on when he and Stephen went into the back garden.
(82) NLI MS 13, p. [10r].
(83) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 2.49.
(84) NLI MS 13, p. [10r].
(85) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS II, p. 15.
(86) Although just about a year older than Bloom would be in Ulysses, W. B. Yeats entered
Erasmus Smith High School on his return to Dublin in 1881 and was there until 1883. W. K.
Magee (John Eglinton) was also there in 1882–4. This was a well-respected non-denominational
high school. Although most of the students were Church of Ireland, it also included at least three
Jewish boys in 1881. See W. J. R. Wallace, Faithful to our Trust: A History of the Erasmus Smith
Trust and The High School, Dublin (Dublin: Columba Press, 2004), 138.
(87) In 1921, alongside the heading 1880, Joyce wrote: ‘L.B. leaves H.S.’ (NLI NB 5B, p. [10v]),
but on an earlier note he wrote: ‘Bloom leaves High School (1881) at 15’ (BL ‘Circe’ NS 3.98). I
have emended Herring’s transcription here because of the draft usage.
(88) Bloom also thinks of Archimedes’ law in ‘Sirens’ (U 271.06; U-G 11.982) and then again in
‘Nausicaa’ (U 361.02; U-G 13.1142).
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(90) Peter Costello suggests that Bloom’s science teacher was named after the Joyce family’s
‘neighbor in Martello Terrace, the local chemist James Noy Vance, who with his brother owned
premises at 92 Main Street, Bray’, Years of Growth, 90 (for more on this Vance family, see Years
of Growth, 90–2 and elsewhere).
(91) Emphasis added; Harvard Pl 8.i; see JJA 17: 79.
(92) NLI NB 5A, p. [1v].
(93) Emphasis added; Harvard Pl 41.ii and Texas PP 23.3; see JJA 19: 301 and 25: 279. The
following note most likely inspired this addition: ‘red rays longest roygbiv’ (NLI NB 5A, p. [21r]).
(96) Cornell MS 56A, p. 27; see JJA 13: 227.
(97) See Wallace, Faithful to our Trust, chapters VIII–X.
(98) BL ‘Oxen of the Sun’ NS 16.83.
(99) NLI MS 11A, p. [5r].
(100) NLI MS 13, p. [7r].
(101) That this is a new idea on this manuscript is suggested by the physical disposition of the
text on the page and the relatively late notes that prompted this story: ‘parallel bars (H.S.)’ (BL
‘Ithaca’ NS 9.91) and ‘heavy wt. [weight] lifting rings’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 9.90).
(102) See Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS I, pp. 8–9.
(103) NLI MS 13, p. [11r]. The following notes probably inspired this story: ‘LB & boys pissed
high’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 16.54) and ‘LB & SD pissjets (LB palmarius)’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 13.45).
(104) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS II, p. 16.
(105) See Harvard Pl III-9.i and Harvard Pl III-9.ii; see JJA 21: 72 and 80.
(108) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS I, p. [1v].
(109) Bloom’s friend is called Cecil Turnbull here and (he or one of his relatives) Master Donald
Turnbull in ‘Circe’ (U 512.17; U-G 15.336).
(110) Buffalo TS 15.c, p. [4r]; see JJA 16: 05.
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(111) Harvard Pl III-10.ii; see JJA 21: 92.
(112) See NLI MS 13, p. [10r].
(113) Buffalo TS 15.c, p. [45v]; see JJA 16: 60.
(115) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 2.54.
(116) NLI MS 13, p. [4r]
(117) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS I, p. 6.
(118) NLI MS 13, p. [3r].
(119) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS I, pp. 6–7.
(121) Oddly, while Leopold clearly knows and enjoys recalling some of the events in his wife’s life
in Gibraltar, Molly does not recount any stories about her husband’s youth. I discuss Joyce’s
elaboration of Molly’s stories about her youth in Gibraltar in Chapter 4.
(122) Buffalo TS 13.h, p. [10r]; see JJA 15: 317.
(123) NLI MS 12, pp. [22v]–[23v].
(124) NLI MS 12, p. [21r].
(125) NLI MS 12, p. [22v]. John Henry Raleigh points out that Joyce gets his dates wrong here
(Chronicle, 38). Bloom was fourteen the year he left high school, but Joyce dates the event as
taking place when Bloom ‘was only sixteen’ on the Rosenbach ‘Circe’ manuscript and never
changed it. This is another indication of Joyce’s only partial commitment to maintaining an
accurate chronological scheme for his characters’ lives.
(126) NLI MS 12, p. [23v].
(127) NLI MS 12, p. [23v].
(129) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 12, p. [23v].
(130) Rosenbach ‘Circe’ MS, f. 51b.
(132) NLI MS 11A, p. [5r]. Readers only find out about Bloom’s first sexual encounter in the first
edition of Ulysses because this part of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ was not published in the Little Review.
Page 44 of 46
(133) BL ‘Oxen of the Sun’ NS 8.70–1.
(134) NLI MS 11A, p. [5r].
(135) NLI MS 11A, p. [6r]. These lines were based in part on the following significant note:
‘Coition illusion of strength’ (BL ‘Oxen of the Sun’ NS 16.25).
(137) Thom’s, 1917.
(138) NLI Quinn MS, f. [13r].
(139) BL ‘Circe’ NS 1.52–3.
(141) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 11A, p. [5r].
(142) The correction ‘for 1882 read 1886’ was added (not in Joyce’s or Harriet Shaw Weaver’s
hand) on the manuscript listed as ‘Errata Included in 2nd Printing’ in the JJA (BL MS 57356, f.
33; see JJA 12: 212), and then it is included in the Errata for the fourth impression of Ulysses, p.
735, as well (see JJA 12: 220).
(144) Emphasis added; NLI MS 13, p. [5v]; see BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 11.21.
(145) This crux has vexed several critics over the decades. Joyce may have made Bloom
motivated by the mistaken idea that there was a British government reward for solving this
problem. Since it had no practical application, the idea that there was a prize for its solution was
merely a popular myth. Furthermore, as Hugh Kenner was the first to point out, it would make
more sense for Bloom to work on solving this problem in 1882 because that was the year the
problem was finally proven to be ‘simply impossible’. There are reasons to quibble about the
change of dates in ‘Circe’ in the Gabler edition, but the fact remains that at one point Joyce did
want the dates to coincide, which demonstrates the effort he made in some instances to make
the chronology of his characters’ lives consistent. See Hugh Kenner, Ulysses, Appendix 3: ‘The
Circle and Three Nines’ (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins Press, revised edition, 1987),
166–8.
(146) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS II, pp. 17–18.
(147) Texas PP 42.1; see JJA 27: 191.
(148) Simplified transcription; Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS II, pp. [17v]–18.
(149) NLI MS 13, p. [15r].
(150) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 3.04.
Page 45 of 46
(151) Emphasis added; Harvard Pl III-11.ii; see JJA 21: 111.
(152) In his 1921 chronology, Joyce maintains that Stephen Dedalus was also born in 1882. In
fact, ‘S D n [nato]’ is the only item listed for that year (NLI NB 5B, p. [10v]), though the day and
month are not specified, just as with Leopold Bloom.
(153) Although Joyce most likely had recourse to one or more sources for this specific
information, there are no traces of his research in his surviving notebooks. Nonetheless, for
further information, see Proceedings in Connection with the Visit to Dublin of the Marquess of
Ripon, K. G. and the Right Hon. John Morley, M.P. 1st to 3rd February, 1888 (Dublin: Browne
and Nolan, 1888); cited in Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 17.1653.
(154) ‘Eumeo’ MS, p. [18v].
(155) NLI NB 5A, p. [15v].
(156) See BL ‘Eumaeus’ NS 1.103.
(157) Buffalo TS 14.a.i, p. [27r]; see JJA 15: 398.
(158) Buffalo PP 38.1; see JJA 27: 109. Joyce, of course, is referring to William Edward ‘Buckshot’
Forster, who was Irish Chief Secretary from May 1880 to May 1882, but that is how Joyce
spelled the surname and he never indicated that it should be changed. This might not be so
surprising since much of the information in this episode is purposely ambiguous and sometimes
patently inaccurate.
(160) NLI MS 13, p. [5r].
(161) BL ‘Circe’ NS 2.147.
Page 46 of 46
Marion Tweedy—Becoming Molly


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
1870–86
Luca Crispi
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.003.0004

This chapter unwinds Molly Bloom’s rambling thoughts about her childhood and adolescence in
Gibraltar, as well as the complex networks of Leopold and Molly’s private and sometimes shared
memories of her early life. By the start of 1918 Joyce had established most of the information
there is about her father, but only four years later made concerted rounds of additions so that
the stories about him might resonate more substantially. Surprisingly, he wrote all of the few
references to Molly’s mother at the last possible moment before Ulysses was published. As well
as adding layers of descriptive details in ‘Penelope’ about Gibraltar, Joyce also intensified the
explicitly physical aspects of Molly’s awakening sexuality. Typical of her contradictory attitudes,
Molly’s uncertainty about her first lover emphasizes the seeming commensurability of her
attitude towards the men in her life in contrast to her relatively clear memories of Leopold’s first
kiss on Howth.
Keywords: adolescent memories, representation of sexuality, awakening feminine sexuality, private and shared
memories, faulty memory
Molly’s beginnings
Molly’s mysterious mother: Lunita Laredo
21 June 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl 19.i
Page 1 of 36
11. ‘Sirens’:
Early 1919 Later Draft NLI MS 9, p. [10r]
June 1919 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, f. 25
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [2v]–[3r]
Whereas Stephen Dedalus’s preoccupation with his mother (as well as the more abstract issues
of maternity) dominates his representations in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and
Ulysses, the Blooms do not share such maternal fixations. Although this may seem to be at odds
with much of Joyce’s writings from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, their apparent lack of concern
about their mothers is partly due to the basic fact that Joyce only conceived of both Leopold
Bloom’s and Molly Tweedy’s mothers after he had already written so much else about their lives.
In this respect, their mothers are afterthoughts to the life-stories of Ulysses. From the start,
fathers play a much more determining role in the construction of the soon-to-be-Blooms than
their mothers. In the same way that Joyce created Rudolph Virag Bloom years before Ellen
Higgins Bloom,1 he had established most of the facts about Molly’s father, Brian Tweedy, many
years before he conjured up the stories about her mother. But the situation with Lunita Laredo
is much more extreme: Joyce included her as an addendum to stories in Ulysses at the last
possible moment before the book was published.
We discover almost everything we know about Molly’s mother at the end of the book in
‘Penelope’. Furthermore, Joyce added all of the references to her on the (p.109) episode’s fifth
and final proof level in the last week of January 1922, just days before Ulysses appeared. Given
the very late date of these crucial additions to the life of Marion Tweedy (when the final
production of the book was almost complete), Joyce simply did not have the opportunity to add
any other information about Molly’s mother in the previous episodes. Therefore, we have no
sense of what Bloom may think about Molly’s maternal ancestry, except that throughout
Bloomsday he takes pride in her mixed Spanish heritage. References to her alluring ‘Spanish
eyes’ recur several times in Ulysses. For example, Bloom is most particularly proud of Molly’s
continental inheritance in ‘Eumaeus’ when he describes her to Stephen: ‘My wife is, so to speak,
Spanish, half that is. […] She has the Spanish type. Quite dark, regular brunette, black. I for one
certainly believe climate accounts for character’ (U 592.03–7; U-G 16.876–80). But earlier in the
day, as Bloom sets out to have Molly’s skin lotion made up again at Sweny’s pharmacy, he
recalls a romantic scene between them and thinks about her foreign origins:
Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me, the sheet up to her eyes,
^+Spanish,+^ ^smelling herself,^ when I was fixing the links in my cuffs.
(U 81.24–6; U-G 5.494–5)
The first addition on the (now missing) typescript of ‘Lotus Eaters’ emphasizes Molly’s sexuality,
while the later one, on the episode’s first proof level,2 reinforces the point that she is not Irish.
In fact, as becomes clearer as Ulysses proceeds, Molly has a continental background, and, like
Page 2 of 36
Bloom, she is from a mixed marriage. Joyce had already determined that Molly had Spanish
blood, and that this aspect of her background is particularly evident in her eyes as early as 1919
on the later draft of ‘Sirens’,3 almost three years before he provided any actual, specific
information about the mother from whom Molly gets her ‘Spanishy eyes’ (U 264.19; U-G 11.732–
3).4
Joyce has Molly introduce a strong sense of suspicion about her mother the first time she
remembers her in ‘Penelope’, and presumably he did this to undermine Bloom’s satisfaction with
his wife’s maternal origins. As an addition on the episode’s fifth proof level, Joyce has her
reflect: ‘he [Bloom] thinks nothing can happen without him knowing ^he hadnt an idea about my
mother till we were engaged otherwise hed never have got me so cheap as he did^’ (U 697.26–
8; U-G 18.281–4).5 The basic context for the introduction of Molly’s thoughts here began with
the night Bartell d’Arcy kissed her ‘on the choir stairs after I sang Gounods Ave Maria’ and
concludes with the extended story of the afternoon when Bloom kissed her ‘in the eye of my
glove’ as they rode along alone in a carriage when they were first courting (U 697.18–31; U-G
18.274–86).6 The couple’s separate (but in Molly’s mind at (p.110) least related) peccadillos
were all part of a single, though expanding storyline on the episode’s draft,7 although Joyce
continued to make additions to it at various stages that complicates the logic of her associations.
Readers can never be sure what was amiss with Molly’s mother. Whether it is something to do
with her social status or her ethnic background (or both) as has been variously argued—or
something else entirely—cannot be determined from the information available in Ulysses. It
seems clear that Joyce purposely did not include sufficient information to make certain facts
about Molly’s mother clear to the reader. She remains one of the many enigmas in the book, but
there are a few more details about her in ‘Penelope’. The next time Molly thinks of Lunita
Laredo is in the context of the ‘lovely’ name her mother had:
or those awful names with bottom in them Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of a
bottom Mulvey I wouldnt go mad about either or suppose I divorced him Mrs Boylan ^my
mother whoever she was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the
lovely one she had ^<Luna> Lunita^ Laredo^
(U 712.22–6; see U-G 18.844–8)8
Coming midway through the final episode of the book, Molly’s mother’s name is not merely a
late discovery for readers of Ulysses. This too was a very late addition on the same last proof
level at the end of January 1921. In fact, Joyce made both of these additions more or less in
tandem with all of the other specific references to Molly’s mother that appear in the book.9
Beautiful as her name may be, there is very little else that we know about Lunita Laredo,
‘whoever she was’. Nonetheless, there is some more tantalizing, though fundamentally vague,
information about her a little later in Ulysses. When Molly remembers what had attracted Bloom
to her ‘the first night ever we met’, she thinks, ‘I suppose on account of my being jewess looking
after my mother’ (U 721.13–16; U-G 18.1182–5).10 Although this revelation has provoked a good
deal of speculation about whether Molly’s mother may have been a Spanish Jew or not,11 there
just is not enough information in Ulysses to settle the question. It could simply be that Molly
Page 3 of 36
recognizes that her exotic Mediterranean appearance makes her look Eastern to Leopold and his
fellow Dubliners, which would presumably have been a further lure for him.
The final reference to Molly’s mother in Ulysses suggests that she either died or left the family
when her daughter was very young, although we have no specific details about this sad news.
Again this new information was part of the final cluster of additions about Lunita Laredo that
Joyce made on the final proofs of ‘Penelope’, but it was sent to the printers so late (possibly by
mail or phone) that it barely made it into the published work. Thinking about Stephen’s current
motherless state (a storyline that was already on the episode’s draft), she thinks, ‘where would
(p.111) they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them ^what I never
had^’ (see U 728.05–6; U-G 18.1441–2).12
Superficial as they are, the few facts we have about Molly’s mother are among the clearest
examples of a very late idea that has a fundamental and transformative impact on our reading of
the published work. It is also evident that Joyce preferred to leave many of the facts about
Molly’s mother a mystery to readers: since, if he had wanted to clarify the situation, he obviously
could have done so, as he made all of these separate additions at the same time.
‘Major’ Brian Tweedy

A daughter of the regiment
4. ‘Calypso’:
February 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, f. 2
Mid-June–2 August 1921 Second Proof Level Buffalo PP 4.1
11. ‘Sirens’:
Late 1917–Early 1919 Earlier Draft and Fragments NLI MS 7B, p. [10r]
Early January 1919 Later Draft NLI MS 9, p. [7r]
August 1919 Serial Publication Little Review, VI.4, p. 54
By the end of February 1918, Joyce had established almost everything we know about Molly’s
father, which was about four years before he included Lunita Laredo in the stories of Ulysses. It
was a revelation to discover that the very first mention of Molly in an extant manuscript was in
an episode that would end up in the middle of the book. Although brief and undeveloped, the
men’s banter in the Ormond Bar on the recently discovered earlier ‘Sirens’ draft specifically
links her to her father.13 But readers of Ulysses know the final version of the dialogue in this
form:
— What’s this her name was? A buxom lassy. Marion …
— Tweedy.
— Yes. Is she alive?
— And kicking.
— She was a daughter of …
— Daughter of the regiment.
— Yes, begad. I remember the old drummajor.
Page 4 of 36
Mr Dedalus struck, whizzed, lit, puffed savoury puff after

— Irish? I don’t know, faith. Is she, Simon?
Puff after stiff, a puff, strong, savoury, crackling.
— Buccinator muscle … What? … Bit rusty … O, she is … My Irish
(p.112)
Molly, O.
He puffed a pungent plumy blast.
— From the rock of Gibraltar … all the way.
(U 258.17–28; see U-G 11.502–15)
The context of the story was always the memorably humorous night of ‘professor’ Goodwin’s
Mansion House concert, but Joyce’s ideas on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft were much more tentative
and even more vague than they are in Ulysses. At that stage, Father Cowley has a great deal
more trouble remembering the young singer’s name than the men do in the published versions.
At first, Cowley remembers her name as ‘Marie Fallon’, but Joyce changed her surname right
away, cancelling ‘Fallon’ and writing ‘Powell’ right next to it. Even though Joyce most likely
always planned this as a story about Molly, naming her as she is generally known in the book
does not seem to have been his principal concern at this early juncture. In fact, the name Fallon
does not appear anywhere in Ulysses, so it is likely that Joyce just used it as a temporary
placeholder as he focused on elaborating the details of the men’s gossipy story about an
attractive singer. The immediate change of the character’s name to Powell (though still Marie,
for some reason) links this indistinct singer to one of the models for Molly’s father: ‘Major’
Powell.14 This kind of mutability in the text is one of the many indications that this story was still
relatively new and very fluid at this early stage. It is also evidence that, in general, Joyce was
more concerned with the dynamics of storytelling, rather than the consistent development of his
characters in Ulysses, even that of Molly Tweedy Bloom.
As Joyce continued to elaborate the scene on the episode’s earlier draft, at some stage he added
a key element that he squeezed into the small open space between two lines of dialogue: Simon
Dedalus sings the line ‘My Irish Molly O’.15 It seems that this prompted Joyce to make three
further, interrelated and fundamental additions in the left margin of this manuscript page: ‘From
rock of Gibraltar’, ‘soldier’s daughter’, and possibly as the last item: ‘a buxom piece’. Having
established these essential descriptive attributes of Molly and her father, the story is almost as
it will appear in the Little Review and later in Ulysses.16 Joyce has now determined all the
dialogue and almost all the elements of this scene. Typical of Joyce’s writing practice, the
change of the character’s name was the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place. On the later
‘Sirens’ draft, she is clearly named Marion Tweedy, and the ‘ôld^ father’ is the well-
remembered ‘^drum^major’.17 This apparently hasty addition is the first indication of this
aspect of the history of Brian Tweedy. It seems that demoting Molly’s father to a drum-major is
probably an instance of Joyce piling up musical allusions in ‘Sirens’, rather than a deliberate
decision about a biographical fact about the character. Joyce most likely changed Tweedy’s rank
to chime with the title of Jacques Offenbach’s opéra comique (La fille du tambour-major),
thereby giving precedence to stylistic or thematic considerations over the development of
character traits and construction.
Page 5 of 36
(p.113) One of the reasons why so much of the story about Marion Tweedy’s father became
stabilized on the later ‘Sirens’ draft is that, in the meantime, Joyce had written (or rewritten)
quite a bit more about ‘old Tweedy’ in other, earlier episodes. Bloom thinks of him at the
beginning of ‘Calypso’, and various thoughts about his father-in-law recur to him throughout the
day. Since Tweedy’s character is well established on the Rosenbach manuscript of ‘Calypso’,18
we know that Joyce had settled on most of the facts about his life-story by February 1918, if not
sooner. As Bloom heads out the door of 7 Eccles Street at the start of the episode, Molly rolls
over in bed and we read that the ‘loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled’ (U 54.31; U-G 4.59).
Although he has been remiss so far, Bloom reminds himself to have them ‘settled’ (U 54.32; U-G
4.60). Their marital bed brings to mind his wife’s foreign origins. Like Molly, the squeaky bed is
‘All the way from Gibraltar. […] Wonder what her father paid for it’ (U 54.32–3; U-G 4.60–1). The
motif and the language in ‘Calypso’ function as direct back and forth echoes (both temporally
and textually) of the description of Molly in ‘Sirens’.
This was the extent of Bloom’s chain of thoughts on the first extant ‘Calypso’ manuscript at the
start of 1918. But three and a half years later (and after Joyce had rewritten ‘Penelope’ many
times), he inserted a curt criticism of Molly on the second proof level of ‘Calypso’ (that I elided
in the quotation), thereby interrupting the connection between Bloom’s thoughts and his
reflections about the bed and about her father: ‘[…] Gibraltar. ^Forgotten any little Spanish she
knew.^ Wonder […]’ (U 54.32–3; U-G 4.60–1).19 This is the first indication in Ulysses of Molly’s
continental background, though the references build up consistently throughout the book. They
pop up variously and, of course, culminate in Molly’s vivid and rambling reminiscences of
Gibraltar in ‘Penelope’, but as we will see, it took Joyce a great deal of time and effort to make
the descriptions of Molly as a young woman as rich as they are in Ulysses.
In ‘Calypso’, Bloom’s thoughts return to his father-in-law and his characteristic habits and
mannerisms:
Old style. Ah yes, of course. Bought it at the governor’s auction. Got a short knock. Hard
as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. Ât Plevna that was.^ I rose from the ranks,
sir, and I’m proud of it. Still he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now
that was farseeing.
(U 54.33–7; see U-G 4.61–5)
As with most of the stories about Molly’s father (and her life generally) in the earlier episodes of
Ulysses, Joyce had written this association of memories, just as it appears in the book, at the
start of 1918, on the Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ manuscript, four years before Ulysses was published.
Although Joyce made the notable addition of the reference to Plevna on the Rosenbach ‘Calypso’
manuscript, after that he did not alter Bloom’s remembrance in any way.20 There are actually
only just a few basic stories (p.114) about Tweedy in Ulysses and they are all about the Blooms’
marriage bed that he bought in Gibraltar, his supposed valour in battle at Plevna, and his
presumed cunning in cornering the market in some stamps.21 It is interesting to discover that all
of the information Bloom has (and so much of what we know) about these aspects of Tweedy’s
life is both vague and most often inaccurate. Unsurprisingly, Joyce left it to Molly to set the
record straight at the end of the book. While apparently correct about Tweedy’s success in
Page 6 of 36
stamps, Bloom is wrong both about the origins of the bed and of his father-in-law having taken
part in the battles of the Siege at Plevna.
The Gibraltar bedstead, Plevna, and Tweedy’s stamps
15. ‘Circe’:
September 1921 Additional Manuscript for Typescript Buffalo MS 20, p. [2r]
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, pp. [6r] and [8r]
29 December 1921–Early January 1922 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl III-10.ii
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. 3 and 22
16 August–Mid-October 1921 Typescript Huntington TS, p. 21
2–Early November 1921 First Proof Level Texas Pl D.i.c
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iii
24–Late November 1921 Fifth Proof Level Texas PP 45.1
Old Tweedy’s dowry gift is one of the oldest stories Joyce established for Ulysses. In one of the
earliest surviving notebooks that Joyce compiled specifically for his work on Ulysses, he wrote:
‘Bed given by her father’.22 Later Joyce settled on a much more significant reason for the bed’s
importance in the Tweedy and Bloom households: ‘Hist. [History] of LB’s bed. Molly conceived
there’.23 (p.115) The Blooms’ marital bed is the centre of their home in 7 Eccles Street. Molly
spends most of her time in Ulysses in it, and, of course, it is also where Molly and Hugh ‘Blazes’
Boylan first consummate their passion. The bedstead is also where husband and wife reunite at
the end of a long and eventful Bloomsday.
In general, Bloom only has positive feelings about the bed, particularly because of its seemingly
aristocratic origins. But, as she is about most topics in ‘Penelope’, Molly herself is of two minds
about it. On the one hand, she complains: ‘Im sick of Cohens old bed in any case’ (U 729.25–6; U-
G 18.1498–9), which Molly was already thinking about on the episode’s draft.24 On the other
hand, earlier in the episode she confessed, ‘O I like my bed’ (U 722.08–9; U-G 18.1215), which
Joyce added later on the last of three copies of the episode’s first proof level of ‘Penelope’,25
presumably as yet another element in his strategy to emphasize Molly’s contradictory nature.
Although Joyce had already established Molly’s dissatisfaction with her bed, he had Molly reveal
her reasons after he completed the draft. Besides adding the only other reference to Cohen, he
also added the following line before the memory appeared on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript: ‘the lumpy old jingly bed âlways reminds me of old Cohen I suppose he scratched
himself in it often enough^’ (U 722.05–7; U-G 18.1213–15).26 There is nothing else in Ulysses
about the itchy man who owned the bed before Tweedy did. But, as Joyce made that all-
Page 7 of 36
important final round of additions to ‘Penelope’ (and so to the book), he made two further
interrelated additions that reveal other aspects about the bed, and together they alter Molly’s
and Leopold’s interactions as husband and wife. He wrote: ‘and he [Bloom] thinks father bought
it from Lord Napier ^that I used to admire when I was a little girl^ because I told him’ (U
722.07–8; U-G 18.1213–15).27 Until this final juncture there was no suggestion that her
childhood respect for the Governor of Gibraltar prompted her to lie about the bed to her
husband for over sixteen years. The effect of noting that these aspects were very late additions
to the story of Tweedy’s bed inevitably nuances our opinions of Molly as a character in Ulysses.
For example, her deceit about the bed might serve to counterbalance the various white lies
Bloom tells his wife. Although Molly feels she can claim earlier in the episode that ‘he [Bloom]
cant say I pretend things can he Im too honest as a matter of fact’ (U 717.06–7; U-G 18.1019–
20), Joyce worked diligently to insert contradictory statements and sentiments in Molly’s
discourse, purposely undermining her credibility and compromising her ethical stance.
As for Plevna, there were four major battles between the joint Russian and Romanian armies and
the Ottomans during the siege of the Bulgarian city in 1877–8. Although it is clear from Ulysses
that Tweedy was an aficionado of the siege, as others have noted before, it is virtually
impossible that the ‘Major’ could have taken part in any campaigns there; in fact, the British
were officially neutral in the conflict.28 Nonetheless, stories about the battles of the siege of the
city were fixed (p.116) in the text as something Bloom associates with Tweedy from at least
1918. Then Joyce added several more references to it about three years later, reinforcing the
narrative strand, and making this storyline seem more significant to readers than it had been
previously. In the summer of 1921, just as he was reworking ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’, Joyce
included a brief mention to a battle at Plevna as part of the ‘Messianic Scene’ in ‘Circe’ (U
457.13; U-G 15.1529).29 His work on the later episodes was probably fresh in his mind as he
wrote this late additional inset for the proofs of ‘Circe’.
In fact, the two mentions of Plevna in ‘Ithaca’ reveal why the battle was of particular interest to
Tweedy and then to Bloom. They both appear in rudimentary forms on the episode’s proto-draft,
and are related to a book that Tweedy probably borrowed but never returned to the garrison
library in Gibraltar, which then took up a special place on Bloom’s bookshelves. It seems that
the source of everything that they both know about the famous battles at Plevna was from some
book on the ‘History of the Russo-Turkish War’ (see U 661.23–5; U-G 17.1385–7). The idea for
the book was also something inspired by one of Joyce’s notes: ‘Books: Hist of Turko-Russian
War’.30 Unusually, although Joyce listed the book on the proto-draft,31 it then dropped out of the
text by the time the catalogue next appears in the manuscript record. Joyce only restored it
about six months later, but he did not know much else about the book except its title when he
added it again on the second proof level.32 This is clear from the fact that he attributed the book
to a certain unidentified, though more Irish-sounding writer vaguely named ‘Hardiman’. Later
on, Joyce must have looked up the reference and found the name of an author who wrote a
similarly-titled book, H. M. Hozier. He also added all the fictional bibliographic details about the
book on the third proof level.33 The book is also referred to as part of what was always going to
be a futile mnemotechnic exercise, which first appears on the proto-draft (U 662.26–663.02; U-G
17.1421–5),34 and another one of Joyce’s notes explains why the effort to get the book was
always intended to be futile: ‘LB takes book to remember at once remembers’.35
Page 8 of 36
Nonetheless, Molly gets the last word on her father’s obsession with the siege when she recalls
‘Captain Groves and father talking about Rorkes drift and Pleva and sir Garnet Wolseley and
Gordon at Khartoum’ (U 708.20–2; see U-G 18.690–1). Joyce inserted the reference to Plevna in
Molly’s reminiscences on the typescript,36 and clearly wanted to make sure he had Molly recall
her father’s hobbyhorse and noted it: ‘Tweedy talking Plevna’.37 This is a telling note because
the evidence suggests that while Bloom correctly remembers this recurrent topic of
conversation, he was either misremembering or imaginatively mocking Tweedy’s supposed
claim: ‘Yes, sir. At Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I’m proud of it’ (U 54.35–6; U-
G 4.63–4).38
(p.117) Although it is the most lucrative and presumably the only accurate instance of his
father-in-law’s notable feats that the Blooms recall, Tweedy’s foresight in buying stamps is the
least-often mentioned motif related to him in Ulysses. After Joyce had written Bloom’s first
version of the story in ‘Calypso’, he did not include any other references to Tweedy’s business
cunning until about four years later, when he added Molly’s point of view on the matter in
‘Penelope’. On the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, she thinks of ‘those richlooking green and
yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the opera hats’ (U 693.24–6; U-G
18.128–9),39 but, on the episode’s third proof level, Joyce simply inserted an allusion to her
father’s passion for stamps, in an otherwise unrelated story about those exotic drinks that she
‘tasted once with my finger dipped out of that American that had the squirrel talking stamps
with father’ (U 693.26–7; U-G 18.129–30).40 This late and tangential mention of Molly’s father
does not add much information about him, but it does help to bind together the stories that are
told, and reinforces the remarkable semblance of unity and totality in Ulysses. Molly’s more
significant reflection is that her Irish accent was ‘all father left me in spite of his stamps’ (U
713.26–7; U-G 18.890), which Joyce added on that same fifth and final proof level of ‘Penelope’,
together with her recognition of her most prized maternal inheritance: ‘Ive my mothers eyes and
figure anyhow’ (U 713.27; U-G 18.890–1).41
Bloom’s other memories of old Tweedy
6. ‘Hades’:
February–May 1918 Mixed Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 3
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
November 1919–January 1920 Draft Cornell MS 56B, p. 30
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, pp. [8r] and [9v]
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Blue MS I, p. [0v]
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, p. 16
Page 9 of 36
(p.118) Bloom’s often seemingly disjointed associations are a hallmark of Ulysses, and readers
slowly become acquainted with the various ways he thinks as the book unfolds. For example, as
he walks along Eccles and then Upper Dorset Streets, Bloom conjures up a scene of a stranger
walking along a strand who comes to a city gate where he encounters a sentry on duty. Bloom
then imaginatively transforms the vision of the ‘old ranker’ into that of his father-in-law and
renders the vision with ‘old Tweedy’s big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of spear’ (U
55.21–2; U-G 4.86–8).
In the next episode, Bloom’s thoughts return to Molly’s father at a telling juncture. As he puts
away a clandestine letter that has been waiting for him at the Westland Row post office, it seems
that his attention is drawn to the Imperial recruiting posters on the walls that he has seen there
before.42 On the earliest known version of the scene, the narrator introduces Bloom’s thoughts
in this way:
He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket, reviewing again the soldiers on parade.
^Where’s old Tweedy’s regiment? ^bearskin cap and hackle plume.^ No, he’s a
grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is: royal Dublin fusiliers.^ Redcoats. Too showy. That
must be why the women go after them.
(see U 70.01–4; U-G 5.65–9)43
Joyce linked the more general political overtones of Bloom’s thoughts about Imperial forces
directly to his family with the first longer addition on the Rosenbach manuscript as indicated.
Since the Grenadiers and Fusiliers did in fact have similar uniforms, Joyce must have done some
further research on British regimental uniforms and noted that they are distinguishable by their
caps as well as their cuffs. So a relatively short time later on the same manuscript page, he
embedded another, more specific addition that serves to clarify Bloom’s confusion (indicated in
bold in the transcription). From the start, the associations in Bloom’s thoughts were about how
men in uniform generally seem to attract women. Initially, the point was more about the
negative moral impact of the British soldiers in Ireland, but Joyce then connected this issue with
Bloom’s own family and their place in the Empire more specifically. This is an exemplary
instance of the way Joyce began with a larger thematic concern and then only later anchored it
in the lives of his characters.
Thoughts of Tweedy recur to Bloom in the next episode as well. In ‘Hades’, as Bloom tries to
distract himself from the troublesome conversation that has arisen in the carriage about
Boylan’s management of Molly’s concert tour, Joyce added another connection with Molly’s
father on the episode’s second proof level: ‘Same (p.119) house as Molly’s namesake, Tweedy,
crown solicitor for Waterford’ (U 90.17; U-G 6.232–4).44 On the one hand, as with the references
to Bloom the dentist, having Bloom think of another Dubliner with the same surname as his
father-in-law provides another of the book’s structuring parallels. On the other hand, Joyce was
presumably trying to emphasize the fact that, as Bloom tries to avoid the painful thoughts about
his current home life, a wide range of associations can bring Molly back to his mind.
Bloom’s later memory of Tweedy (particularly the connection between father and daughter)
presents another significant parallel. Although it first appears on the ‘Nausicaa’ draft, in Ulysses
Bloom thinks: ‘And the old major, partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only child, I an
Page 10 of 36
only child’ (U 360.07; U-G 13.1108–9).45 But the mentions of Tweedy and Molly in ‘Cyclops’ (U
306.20–3; U-G 12.1003–7), in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (U 389.07; U-G 14.915–16), as well as all of his
various hallucinatory appearances in ‘Circe’, are all derivative of the basic stories about them
told elsewhere. In contrast, the several references to the father and daughter in ‘Ithaca’ add
more depth to the stories. For example, it seems that the son-in-law is as loquacious as old
Tweedy. As part of a set of questions and answers that Joyce added to the Rosenbach
manuscript,46 we read that Bloom’s discussion with Stephen about the effects of artificial
lighting on the city’s trees recalls similar debates many years before:
In 1888 frequently with major Brian Tweedy and his daughter Miss Marion Tweedy,
together and separately on the lounge in Matthew Dillon’s house in Roundtown.
(U 620.28–30; U-G 17.55–7)
This makes a nice counterpoint to Molly’s unkind statement later on: ‘like all the things he told
father he was going to do and me but I saw through him’ (U 716.07–8; U-G 18.983–4), which first
appears on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript.47 Finally, besides the ‘oblong trunk’ with old
Tweedy’s initials (see U 682.17–19; U-G 17.2097–100), which Joyce had placed in their bedroom
on the episode’s proto-draft,48 Bloom also thinks of a more enduring inheritance Molly has from
her father. In answer to the most simplistic (and just temporary formulation) of the question
‘(resembled) Whom’ on the proto-draft, the answer is:
Her late father, Major Brian Tweedy.
In the jaws and in facial expression.
(see U 682.01–3; U-G 17.2081–3)49
This early version is a more basic rendition of these facts and also less detached than the one we
read in Ulysses, and so is a fitting end to the discussion of Molly (p.120) and her father. It is
remarkable that there is no further information in Ulysses about Tweedy after the Blooms
married.
Molly’s birthdate: 8 September 1870 or 1871?
January–July 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 15 and 27
February-March 1919 Serial Publication Little Review, V.10-11, p. 60
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Page 11 of 36
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, p. [3v]
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iii
The day and month of Molly’s birth have never been in doubt, but figuring out the year she was
born turns out to be a much more troublesome issue. On 16 June Bloom reminds himself that her
birthday is just a few months away on 8 September. Therefore, possible gifts are on his mind in
‘Lestrygonians’, and Molly thinks about what she would like as well in ‘Penelope’. As he walks
along Grafton Street at midday, Bloom comes up with a solution to a recurring problem in his
life. It seems that Molly has an unpleasant habit of leaving pins ‘all over the place’ so he thinks:
‘Pincushions. I’m a long time threatening to buy one’ (U 160.24; U-G 8.625–6). Then, as he looks
at the almost healed scrape on his left forearm caused by some misadventure with an unseen
pin, he tries to decide when he should give it to her: ‘Not today anyhow. Must go back for that
lotion. For her birthday perhaps. Junejulyaugseptember eighth. Nearly three months off’, but
then he reconsiders the matter and comes to the sensible conclusion: ‘Then she mightn’t like
it’ (U-G 8.627–30; see U 160.26–9). Except for the flow of the months that Joyce combined fully
as one word as he prepared the episode for the Little Review,50 everything about Molly’s
birthdate was already on its Rosenbach manuscript.51 Similarly kind but unproductive thoughts
return to Bloom later on in the episode: ‘Work basket I could buy Molly’s birthday. Hates
sewing. Might take an objection’ (U 173.23–4; see U-G 8.1119–20). Again, except for a slight
stylistic modification for its appearance in the Little Review,52 Bloom’s concern with Molly’s
upcoming birthday was already on the Rosenbach manuscript.53
(p.121) Molly confirms her birthdate at the start of ‘Penelope’ when she recalls a thoughtful
gift Bloom had once given her: ‘when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th’ (U
698.37–699.01; see U-G 18.329–30). Joyce added Molly’s echo about her birthday on the
episode’s third proof level,54 about three years after he had written the other references to it in
‘Lestrygonians’. The symbolic significance of the gift of poppies, rather than any other flower for
her birthday, is open to interpretation. Similarly, it is not clear why Joyce would make Molly
appear confused about her birthstone. In ‘Penelope’ she thinks: ‘if I only had ^<the> a^ ring
with the stone for my month a nice aquamarine Ill stick him [Boylan] for one and a gold
bracelet’, which Joyce included as part of the last-minute round of additions on the fifth and final
proof level of Ulysses (see U 697.05–7; U-G 18.261–2).55 Traditionally, aquamarine is the
birthstone for October, while chrysolite is the one for September.56 In general, that is all we
discover about Molly’s birthdate in Ulysses, but it seems clear that Joyce chose it to coincide
with the Catholic Church’s celebration of the feast day of the nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
If we are certain about Molly’s birthday, determining the year in which she was born is a more
complicated matter, and there are several reasons for this basic ambiguity. On the one hand,
Joyce had determined that Molly is responsible for the confusion, but it seems that she plays
only a small part in the muddle. On the other hand, though absolutely clear, upon closer
inspection the narrator’s statement of Molly’s birthdate in ‘Ithaca’ is much less reliable than it
appears to be. As Joyce was preparing to rewrite ‘Penelope’, he made a point of noting that ‘MB
mistakes her age’,57 which was probably the direct prompt for an addition on the episode’s
Page 12 of 36
draft. Molly’s various calculations about her age remained virtually unchanged from the draft to
Ulysses: ‘for the 4 years more I have of life up to 35 no Im what am I at all Ill be 33 in
September’ (U 702.33–4; U-G 18.474–5). But, unusually for him, Joyce left out something
revealing from her thoughts when he prepared the next version. He wrote almost all of Ulysses
through the accretion and elaboration of his text. In fact, he almost always added facts and
details to what he had already written. Since Joyce rarely deleted something once he had written
it, when some text does drop out it can be quite significant. In this case, there was a twist on the
episode’s draft that is absent when the rest of the line next appears on its Rosenbach
manuscript. The last clause of her thoughts ended on the draft with her resigned reflection: ‘O
well up to forty’.58 This consideration makes Molly seem much more comfortable with aging
than she is in Ulysses.
The point of Joyce’s note is that Molly would make herself seem younger by briefly mistaking her
current age as 31, but then she corrects it. Molly admits that (p.122) she will actually be 33 on
her next birthday. If we take her at her word, then she is in fact 32 years old on 16 June 1904,
which would mean that she was born in 1871. Nonetheless, readers and critics have usually
given greater credence to the narrator of ‘Ithaca’ who unambiguously states that Molly was born
on ‘8 September 1870’ (U 687.25–6; U-G 17.2275–6). This statement is well established on the
Rosenbach manuscript,59 but it may simply be one of the many factual inconsistencies that
pepper that particular episode. Several other references bolster Molly’s statement of her age in
‘Penelope’. For example, in ‘Lestrygonians’ Bloom confirms the relation between their
respective ages. Before he thinks of the various birthday gifts he might get her, his thoughts
return to one of the most constant themes in the episode and in the book. When the memory
first appears in print, Bloom wonders:
I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She twentythree.
Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just
beginning then. Would you?
(see U 160.08–11; U-G 8.608–12)60
According to Bloom there is a five-year difference in age between them, and since he was
certainly born in 1866, Molly must have been born in 1871. Here Bloom is thinking back to a
happier time for the couple before the tragic death of their son Rudy.61 But there is still more
paratextual evidence corroborating Molly’s statement of her age. In a partial chronology of
Ulysses that Joyce compiled in 1921, he noted that the story of Ulysses begins in 1866, the year
Leopold Bloom was born. Then on the same list, he wrote ‘M.B. n. [nata]’ for 1871.62 If this late
chronology was not clear enough about these basic facts, while writing ‘Penelope’, Joyce put the
matter as simply as possible to his confidant Frank Budgen: ‘Molly Bloom was born 1871’.63
While the majority of both internal and external evidence supports Molly’s statement of her age,
it contradicts the only unequivocal statement of Molly’s birthdate in Ulysses. This seeming
statement of fact pointedly comes in the midst of crucial revelations about the lives and loves of
Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy. It is impossible to know if this was simply a mistake, but if
Joyce made the narrator in ‘Ithaca’ wrong about this basic fact, it would put in doubt other
aspects of the answer to the vital question about the date of the ‘limitations of activity and
Page 13 of 36
inhibitions of conjugal rights’ between the couple (U 687.21; U-G 17.2271), but that is a question
for a later chapter.
(p.123) Molly’s childhood friends

Captain Groves
15. ‘Circe’:
22–Late November 1921 Fifth Proof Level Harvard Pl 50.i
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. [11v]–12
2–Early November 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl B.ii.a
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl B.iii.b
Major Tweedy’s friend, captain Groves, existed in name only on the ‘Penelope’ draft and
nowhere else in Ulysses.64 At the end of the episode Molly recalls the day of Bloom’s proposal on
Howth in this way: ‘I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope
and Hester and father and old captain Groves’ (U 731.33–5; U-G 18.1582–3).65 That was the only
reference to him in Ulysses at that stage. Joyce added the other references to the captain on one
or more missing manuscripts that subsequently appear as part of the main text on the
Rosenbach manuscript.66 One of Molly’s further memories of captain Groves is typical of her
contrary attitudes in the episode towards almost everyone. In this case, Molly remembers both
his unpleasant habits as well as his general propriety:
captain Groves and father lighting their pipes for them everytime they went out drunken
old devil picking his nose trying to think of some dirty story to tell up in a corner but he
never forgot himself when I was there
(U 708.20–5; U-G 18.690–5)67
Joyce continued to add different aspects to this story. For example, he added another contrast to
captain Groves’ personality on the Rosenbach manuscript when Molly thinks of him ‘^paying his
compliments ^+the drink talking of course+^ but hed do the same to the next woman that came
along^’ (see U 708.26–7; U-G 18.695–7).68 At first, Joyce has Molly recall his politeness, but with
an addition to the addition (p.124) (as indicated), he has her disparagingly attribute it to the
effects of alcohol. It was only on the subsequent typescript that Joyce specified the captain’s
preference for Bushmills,69 inflecting Molly’s memory with a specifically Irish flavour.
Joyce made three other sets of additions on the typescript. First, he indicated the friends’ shared
interest in British military history. Molly remembers Tweedy and Groves ‘talking about Rorkes
drift and Plevna and Gordon at Khartoum’ (U 708.21–2; U-G 18.690–1).70 Although, as I
Page 14 of 36
discussed earlier, Tweedy’s stories about Plevna were already long-standing topics in Ulysses,
Joyce only added the first reference to Rourke’s Drift on the earlier ‘Circe’ manuscript in late
spring 1920,71 about a year before he added the reference to that important battle of the Anglo-
Zulu War in ‘Penelope’. The context for the first reference to Rorke’s Drift in ‘Circe’ (and so in
Ulysses) was imperial militarism. In the most basic version, Joyce had the figure of ‘Lord
Tennyson’ utter Wellington’s apocryphal battle command: ‘Up, guards, and at them!’ But, in
what was surely a very fluid moment of composition, Joyce revised the scene and assigned the
rallying cry to the figure of ‘Major Tweedy’ and simply added ‘Rorke’s Drift’ to the mix of
historical references (U 433.26–7; U-G 15.4616–17).72 Given the spectral nature of the episode,
this is just another instance of the melding of figures of characters and texts. Nonetheless, on
the fifth proof level of ‘Circe’ (therefore, about four months after he added the prior reference in
‘Penelope’, and just two months before Ulysses appeared), Joyce added another reference that
further binds together the allusions in Ulysses to Tweedy and the battle at Rorke’s Drift. In the
midst of Bloom’s exaggerated defence when confronted by the Watches in ‘Circe’, he makes the
hyperbolic claim that Tweedy ‘Got his majority for the heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift’ (U
433.26–7; U-G 15.780–1).73 Joyce added Molly’s recollection of the battle in ‘Penelope’ in
between writing these separate references in ‘Circe’.
Conversely, this is the only reference in Ulysses to Tweedy’s relatively recent interest in
Gordon’s unsuccessful 1884 defence of Khartoum. Then, about two months after Joyce wrote
this list of battles, on the third proof level of ‘Penelope’,74 he added another Anglo-Irish military
hero, ‘sir Garnet Wolseley’, to Molly’s memories of the men’s conversations (U 708.21–2; U-G
18.690–1).75 Joyce reminded himself to include Wolseley in a very late notebook, which probably
accounts for his late appearance in the evolving text of Ulysses. All four of the references to the
famous battles and soldiers Molly remembers her father and Groves discussing in these few
lines can all be traced to four distinct notebooks:
Note: Notebook: Level added:

Tweedy talking Plevna NLI NB 4, p. [1lv] Typescript
relief of Khartoum 1886 Gordon BL ‘Penelope’ NS 6.31 Typescript
Rorke’s drift NLI NB 5A p. [18r] Typescript
sir Garnet Wolseley 76 Third Proof Level
Buffalo NB 2b, p. [1r]
(p.125) Correlating the information in this way shows the enormous effort Joyce put into
constructing even relatively small scenes in his work, and it also graphically illustrates the
obvious lack of definite intention before the act of composition, which was almost always
triggered by Joyce’s act of reading his most current text and his disparate notebooks in tandem
in search of further connections and information to add to his ever-expanding novel.
He also added on the typescript other nuanced aspects to Molly’s memory. It seems that captain
Groves kept his drink out of sight of the young girl, but never out of reach. She remembers him
‘with his grog on the windowsill catch him leaving any of it’ (U 708.23; U-G 18.692–3).77 Here
too, Joyce focuses on Groves’ seeming propriety together with Molly’s explicit criticism of her
father’s friend. Finally, on the typescript, Joyce also added Molly’s final verdict on him: ‘I
Page 15 of 36
suppose he died of galloping drink ages ago’ (U 708.27–8; U-G 18.697–8).78 Nonetheless, Joyce
was not finished adding to Molly’s memories of captain Groves. On the second proof level, she
recalls him ‘sending me out of the room on some blind excuse’ (U 708.25–6; U-G 18.695).79
Again, this addition conveys both a sense of his outward politeness together with what we can
only presume was his aim of enjoying his drink.
The notes that inspired all of these seemingly very specific memories of captain Groves were
typically vague and unattributed to any character in Ulysses: ‘catch him leaving any of it’,80
‘dead and rotten long ago’, ‘dead as a beetle’, ‘galloping drink’,81 and ‘sending me out of the
room’.82 Like Groves’ cruder habit of ‘picking his nose’, which Joyce also took from a
notebook,83 it is unlikely that he collected these notes with the eventual stories of captain
Groves in mind, let alone all five of them. In fact, they are clear examples of Joyce’s strategy of
gathering phrases with little or no reference to the character and situational context to which he
would subsequently assign them. In general, Joyce constructed both the characters and the
stories in Ulysses from unrelated fragments that only slowly coalesced into the versions we know
in the book, and with much less of a sense of necessity than most readers would have imagined
without access to Joyce’s manuscripts and notebooks.
Mrs Rubio
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September Faircopy for Rosenbach MS, pp. 12–14 & Buffalo MS 22,
1921 Typescript ff. [2r]–[3r]
16 August–Mid-October Typescript Huntington TS, p. 23
1921
17–Late October 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl C.i
(p.126) The Tweedys’ Spanish housekeeper also made a relatively late entrance in Molly’s
stories of Gibraltar. Joyce first included Mrs Rubio in Molly’s childhood memories after he wrote
the ‘Penelope’ draft. She first appears on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, though Joyce
kept adding to the description of her until its final proof level. For whatever reason, Bloom does
not think of her on 16 June 1904 and so she does not appear in any other episode. Mrs Rubio
walks onto the stage of Ulysses to bring Molly her first love letter, but from the start Molly has
primarily unpleasant memories of the older woman. This was how Molly first remembered her
on the Rosenbach manuscript:
when I was in bed that morning and Mrs Rubio brought it in with the coffee she stood
there standing when I asked her to hand me and I pointing at them I couldnt think of the
word a hairpin to open it with ah horquilla disobliging old thing
(see U 710.03–6; U-G 18.748–51)84
Besides showing that Molly had some trouble with her Spanish but still manages to recall some
of it even after all that time, this addition was probably inspired by the following intriguing note:
Page 16 of 36
‘also Jim children open letter hairpin’.85 While Joyce read or noticed at some stage that children
use hairpins to open letters, the note suggests that it might also be something he himself did. If
so, this would be an example of the way the author fictionalized aspects of his own life in
Ulysses. If this is what it is, then this is a very rare occurrence of a seemingly self-referential
note for Ulysses.
Joyce gives Molly other reasons to criticize Mrs Rubio on the Rosenbach manuscript. She seems
to have been ‘vain about her appearance ugly as she was’, but, more importantly, ‘with all her
religion’ (U 701.07; U-G 18.752–3),86 it seems Molly ‘didn’t run into Mass often enough to please
her’ (see U 710.12; U-G 18.757–8).87 This was the extent of the description of their interactions
on the Rosenbach manuscript, but Joyce continued to add to it. On the episode’s typescript, he
made her appearance even less attractive by adding ‘with her switch of false hair on her’ and
also made her quite old: ‘near 80’.88 Later, Joyce added a further insult on the first proof level,
making ‘her face a mass of wrinkles’,89 and then had Molly further exaggerate Mrs Rubio’s age
on the fifth proof level, making her ‘near 80 ôr a 100^’ (U 710.07–8; U-G 18.752–3).90
All of Joyce’s additions clearly establish that the problem between the women was based on both
political and religious differences. For example, he made it clear with the following paired
additions on the typescript. It seems Mrs Rubio was ‘domineering because she never could get
over the Union Jack flying’ and that she was always going on ‘with all her miracles of the saints
and the sun dancing 3 times on Easter Sunday morning’ (see U 710.09–15; U-G 18.758–60).91
Furthermore, the subsequent additions on the proofs, which I elided in the earlier quotations,
reinforce her political and religious prejudices. On the one hand, Joyce’s additions on the fifth
proof level emphasize her nationalistic views. Molly recalls that (p.127) Mrs Rubio was angered
by the fact that Gibraltar harbour was full of the ‘Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the
world’,92 all ‘because 4 ^drunken^ English sailors took all the rock from them’ (U 710.09–11;
18.754–6).93 On the other hand, Joyce’s other additions on various proof levels emphasized her
religious fervour; for example, her reverence towards the ‘black blessed virgin with the silver
dress’ that he also added on the fifth proof level (U 710.14; U-G 18.759).94
Joyce increased the description of Mrs Rubio at the start of ‘sentence’ five about fourfold from
the Rosenbach manuscript to its appearance in Ulysses, but there was another reference to her
on the related Buffalo faircopy manuscript as well: ‘pity I never tried to read that novel
cantankerous Mrs Rubio lent me by Valera with the questions in it all upside down the two
ways’ (U 729.01–2; U-G 18.1474–5).95 Typical of Molly’s attitude in ‘Penelope’, she is both
critical of the woman but also appreciates something kind she tried to do for her.96
Furthermore, without any context or narrative preparation, Joyce invented Mrs Rubio’s husband
out of thin air on the Rosenbach manuscript as well. It seems that Molly borrowed his spyglass
to see Mulvey’s ship leave the harbour. The flourish of specifying that the spyglass belonged to
‘captain Rubios that was dead’ was something that first appeared on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’
manuscript (U 712.35; U-G 18.856–7).97 Although in Ulysses we know nothing else about the
man, by specifying an aspect of a story in this way, this type of addition gives a greater sense of
depth and coherence to Molly’s stories and so the book more generally.
Molly’s first lover: Lieutenant Harry Mulvey

Establishing the earliest memories of Mulvey
Page 17 of 36
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
July–August 1920 Serial Publication Little Review, VII.2, p. 47
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [4r] and [6r]–[8r]
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. 8, 11–12,
14, and 20
16 August–Mid-September 1921 Typescript Buffalo TS 16.a, p. 22
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl B.iv
(p.128) Since Molly only gets the opportunity to recount the stories of her life at the end of the
book, it is not surprising that Bloom reveals some of the facts about her first lover before she
does. Molly’s adolescent affair is one of the couple’s many shared memories in Ulysses, though
she is proud that over the years she has managed to conceal many of the details from her
husband. Therefore, it is particularly illuminating to uncover both the ways Joyce intertwined
and elaborated certain elements and echoes of their different accounts of her story. This is
Bloom’s version as it first appears in print:
First kiss does the trick. Something inside them goes pop. Mushy like, tell by their eye, on
the sly. First thoughts are best. Remember that till their dying day. Molly, lieutenant
Mulvey that kissed her under the Moorish wall beside the gardens. Fifteen she told me.
But her breasts were developed.
(see U 354.15–19; U-G 13.886–91)98
For Bloom, this specific recollection about his wife’s first kiss is enmeshed in his own ideas
about the transformative emotional and sexual effects he thinks such events have on young
women generally. By 1920 Joyce had already determined that Ulysses would include a story
about Molly and Mulvey’s affair.99 For example, the place where the pivotal event took place
—‘under the Moorish wall’—takes on a formulaic resonance in Ulysses, because these are
precisely the words Molly uses when she recalls her first kiss in ‘Penelope’. Still, it took Joyce
several steps to settle on the spot, and then it took him several more years to establish the
verbal echo that is the foundation of this shared memory. On the first extant version of the
recollection on the ‘Nausicaa’ draft, Joyce changed where it took place in this way: ‘under the
^<monkeys’ garden> Moorish wall^ în Gibraltar^ beside the gardens’ (see U 354.15–17; U-G
13.889–90).100 Once revised, this remained the spot of the memorable kiss from then on.
We have to turn to ‘Penelope’ to find out more about Molly’s first lover and the manuscripts
document how Joyce developed his character. The stories about Mulvey start off ‘sentence’ five
in Ulysses in the following way: ‘Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning’ (U
710.03; U-G 18.748). On the episode’s draft, Molly’s thoughts about her first love letter directly
followed her complaint that she has not received many letters, except the ‘few I posted to
myself’, and then she thinks, ‘not that I get many now’,101 which makes the ‘days like years’ (U
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708.28–9; U-G 18.698–9). There was Boylan’s and just a card from Milly that morning, neither of
which was very gratifying. On the draft, Molly then tries to recall who had written to her last
and remembers a letter from a certain ‘Mrs X Y Z’.102 Joyce wrote this non-name as a
placeholder, and this is an exemplary instance of the way in which Joyce was often more
concerned with the (p.129) story than the subject of the story. In Ulysses, she is the otherwise
unknown Mrs Dwenn (U 709.11; U-G 18.718), but Joyce names her Mrs Thornton on the
Rosenbach manuscript.103 Then, for whatever reason Joyce finally settled on the name of Molly’s
friend as he revised the typescript for Ulysses.104 Although a truly minor character in Ulysses,
the way in which Joyce only slowly built up her identity is paradigmatic of the fluidity of his
characters’ names and their histories. On the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce added that her letter
had come ‘^from Canada^ after so many years’,105 and then added the reason for it about sixth
months after she first appeared as ‘Mrs X Y Z’ on the episode’s draft. On the fourth proof level,
she had at first asked Molly for her recipe for ‘olla podrida’, but Joyce quickly changed it to
‘pisto madrileno’,106 the other Spanish dish readers of Ulysses know (U 709.12–13; U-G 18.719–
20).
In line with her contradictory nature in ‘Penelope’, on the draft Joyce has Molly immediately
complain that ‘it’s a nuisance having to answer and he [Bloom] always tells me the wrong things
to say’, but then he has her change her mind and thinks: ‘I hope he’ll [Boylan will] write me
longer îf it’s he really likes me^ next time I wish someone would write me a loveletter true or
not’ (see U 709.23–9; U-G 18.731–7).107 This transition introduced the story of her first love
letter, though initially it had a different emphasis: ‘Mulvey’s was the first I got señorita he called
me I suppose he thought I must be Spanish âll did^’ (see U 710.03; U-G 18.748).108 Joyce did
not include the additional part of Molly’s recollection—‘all did’—on the next extant manuscript,
and at this stage the mention of his letter was the end of the episode’s fourth ‘sentence’.
Later, he expanded Molly’s rambling thoughts at the end of this ‘sentence’, separating the link
between the storyline about the few letters Molly has received in her life and her other stories
about Mulvey that evolved slowly but grew significantly in length and complexity as the start of
the fifth ‘sentence’. On the draft, Joyce left some open space on the page at the end of the fourth
‘sentence’ and then took up the story of Molly’s first kiss.109 These pages indicate that the
stories about Mulvey were still in a rudimentary state at this stage. Furthermore, the way Joyce
filled in almost all of the previously open spaces on the page reveals how he constructed the
tales of this pivotal juncture in Molly’s young sexual life. In fact, the state and disposition of the
text on these few pages of the draft (compared to the much more developed and substantially
longer version of Molly’s recollections of Mulvey in Ulysses) document just how much Joyce
added as he constructed Molly’s recollections, a process that continued at every subsequent
stage.
Molly’s other memories of Mulvey began in a more revealing and explicit way on the draft: ‘I
didn’t know what he meant when he put his tongue in my mouth first the day’ when ‘we were
lying down near the Firtree cove behind O’Hara’s (p.130) tower’ (see U 710.24–5 and U
710.37–711.06; U-G 18.770–1 and 18.784–90).110 This line of thought continued directly with the
revelation that ‘he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment but I wouldnt let him […] for fear
you never know’ (see U 711.16–17; U-G 18.800–1).111 Joyce greatly expanded these few
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fragments from about fifty words on the draft to about five hundred in Ulysses. On the draft, she
then asks herself: ‘how did we finish O yes I remember he did it into my handkerchief with his
eyes shut Î pretended not to be excited^ still he was shy all the same when I unbuttoned him
and took his out’ (see U 711.24–30; U-G 18.809–16).112 Again, Joyce expanded these forthright
lines fourfold before the scene appeared in print. Molly then struggles to remember Mulvey’s
first name, his rank, and his appearance, before she recalls the adolescent pledge she made to
him: ‘I promised to let him do it to me if he came back & I was married I’d let him block me now
if I met him’ (see U 711.37–712.01; U-G 18.821–2).113 This revealing twist was clearly based on a
frank note Joyce had stored away for some time before he found the opportunity to include it in
Ulysses: ‘MB promised Mulvey a fuck if he came back’.114 While many readers consider Ulysses
to be a sexually explicit book, more often than not Joyce moderated his language in the
published version compared with his more forthright formulations in his notes and drafts, which
were intended only for his continuing work on Ulysses.
Unsurprisingly, Molly’s thoughts continue to go back and forth. She wonders what became of
Mulvey and whether he would even remember her, then she thinks ‘I wouldn’t know though I
might recognise him hes young still about forty’, and finally, she presumes that he must be
married (see U 712.03–4; U-G 18.823–6).115 This very short version of the fifth ‘sentence’
continued to the end of the manuscript page with Molly’s thoughts about not being able to find a
proper memento to give him, as well as a sand frog shower and a derelict boat in Gibraltar
harbour. Then it concluded abruptly with her final vision of Mulvey, which for whatever reason
Joyce decided not to transfer to the next extant manuscript and so it does not appear in Ulysses:
‘I can see his face plainly now saying the whatyoucallit half laughing cleanshaven silly kind of
boy’.116 Then, what would become ‘sentence’ six began on the following recto page.117 That was
all Joyce had written about Molly’s memories of Mulvey as the base text on less than a page and
a half of the draft, and even some of that was clearly new to this version.
Joyce added all the intervening text about Mulvey, as well as the other stories that make up
‘sentence’ five of ‘Penelope’, on various manuscripts over the following six months. He began
the process of building up Molly’s memories of Mulvey right away on the episode’s draft. For
example, although it is only sometimes possible to precisely disentangle the layers of the
additions, here we can see that Joyce first wrote an introduction to the entire scene—‘he was the
first man kissed me’—and that he then specified where it took place as an addition to the
addition: ‘ûnder the moorish wall <I remember>^’ (see U 710.23–4; U-G 18.769–70).118 It
might (p.131) be surprising to discover that what appears to be Molly’s verbal formula of her
memory that Bloom recounts in ‘Nausicaa’—that ‘Mulvey had kissed her under the Moorish
wall’ (U 354.17–18; U-G 13.889)—was not a basic part of Molly’s recollection of the event on the
‘Penelope’ draft. In fact, Joyce added it to her description of that first encounter on that
manuscript, squeezing it in between many other layers of additions to her stories. The addition
is significant because it indicates that (as with so much else about Molly’s memories about
Mulvey) this element of her stories was not on a previous (now lost) version of ‘Penelope’.
Therefore, it is clear that the first time Joyce has Molly think of where that memorable kiss took
place was in the spring of 1921, about a year and a half after he had written Bloom’s version of
what readers are encouraged to presume is Molly’s tell-tale version of the event. In fact, looked
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at from a genetic perspective it is more appropriate to think of it as a textual rather than a

shared personal memory.
When Joyce wrote the addition, it ended with the phrase ‘I remember’.119 Given the episode’s
stylistic features, the phrase might have seemed redundant. This may be the reason why Joyce
crossed it through and it does not appear on the next version. Nonetheless, ‘I remember’
appears just four times on the base level of the ‘Penelope’ draft and they are all related to the
contrast between Molly’s memories of Bloom, on the one hand, and of Mulvey, on the other.
Suggestive of the various ways in which memory and desire are interwoven, Molly has clear
memories of her first experiences with Bloom, but her memories of her experiences with Mulvey
are marked by her efforts to remember them accurately, a state of mind Joyce stressed as he
continued to revise the episode’s manuscripts. In the first instance of the phrase on the draft,
Joyce emphasized the persistence of Molly’s memory of one of Bloom’s first kisses. As it appears
in Ulysses, she thinks: ‘the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it simply
it makes you feel like nothing on earth’ (U 699.01–2; U-G 18.330–1), but on the draft Molly sums
up its enduring importance to her explicitly with the concluding remark, ‘O I remember that
still’.120 For some reason, Joyce decided to elide that beautiful finale to her recollection on one
of the next versions, and so it does not reappear in this context again. The next time the phrase
occurs is, as we just saw, when Molly tries to recall her only real sexual encounter with Mulvey.
In reply to her question to herself, ‘how did we finish’, she recalls, ‘O yes I remember he did it
into my handkerchief’.121 Here too Joyce dropped that tag-like phrase on the next version of
Molly’s recollection of this even more dramatic experience.
The following time the phrase appears is just after her struggle to recall Mulvey’s first name,
which she manages to do after a few tries (U 711.32; U-G 18.818). Then Molly seems to have a
clear image of his face and thinks: ‘he had a little moustache I remember’ (see U 711.34; U-G
18.820).122 One of Joyce’s notes indicates that he particularly wanted to make her first lover’s
facial hair a thematic motif in the book: ‘MB & Mulvey’s moustache’.123 He did so by adding
layers of doubt about the accuracy of Molly’s memory of Mulvey’s appearance. On the (p.132)
Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce had purposely diminished Molly’s confidence in her recollection,
and in the published version she questions it by pointedly asking, ‘moustache had he’?124 Later
in ‘Penelope’, on the draft Molly corrects herself, settling the question about Mulvey’s
appearance. It turns out that it was a different lover who had the facial hair: ‘no he [Mulvey]
hadnt a moustache that was Gardner yes I can see his [Mulvey’s] face cleanshaven’ (U-G 18.872–
3; see U 713.11).125 It seems that one of the points about Joyce’s characterization of Mulvey is
that the more Molly tries to recall him, the less precise her memories become. In general, Joyce
sought to emphasize the seeming commensurability of Molly’s memories of her few lovers in
Ulysses.
Those are the relatively few uses of ‘I remember’ on the base level on the episode’s draft, but
Joyce continued to revise the text on the subsequent manuscripts. In this case, he added several
more specific references to her various efforts to recollect the past, some of which underscore
her ability to accurately remember specific things, while others emphasize the unreliability of
Molly’s memories in ‘Penelope’. The cumulative effect demonstrates the interconnected
potential as well as the limitations of human and narrative memory. The first time Joyce added a
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specific reference to memory was in the context of her inability to remember. He wrote in the
left margin of the page on the draft: ‘if I cd. [could] only remember the 1 half of the things &
write a book’,126 to which he later added: ‘out of it the works of Master Poldy’ by the time it
appears on the Rosenbach manuscript (U 705.26–7; U-G 18.580).127
Molly also uses the phrase to introduce the description of the departure of her closest friend,
Hester Stanhope. Although Joyce had written much of the scene that takes place in Gibraltar
harbour as a long and convoluted set of additions on the episode’s draft, he only added the
formulaic phrase ‘I remember that day’ later on the Rosenbach manuscript, where it serves to
establish the context of the scene (U 707.37; U-G 18.668–9).128 It is worth noting that Joyce
achieved the vivid clarity of Molly’s memory of the scene as it appears in Ulysses with several
separate layers of additions on at least two manuscripts over several weeks, or possibly a month.
Another thing Molly explicitly remembers is the way she could piss when she was younger: ‘easy
God I remember one time I could scout it out straight whistling like a man almost easy O Lord
how noisy’ (U 720.11–12; U-G 18.1141–2). This first appears on the Rosenbach manuscript,129
though Joyce may have written it on some lost manuscript between the two extant versions. It is
quite possible that he made this addition to counterbalance Bloom’s similar youthful prowess
that is recounted in ‘Ithaca’ (U 655.20–7; U-G 17.1191–8).130
(p.133) Joyce continued to build up the stories of Mulvey on the ‘Penelope’ draft by adding
various small touches in the left margins of these recto pages. But more significantly, in an
effort to make the story that much more vivid, he wrote some of the description of the
lovemaking scene on the hills above Gibraltar in a large open space at the top of the next
manuscript page (see U 712.26–713.02; U-G 18.848–60).131 This was clearly the first time Joyce
had written this scene and it was relatively short, less than a hundred words long. The scene
was based in part on notes Joyce had taken on Gibraltar. Specifically, ‘after Europa Pt [Point] up
twisted road = Willis rd [road]’ and ‘Morocco visible’ that he used both to create the initial
scene and to add to it as well,132 but tellingly Joyce does not seem to have relied on his notes for
the more overtly sexual aspects of Molly’s memory; for example, the fact that she kept the
handkerchief Mulvey soiled under her pillow after he left to recall ‘the smell of him’ (U 713.04;
U-G 18.863–4).
Embellishing Molly’s stories of Mulvey
Active Kind of Manuscript: Manuscript:

Dates:
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid- Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. [12v]–14 & Buffalo MS 22, f.
September 1921 [5r]
16 August–Mid- Typescript Huntington TS, pp. 23–6
October 1921
17–Late October First Proof Level Harvard Pl C.i
1921
2–Early Second Proof Level Harvard Pl C.ii
November 1921
Page 22 of 36
Active Kind of Manuscript: Manuscript:

Dates:
18. ‘Penelope’:
15–Mid- Third Proof Level Harvard Pl C.iii.a & Harvard Pl C.iii.b
November 1921
24–Late Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl C.iv
November 1921
Late–31 January Fifth Proof Level Texas PP 44.1
1922
Although most likely there was at least one other now missing manuscript between the draft and
the Rosenbach manuscript of ‘Penelope’, comparing what survives, as well as also noting what
Joyce added to the later manuscript, reveals a great deal about Joyce’s ideas about Molly’s
expanding memories of Mulvey. Joyce returned to the beginning of the story and added as part
of the main text on the Rosenbach manuscript some more details about the letter Mulvey sent
her, which Joyce further elaborated with the following important details:
an admirer he signed it I near jumped out of my skin Î wanted to pick him up when^ I
saw him following me along the Calle Real în the shop window then he tipped me just in
passing^ but I never thought he’d write making an appointment Î had it inside my
petticoat bodice all day reading it up in every hole and corner signing I remember shall I
wear a white rose^
(see U 710.16–23; U-G 18.762–8)133
(p.134) Joyce took the last idea from another one of his notes: ‘letter in bosom take it out to
read’,134 but it is not at all clear that he wrote the note with Mulvey or this scene in mind.
Nonetheless, in this instance he did not add anything further to these lines afterwards. Once
again this demonstrates how Joyce used his purposely decontextualized notes.
There were other significant additions that first appear on the Rosenbach manuscript, for
example:
I put my knee up to him a few times ^+to learn the way+^ what did I tell him I was
engaged for fun to the son of a Spanish nobleman ^+named Don Miguel de la Flora+^ and
he believed me that I was to be married to him in three years time there’s many a true
word spoken in jest […] â few things I told him true about myself just for him to be
imagining the Spanish girls he didn’t like I suppose one of them wouldn’t have him^ I got
him excited he crushed all the flowers on my bosom he brought me he couldn’t count the
pesetas […] till I taught him Waterford he came from he said on the black water but it was
too short then the day before he left
(see U 710.26–34 and U-G 18.771–81)135
But in this case, Joyce added further telling details to this part of the story at various levels (as
indicated in the transcription). For example, on the Rosenbach manuscript he further added that
there were ‘a few things I told him true about myself just for him to be imagining the Spanish
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girls he didn’t like I suppose one of them wouldn’t have him’.136 Then, on the typescript, Molly
became more active in her encounter with Mulvey because she wanted ‘to learn the way’ and
Joyce named her imaginary fiancé: ‘Don Miguel de la Flora’.137 Later, on the first proof level,
Joyce specified where Mulvey came from in Ireland. At first he wrote that Mulvey was from
Waterford, but then he changed it to the much smaller town of Cappoquin on the same
manuscript page.138 Joyce only decided on this fundamental detail several months after he
began expanding the stories of Mulvey on the episode’s draft and presumably years after he had
first included Molly’s first lover in the tales told in Ulysses.
Besides adding further descriptive details about Gibraltar, Joyce continued to focus on the
sexual aspect of the love affair. The expanded version on the Rosenbach manuscript provided
many more candid particulars about the encounter. For example, Molly thinks: ‘he was looking
at me I had that white blouse on open in the front to encourage him âs much as I could without
too openly^ they were just beginning to be plump I said I was tired we lay over the firtree cove
a wild place’, which Joyce decided to temper by adding Molly’s admission: ‘as much as I could
without too openly’ (see U 711.03–6; U-G 18.787–90).139 The version on the Rosenbach
manuscript continues to provide more specific details about the physical encounter: (p.135)
you could do what you liked he caressed them outside they love doing that it’s the
roundness there I was leaning over him with my white ricestraw hat ^to take the newness
out of it^ the left side of my face the best my blouse open for his last day
(see U 711.12–15; U-G 18.796–9)140
Joyce added many other, small but meaningful touches that first appear on the Rosenbach
manuscript. For example, Molly recalls that she had her reasons for resisting Mulvey’s desire:
she might get consumption or become pregnant. It seems that the ‘old servant Ines told me that
one drop’ was enough to leave her ‘embarazada’, a specifically Spanish word Joyce added on the
episode’s second proof level (U 711.18–19; U-G 18.801–3).141
But Molly’s sexual curiosity and appetite could not be quenched so easily, and she admits that
‘after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me
somewhere’ (U 711.19–20; U-G 18.803–4), an idea Joyce took from another one of his more
explicit notes for the episode: ‘banana in cunt’.142 Among other new details that first appear on
the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce made their act more explicit and provided fresh insights into
Molly’s state of mind by adding the following to the more basic version he had written on the
draft: ‘how did we finish ît off yes O^ yes Î pulled him off^ into my handkerchief
^pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs^’ (U 711.24–6; U-G 18.809–10).143 Joyce
further enhanced the scene with two additions, the first on the Rosenbach manuscript and the
later one on the second proof level: ‘Î tormented the life out of him first ^+tickling him
+
^^’ (see U 711.27; U-G 18.812).144 He also added other details on the Rosenbach manuscript.
For example, the fact that she liked Mulvey’s shyness when he was ‘moaning I made him blush a
little when I got over him that way’ (U 711.29; U-G 18.814–15).145 This revealing addition could
have been inspired by the note ‘prick blushes’ in combination with another, presumably
unrelated, note on a subsequent notebook page: ‘made L.B. blush’.146 Yet again Joyce
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transformed a note he had assigned to one character to another, which indicates the intertwined
malleability of both Joyce’s ideas and of the characters’ traits in Ulysses.
Joyce added a more sentimental touch that first appears on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’
manuscript: she also liked that ‘Molly darling he [Mulvey] called me’ (U 711.33; U-G 18.817).147
He then has Molly wonder whether Mulvey had become an admiral, not just a captain, and she
thinks ‘perhaps he’s married some girl on the black water’ (see U 712.04; U-G 18.826).148 Then
she recalls that ‘I was (p.136) a bit wild after’ (U 712.08; U-G 18.830).149 One of the final pieces
of information that first appears on the Rosenbach manuscript is Molly’s complaint that ‘he was
to write’ (U 712.31; U-G 18.853),150 which is a promise it appears Mulvey did not keep. Molly’s
admission that she had kept that soiled handkerchief for ‘weeks and weeks’ (U 713.03; U-G
18.861–3) is also new to the Rosenbach manuscript, but obviously his memory stayed with Molly
for many more years. Finally, Joyce added Mulvey’s parting gift on the Rosenbach manuscript:
‘he gave me that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck’ (U 713.07; U-G 18.866–7).151 She kept it for
years, but then passed it on to her other lover, Lieutenant Stanley Gardner, when he left Dublin
for South Africa.152
Joyce continued to make further additions at every subsequent stage, and the typescript gave
him his first opportunity. He added the fact that Molly tried to decipher Mulvey’s first letter ‘by
the handwriting or the language of stamps’ and that ‘his mouth was sweetlike young’ (U 710.21–
2 and 25–6; U-G 18.767 and 18.771).153 Joyce added many other specific details about Molly’s
memories of Gibraltar (see U 710.36–711.11 and 712.10–12; U-G 18.783–94 and 18.832–4), and
also continued to enrich the sexual aspects of her first encounter. For example, he specified her
fears because of the more accessible clothes she wore that day. She recalls that she did not let
Mulvey ‘touch me inside ^my petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side^’ (see U
711.26; U-G 18.811–2).154 Joyce also has Molly recall her first impression of a penis: when she
‘drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it’ (U 711.31–2; U-G 18.816).155 Molly also laments,
‘Lord its just like yesterday to me’ (U 711.36; U-G 18.821),156 which purposely contradicts what
he already had her think on the Rosenbach manuscript: ‘its nearly 20 years’ (U 712.01–2; U-G
18.823).157 She also remembers that ‘he didn’t know what to make of me’, which Joyce also
added to the typescript (U 712.13; U-G 18.835).158 He took this line directly from his notes,159
but the masculine pronoun makes it impossible to determine whether Joyce had Mulvey in mind
when he took it.
Joyce made several more additions to the typescript. For example, Molly remembers Mulvey’s
peaked cap ‘that he always wore crooked’ (U 712.14; U-G 18.836).160 Four months later, after
the text had passed through his hands at least four separate times, Joyce pointedly undermined
the earlier point of Molly’s memory with another addition on the fifth proof level: ‘as often as I
settled it straight’ (U 712.14; U-G 18.836).161 Together, these separate additions accentuate the
structurally contradictory style of the episode that is evident in the pattern of Molly’s logic; for
example, ‘always [… and] as often as’. Small as they are, these interventions are exemplary of
Joyce’s representation of Molly’s psychology as based upon explicit (p.137) contradictions, and
a style constructed on semantic and syntactic negation. Furthermore, one of Joyce’s notes also
directly inspired this addition, but with a twist: ‘MB settled LB’s hat he resettled it’.162 This is
Page 25 of 36
just one of many examples of Joyce taking a note intended for the stories about one of his
characters and then transposing it to another with little regard for its initial context.
He also first gave Mulvey’s ship a name on the typescript. Joyce’s initial idea was to call it the ‘H
M S Bellisle’,163 but later he was inspired to change her name to the ‘Calypso’ on the episode’s
first proof level (U 712.14; U-G 18.836–7).164 On the typescript, he also added to Molly’s
indulgent thoughts about Mulvey’s tryst with her: ‘it’s the least they might get a squeeze or two
at a woman while they [sailors] can going out to be drowned or blown up’ (see U 712.32–4; U-G
18.854–5).165 He also added the fact that Mulvey left on a ‘^Sunday^ morning’ on the typescript
(U 712.34; U-G 18.856).166 This seemingly precise nuance is typical of the way Joyce often strove
to add what is often merely a vague sense of temporal and spatial specificity to the events in
Ulysses. Finally, again pairing additions on the typescript about Gibraltar and about Molly’s
sexuality, she thinks of ‘the bay of Tangier ^white^ and the Atlas mountain with snow on it and
the straits like a river’, and then ‘I was thinking of him on the sea all the time after at mass
when my petticoat began to slip down at the elevation’ (see U 712.37–713.03; U-G 18.860–2).167
There were five more proof levels after the typescript, and Joyce continued to enrich these
stories on every one. For example, all on the third proof level, Molly recalls the anticipation she
felt before her meeting with Mulvey: ‘and I wanted to put on the old stupid clock to near the
time’ (U 710.22–3; U-G 18.768–9),168 and he gave Mulvey something sexier to wear as well. In
Ulysses she recalls that he wore a ‘transparent kind of shirt he had I could see his chest pink’ (U
711.15–16; U-G 18.799–800).169 More importantly, also on the third proof level, Joyce finally
specified when the affair took place, but it appears in a typically oblique way in Ulysses: ‘May
yes it was May when the înfant^ king of Spain was born’ (U-G 18.781; see U 710.35).170 Most
readers would have to look up this reference, and Joyce must have sought out this information
as well, as the note that inspired the addition makes clear: ‘Alfonso XIII b. [born] 17/5/86’.171 It
is not possible to determine when Joyce decided that May would be the month when Molly’s first
sexual encounters took place, but he only specified it with this addition to Ulysses. In fact, it
would not be at all surprising if Joyce settled on May—rather than another month that year, such
as June, for example, if he wanted to further strengthen the parallels between Molly and Milly’s
coming of age—simply because he wanted to (p.138) include this seemingly tangential
historical reference. This is another example of the various ways in which Joyce established the
(sometimes unexpected) temporal markers in his characters’ lives. Furthermore, in ‘Nausicaa’
Bloom recalls that Molly was 15 that spring, and, if Mulvey is about 40 in 1904 (see U 712.04; U-
G 18.825), then her first lover is about seven years older than she is and a few years older than
Bloom as well.172 It is certainly no coincidence that this would make Molly the same age Milly is
in 1904 as she too begins to explore her own sexuality in Mullingar.173
Joyce also began an addition on the fourth proof level by having Molly think of Mulvey’s
supposed wife: ‘she little knows what I did with her beloved husband before he ever dreamt of
<the> her in broad daylight too in the sight of the whole world you might say’ (U 712.05–7; U-G
18.827–9).174 Later, at the start of that addition he made yet another insertion on the same proof
page. This one made Molly more critical of Mulvey (and men generally): ‘quite changed they all
do they havent half the character a woman has’ (U 712.04–5; U-G 18.826–7).175 And, as another
embellishment on the fifth proof level, Joyce has Molly recall that Mulvey ‘was awfully put out
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first’ (U 711.16; U-G 18.801),176 when she refused to let him make love to her that memorable
afternoon on the hills above Gibraltar. Joyce also continued to underscore the temporal aspect of
the affair on the fifth proof level when he added, ‘Im always like that in the spring Id like a new
fellow every year’ (U 710.35–6; U-G 18.782).177
Molly recalls Mulvey again at the end of the episode when she remembers the day Bloom ‘asked
me to say yes’ and she ‘was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr
Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves’ (emphasis added; U 731.32–4; U-G
1580–3). On the ‘Penelope’ draft, Joyce simply had Molly recall her past, but he transformed the
thrust of Molly’s recollection on a later manuscript. On the Buffalo faircopy manuscript (which is
how it appears in Ulysses), the point is that Molly’s friends from Gibraltar were aspects of her
life that Bloom did not know about when he proposed to her.178 This crucial alteration indicates
that Joyce wanted to call attention to the private nature of Molly’s memories about her
adolescence (at least in the early months of her courtship with Leopold), but the ramifications of
this alteration are more substantial. Joyce made the dramatic change to the end of ‘Penelope’ in
the summer of 1921, at the same time that the long process of revising the proofs for the prior
episodes of Ulysses was just beginning. As I show elsewhere, he usually tended to establish
symmetrical echoes of the newer stories he had recently written as he revised the proofs of the
earlier episodes. Therefore, it is notable that he did not make a single corresponding addition in
which Bloom shares any of Molly’s now more expansive (p.139) memories about her friends
and life in Gibraltar. In fact, as I discussed at the start of this section, the one mention Bloom
makes of where Mulvey first kissed Molly was something that Joyce had written at the start of
1920, a year and a half before Joyce began to enrich Molly’s stories of her adolescence.
Nowhere else in Ulysses does Bloom ever think of Mulvey, the Stanhopes, captain Groves, or
anyone else from his wife’s eighteen years in Gibraltar. Correspondingly, except for his father,
Molly does not recall any aspect of her husband’s life before they met. Based on Bloom’s
recollections on 16 June 1904, readers are led to believe that these adolescent memories always
remained something that Molly has purposely kept to herself.179
Notes:
(1) See ‘Before Bloom’ in Chapter 3 for a discussion of Leopold Bloom’s parents.
(3) NLI MS 9, p. [10r].
(4) Joyce changed the description of her eyes to ‘Spanishy’ on Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ manuscript (f.
25).
(5) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 238.
(6) This more basic context explains Molly’s criticism of Bloom’s sexual interests as ‘10 times
worse himself anyhow’. Therefore, this line is not an oblique reference to Bloom’s Jewish
heritage as has sometimes been presumed. I discuss this early outing in ‘Teasing Leopold’ in
Chapter 5.
(7) NLI MS 14, pp. [2v]–[3r].
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(8) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 252.
(9) The related additions that constitute the few stories about Molly’s mother are one of those
fairly rare instances for which there are no known notebook sources.
(10) Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 262.
(11) See, for example, Ruth von Phul, ‘ “Major” Tweedy and His Daughter’, JJQ, 19/3 (Spring
1982), 341–8.
(12) Texas PP 45.1; scribal addition; see JJA 27: 271.
(13) NLI MS 7B, p. [10r]. I discuss the different versions of ‘Sirens’ more fully in Chapters 2 and
6.
(14) NLI MS 7B, p. [10r]. For more information on Sergeant-Major Malachi Powell, see Tierney,
‘Major Malachi Powell and Ulysses’, JJON, December 2013.
(15) NLI MS 7B, p. [10r].
(16) Little Review, VI.4, p. 54.
(17) NLI MS 9, p. [7r].
(18) See, for example, Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ MS, f. 2.
(19) Buffalo PP 4.1; see JJA 22: 174. Joyce derived this addition from one of his late notes: ‘MB
has forgotten all she knew of Spain’ (NLI NB 5A, p. [1r]). Later, probably in another effort to
undermine Bloom’s disparaging opinion of her knowledge, Molly demonstrates that she does
remember many things about Gibraltar as well as some of her Spanish in ‘Penelope’.
(21) Joyce made it a point of reminding himself to include references to at least two aspects of
Tweedy’s stories when he compiled one of his sets of notes for Molly’s episode. He squeezed
‘Stamps’ and ‘Cohen’s auction’ in the left margin on the first BL ‘Penelope’ NS (1.1–2).
(22) Buffalo NB 2a, p. [4v] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 8). Herring has traced most of the
sources of Joyce’s reading in this notebook (Notes and Drafts, 15). This page contains notes from
W. H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, 6 vols and 2
supplemental vols (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1884–1937), and from Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens
et l’Odyssée 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1902). Although presumably suggested by his
reading of Roscher, there is no direct source for this specific note. In fact, this may be one of the
few ‘compositional notes’ in the notebook.
(24) NLI MS 14, p. [16r].
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(25) Harvard Pl D.i.c; see JJA 21: 324.
(26) See Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 22.
(27) Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 263.
(28) For example, see Ruth von Phul’s informative but highly speculative note, ‘ “Major” Tweedy
and His Daughter’, JJQ, 19/3 (Spring 1982), 341–8, as well as Fritz Senn’s more cautious
approach to these questions in Christine O’Neill (ed.), Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), 93.
(30) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 14.38.
(31) NLI MS 13, p. [6r].
(33) Texas PP 41.1; see JJA 27: 182. See H. M. Hozier (ed.), The Russo-Turkish War: Including an
Account of the Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Power; and the History of the Eastern Question
(London: MacKenzie, 1878).
(34) See NLI MS 13, p. [8r].
(36) Huntington TS, p. 21; see JJA 16: 319.
(37) NLI NB 4, p. [11v].
(38) Given the deceptive nature of the episode, it is unlikely that we should take seriously
Bloom’s claim in ‘Circe’ that Tweedy ‘Got his majority for the heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift’ (U
433.26–7; U-G 15.780–1).
(39) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 3.
(40) Harvard Pl A.iii.a; see JJA 21: 182. The following note probably prompted Joyce to make the
addition: ‘dips finger in liqueur’ (Buffalo NB 2b, p. [1r]; see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 1.38),
and so the memory has more to do with the drinks than it does with Tweedy. It is not known why
Joyce chose to associate Molly’s interest in fancy drinks with another, previously unknown
anecdote about her father.
(41) Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 255.
(42) Mark Wollaeger has shown that the details of this poster are not historically accurate. He
writes: ‘Given that pictorial recruiting posters of the kind Bloom goes on to describe were not
produced before World War I, Bloom’s poster is probably a Joycean invention modeled on
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posters distributed from 1915–1918. Known for this [sic] pedantic fidelity to the historically
verifiable, here Joyce indulges in an anachronism that distinctly foregrounds the text’s complex
historical layering, a layering that needs to be acknowledged by situating Ulysses more
insistently in the period of its composition than is often the case’, ‘Seduction and Estrangement:
World War I Recruiting Posters and the Politics of Ulysses’, Hypermedia Joyce Studies, 2.1
[1999].
(43) Emphasis added; Rosenbach ‘Lotus Eaters’ MS, f. 3.
(44) Harvard Pl 10.ii; see JJA 17: 216. I discuss the Blooms’ connections with Henry R. Tweedy
and Marcus J. Bloom (see U 240.17 and 323.12; U-G 10.1115 and 12.1638) more fully in ‘A First
Sighting of Blazes Boylan in “Hades” ’ in Chapter 2.
(45) Cornell MS 56B, p. 30; see JJA 13: 233.
(46) See Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS I, p. [0v].
(48) NLI MS 13, p. [8r].
(49) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 13, p. [9v]. This question and answer were inspired by the
note: ‘MB has look of old Tweedy’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 2.64), and it is quite possible that this is the
first time Joyce wrote out this text for Ulysses.
(52) Little Review, V.10-11, p. 60.
(54) Harvard Pl A.iii.b; see JJA 21: 194.
(55) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 237.
(56) Joyce’s error (if that is what it is) can probably be traced to a phrase in his notes that simply
reads: ‘aqua marine’ (Buffalo NB 2b, p. [1v]; see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 2.04). It is not clear
whether Joyce took the note to (erroneously) remind himself of Molly’s birthstone or whether it
had some other (unknown) reference when he collected his notes, and he just used it here
without checking his facts. Nonetheless, the point of the addition was most likely to simply
emphasize Molly’s desire to get more gifts from Boylan, whatever they might be.
(57) BL ‘Penelope’ NS 3.35.
(58) NLI MS 14, p. [3v].
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(61) Joyce only specified this connection on the episode’s first proof level in late August 1921
when he added the following lines in the midst of Bloom’s painful thoughts: ‘When we left
Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy’ (Harvard Pl 17.i;
U 160.09–10; U-G 8.609–10; see JJA 18: 112). I discuss his son’s brief existence more fully in
‘Rudy: A Life Cut Short’ in Chapter 7.
(62) NLI NB 5B, p. [10v].
(63) Joyce to Frank Budgen; 16 August 1921; LI 170. Nonetheless, his ambivalence about the
dates in Molly’s life is also reflected in another note from a later notebook that reads: ‘?b. [born]
8. IX m. [married] 15. X’ (Buffalo NB 2b, p. [2v]; see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 4.04; the
question mark is Joyce’s).
(64) NLI MS 14, p. [18r]. Joyce has Molly remember his name both as Groves and Grove. In
general, she thinks of him as captain Groves, but in connection with the stories of the Stanhopes
she recalls him as Grove. Of course, this could simply have been an oversight or error on Joyce’s
part in this context. Since he christened him Groves in the first instance, and more often than
not spelled captain in lowercase, I will use that name.
(65) I discuss the Stanhopes more fully in ‘Molly, Mr Stanhope, and Hester: A Genetic Reading of
a Love Triangle in Ulysses’ (forthcoming in JJQ, 51/1 [Fall 2014]).
(68) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. [11v].
(72) See Herring, Notes and Drafts, 240.
(73) Harvard Pl 50.i; see JJA 20.33.
(74) Harvard Pl B.iii.b; see JJA 21: 246.
(75) Harvard Pl B.iii.b; see JJA 21: 246.
(76) See Herring, Notes and Drafts, 1.22.
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(79) Harvard Pl B.ii.a; see JJA 21: 222.
(80) NLI NB 4, p. [10r].
(81) These three notes appear on NLI NB 4, p. [12r].
(82) Buffalo NB 2b, p. [2v] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 4.41).
(83) NLI NB 5B, p. [7r].
(85) NLI NB 4, p. [10v].
(89) Harvard Pl C.i; see JJA 21: 257.
(90) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 250.
(92) Texas PP 44.1; scribal addition; see JJA 27: 250.
(93) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 250. Also see Buffalo NB 2b, p. [2v]: ‘4 drunk tars red vest took G
[Gibraltar]’ (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 4.16).
(94) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 250.
(95) Buffalo MS 22, ff. [2r]–[3r]; JJA 16: 294–5.
(96) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 250. If Joyce is referring to Juan Valera y Alcalá Galiano, then he
may have been ascribing an agenda to Mrs Rubio’s reading material since his books often
address the struggle between romantic love and religious vocation.
(98) Little Review, VII.2, p. 47.
(99) Joyce based some aspects of Molly’s relationship with Harry Mulvey on Nora Barnacle’s
early romance with William Mulvagh in Galway, but altered and transformed the elements he
needed for his fiction. See Ellmann, James Joyce, 158–9.
(100) Simplified transcription; Cornell MS 56A, p. 26; see JJA 13: 225.
(101) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
Page 32 of 36
(102) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
(103) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 12. It is not clear if this is supposed to be the same character
who delivers the Blooms’ children.
(104) Buffalo TS 16.a, p. 22; see JJA 16: 321.
(106) Harvard Pl B.iv; see JJA 21: 254.
(107) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
(108) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
(109) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
(110) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
(111) See NLI MS 14, pp. [6r]–[7r].
(112) NLI MS 14, p. [7r].
(113) NLI MS 14, p. [7r].
(114) BL ‘Penelope’ NS 2.38–9.
(115) NLI MS 14, p. [7r].
(116) NLI MS 14, p. [7r].
(117) NLI MS 14, p. [8r].
(118) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
(119) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
(123) NLI NB 5A, p. [18r].
(125) See NLI MS 14, p. [7r]. Several important lines of text (in bold here) do not appear in the
1922 edition of Ulysses. Their first publication in 1984 provides a good deal more information
and changes our understanding of the scene: ‘but what could you get in a place like that the
Page 33 of 36
sandfrog shower from Africa and that derelict ship that came up to the harbour Marie the Marie
whatyoucallit no he hadnt a moustache that was Gardner’ (emphasis added; U-G 18.870–3).
(126) See NLI MS 14, p. [5r].
(127) See Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 8
(130) I discuss this scene more fully in ‘Leopold’s Schooldays’ in Chapter 3.
(131) See NLI MS 14, p. [6v].
(132) NLI NB 5B, p. [7r]. Furthermore, for some reason, when Joyce revised this addition on the
‘Penelope’ draft, he also briefly considered having Mulvey shipped off from Gibraltar to
Southampton, but reverted to his earlier plan of having him go to India after all (NLI MS 14, p.
[6v]).
(133) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, pp. [12v]–13.
(134) NLI NB 4, p. [10v].
(136) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. [12v]. Joyce made a point of the gentleman’s preferences in
his notes: ‘Mulvey didn’t like Sp [Spanish] woman she must have rejected him’ (NLI NB 4, p.
[11v]).
(141) Harvard Pl C.ii; see JJA 21: 266.
(142) See Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 13 and BL ‘Penelope’ NS 1.41.
(143) See Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, pp. [12v]–13.
(144) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. [12v] and Harvard Pl C.ii; see JJA 21: 266. The Gabler edition
restored the episode’s Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript reading: ‘I tormented the life out of
him’ (emphasis added), which had been typed as ‘tortured’. Though most often exaggerated, this
is in fact an example of Robert McAlmon’s interference in all the published versions of the text
before 1984, though Joyce does not seem to have noticed.
Page 34 of 36
(146) NLI NB 4, pp. [10v] and [11v], respectively.
(152) I discuss Molly’s only other adulterous affair in ‘Molly Takes A Lover’ in Chapter 7.
(159) See NLI NB 4, p. [10v].
(161) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 252.
(162) Emphasis added; Buffalo NB 2b, p. [1v] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 2.09).
(168) Harvard Pl C.iii.b; see JJA 21: 281.
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(170) Harvard Pl C.iii.a; see JJA 21: 273. Joyce separately revised between one and three copies of
each of the five proof levels of ‘Penelope’ and two copies of all placard settings of proof level
three. These are some of the most complex and convoluted documents in the production of
Ulysses.
(171) Buffalo NB 2b, p. [3r] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 5.43).
(172) Since Molly’s first tryst took place in May 1886 when Bloom claims she was 15, this is still
more evidence that she was born in 1871.
(173) I discuss the many parallels Joyce established between Molly and her daughter in ‘Milly
Bloom’ in Chapter 6.
(174) Harvard Pl C.iv; see JJA 21: 290.
(175) Harvard Pl C.iv; see JJA 21: 290.
(176) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 251.
(177) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 250.
(178) Buffalo MS 22, f. [5r]; see JJA 16: 297.
(179) Bloom’s ignorance about Molly’s early life also reflects Gabriel Conroy’s anxiety in ‘The
Dead’ in Dubliners when he realizes that there are things he does not know about his wife’s life
before they met. Another way of looking at this aspect of the Blooms’ marital dynamic is to
suggest that it reflects Joyce’s anxiety that he does not know everything about Nora Barnacle’s
adolescence as well.
Page 36 of 36
The Courtship of Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
July 1886–October 1888
Luca Crispi
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.003.0005

The stories of the Blooms’ ‘origin’ as a couple can be read as paradigmatic of the representation
of textual and psychological memory in Ulysses, and the manuscripts document how Joyce only
gradually determined the semblance of their subjective and intersubjective psychological and
emotional depth. In part, this chapter explores the memories of their several ‘first nights’
together and how this narrative inconsistency somehow disturbs our expectations about the
total unity of the book. It is also concerned with the fact that readers discover most of the
stories about the passionate courtship, growing love, and eventual marriage of Leopold and
Molly in the book’s two final, highly-stylized episodes, which Joyce only fully elaborated about
six months before Ulysses appeared. Furthermore, rather than being sharply delimited as multi-
dimensional characters in their own right, Joyce usually only distinguished amongst his
malleable minor characters to flesh out the stories of Leopold and Molly.
Keywords: textual and psychological memory, narrative inconsistencies, psychological depth, minor characters
Leopold and Molly’s first meetings

One of the abiding cruxes in Ulysses is a seemingly simple question: when and where did
Leopold and Molly first meet? After summing up all the information in the book about the first
night, it seems there were indeed two (or possibly more) so-called first nights—different firsts on
different evenings—for the soon-to-be Blooms.1 It might be surprising that even careful readers
could be confused about this happy occasion, but what might be considered a more critical fault
is that it seems that Bloom himself is of two minds about the date and location of this
Page 1 of 47
momentous event. The textual history of these scenes indicates that it was James Joyce himself
who was imprecise about these facts in the novel, and this narrative inconsistency will always be
part of Ulysses. This kind of slip-up should not surprise us about any author or any book, but
tellingly somehow it does disturb our conceptions of Joyce and of Ulysses, and so one of my aims
is to explore why this may be. Since these events happened to both of them, they provide the
couple’s earliest shared memories. Looked at more generally, the story of the Blooms’ ‘origin’ as
a couple may well be paradigmatic of the complexities of the working of both textual and
psychological memory. According to the various retellings of the stories in Ulysses, Leopold and
Molly must have first met sometime between July 1886 and May 1887, but exactly when cannot
be firmly established. Clearly, the slippage of almost a year marks quite a difference in the lives
of the Blooms as fictional characters, and thus also in the reader’s understanding of them. Also,
it seems that they could have either first met at Luke Doyle’s home in Dolphin’s Barn or at
Mathew Dillon’s in Roundtown (or Terenure as it is sometimes called in Ulysses).2 The only thing
that is certain is that while they were courting for over a year, Leopold and Molly met often in
both these homes.
(p.141) One or more games of charades
4. ‘Calypso’:
February 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach, f. 10
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
November 1919–January 1920 Draft Cornell MS 56B, pp. 30–1
15. ‘Circe’:
December 1920–January 1921 Mixed Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 51d–e

18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [10r]–[11r]
We come across the initial account of the story of Leopold and Molly’s first night in ‘Calypso’
whether we read the book from cover to cover or trace the history of the creation of the stories
in the manuscripts. This first recollection of the pivotal scene is on one of the earliest surviving
manuscripts that feature the Blooms: the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, which Joyce wrote in
February 1918. The scenario itself does not change significantly from the earliest version to its
final appearance in Ulysses in February 1922. Bloom thinks to himself: ‘Young still. The same
young eyes. The first night after the charades at Dolphin’s Barn’ (U 62.14–15; U-G 4.344–5).3
There is another reference to this first night in ‘Lestrygonians’, when on Westmoreland Street
Bloom runs into Josie Breen, née Powell. Although the facts of the event remain consistent, Joyce
is more ambivalent about who the character is in the scene on that episode’s Rosenbach
Page 2 of 47
manuscript. There he has Bloom think to himself: ‘Floey Powell that was’ (see U 151.16; U-G
8.273).4 As often happens, Joyce reassigned the events, actions, thoughts, and feelings to
different characters in his work. In this case, Joyce put together parts of the names of what
became two different characters: Floey Dillon and Josie Powell. While the language and most of
the facts of the scene are relatively fixed, the characters (or at least their names) often remained
malleable until some other specific advance in the narrative made it necessary for Joyce to
distinguish them as such.
(p.142) Two and a half years after he wrote the previous mention of ‘the first night’ of charades
in ‘Calypso’, Joyce connected Bloom’s memory of the young Josie with the pleasant games at
Luke Doyle’s home. On the second proof level of ‘Lestrygonians’, he added: ‘Josie Powell that
was. În Luke Doyle’s long ago. Dolphin’s Barn, the charades^’ (see U 151.16–17; U-G 8.273–
4).5 Something clearly happened for the first time after a night of charades at Luke Doyle’s, but
what that was may never become fully clear. Furthermore, from the ‘Penelope’ draft to Ulysses,
Molly seems absolutely certain about one thing at least: ‘the first night ever we met when I was
living in Rehoboth we stood staring at each other for about 10 minutes’ (see U 721.13–15; U-G
18.1182–3).6 These games of charades are fundamental moments in the courtship of Leopold
and Molly. They are obviously also the earliest instances of the couple’s shared memories and so
now we can begin to compare the various ways in which Joyce represents the lovers’ memories
of their courtship. For example, later in the day, Bloom thinks about a particularly memorable
game of charades that he specifically recalls took place in 1887, the year before they married (U
360.06; U-G 13.1107). It is just this sort of precise detail in the various stories in the book, which
are otherwise quite vague and certainly fluid (at least in their manuscript versions), that gives
Ulysses the semblance of facticity for which it is often appreciated. Bloom’s memory is
recounted in ‘Nausicaa’, and it was already on its draft, which Joyce was writing when he
returned to Trieste at the end of 1919.7 After Bloom’s erotic encounter, the flashing of the Bailey
lighthouse on Howth brings back memories of the couple’s courtship and of the fateful day when
he proposed to Molly, in between which he also thinks of Milly’s flirtation with Alec. Bannon in
Mullingar, as well as his own dalliance with Martha Clifford. In a complex whirl of associations,
these thoughts also bring up the older memories of the Doyles, the Dillons, and Major Tweedy:
Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out of me, little wretch.
She kissed me. My youth. Never again. Only once it comes. Or hers. Take the train there
tomorrow. No. Returning not the same. Like kids your second visit to a house. The new I
want. Nothing new under the sun. Care of P. O. Dolphin’s Barn. Are you not happy in
your? Naughty darling. At Dolphin’s barn charades in Luke Doyle’s house. Mat Dillon and
his bevy of daughters: Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy, Hetty. Molly too. Eightyseven that
was. Year before we. And the old major, partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only
child, I an only child. So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest
way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse walking in a
ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in Henny Doyle’s overcoat. Van: breadvan
delivering. Winkle: cockles and periwinkles. Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She
leaned on the sideboard watching. Moorish eyes. Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow.
All changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew.
(U 359.36–360.14; see U-G 13.1096–116)
Page 3 of 47
(p.143) Looking out from Sandymount Strand as the light settles on Howth—precisely when his
wife and Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan are having their rendezvous—Bloom begins to recall the various
times when he and Molly were happy, distinctly happier than they are now, when they were
single and just starting to meet at the homes of the Doyles and Dillons. Then he thinks that the
way life works reminds him of a circus horse walking in a ring, an apt metaphor for the cyclical
working of the events in our lives (U 360.11; U-G 13.1111–12).8 As Bloom contrasts his early
lovemaking on Howth with the state of his marriage more than fifteen years later, he briefly
laments his youth. In response, he thinks: ‘The new I want’, but instantly he reconsiders the
matter: ‘Nothing new under the sun’ (U 360.02–3; U-G 13.1104–5). This was the night Bloom
acted out ‘Rip Van Winkle’, and Bloom recalls all the elements of his winning performance,
Molly’s pose, and then her Eastern look. He then thinks more about what Rip Van Winkle must
have experienced waking up after two decades: ‘All changed. Forgotten. The young are old’ (U
360.14; U-G 13.1115), which is how Bloom must feel when he lets himself think about his
marriage and what his wife and her lover are doing just then in their home.9
Then, about a year after Joyce wrote the scene in ‘Nausicaa’ of a night of charades at the
Doyles,10 he added to Molly’s seemingly same memory of that night in ‘Penelope’. In an addition
on the typescript, Molly thinks to herself: ‘he [Bloom] had a few brains not like that other fool
Henny Doyle he was always breaking or tearing something in the charades I hate an unlucky
man’ (U 698.29–31; U-G 18.321–3).11 There simply is not enough contextual information in
Ulysses to determine whether these are all the same night of charades, though most readers
have good reason to think that they are.
From the earliest manuscript version of the scene in ‘Nausicaa’ onwards,12 Joyce has Mat Dillon
and his daughters in attendances at this memorable night of charades at the Doyles. Readers
can account for this fact with the simple proposition that the Doyles and Dillons (and their
children, who appear to be the same age as Leopold and Molly) were part of the same circle of
friends, and so they all met regularly at one another’s homes. But it is also quite likely that Joyce
never fully differentiated between the two families, or between what he may have planned as
separate events in their respective homes. So, in a very basic sense, these possibly several
encounters become intertwined in the text of Ulysses (and therefore in Bloom’s mind and so in
the reader’s understanding as well). Then, in ‘Ithaca’, we read that on a memorable morning
Bloom saw the sunrise seated on a garden wall after a particular night of charades: (p.144)
Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?
Once, in 1887, after a protracted performance of charades in the house of Luke Doyle,
Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition of the diurnal phenomenon, seated
on a wall, his gaze turned in the direction of Mizrach, the east.
(U 657.25–9; U-G 17.1259–63)
Since Joyce has inexplicably transplanted the Doyles from Dolphin’s Barn to Kimmage, it is
impossible to know whether this refers to the same evening of charades recounted in ‘Nausicaa’,
and reprised in ‘Penelope’, or whether they are all that ‘first night’ mentioned in ‘Calypso’,
because the facts as they are given in ‘Ithaca’ contradict those other versions of the stories.
Page 4 of 47
Finally, what may or may not be the same night of charades is reprised in ‘Circe’. It first appears
on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript (which means that Joyce wrote it after all but the
‘Ithaca’ descriptions of one or more nights of charades at Luke Doyle’s house).13 This version of
the story further complicates the attempts to differentiate between what took place at the
homes of the Doyles and of the Dillons. Presumably, the context is meant to suggest precisely
that same night of charades at Luke Doyle’s when Bloom acted out ‘Rip Van Winkle’, but
predictably enough, given the fluid state of these stories, it is not as clear as all that.14 Here
Bloom repeats the fact that this was indeed the first night, but now it does not take place at
Luke Doyle’s home. In fact, as Bloom’s memory of that night returns he exclaims, ‘I see her! It’s
she! The first night at Mat Dillon’s!’ (emphasis added; U 507.23–4; U-G 15.3162).
Another ‘first night’
11. ‘Sirens’:
Early 1919 Later Draft NLI MS 9, p. [10r]
August 1919 Serial Publication Little Review, VI.4, p. 59
That is all the information there is about that night (or nights) of charades at the home of the
Doyles (or was it at the Dillons after all?). Nonetheless, Joyce wrote a distinctly different version
of Leopold and Molly’s ‘first night’ on the later ‘Sirens’ draft, which he finished about a year
after he had written the other ‘first night’ scene in ‘Calypso’. There is no evidence that Joyce had
written this other ‘first night’ scenario before, and it is important to bear in mind that he
continued to expand and refine the scene substantially on several subsequent manuscripts. The
(p.145) narrator describes Cowley singing Lionel’s sorrowful memories of lost love in M’appari
in the next room:
The voice returned. Weaker but unwearied it sang again how first it saw that form
endearing, how sorrow then departed, how look and form and word charmed him and won
his heart.
(see U 264.04–7; U-G 11.717–20)15
Moved by the emotions that the music has stirred in him, Bloom thinks about his past: ‘First
night at Mat Dillon’s I saw her’ (see U 264.12; U-G 11.725).16 Then, he recalls the summery
dress Molly wore that night. He remembers her full voice as she sang Waiting while he turned
the music for her. More particularly, Bloom recalls the recurring motifs of her ample bosom and
Spanish eyes. This, as usual both erotic and exotic, pointedly sexualized memory of Molly is
exemplary of how the other men in the Ormond (and generally in Ulysses) think of her; that is,
this sort of formulaic depiction of Molly is essential to the way Joyce represents her in Ulysses.
Furthermore, also typical of both their memories of pleasant times at Mat Dillon’s even after so
many years have passed, Bloom associates Molly’s voice with the Dillons’ garden flowers. This
shared memory of that time and place is always an idyllic—even Edenic—setting and event.
Page 5 of 47
Maybe it is not surprising, but almost all of Leopold and Molly’s memories of their early
courtship revolve around the theme of the repeating cycles of time in life. Here his memory is
most obviously figured in the game the couple first played. After Joyce revised it several times, it
appears in Ulysses as follows:
Musical chairs. We two the last. Fate. After her. Fate. Round and round slow. Quick round.
We two. All looked. Halt. Down she sat. All ousted looked. Lips laughing. Yellow knees.
(U 264.13–15; U-G 11.726–8)
Here Bloom recalls that they were the last to find their seats in the parlour game. He thinks
about how this seemingly trivial entertainment may have sealed their fates and then ponders the
ways the past must necessarily determine the future. The others (presumably men), who ‘All
looked’ at Molly, had been ‘ousted’ by Bloom’s successful efforts in the game and so in life; and
he thinks how this must have been ordained by fate. While chance may have played a part in
their courtship, their love was destined to be in Ulysses.
There was no mention of any ‘first night’ scene on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft; it only appears on
the later one. Then, by the time he wrote the Rosenbach manuscript six months later,17 Joyce
had changed the start of the paragraph from ‘First night at Mat Dillon’s I saw her’ to ‘First night
I met her at Mat Dillon’s in Roundtown’ and this is how it was typed (emphasis added; see U
264.12; U-G 11.725). When Joyce reread the episode’s typescript,18 before the publication of
‘Sirens’ in the August issue of the Little Review, he presumably noticed that this version of the
couple’s ‘first night’ in effect contradicts the other ‘first night’ scene in ‘Calypso’ (p.146) that
had by then already appeared in print. So, as he often did, Joyce tried to address the situation by
smoothing over the apparent contradiction as simply as possible, rather than radically altering
what he had already written. Joyce changed the location and phrasing on a missing manuscript
that was used to set up the episode for the August 1919 issue of the Little Review to read ‘First
night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon’s in Terenure’ and that is how it appears in the Little
Review.19 This shows how, as he often did, Joyce tried to redress a textual discrepancy caused
by his evolving narrative by smoothing over it as simply as possible. Nonetheless, if these
changes were supposed to be clarifications, they obviously do not diminish the confusion about
when and where these several first nights take place. Still, this is how the various stories stand
in Ulysses and in the manuscript versions that lead to the version in the published book.
The Dillons of Roundtown (Terenure)
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
February 1920 Mixed Faircopy Rosenbach, f. 51
25 October–Early November 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl 41.ii
23–25 November 1921 Fifth Proof Level Texas PP 23.3
Page 6 of 47
On the road out of town through Rathgar, it is not clear why Joyce would have located the
fictional Dillons in what was then a relatively rural setting or why he has Molly and Leopold
travel out to what is now Terenure to visit them, except for the fact that in Ulysses the Blooms
always associate the Dillons with their lush pastoral garden (as I discuss more fully in the next
section). Nonetheless, the connection between the Dillons and Leopold and Molly is apparently
more substantial and fundamental to the narrative history of Ulysses than the night (or nights) of
charades at the Doyles. In fact, the gatherings at Mat Dillon’s home assumed greater
significance as Joyce continued to expand the biographical narrative of the soon-to-be Blooms.
To bolster this memory, in ‘Nausicaa’ Joyce has Bloom recall a particularly romantic encounter
in the Dillons’ garden in May (in what must have been 1887), where he kissed Molly among the
nightstock and other flowers (U 359.26–7; U-G 13.1090–1). There is no mention of the kiss in the
garden on the episode’s draft—there he simply ‘wooed her’20—but on the episode’s subsequent
Rosenbach manuscript it has become an integral part of the story.21 Oddly, besides the
momentous kiss on Howth the day she encouraged him to propose, which I discuss more fully
(p.147) later in this chapter, the only other one of Leopold’s kisses that Molly happens to
remember was actually at Luke Doyle’s, thereby further entangling the two families and what
happened at their homes in the Blooms’ memories. Again, the events at the homes of the Dillons
and the Doyles have presumably merged in Joyce’s descriptions. Could Joyce have meant to
describe the same scene here, and did he conflate the homes where this memorable kiss took
place yet again? More fundamentally, this is another example of the more persistent issue of
whether or not Joyce’s characters are actually integral to the stories being told in Ulysses. Then,
a year later, at different times on the second and fifth proof levels, Joyce continued to add
elements to this idyllic scene. Now the memory of Molly in the garden makes him think: ‘^Wish I
had ^+<an> a fulllength+^ oilpainting made of her then.^ June that was too I wooed. The year
returns. History repeats itself.’ (see U 359.27–9; U-G 13.1091–3).22 Throughout Ulysses, Bloom’s
thoughts centre on a desire to capture (or else recapture) the past, and so evoke a time when he
was happier than he is in 1904.
If one accepts the view that Joyce’s characters are less significant to the narrative and the
meaning of Ulysses than the stories being told by and about them, then in this case it is not so
much that Joyce decided that the Dillons would occupy a relatively more central space in the
early life histories of the Blooms. Rather, as he kept revising, Joyce only progressively began to
attribute significance to the Dillons (to their home and garden and to the pleasant times the
young couple spent there) and, therefore, only slowly concentrated the possibilities of
coincidence that this creative nexus of situational contexts and constructed memories afford the
narrative. Instead of being relevant for their factual detail, these fictionalized families and their
homes accumulated thematic meaning and narratological significance as Joyce kept
amalgamating and unifying his stories at the same time as he was elaborating and complicating
them.
Leopold in love
Encounters in the Dillons’ garden
(p.148)
Page 7 of 47
6. ‘Hades’:
March–May 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 28 and 38
September 1918 Serial Publication Little Review V.5, p. 31
June–August 1921 Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 4, pp. [11r] and [15r]
6–19 September 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl 12.iii
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
February–March 1920 Earlier Draft NLI MS 11B, pp. [7v]–[8r]
March–May 1920 Later Draft NLI MS 11E, p. [10r]
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. [0v] and 21
As I discussed in the previous section, the entertainments at the Dillons’ home became
progressively more important as Joyce continued to write Ulysses, but the first time readers are
given an inkling of those memorable gatherings is in an aside by John Henry Menton in
‘Hades’ (U 102.21–37; U-G 6.690–707); then there is Bloom’s version of the same day at the end
of the episode (U 110.34–111.04; U-G 6.1007–14). Unlike some of the stories that Joyce variously
changed, the entire scenario involving Menton, Bloom, and Molly appears almost in its final form
on the earliest surviving version of these stories, the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.
Whereas Bloom remains on the margins of the group at Glasnevin cemetery in ‘Hades’, Menton
is well known to most of the other men at Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Simon Dedalus speaks kindly
of his generosity, concluding that ‘John Henry is not the worst in the world’ (U 99.14; U-G
6.571).23 After the funeral, Kernan makes a vain attempt to engage Bloom in a discussion on the
relevant merits of the Protestant funeral rites and Corny Kelleher joins the men walking along
and asks about the funeral. Then Menton asks curiously, ‘Who is that chap behind with Tom
Kernan? […] I know his face’ (emphasis added; U 102.21–2; U-G 6.690–1). On the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript, Ned Lambert replies by bringing up Molly: ‘Bloom, he said. Madame
^<Marie Meagher> Marion Tweedy^ that was, the soprano. She’s his wife’ (see U 102.24–5;
U-G 6.693–4).24 It might be surprising for readers of Ulysses to discover that Joyce clearly
named Bloom’s wife ‘Marie Meagher’ on this relatively late version of the episode, even though
he had already settled on the name Marion Tweedy for his heroine before he wrote it.25 It is not
clear why Joyce (p.149) purposely misnamed her here in this way. It could be that he was
experimenting with the idea that the other Dublin men would know Molly by one of her stage
names. Whatever the case, he then renames the singer as we know her in Ulysses on a missing
document because that is how she appears on the later typescript and therefore in the Little
Review in September 1918.26
Page 8 of 47
The mention of Molly elicits Menton’s own memories of a flirtatious dance with her in Mat
Dillon’s garden many years ago. He then recalls the still surprisingly clear time when he ‘fell
foul of him [Bloom] one evening, I remember, at bowls’ (U 102.31; U-G 6.701). All of the
elements of the story as they appear in Ulysses were already on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript. As we saw in Lambert’s response, the specific context of the discussion about Molly
is not only her singing, but also her ample proportions, which Joyce particularly emphasized in
an addition on that manuscript:
— O, to be sure, John Henry Menton said. I haven’t seen her for some time. She was a
finelooking woman. I danced with her – wait – fifteen, seventeen golden years ago, at Mat
Dillon’s in Roundtown. Ând a good armful she was.^
(see U 102.26–8; U-G 6.695–8)27
Typical of the way Molly is represented in Ulysses, she is sexualized in the men’s memories and
in their discussions of her. Similarly, the other male Dubliners openly disparage Bloom for his
background and work. When told that Bloom had been ‘A traveller for blotting paper’, Menton
sneers: ‘In God’s name, […] what did she marry a coon like that for? She had plenty of game in
her then’, to which Ned Lambert replies: ‘Has still, […]. He does some canvassing for ads’ (U
102.34–6; U-G 6.704–6).28 Then, the story of that memorable day is dropped, only to return at
the end of the episode in precisely the same way in Bloom’s own version of the events that took
place that day in the Dillons’ garden. As the men are leaving the cemetery gates, Bloom is
similarly curious about the other man and thinks: ‘Solicitor, I think. I know his face.
Menton’ (U 110.34; U-G 6.1007).29 By having Bloom and Menton share such explicitly similar
memories and reactions, it would seem that Joyce is not merely calling attention to the
somewhat banal fact that most people can recognize one another’s faces even after many years,
but he also seems to be striving to build up specifically verbal associative networks for readers
to follow in different ways throughout Ulysses. Then Bloom recalls that Dignam had worked for
Menton, and he too remembers that game of lawn bowls in ‘Mat Dillon’s long ago’:
Got his rag out that evening on the bowling green because I sailed inside him [Menton],
Pure fluke of mine: the bias. ^Why he took such a rooted dislike to me. Hate at first
sight.^ Molly and Floey Dillon linked under the lilactree, laughing. Fellow always like
that^+, mortified+^ if women are by.
(see U 110.37–111.04; U-G 6.1010–14)
(p.150) Joyce made the earlier addition on the episode’s typescript for Ulysses and the later
one on its third proof level,30 but already on its Rosenbach manuscript version of Bloom’s
memory Molly and Floey Dillon were ‘linked under the lilactree, laughing’, watching the men
compete (U 111.02–3; U-G 6.1013).31 Building on the potential of this scene in ‘Hades’, Joyce
reworked the shared memory of these two pivotal scenes in Mat Dillon’s garden—the
contentious game of lawn bowls amongst the men and the (at the time) separate idyllic scene of
Molly and the Dillon girls—and merged them into one of the most illuminating analyses of
multiple and shared memories in Ulysses. Exactly the same setting and actions reoccur in ‘Oxen
of the Sun’, which makes this a prime example of the persistence of some very specific details
Page 9 of 47
and imagery in one story over many years, even when so much else in Ulysses sometimes
underwent radical change.
By mid-1918, Joyce had established the brusque banter in ‘Hades’ between Menton and Bloom
at the end of the episode exactly as it will appear in Ulysses, but in 1921 he gave Molly the last
word on Menton at the start of ‘Penelope’. Joyce added the entire description of her version of
that fateful day on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript at least four years after he had
established the coordinates of the scene in ‘Hades’. Molly reflects on what Bloom said as he was
getting into bed:
who did I meet ah yes I met do you remember Menton and who else who let me see that
big babbyface I saw him and he not long married flirting with a young girl at Poole’s
Myriorama and turned my back on him what harm but he had the impudence to make up
to me one times ^well done to him ^mouth almighty^ and his boiled eyes^ of all the big
stupoes I ever met and that’s called a solicitor
(see U 691.09–15; U-G 18.38–44)32
To further balance matters, in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ Mat Dillon’s daughters reappear in the family
garden in Roundtown as adornments at some of the most important encounters in the novel.33
Several momentous events happened that day. Bloom bested Menton at a game of lawn bowls
(in what Bloom humbly thinks was simply a stroke of luck on his part) and thereby ousted him as
a possible suitor for the lovely and exotic Molly. That same day Bloom also has one of his most
romantic visions of Molly and they first see Stephen. This is another example of the ways in
which Joyce strove to unite rather than disperse the events in his stories, thereby providing a
stronger semblance of cohesion in the novel. In February 1920—therefore, two and a half years
after he had written about the same scene in ‘Hades’—Joyce wrote another rudimentary version
of Bloom’s recollection in the garden of both seeing Molly and his first sighting of Stephen.
On the earlier draft of ‘Oxen of the Sun’, the gathering in Holles Street maternity hospital
evokes the following memory in Bloom. It is late in the evening of (p.151) 16 June 1904 and, as
he is staring at Stephen who is sitting beside him at the table, Bloom notices the ‘false serenity’
of the expression on the young man’s face. The interaction between them prompts Bloom to
conjure up another occasion when he had noticed Stephen express a similar ‘unhealthy
sensitiveness’ towards life (see U 401.03–5; U-G 14.1357–8). Here are much simplified versions
of Joyce’s first rendering of the scene and the revised version on the same page of the episode’s
earlier draft:
Earlier version:
Two scenes stood forth in the watcher’s memory. A lilac garden. A bowling green in
Roundtown on a soft July evening, the scent of lilac from the sisterhood of trees mingling
softly with that other sisterhood of girls, Floey, Tiny, Atty and yet another. A lad of four or
five in linsey woolsey of ripe damson in the centre of that wellremembered ring, a prattler
even then, while by the grey urn beside them – a mother looks on.34
Later version:
Page 10 of 47
A scene ^disengaged itself quiet save for the slow roll and brief shocks of the pellets^ in
the observer’s memory in Roundtown on a soft June evening the scent of lilac from the
sisterhood of trees mingling softly with that other sisterhood of girls, Floey, Tiny, Atty and
yet another ^whose eyes and brain seem the product of a distant more southern clime^. A
lad of four or five in linsey woolsey of ripe damson in the ^[illegible word]^ centre of that
wellremembered ring, a prattler even then, while by the grey urn beside them – a mother
looks on.
(see U 401.06–24; U-G 14.1359–78)35
About eleven hours after the funeral in ‘Hades’, Bloom again recalls that same day, so many
years ago in that primal garden.36 It was here on a summer afternoon that, while playing lawn
bowls, Leopold Bloom had an early love-struck vision of Molly Tweedy. Furthermore, it was also
here on that same day that they both first encountered the very young Stephen Dedalus. In what
purports to be a parody of Pater’s style, the vivid facts of that memorable afternoon are evoked
most fully, if somewhat fancifully. Although all of these events happened in the same place and
were certainly always intertwined, in the first version of Bloom’s recollection, Joyce wrote that
‘two scenes stood forth in the watcher’s memory’ (emphasis added). There was one separate
scene in ‘A lilac garden’ where Leopold sees Molly and the Dillon girls as they play with
Stephen. Then, there is another scene in ‘A bowling green’ where presumably he and Menton
are vying for Marion’s attention. The manuscript shows how Joyce only merged the two
previously separate scenes as he was revising these stories, thereby strengthening the
importance and unity of this crucial day in the history of Ulysses. Once again, rather than
inventing a new scenario for the meeting with Stephen, Joyce built on the relatively limited
number of stories that he had already written by interweaving (p.152) other (sometimes new)
narrative and thematic lines within them. The actual merging of the scenes may have begun
with an addition in the margin, in which Joyce stressed that the lilac garden was ‘quiet save for
the slow roll and brief shocks of the pellets’ from the bowling green. So now, with this specific
connection, Joyce made it all one interconnected scene in Bloom’s mind and so in Ulysses.
On the initial version of what were then two scenes on the earlier ‘Oxen of the Sun’ draft,
Bloom’s memory unexpectedly shifts to ‘A lad of four or five […], a prattler even then, while by
the grey urn beside them – a mother looks on’ (see U 401.17–24; U-G 14.1371–8).37 It seems that
the young Stephen’s appearance in the ‘lilac garden’ scene is a new story in Ulysses at this
juncture, but that is the full extent of this earliest version of Bloom’s memory of first seeing
Stephen. Rather than simply adding to or modifying what he had already written, in what was an
unusual practice, Joyce rewrote the whole scene on the facing (verso) page, even though he had
heavily revised its basic facts several times. He kept the now expanded earlier narrative of the
two scenes as one, but focused his efforts on enhancing the details of the setting, as well as
elaborating the more precise actions of the characters. Joyce also conspicuously enriched the
scene’s verbal texture based on a related cluster of notes that he transferred verbatim from his
hoard (the words from the notes are highlighted in bold font):
A shaven space of lawn one soft May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at
Roundtown, slender ^<perfumed> fragrant^ spectators of the game but with much real
Page 11 of 47
interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over the ground and stop, one by
another, with a brief alert shock
(see U 401.09–12; U-G 14.1362–6).38
This new rendering of the scene is exemplary of one of the ways in which Joyce constructed the
text in Ulysses from his notes. As Robert Janusko has recently discovered, Joyce took most of
these notes from Walter Pater’s Marcus the Epicurean, a copy of which he had in his Trieste
library.39 Not only is this bucolic garden scene of children playing while a couple looks on
basically similar in structure and tone to the scenes in Pater from which Joyce took these notes,
but many of the words in it also come directly from Pater’s work. Although it is difficult to know
for certain whether Joyce was directly inspired by the imagery in Marcus the Epicurean when he
rewrote his scene, the correspondences are strikingly similar. Nonetheless, Joyce did purposely
incorporate enough precise verbal echoes of Pater’s work to provide (p.153) a clearly
identifiable context for interpreting the new scene once the source text has been identified.
Above this block of writing and in a quite open handwriting that is characteristic of his very
early (often first) drafts, Joyce then also rewrote the rest of the scene (the text remained in a
quite fluid state, therefore I have simplified its representation here), and again he mined his
notes from Pater extensively to do so:
And yonder <by the grey urn> you saw another sisterhood, Floey, Tiny, Atty and <one>
yet another ^<comelier than they for a certain foreign grace which> I know not what of
arresting in her pose^ Ôur Lady of the Cherries,^ a ^comely^ brace of ^<cherries>
them^ ^<hanging> pendent^ on the ear, bringing out the <comely> foreign
^<graciousness> warmth^ of her skin ^so daintily^ against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of
four or five in linseywoolsey of ripe damson stands on the urn upheld by that circle of
girlish hands. He frowns a little just as this young man does now with perhaps a too
conscious enjoyment of the act but must needs glance at whiles towards where his
mother watches with a faint shadow of remoteness in her glad look.
(see U 401.12–24; U-G 14.1366–78)40
The essential characteristics of the first version persist, but Joyce substantially elaborated that
relatively sparse description, both with more sexualized bucolic imagery as well as with the
precise language that is supposed to be one of the hallmarks of the various styles in ‘Oxen of the
Sun’, much of which he again took from his notes on Marcus the Epicurean. He also significantly
expanded the description of Stephen’s attitude at the time, connecting it more pointedly with
the blasé pose of the young man on Bloomsday. Much as it is in Ulysses, the subsequent version
on the later draft is similar to what Joyce has achieved here probably in just a matter of hours or
at most a few days, except that he pointedly further brought out Molly’s exotic appeal by
describing her as the Dillons’ ‘darker friend’.41 In general, here Joyce’s changes and additions to
the scene make Molly more alluring, but also more generic.
Already on the earliest version of Bloom’s memory, the feminized sense of the natural setting is
inherently connected with the allure of the community of Dillon daughters and the other girl,
Page 12 of 47
who is obviously the lovely young Molly. In yet another addition to Bloom’s memory of her on the
earlier ‘Oxen of the Sun’ draft, Joyce made that even clearer by stressing the exotic appeal of
Molly’s eyes. But (possibly just to use a note he had at hand) he decided to make that association
more obscure in the next version where it simply reads: ‘their darker friend with I know not
what of arresting in her pose’ (401.14–15; U-G 14.1368–9).42 It is significant that in this scene
what most attracts Bloom—whom everyone else (p.154) thinks of as not being Irish—is that
Molly does not look like all the other Dublin girls around her: she too looks foreign. In
‘Penelope’, Molly has a similar memory of first seeing Leopold, which Joyce revised twice. She
recognizes her exotic appeal for Bloom: ‘we stood staring at one another for about 10 minutes
âs if we met somewhere^ ^+I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother
+
^’ (see U 701.14–16; U-G 18.1183–5).43 Joyce made the vague earlier addition on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript,44 but only added the other telling association as he quickly worked out
the details about Molly’s mother for the first time on its final proofs.45 Further reinforcing this
personal and thematic correspondence, on the ‘Nausicaa’ draft Bloom remembers that this same
force is precisely what Molly was attracted to in him. He wonders: ‘Why me? Because you
looked so foreign from the other’ (see U 362.30–1; U-G 13.1209–10).46 Later in their romance,
Molly must have shared this feeling with her husband and her view of him goes a long way to
reassure him as a man and about his life in Dublin, particularly after the trying encounters in
‘Cyclops’. Molly’s comforting answer was already on the earliest surviving manuscript version of
the scene in ‘Nausicaa’,47 and this aspect of the dynamic between the couple was surely an
early, fundamental, and remains an extremely moving, theme in Ulysses.
The young couple’s friends
June 1919 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 5–8
15. ‘Circe’:
July–December 1920 Intermediate Draft NLI MS 12, p. [4v]
December 1920–January 1921 Mixed Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 11
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Earlier Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [1v]–[2r]
July–September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach pp. [3v]–4
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iii.a
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iv
The night of the young couple’s first argument is another memorable story about which we are
given specific information concerning when and where it took place. (p.155) The setting for the
row was at Georgina Simpson’s housewarming party. Although we know almost nothing about
this minor character, we can presume that she and her fiancé (or possibly husband) were part of
the circle that attended similar evenings at the homes of the Doyles or the Dillons (or
presumably both). Georgina Simpson’s only importance as a character in Ulysses is that she is
intertwined in the stories of the friendship and jealousy between Leopold, Molly, and Josie
Page 13 of 47
Powell. So before we go any further with Georgina Simpson, we have to situate the third figure
in the couple’s early love triangle.
Josephine Powell, later Mrs Breen, is a minor, though certainly a more important character in
Ulysses than Georgina Simpson. In many ways Josie Powell is inextricably connected with Molly
in the book and in the real Dublin that forms a fundamental part of its background.48 As we have
seen, readers first encounter Josie Breen when Bloom runs into her on Westmoreland Street in
‘Lestrygonians’ (U 149.20–152.15; U-G 8.202–308). Almost all of the interactions between the
two old friends were already set out in the earliest version of the meeting on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript.49 In June 1904, the Blooms and the Breens are still nominally friends,
but they have not remained close after the couples married. In fact, Josie comments that she has
not ‘seen her [Molly] for ages’ (U 149.22; U-G 8.204–5). On the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’
manuscript, Molly recalls the fun times the young women had together, teasing one another for
Bloom’s sake, which was also part of the play of their feminine rivalry (see U 695.22–696.13; U-G
18.202–31). She remembers that they were always ‘embracing’ when he was around.50 Then, as
part of another, even later addition on the ‘Penelope’ Rosenbach manuscript, we are given an
example of the repartee between the young women. Molly recalls when she said in front of
Bloom that she ‘washed up and down as far as possible’, Josie was quick to ask her ‘and did you
wash possible’. Molly then cattily comments that ‘women are always egging on to that when he’s
there’ (see U 695.24–6; U-G 18.204–6).51
On the intermediate ‘Circe’ draft, Joyce added the (at the time) completely new story of the ‘ball’
at Georgina Simpson’s (U 422.22–7; U-G 15.440–5).52 This is one of the few stories in the
Blooms’ love affair that we can date precisely, but that is only because Joyce included the
specific detail that it took place on 6 January 1888 (Old Christmas Night or the Epiphany) on the
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.53 Before that change, the party could have taken place
anytime in their courtship or marriage. That night, along with Josie Powell, the ‘prettiest deb in
Dublin’, the friends play various games of clairvoyance, like the ‘Irving Bishop game, finding the
pin blindfold and thoughtreading’ (U 422.26–7; U-G 15.444–5), all of which first appear on the
Rosenbach manuscript.
(p.156) Joyce certainly wrote the initial version of the scene at Georgina’s party in ‘Circe’
before he wrote Molly’s account of the events on the ‘Penelope’ draft (U 694.27–33; U-G 18.172–
9), but they are mirror images. In both versions Leopold is to blame! Molly believes that she
knows what is going on: she is sure that Bloom and Josie were still flirting and that this led to
their first major row. As we will see in more detail in the following sections, reading a story only
from Molly’s perspective necessarily shapes the readers’ views of it. Here Molly’s bias is evident
in the way that Joyce made sure to have her claim that ‘he began it not me’ (U 694.30; U-G
18.175), but it is notable that Joyce only coloured the story with Molly’s view of the row months
after most of the contours of the story were already worked out on the Rosenbach ‘Circe’
manuscript.
Even though all of the facts of the story in ‘Penelope’ were constructed as several additions on
the episode’s draft,54 most of the ideas were based on notes that Joyce had already collected,
possibly years before. As in ‘Circe’, Molly’s associations began with the memory of the night
Bloom paid attention to Josie Powell, the ‘wallflower’ at Georgina’s party (U 694.29; U-G 18.174).
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On the ‘Penelope’ draft it reads: ‘talking about her being a wallflower and that was when we had
sort of a row about politics it was after that he bought me the gloves’ (see U 694.30–695.07; U-G
18.174–86).55 Joyce continued to expand this nexus of associations by adding Molly’s accusation
that the row came about because of Bloom’s liberal views on religion. As we know from Ulysses
(though they were unrelated ideas for a long time), it seems the row was caused by Bloom’s
claim about ‘our Lord being the first socialist and a carpenter’, which in a typical manner she
tempers with her next thought: he ‘still knows a lot of mixed up things especially about the body
& the inside’ (see U 694.30–4; U-G 18.175–8).56 This complex constellation of ideas came from
separate notes in different note-repositories: ‘He [Bloom] told her [Molly] J.C. [Jesus Christ] was
a Socialist carpenter’,57 ‘LB knew a lot about the body’,58 as well as ‘MB impressed by LB’s
knowledge’.59
The context for Molly’s reminiscences on the episode’s draft was the fact that she remembers
how handsome a suitor Bloom was and that she and Josie would tease him to get him aroused,
all of which were parts of further distinct additions on the verso page of the scene on the
‘Penelope’ draft.60 Then, a month or so later, Joyce integrated these additions into the flow of
Molly’s thoughts by the time it appears on the Rosenbach manuscript.61 As he wrote the scene
on the draft, Molly’s first thought was probably, ‘of course I don’t wonder because he was so
handsome then trying to look like Byron I said I liked & he was it’ (see U 695.29–30; U-G 18.209)
and, although it comes earlier in the next version, then Molly thinks, ‘because she was always
embracing me Josie when Poldy was there meaning him’ (see U 695.23–4; U-G 18.202–3).62 The
ways in which Joyce decided at this juncture to relate these (p.157) previously disparate ideas
tells us as much about how he conceived of Molly’s motivations and her ways of thinking as it
does about the character we read about in the novel.
Similarly, though in a more complex manner, Joyce only added most of the description of Molly’s
overly emotional reaction to the row on several proof levels. On the third proof level, Joyce
added that ‘he annoyed me so much I couldnt put him into a temper’ and, on the fourth proof
level, he then added: ‘at last he made me cry of course a woman is so sensitive about everything
I was fuming with myself after for giving in only for I knew he was gone on me’ (U 694.33 and
694.30–2; U-G 18.178 and 18.176–8, respectively).63 Although it is something readers often take
for granted as a well-established and somehow necessary pattern in Ulysses (or in almost any
narrative), this was how over several months Joyce slowly built up the emotional dynamic
between the couple at that stage of their courtship. Having charted the budding romance
between Molly and Leopold, the next section traces the evolution of their love and eventual
marriage.
The Romance Blossoms

Except for the beautiful description of the proposal on Howth that Bloom first recalls in
‘Lestrygonians’ (U 167.27–168.06; U-G 8.899–916) that I discuss in greater detail later in the
chapter, readers have to wait to the very end of Ulysses to discover almost all of the remaining
stories about the passionate courtship, growing love, and eventual marriage of Leopold and
Molly. Almost everything that we know about Leopold’s sexual interests while he was courting
Molly only comes from her version of these events in ‘Penelope’. Based on the general pattern by
which Joyce usually strove to establish a sense of symmetry in the stories that are recounted in
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Ulysses, it is quite surprising that readers are not also given Bloom’s version of the couple’s
early romantic and sexual encounters. These are certainly the sort of memories that one would
expect to be on Bloom’s mind as well and, therefore, part of the narrative foundation of the
book. The basic fact that readers do not have more than one version of these stories suggests
that if Joyce had postponed (yet again) the publication of Ulysses so as to continue writing and
revising the book, he most likely would also have included Bloom’s view on these events in the
earlier episodes as well. Since so much of this information is only presented from Molly’s point
of view, readers should be circumspect about her bias towards these facts as they read just her
versions of their stories.
It is also often difficult (and sometimes impossible) to ascertain a precise chronology of the
relatively few remaining events in their early love affair. This is because—even though the chain
of associations in ‘Penelope’ may be just as subjective and complex as Bloom’s are in other
episodes—the narrative style and therefore the logic that binds these memories (and the feelings
they prompt) is (p.158) even more convoluted and entangled for Molly and so for the reader. In
Ulysses much of this information is jumbled together in her telling of these stories and all too
often there just is not enough information to determine the sequence of these events in their
lives, which is obviously a crucial aspect of the development of their experiences. This episode’s
narrative style manifestly impinges on readers’ judgments about these events in a different way
than in the rest of the book. In fact, when some of these stories are told, it is often impossible to
clearly distinguish which actions trigger a particular response in one or other of the partners in
the couple. But, by disentangling the causal prompts for the ways in which Joyce added and
related particular moments, thoughts, feelings, and reactions in these stories in ‘Penelope’, a
genetic reading of Ulysses presents different insights into the characters of Leopold Bloom and
Molly Tweedy, and so further tools for critical interpretation as well.
Teasing Leopold
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [3r], [5v]–[6r], and [11r]
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. [4v]–5 and 22
17–Late October 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl B.i
Let us begin with an example that may or may not have happened early on in the couple’s
continuing courtship. Joyce only added the telling detail about Molly’s coy ploy to tease Bloom
with a photo of her first lover, Lieutenant Harry Mulvey,64 after much of the context of the scene
had already been established (U 707.21–7; U-G 18.652–9). A constellation of additions on the
‘Penelope’ draft seems to have been the starting point of the chain of associations that
structures Molly’s account here.
Joyce began by adding the simple notion that Molly’s friend in Gibraltar, the slightly older
Hester Stanhope, had taught Molly a few ladylike things; for example, how to settle her hair
when she wore it up (U 707.09–10; U-G 18.639–40). Linked with this motif of instructing and
improving Molly, he also added the fact that Hester gave Molly Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone
(U 707.21–2; U-G 18.653).65 Then, presumably pleased with the new possibilities afforded by
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telling a story about the seemingly few books that Molly read in her adolescence, Joyce
continued to amplify this additional scene. He squeezed his writing in on what little open space
there was in the left-hand margin of the main (recto) page and then, when that was full as well,
he kept on writing just below the primary block of text on the by then already quite full page.66
(p.159) In the margins, Joyce wrote out a more elaborate list of books that Hester had given
Molly. On the draft, the list simply read:
The Moonstone, East Lynne I read The Shadow of Ashlydyat Mrs Henry Wood Henry
Dunbar and by Lord Lytton Eugene Aram & Molly Bawn by Mrs Hungerford on a/c
[account] of name Î don’t like books with my name in it too unreal like that one <Poldy>
he brought me about somebody in Flanders Moll she was a whore & a shoplifter^.
(see U 707.21–8; U-G 18.652–9)67
Joyce only embedded yet another narrative line within what was at the time an unrelated scene
several months later. On the first proof level, Joyce included the story that several years after
both young ladies had left Gibraltar, Molly, now in Dublin, purposely put a photo of Mulvey in
one of these books before she loaned it to her current suitor (U 707.23–5; U-G 18.654–6).68 With
this stratagem, Molly wanted to tease Leopold with evidence that she had had another man in
her life before him. We are never told what Bloom thought when he made this unexpected
discovery, and so this is just one example of a story we only hear from Molly’s perspective.
There are other stories to unwind as well; for example, what happened when Leopold and Molly
were alone in a carriage one afternoon (U 697.31–4; U-G 18.284–9). Since conventions for young
couples back then were different, presumably just being alone together at this early stage in
their romance was a notable event. But the scene is exemplary in yet another way. The events as
well as the lovers’ reactions were a mosaic that Joyce slowly constructed in a disjointed manner,
seemingly without a clear sense of the overall narrative storyline he would create. Nonetheless,
that daunting prospect does not seem to have bothered Joyce as he wrote. The original setting of
the story on the ‘Penelope’ draft was a drive along Leinster Road, but Joyce for some reason
changed it to the nearby Kenilworth Square, Rathgar.69 Molly recalls that it was on this
memorable drive that Bloom ‘kissed me in the eye of my glove’ (U 697.30–1; U-G 18.286). This
prompted her to take it off, and gave him the opportunity to slip the memento into his pocket,70
a peccadillo that she allowed him, fearing worse. Emboldened, Bloom asked her politely whether
it is ‘permitted to enquire ^the shape of my bedroom^’, though the gist of his inquisitiveness
was something Joyce only added to the story after the draft.71
Furthermore, although we cannot be sure when this other scene in their love affair happened
either, towards the end of ‘Penelope’, just after Molly thinks about the first time she and Bloom
had met, she remembers the plan he cooked (p.160) up to see her bedroom (U 721.23–5; U-G
18.1192–5). Shortly after the Tweedys had left Rehoboth Terrace for Brighton Square, it seems
that Bloom managed to purposely spill ink on his hands so he could run inside the Tweedys’
home to wash it off. In his desperate hurry and excitement, she recalls that he had used the
‘milk and sulphur’ soap without taking off the gelatine wrapper. Molly found that very funny and
‘laughed myself sick that day’ (U 721.24–5; U-G 18.1195). Except for adding the tiny detail that
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the soap was specifically made of ‘Albion’ milk on the Rosenbach manuscript,72 everything else
about the story was already on the episode’s draft and remained virtually unchanged.73 Here,
too, we just do not know what Bloom thinks of his own cunning trick, though we can be sure that
his version would also have been a different sort of funny story.
A seemingly chance encounter on Harold’s Cross road
15. ‘Circe’:
September 1921 Additional Manuscript for Typescript Buffalo MS 20, p. [7r]
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, p. [3r]
July–September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. [4v]–5
16 August–September 1921 Typescript Huntington TS, pp. 9–10
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iv
Another example of a story we only hear from Molly’s perspective is of the time the two lovers
ran into one another at the corner of Harold’s Cross road. This is how the text ultimately
appears in Ulysses, but it developed in several unexpected ways before it achieved this form:
when he saw me from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me however
standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new raincoat on him with the
muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion and the brown hat looking
slyboots as usual what was he doing there where hed no business they can go and get
whatever they like from anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions
but they want to know where were you where are you going I could feel him coming along
skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping away from the house he felt it
was getting too warm for him so I halfturned and stopped then he pestered me to say yes
till I took off my glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for
the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers the whole
blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat
pocket O Maria Santisima he did look a big fool dreeping in the rain splendid set of teeth
he had made me hungry to look at them (p.161) and beseeched of me to lift the orange
petticoat I had on with the sunray pleats that there was nobody he said hed kneel down in
the wet if I didnt so persevering he would too and ruin his new raincoat you never know
what freak theyd take alone with you theyre so savage for it if anyone was passing so I
lifted them a bit and touched his trousers outside the way I used to Gardner after with my
ring hand to keep him from doing worse where it was too public I was dying to find out
was he circumcised he was shaking like a jelly all over they want to do everything too
quick take all the pleasure out of it and father waiting all the time for his dinner he told
me to say I left my purse in the butchers and had to go back for it what a Deceiver
(U 698.01–26; see U-G 18.293–313)
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Although the rudiments of this encounter were already on the ‘Penelope’ draft,74 as usual Joyce
significantly expanded it on several subsequent manuscripts. For example, while Joyce had
established much of the action, he only specified where it took place on a missing intermediary
manuscript between the episode’s draft and the Rosenbach manuscript. Until that point, the
encounter could have happened anywhere in Dublin, but once Joyce settled on the fact that it
took place on Harold’s Cross road, then this obviously defining detail altered the contours and
significance of the seemingly chance meeting. Joyce slowly built up the determination that
Leopold had been pursuing Molly, and that is the reason why they met unexpectedly on the
road. As an addition on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce emphasized this by making
Molly quite judgmental not only about Bloom, but men in general. Commenting on where they
met and the freedom men have in society, she thinks: ‘where he’d no business they [men] can go
and get anything they like’ (U 698.05–6; U-G 18.297–8),75 and Joyce later made her views even
stronger with another addition on the typescript: ‘from anything at all with a skirt on it’ (U
698.05–6; U-G 18.298).76
According to Molly on the draft, the scene was already overtly sexual and voyeuristic: ‘he saw
me from behind in the rain’ (U 698.01–2; U-G 18.293–4).77 Later, on a missing manuscript, Joyce
made the scene even more suspicious by adding the fact that Bloom had been ‘following’ her. At
the same time, he undermined Bloom’s endeavour by giving Molly the upper hand with another,
symmetrical addition. Now she boasts, ‘I saw him before he saw me however standing at the
corner of the Harold’s cross road with a new raincoat on him’ (U 698.02–3; U-G 18.294–5).78 This
long addition also gives the story a great deal of previously missing specific narrative detail,
which further determines the reader’s perspective on the scene. Her recollection was even more
sensual on the draft when she thinks: ‘I saw him first felt him looking on my neck’ (U 698.08–9;
U-G 18.300–1),79 which is based on another note: ‘feel LB’s eyes at nape’.80 They met after a rain
shower and she noticed that he was wearing a new raincoat with his brown hat, but ‘the muffler
in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion’ was something Joyce only added later to the
typescript (U 698.04–5; U-G 18.295–6).81
(p.162) In Ulysses, Molly admits that she felt that she had to encourage him a bit at this
unforeseen meeting because ‘he had been keeping away from the house he felt it was too warm
for him’ (U 698.09–10; U-G 18.301–2). Although the story was already quite well established on
the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript,82 Joyce only added the particular reason for her genial
attitude towards Bloom’s pestering that day on the episode’s fifth (and final) proof level;83 that
is, just about two weeks before Ulysses was published. On the other hand, months or maybe
even years before, Joyce had conceived of a more poignant reason to explain why Bloom was
‘keeping away’. In one of his notes Joyce revealingly wrote that ‘LB kept away afraid to fall in
love’,84 which is a much more pointed statement about Leopold’s early romantic sentiments than
we are ever given in the book.
The syntax of Molly’s thoughts seems to break down as Joyce has her describe their continuing
conversation on Harold’s Cross road. On the ‘Penelope’ Rosenbach manuscript, the story reads:
Bloom ‘pestered me to say yes ^till I took off my glove slowly watching him^’ (U 698.10–11; U-G
18.302–3).85 Although somewhat vague in Ulysses, the reason why she reluctantly said ‘yes’ and
took off her glove is made clear by the note that probably inspired this additional detail: ‘LB
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prefers hand took off glove slowly’.86 This was something that Joyce added at least five months
before the other addition. This is one of the ways in which a genetic reading of Ulysses reveals
the author’s construction of his character’s traits in the published work as a palimpsest over
time and on one or more documents.
As the story of that day on Harold’s Cross road continues on the draft (U 698.11–26; U-G 18.303–
17), it seems that, gentleman that he is, Bloom is overly worried that Molly may be cold in the
rain in her ‘openwork sleeves’ (U 698.11–12; U-G 18.303). But she has a different view about his
real motivations on the draft. There Molly thinks, ‘of course glad of any excuse to touch me’ (see
U 698.12–13; U-G 18.304–5),87 which leads her to continue ruminating on Bloom’s well-known
fixation. According to Molly, on another occasion Bloom begged Molly ‘to give him a bit of my
drawers’ (U 698.13–14; U-G 18.305–6), which is based on a straightforward note: ‘to give LB bit
of drawers’.88 On the ‘Penelope’ draft, she thinks: ‘of course he’s mad on drawers’.89 Readers
know that Leopold Bloom is a ‘Friend of all Frillies’ (U 470.17; U-G 15.1950), and his fetish
resounds throughout the novel.90 Thinking back at the end of Bloomsday, on the ‘Penelope’
draft, Molly admits that ‘drawers drawers all the time he made me laugh’,91 which is a softer
attitude than she affords his fascination in Ulysses. When Joyce rewrote this memory, he
sharpened Molly’s sentiments considerably. In the published version of ‘Penelope’ she no longer
finds his obsession so amusing. Finally, Joyce only supplied Molly with a (p.163) solution to
Leopold’s pestering on the subject—‘till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry
about in his waistcoat pocket O Maria Santissima’ (U 698.14–15; U-G 18.305–6)—as he revised
the episode’s typescript,92 a few months after he had finished both with the draft and its
Rosenbach manuscript.
But it seems that Bloom was not the only man in Molly’s life who would look for almost any
pretext to ‘put his hand anear’ her (U 698.12–13; U-G 18.304), and this bit of contextual
information changes our perspective on her and her soon-to-be husband in this scene. It may be
surprising to learn that the note that probably inspired Molly’s criticism of Bloom here was in
fact ascribed to another lover. Joyce’s note reads: ‘For any excuse to touch her (Mulvey)’.93 As
often happens in Ulysses (and then even more so in Finnegans Wake), Joyce may have had quite
different plans in mind when he was compiling his notes, but, as he started to actually write, the
execution of his ideas—and, more specifically, the language as well as the characters’ traits—
remained exceptionally malleable. The manuscripts document the extent to which Joyce was
prone to reassign actions, thoughts, or traits from one character to another.
Bloom’s agenda that day was even clearer on the draft than it is in Ulysses. Molly thinks simply
enough: ‘he wanted me to lift my skirts’,94 but her response was more complicated. On the one
hand, Molly was worried that someone might see her acting in such a bold way in public, but on
the episode’s draft she was also worried that Bloom might see her ‘with the old things I had
on’ (emphasis added). But later Joyce rethought the scene and pilfered a fact he had noted
before, though probably not with this particular context in mind. As he revised the scene (still on
the same page of the draft), all of a sudden Joyce gave Molly a change of clothes, and now she is
wearing a more enticing ‘orange petticoat with the sunray pleats’ (see U 698.16–17; U-G 18.308–
9).95 It seems that Molly’s moral sensibilities can change as quickly as her clothes, so in this
revised version she actually becomes eager to have her suitor see her pretty frillies. At first,
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Molly feigns to resist, but on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript Joyce gave her a good reason
to relent. It seems Bloom was ‘^so persevering^’ that he even threatened to ‘kneel down in the
wet’ road (see U 698.17–18; U-G 18.308–9).96 Although it seems ‘he did look a big fool ^dreeping
in the rain^’ as he stood there,97 he certainly won the day. On the draft, we find out that ‘that
was the first night I touched him outside’ (see U 698.20–1; U-G 18.312–13), and in an addition in
the left margin Joyce brought out the telling details that ‘he was shaking all over <off his
feet>’,98 though that he was ‘shaking ^like a jelly^ all over’ first appears on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript.99
Although unknown to readers of Ulysses, a remarkable aspect of Joyce’s conception of their

pivotal first sexual encounter is that on the draft we read that afterwards ‘he thanked me’,100 or
better yet—as he had it in the note that prompted this scene—we read that ‘LB thanked her for
frig’.101 Fortunately, Bloom’s sincere (p.164) (but certainly less than romantic) response
dropped out of Ulysses, and the focus of the story shifted to what motivated Molly to initiate this
tantalizing sexual experience. In fact, it was only later that Joyce added many of the details of
this story that we know from Ulysses. By the time he wrote the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’
manuscript, Joyce had added the idea that Molly associates her first time with Bloom with other,
similar acts with another lover. In this revised telling, Molly recalls that she ‘touched his
trousers outside the way I used to Gardner’ (U 698.20–1; U-G 18.313),102 but that encounter
with another lover happened years after the Blooms had married. To make Molly’s behaviour
even more suspect, months later Joyce added that she would touch Gardner ‘with my ring
hand’ (U 698.20–1; U-G 18.313). Joyce added that hurtful detail of Molly’s only other previous
extramarital affair before 16 June on the episode’s fourth proof level,103 about four months after
Lt Stanley Gardner first entered Molly’s thoughts here, but that story has to wait until ‘Molly
Takes A Lover’ in Chapter 6.
The first thing that changes from the version of this scene on the ‘Penelope’ draft is that Joyce
has Molly think about men in general in this context: ‘they’re so savage for it’ (see U 698.19–20;
U-G 18.311–12), which Joyce added towards the end of the summer of 1921 on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript.104 Joyce added a much more compelling motivation for Molly’s actions
on its fourth proof level. Put bluntly, she ‘was dying to find out was he circumcised’ (U 698.22–3;
U-G 18.314–15),105 which Bloom is not, as we read in ‘Nausicaa’: ‘This wet is very unpleasant.
Stuck. Well the foreskin is not back. Better detach’ (U 356.30–1; U-G 13.979–80). This too was
based on a note Joyce may have stored away for a long time but only found an opportunity to
include it in ‘Penelope’ at a very late stage in the production of the book: ‘MB’s curiosity if LB
circumcised’.106
Letting love bloom
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [1v] and [2v]–[3r]
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy Manuscript Rosenbach MS, pp. 3–5
16 August–September 1921 Typescript Huntington TS, p. 10
Page 21 of 47
18. ‘Penelope’:
17–Late October 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl A.i.a
2–Early November 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl A.ii.a
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iii.b
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl B.iv
(p.165) Although other scenes must have intervened in their affair, Molly’s reminiscences
about her courtship continue with the story about Bloom writing her erotic letters ‘with all those
words in it’ (U 698.26–9; U-G 18.317–21). This is almost certainly a storyline that Joyce had
intended for Ulysses for quite a long time, possibly for years, though we first find the idea
explicitly stated in the following relatively late note: ‘LB’s obscene letters to MB’.107 On the
‘Penelope’ draft, Molly next wonders: ‘how could he have the face to any woman after his
company manners’ (U 698.27–8; U-G 18.319–20).108 Molly’s sense of awkwardness when he
boldly asked whether she was offended by the naughty words in his flirtatious correspondence
was already on the draft, and was possibly part of the scene before then. Then, she recalls that
he also had the nerve to ask ‘if I knew what they meant of course I had to say no ^+for form
sake+^ meaning yes then writing every day’ (see U 698.29–32; U-G 18.320–4). Joyce made this
addition to the episode’s draft and then further clarified Molly’s motivation by the time the
memory appears on its Rosenbach manuscript.109 The following note presumably inspired the
description of Molly’s public demeanour when Bloom asked the provocative question: ‘MB feigns
not to know obscene word in company’.110 But then Joyce added a different, more forthright
perspective on her reaction. As he was revising the typescript, Joyce has Molly candidly admit
that ‘of course he saw I wasnt’ (U 698.29; U-G 18.321).111 Each of these additions serves to
make Molly’s revelations more explicit and makes her seem more sexually precocious, especially
in comparison with the earlier versions of this story when her response may have been implied
but remained unexpressed.
One of the more important stories about their courtship was the time Leopold unsuccessfully
tried to propose to Molly in the Tweedys’ kitchen in Brighton Square (U 695.15–21; U-G 18.194–
201). This story was not on the ‘Penelope’ draft. In fact, as usual, the final version in Ulysses was
built up over several months on different documents. The original context in which Joyce
embedded this memory was on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.112 On the one hand, Molly
is jealous about some hypothetical woman Bloom might be seeing in 1904 and, on the other
hand, she recalls how she used to tease him by flirting with Josie Powell when they were all
much younger. Within these distinct but connected scenarios, Joyce added a completely new and
important story. He first started to create it as an addition on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript when he has Molly reveal that she is worried that Bloom might get it into his head
that he is in love with this imaginary rival—and, worse yet, that he might make some sort of
declaration to her, precisely like the first time he tried to propose to her. The new story begins
this way: (p.166)
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but he [Bloom] might imagine he was [in love with another woman] and make a
declaration to her like he did to me though I had the devil’s own job to get it out of him
though I liked him for that it showed he could hold in and wasn’t to be got for the asking.
(see U 695.15–21; U-G 18.194–9)113
There is no other version of this important event in Ulysses, so we have no idea how Bloom
might remember it. Furthermore, Joyce presents Molly as conflicted about her feelings and the
oscillation of her views serves to reinforce the narrative structure of ‘Penelope’. Several months
later, on the fourth proof level, Joyce also made Molly more critical of Bloom’s heartfelt effort,
pointedly describing how he proposed ‘with his plabbery kind of a manner’ (see U 695.17; U-G
18.195).114 Joyce simply found the word I have highlighted in bold among his notes, and it is not
at all clear whether there was any prior link with Bloom or a proposal when he took it.115 Such a
definite connection seems quite unlikely: he probably just liked the word. This indicates how
some of the character traits we consider so distinctive in the book are really not as essential as
they may seem to be.
More importantly, at this relatively early stage of Molly and Leopold’s romance, Joyce had yet to
determine where or when this pivotal event happened; that decision only came later. He did not
add anything to the scene on the typescript, but then he added all of the following very specific
and descriptive details on the episode’s first proof level. These new narrative features fill out
Molly’s memory in much greater depth, turning a mere aside that was probably prompted by
several different narrative considerations into a much more dramatic account of their
interactions early on as a couple:
he was on the pop of asking me too the night in the kitchen I was rolling the potato cake
theres something I want to say to you only for I put him ôff^ letting on I was in a temper
with my hands and arms full of pasty flour
(see U 695.18–21; U-G 18.198–201)116
Joyce further added to the complexity of Molly’s recollection on the third proof level when he
has her reveal that ‘in any case I let out too much the night before talking of dreams so I didnt
want to let him know more than was good for him’ (U 695.21–3; U-G 18.201–2).117 It is precisely
in this sort of piecemeal fashion that Joyce provided both narrative depth and breadth to the few
stories about the Blooms that he presents in Ulysses, and it is also how he created his character
traits and characters more generally.
Returning to the stories as they were ordered and presented on the ‘Penelope’ draft, Molly is
still focused on Bloom’s hypothetical mistress (U 695.07–15; U-G 18.189–94). She knows that she
could ‘^win him back O quite easily^’ from her,118 (p.167) which Joyce elaborated on one or
more missing manuscripts before it appears on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript as follows:
Molly knows she ‘could quite easily get him to make it up any time I know how I’d even
supposing he got in with her again’ (U 695.07–9; U-G 18.186–7).119 Joyce also slowly built up the
list of the ‘plenty of ways’ by which Molly would know whether or not he had a woman on the
side (U 695.10; U-G 18.189), and probably made these particular additions to balance Molly’s
Page 23 of 47
more positive view of Bloom’s resolve towards her. This is another example of Joyce’s technique
of adding contradictory statements to counterbalance—and sometimes pointedly undermine—
Molly’s wide-ranging opinions about other people and life in general.
Already on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript, Molly thinks that she would know if he was
going out to see another woman ‘if he refused to eat the onions’ (see U 695.09–10; U-G 18.188–
9).120 As we saw, Molly also knows that she could make it up to Bloom anytime she wants to.
She would just ‘touch him with my veil and gloves on the way out one kiss then would send them
all spinning however’ (U 695.11–12; U-G 18.190–1), which is another idea Joyce added on the
Rosenbach manuscript.121 He rounded off her list of feminine wiles with the following addition
on the second proof level: she would ‘ask him to tuck down the collar of my blouse’ (U 695.10; U-
G 18.189).122 After these various inserted digressions, the narrative reverts to the original
trajectory of the storylines as Molly thinks back on how ‘she used to be always embracing me
Josie whenever he was there meaning him of course’ and the ways the young women were
always egging each other on to tease Bloom (U 695.23–6; U-G 18.202–6).
Lovemaking on Howth
The foundational shared memory: Leopold’s version
11. ‘Sirens’:
Early 1919 Later Draft Buffalo MS 5, p. [11r]
15. ‘Circe’:
(p.168) Without a doubt the single most romantic memory Leopold and Molly share is of their
day on Howth when she finally lets him ask her to marry him and she says ‘yes’. This scene in
Ulysses defines them as man and woman, as lovers, and as husband and wife. Readers first
encounter Bloom’s version of the story in ‘Lestrygonians’, but the same scene is also recounted
in ‘Sirens’, ‘Nausicaa’, as well as in ‘Circe’, and then we finally get Molly’s own remarkable
account of it in ‘Penelope’.
The first version of this momentous scene is in ‘Lestrygonians’ and it is also already present on
the episode’s earliest surviving document, its Rosenbach manuscript, which Joyce wrote in
mid-1918. This particular story remained virtually unchanged until its appearance in Ulysses two
and a half years later, which indicates that it is one of the primal stories in the book. Here the
secret touch of the glowing sun-drenched wine on Bloom’s palate at Davy Byrne’s pub on 16
June 1904 brings forth his most treasured memory of his love for Molly Tweedy. This is how the
reminiscence appears on the Rosenbach manuscript:
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Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay and sky. No sound. The bay. Over her I
lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the
seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with
spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips as she gave pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly
lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She did not move. A goat.
Nobody. High above it surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed
warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched throat beating,
woman’s breasts full in her blouse of voile, fat nipples standing. Hot I tongued her. She
kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
Me. And me now.
(see U 167.27–168.06; U-G 8.899–916)123
It is impossible to know what Joyce’s inspiration for such an idyllic and romantic scene might
have been. In its imagery and romantic sentiment, it is quite unlike anything else Joyce had
written by 1918, but this particularly evocative scene must have had some particular
significance for him because the precise setting on Howth, the specific actions of the lovers, and
the import of the events did not vary in the slightest detail in any of the subsequent versions or
retellings elsewhere. As far as we know, Joyce himself never had such an experience on Howth
with Nora Barnacle in their brief courtship from June to October 1904 (or with anyone else at
any time for that matter). On the other hand, ironically enough, Oliver St John Gogarty is known
to have had ‘the most happy day I ever wish to spend’ on Howth on 26 June 1904. This is how he
described it to his Oxford friend, G. K. A. Bell:
First of all a letter from you, then a talk with a Platonic friend (W. K. Magee) unsphering
and resphering the Spirit of Plato, and, after lunch, a visit to the most beautiful Hill of
Howth ‘all but island’, the northern arm of our beautiful bay that takes the morning to its
breast; Î arose at 3.30 and saw the dawn^—the southern arm is the ‘Golden Spears’ (of?)
which I praised to you ere this—The air was Lesbian. I climbed the field and (p.169)
gratefully reached a woody lane that looks towards Lambay island & the dim northern
hills. Below the mountain crest—Slieve Martin. I stayed in one of the beautiful brakes
where rhododendrons flush the air and the ground is soft with moss and bracken. It was
like lying (‘in the field divine and pastures blue of heaven’) on a purple cloud above the
dawn. You know the mountain slopes—a little well a ‘secret spring’ freshened the middle
of the ground which was islanded by hazels, oaks, ashes and banks of bloom on the one
side, rhododendron-covered rocks on the other, and fed rushes which had tufted heads. I
lay under rho[do]dendron and watched the midges dance like a fountain for joy of the
sunlight. I mixed light purple rhododendron leaves in a girl’s red brown hair—hair that’s
golden in the sunlight. You hear me sport:
When the sun shine on Mary’s hair
Her splendour seems to own (or ‘then clearly it is shown’)
That solid rays of sunlight there
Page 25 of 47
Are blended with brown;
And in the coil of it
A thousand little rainbows sit.
That neither wonder that my sight
On her is wholly shed,
When she can take the heaven’s light
To bind her head;
Or that to her I captive fall
Who holds the rainbow in her thrall124
Gogarty had this ‘most happy’ experience at the height of his friendship with Joyce, about two
months before Joyce joined him in the Martello Tower on 9 September 1904. If we can take
Stephen’s experience in ‘Telemachus’ as a guide, we can be sure that Joyce must have heard
Gogarty recount his impression of this very special day most likely more than once. In fact, we
know that Gogarty sent him a copy of this Howth-inspired love poem, which he had with him in
Trieste while he was writing ‘Lestrygonians’.125 This is a prime example of the eclectic breadth
of sources that served as the foundation of Joyce’s works.
Joyce reprised Bloom’s memory of the scene on Howth in an addition on the later ‘Sirens’ draft.
It reads:
Gets on your nerves. Music. ^<Hand> Her hand. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the
world.^ ^Ben Howth we lay. Her cool soft hand that touched. Far far far far.^ ^That
rules the world.^
(U 276.14–15; U-G 11.1182–4)126
(p.170) Bothered by the music in the other room at the Ormond, Bloom returns to watching
Mina Kennedy’s hand on the beerpull and his mind jumps to ideas about the roles of mothers
and empires. He recalls a version of the title of William Ross Wallace’s poem ‘The Hand that
Rocks the Cradle is the Hand that Rules the World’,127 and unexpectedly this thought leads him
to recall the couple’s lovemaking on Howth. The version in Ulysses is similar, but the logic of the
association is rearranged and even more obscure and clipped:
Music. Gets on your nerves. Beerpull. Her hand that rocks the cradle rules the. Ben
Howth. That rules the world.
Far. Far. Far. Far.
(U 276.14–16; U-G 811.1182–5)
Page 26 of 47
Although it appears earlier in the book, Joyce wrote the other, more significant mention of
Howth in ‘Sirens’ afterwards. It first appears on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript in this
form:
Only the harp. Lovely. Gold glowering light. Girl touched it. Poop of a lovely. Gravy’s
rather good fit for a. Golden ship. Erin. The harp that once. Cool hands. Ben Howth, the
rhododendrons. We are their harps. ^<He.> I.^ He. Old. Young.
(see U 260.16–19; U-G 11.580–3)128
This is an example of one of Bloom’s more convoluted series of associations in ‘Sirens’ (or
anywhere in the book for that matter). In the previous paragraph Bloom remembers an evening
out with Molly at the Gaiety Theatre in 1897 that prompted him to recall a female harpist’s
performance that same night on a ‘lovely’ gilded instrument. Then Bloom associates her with the
golden throne on the royal barge in Antony and Cleopatra. At this stage, the conjunction of
golden with royal ship reminds Bloom of the excursion with Milly on the Erin’s King,129 which
also took place in 1897 (see U 64.27; U-G 4.434). Next Thomas Moore’s ‘The Harp that Once
Through Tara’s Halls’ floats through Bloom’s mind, possibly linking women with empires again,
setting up the echo for later in the text. It is probably no coincidence that Bloom thought of
precisely this song before in ‘Lestrygonians’ (U 160.07; U-G 8.606–7), since this is another
linking motif between the episodes. These thoughts ultimately prompt him to remember the day
out on Howth with Molly that he had also thought of in ‘Lestrygonians’. This nexus of
associations is one of the many instances in Ulysses of the confluence of textual and personal
memories (if there is such a difference in fictional narratives). The conjunction of the romantic
and melancholy nature of the song with his sad recollections of time’s passing makes Bloom
reflect on the relationships between all men and women—and, more specifically, he and Molly
then, and Boylan and Molly now—that brings forth his mournful comment: ‘We are their harps. I.
He. Old. Young’.
Joyce also briefly repeats Bloom’s memories of that bucolic lovemaking afternoon in
‘Nausicaa’ (U 359.32–5; U-G 13.1097–100), and then there is a further (p.171) surrealistic
reprise of the scene on Howth that appears on the Rosenbach ‘Circe’ manuscript as follows:
(High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, plumpuddered,

buttytailed, dropping currants.)
The Nannygoat
(bleats) Megeggaggegg! Nannannanny!
Bloom
(hatless, flushed, covered with burrs of thistledown and gorsespine) Regularly engaged.
Circumstances alter cases. (he gazes intently downwards on the water) Thirtytwo head
over heels per second. Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Clerk of government printer’s office
falls from cliff. Sad end of clerk.
Page 27 of 47
^The Dummymummy
Bbbbblllllblblblblobschb!^
^(Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom, rolled in a mummy, rolls
roteatingly from the Lion’s Head cliff into the purple waiting waters.)^
(Far out in the bay between Bailey and Kish lights the Erin’s King sails, sending a
broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards the land)
(see U 513.25–514.10; U-G 15.3367–84)130
Typical of an aspect of the episode’s style, this recap of motifs does not expand what little has
already been recounted about the couple’s romantic encounter. In fact, it simply blends together
all of the various elements from the other versions of the scene. Together with various
fragments of Bloom’s day, in the Howth scene in ‘Circe’ we read about the bleating nanny goat
‘dropping currants’, the bucolic scene of rhododendrons on the mountainside, the Bailey and
Kish lights, and the father and daughter’s excursion on the Erin’s King. Here Joyce has fused all
of these elements in a kaleidoscopic manner from previous versions of the story. Rather than
trying to read this as another version of Bloom’s memory of that special day, it is merely a
recycling of assorted textual material in keeping with an important aspect of the episode’s
stylistic design. Unsurprisingly, this version of the scene first appears on the relatively late
‘Circe’ Rosenbach manuscript that Joyce was writing about three years after he had written the
earliest known version of the scene in ‘Lestrygonians’, and a full year after he wrote the more
complex renderings of it in ‘Sirens’.
The foundational shared memory: Molly’s version
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [18r]–[19r]
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Buffalo MS 22, ff. 4–5
2–Early November 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl E.ii
(p.172) In some of the last lines of ‘Penelope’ almost at the very end of Ulysses, we read
Molly’s version of these romantic events. Although Joyce had probably written this scene much
earlier on a now missing manuscript, the first known version is on the episode’s draft. This is
how it appears there in its rudimentary form, but like the rest of the episode it grew
substantially as Joyce wrote and rewrote ‘Penelope’ for the rest of the year as Ulysses neared
publication:
Howth when we were lying among the rhododendrons the day I got him to propose after
that long kiss I lost my breath said I was ^<the> a^ flower of the mountain so we are
flowers all [us] body is that was one true thing he said and the sun shines for you that’s
why I liked him and gave him all the pleasure I could till he asked me to say yes and I
Page 28 of 47
didn’t answer only looked I was thinking of so many things Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and
Hester and father and old Captain Groves
(see U 731.24–35; U-G 18.1573–83)131
Just like Bloom, who throughout the day thinks about the present and past in terms of ‘Happy.
Happier then.’ (U 148.27; U-G 8.170), the memory of that single day, when she ‘got him to
propose’ (U 731.25; U-G 18.1573–4),132 is something Molly treasures and would like to recapture
again after these sixteen years of marriage. She recalls this most romantic moment in their
courtship, the breathless passion of their kisses, and Bloom’s loving, albeit clichéd compliment
that women are like flowers. But then she evokes his more heartfelt tribute: the ‘one true thing
he said’ that ‘the sun shines for you’. Moved, she gave herself to him, encouraging him to ask
her so she will say ‘yes’.
The language and imagery are unforgettable to readers of Ulysses: ‘the sun shines for you’ is the
summation of Bloom’s love for Molly. Nonetheless, (if we can rely on a third- or fourth-hand
anecdote) as early as 1959 Richard Ellmann first suggested that it was possibly Joyce’s friend
and admirer, Roberto Prezioso, editor of Trieste’s Piccolo della Sera, who spoke this memorable
line to Nora Joyce ‘at some time in 1911 or 1912’, though it seems he said, ‘Il sole s’è levato per
Lei’.133 If true, Joyce’s willingness to appropriate and turn his rival’s homage to his wife into art
as a basic constituent element of Leopold and Molly’s most pivotal romantic exchange adds
further credence to the possibility that he borrowed the setting and tenor of the entire scene on
Howth from Gogarty, especially since ‘sun shine’ figures in the first line of his Howth poem as
well.
Although Joyce slightly revised the text on this draft, most obviously by adding three breathless
‘yeses’, it is much more significantly expanded on the subsequent surviving version. When it
next appears on the Buffalo faircopy manuscript of ‘Penelope’ it reads like this: (p.173)
the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on
Howth head the day I got him to propose to me ^^yes^^ and it was leapyear like now
^^yes^^ 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath ^yes^ he said I
was a flower of the mountain ^yes^ so we are flowers all a woman’s body ^yes^ that was
one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked
him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always
get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to
say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was
thinking of so many things he didn’t know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and
father and old captain Groves
(see U 731.23–35; U-G 18.1571–83)134
In this case, the words in bold font indicate that on one (or more) missing document(s) Joyce
added (among other things) a foreshadowing repetition of Bloom’s magnificent compliment as
well as the tell-tale description of the scenery on Howth, let us call them Gogarty’s
rhododendrons. He also has Molly remember that the great event happened in a leap year and
Page 29 of 47
let the reader know that the year must have been 1888.135 Joyce also altered Bloom’s homage,
emphasizing the sun’s particular allure just for Molly on that special day, rather than the
emptier eternity that was previously implied in Bloom’s avowal. Furthermore, typical of the way
in which Joyce’s later additions to ‘Penelope’ were meant to demonstrate an oscillation between
her admiration for Bloom and an equal sense of disrespect, Molly recognizes that he ‘felt what a
woman is’, but she also thinks that ‘I knew I could always get around him’. Similarly, in the next
matched pair of additions, Molly is ‘leading him on’ to propose, only to insist that she ‘wouldn’t
answer first’.136 Then, as earth goddess she surveys ‘the sea and the sky’ and as mere woman
she savours the private thought that there were so many things ‘he didn’t know’ about her past.
Also, although it was already on the earliest version of Bloom’s memory of that day in
‘Lestrygonians’, the ‘seedcake’ that symbolizes their union and is fundamental to our
understanding of this scene in Ulysses was something Joyce only added at least three months
after he had included all those other elements. Joyce made this crucial addition on the second
proof level of ‘Penelope’,137 and was inspired by the note ‘Howth seedcake’,138 though it is
impossible to know when he first took the note or whether it was always destined for its place
here or not. Finally, as Joyce revised the scene, he added two further ‘yeses’ (marked with
matched double caret marks around the later additions in the transcription here).
Correspondingly, on the last ‘Penelope’ notesheet, Joyce reminded himself to stress (p.174)
Molly’s catchphrase as he revised this climactic scene: ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes’.139 Maybe it is not
just mere chance that on these two manuscripts Joyce added exactly five further ‘yeses’. In fact,
there are ninety-one ‘yeses’ in the episode and twenty-four in the final ‘sentence’ alone, of which
nineteen are in this climactic scene.140 The following chart shows how Joyce added ‘yeses’ at
almost every opportunity as he slowly crafted the finale of the book:
‘Penelope’ Manuscript: Number of ‘yeses’: Date:

On the draft: 4 Spring–Summer 1921
Added to the draft: 3 Spring–Summer 1921
Added on missing document(s): 0 Summer 1921
Added to the faircopy: 2 July–Mid-September 1921
Added to the typescript: 1 16 August–Mid-October 1921
Added to the first proof level: 0 17–Late October 1921
Added to the second proof level: 3 2–Early November 1921
Added to the third proof level: 2 15–Mid-November 1921
Added to the fourth proof level: 3 24–Late November 1921
Added to the fifth proof level: 1 Late–31 January 1922
Total: 19
All that remains is the culmination of the day: Molly’s ultimate acceptance of Leopold. This is
how the scene reads on the draft:
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âs well him as another^ and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a flower of the mountain and
I asked him with my eyes to ask again and then he asked me would I to say yes my
mountain flower and I put my arms around him and [new page] drew him down to me ^so
he could smell my perfume^ and I said I <would> will yes.
(see U 732.15–22; U-G 18.1601–8)141
Much of the text that we are familiar with in Ulysses—most obviously all of Molly’s specific
memories of Gibraltar—is missing on the draft, and Joyce only added it on several subsequent
manuscripts as he continued to harvest material about her adolescent life from his notebooks.
Molly repeats and makes her own Bloom’s earlier compliment that women are mountain flowers.
Then, as Molly continues to entice Bloom, in the first addition Joyce has her finally decide that
she might as well settle for him.
Fittingly, there are only eighteen more words on the last page of this only recently discovered
‘Penelope’ draft, but in many ways they have changed our (p.175) understanding of Joyce’s
work and of Ulysses. As Michael Groden was the first to point out in 2002,142 what is most
surprising about this version of the episode is that the now famous ending was not as we know it
in the published work. Joyce had an initial idea of what it would be, which he presumably copied
directly from an even earlier (now missing) version that reflected a different conception of the
book, one that predated the year-long overhaul of ‘Circe’ as well as his extensive elaboration of
both ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Ithaca’ that followed. This formula of Molly’s response to her lover’s
proposal was tentative and searching, using a conditional tense verb indicating indirect or
reported speech. Here Joyce has Molly recount to the reader what she said to Bloom: ‘and I said
I would’ (emphasis added). But, as he continued to rewrite these last few words, Joyce made a
small but remarkable change. He transformed the narrative voice of the ending of Ulysses by
using a future tense verb, thereby making it a representation of direct speech. It is no longer
just a moment recalled sixteen years after the event; with the change of tense, the reader
participates in the mode in which Molly relives that moment for all time. In its new formulation,
Joyce represents Molly’s acceptance of her life-mate on that memorable day on Howth in the
summer of 1888, as well as again at the end of Bloomsday, and for all eternity. The drive in
Ulysses to fulfil the Blooms’ desire to return to a time when they were ‘happier’ is achieved in
this final syntactic turn that captures the temporal and emotional complexity of relationships in
which cycles of memory, hope, disappointment, and the resurgence of hope punctuate the
lovers’ lives. It also encapsulates the everlasting affirmation of Molly and Leopold’s love for one
another and thereby fulfils the more optimistic promise of Ulysses itself: ‘and I said I ^<would>
will^ yes’ (emphasis added). The cyclical nature of the episode and of the book—and of life as
well—suggests that this moment of fulfilment will be followed by further trials and tribulations,
great highs will precede further difficulties, but for this moment at least the positive potential of
the Blooms’ love for one another and their lives together has been achieved sixteen years after
that romantic proposal on Howth.
It is likely that Joyce was copying the initial conditional version from a now lost previous
document (and we cannot be sure how long it had that form, possibly several years), but only
because of the survival of this particular draft are we able to know the precise moment when
Joyce profoundly transfigured the entire tenor of Ulysses with that one change. Unlike the other
Page 31 of 47
additions that Joyce placed in the left margin of this page—indicated by the other caret marks
above; that is, another matched set of additions comprising the disparaging ‘as well him as
another’ and the alluring ‘so he could smell my perfume’—here Joyce paused as he was writing
and changed his plans. Looking at this draft, we can see that ‘would’ is crossed out and only
then did Joyce write ‘will’, right beside it on the same line, before continuing on to the final word
of Ulysses: ‘yes’.
(p.176) Sex before marriage
17. ‘Ithaca’:
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [9v]–[10r]
July–September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. 20–1
It is only in the last few pages of ‘Ithaca’, the penultimate episode of Ulysses, that readers are
finally told of the momentous day on which Molly Tweedy and Leopold Bloom first made love.
The information is given in the midst of a question-and-answer sequence that first appears on
the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, though Joyce revised it heavily and continued to amplify
and refine the text and the facts of the story on several later manuscripts.143 The momentous
event took place two days after Molly’s eighteenth birthday on 10 September 1888, ‘having been
anticipatorily consummated’ almost a month before their wedding day on 8 October (U 687.27;
U-G 17.2277–8). It is also significant that we are only given the information about this pivotal
sexual encounter in the context of a statement about the ‘limitations of activity and inhibitions of
conjugal rights’; that is, we only find out about their first lovemaking when we are told of the
last time the couple had intercourse just five years after they were married (U 687.21; U-G
17.2271).
Unlike the more vivid and often tender versions of their romance that we get from Molly in
‘Penelope’—and elsewhere from Bloom—here we are simply given the bare fact of the date of
the first time they had intercourse. But Joyce was quite blunt about the matter in one of his late
notes. Simply put: ‘LB fucked her before marriage’.144 That is all we know about their first
union. We know nothing about where this might have happened, for example, and more
significantly how either of them reacted then or think about it now. We certainly have a lot more
information about Molly’s lovemaking with Boylan than with her fiancé sixteen years before.
This is yet another instance when the most significant events in Ulysses are not narrated,
contesting more traditional forms of the novel and therefore challenging some readers’
expectations.
(p.177) The story about a gynaecological examination she underwent is one of the most
intimately revealing stories Molly tells us about the repercussions of the early awakening of her
sexual desires for Poldy. The general contours of the scene are part of the main text on the
‘Penelope’ draft, though it seems to have been a generally new and still a very adaptable
Page 32 of 47
scenario at the time. The basic idea for the story only appears in one of the last notebooks Joyce
compiled: ‘MB Dr Collins’.145 There is further evidence that the story (at least in its particular
telling here) was a late idea and was mostly put together on the episode’s draft in 1921. Another
note on the same notebook page has the only somewhat amusing rhyme, ‘her vagina & her
cochinchina’, which is also part of the main draft. This is how Molly recalls the start of the story
on the draft:
when I had that white thing coming from me when I went to that dry old stick Dr Collins
^for women’s diseases^ your vagina he calls it I suppose that’s how he gets round the
rich ones that come running into him for every little fiddle faddle her vagina and her
cochinchina I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man in the world smelling around all
kinds of filthy women all sides asking me if what I did had a bad smell what did he want
me to do but the one thing ^gold maybe^ such a question if I smathered it over his
^<dry> wrinkled^ old face for him I suppose he’d know then
(see U 720.22–32; U-G 18.1152–63)146
At this stage, Joyce had not included enough information to determine much about this Dr
Collins, or when Molly went to see him, but that changed as Joyce added to and rewrote the
story. In his biography, Ellmann confidently states that this Dr Collins was based on Dr Joseph
Collins, a psychologist Joyce met in the spring and summer of 1921, who later wrote The Doctor
Looks at Literature, which features an unflattering chapter on Joyce.147 There is no evidence to
support Ellmann’s claim, so it is unlikely that Joyce had this Dr Collins in mind as he began
writing this scene, but, in contrast to Dr Joseph Collins, with an addition on the draft, Joyce
specified that Molly’s Dr Collins was a specialist ‘for women’s diseases’.148 Similarly, Joyce made
at least two further important additions to the story on one or more missing manuscripts. On the
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, we are given a definite date when Molly visited the doctor. At
the start of the scene Joyce added that ‘it would be like before I married’ and that ‘Floey [Dillon]
made me go’.149 Therefore, Molly went there sometime in the summer or early autumn of 1888,
between the proposal and her wedding day.
(p.178) Molly’s memories of the doctor are never very kind and Joyce made them worse as he
continued to develop the scene. Molly knows that she would never be able to marry a doctor
who was ‘smelling around all kinds of filthy women’ (they only became ‘bitches’ when they
reappear on the Rosenbach manuscript).150 Dr Collins even had the nerve to ask her if she ‘had
a bad smell’—‘such a question’—and Joyce found Molly’s rejoinder in another note: ‘like to
smather it over his face’.151 We do not know what the original context for this distasteful image
might have been, but its use here was something Joyce probably had not planned. In fact, he
may have been simply interested in the word ‘smather’. The doctor’s face also became less
appealing as Joyce revised the story. He first described it as ‘dry’ and then changed it to
‘wrinkled’, but it was always ‘old’. Molly’s parting shot ‘with all my compriments’ (misspelled as
it is) was something Joyce only added to the story on the episode’s fifth proof level just weeks
before the book was published,152 but at least six months after the story itself took shape.
Joyce made two related but separate additions on the facing page of the ‘Penelope’ draft:
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I suppose he’d know ^that’s a nice invention too the only thing I like is letting myself
down as far as I can squeeze and pull the chain flush it nice cool pins & needles ^still
there’s something in it I used to know by Milly’s when she was a child whether she was
well or not^^ then paying him then how much is that one guinea please asking me had I
frequent emissions where do those fellows get the words with his ^shortsighted^ eyes on
me sideways Î wouldn’t trust him too much give me chloroform or God knows what else^
(see U 720.32–721.04; U-G 18.1162–72)153
The doctor’s exorbitant fee of a guinea was already fixed on the draft, but Joyce only later made
her misunderstand ‘omissions’ for ‘emissions’, a change that first appears on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript, though from the start Molly wondered ‘where do those fellows get the
words’.154 Joyce balances Molly’s critical view of the doctor’s ‘nice invention’ with her reluctant
admission that there was ‘something in it I suppose’ to those tests after all. The rest of the
addition was most likely prompted by the straightforward note: ‘looked at Milly’s shit’.155
Molly’s dislike of his ‘^shortsighted^ eyes’ and the fact that she ‘wouldn’t trust him too much
give me chloroform’ was something Joyce added separately on the facing page of the draft,
again from one of his stored-away notes.156 Among other things, Joyce probably added this to
balance Molly’s admission that Dr Collins ‘was clever to know that’.
It seems that Bloom’s ‘mad’ erotic letters were the cause of Molly’s masturbatory excitement
and consequent genital irritation, a story Joyce had already developed on the draft in this way:
(p.179)
of course it was thinking of him and his mad letters ^W^ had me always at myself four &
five times a day sometimes and I said I hadn’t are you quite sure O yes I said I am quite
sure în a way^ that shut him up Î knew what was coming after^
(see U 721.07–11; U-G 18.1175–81)157
Just below the other additions also on the facing page of the draft,158 Joyce further elaborated
the specific tone and content of Leopold’s letters, marking the placement of the addition with
one of his typical tags—‘W’—as indicated here. Joyce started with the idea that he had resorted
to the banal statement that ‘everything ^<that comes> is connected with^ your glorious young
body is divine and beautiful’, but Bloom had the audacity to add his own poetic gesture: in his
letter to her ‘everything’ was ‘underlined twice’ (see U 721.07–9; U-G 18.1176–8). On the other
hand, the shift from Bloom’s first and more sincere compliment that Molly’s everything ‘is divine
and beautiful’ to the direct reference to the tired cliché from Keats’s Endymion that it ‘is a thing
of beauty and of joy for ever’ that was ‘something he got out of some ^nonsensical^ book’ was
included on a missing document and simply appeared on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript
(see U 721.09–10; U-G 18.1177–8).159 It is possible that with this pointed change Joyce wanted to
further stress Bloom’s lack of poetic ability. Nonetheless, critical as Molly may be of his artistry,
it seems it still did the trick for her at least, and that is all that mattered to Poldy. Finally, Joyce
only later added his further flourish of addressing Molly as ‘my Precious one’ as an addition on
the Rosenbach manuscript (U 721.07; U-G 18.1176).160
The not so big day
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17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, pp. [8r]–[9r]
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy Manuscript Rosenbach Blue MS II, pp. 10–11 &
Rosenbach Green MS II, p. 11
October 1921 First Typescript Buffalo TS 15.c, p. [82r]
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Rosenbach MS, pp. [13v] and [15v]–16
Typescript
Though we cannot be sure precisely when this happened, once betrothed, Molly started to think
about what her new name would be. The context for this particular memory is as convoluted as
most of the things she recounts in ‘Penelope’. Therefore, (p.180) it is useful to follow the way in
which these various memories acquired the form they have in the book. In this case it was quite
simple: Joyce just inserted several new stories in the midst of Molly’s other, previously unrelated
thoughts. In Ulysses, Molly’s memories of Mulvey remind her of a bishop’s sermon (presumably
in Dublin, though that is not made clear), which she then manages to connect to Leopold Bloom,
but the way this recollection was constructed is revealing. Joyce had already revised much of
Molly’s story about Mulvey at least twice. Then, he simply added everything about this new story
as a single block of text on a verso page of the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, which he
further amplified, and then only made two final, quite minor, additions to the proofs. This is how
Joyce first wrote the story:
that old bishop that spoke off the altar ^his long preach about woman’s higher functions^
about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak caps and ^the new woman^ bloomers
God send him sense and me more money I suppose they’re called after him I never
thought that would be my name Bloom ^when I used to write it in print to see how it
looked or practising for the butcher and oblige M Bloom^ you’re looking blooming Josie
used to say after I married him well it’s better than Breen or those awful names with
bottom in them Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of a bottom Mulvey I wouldn’t <like>
go mad about either
(see U 712.15–23; U-G 18.837–46)161
It seems that the bishop’s strictures on what ‘the new woman’ does and wears make Molly think
of a pun on Leopold’s last name, which leads her to think of what her new name will be. Joyce
then has Molly remember when she first started to accustom herself to being known as Mrs
Leopold Bloom in the early weeks and months of her engagement and marriage. She thinks:
‘never thought that would be my name Bloom’ (U 712.18–19; U-G 18.840–1), a complaint that
Joyce had stored away in his notebooks.162 She also recalls when she practised writing it out,
though the vision of seeing it printed ‘on a visiting card’ was a detail he added on the typescript
(U 712.20; U-G 18.842).163 She then recalls Josie poking fun at her new name and what she
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thinks of other names. Finally, she reflects, ‘Mulvey I wouldn’t <like> go mad about either’,
which brings Molly’s thoughts full circle, since it was her reminiscences about her boisterous
adolescence that started her off on this tangent about names. As we see illustrated throughout
Ulysses, Joyce is exploring the many ways that the dynamics of memory and of textuality mimic
one another. With a great deal of effort, though quite quickly, he manages to interweave new
stories within an already fairly well-formulated, though always malleable, textual network. By
examining the various ways in which Joyce wrote Molly’s monologue we are afforded a unique
perspective on the construction of her seemingly rambling memories.
One of his notes, ‘LB wept before marriage’, indicates that Joyce considered revealing a more
sentimental side to Bloom’s attitude towards his impending (p.181) nuptials,164 but he did not
include this story in Ulysses. In fact, there is no further mention of the young couple’s wedding
in the book. Readers are not told anything about where it took place and can only presume that
there were few friends and very little family in attendance. We also know almost nothing about
their honeymoon, if they took one, though Molly remembers the younger Bloom’s promises to his
bride. On the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, she recalls:
all the things he told father he was going to do and me but I saw through him telling
me all the lovely places we could go for the honeymoon Venice by moonlight with the
gondolas and the lake of Como he had a picture cut out of some paper of and mandolines
and lanterns O how nice I said ^whatever I liked he was going to do immediately if not
sooner will you be my man will you carry my can^ he ought to get a leather medal with a
putty rim for all the plans he invents
(see U 716.07–13; U-G 18.983–9)165
The words in bold font were the full extent of the various additions that comprised Molly’s
memories on the draft,166 which were in fact part of a longer new storyline about Leopold’s
manifold schemes to make an exciting new start in life as a young married man. Joyce added the
first level of overlay on one or more missing manuscripts and made the additions signalled by
the caret marks on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript. The point of her recollection was
simple enough. Molly complains about the grand promises for the future that he made to her
and her father, to which she simply replied, ‘O how nice’. It is difficult to be sure whether the
younger Molly had an ironic attitude to Bloom’s grand ambitions, but Joyce made that clear with
yet another addition on the ‘Penelope’ draft that counterbalances her previous thought: ‘I saw
through him’. All of the romantic details about Bloom’s exotic dreams of Italy that she claims he
pilfered from a newspaper photo were only added later, possibly on several (missing)
manuscripts, as was Molly’s cutting jibe about it all. It is precisely this counterbalanced reversal
of Molly’s sentiments that makes it difficult for readers to know whether they should condemn
or feel sorry for Bloom and the other people Molly discusses so candidly in ‘Penelope’. In what is
a relatively unusual occurrence, Joyce made just one further addition to the scene on its
Rosenbach manuscript, but then left the memory untouched until it appeared in Ulysses.
What we do know about the wedding is revealed in a more oblique way. As Bloom is about to
end his day in ‘Ithaca’, he glances around the rearranged front room of 7 Eccles Street and sees
a collection of mementos that connect his present state to their wedding day about sixteen years
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before. Then he recalls the mutual friends of those happier days of the couple’s courtship and
love (U 659.32–660.13; U-G 17.1333–47). On the mantelpiece, he ponders the several frozen and
dead symbols of their marriage: a stopped marble clock, an encased tree, and a stuffed owl,
each of which we are told were wedding gifts from their friends. The following question-and-
answer sequence appears on the episode’s proto-draft, but even (p.182) though the thematic
thrust of the text was already established, much of the detail was still to be elaborated. The
version on the proto-draft was simple enough:
What adorned the mantleshelf?
A marble clock, stopped a long time ago at twenty to eight and a stuffed owl the wedding
gift of alderman Hooper.
(see U 659.32–660.05; U-G 17.1333–9)167
This entire short text was prompted by the conjunction of two notes in different repositories:
‘mounted mantel clock’ and ‘stuffed owl marriage gift’.168 The building blocks of Joyce’s creative
impetus can often be traced to such minimalist and disparate beginnings. While the ‘stuffed owl’
was always slated to be a ‘wedding gift’ for the Blooms, the fact that it was Alderman John
Hooper who gave it to them was a detail Joyce added on a missing manuscript; it first appeared
on the Rosenbach manuscript.169 Similarly, the stopped marble clock was a long-standing
adornment to ‘mantleshelf’, but that it had been received as a nuptial gift, let alone from
Matthew Dillon, was also only established as well on the Rosenbach manuscript, and that it was
made of green-hued ‘Connemara’ marble was added on the subsequent typescript.170 Joyce
further tied together the stories of the Dillons and the Doyles by also including the ‘dwarf tree of
glacial arborescence under a ^transparent^ bellshade, matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline
Doyle’ on the Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ manuscript.171
It is difficult to know why Joyce decided that the clock would be frozen in time specifically at
‘4.46 a.m. on 21 March 1896’ (another detail that first appears on the same page of the
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript). This may be just one of the many red herrings with which
Joyce peppered Ulysses, particularly in this seemingly overly exact episode. The description of
the clock having simply stopped ‘a long time ago at twenty to eight’ as Joyce had it on the proto-
draft is obviously more sensible. In fact, the ridiculous notion that an analogue clock could have
stopped at any time in the ‘a.m.’ must be an ‘Ithacan’ joke, and if there was a reason why Bloom
would have remembered the exact date on which the clock stopped that mystery is best left with
him, since the book does not provide any further information about it.
Unusually for the layout of this non-sequential notebook-like proto-draft of ‘Ithaca’, the next
question-and-answer block followed directly from the previous question and answer, but it was
first present only in the most rudimentary fashion there:
Did it look at him?
With a clear sad wise bright [amusing] pitying eye172
And this is the much-expanded version of this question and answer in Ulysses: (p.183)
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What interchanges of looks took place between these three objects and Bloom?
In the mirror of the giltbordered pierglass the undecorated back of the dwarf tree
regarded the upright back of the embalmed owl. Before the mirror the matrimonial gift of
Alderman John Hooper with a clear melancholy wise bright motionless compassionate
gaze regarded Bloom while Bloom with obscure tranquil profound motionless
compassionated gaze regarded the matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle.
(U 660.06–13; U-G 17.1340–7)
It is also notable that Joyce did not alter this text at all once he rewrote it on the Rosenbach
manuscript.173 More interestingly, however, two further related questions and answers followed
on the proto-draft, which Joyce moved to a remote part of ‘Ithaca’ on its Rosenbach
manuscript.174 On the proto-draft, the questions and answers were:
Had these gifts any practical use?
He had used the clock with moveable arms to teach his daughter Milly to read the hours,
explaining the pendulum, the wheelwork of the clockwork and the time in each hours
when minute and hour hands overlapped.
She understood?
Something ^<not all> less than all^.
(see U 647.14–32; U-G 17.909–28)175
The reason that the transition to the first question and answer is somewhat jarring in Ulysses is
simply because it was conceived as part of the stories about the wedding gifts, but then Joyce
abruptly transferred the focus to Milly at a later stage. Finally, Joyce made this last related
question and answer from the proto-draft even more touching in Ulysses: ‘She admired: a
natural phenomenon having been explained by him to her she expressed the immediate desire to
possess without gradual acquisition a fraction of his science, the moiety, the quarter, a
thousandth part’ (U 647.29–32; U-G 17.925–8). It is only appropriate that a father’s thoughts of
his cherished daughter should end this chapter and prepare the way for the chapters on the
years of married life for the Blooms that follow.
Notes:
(1) Carl Niemeyer first noted this discrepancy in the text, but as far as I know, it has not been
discussed elsewhere, ‘A Ulysses Calendar’, JJQ, 13/2, 178.
(2) In a forthcoming publication, I explore other aspects of the Dillons and the Doyles as fictional
characters based at least in part on Dubliners Joyce knew.
(3) Emphasis added; see Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ MS, f. 10.
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(7) Cornell MS 56B, pp. 30–1; see JJA 13.233 and 235.
(8) Leopold Bloom also figures the cyclical pattern of his life in terms of Ponchielli’s ‘dance of the
hours’ in ‘Calypso’ (U 67.11; U-G 4.526), which I discuss in ‘ “Bold hand”: Blazes Boylan in
“Calypso” ’ in Chapter 2, and in the game of musical chairs that sealed their fate as a couple (U
264.13–15; U-G 11.726–8) that I discuss later.
(9) I discuss the implications of Molly’s affair with Boylan in Chapters 2 and 8.
(10) Joyce wanted to remind himself to reprise the memory of a game of charades in ‘Penelope’.
So he wrote ‘charades dolphin’s barn’ in one of the late notebooks (NLI NB 4, p. [11v]).
(13) Rosenbach ‘Circe’ MS, ff. 51d–e.
(14) As in ‘Nausicaa’, Joyce conflates ‘Rip Van Winkle’ with Washington Irving’s other well-
known story ‘Sleepy Hollow’.
(15) NLI MS 9, p. [10r].
(19) See Little Review, VI.4, p. 59.
(21) Rosenbach, ‘Nausicaa’ f. 51.
(22) Harvard Pl 41.ii and Texas PP 23.3; see JJA 19: 301 and 25: 279; see NLI NB 5A, p. [24r]: ‘to
have oil painting of MB’.
(23) There was an actual Dubliner named J. H. Menton who was a friend of John Stanislaus Joyce
and a solicitor with offices at 27 Bachelor’s Walk (see Thom’s, 1955). This is the exact address
Bloom gives for Menton when confronted by the First Watch in ‘Circe’ (U 432.07–8; U-G 15.730–
1).
(24) Emphasis added; Rosenbach ‘Hades’ MS, f. 28.
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(25) She is referred to by this name in one of the earliest surviving notebooks for Ulysses, which
Joyce compiled a year before he wrote this manuscript. Under the heading ‘Leopold’, Joyce
wrote: ‘angry with those who do not hunt Mollie’ (NLI NB 3, p. [2r]), which he later transformed
into: ‘LB angry when man does not hunt Molly’ (BL ‘Cyclops’ NS 10.93; correcting Herring’s
transcription). Also in this early notebook, Joyce wrote under the heading ‘Stephen’: ‘objects to
begin Mollie’s teaching on Friday’ (NLI NB 3, p. [6r]), which he also later transformed into
another note: ‘SD objects to teach Molly Friday’ (BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 12.69). Since she already had a
central role in ‘Calypso’, Joyce had certainly settled on the name Mollie/Molly before he wrote
the Rosenbach ‘Hades’ manuscript, though he may simply have copied the other name from an
older version where he called her ‘Marie Meagher’.
(26) See Buffalo TS 4, p. [11r] and Little Review V.5, p. 31; see JJA 12: 280.
(28) I discuss Bloom’s chequered employment in Chapters 6 and 7.
(29) Emphasis added; Rosenbach ‘Hades’ MS, f. 38.
(30) See Buffalo TS 4, p. [15r] and Harvard Pl 12.iii; see JJA 12: 283 and 17: 269.
(33) It is not clear if it was also one of the ‘first night’ stories of when Leopold and Molly met, but
—given the way Joyce progressively tried to consolidate events in the various stories—readers
are encouraged to think so.
(34) NLI MS 11B, p. [8r].
(35) Simplified transcriptions; NLI MS 11B, p. [8r].
(36) Initially, Joyce had this central event take place in July, but changed the month to June (NLI
MS 11B, p. [8r]), and then, he finally settled on a ‘soft May’ Dublin evening (NLI MS 11B, p.
[7v]). Most likely he intends the reader to presume that this meeting happened in 1887,
obviously before the couple’s engagement.
(37) NLI MS 11B, p. [8r].
(38) Emphasis added; NLI MS 11B, p. [7v]. These words and phrases all come from BL ‘Oxen’ NS
20 and are all crossed through with the same red crayon, which is characteristic of a single pass
through the notes for a particular stage of composition and revision: ‘wellremembered’ (73), ‘a
grove of’ (80), ‘with much real’ (82), ‘alert’ (83), ‘shaven space’ (85), and ‘running forward
to’ (86). See the following footnotes for further information about Joyce’s notes.
(39) Robert Janusko, ‘Pater: Leopold the Epicurean’, JJON 4 (2013). See Walter Pater, Marcus the
Epicurean (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911), vol. 1, and Michael Gillespie, Catalogue of James
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Joyce’s Trieste Library (Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1986), 183,
item 367.
(40) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 11B, p. [7v]. These words and phrases also come from BL
‘Oxen’ NS 20: ‘perhaps’ (75), ‘Our Lady’ (76), ‘must needs’ (78), ‘yonder’ (77), ‘you saw’ (79),
and ‘comely’ (79), while Joyce took the others from BL ‘Oxen’ NS 19: ‘I know not’ (30) and BL
‘Oxen’ NS 8: ‘a brace of’ (14); all of these notes are correspondingly crossed through in red
crayon. The notes in bold font here (and correspondingly in the transcription main text) come
from Pater’s Marcus the Epicurean as identified by Janusko. It is also typical of Joyce’s writing
practice that he intermixed notes from another (as yet identified) source (or sources) in this
Pateresque scene.
(41) NLI MS 11E, p. [10r].
(42) Emphasis added; NLI MS 11E, p. [10r] and BL ‘Oxen’ NS 19.30.
(43) For further information, see ‘Molly’s Mysterious Mother: Lunita Laredo’ in Chapter 4.
(45) Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 262.
(46) Emphasis added; Cornell MS 56B, p. 33; see JJA 13: 239.
(47) Joyce wrote this corresponding response from Bloom in ‘Nausicaa’ just about a month
before he worked on the related Dillon garden scene in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, thereby strengthening
the thematic and textual connection between Leopold and Molly’s memories.
(48) Joyce specifically makes the connection between the character and the real-life Dubliner in a
letter to his aunt, Josephine Murray: ‘Major Powell—in my book Major Tweedy, Mrs Bloom’s
father’ (21 December 1922; LI 198). For further information on Sergeant-Major Powell, also see
Ellmann, James Joyce, 46 and 519, and Andrew Tierney, ‘Major Malachi Powell and Ulysses’.
(49) Rosenbach ‘Lestrygonians’ MS, ff. 5–8.
(52) NLI MS 12, p. [4v].
(54) NLI MS 14, pp. [1v]–[2r].
(55) NLI MS 14, p. [1v] and see BL ‘Penelope’ NS 4.11.
(56) NLI MS 14, p. [1v].
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(58) NLI NB 5A, p. [25v].
(60) NLI MS 14, p. [1v].
(62) NLI MS 14, p. [1v].
(63) Harvard Pl A.iii.a and Harvard Pl A.iv; see JJA 21: 183 and 199; see ‘LB made her cry’ (BL
‘Penelope’ 3.35).
(64) For further information, also see ‘Molly’s First Lover: Lieutenant Harry Mulvey’ in Chapter
4.
(65) NLI MS 14, p. [5v].
(66) NLI MS 14, p. [6r].
(67) NLI MS 14, p. [6r]. Once again we see how Joyce worked to dissimulate the subject of
Molly’s thoughts by changing her husband’s name to the more indistinct pronoun, thereby
strengthening one of the episode’s stylistic motifs and further defining the character as we know
her in Ulysses.
(68) Harvard Pl B.i; see JJA 21: 213.
(69) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(70) It appears that in Dublin while they were walking out together Nora Barnacle gave James
Joyce a similar gift as well. He wrote to her: ‘Your glove lay beside me all night—unbuttoned—
but otherwise conducted itself very properly—like Nora’ (LII 43; [?12] July 1904).
(73) NLI MS 14, p. [11r].
(74) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(77) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(79) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
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(83) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 238.
(86) NLI NB 4, pp. [10r]–[10v].
(87) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(89) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(90) Joyce added the designation ‘Friend of all Frillies’ (U 471.17; U-G 15.1950) to the ‘Messianic
Scene’ in ‘Circe’ several months before writing the related scene in ‘Penelope’ (Buffalo MS 20,
p. [7r]; see JJA 15: 306). Joyce’s letters and other accounts indicate that he too had a
predilection for ladies’ undergarments.
(94) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(95) NLI MS 14, p. [3r]; see BL ‘Penelope’ NS 1.33.
(98) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(100) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(103) Harvard Pl A.iv; see JJA 21: 202.
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(107) BL ‘Penelope’ NS 4.41. Presumably, this exchange echoes Joyce’s December 1909 letters to
Nora Barnacle Joyce (see SL 180–92, for example).
(108) NLI MS 14, p. [3r].
(109) NLI MS 14, p. [2v] and see Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 5.
(110) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 1.93.
(114) Emphasis added; Harvard Pl B.iv; see JJA 21: 200.
(116) Harvard Pl A.i.a; see JJA 21: 151.
(118) NLI MS 14, p. [1v].
(120) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, pp. 3–4.
(122) Harvard Pl A.ii.a; see JJA 21: 167.
(124) Oliver St John Gogarty, Many Lines to Thee: Letters to G. K. A. Bell from the Martello
Tower at Sandycove, Rutland Square and Trinity College, Dublin, 1904–1907, edited with a
commentary by James F. Carens ([Dublin & London]: Dolmen Press, 1971), 7–8. That this is
Gogarty’s rather than Joyce’s memory is not a new hypothesis: see, for example, J. B. Lyons,
Thrust Syphilis Down to Hell and Other Rejoyceana: Studies in the Border-lands of Literature
and Medicine (Dun Laoghaire: Glendale Press, 1988), 176.
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(125) Joyce left Gogarty’s poem in Trieste when he went to Zurich and then to Paris.
Nonetheless, Stanislaus retained the poem, and it is now part of the Cornell Joyce Collection,
Cornell University Library’s Rare Books, Manuscripts and Archives. See Robert E. Scholes
(comp.), The Cornell Joyce Collection: A Catalogue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1961]),
88, no. 522.
(127) Cited in Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 11.1183.
(129) I discuss this family outing in ‘A Father and Daughter Excursion on the Erin’s
King’ (forthcoming in JJQ, 51/3 [Spring 2015]).
(131) NLI MS 14, p. [18r].
(132) Joyce was clearer in his notes about how he understood the interaction between the couple
that afternoon: ‘MB propose to LB’ (BL ‘Penelope’ NS 5.83), though, as so often is the case, he
was prone not to follow his schematic ideas when actually writing. The lovers’ agency at this
pivotal moment remains equivocal in Ulysses.
(133) Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 327; also see
Ellmann, James Joyce (1982), 316.
(134) See Buffalo MS 22, ff. 4–5; see JJA 16: 296–7.
(135) According to tradition, a woman can propose to a man in a leap year. Separately from the
other notes on the page, Joyce reminded himself that 1904 was also a leap year on the first page
of the earliest surviving document that is solely devoted to Ulysses. He compiled this notebook
in the autumn of 1917, almost four years before he was finally able to include it in the fabric of
his novel (NLI NB 3, p. [1r]).
(136) This is an example of the fact that Joyce had yet to implement the rhetorical strategy of
removing the apostrophes from Molly’s discourse. Like the progressive accumulation of ‘yeses’,
he only slowly accomplished this strategy in full with many rounds of revisions on multiple
manuscripts.
(137) Harvard Pl E.ii; see JJA 21: 368.
(140) In an early genetic study of the episode that appeared soon after the publication of the JJA,
Stephany Lyman writes: ‘Taken collectively they [Joyce’s additions] leave no doubt as to the
Page 45 of 47
author’s overall concern with drawing a favourable, or at least a human, picture of Molly and
with closing the novel on a reassuring note’, ‘Revision and Intention in Joyce’s “Penelope” ’, JJQ,
20/2 (Winter 1983), 193–200: 198. I maintain that the ‘picture of Molly’ Joyce created is much
more nuanced and purposely ambivalent.
(141) NLI MS 14, pp. [18r]–[19r].
(142) See Groden, ‘The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts’, 48.
(143) None of this scene is present on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft, but Joyce significantly revised and
altered it on the episode’s next extant manuscript (Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS III, p. 30). He
struggled to determine precisely when it took place, suggesting that it was indeed a relatively
late idea in the genesis of Ulysses. It is odd that Joyce did not find a way to echo this major event
in the lives of the soon-to-be Blooms elsewhere in Ulysses.
(145) NLI NB 4, p. [9r].
(146) NLI MS 14, p. [10r].
(147) Ellmann, James Joyce, 516. Joseph Collins, ‘Ireland’s Latest Literary Antinomian: James
Joyce’ in The Doctor Looks at Literature: Psychological Studies of Life and Letters (New York:
George H. Doran Company; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), 35–60. For further
information on Joyce’s short-lived acquaintance with Dr Joseph Collins in Paris, see David
Hayman, ‘Dr J. Collins Looks at J.J.: The Invention of a Shaun’, Writing Its Own Wrunes for Ever:
Essais de génétique joycienne/Essays in Joycean Genetics, Daniel Ferrer and Claude Jacquet
(eds) (Tusson: Editions du Lérot, 1998), 119–50.
(148) By the time Joyce wrote the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript version of the scene, he
located the doctor’s office ‘on Pembroke road’ (p. 20). The 1904 Thom’s lists a Dr J. R. Collins
with an office at 65 Pembroke Road (1835). This elegant address merits an office that was filled
with ‘gilt mirrors and carpets’, fancy furnishings that first also appear on the same page of the
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.
(152) Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 262.
(153) NLI MS 14, pp. [9v]–[10r].
(154) NLI MS 14, p. [10r] and see Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 21.
(155) NLI NB 4, p. [10v].
Page 46 of 47
(156) NLI MS 14, p. [9v] and see NLI NB 4, p. [9r]: ‘no chloroform fear of assault’.
(157) Emphasis added; NLI MS 14, pp. [9v]–[10r].
(158) NLI MS 14, p. [10r].
(160) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. [20v]; see BL ‘Penelope’ NS 7.22.
(162) See NLI NB 4, p. [10v].
(164) NLI NB 5A, p. [25r].
(165) Emphasis added; Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, pp. [15v]–16.
(166) NLI MS 14, p. [7v].
(167) NLI MS 13, pp. [8r]–[9r].
(168) NLI NB 4, p. [8v] and BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 15.29.
(169) See Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS II, p. 11.
(170) Buffalo TS 15.c, p. [82r]; see JJA 16: 122.
(171) See Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS II, p. 11.
(172) NLI MS 13, p. [9r].
(173) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Green MS II, p. 11.
(174) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS II, pp. 10–11.
(175) NLI MS 13, p. [9r].
Page 47 of 47
Married Life


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Married Life
1888–93
Luca Crispi
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.003.0006

This chapter explores the often contradictory historical and fictional facts with which Joyce
peppered the stories about the earlier, ‘happier’ years of the Blooms’ life together as a married
couple. It reconstructs as comprehensive an account of this period as is possible and thereby
highlights the many narrative gaps in these stories. Resolving these narratological issues was
clearly not one of Joyce’s primary concerns as he was writing the book. It explores how the
reader actively fills in the lacunae in the stories to provide a cohesive narrative that is otherwise
not intrinsic to the disparate stories. The second part of the chapter documents how Joyce uses
Leopold and Molly’s memories of their absent daughter to flesh out their representation as
characters, rather than developing these stories to present a well-rounded representation of
Milly Bloom as a secondary character in her own right.
Keywords: narrative gaps, cohesive narrative, disparate stories, Milly Bloom, secondary characters
‘Happy. Happier then’

Life around Pleasants Street

4. ‘Calypso’:
February 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 6–7
June 1918 Serial Publication Little Review, V.2, p. 44
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6. ‘Hades’:
7. ‘Aeolus’:
Summer 1918 Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 6, p. [3r]
June–August 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl 17.i
15. ‘Circe’:
December 1920–January 1921 Mixed Faircopy for Rosenbach MS, f. 51b
Typescript
February–April 1921 Composite Typescript Buffalo TSS 13.h.5, p. [6r]
17. ‘Ithaca’:
29 December 1921–Early Second Proof Level Harvard Pl III-10
January 1922
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. [6v] and
9
16 August–Mid-October 1922 Typescript Buffalo TS 16.b, p. 13
(p.185)
Bloom first thinks about the earlier, happier days of his life with Molly in ‘Calypso’ as he walks
home from Dlugacz’s butcher’s shop and examines more closely the blurred image on the
advertisement for the model farm at Agendath Netaim. The description of olive and orange
groves makes him think of lemons, and then of his old friends of bygone days:
Wonder is poor Citron still alive in Saint Kevin’s parade. And Mastiansky with the old
cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron’s basketchair. Nice to hold, cool
waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy,
sweet, wild perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too
Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times. Must be without a
flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates
lined up on the quayside at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them in
soiled dungarees.
(U 58.24–33; see U-G 4.205–13)
This is an early exercise in following the associative patterns of Bloom’s thoughts in Ulysses.
They begin and end with thoughts and images about the Eastern Mediterranean, and in between
he thinks of his old Jewish friends—Citron, Mastianksy, and Moisel—as well as of Molly. He
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specifically links the citrons that come from the Levant to one of the first descriptions of his wife
at the start of the episode. She too is from the Mediterranean: ‘All the way from Gibraltar’ (U
54.32; U-G 4.60). Joyce makes explicit the link between the Jewish neighbourhood and the
couple’s happier life when they were first married: ‘Pleasants street: pleasant old times’. It is
not precisely clear where the Blooms lived at the time, but St Kevin’s Parade, Pleasants Street,
and Arbutus Place are all in the Jewish quarter of Dublin.1 These roads are all near Clanbrassil
Street, where Bloom was born and grew up, and also near Lombard Street West, where Leopold
and Molly lived until they moved to Raymond Terrace in about March 1893. The early, happier
times of their marriage are all located on the south side of the Liffey, specifically amongst the
Jewish community of Dublin. Although it seems they have lost touch with them since those days,
the Blooms were much closer to these neighbours than to any others in their sixteen years of
marriage.
Joyce had already written all of this scene on the Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ manuscript,2 except that
he changed her name from ‘Mollie’ to ‘Molly’ on a missing typescript page for the Little Review.3
As Louis Hyman has shown in The Jews of Ireland, the choice and spelling of the names and
addresses of these Jewish (p.186) friends make Joyce’s reliance on Thom’s explicit. It lists a ‘M.
Moisel’ as resident of 20 Arbutus Place, though this is ‘probably a misprint’ because, according
to Hyman, a certain Nisan Moisel lived at that address.4 Similarly, the 1905 Thom’s Official
Directory lists a ‘J. Citron’ at 17 Kevin’s Parade as well,5 though Hyman points out that this is
another misprint for I. [Israel] Citron who was resident at that address at the time.6 Finally,
Joyce also borrowed the name of the grocer just beside the Citrons at 16 Kevin’s Parade, ‘P.
Mastiansky’, from Thom’s.7 Hyman points out that this too is a mistaken spelling for P.
Masliansky.8
After ‘Calypso’, each time Bloom thinks of Citron, it involves an effort on his part to remember
something else correctly. In ‘Aeolus’, it is Alexander Keyes’s phone number, which Bloom tries
to associate with Citron’s house number. Then, beginning in ‘Lestrygonians’, Bloom tries
different ways to remember the ‘priestlylooking chap’ who knew Citron. Bloom’s efforts to
associate Keyes’s phone number with Citron’s house number is probably erroneous, or at least
misleading. As Bloom considers how he is going to contact Keyes about his ad, he thinks:
Now am I going to tram it out all the way and then catch him [Keyes] out perhaps. Better
phone him up first. Number? Same as Citron’s house. Twentyeight. Twentyeight double
four.
(U 118.22–4; U-G 7.218–20)
On the one hand, since Joyce had looked up Citron’s name and presumably his address in
Thom’s, he would have known that he lived at 17 (not 28) St Kevin’s Parade and, on the other
hand, when Bloom actually does try to ring Keyes he corrects himself and seems to give another
number: ‘Twenty eight … No, twenty … Double four … Yes’ (U 123.16; see U-G 7.385).9 Except
for some differences in punctuation, both of these scenes were exactly as they appear in Ulysses
on the ‘Aeolus’ Rosenbach manuscript.10 Robert M. Adams writes, (p.187)
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it seems pointless and out of character to have Bloom attempt feats of virtuosity with his
memory, above all when fairly elaborate research is required to establish whether he was
right or wrong. Even in making a phone call, Bloom is bound to have memory trouble […].
But the whole matter is imaginary, since neither number is listed in the Irish phone
directory for 1904, nor does Keyes appear in the book under any number.11
Adams rightly points out the consistent way in which, throughout Ulysses, Joyce has Bloom
struggle to remember so many different things for different reasons and the effect this has on
reading the work. For example, Bloom is also stymied by the name of Citron’s young friend in
‘Lestrygonians’:
What was the name of that priestylooking chap was always squinting in when he passed?
^Weak eyes, woman.^ Stopped in Citron’s saint Kevin’s parade. Pen something.
Pendennis? My memory is getting. Pen … ?
(U 148.33–5; U-G 8.176–9)
It is not clear why Joyce associates poor sight with this character, but the young man’s
description was well established on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.12 Later, Joyce has
some fun with this idea in the story of his encounter with Molly in ‘Penelope’. In ‘Lestrygonians’,
Joyce made the thematic connection between his disability and his supposedly feminine
characteristic more evident with an addition on the typescript for Ulysses (as indicated here),13
which was probably based on the following note: ‘Penrose (with weak eyes)’.14 Still Bloom
vindicates his power of recollection at the end of the episode. Thinking of priests, the
‘priestlylooking’ man’s name finally comes to him: ‘Penrose! That was that chap’s name’ (U
173.18; U-G 8.1114). Bloom’s desire to remember things accurately is a recurring motif, and this
drive must stand as a counterpoint to the reader’s efforts to remember so many of the book’s
details correctly to make sense of both specific scenes and across the eighteen episodes of
Ulysses more generally.
Molly remembers the young man in ‘Penelope’ as well. Though unnamed at the time, he makes
his first appearance in Molly’s memories as an addition on the episode’s draft when she thinks of
‘the morning that sick looking student that used to be squinting in nearly saw me <all>
washing only for I snapped up the towel to my face’ (see U 705.19–22; U-G 18.572–5).15 The fact
that she remembers him ‘squinting in’ is an explicit verbal link to Bloom’s description of the
young man in ‘Lestrygonians’, but this description did not persist in the text. At the same time as
Joyce explicitly names him as Penrose in Molly’s thoughts on a missing intermediary manuscript,
he decided to make the connection with Bloom’s memory of him earlier in the day less evident.
In Ulysses Joyce elided the reference to his eyes completely and has Molly describe him less
harshly: according to her, Penrose is just ‘delicate’. Therefore, the reader has to match up the
little information that is given about this character to get the joke that Molly’s voyeur, despite
her precautions, has ‘weak eyes’ anyway. Later Joyce underscored the connection between the
character (p.188) descriptions in ‘Lestrygonians’ and in ‘Penelope’ with an addition on the
latter episode’s Rosenbach manuscript that places him in Citron’s home at number 28.16
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Joyce expanded the Moisel family circle in a late burst of additions to the proofs of Ulysses,
specifically by adding at least one son and a daughter-in-law to the cast of characters in several
newer stories.17 First, Joyce created a more touching context for the Moisel family in Bloom’s
memory. As Bloom thinks of the cycles of life and death—and childbirth in particular—in an
addition on the first proof level of ‘Lestrygonians’,18 he remembers: ‘Funny sight two of them
together, their bellies out. Molly and Mrs Moisel. Mothers’ meeting’ (U 154.19–20; U-G 8.391–2).
Hyman records that Mrs Basseh Moisel, wife of Elyah Wolf Moisel, daughter-in-law of Nisan,
was in fact pregnant at the same time as Molly would have been and that Mrs Moisel gave birth
to Rebecca Ita on 28 June 1889, just thirteen days after Milly was born,19 but how Joyce could
have uncovered this historical fact has not been definitively ascertained. Then the narrator of
‘Ithaca’ recalls the other Moisel son’s untimely death: ‘Philip Moisel (pyemia, Heytesbury
street)’ (U 657.19–20; U-G 17.1254). Joyce included him among Bloom’s friends who are now
‘defunct’ on the episode’s second proof level,20 just a month or so before Ulysses appeared.
Hyman also states that this Moisel left Dublin for South America sometime late in the nineteenth
century, where he died in about 1903.21 If Joyce knew this information, he could not have
gleaned it from Thom’s.
Both Blooms think of Mastiansky. In ‘Hades’ Leopold recalls the information he gave him that
‘Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me’ (U
104.25–6; U-G 6.769–70). Joyce had established this fact on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript,22 and it is structurally related to the way he remembers that Moisel told him that
exotic fruit ‘Must be without a flaw’ (U 58.30; U-G 4.210–11). These friends were a great source
of information. In fact, at the start of ‘Penelope’ Molly recalls a much more personal bit of
information that she learned from Mrs Mastiansky. Thinking of her exertions with Boylan that
afternoon, on the typescript version of this memory, she complains:
better for him put it into me from behind the way Mrs ^<Galbraith> <Citron>
Mastiansky^ told me her husband made her like the dogs do it and stick out her tongue as
far as ever she could and he so quiet and mild ^with his tingating cither^ can you ever be
up to men the way it takes them
(see U 701.12–16; U-G 18.417–20)23
The following note must have been the initial prompt for the addition ‘do it from behind like Mrs
Galbraith’.24 The manuscripts show that Joyce attributed this bit of womanly advice to Mrs
Galbraith when he first included the scene on the (p.189) Rosenbach manuscript,25 but he
changed his mind about the matter twice as he revised the episode’s typescript. First, it was Mrs
Citron who made the revelation to Molly, but Joyce rethought the matter, and she became the
Mrs Mastiansky we know from the story in Ulysses. With the other additions, Joyce connects
Molly’s memory to Leopold’s recollections in ‘Calypso’ when he remembers: ‘And Mastiansky
with the old cither’ (U 58.25; U-G 4.205–6). Again, the malleability of the characters (and their
names) is a fundamental feature of Joyce’s creative practice. In general, these are some of the
ways Joyce tied together the various threads about the Blooms’ Jewish friends across the book.
Memories of Lombard Street West
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6. ‘Hades’:
January 1919 Serial Publication Little Review V.9, pp. 31–2
June–August 1921 Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 6, p. [3r]
Early–19 September Second Proof Level Harvard Pl 16.ii
11. ‘Sirens’:
Late 1917–Early 1919 Fragments NLI MS 7B, p. [10r]
12. ‘Cyclops’:
August–September 1919 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 25
16. ‘Eumaeus’:
January–February 1921 Later Draft Buffalo MS 21, p. [16v]
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, p. [12r]
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Blue MS I, p. 7
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [front cover verso] and
[2v]
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. [0v], [3v]–4, [17v],
and 22
16 August–Mid-October Typescript Huntington TS, p. 9
1921
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl C.iii.b
Late–31 January 1922 Fifth Proof Level Texas PP 43.1.b
(p.190)
Another hole in the history of the Blooms’ early life together is precisely when they took up their
residence in Lombard Street West. The few datable events at this address take place in 1892–3,
but the evidence about when the Blooms moved to and from Lombard Street is contradictory. It
is possible that they lived in Pleasants Street (and possibly Arbutus Place) when they first
married, but the evidence about such moves is slim and ultimately unconvincing. In fact, Joyce
did not attempt to establish these details about his characters’ lives with much precision in any
case. I believe that Leopold and Molly are supposed to have arrived in Lombard Street soon
after they married and stayed there until early 1893, but ultimately it is not possible to prove
such fictional details one way or another based on the evidence in the book or the manuscripts.
Nonetheless, I suggest that having them spend almost five years in the same home provides a
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further sense of the stability they enjoyed during this period, which bolsters the overall motif in
Ulysses that these are the happiest years of the Blooms’ marriage.
While where they lived may remain vague, Bloom is clear about where he was working in 1888.
Towards the start of ‘Lestrygonians’, he recalls that he ‘Got the job in Wisdom Hely’s year we
married’ (U 148.15–16; U-G 8.158), but the first time we read about Bloom’s occupation is in a
conversation in ‘Hades’ between John Henry Menton and Ned Lambert as they move towards
Paddy Dignam’s gravesite:
— What is he? he asked. What does he do? Wasn’t he in the stationery line? […]
Ned Lambert smiled.
— Yes, he was, he said, in Wisdom Hely’s. A traveller for blottingpaper.
(U 102.30–3; U-G 6.700–3)
This is all that we know about Bloom’s first job as a married man by the end of the sixth episode,
and all of this information was on the Rosenbach ‘Hades’ manuscript in 1918, which is exactly as
it appears in Ulysses.26 Then, in ‘Lestrygonians’, Bloom complains to himself about not having
been sufficiently appreciated for his innovative ideas when he worked at Hely’s, and also vividly
remembers an experience of trying to collect an overdue debt from a convent. This is how the
recollection first appears in print:
I suggested to him [Charles Wisdom Hely] about a transparent showcart with two smart
girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. I bet that would
have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to
know what she’s writing. Wouldn’t have it of course because he didn’t think of it himself
first. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a job it was collecting accounts of those convents.
Tranquilla convent. That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Sister? Sister? I am sure
she was crossed in love by her eyes. Very hard to bargain with that sort of woman. I
disturbed her at her devotions that morning. Our great day, she said. Feast of Our Lady of
Mount Carmel. Sweet name too: caramel. She knew I, I think she knew by the way she. If
she had married she would have changed. I suppose they really were short of money.
Fried everything in the best butter all the same. Sister? It was a nun they say invented
barbed wire.
(see U 147.28–148.12; U-G 8.131–54)27
(p.191) In the midst of Bloom’s dismissive criticism of his time at Hely’s and his ambivalent
thoughts about a nun’s life in a convent, Joyce amplified some of Bloom’s associations with
additions on several subsequent manuscripts, the most significant of which was his criticism of
Hely’s advertising schemes. Initially, he added Bloom’s judgment that Hely’s placement of a
Plumtree’s potted meat ad was misguided and reinforced this implied criticism with an ad for
Kansell’s ink eraser that Bloom imagines. Recognizing the ineffectiveness of this ad requires a
bit of local historical information because the address given for Hely’s establishment is plainly
wrong.28 Here are the lines Joyce added on the typescript for Ulysses:
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Wouldn’t have it of course because he didn’t think of it himself first. ^His ideas for ads
like Plumtree’s potted under the obituaries, cold meat department. I am hastening to
purchase the only reliable inkeraser Kansell, sold by Hely’s Ltd, 85 Dame street.^ Well out
of that ruck I am.29
As set out here, Joyce further concretized the imagined ad on the first proof level by including
the representation of some dialogue,30 but it was only on the second proof level that he included
Bloom’s more visually striking idea for the inkbottle advertisement,31 and with these final
additions to the scene the text as it appears in Ulysses was set:
Wouldn’t have it of course because he didn’t think of it himself first. ^+Or the inkbottle I
suggested with a false stain of black celluloid.+^ His ideas for ads like Plumtree’s potted
under the obituaries, cold meat department. ^You can’t lick ’em. What? ^<Hely’s Our>^
envelopes. Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can’t stop, Robinson,^ I am hastening to
purchase the only reliable inkeraser Kansell, sold by Hely’s Ltd, 85 Dame street. Well out
of that ruck I am.
(U 147.33–148.01; U-G 8.136–42)
Obviously, the most momentous event in the Blooms’ lives in these years was Milly’s birth, but
Bloom also had two brushes with history in 1889 and 1890. Not only was he taken up by the
riotous events ‘the day Joe Chamberlain was given his degree in Trinity’ on 18 December 1899
(U 155.14; U-G 8.423–4),32 but one of Bloom’s most celebrated political acts took place on 11
December 1890. That was the day Charles Stewart Parnell returned to Dublin to recapture the
editorial offices of the United Ireland newspaper, and Bloom returned the great man’s hat to
him. The version on the later ‘Eumaeus’ draft already contains most of the rudimentary elements
of the recollection in Ulysses. But, as usual, Joyce later expanded and refined it at almost every
level before it appeared in Ulysses like this:
His hat (Parnell’s) a silk one was inadvertently knocked off and Bloom was the man who
picked it up in the crush and returned it to him ^with the utmost celerity^ who (p.192)
panting and hatless and whose thoughts were miles away from his hat at the time all the
same what’s bred in the bone because he turned round to the donor and remarking Thank
you, sir.
(see U 604.10–13; U-G 16.1333–6)33
While the Blooms do not have any specifically datable memories for 1891 either, they both recall
several events in the following years. In fact, Adams writes: ‘A notable circumstance about
Bloom’s past is that the years 1892 and 1893 (which are the years of confusion [about where
they are living]) are remarkably rich in specifically dated material’,34 and this is true for Molly
as well. For example, a turning point in her life finally took place either four of five years after
she married Poldy. In the midst of Molly’s thoughts about Milly’s emotional and sexual
awakening, on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript Joyce added quite an intimate recollection
in her seemingly rambling thoughts. She thinks: ‘I never came properly till I was what
twentytwo or so’ (U 717.34; U-G 18.1050–1).35 If some might consider this disclosure too frank
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an admission in the book, the note that prompted the story is much more explicit. Joyce wrote:
‘1st complete fuck at 25’.36 While Joyce, as usual, toned down the language in the published
work, the often-terse phrases in his notes illuminate the striking ways in which he conceived the
characters and his work. As I discuss in ‘Molly’s Birthdate’ in Chapter 4, dating this momentous
event is tricky. If one maintains that she was born in 1870, as the narrator in ‘Ithaca’ states,
then she must have had her first complete orgasm in 1892, but if we take Joyce at his word in
his letters and elsewhere, then Molly was born in 1871, and so she had to wait another year for
the big event. Fortunately for her, Joyce did not follow his note explicitly otherwise Molly would
have had to wait until 1895 or 1896 to fully bloom. He continued to expand the story in an
ambiguously humorous way on the third proof level with yet another addition. Molly explains the
problem by remembering that ‘it went into the wrong place always’ (U 717.35; U-G 18.1051–
2).37 Joyce took this idea almost verbatim from his notes—‘he put it into the wrong place, help
him’—and as usual it was completely decontextualized until it became part of the text.38
That same year Leopold Bloom met Stephen Dedalus for the second and only other time before
16 June 1904.39 Joyce had established the parameters of the story on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft. In
answer to the question: ‘They had met before’, he wrote: ‘^The second time^ in the coffeeroom
of Breslin’s Hotel, Bray, county Wicklow six years later on a rainy Sunday when Stephen had
invited Bloom home to dinner, his father seconding’ (see U 632.28–34; U-G 17.466–72),40 which
was prompted by the following note: ‘SD invited LB to dine with Si D [Simon Dedalus]’.41 Joyce
did not date either meeting on the earlier version and so the (p.193) information that the other
meeting took place ‘six years later on a rainy Sunday’ is not particularly helpful. Nonetheless, by
the time Joyce wrote the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript he established that the first meeting
takes place in 1887 and the second in 1892, and so five rather than six years later, not that this
was Joyce’s main concern at any stage in his elaboration of this scene. This is another instance
of the fact that Joyce is usually more concerned with the other elements of the story at first and
only establishes its precise temporal coordinates in the characters’ lives afterwards. Bloom’s
reply to the invitation was the same as the one in the proto-draft to Ulysses, but Joyce added
Stephen’s granduncle to the party of Dedaluses as he revised the Rosenbach manuscript.42
One of the oldest stories in the book is about the time (presumably also in 1893) when Bloom
was embroiled in some sort of scandal for selling tickets for the so-called Royal and Privileged
Hungarian Lottery (U 673.32; U-G 17.1808). Although we first read about the scheme in
‘Lestrygonians’, Joyce only inserted this reference—in the middle of the otherwise unrelated
story about Molly’s concert with Professor Goodwin—on the episode’s now missing typescript
for the Little Review: ‘Windy night that was I went to fetch her, ^there was that lodge meeting
on about those lottery tickets^ after Goodwin’s concert in the supperroom of the mansion
house’ (see U 149.04–6; U-G 8.184–6).43 In Ulysses, this story is clearly always associated with
Bloom’s Masonic connections. The most basic idea for it first appears on the earliest surviving
notebooks for Ulysses, which Joyce compiled in 1918, around the time he was writing this
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript and revising its typescript. In the midst of assorted Homeric-
related notes, Joyce wrote the somewhat syntactically confusing note: ‘Bought Hungarian sold
me lottery ticket from him (Father Cowley)’.44 It is not at all unusual that Cowley would be the
one who spreads malicious rumours about Bloom selling him these dodgy tickets. As I discuss
more fully in ‘A New Life in the City Arms Hotel’ in Chapter 7, Joyce has Cowley relate several of
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the stories about the Blooms’ married years in some of the fragments at the end of the earlier
‘Sirens’ draft.
The scandalous subject comes up more forcefully in ‘Cyclops’ when the narrator reveals
He [Bloom] was bloody safe he wasn’t run in himself under the act that time as a rogue
and vagabond only he had a friend in court. Selling bazaar tickets or what do you call it
royal Hungarian privileged lottery.
(U 300.19–21; U-G 12.775–7)
This story first appears on the Rosenbach manuscript almost as it does in Ulysses.45 It obviously
connects many related themes about Bloom in Ulysses, but its principal significance seems to be
to impugn his character as someone whose business dealings are connected in the other
Dubliners’ opinion to the idea that he is a Jew (p.194) and/or a Mason. Molly is similarly
unforgiving about Bloom’s machinations when she thinks
either he’s going to be run into prison over his old lottery tickets ^that was to be all our
salvations^ or he goes and gives impudence we’ll have him coming home with the sack
soon out of the Freeman too like the rest
(see U 722.17–20; U-G 18.1224–7)
Joyce wrote this entire scene on a missing manuscript between the episode’s draft and its
Rosenbach manuscript, and then revised it there as indicated here in mid-1921,46 about three
years after he first noted the idea.
One of Molly’s main complaints in 1904 is that she had to abandon her singing career once she
was pregnant with Rudy. There are several stories about her work in the choir in the early years
of their marriage, though some are impossible to date accurately. Molly’s singing per se is not
the main subject of either Leopold or Molly’s memories of her time in the choir at St Francis
Xavier Church in Gardiner Street Upper. In fact, a particular choir picnic is one of the most
consistently represented of the couple’s few shared memories of a public event together, but it
took Joyce a great deal of effort to bring about the perfect symmetry in his storytelling in
Ulysses. The first time Bloom recalls that day is in ‘Lestrygonians’ when he remembers:
Molly had that elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with selfcovered
buttons. She didn’t like it because I sprained my ankle first day she wore choir picnic at
the Sugarloaf. As if that. […] Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove,
shoulders and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbitpie we had that day. People
looking after her.
(U-G 8.163–9; see U 148.21–6)
This scene is one of Bloom’s many memories of the couple’s happier times together, but it also
mixes his heartfelt romantic memory of her appealing figure and dress with his criticism of her
superstitious nature. In general, Leopold clearly still finds Molly attractive in 1904 and has
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always taken an interest in the way other people do so as well. The idea for the event was
already on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, though at first it was just a more generic picnic
that took place on the equally scenic ‘Killiney hill’.47 Then Joyce specifically made it a ‘^choir^
picnic’ as he revised that manuscript, and then, on the now missing typescript for the Little
Review, he moved the convivial outing to the Sugarloaf Mountain where readers of Ulysses know
it takes place.48
An analogous transformation happened to Molly’s memory of this choir picnic at the start of
‘Penelope’. Her version of the day’s events is identical to her husband’s, though it happened in a
different place. She recalls ‘when he sprained his foot at the choir party at the sugarloaf
Mountain the day I wore that dress’ (U 690.24–5; U-G 18.25–6), but Joyce only managed to
establish that perfect parallelism on the episode’s fifth and final proof level,49 just days before
the book (p.195) was published. He set up the basic context of the story—her complaints about
the way men behave when they are sick—as an addition on the ‘Penelope’ draft,50 but he only
added the specific storyline about the time Bloom sprained his ankle that particular day at the
choir picnic (along with Miss Stack’s solicitous visit to his sickroom afterwards) as a further
addition on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript. At that stage of the story’s development, her
version of that same choir picnic has it taking place ‘at lough Bray’,51 and this is how it
remained until the very last possible moment of the book’s production when Joyce ensured that
his characters’ memories would precisely coincide. By doing so, he bolsters the sense of the
unity of the relatively few events that are retold by different characters in Ulysses, but once
again the fluidity of the place shows that it was not a defining aspect of the story as Joyce
conceived it.
Molly’s singing in the choir is also tied to a significant story about another singer they both
know. Bloom thinks of him first in ‘Lestrygonians’:
My memory is getting. Pen …? Of course it’s years ago. […]
Bartell d’Arcy was the tenor, just coming out then. Seeing her home after practice.
Conceited fellow with his waxedup moustache. Gave her that song Winds that blow from
the south.
(U-G 8.178–83; see U 148.35–149.03)
As readers of the stories in Dubliners know, Bartell d’Arcy has a prehistory in Joyce’s works. He
appears in ‘The Dead’ and is described there as ‘a dark-complexioned young man with a smart
moustache’.52 This example demonstrates how by specifically mentioning the same
characteristic—in this case, the tenor’s moustache—Joyce is working to establish parallel
representations of this character in different works, much as he does with the characters in
Ulysses, thereby giving what appears to be greater depth to the overall fictional world he
creates. In a typical movement of memory, Bloom tries to recall one thing by remembering
another; hence d’Arcy is introduced into this scene by association. To recall Penrose’s name he
remembers that d’Arcy was making his debut at the same time that he knew the other young
man.
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Another significant connection that Joyce underscores here is the song d’Arcy’s gave Molly. In
‘Penelope’, she reveals much more about her friendship with him. As an addition on the
episode’s draft, Joyce has Molly make a frank confession, one that she has not shared with her
husband:
Bartell d’Arcy too he used to make fun of when he kissed me on the choir stairs after I
sang Gounods Ave Maria he was pretty hot voice too if you can believe him ^then he said
wasn’t it terrible to do that there in a place like that I didn’t see anything so terrible in it
Î’ll tell about ^<him> that^ some day not now surprise him [Bloom]^
(see U 697.18–25; U-G 18.273–80)53
Once again, the note that prompted (at least in part) the new storyline was something Joyce had
assigned to one character only to transfer it to another as he wrote (p.196) Ulysses. The note
reads: ‘MB mocked Bartell d’Arcy’,54 but from the first time the story appears in the text it is
Leopold who is accused of mocking his secret rival. Joyce made two further additions to this
basic story on the episode’s draft and both are based on notes: ‘didn’t see anything so terrible in
it’ and ‘tell him some day not now’.55 Typically, neither note has a direct subject or a clearly
defined context. The ‘terrible’ thing Molly would tell her husband ‘someday not now’ only
became the illicit kiss as Joyce was writing. It seems evident that Joyce only put these previously
disparate ideas together as one coherent story as he constructed the scene for the first time on
the draft. Joyce then reinforced the fact that Molly will reveal the indiscretion to her husband on
the subsequent manuscripts.
Molly’s concert with Professor Goodwin also takes place in 1893, towards the end of their stay in
Lombard Street West. Unlike Molly and the other men, throughout Ulysses, Bloom has fond
memories of Molly’s music teacher. More importantly, it appears on the earliest manuscript to
feature the Blooms, the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft, and as far as we know, it is a kernel story in the
elaboration of her life story:
— ^<I> Poor old Goodwin^ was the pianist that night, Father Cowley said.
— And a nice hash he made of it! Mr Dedalus said. A symposium âll^ of his own.
— I remember, Father Cowley said. <What became of that> Marie <Fallon> Powell sang
too. What became of her Simon? I never see her name. Is she alive.
— Alive and kicking, Mr Dedalus ^<said> began^. <^Yes.^ She married.> ^My Irish
Molly O^ ^soldier’s daughter^.
(see U 257.18–258.22; U-G 11.466–507)56
I discuss this scene more fully in ‘A Daughter of the Regiment’ in Chapter 4, but what is
significant here is that this very early story in the genesis of Ulysses takes place in the same
period as the story of the Hungarian Lottery ticket fiasco. Furthermore, as Joyce conceived
them, initially, it is Cowley who tells the other men both stories. These early versions of the
stories indicate that this period in their lives is an originary moment in the elaboration of
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Leopold and Molly Bloom as central characters in the book. The surviving manuscripts show
that the stories about their years of marriage took precedence over the stories about Leopold
and Molly’s lives before they met. In this case, Joyce simply merged the two storylines by adding
the story of the Hungarian Lottery tickets to the one he had already written in ‘Lestrygonians’
about the night of Molly’s concert with Professor Goodwin. The first time the scene appears in
print, as Bloom is walking along, he recalls that memorable evening in this way:
Windy night that was I went to fetch her, there was that lodge meeting on about those
lottery tickets after Goodwin’s concert in the supperroom of the mansion house. He and I
behind. Sheet of her music blew out of my hand against the high school railings Lucky it
didn’t. Thing like that spoils the effect of a night for her. Professor Goodwin linking her in
front. Shaky on his pins, poor old sot. Remember her laughing at the wind, her blizzard
collar up. Corner of Harcourt road remember that gust? Brrfoo! Blew up all her skirts and
her boa nearly smothered old Goodwin. She did get flushed (p.197) in the wind.
Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up those pieces of lap of
mutton for her with the Chutney sauce she liked. And the mulled rum. Could see her in the
bedroom from the hearth unclasping her stays. White.
(see U 149.04–16; U-G 8.184–97)57
Though Joyce expanded Goodwin’s part as he continued to add to the scene, Bloom’s memories
revolve around Molly. He was principally worried that the wind might ‘[spoil] the effect of a
night ^for her^’, which Joyce added on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript,58 but ‘She did get
flushed in the wind’. Joyce did not include any description of the concert itself. The focus of
Bloom’s memory was always the intimate evening the couple shared afterwards. Joyce also has
Molly remember the same evening in ‘Penelope’: ‘I dont like my foot so much still I made ^
+
<Poldy> him+^ spend once with my foot ^the night after Goodwin’s botchup of a concert so
cold and windy it was well we had that rum in the house to mull and the fire wasnt black out
when he^ asked to take off my stockings lying on the hearthrug in Lombard street west’ (see U
697.07–11; U-G 18.262–6). Joyce made the first round of additions to Molly’s memory on the
Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript,59 and the second on its typescript.60 This may be all we find
out about this stage in the young Blooms’ lives, but the central stories during this period,
naturally enough, revolve around their daughter.
Milly Bloom: 15 June 1889–17 June 1904

17. ‘Ithaca’:
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Blue MS II, p. 31
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, p. 19
Milly is the first Bloom mentioned in Ulysses. But, as often happens with the representation of
minor characters in the book, she is introduced obliquely as an unnamed ‘sweet young thing’,
and then the reader must slowly piece together the scattered information that is provided about
her. In the first episode, ‘Telemachus’, we read:
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— Is the brother with you, Malachi?
— Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.
— Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there.
Photo girl he calls her.
— Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.
(U 21.26–30; U-G 1.682–6)
(p.198) Mulligan’s casual exchange provides the first bit of information that Alec. Bannon’s girl
works in a photographer’s studio;61 that this is Milly is confirmed in ‘Calypso’ and elsewhere in
Ulysses. Nonetheless, this is the only reference to Milly Bloom in the ‘Telemachiad’: ‘Brief
exposure’, indeed. In general, the stories Joyce created about Milly tend to reveal more about
her parents than they do about her as a character in the book. Rather than striving to develop a
richer representation of Milly per se, Joyce’s elaboration of her character was almost always
focused on revealing different aspects about Leopold and Molly as her father and mother. In a
typically Joycean manner, the daughter is most generally figured as a younger incarnation of the
mother, much like Issy and Anna Livia in Finnegans Wake. In Ulysses, Bloom frames the matter
most succinctly when he thinks: ‘Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down’ (U 86.23; U-G 6.87).
The analogy between mother and daughter goes further for Bloom: for him they also represent
all women. The generational motif between mother and daughter is most obviously figured in
Bloom’s ideas about menstruation, though Joyce only built up this thematic network at a
relatively late stage in a convoluted sequence of additions in different episodes over several
years.
As we find out later, Milly’s menstrual cycle began in step with her mother’s, but the reader
discovers the fact of their coinciding cycles in the reverse order of how Joyce wrote about them.
According to the narrator of ‘Ithaca’, Milly’s first period has come ‘9 months and 1 day’ before
Bloomsday and its advent has brought about a fundamental alteration in her parents’ marriage
as well as in the way the women in the house treat Leopold as husband and father. It seems that
there have been two ‘limitations of activity’ between the couple. On the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript, while Molly (‘the listener’) thinks of the first and last times she and her husband
had ‘complete carnal intercourse’, Leopold (‘the narrator’ of his day’s events to his wife) is more
troubled by the consequent
limitation of activity, mental and corporal, inasmuch as complete mental intercourse

^between himself and the listener^ had not taken place since the consummation of
puberty, indicated by catamenic hemorrhage, of the female issue of narrator and listener,
15 September 1903, there remained a period of 9 month and 1 day during which in
consequence of a preestablished ^<sexual> <female> natural^ comprehension in
incomprehension between the consummated females (listener and issue) complete
corporal liberty of action had been ^<inhibited> circumscribed^.
(simplified transcription; see U 687.34–688.07; U-G 17.2284–92)62
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Joyce drew out the implications of the coinciding rhythm between Milly and Molly’s cycles in
several episodes at more or less the same time. Although he may have had the idea before, Joyce
specifically included the fact that ‘that thing has come on’ Molly late at night on the Rosenbach
‘Penelope’ manuscript in the summer of 1921 (U 719.13; U-G 18.1105),63 and built up the
network of associations by continuously adding facets to this basic motif in a complex and non-
linear manner. This process is analogous to the reader’s cumulative process of discovering the
basis of this associative network of facts and possible significations.
(p.199) What is most striking about the stories about Milly is that Leopold and Molly do not
have any shared parental memories of their lives together with her. Rather, like the letter and
note they each receive from her on the morning of 16 June 1904, their memories of their
daughter are always separate. As I discuss more fully later in the chapter, though Molly’s
thoughts about Milly are generally positive, they are always tinged with some form of jealousy
and criticism. But, as far as her father is concerned, Milly is always simply ‘my darling’ (U 60.28;
U-G 4.287). For the father, Milly is an image of the adolescent Molly on the cusp of womanhood,
before the parents’ courtship commenced. While Bloom is proud of her maturing appeal, Milly’s
interest in Alec. Bannon provides a further distressing parallel to his wife’s affair with Boylan.
So even though Bloom is disturbed by the idea that his daughter is growing up and will find
another man to fill his place in her life, nonetheless, he cherishes his memories of their caring
relationship. For the mother as well, Milly is an avatar of her youthful self, filled with all the
many possibilities she had as an attractive younger woman before she married and had children.
This perspective on their relationship elicits both positive and negative responses from Molly. At
times, she relishes what the future holds for Milly, but, more often, she is jealous of her
daughter’s youthful possibilities and overtly critical of her personality and behaviour, though she
admits that she and her daughter share several similar traits.
Leopold’s memories of Milly

4. ‘Calypso’:
February 1918 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS ff. 7–14
June 1918 Serial Publication Little Review V.2, p. 46
Mid-June–2 August Second Proof Level Buffalo PP 4.1
8–Late August Third Proof Level Buffalo PP 4.2.b
6. ‘Hades’:
June–August 1921 Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 4, pp. [3r] and [15r]
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
November 1919–January Draft Cornell MS 56A, p. 27 & Cornell MS
1920 56B, p. 33
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, pp. [8v]–[11r]
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August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Blue MS II, pp. 9 and 11
18. ‘Penelope’:
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl E.iv
(p.200)
Just before the shock of seeing the letter addressed to his wife from Boylan, Bloom evokes a
beautiful sun-filled memory of his young daughter running to greet him. It sets the tone for their
relationship throughout the book:
Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the
brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind.
(U 59.20–2; U-G 4.240–2)
Joyce had established most of the elements of Milly’s life-story in the early episodes of the book
by 1918,64 and the first direct mention of her in Ulysses calls attention to the most basic fact
about her characterization. As Bloom looks at the post he thinks: ‘Mullingar. Milly’ (U 59.29; U-G
4.250). Their daughter is defined by the fact that she has left the parental home and is starting
to make a life of her own in Mullingar. Milly’s absence from 7 Eccles Street in 1904 is the most
fundamental aspect of her role in Ulysses. Besides the allusions to her as Bannon’s ‘Photo girl’,
she is present only in the reflected images her parents conjure up of her that day. In fact, Milly’s
only virtual speaking part in the book is her father’s silent readings of her letter thanking him
for her birthday gifts.65 She has no separate individuating presence in the book.
But some aspects of Milly’s life story were still malleable at that point. For example, Joyce
altered several times how old Milly was when she gave her father a special gift:
The tea was drawn. He filled his own moustachecup, sham crown Derby, smiling. Silly
Milly’s birthday gift. Only ^+^<ten> nine^ five+^ she was then. No, wait: ^+<eight>
four+^. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke.
(U 60.24–6; U-G 4.283–5)
She was 10 on the Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ manuscript,66 the earliest extant version of the scene in
‘Calypso’, but Joyce made her a year younger on a now missing page of the episode’s typescript,
and that is how old she appears in the Little Review.67 Joyce reconsidered the matter and for
whatever reason made her significantly younger when he revised Bloom’s memory of receiving
this sentimental memento from his daughter. He made ‘Silly Milly’ just 5 on the third proof level
and, correspondingly, has Bloom correct himself and make her still another year younger.68 She
is 8 in the story from 1918 until August 1921, but then with a stroke of the pen Joyce made her
half as old, and that is how the story appears in Ulysses. It is not clear why Joyce kept making
Milly younger, but it was clearly a purposeful strategy from the start.
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(p.201) Earlier, on a missing page of the ‘Calypso’ typescript for Ulysses, Joyce added the
touching story about ‘Putting pieces of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her’ (U
60.26–7; U-G 4.285–6).69 Since we read Molly complain that she has not received many letters
when she was a young girl, except the ‘few I posted to myself’ (U 708.28–9; U-G 18.698–9), this
story reinforces the structural patterning between Milly and Molly. It also emphasizes the
father’s kind attention to his young daughter—as well as Molly’s more isolated childhood.
Bloom’s reaction to these fond memories remained the same from the first time they appear on
the Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ manuscript: ‘He smiled’ (U 60.27; U-G 4.286).70
By the time he prepared the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce had established the story of
Milly’s precocity in discovering old Professor Goodwin’s mirror hidden in his hat as well as
Bloom’s judgment on his daughter: ‘Pert little piece she was’ (U 60.32–61.02; U-G 4.291–5). But,
it was only three years later, on the second proof level,71 that he decided to add a different
dimension to Bloom’s memory. Now he thinks: ‘Sex breaking out even then’. Milly’s budding
sexuality is one of the most basic correspondences between mother and daughter. Joyce reprises
many of the most basic motifs about Milly in ‘Nausicaa’:
And when I sent her for Molly’s Paisley shawl to Prescott’s, by the way that ad I must,
carrying home the change in her stocking. Clever little minx! I never told her. Neat way
she carries parcels too. Attract men, small thing like that. Holding up her hand, shaking it,
to let the blood flow back when it was red. Who did you learn that from? Nobody.
Something the nurse taught me. O, don’t they know!
(U 355.09–15; see U-G 13.920–5)
This memory of Milly’s attractive ways was already on the episode’s draft almost as it appears in
Ulysses,72 and it helps consolidate the sexualized characterization of her throughout the episode
and the book.73 Similarly, Bloom’s thoughts of Molly and Milly merge again in ‘Nausicaa’ and
the dynamic is always the same. On the one hand, Bloom is concerned with his daughter’s health
and has fond memories of her growing up. On the other hand, as usual the mother and daughter
are figured as mirror images that are specifically linked by their menstruation. Joyce also wrote
this series of associated memories on the episode’s draft around the start of 1920 and only
added to it slightly before it appeared in Ulysses like this:
Only troubles wildfire and nettlerash. Calomel purge I got her for that. After getting better
asleep with Molly. Very same teeth she has. What do they love? Another themselves? But
the morning she chased her with the umbrella. Perhaps so as not to hurt. I felt her pulse.
Ticking. Little hand it was: now big. Dearest Papli. All that the hand says when you touch.
Loved to count my waistcoat buttons. Her first stays I remember. Made me laugh to see.
Little paps to begin with. Left one is more sensitive, I think. Mine too. Nearer the heart?
Padding themselves out if fat is in fashion. Her growing pains at night, calling, wakening
me. Frightened she was when her nature (p.202) came on her first. Poor child! Strange
moment for the mother too. Brings back her girlhood.
(U 362.15–25; U-G 13.1194–2004)74
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Bloom is recalling incidents that show his caring and nurturing interactions with Milly, but he
also has ambivalent feelings about Molly’s behaviour towards their daughter. There is an uneasy
movement between Bloom’s memories when he recalls how he nursed Milly and put her to sleep
with Molly. As usual, he recognizes the physical and psychological similarities between mother
and child, but he then recalls a less pleasant scene that was inspired by this quite explicit note:
‘Molly going to beat Milly with umbrella’.75 Nonetheless, Joyce tempers the situation and
provides an excuse for Molly’s actions when he actually writes the scene: ‘perhaps not to hurt’.
He balanced this troubling idea with a more pleasant memory that Bloom checked Milly’s pulse,
but it is ironic that the note that inspired it is different: ‘Milly sleep with Molly: her pulse’.76 Of
course, there are many instances when Joyce reassigns a note to another character, but in this
case the change of subject is more pointed and transformative of Joyce’s representation of the
characters. In general, these scenes emphasize Bloom’s more tender rapport with his daughter,
specifically in contrast to how Molly interacts with Milly. Finally, this is another clear statement
of the way Bloom thinks that menstruation is the primal bond between mother and daughter.
In between brief pauses to savour his breakfast in ‘Calypso’, Bloom’s thoughts return to Milly:
Twelve and six a week. Not much. Still, she might do worse. Music hall stage. Young
student. […]
O well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has happened. Of course it
might. Wait in any case till it does. A wild piece of goods. Her slim legs running up the
staircase. Destiny. Ripening now. Vain: very.
(U 64.19–25; see U-G 4.425–31)
Like most fathers, Bloom reflects on his young daughter’s future. He is satisfied with her
present course—fearing worse—but the news of her current admirer causes him to worry.
Throughout Ulysses, Bloom’s attitude towards Milly vacillates between the pride and joy he feels
towards his only child and an awareness of her growing sexuality, which provokes his parental
(and masculine) anxiety. (This is hardly surprising and corresponds in different ways to how her
mother feels about her.) For example, in ‘Hades’ he thinks: ‘Soon be a woman. Mullingar.
Dearest Papli. Young student. Yes, yes: a woman too. Life, life’ (U 86.24–5; U-G 6.88–90). But it
was already evident in the way his opinions about his daughter constantly waver from assurance
to doubts about her personality in ‘Calypso’. In fact, Bloom’s ambivalence becomes more
focused when he connects his thoughts about Milly with his concerns about Molly’s impending
rendezvous with Boylan: (p.203)
Milly too. Young kisses: the first. Far away now past. Mrs Marion. […]
A soft qualm regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes. Prevent.
Useless: can’t move. Girl’s sweet light lips. Will happen too. He felt the flowing qualm
spread over him. Useless to move now. Lips kissed, kissing kissed. Full gluey woman’s
lips.
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Better where she is down there: away. Occupy her. Wanted a dog to pass the time. Might
take a trip down there. August bank holiday, only two and six return. Six weeks off
however. Might work a press pass. Or through M’Coy.
(U 65.03–12; see U-G 4.444–54)
As he will do throughout the day, Bloom’s equates Milly’s precociousness as she comes of age
with Molly’s developing affair. Though ‘regret, flowed down his backbone’, he recognizes his
inability to alter the course of events, either with his daughter or his wife: ‘Useless: can’t move’.
Resignedly, he concludes that being in Mullingar is the best thing for Milly, after all.
Nonetheless, he misses his daughter, and this is the first mention of his plan to pay her an
impromptu visit, an idea that preoccupies Bloom all day.
Although Bloom has other things on his mind in ‘Lotus Eaters’, thoughts of Milly recur in
‘Hades’. As the carriage passes the gasworks on its way to Glasnevin, Bloom thinks about Milly
again: ‘Got off lightly with illnesses compared’ with other children (U 87.20; U-G 6.123). He
added this on the episode’s typescript for Ulysses and continued to add to the list of diseases.77
In general, these memories serve to underscore the father’s consistently caring attitude towards
his daughter, which is something that cannot be said about Molly. In fact, Milly is never absent
from her father’s thoughts for long. At the end of the episode, the funeral and the ambiance of
the cemetery make Bloom think of Milly again: ‘Milly silly burying the little dead bird in the
kitchen matchbox, a daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave’ (see U 109.18–20; U-G
6.952–3), which he also added on the typescript for Ulysses.78 Joyce was clearly reinforcing the
representation of the father’s loving memories of his daughter, thereby making Bloom more
human and humane. In fact, some of Bloom’s most heartfelt memories of his daughter are in
‘Lestrygonians’ and, although many of the main stories were already present on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript, as usual Joyce added still more, thereby building a richer image of the
father’s memories of his absent daughter. As Bloom thinks back on his life, he concludes:
‘Happy. Happier then’. Then, with an addition on the second proof level, he thinks of her then
and now:
Milly’s tubbing night. American soap I bought: elderflower. Cosy smell of her bathwater.
Funny she looked soaped all over. Shapely too. ^Now photography. Poor papa’s
daguerreotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.^
(U 148.27–31; U-G 8.170–4)79
This is another instance of Bloom’s deeply felt memories of taking care of his daughter. With the
addition signalled here, Joyce used this opportunity to connect (p.204) the generations of
Blooms, thereby only establishing the inherited disposition for photography at a relatively late
stage in the genesis of Ulysses. This was the first time Joyce made this thematic link explicit in
the book, but he reinforced the network of references in ‘Ithaca’ (U 675.27–9; see U-G 17.1875–
6), and later still, in ‘Penelope’ (U 716.28; U-G 18.1005).80 Although in hindsight it may seem
like an obvious thematic connection, it is interesting to discover both how late Joyce included
the balancing motif in the book, and also how he typically worked to consolidate a significant
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idea with scattered references in several episodes that he was still revising as Ulysses neared
publication.
Joyce also dispersed a wide array of what are presented as Bloom’s memories of Milly in
‘Ithaca’. He sketched out many of these stories in this purportedly all-encompassing episode on
the episode’s proto-draft, but he did so in a non-sequential manner and as usual expanded them
at several stages of rewriting. Whereas the mention of Milly’s childhood birthday gift to her
father is the first time she is evoked in the episode (see U 629.19–26; U-G 17.359–61), the family
heirloom is actually part of the last question and answer about her in the proto-draft. In fact,
Joyce added her gift as an afterthought in the left margin of the page.81 Furthermore, this
sentimental and practical gift returns the reader almost full circle to one of the first times Milly
is evoked in the book (see U 60.24; U-G 4.283–4). This memento is one of the earliest markers of
Milly in the book, and was already a token of Bloom’s loving relationship with his daughter on
the earliest extant manuscript of ‘Calypso’, the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.82
More significantly, in another question and answer that only first appears on the ‘Ithaca’
Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce added another typical detail (in between the extant manuscripts)
that gives this already iconic object greater symbolic import. Here the narrator finally tells us
when Milly gave her father this memorable birthday gift (U 647.26–7; U-G 17.921–2).83
According to the chronology of the events in Ulysses, it was in 1893, when Leopold was 27 and
Milly was just 4. This was an especially happy year in the Blooms’ lives because it was when
they were expecting Rudy. Since we never discover the exact date of the ‘anniversary of his
[Bloom’s] birth’, we do not know if Molly was pregnant with her last child when their firstborn
gave her father this token of her love, but this added, tangential information creates the
possibility of exploring this idea. Furthermore, Joyce usually also strove to establish a
symmetrical balance of the same stories in various episodes, so it is not surprising that he added
another, final mention of the daughter’s gift to her father in ‘Penelope’. But he only did so on the
episode’s fourth proof level after he had incorporated these same details in ‘Ithaca’.84 Joyce has
Molly think: ‘then Ill throw him up his eggs and tea în the moustachecup she gave him to make
his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream too^’ (U 729.31–3; U-G 18.1504–6), thereby
further tying together more of the stories in ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’.
(p.205) Milly is also the primary focus of a related series of questions and answers about
midway through ‘Ithaca’ (U 645.26–648.16; U-G 17.858–944). Unusually, this most extended
discussion of Bloom’s memories of his daughter in Ulysses is also concentrated on consecutive
pages of the episode’s proto-draft.85 Presumably, Joyce was purposely gathering together and
expanding these topically related questions and answers at this stage, some of which may have
been in part older ideas, though he was clearly writing most of them for the first time on this
manuscript. There are several distinct questions and answers on these pages as well as many
fragmentary phrases and ideas that he was still just sketching out. It is obvious that Joyce was
not concerned with the issue of how he would arrange these fragments into a linear narrative
and was only going to deal with that aspect of the episode’s development at a later stage. The
clear and relatively stable manner in which the text appears on the subsequent Rosenbach
manuscript indicates that Joyce must have revised and expanded this section of the episode on
one or more missing intermediary manuscripts.
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The rudimentary state of the text on the proto-draft is most evident in the fact that what was a
single question-and-answer sequence became different parts of at least three distinct questions
and answers on the later faircopy and so in Ulysses (see U 646.01–07, 646.12–18, and 647.01–
13; U-G 17.864–70, 875–81, and 895–908). The most basic constituent portion of this sequence is
the main text on these pages, and even in its primitive version on the proto-draft it had some
sort of a beginning, middle, and end, though Joyce significantly expanded and broke it up later
on. It begins in the centre of the manuscript page and starts off with a straightforward question
that remained almost identical in Ulysses. Here is a much-simplified transcription of the
fragmentary question and answer on the proto-draft, after which I have listed the separate
additions, without indicating where they might belong because Joyce’s plans are not always
evident. Furthermore, there is no way to determine how he arranged these texts on the
subsequent missing manuscript(s), and by the time they next appear on the Rosenbach
manuscript Joyce has radically transformed their order in any case:
Main Text:
What memories had he of her?
As a child he called her Padney Socks. She had shown him the place of a sleeping minnow
in the basin of B. [Botanical] Gardens by a tiny spot which caused ripples, her present of a
moustachecup, followed by a queer man she went down the street & back again, a
sailorboy doll he bought for her which she [illegible word or words] as he would [and]
would she, she pulled her plait to remember the date of Waterloo. Silly Milly.
Additions:
^Rattling her moneybox^
^holding up her fair hair for her to be ribboned^
^She told dreams of — — — —^.
â querulous girlbaby <but> a crying woman but cry lessened pain^
(p.206) ^Fairy of two dark parents she had come from some ancestor & a youthful love^
^Mulvey was fair^86
At some point between the episode’s proto-draft and its Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce split up
this group of earlier ideas and this is how the first part of the text next appears on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript:
What other infantile memories had he of her?
15 June 1889. A querulous female infant crying to cause and lessen ^<pain> congestion^.
A child renamed Padney Socks she shook with shocks her moneybox: counted his three
free buttons, one, tloo, tlee: a doll, a boy, a sailor she threw away: ^<fair> blond^, born
of two dark, she had blond ancestry, remote, a <^military^> violation, Herr Hauptmann
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Hainau, ^<a soldier> Austrian army,^ proximate, a hallucination, lieutenant Mulvey,

British navy.
(U 646.01–7; U-G 17.864–70)87
Although variously expanded, the later version shows that Joyce only used some of the stories
from the proto-draft. Specifically, he included Bloom’s memory of Milly crying, his loving
nickname for her, her rattling moneybox, the toy doll, and the reasons that may account for why
she is fair or blond. On a missing document, Joyce also decided to provide a very precise date
when Milly cried. As it turns out, this is Bloom’s only memory of the day that his first child was
born—and Molly does not recall this momentous day in their lives at all.88 Also, as the note that
prompted the first change on the Rosenbach manuscript makes clear, Joyce intended this
recollection to be another example of the father’s concern for his daughter’s health: ‘Milly
crybaby good prevent congestion’,89 which is a recurrent motif in their relationship throughout
Ulysses.
Molly’s memories of Milly

18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [2r], [5r], and [7v]–[9r]
July–Mid-September Faircopy for Rosenbach MS, pp. 3, [13v], [16v]–[18v],
1921 Typescript and [23v]
16 August–Mid-October Typescript for Ulysses Huntington TS, p. 9
1921
2–Early November 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl C.ii
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl C.iii.a and .b
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl C.iv
The first time Molly thinks of Milly in ‘Penelope’ is in the context of her complaints about sex
and childbirth. In Ulysses, it reads: ‘nice invention they made for (p.207) women for him to get
all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it themselves theyd know what I went
through with Milly nobody would believe cutting her teeth’ (emphasis added; U 694.12–15; U-G
18.157–9). The disparate notes that prompted this interwoven memory suggest that Joyce
probably wrote this block of text as a cluster of separate additions on a now missing document
that preceded the extant draft: ‘nice invention nothing for a woman in that’, ‘what she went
through no-one wd. [would] believe’, and ‘cut his teeth’.90 The subject of Molly’s complaint
about the ‘nice invention’ is obviously vague. It could refer to many things, but Joyce only
specified that it is what men get from sex as he wrote the addition. The main subject of the next
note is similarly vague. Joyce could have used it for almost any of his female characters, but it
also clearly lends itself to Molly’s complaint about childbirth. The last note Joyce used to create
this memory is also vague, but the gender is clear: it is a boy. In fact, the masculine pronoun
reinforces the initial subject of the story on the draft: ‘Rudy’.91 But, on a missing document
between it and the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce simply swapped in Milly as the
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subject, and that is how the story remains in Ulysses.92 This is another clear example of the
priority of the narrative line of the story over the character as the subject of the story. As I show
here, this shift was part of Joyce’s general strategy to diminish Molly’s thoughts about her lost
son and focus them in both positive and negative ways on her daughter instead.
The same shift of subject happens the next time Molly thinks of her children on the draft. This
memory comes up in the context of her thoughts about her body, specifically her breasts, which
was inspired by this note: ‘Belladonna & good breast of milk’.93 In Ulysses the story is about the
daughter, but on the draft it reads:
I had a great breast of milk with Rudy from the belladonna âll swollen out^ used to hurt
me […] that machine was no good till I got Poldy to suck them into the tea he wanted to
^<do it> milk me […]^ he’s mad like goat’s milk he said it was yes
(see U 705.17–25; U-G 18.570–8).94
This idea was prompted by two notes that are next to each another on the same notesheet as the
previous one: ‘LB sucked her after Rudy’ and ‘sag swollen teat in coffee’.95 Again, the first note
is clearly about Rudy, but on a missing document between the ‘Penelope’ draft and its
Rosenbach manuscript Joyce simply reassigned the story to the Blooms’ other child and that is
how it appears in Ulysses.
Joyce added two more references to Milly on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript, both of
which can also be traced to notes. One of them comes in the midst of Molly’s fond memories of
her budding sexuality in Gibraltar: ‘^they (p.208) were shaking and dancing about in my
blouse like Milly’s ^little ones^ now when she runs up the stairs^’ (see U 712.27–9; U-G 18.849–
51).96 As usual, this story is more about Molly than it is about Milly, and it also serves to
reinforce the idea that mother and daughter are very much alike.97 Similarly, Molly’s other story
is more pointedly about her husband’s bad habits in public than it is about Milly:
even when I was with him [Bloom] with Milly at the College races that Hornblower with
the hat on him let <him> us into he [Bloom] was throwing his sheeps eyes at those two
[women] I tried to wink at him first no use of course
(see U 723.12–15; U-G 18.1256–60)98
The following oblique note presumably prompted this new story in Ulysses: ‘I winked at him re
[regarding] Milly’.99 Once again, the note has almost no context—it could have been about
almost anything—and only acquired a determined sense as Joyce elaborated the scene. He
added yet another reference to Milly on the typescript and, though placed far away from the
other addition, it too was inspired by a note on the same notesheet: ‘LB looks at whores when
daughter there’.100 This is how the story first appears on the episode’s typescript:
always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to
their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fête that one in the
cream muslin standing right against the sun so he could see every atom she had on
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(see U 697.35–698.01; U-G 18.290–3)101
Again, this story was clearly intended as the wife’s criticism of her husband’s behaviour, and
Milly just plays a supporting role in the story as she does throughout Ulysses.
Joyce wrote Molly’s most concentrated ruminations on Milly at the start of a new ‘sentence’—the
fourth on the draft, which became the sixth in ‘Penelope’ (U 714.09–720.19; U-G 18.909–1148)—
and they are pointedly framed at both ends by her criticism of her husband. She begins with ‘not
that hed be much use still better than nothing’ (U 716.22; U-G 18.999) and concludes with ‘its
his fault of course having the two of us slaving here instead of getting in a woman long ago’ (U
718.24–5; U-G 18.1078–9). Joyce had already established these ideas on the base text of the
episode’s draft,102 as well as the general contours of Molly’s thoughts about Milly, but the
elaboration of the mother’s sentiments about her daughter was a complex and convoluted
process. An analysis of the ‘Penelope’ draft and its correspondences with Joyce’s notes reveal a
great deal about his evolving ideas about the relationship between Molly and Milly. For example,
on the one hand, the physical layout of the text on the draft indicates that Joyce had determined
that (p.209) Milly would be on Molly’s mind at this particular juncture in the episode at a prior,
now missing, stage of his work on ‘Penelope’. But, on the other hand, his heavy reliance on
several late note-repositories clearly shows how he worked to extensively expand and nuance
the interpersonal dynamic between mother and daughter at various later stages in the genesis
of Ulysses.
The clear and fluid disposition of the text on the recto pages of the draft indicates that Joyce was
copying it from a now lost prior document, which was either a primitive draft or some sort of
collection of fragmentary texts that was already in the early stages of the episode’s distinctive
style.103 Joyce subsequently heavily revised these pages and filled their margins and facing
verso (left-hand) pages with both small and large blocks of additional texts, making them some
of the most overcrowded pages in the manuscript. Furthermore, Joyce used several different
notesheets and notebooks to revise the prior (now missing) manuscript before he copied the text
onto the extant draft. The fact that he only compiled these note-repositories in Paris in 1921—so
just before and while he was writing the surviving draft—makes it possible to ascertain a great
deal about Joyce’s ideas as these stories developed.
The most basic text of Molly’s memories of Milly on the ‘Penelope’ draft is just over four
hundred words long, much of which can be traced directly to at least seventeen notes, and
Joyce’s reliance on his notes continued at every level of revision. In the first instance, his
additions on the draft expanded the scene by more than two hundred words, many of which can
also be directly traced to at least fourteen more notes. Often based on still further notes, the
heavily revised final version of the scene is over one thousand two hundred words long in
Ulysses. Here is a much-simplified transcription of Molly’s various memories of Milly on the
draft, with the additions Joyce made on it marked in a bold font and the elements that can be
traced to the notes underlined:
especially now with Milly away such an idea for him to send the girl down there to learn to
take photographs only he’d do a thing like that all same on account of me & Boylan
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that’s why he did it I’m sure the way he plots and plans everything out I couldn’t turn
round with her in the place lately when I put the chair against the door
knocking first just as I was then with the glove get on yr nerves doing the loglady all
day wouldn’t even teem the potatoes for you of course she’s right not to ruin her hands I
noticed he was always talking to her lately at the table explaining things in the paper and
she pretending to understand sly of course that comes from his side of the house
can’t say I pretend things can he? I suppose he thinks I’m finished out well I’m not at
all no nor anything like it she’s well on for flirting too with those Devans imitating me
whistling with those Murray girls calling for her can Milly come out please she’s in
great demand to pick what they can out of her round in (p.210) Nelson street riding
the boy’s bicycle at night and smoking a cigarette I smelt it on her dress when I was
biting off the thread of the button I oughtn’t to have stitched it and it on her it
brings a parting she couldn’t hide much from me and the last plumpudding split
in 2 halfs too see it’s comes out your blouse is too open she says to me I had to tell her
not to have her legs like that on show on the windowsill before all the people they all look
at her like me when I was her age of course any old rag looks well on you then a great
touchme not too at the <pantomine> take your foot away out of that I hate people
touching me afraid of her life I’d crush her skirt a lot of touching must go on in
theatres in the crush they’re always trying to the last time I’ll ever go there every
two minutes tipping me there he’s a bit daft I think I saw trying to get near two
ladies outside Switzer’s at the same little game I recognised him on the moment
by his movements stylishdressed he didn’t remember me didn’t even want me to kiss
her at the Broadstone going away well I hope she gets someone to dance attendance on
her as I did where’s this and where’s that wouldn’t let me sit down of course she
^<doesn’t> can’t^ feel anything yet only the usual nonsense & giggling writing to her
that Conny Connolly in white ink on black paper & sealingwax though she clapped at
the time because he looked handsome I thought afterwards it must be real love if a man
gives up his life that way for her for nothing I suppose there are a few men like that left
it’s hard to believe in it though unless it happened to you the majority of them
^<without> with not^ a particle of love in their natures two people <in love> like
that nowadays full of each other they’re usually a bit foolish in the head she’s
always making love to my things too the few old rags I have wanting to put her hair up
at fifteen she’s time enough for that all her life after of course she’s restless knowing
she’s pretty I was too but there’s no use going to the fair with the thing answering me like
a fishwoman when I asked to go for a head of cabbage till I gave her a damn fine crack on
the ear she had me real nervous that was the last time she turned on the teartap of course
I was like that myself they daren’t order me about the place
(see U 716.27–718.24; U-G 18.1004–78)104
This relatively brief but concentrated scene provides a clear glimpse of Joyce’s creative process
in general, as well as his dynamic method of character construction. It is an exemplary instance
of the meticulous and labour-intensive ways in which Joyce wrote and revised his work
surrounded by his manuscripts and multiple note-repositories. The expansion of the text at every
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stage shows how Joyce would read page after page of his notes alongside his working draft and
use just a few of them at each particular stage to make specific additions to the text,
transforming it in both minor and major ways. He then recopied the revised and amplified text
onto a newer manuscript and the procedure started all over again. Joyce repeated this process
of revision and accretion at least six more times before this particular scene appeared in
Ulysses.
By focusing on the notes Joyce compiled for the construction of his characters, it is sometimes
possible to distinguish between what can be categorized as ‘conceptual notes’—the notes that
formed the basis of a scene or story—from the much more common ‘lexical notes’—words and
phrases that remained relatively similar from the note to the text—that he relied on to create the
very specific language in his work. In general, there are many more conceptual notes for
characters than there are notes about other basic aspects of the novel; for example, the plot, (p.
211) structure, or style of an episode. Obviously, there are many notes that can be considered
both conceptual and lexical. For example, the most basic prompt for Joyce’s recasting of the
scene was probably as simple as this note: ‘Milly away’,105 which may have been a kernel idea
for the expansion of this aspect of Molly’s thoughts about Milly, but Joyce also used this exact
phrase in the text.This chart sets out the notes that served as prompts for the base text of the
draft. Since it is not possible to be sure when and how Joyce made use of these notes to make
the various additions (all of which are crossed through in red crayon), I have arranged them
below as they appear in the text:
Note: Note-repository: NLI MS 14:

1. ‘Milly away’ BL NS 3.15 p. [8r]
2. ‘doing the loglady all day’ NLI NB 4, p. [11r] p. [8r]
3. ‘wdn’t teem the potatoes for you’ NLI NB 5A, p. [25v] p. [8r]
4. ‘talks to Milly all the time.’ BL NS 5.61 p. [8r]
5. ‘suppose he thinks I’m finished well I’m not’ BL NS 5.62 p. [8r]
6. ‘Milly imitating me whistling’ BL NS 5.20 p. [9r]
7. ‘Milly learns to men’s cycle night Nelson street’ BL NS 5.78 p. [9r]
8. ‘your dress is too low (Milly to MB) don’t put up yr legs NLI NB 4, p. [10r] p. [9r]
like that’
9. ‘men look at Milly in street’ NLI NB 5A, p. [18r] p. [9r]
10. ‘jealous of Milly dress’ NLI NB 5A, p. [25v] p. [9r]
11. ‘Milly touch me not’ NLI NB 4, p. [12r] p. [9r]
12. ‘MB embraced Milly in public, she doesn’t like it, take BL NS 4.56–7 p. [9r]
yr. foot away’
13. ‘Milly won’t let MB sit down’ BL NS 4.66 p. [9r]
14. ‘Milly takes MB’s things’ NLI NB 4, p. [10v] p. [9r]
15. ‘pretty girl restless’ NLI NB 4, p. [11r] p. [9r]
16. ‘like a fishwoman’ NLI NB 4, p. [10r] p. [9r]
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Note: Note-repository: NLI MS 14:

17. ‘MB hit Milly her last cry’ NLI NB 5A, p. [17v] p. [9r]
Though he may have planned to have Molly think about her daughter’s recent move out of the
family home before he wrote the draft, this note first appears on a relatively late notesheet. In
fact, many of the most basic themes that frame Molly’s relationship with Milly are already well
established on the basic level of the text on the draft, but based on Joyce’s reliance on other late
notes it is possible to distinguish those that were newer ideas at this stage. On the one hand (as
far as we can tell since several of the relevant documents are missing), one of the older ideas
was that her father sent Milly to Mullingar to get her out of the way ‘on account of Boylan’. This
revelation further underscores the husband’s complicity in his wife’s extramarital affair. While
Molly says this is another example of the way Bloom ‘plots and plans’ their lives, at the same
time Joyce has her reveal that the new arrangement suits Molly as well because she ‘couldn’t
turn around the place lately’. Furthermore, Molly and Milly were not getting along recently: she
would not even let her mother kiss her when she went away. It also seems that Milly can
understand (p.212) some things about ‘real love’ even at her age, though the more mature
mother is less idealistic and needs proof of it in her own life. On the other hand, there are many
more, newer ideas and themes that can be directly traced to Joyce’s notes for the most basic
level of the text on the draft.
The list should make the foundations of the newer ideas clearer, so I will focus my analysis on
the various ways in which Joyce transformed some of these notes as he wrote these stories.
Besides combining notes from different notebooks to describe some of the things Molly finds
fault with her daughter, he complicated and undercut Molly’s criticism when he used them by
having her concede that Milly is ‘right not to ruin her hands’ with domestic work. This further
dimension adds a sense of greater depth to Molly’s characterization, which is a thematic idea
that was not indicated by the notes themselves, even in combination. This sort of transformation
of previous ideas and texts is an aspect of the creative process that moves beyond the material
traces that are inscribed on any of the material documents and opens up other dimensions of the
creative process for critical interpretation.
The fourth note is fairly vague and typically does not contain a subject, but Joyce gave an
unmistakably Bloomian specificity to the additional text and used this opportunity to let Molly
criticize Milly for just ‘pretending to understand’ when her father tries to explain things to her.
The fifth note does presumably sound like something Molly would say, but by being included
here (rather than in some other context where it would have most likely fit just as easily), it
becomes a statement about Molly’s anxiety about growing older as her daughter is just
beginning her adult life. Not only is Leopold wrong to think his wife is ‘finished’, but Joyce also
added ‘nor anything like it’ as he wove his text, which is the sort of phrase that constructs a
deeper verbal sense of the character’s way of thinking. Conversely, he used the sixth note
almost verbatim, and as usual the point is clearly that Milly is just a younger incarnation of
Molly. Joyce got the idea that she knows her daughter is flirting with boys on bicycles from a
note, but he decided to add something else that it seems he did not find in his storehouse: Milly
also smokes cigarettes. At some stage, Joyce used the relatively long eighth note that he tagged
with Molly’s initials as a snippet of dialogue with only slight modifications to create the banter
between mother and daughter, but he changed the ‘dress’ in the note to a ‘blouse’ in Ulysses,
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probably because Molly’s ample breasts function as a synecdoche of her character throughout
the book.
The mother has also noticed that men look at Milly, and Joyce uses this idea to reinforce one of
the principal aspects of their relationship by having Molly reflect that Milly’s behaviour is just
‘like me when I was her age’. Another note in the same notebook inspired the rest of the
addition: ‘any old rag looks well on you then’. Again, this underscores the prevalent themes that
mother and daughter are very much alike and that Molly envies Milly’s youth. Joyce added a
different connection between mother and daughter: they both do not like to be touched in
public. The thirteenth note appears verbatim in the draft, but for whatever reason Joyce dropped
this idea by the time the scene next appears on the Rosenbach manuscript.
One of Molly’s harshest complaints is that Milly takes her things, but Joyce has the mother also
complain about the ‘few’ and ‘old’ clothes she has, which is more (p.213) obviously a criticism
of her own state than of her daughter. It also helps to tie together the flow of her thoughts from
one topic to another. More importantly, Molly provides an excuse for Milly’s recent behaviour.
She is restless because she is pretty, just like Molly was at her age. Joyce also added some vivid
details about the time Milly answered her mother ‘like a fishwoman’ (see note 16). For now at
least, the cabbage serves to give the scene a bit of descriptive context, thereby making it sound
more realistic. Once again, the note that prompted the scene has no subject, so Joyce could have
used it in a wide variety of ways, which is typical of the often-generic nature of his notes and is
precisely why they proved to be so useful in the actual writing process. Conversely, tagged as
they are with their names, some of the notes were just as clearly intended for specific character-
related stories. In fact, the final note is certainly more of a conceptual idea for a story than a
lexical one, though it too is generic in another way. It does not specify any particular time,
place, or reason why Molly would hit her daughter. All of these examples show precisely how
Joyce variously transformed a basic idea—that he often combined with other ideas and words
from different notes—into the much more elaborate and stylized text in Ulysses. This version of
Molly’s reminiscences about Milly ends with another reprise of the theme that the daughter is
more like the mother than she would like to admit, thereby bringing Molly’s seemingly rambling
thoughts back to a central idea of the scene.
The ‘Penelope’ draft explicitly documents the ideas and words that Joyce only added on that
manuscript and they too can often be traced to his notes. Here is another list of notes that
prompted the newer text on the draft. Given the difficulty of disentangling when Joyce made
each of the particular additions, I have again arranged the notes based on where they appear in
the text:
Note: Note-repository:106106 NLI MS 14:

18. ‘only he’d do a thing like that (Milly in M NLI NB 4, p. [9r] p. [8r]
[Mullingar])’
19. ‘chair against door’ NLI NB 4, p. [12r] p. [7v]
20. ‘washing there myself with the glove’ NLI NB 4, p. [10r] p. [7v]
21. ‘get on yr [your] nerves’ NLI NB 4, p. [12r] p. [7v]
22. ‘that’s from his side of house’ BL NS 1.60 p. [8r]
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Note: Note-repository:106106 NLI MS 14:

23. ‘you can’t say that now, can you?’ NLI NB 5A, p. [25v] p. [7v]
24. ‘girls call for Milly’ NLI NB 4, p. [9r] p. [8r]
25. ‘Milly—What they cd [could] pick out of her’ NLI NB 5B, p. [7r] p. [8r]
26. ‘bite off thread of button’ BL NS 7.06 p. [8r]
27. ‘loaf halves a parting’ NLI NB 5A, p. [31r] p. [8v]
28. ‘afraid of her life crush her skirt’ BL NS 5.70 p. [9r]
29. ‘touched in dark theatre’ NLI NB 5A, p. [25v] p. [9r]
30. ‘I knew on the moment’ NLI NB 4, p. [11v]: p. [8v]
Blue
31. ‘MB wrote white ink black paper’ BL NS 1.86 p. [9r]
32. ‘not a particle of love in their nature’ NLI NB 4, p. [12r] p. [8v]
(p.214) The eighteenth note is something Joyce used almost verbatim as an addition and it is
interesting to see that he explicitly tagged this idea for its eventual use, even though he may
have stored it away for years. Given its clearly defined purpose and the fact that it appears in a
notebook Joyce mined heavily for additions to this particular scene, it is difficult to figure out
why he only added it at this relatively late juncture, but such are the often-unaccountable ways
in which the creative process works. The next addition about Milly bursting in on Molly as she is
washing provides a greater sense of depth to her complaint about having her daughter
constantly underfoot, and Joyce built it up from separate notes on two different pages of the
same notebook.
Another generic note (number 22) was the prompt for Molly’s criticism about the traits Milly
gets from the Bloom-side of the family, but it was only when Joyce wrote the addition that he
decided that it would in fact be slyness. The next note prompted Molly’s rhetorical question:
‘can’t say I pretend things can he?’ (emphasis added). Though the note is generic, Joyce
probably decided to write Molly’s retort in this way to counterbalance her accusation that Milly
is only ‘pretending to understand’ what her father tells her. Moreover, he created Molly’s vivid
description of the time some unnamed man touched her at the theatre from note 29, but he
elaborated her further encounter with the man in front of Switzer’s window as he continued to
write. The penultimate note—‘MB wrote white ink black paper’—shows the way Joyce might take
a note with the expectation that it was about a character, but then simply reassigned it to
another one as he was writing. Although originally intended as something Molly has done, Joyce
decided that it would be something ‘Conny Connolly’ sent to Milly.107
In general, on the subsequent manuscripts, Joyce added both individual words and phrases.
Most of the additions Joyce made on the missing manuscript(s) between the episode’s draft and
the Rosenbach manuscript did not radically change any substantial aspects of the various
stories, but taken together they clearly demonstrate the care with which Joyce elaborated his
text at every juncture. Conversely, other changes did alter the contours of some of the stories he
had already written. For example, Joyce only decided at this stage that there are actually two
Devan boys, and named the one with the bicycle Harry, while he gave the father the name Tom
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Devan.108 This is another instance of the way Joyce established a story before he assigned
names to the minor characters they are supposedly about. Joyce also decided where and what
Molly saw when a man touched her in public. The scene is much more specific on the Rosenbach
manuscript. It was ‘at the Gaiety for Beerbohm Tree in Trilby the last time Ill ever go there to be
squashed like that for any (p.215) Trilby’ (U 717.26–7; U-G 18.1041–3).109 Joyce continued to
add to the scene on the Rosenbach manuscript as well, and some of these new bits of the text
also came from notes. Besides further refining ideas and phrases, Joyce also added several
totally new stories about Milly’s recent antics. The first is distinctive because it is a story Molly
kept from her husband. With the first addition on the Rosenbach manuscript, she thinks:
put her in a glasscase with two at a time to look at her if he knew she broke off the hand
off that little ^gimcrack^ statue with her roughness and carelessness ^+before she left+^
that I got that little Italian boy to mend so that you cant see the join for 2 shillings
(U 716.34–717.01; U-G 18.1013–16)110
At least three notes in two different notebooks were the initial prompt for the addition, all of
which are typically de-contextualized, the most significant of which is ‘hid from LB broken
ornament’.111 But in an illuminating twist, he wrote all the particular details of the story of her
misdemeanour before he used a late note that helped to specify when this happened: ‘Milly
broke before she left’.112 He only added that part of the story on the third proof level (as
indicated here). As a final flourish to the stories he added on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript, at the start of an addition Joyce swapped the ‘head of cabbage’ that Molly asked
Milly to get the day she answered back for ‘a half a stone of potatoes’.113 This gives further
specificity to the day’s events in a way that has nothing to do with Milly. The general point of
this new addition is to allow Molly to criticize another woman: ‘the day we met Mrs Joe Gallaher
at the trottingmatches and she pretended not to see us in her trap with Friery the solicitor we
werent grand enough’ (U 718.14–16; U-G 18.1068–70).114 Separately, he also added Molly’s
hopefully unspoken reply to Milly after she hit her: ‘take that now for answering me like that’.115
Later, Joyce significantly expanded the story of the last time Molly hit Milly on both the second
and third proof levels:
^2^ damn fine ^<crack> cracks^ across the ear for herself take that now for answering
me like that ând that for your impudence^ she had me that exasperated ôf course ^+I
was badtempered too because how was it there was a weed in the tea or I didnt sleep the
night before cheese I ate was it and I told her over and over again not to leave knives
crossed like that+^ because she has nobody to command her as she said herself well if he
doesn’t correct her faith I will
(U 718.16–23; U-G 18.1070–7)116
Joyce continued to make additions on each of the next three levels before he was finally done
revising this scene. On the third proof level, Joyce added another (p.216) reason why her father
sent her to Mullingar: ‘on account of his grandfather instead of sending her to Skerrys academy
where shed have to learn not like me’ (U-G 18.1005–7; see U 716.28–30).117 He achieved several
things with this addition: it connects the generations of the Bloom family and it emphasizes
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Molly’s recognition of her own poor education, though why he chose that particular professional
commercial college as the other option is not known. He only made one addition on the fourth
proof level and it serves to amplify Molly’s description of her education: ‘getting all 1s at
school’ (U-G 18.1007; see U 716.29–30),118 which Joyce took almost verbatim from another
note.119 Joyce’s use of so many pronouns in this episode creates several cruxes; for example,
here it not clear whether it is Molly or Milly who is getting those high marks at school. This is a
clear example of the subsidiary nature of Milly Bloom as a character in Ulysses; her primary
function is merely to shed light on the reader’s understanding of her parents.
Notes:
(1) Moisel, Citron, and Mastiansky become stock Jewish characters in Ulysses. For example, they
all appear together in the crowd of ‘figures of the circumcised’ in ‘Circe’ (U 509.15–20; U-G
15.3220–5). Furthermore, the notion that the Blooms lived in Pleasants Street only comes from a
revelation he makes to Bella Cohen in ‘Circe’ when she asks, ‘Say! What was the most revolting
piece of obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out! Be candid for
once’ (U 504.05–6; U-G 15.3042–3). In an effort to avoid answering, Bloom appeals to what he
presumes is their ‘mutual faith’ in an addition that first appears on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript (f. 51b). Later, he added ‘Pleasants Street’ on its second typescript at the same time
that he specifies Bloom’s worst indiscretion: ‘I ^^repugnosed in repugnant> rererepugnosed in
rererepugnant’ (Buffalo TS 15.h.5, p. [6r]; U 504.12–20; U-G 15.3049–57; see JJA 15: 250).
(4) See Thom’s, 1415, and Louis Hyman, The Jews of Ireland: From the Earliest Times to the Year
1910 (London: Jewish Historical Society of England; Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1972),
329, n. 7.
(5) Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Thom’s,
1905), 1589.
(6) Hyman, Jews of Ireland, 329, n. 8.
(7) Thom’s, 1589.
(8) Hyman, Jews of Ireland, 189 and 329, n. 10. The fallibility of Joyce’s sources for some of this
information presents an editorial conundrum. If one maintains that Joyce wanted to include the
correct names of these Jewish citizens of Dublin, but was led astray by his reliance on faulty
sources, then these names should be changed. In fact, following John Kidd’s lead, Danis Rose
altered the spelling of the fictional character’s name to Maslianky in James Joyce, Ulysses: A
Reader’s Edition, Danis Rose (ed.) (London: Picador, 1997); see, for example, 58. But, if one
maintains (as Gabler and virtually all textual editors do) that the goal of a critical edition is to
preserve the text of Ulysses precisely as Joyce wrote it, then the names should remain as they
are.
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(9) In another reprise of the surface and symbol divide in Joyce studies, it seems that
hypothetical cruxes bother some Joyceans as much as actual ones. Joe Schork has put forward
the hypothesis that Bloom may be simply correcting the operator who misheard the first two
digits, and that Keyes’s phone number in Ulysses is indeed 2844. He then goes on to make some
illuminating, though highly speculative, connections between ‘Aeolus’ and Deuteronomy 28:44.
See Schork, R. J., ‘Kennst du das Haus Citrons, Bloom?’, JJQ, 17/4 (Summer 1980), 407–18.
(10) Rosenbach ‘Aeolus’ MS, f. 12.
(11) Adams, Surface and Symbol, 173–4.
(14) NLI NB 5A, p. [5r].
(15) Emphasis added; NLI MS 14, p. [4v] and see BL ‘Penelope’ NS 1.16.
(16) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 9 and see NLI NB 4, p. [11r]: ‘who stopped in 28 (Penrose)’.
(17) Joyce must have relied in part on Thom’s for his information about these characters as well,
but it is not known how, from whom, or when he managed to collect the other reliable bits of
information that are the foundation of the characterization of the Blooms’ Jewish friends.
(19) Hyman, Jews of Ireland, 190.
(21) Hyman, Jews of Ireland, 190–1.
(23) Buffalo TS 16.b, p. 13; see JJA 16: 311.
(24) NLI NB 4, p. [11r].
(28) Hely’s was actually located at 27–30 Dame Street, which ended at number 82 in 1904
(Thom’s, 1895 and 1470; Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 8.142). Joyce gives the same erroneous address for
Hely’s in ‘Ithaca’ (U 673.11; U-G 17.1785).
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(32) For further details about the conferral, see Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 8.423–4.
(33) Buffalo MS 21, p. [16v]; see JJA 15: 352.
(36) NLI NB 4, p. [9r].
(39) I discuss Leopold and Molly’s first meeting with the young Stephen Dedalus in ‘Encounters
in the Dillons’ Garden’ in Chapter 5.
(40) NLI MS 13, p. [12r].
(42) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS I, p. 7.
(44) Buffalo NB 2a, p. [3r] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 5).
(45) Rosenbach ‘Cyclops’ MS, f. 25. According to Sam Slote, there was a news report in the
Illustrated Irish Weekly Independent and Nation on 16 June 1904 from which Joyce may have
adapted the name of the venture (‘Notes’, U-G 8.184).
(48) See Little Review, V.9, p. 31.
(49) Texas PP 43.1.b; see JJA 27: 229.
(50) NLI MS 14, [front cover verso].
(52) Joyce, Dubliners, ‘The Dead’, ll. 777–8.
(53) NLI MS 14, p. [2v].
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(55) NLI NB 4, p. [9r] and BL ‘Penelope’ NS 3.04, respectively.
(56) NLI MS 7B, p. [10r].
(59) Simplified transcription; Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, pp. [3v]–4.
(61) For more information on Milly’s suitor, see my ‘Meeting Bannon’ (forthcoming) in JJON.
(64) While the most basic aspects of her character were set by 1918, Joyce still spelled her name
both as ‘Milly’ (U 58.29, 60.28, 60.37, 64.06, and 65.03; U-G 4.250, 287, 293, 411, and 444) and
as ‘Millie’ (see U 58.29, 60.25; U-G 4.250, and 284) on the Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ manuscript (ff.
7–14). This mirrors the oscillation between how Joyce spelled her mother’s name as ‘Mollie’ and
as ‘Molly’ at about the same time in the development of Ulysses.
(65) I discuss the importance of Milly’s letter in the framing of the Boylan plotline more fully in
‘ “Bold hand”: Blazes Boylan in “Calypso” ’ in Chapter 2.
(66) Rosenbach ‘Calypso’ MS f. 9.
(68) Buffalo PP 4.2.b; see JJA 22: 212.
(69) See NLI NB 5A p. [1r].
(73) See, for example: ‘(Milly) Carried home change in shoe: sly little minx’ (BL ‘Nausicaa’ NS
1.62).
(74) See Cornell MS 56B, p. 33; see JJA 13.239.
(75) BL ‘Nausicaa’ NS 5.63.
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(76) Emphasis added; BL ‘Nausicaa’ NS 1.13.
(80) I discuss the generational connections more fully in ‘Rudolph Virag Bloom’s Conversion and
New Name’ in Chapter 3.
(81) NLI MS 13, p. [11r].
(83) See Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS, p. 11.
(84) Harvard Pl E.iv; see JJA 21.373.
(85) NLI MS 13, pp. [8v]–[10r].
(86) NLI MS 13, p. [9r].
(88) Bloom also remembers running to call the midwife for Rudy’s birth (U 64.10–11; U-G 4.417–
20), while Molly does not recall the day of his birth either.
(89) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 15.80.
(90) Emphasis added; see NLI NB 4, p. [10v], BL ‘Penelope’ NS 1.102, and BL ‘Penelope’ NS
7.04, respectively.
(91) NLI MS 14, p. [2r].
(94) Emphasis added; simplified transcription; NLI MS 14, p. [5r].
(95) Emphasis added; BL ‘Penelope’ NS 1.20 and 1.21.
(97) This is particularly important because throughout Ulysses Molly’s breasts are central
aspects of her characterization.
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(102) NLI MS 14, pp. [8r]–[9r].
(103) It is likely that at least one of the missing previous drafts of ‘Penelope’ was similar to the
recently discovered earlier ‘Eumeo’ draft in that it contained a base level text that Joyce had
written much earlier in Trieste, but which he further revised in Paris as he began to prepare the
episode for publication. Joyce wrote to John Quinn: ‘I hope to finish the Circe episode before
Christmas [1920]. Eumeus, being already drafted, I could send on in January. The printing of the
book could be put in hand at once when the contract is signed. I must have a few months’ leisure
after January to write the Ithaca and Penelope episodes which, however, have been sketched
since 1916 and are very short in comparison with the Circe episode’ (24 November 1920; LIII
30).
(104) Emphasis added; simplified transcription; NLI MS 14, pp. [7v]–[9r].
(106) Like the other notes Joyce had already used to construct this scene, all of these are also
crossed through in red crayon, except note 30, which signals what is presumably a return to that
particular notebook and therefore probably a later round of additions.
(107) According to Richard Ellmann, Conny Connolly was also the name of the sister of Albrecht
and Vincent Connolly, classmates of Joyce’s when he was at Belvedere College, but there is no
textual or contextual evidence to support her connection with the character in Ulysses; see
James Joyce, 356.
(108) See Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 17. Sam Slote suggests that Joyce had his father’s friend
Tom Devin in mind here, even though Joyce clearly wrote Devan and never altered the spelling
of the family name of Milly’s friends (‘Notes’, U-G 18.1023). A Tom Devan is also mentioned in
‘Wandering Rocks’ (U 242.23–4; U-G 10.1196). Similarly, there are many possible Murrays that
this could refer to both in Ulysses and in real life, but since Joyce did not provide any further
context it is impossible to know who these Murray girls might be.
(110) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. [16v] and Harvard Pl C.iii.b; see JJA 21: 286.
(111) NLI NB 5A, p. [17v].
(114) For more information on Mrs Joe Gallaher and Friery, see Ellmann, James Joyce, 46n.
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(116) Harvard Pl C.ii and Harvard Pl C.iii.b; see JJA 21: 271 and 287.
(117) Harvard Pl C.iii.a; see JJA 21: 278.
(118) Harvard Pl C.iv; see JJA 21: 294. The printers of the first edition mis-set Joyce’s addition and
it read ‘getting all at school’ on all editions until the missing number was restored in U-G.
(119) See Buffalo NB 2b, p. [2v]: ‘all ones at school’ (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 4.34).
Page 37 of 37
Life Goes On


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
Life Goes On
1893–1902
Luca Crispi
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.003.0007

This chapter begins by recounting the sad facts about the untimely death of the Blooms’ only
son, Rudy, and the different ways in which he remains a spectral presence for the parents on 16
June 1904, as well as how they mourn their loss. It then traces the couple’s several moves across
Dublin and Leopold’s difficulty in maintaining steady employment. The stories about them
during this period are founded on malicious male gossip that functions as another primary
narrative mode in Ulysses. The textual evidence makes clear that the stories about them when
they were ‘on the rocks’ were some of the earliest Joyce wrote and were pivotal in his
conception and construction of Leopold and Molly Bloom as characters. The second part of the
chapter traces yet another move across Dublin. This change in address and work brought other
complications to their lives, including Molly’s first extramarital affair.
Keywords: mourning, moves across Dublin, Bloom’s employment, malicious male gossip, adultery
Hard times
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, pp. [21v]–22
2–Early November 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl D.ii.a
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl D.iii.a
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The information in Ulysses about where the Blooms lived after they married and other such
basic details about these crucial years is sparse and at times simply contradictory. In his 1921
chronology, Joyce himself was not especially precise about the facts of the Blooms’ lives. For
example, for 1888 he simply wrote: ‘LB & MB II [presumably marry]. Hely’s. Lombard St.’, but
then he tried to correct himself by crossing through the address and writing ‘Raymond’s
Terrace’ instead.1 Except for the year of their marriage, none of this information accords with
the stories in the book. This is further evidence that Joyce himself was not clear in his own mind
about the facts in the Blooms’ lives even at this late stage in the book’s genesis, but that clearly
did not bother him as much as other thematic, stylistic, and narrative considerations. In general,
Robert M. Adams’ claim that ‘Joyce was less concerned with intellectual precision than with the
machinery of precision, with the click and glitter of accuracy’ seems to be amply borne out by
this phase of the Blooms’ lives.2 All in all, it proves impossible to make all the different details
about this period coalesce into a coherent narrative account. This might seem like a failing of
the realist strand of the book, but Joyce does not seem to have been much bothered by the
situation, and therefore readers and critics probably should not be either. I will point out some
of the discrepancies, but since they are ultimately irresolvable based on the available evidence it
may be best to just enjoy them as they are.
Summarizing what we find out in Ulysses, it seems that in early 1893 the Blooms were still in
Lombard Street West and that they presumably moved to (p.218) Raymond Terrace by March
of that year, since that is where Rudy was conceived. Then they moved to the City Arms Hotel
around the start of 1894 when their son was born and soon thereafter passed away. The Blooms
moved into another rented home in Holles Street in 1895 for a short while, and then managed to
move to a better home in Ontario Terrace in 1897. But other information in the book makes a
muddle of this neat chronology. Furthermore, it is unclear where the Blooms lived at the turn of
the century, or when they moved to 7 Eccles Street, though there is some evidence to suggest
that it was in 1903.3 Joyce may have realized that readers might be confused by the factual
details he had included in the book over the many years he was at work on Ulysses, so he made
two rounds of additions to the second and third proof levels of ‘Penelope’ to help clarify them.
Towards the end of the book, Molly takes account of her life with her husband and makes a list
of their homes to match her list of Bloom’s jobs, which he had already set out on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript.4 Here is Molly’s initial account with the subsequent additions signalled
accordingly:
God here we are as bad as ever after ^+<sixteen> 16+^ years ^how many houses
were we in at all^ ^+Raymond terrace and Ontario terrace and Lombard street and Holles
street and he goes about whistling every time were on the run again his huguenots or the
frogs march ^pretending to help the men with our 4 sticks of furniture^ and then the City
Arms hotel worse and worse says Warden Daly that charming place on the landing always
somebody inside praying then leaving all their stinks after them always know who was in
there last+^ every time were just getting on right something happens or he puts his big
foot in it Thom’s and Hely’s and Mr Cuffe’s and Drimmie’s either he’s going to be run into
prison over his old lottery tickets that was to be all our salvations or he goes and gives
impudence well have him coming home with the sack soon out of the Freeman too like the
rest
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(U 722.09–20; U-G 18.1215–27)5
The only topic of Molly’s criticism on the Rosenbach manuscript was the summary of the many
unrewarding jobs her husband has had, though they are not in precise order in which Bloom
recalls them in other episodes. Then as he revised the episode’s second proof level, Joyce added
another topic to Molly’s complaints: ‘how many houses were we in at all’, which was prompted
verbatim from a late note.6 He only added the list of their addresses on the third proof level, and
here too the order does not accord with what we read elsewhere, but the randomness of her
recollections about her past is most likely the point: so much for Joyce’s late effort to clarify the
facts in Ulysses.
(p.219) Rudy: a life cut short: 29 December 1893–9 January 1894
4. ‘Calypso’:
6. ‘Hades’:

September 1918 Serial Publication Little Review, V.5, p. 22
June–August 1921 Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 4, p. [6r]
Late August–2 September 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl 10.i & Harvard Pl 11.i
11. ‘Sirens’:
Early 1919 Later Draft Buffalo MS 5, p. [8r]
12. ‘Cyclops’:
February–March 1920 Earlier Draft Buffalo MS 11, p. [8r]
March–May 1920 Later Draft Buffalo MS 14, p. [8r]
May 1920 Mixed Faircopy Rosenbach MS, f. 13
15. ‘Circe’:
February–8 April 1921 Amanuensis Copy for Typescript Buffalo TS 13.d.11, p. [1r]
6–Mid-January 1922 Ninth Proof Level Harvard PP 36.1
13–Mid-January 1922 Tenth Proof Level Buffalo PP 36.2
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17. ‘Ithaca’:
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Blue MS III, pp. 30–1
Mid–Late December 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl III-13.i
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [12r], [14v]–[15r]
July–Mid-September Faircopy for Rosenbach MS, p. [24v] & Buffalo MS 22, f.
1921 Typescript [2r]
16 August–Mid-October Typescript Buffalo TS 16.c, p. [19r]
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl D.iv
(p.220) While Milly is an off-stage character in Ulysses, Rudy is a sombre and spectral
presence in the Blooms’ lives and therefore in the book. There are many reasons why their son
continues to haunt Leopold and Molly eleven years after he died.7 The day of Rudy’s conception
is one of the couple’s most passionate shared memories and his burial is the darkest day of their
lives. With an addition on the fourth proof level of ‘Penelope’ just before Ulysses appeared, Joyce
captured how Molly thinks about the effect their loss has had on their marriage: ‘our 1st death
too it was we were never the same since’ (U 728.14–15; U-G 18.1450).8 Furthermore, although
Joyce most likely planned this fundamental structural element of Ulysses before, the first explicit
instances when Leopold and Molly associate Rudy with Stephen Dedalus are on the earliest
extant drafts of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ and ‘Penelope’.
The first mention of the Blooms’ lost son comes towards the end of ‘Calypso’. As Leopold thinks
of Milly’s birthday and the day she was born, he recalls the family’s midwife:
running to knock up Mrs Thornton in Denzille street. Jolly old woman. Lots of babies she
must have helped into the world. She knew from the first poor little Rudy wouldn’t live.
Well, God is good, sir. She knew at once. He would be eleven now if he had lived.
Rudy is introduced simply as a child who was not meant to live, and this recurrent motif is one of
the foundational stories in the book. Joyce had written this scene on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript almost exactly as it appears in Ulysses,9 except that he had to correct a slight
miscalculation on a now missing page of the typescript for the Little Review. On the Rosenbach
manuscript, Bloom thinks that Rudy would be ‘twelve’ whereas the dates of his short life given
later in the book establish that he would only be eleven in 1904 (see U 565.10; U-G 15.4957).10
While Joyce wanted to have the fictional facts about Rudy’s short life in the book accord, he
never managed to do so. Although the year of Rudy’s birth in 1893 was established on the
earliest manuscripts that feature him, Joyce only determined the precise dates of his very short
life as he wrote ‘Ithaca’ three years later.
Unsurprisingly, the funeral and visit to the cemetery in ‘Hades’ bring the dark thoughts about
his son back to Bloom’s mind. Reacting to Simon Dedalus’s diatribe about Stephen’s new friend,
Buck Mulligan, Bloom thinks of Rudy and Molly:
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Life Goes On
Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If little Rudy had
lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly în an Eton
suit^. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must
have been that morning ^+in Raymond terrace+^ she was at the window (p.221)
watching the two dogs at it by the wall of the cease to do evil. And the ^+<warder>
sergeant+^ grinning up. She had that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give
us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins.
Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside her. I could have helped
him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn German too.
(U-G 6.74–84; see U 86.09–20)11
Leopold’s deep sense of loss leads him to vividly remember the passionate lovemaking that
engendered Rudy, intertwining ideas about death, sex, and new life, all of which are crucial
themes in the episode. This is the originary rendering of the scene of Rudy’s conception in
Ulysses and Joyce had created most of its very specific elements and leitmotifs by mid-1918
when he wrote the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript,12 though it is likely that some of the
principal ideas were older. Nonetheless, years later Joyce reprised various elements of this
scene in other episodes and, after he had elaborated the scene in ‘Hades’, he added newer
proleptic details to the episode’s proofs for Ulysses. The central element of the scene is Leopold
and Molly’s spontaneous lovemaking by a window as she watches two dogs mating in the street
while a ‘warder’ is ‘grinning up’ at them.13 This moment captures the full range of the Blooms’
physical and emotional passion for one another during the early years of their marriage, and the
scene stands in stark contrast to their relationship in 1904. As I will explain further, Joyce made
the first round of additions on the first proof level and the second on the third proof level.
At least three years after writing this scene in ‘Hades’, on the typescript for ‘Penelope’ Joyce
added a clear reprise of the scene in Molly’s memory of that day that unites the couple in love
and mourning and gives the narrative of their lives together an overt sense of cohesion. She
thinks: ‘was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching
the two dogs up in her behind in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me
altogether’ (U 728.09–12; U-G 18.1445–7).14 Both Leopold and Molly’s versions are obviously
sexualized, but they also show how the death of their son irrevocably altered them.
Furthermore, in ‘Hades’, Rudy is figured as an uncanny presence in his father’s imagination: he
is a ghost that still lives with him. Joyce established this motif long before he conjured up the
boy’s apparition at the end of ‘Circe’, but he only clad Rudy in the Eton suit on the first proof
level of ‘Hades’, after he had written Bloom’s hallucination in the later episode.15
By adding this proleptic detail, the stage is set for the vision of the Blooms’ dead son at the
climactic juncture of the book. In fact, the finale of ‘Circe’ first appears on its Rosenbach
manuscript (see U 565.08–20; U-G 15.4955–67),16 which Joyce finished about eight months
before he added this detail in ‘Hades’. Finally, though he already included the reference to the
‘Cease to do evil – learn to do well’ sign (p.222) that hung above the entrance of the Richmond
Penitentiary on the South Circular Road,17 it was only on the third proof level that Joyce
specified that the lovemaking happened when they lived ‘in Raymond Terrace’ just across the
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road from the jail, and decided to promote the man looking up at them to ‘sergeant’.18 All of
these details enrich and clarify the scene in ‘Hades’ and establish the correspondences that
unfold later.
Then the spectacle of a child’s funeral at Glasnevin cemetery naturally brings back yet again the
painful thoughts of Rudy. In between the men’s concerned comments, the focus of Bloom’s
memory was more clearly on Rudy the first time the scene appears in print:
—Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.
A dwarf’s face mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was. Dwarf’s body, weak as putty, in a
whitelined box. Meant nothing. Mistake of nature.
—Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It’s well out of it.
(see U 92.32–93.01; U-G 6.325–31)19
This description of the young dead child as a dwarf and particularly his pallid colour further
determines Rudy’s characterization and resonates across the book. Much later Joyce will rely on
these elements to create the ghostly vision of Rudy at the end of ‘Circe’. Bloom’s sentiments
here—that Rudy’s death ‘Meant nothing. Mistake of nature’—do not support the symbolic
significance that many readers attach to Rudy as the lost son and heir of the Bloom family line,
but this is most likely meant to represent a mechanism that the father uses to try to cope with
his loss. Joyce added to and complicated Bloom’s resigned and practical attitude towards Rudy’s
death as he continued to make additions to this scene. Although unchanged for three years from
the Rosenbach ‘Hades’ manuscript, as Joyce revised the episode’s typescript for Ulysses,20 he
made two additions that can be traced to the same notebook page. On the one hand, he used the
note ‘our little beggar baby’ and, on the other, ‘better luck next time’.21 These seem like clichéd
remarks rather than deep expressions of Bloom’s remorse, but then Joyce heightened the pathos
of the scene and emphasized the personal guilt that Bloom feels with another addition on the
episode’s first proof level.22 The inspiration for this line can be found in the following colloquial
note: ‘child healthy praise ma if not blame da’.23 Though added relatively late, Bloom’s
recognition of this superstition lends support to another recurrent motif associated with Rudy
that Joyce had already established and would continue to enrich later. For example, in ‘Sirens’
Bloom wonders:
I too, last of my race. Milly young student. Well, my fault perhaps. No son. Rudy. Too late
now. Or if not? If not? If still?
He bore no hate.
Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old.
(p.223) As Boylan is making his way to his rendezvous with Molly at 7 Eccles Street, Bloom
admits to himself that he has no male heir and that it is ‘my fault perhaps’, but thinks of Milly.
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He is only temporarily reassured by the idea that she will soon start a family, and so the Bloom
line will at least continue through his daughter. Then he subconsciously considers the possibility
that Molly could still bear him a son, though with Boylan! Such a prospect elicits an extreme
expression of Leopold Bloom’s passive nature: ‘Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am
old’. This is a crucial statement of his response to the brute facts of his life on 16 June 1904: he
has no son and his wife is having an affair with another man. Though slightly altered and
rearranged, this is almost exactly as these lines appear on the episode’s later draft,24 which
Joyce wrote in early 1919, more than two years before he added the thematic echo in ‘Hades’
about the father bearing the blame for the death of a child. In ‘Penelope’, Joyce has Molly
corroborate Bloom’s fear as she dismisses her responsibility in either their lovemaking or Rudy’s
death. Molly wistfully links her lost son and Stephen in a way that is paradigmatic of how Joyce
represents her grief. She thinks: ‘and I none was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault
we came together when I was watching the two dogs’ (U 728.09–10; U-G 18.1445–6).25 He added
this on the episode’s draft—so also before the addition to the scene in ‘Hades’—and it is based
on this fundamental conceptual note: ‘his [Bloom’s] fault no boy’.26
Bloom’s thoughts in ‘Lestrygonians’ make clear the dichotomy of his life before and after Rudy
was born. At the start of the episode on its Rosenbach manuscript,27 he has pleasant memories
of an errand to satisfy Molly’s maternal cravings:
Night I went down to the pantry in the kitchen. What was it she wanted? The Malaga
raisins. Before Rudy was born.
(see U 144.22–4; U-G 8.22–4)
But Rudy’s premature death caused the most significant rupture in his life. In mid-episode Joyce
highlights the book’s most recurrent theme of the cycles of happiness in Bloom’s life:
I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She twentythree.
^When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after
Rudy.^ Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to
then? Just beginning then. Would you?
(U-G 8.608–12; see U 160.08–12)28
As indicated, Bloom’s questioning meditation was more abstract until the episode’s first proof
level for Ulysses when Joyce added a specific cause for the disruption in his life: the loss of his
son. It is impossible to know how long Joyce had stored away this idea, but it was only in late
August 1921 that he found a place to use the following note: ‘left Lombard street because Rudy
† [died]’.29
(p.224) Nothing in Leopold’s life was the same after Rudy’s death. Though obviously couched
in an unsympathetic manner that is characteristic of the episode’s style, the men in Barney
Kiernan’s comment on how important the birth of Bloom’s son was for him:
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— O, by God, says Ned, you should have seen Bloom before that son of his that died was
born. I met him one day in the south city markets buying a tin of Neave’s food six weeks
before the wife was delivered
(U 323.23–5; U-G 12.1650–2)30
This snippet of dialogue first appears on the Rosenbach ‘Cyclops’ manuscript almost exactly as it
will in Ulysses.31 Conversely, in keeping with the episode’s hyperbolic style, there is an extended
and more moving image of Bloom’s feelings about his son in ‘Oxen of the Sun’. Concerned about
the women who are having children in the maternity hospital, the narrator describes Bloom
thinking about Molly and Rudy, ‘his good lady Marion’ and ‘the flower of the flock’:32
But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the
terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour and as he was minded of his good
lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had
died and no man of art could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of
heart for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of lamb’s wool, the
flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and lie akeled (for it was then about the
midst of the winter) and now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir
looked upon him his friend’s son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness
and as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all accounted him of
real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived
riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores.
(U 373.03–15; U-G 14.264–76)
Joyce wrote this scene virtually as it appears in Ulysses on the episode’s earlier draft.33 It
contains both elements that he had already established about this story in other episodes as well
as newer leitmotifs that he only now incorporated into stories about Rudy. Most obviously, it is
the first clear statement that Rudy was born in winter and only lived for eleven days, though
Joyce had not yet specified the dates beyond that point. The earlier draft also includes the first
mention of the ‘white corselet of lamb’s wool’, which Joyce changed from ‘white’ to ‘fair’ on the
later draft.34 This was a new idea that Joyce only included in Ulysses at this stage, and was
presumably inspired in part by the following note: ‘Molly put inside vest on Rudy dead’.35
(p.225) More pointedly, in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ Joyce also toned down the representation of
Molly’s grief as it appears on the earlier draft and shifted the focus of the scene more squarely
towards Leopold’s feelings. Although the mother is always represented as ‘wondrous stricken of
heart’, Joyce made the reason for Molly’s grief less personal and simply generic with the
following change: ‘^<her babe so dead> that evil hap^’. Joyce also dropped the
description of her as ‘sore weeping’ for the death of her son when he prepared the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript,36 even though it was part of the scene on both the earlier and later
drafts. Furthermore, Joyce had established the motif of Leopold’s perception of Stephen Dedalus
as a surrogate for his lost son on the earlier draft as well. As the narrator puts it: ‘sir Leopold
that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his friend’s son’ (U 373.10–11; U-G
14.271–2). This is the first mention of this fundamental narrative structural principle in Ulysses.
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It is not surprising that it only comes up in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ because that is when Leopold and
Stephen are face-to-face for the first time, and from this point on it becomes a dominant motif in
the book.
Rudy makes his only spectral appearance in ‘Circe’, and this scene only first appears on the
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript at the start of 1921 (U 565.08–20; U-G 15.4955–67). Though
squeezed in at the bottom of its last page, the fluidity with which Joyce wrote it suggests that he
had written the finale before, though no earlier version of it is known to survive. Many of the
elements associated with Rudy’s characterization in Ulysses are already present on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript. For example, he is introduced in the following way: ‘a figure appears
slowly, a boy of eleven, in an Eton suit, holding a book’.37 Though unnamed, his age clearly
establishes him as Rudy, but the Eton suit and his book are new accoutrements for the
character. Joyce had already portrayed Bloom’s amazed reaction to the vision on the Rosenbach
‘Circe’ manuscript, but later he added the father’s call to his son on the amanuensis copy of the
Rosenbach manuscript for the episode’s first typescript.38
Joyce had also already established Rudy’s unresponsive, though kind, demeanour, and in this
first instantiation the child is figured as Little Lord Fauntleroy, but with an incongruous ‘squirrel
[that] peeps out of his waistcoat pocket’. Joyce made two changes to the scene on the Rosenbach
manuscript. He added ‘ruby’ buttons to Rudy’s suit and, more significantly, he changed the
‘squirrel’ in the young boy’s waistcoat pocket to a ‘white lambskin’. This latter addition is clearly
a figuration of the ‘white corselet of lamb’s wool’ in which Molly buried her son, and this
recurring motif gives Rudy’s death a sacrificial resonance. Much like the additions Joyce would
continue to make to this scene, the first one adds a new range of symbolic possibilities to his
description, while the other reinforces attributes that readers would already associate with Rudy
from earlier representations of the character in the book.
This scene remained completely unchanged for a year, as Joyce was writing the ‘Nostos’
episodes and revising the typescripts of the earlier ones for Ulysses. Then (p.226) he focused
his attention on this climactic vision of Rudy again in mid-January 1922, just a few weeks before
the book was published. Joyce made two concentrated rounds of additions on the episode’s ninth
and tenth proof levels, thereby expanding and in some cases transforming the interpretative
potential of the scene. This is how it appears in Ulysses, with the two levels of additions
signalled accordingly:
(Silent, thoughtful, alert he stands on guard, ^+his fingers at his lips in the attitude of
secret master+^. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a ^fairy^ boy of eleven ^,
a changeling, kidnapped,^ ^+< in an Eton suit> dressed in an Eton suit with glass
shoes and a little bronze helmet,+^ holding a book in his hand. He reads ^from right to
left^ inaudibly, smiling, ^+kissing the page+^.)
BLOOM
(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
RUDY
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(Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, ^+kissing,+^ smiling. ^+He has
a delicate mauve face.+^ ^+On his suit+^ he has diamond and ruby buttons. În his free
^left^ hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot.^ A white lambkin peeps out
of his waistcoat pocket.)
(U 565.08–20; U-G 15.4955–67)39
With the first round of additions on the ninth proof level, Joyce continued the process of
elaborating the description of Rudy, piling on attributes that make him more clearly
recognizable as the character in Ulysses, but he also includes details that dilute the previously
clearer identification. For example, he made Rudy both a ‘fairy’ and ‘a changeling, kidnapped’,
thereby associating him with a particularly Irish tradition, alongside his representation as Little
Lord Fauntleroy. Joyce then added the specific detail that the boy is reading ‘from right to left’,
presumably to highlight his connection with his Jewish ancestors. He also added a more generic
element to Rudy’s wardrobe: ‘a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot’, which might suggest
Little Bo Peep.
The additions on the tenth proof level were similarly balanced between strengthening
correspondences with already established elements of Rudy’s description and others that make
him a more abstract symbolic figure. To begin with, Joyce clearly identifies Bloom as a Mason
with a pair of coordinated additions that provide a transition from Bloom’s concern for the fallen
Stephen to his vision of his son. On the one hand, he added: ‘^(He murmurs)^… swear that I
will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or arts… (He murmurs.)… in
the rough sands of the sea… a cabletow’s length from the shore… where the tide ebbs… and
flows…’ (U 565.04–7; see U-G 15.4951–4). According to Sam Slote, ‘Bloom is performing the role
of Secret Master and is initiating Stephen as a Mason’,40 which Joyce establishes with another
addition: Bloom is on ‘guard, ^his (p.227) fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master^’.
These additions provide clear and definite support to the supposedly general Dublin opinion that
Bloom is a Mason, though how reliable any information that is provided in ‘Circe’ is supposed to
be is open to question.
The additions to Rudy’s description are more ambivalent. Joyce adds ‘glass shoes and a little
bronze helmet’ to his already elaborate attire, mixing symbols from Cinderella and Greek myth,
as well as the further detail that Rudy is ‘kissing the page’ of the book he is reading,
strengthening the already present Hebraic overtones of the scene. Finally, Joyce specifically
links this scene to Bloom’s vision of the funeral of the dead child in ‘Hades’ by giving Rudy ‘a
delicate mauve face’. This is another example of how Joyce further consolidated the verbal and
thematic registers in the book as a whole.
The previously unresolved issue of Rudy’s birth and death dates are finally dealt with in ‘Ithaca’.
The information comes as part of a long list of (purportedly accurate) significant dates in the
Blooms’ marital lives. The entire question and answer first appear on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript, but Joyce strove to further specify the last time Leopold and Molly had sex, as well
as the lifespan of their second child, on that manuscript. There we read that
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complete carnal intercourse, with ejaculation of semen within the female natural organ,
having last taken place 5 weeks previous, ^viz. 27 November 1894,^ to the birth ôn
29 December 1894^ of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1895, aged
11 days, there remained a period of 9 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal
intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female
organ.
(see U 687.28–34; U-G 17.2278–84)41
Joyce never got these dates right even though he made several attempts on different
manuscripts to make the fictional facts in the novel cohere. In keeping with the totalizing drive
of the episode’s style, Joyce only established some of these dates for the first time in Ulysses at
this juncture, but initially he only set up some of the basic elements. Specifically, he wrote that
the last time the couple had ‘complete carnal intercourse’ was ‘5 weeks previous to the birth of
second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1895, aged 11 days’ and, therefore, that there
had been ‘a period of 9 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been
incomplete’. Then, working backwards from Rudy’s deathday, he made the other dates explicit
as he revised the Rosenbach manuscript.
In the pair of coordinated additions I have emphasized, Joyce included for the first time the
precise date of Rudy’s birth, and thereby he also prescribed the occasion of Leopold and Molly’s
last ‘complete’ intimacy. He had already established that Rudy only lived for eleven days on the
earlier draft of ‘Oxen of the Sun’,42 and here Joyce’s additions explicitly determine that these
events took place (p.228) in 1894–5, even though these dates contradict what he had already
written in other episodes. Joyce let the inconsistency stand as he amplified the rest of ‘Ithaca’ on
several of its typescripts, but then he spotted the issue as he revised the episode’s first proof
level.43 So he changed both instances of 1894 to 1893, and correspondingly extended the
Blooms’ long abstinence from nine to ten years, but he inadvertently left the year of Rudy’s
death as 1895. Therefore, on all Shakespeare and Company printings of Ulysses, the child would
have been alive for a full year and eleven days. It was only ten years after the first Shakespeare
and Company edition that the textual fault was finally corrected and Rudy’s history was sorted
out in the 1932 Odyssey Press edition. Obviously, such a significant change in the basic facts of
the work has a profound impact on our understanding of the Blooms and their lives.
As I discuss in the section on ‘Milly Bloom: 15 June 1889–16 June 1904’ in Chapter 6, Joyce
eliminated some of the reference to Rudy on the ‘Penelope’ draft and pointedly reassigned the
stories to Molly’s memories of Milly’s childhood. In fact, Molly never thinks of her son by name,
whereas Bloom recalls Rudy by name nine times in Ulysses. Nonetheless, there is a clear pattern
to the way Joyce frames Molly’s few memories about Rudy. They always come up when she
thinks of Stephen Dedalus, but she thinks about Stephen much more than she does about her
dead son. It could be that Joyce is indicating that repressing thoughts of Rudy—and transferring
her attention to Stephen—is Molly’s way of coping with her loss. For instance, Stephen is clearly
the primary focus of the story when Molly first thinks of her son’s death and the way she
associates them was already established on the episode’s draft.44 Though he added to it, Joyce
did not alter the main features of the story before it appeared in Ulysses like this:
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I wonder what sort is his [Simon Dedalus’s] son he [Bloom] says hes an author and going
to be a university professor of Italian and Im to take lessons what is he driving at now […]
I saw him driving down to the Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in
mourning thats 11 years ago now yes hed be 11 though what was the good in going into
mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other […] I suppose hes [Stephen is] a
man now by this time
(U 724.18–26; U-G 18.1300–10).
Joyce took some of the ideas about Stephen from different notebooks, for example, ‘S D an
author’ and ‘Professor SD’,45 but there does not appear to be a textual source for the
correspondence he establishes between Molly being in mourning for Rudy and seeing Stephen
pass by with his parents. Presumably, Joyce did not need one since this parallel strengthens the
already-established overarching thematic link between Leopold and Molly’s lost son and the
other ‘lost son’ of Ulysses. Joyce smoothed over the text on some lost intermediary document,
but then added two other ideas on the Rosenbach manuscript, which he also took from his notes.
Like Mrs Thornton, the midwife, Molly recalls ‘the first cry was enough for me I heard (p.229)
the deathwatch too ticking in the wall’ (U-G 18.1308–9),46 which serves as a clear echo of
Bloom’s pained thoughts about Rudy in ‘Calypso’.
Joyce also further links Rudy and Stephen with another added correspondence on the ‘Penelope’
Rosenbach manuscript. Molly thinks that ‘he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow
in his lord Fauntleroy suit ând curly hair like a prince on the stage^ when I saw him at Mat
Dillon’s he liked me too I remember they all do’ (U 724.27–9; U-G 18.1311–13).47 The idea
originated with the following questioning note: ‘Innocent boy (SD) now?’,48 but Stephen’s outfit
also echoes Leopold’s vision of Rudy at the end of ‘Circe’. Again this was part of Joyce’s effort to
interweave the relatively few but distinct representations of Rudy that appear in Ulysses. The
connection Joyce had in mind between Stephen and Rudy is even clearer in the note that
presumably inspired this addition to the addition: Molly ‘likes little boy on stage (Rudy)’.49
Molly next thinks of Rudy towards the end of ‘Penelope’, and again, as it appears in Ulysses, her
memory is pointedly framed by her thoughts about Stephen Dedalus. In fact, Joyce’s strategy of
interweaving these two lost sons is even more explicit in this case. This is how Joyce elaborated
the scene on the episode’s draft:
I suppose he’s running wild now out at night away from his books and studies and not
living at home on account of the usual ^<rowy> rowy house^ or whatever you see
those that have a fine son like that they’re not satisfied ând I with none was he not able
to make a son that disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtn’t to have buried him in
that little woolly ^crying as I was^ but given it to some poor child O I’m not going to think
about that any more^ I wonder why he wouldn’t stay the night
(see U 728.06–16; U-G 18.1442–52)50
Molly is concerned with what she imagines is Stephen’s life after the death of his mother. She
complains ‘that those that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied’, and she cannot
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understand ‘why he wouldnt stay the night’.51 Then, as an addition on the facing verso page of
the ‘Penelope’ draft, he wrote Molly’s most tender recollection of Rudy’s death and its impact on
her: ‘that disheartened me altogether’. Like her husband, she regrets not having a son, and we
finally read from her about that ‘little wooly’ she buried him in.52 This is a direct reference to the
‘white corselet of lamb’s wool’ that was described in the earlier draft of ‘Oxen of the Sun’.53
Staving off ‘the glooms’, she tries not to think about her grief any more, and Joyce has her
thoughts return to what he had already written about Stephen Dedalus. Joyce added another
element to Molly’s melancholy thoughts that first appears on the Buffalo ‘Penelope’ faircopy
manuscript: ‘but I knew well Id never have another’ (U 728.13–14; U-G 18.1449–50).54 This idea
was a turning point in both the Blooms’ lives.
(p.230) A new life in the City Arms Hotel: 1893–4
6. ‘Hades’:
January–February 1919 Composite Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, ff. 18–19
July 1919 Serial Publication Little Review, VI.3, pp. 30–1
25 August–5 September First Proof Level Harvard Pl 25.i
1921
11. ‘Sirens’:
Late 1917–Early 1919 Fragments NLI MS 7B, pp. [10v], [11v], and [13v]
12. ‘Cyclops’:
Mid-June 1919 Earlier Fragments Buffalo MS 8, pp. [21r]–[22r] & NLI MS 10, p.
[3v]
Summer 1919 Later Fragments Buffalo MS 6, ff. [2v]–[4r]
September–October Faircopy for Rosenbach MS, f. 28
1919 Typescript
30 September–Early First Proof Level Harvard Pl 34.i
October 1921
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
February–March 1920 Earlier Draft NLI MS 11A, p. [1v]
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, p. [10v]
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13. ‘Nausicaa’:
August–Late October 1921 Faircopy for Rosenbach Blue MS I, p. [7v]
Typescript
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [1r], [5r], and [13r]
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy for Rosenbach MS, pp. [0v]–1, [6v], 8, and
Typescript [15v]
17–Late October 1921 First Proof Level Harvard Pl A.i.a
2–Early November 1921 Second Proof Level Harvard Pl C.ii
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iii.b, Harvard Pl B.iii.a,
Harvard Pl C.iii.a, & Harvard Pl D.iii.a
(p.231)
While the early years of the Blooms’ marriage were generally happy, the later ones were marked
by both personal and professional highs and lows that altered their lives. They experienced the
great joy of expecting their second child and then the terrible grief of losing Rudy. This loss
wrought a tremendous change in them individually, as parents, and as a couple. Their complete
sexual intimacy came to an end and Molly had to give up her professional singing career during
her pregnancy: ‘Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert’ (U 86.18; U-G 6.82).
Furthermore, their several moves and Leopold’s sporadic employment compounded their
personal and marital unhappiness. Even though these general contours are relatively clear,
precise dates in the Blooms’ lives during these years are hard to determine. For example,
Bloom’s recollection in ‘Hades’ indicates that they moved to Raymond Terrace by March 1893.
But, as I discussed in ‘Memories of Lombard Street West’ in Chapter 6, Joyce only added this
reference to the move at a quite late stage in the book’s genesis on the episode’s third proof
level in mid-September 1921 (U-G 6.74–85; see U 86.09–20).55 Regardless, their stay in Raymond
Terrace was brief. Besides the memory of their lovemaking at that address, neither Leopold nor
Molly has any other significant recollection of their time there. Conversely, towards the end of
1893, with Rudy on the way, they moved to the City Arms Hotel, and this new residence
resonates more fully in the memories of their life together. Besides these few temporal and
geographical markers, it is remarkable that there is so little concrete information about this
difficult period (and in general about the rest of their lives before 16 June 1904). Therefore, we
must speculate about this long stretch of time that is only tangentially recalled in Ulysses.
Presumably the Blooms’ move to the north side of the Liffey towards the end of 1893 was
prompted by the fact that Bloom lost his job at Hely’s and was taken on as an actuary at
Laurence Cuffe & Sons at 5 Smithfield (U 633.13; U-G 17.485).56 These premises were adjacent
to the city cattle market and so they decided to make their new home in the nearby City Arms
Hotel in Prussia Street (U 633.10; U-G 17.482).57
These were troubling years for the Blooms, but 1894 must have been the most difficult one so
far: their only son passed away at the start of January and by the end of the year Leopold lost his
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job at Cuffe’s. The stories about the Blooms around this time are intrinsically linked with the
lack of privacy that they had to endure as residents in the City Arms Hotel. Having left the
security of their first home as well as their closest friends in the Southside Jewish
neighbourhood, their personal lives at this pivotal juncture became the object of public scrutiny
and so of Dublin gossip. Whereas both Molly and Leopold have many fond memories of their
lives around Lombard Street, none of the stories about their time at the City Arms Hotel is
particularly pleasant. With an addition of the third proof level of ‘Penelope’, Joyce has Molly sum
up her opinion of their new home like this: ‘the City Arms hotel worse and worse says Warden
Daly that charming place on the landing always somebody inside praying then leaving all their
stinks after them always know who was in there last’ (U 722.13–16; U-G 18.1220–2).58
(p.232) Furthermore, while readers rely on the Blooms’ personal memories of their earlier,
happier days as new parents, other Dubliners reveal most of the stories about the year or so
Leopold worked at Cuffe’s and they lived at the City Arms Hotel. The information about the
Blooms, individually and as a couple, during this period is always presented as seemingly well-
known and sometimes scandalous rumours. In fact, Dublin male gossip structures almost all of
these stories, and their objective is to impugn the reputation of one or both of the Blooms. The
ones about Leopold are usually concerned with his inability to keep a steady job and his
supposedly odd behaviour, but all of the stories about Molly are related to her sexuality. These
are some of the oldest tales Joyce wrote for the book, but he radically transformed some of them
by the time they appeared in Ulysses. That he wrote all of these early fragments for the ‘Sirens’
and ‘Cyclops’ episodes in part accounts for the fact that they are almost all framed as second- or
third-hand pub stories. But, taken together, they suggest that the presentation of the Blooms by
means of a discourse of innuendos is a primary narrative foundation of the construction of the
characters and of the storytelling in the book.
It seems that Joyce wrote the earliest versions of these stories in the summer of 1919 as he was
reconceiving the structure of ‘Sirens’ and beginning to conceive of ‘Cyclops’ as another, distinct
pub episode. These texts are usually in the form of disconnected and fragmentary snippets of
dialogue, most often between unnamed speakers and listeners. The undeveloped state of the
new episode is clear from the fact that Joyce compiled its earliest fragments in some of the
unused pages following the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft, and then sketched more of them as part of the
fragmentary proto-drafts for ‘Cyclops’. In general, once again when first formulating these
stories, Joyce’s primary interest is to establish the mode of storytelling—that is, how the
information in them circulates in Dublin and so in the book—rather than to determine precisely
who in particular is taking part in the gossiping. It is important to remember that Joyce only
developed the narrative style of ‘Cyclops’ as we know it in Ulysses after he had written most of
these fragments, and that it was only later (on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript as far as we
know) that the episode achieved the form that most readers would recognize.
Although Joyce sketched the earliest known versions of these related but sometimes conflicting
fragmentary stories on the final pages of the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft, they are based at least in part
on notes that he had tagged for use in ‘Cyclops’. In particular, Joyce relied on two notes—‘City
Arms, chewing the fat’ and ‘Molly hair to her middle’—to write the following seminal fragment
about the Blooms’ new life in 1893–4.59 Together these notes set out basic motifs that are
central to the construction of these stories; that is, that they are based on gossip in general and
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are specifically concerned with Molly’s body. It is not clear if the notes were related when Joyce
collected them, but he used them separately. The first one appears in a completely
decontextualized speech by an unnamed character to an unidentified audience. The most basic
point of this fragment on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft is (p.233) simply that the men at the bar
share stories about Leopold and Molly quarrelling during this trying time in their marriage:
— The two of them were hard at it in the City Arms în Prussia Street^,
chewing the fat. But sure she’d screech the head off him.60
Later, Joyce added to this very basic story by squeezing in the left margin of the same page of
the manuscript another story about Leopold’s new job with Cuffe at the cattle market. The first
part of the additional story stresses Bloom’s diligence at work, to which Joyce added the twist
that it was to no purpose, since he ultimately lost his job. Joyce specifically frames the reason
why Bloom was fired as a secret that merits being gossiped about and so it is the foundation of
‘a tale’ about him amongst the men. Still later, though on the same manuscript page, Joyce
added a segue that introduces Molly into the scenario and brings together these pieces of the
story about them as a couple in the City Arms Hotel:
^She had a fine head of ^<[flaxen]> [black]^ hair. Faith she had down to her
middle. Many a morning I saw her combing it.^ Begob he was up at cockshout every
market morning. ^How did he lose that job? Thereby lays a tale.^61
This fragment is presumably male gossip by an unnamed speaker who describes Molly in purely
physical terms and confesses to being a voyeur. Nonetheless, Joyce only wrote the ‘tale’ the
unnamed speaker promises about how Leopold lost his job at Cuffe’s as another, unrelated block
of text on another page of this manuscript; it too is presented as male, presumably pub gossip.
In fact, all these primal stories are structured as often-repeated rumours. Like the stories about
the Hungarian lottery tickets and Professor Goodwin’s concert,62 Cowley narrates this one as
well. But, unlike some of the other fragments, this one presents the Dubliner’s views about
Bloom from a more positive perspective:
— It was the devil’s own fun, Father Cowley said. I heard it from little Peake who was
bookkeeper there. Bloom put up a good fight. ^<He was> He’s^ a hardworking
chap, you see, attends to his business. Cuffe used to glare at him every time he met him
ând^ Bloom at it quite coolly. Music without words. In the end Bloom made some
mistake or other and <be damned> Cuffe wrote him a hell of a letter <and> the
same night. But, faith, Bloom stood up to him. What did he do but he tore up the letter into
little bits and sent it back ^<by> in a^ registered envelope. ^Cuffe was fit to be
tied.^ And from that day to this he was never seen in the office.63
As is often the case with these early stories, Joyce structures it as something a character has
heard from a third party and relays it to someone else, and this is how it enters the public
discourse about the Blooms in Ulysses. A certain ‘little Peake’ is mentioned as Richie Goulding’s
friend in ‘Sirens’ (U 261.22–3; U-G 11.623–4). He may also be the same man Bloom thinks of in
‘Hades’, ‘the chap was in Crosbie (p.234) and Alleyne’ (U 88.17–18; U-G 6.158–9), who also
features in the Dubliners story ‘Counterparts’. The foundation of this story is the underlying
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conflict between Cuffe and Bloom and the latter’s prudent reaction to the situation, but this
version of the story about how Bloom lost his job is quite different from the one that Joyce
included in Ulysses. The tension between the two men is also figuratively described as ‘Music
without words’, which indicates some of the underlying conceptual and narrative links between
‘Sirens’ and ‘Cyclops’ at this juncture in the evolution of Ulysses. Bloom is presented as the hero
of this story: he is ‘hardworking’, ‘attends to his business’, and meets Cuffe’s glare ‘quite coolly’.
While ultimately ‘Bloom made some mistake or other’, he ‘stood up to’ Cuffe as well. The way
Bloom confronts the situation reinforces the narrative and thematic parallels between this story
about Bloom and the one about Farrington’s futile stratagem towards Mr Alleyne in
‘Counterparts’. This may account for the fact that Joyce made Little Peake the original source of
the story about Bloom and Cuffe. Furthermore, this story points towards the dramatic elements
that Joyce would ultimately deploy as part of Bloom’s confrontation with the Citizen in ‘Cyclops’.
In a quite unusual turn, Joyce returned to the idea—but not the older storyline—of how Bloom
lost his job at Cuffe’s when he included it in ‘Cyclops’. For whatever reason, by the time the
story appears in Ulysses Joyce had abandoned not only the intertextual links with the Dubliners
story, but also the more general narrative and thematic trajectory of Bloom’s good traits, as well
as his minor victory over his employer. Here is the story of how Bloom was fired as it appears in
Ulysses:
Because he [Bloom] was up one time in a knacker’s yard. Walking about with his book and
pencil here’s my head and my heels are coming till Joe Cuffe gave him the order of the
boot for giving lip to a grazier.
(U 302.03–5; U-G 12.835–8)
According to this version, Bloom’s talkative nature, rather than a conflict with Cuffe, is the
cause of his being fired. We read this same account of how Bloom lost his job again in ‘Oxen of
the Sun’ when the narrator reports how ‘in Mr Cuffe’s hearing brought upon him from an
indignant rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were
bucolic’ (U 390.02–4; U-G 14.926–8). The story started off as an addition on the episode’s earlier
draft,64 but Joyce only made Bloom’s offence clear on the later draft,65 thereby making the
stories in Ulysses cohere. While this is all we know about ‘the tale’ of how Bloom lost his job at
Cuffe’s in Ulysses, an understanding of the abandoned version provides a greater awareness of
the evolving construction of the characters as well as of Joyce’s changing conception of the
work.
In the published account of the events the blame clearly only falls on Leopold; then Molly fills in
the story’s finale when she recalls how her husband sent her to see Cuffe to try to win back his
job. The following note probably prompted the story, though in its original state it had nothing
specifically to do with Bloom losing his job: ‘LB sent her to plead’.66 Here is Molly’s version of
the story: (p.235)
when he could have been in Mr Cuffes still only for what he did then sending me to try and
patch it up I could have got him promoted there to be the manager he [Cuffe] gave me a
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great mirada once or twice first he was as stiff as the mischief really and truly Mrs Bloom
only I felt rotten simply with the old rubbishy dress […] but I could see him looking very
hard at my chest when he stood up to open the door for me it was nice of him to show me
out in any case Im extremely sorry Mrs Bloom believe me without making it too marked
the first time after him being insulted and me being supposed to be his wife I just half
smiled I know my chest was out that way at the door when he said Im extremely sorry and
Im sure you were
(U 703.30–704.18; U-G 18.510–34)
Joyce had already worked out most of the story as part of the main text on the ‘Penelope’ draft,
but the issue at that stage was what Bloom ‘said’ to Cuffe rather than what he ‘did’.67 Then, also
on the episode’s draft, Joyce added a twist to the story interlineally, and it too was based on
another note: ‘MB got LB promoted’.68 The note reveals two things: like so many of Joyce’s
notes, it was not specifically about Cuffe until Joyce wrote the text, and he clearly envisaged a
more positive outcome from Molly’s intervention when he took the note than when he actually
incorporated it in the stories of Ulysses. These are paradigmatic instances of the way Joyce
transformed earlier ideas during the act of composition. Although he added Cuffe’s initially cool
reception on a missing intermediary document before the Rosenbach manuscript,69 on the
episode’s draft he had already established the pronounced effect that her revealing dress had on
the interview. Like the men who gossip about her throughout Ulysses, Molly too is fully aware of
her physical charms.
Once ‘Sirens’ had achieved the form readers know from its appearance in the Little Review,
Joyce turned his full attention to the next episode. At this stage in mid-1919, ‘Cyclops’ was just a
collection of fragmentary and disconnected texts. In fact, he had yet to conceive of the narrative
voice and consolidate the other stylistic devices that are the hallmarks of the episode in Ulysses.
Towards this end, Joyce brought together three separate fragments about the Blooms and their
lives at the City Arms Hotel as parts of an extended scenario. The first part (numbered ‘6’)
begins with a bigoted conversation about whether a Jew can know his nation, and then continues
with specific aspersions on Bloom’s marriage, and further gossip, including the notion that the
other men know that he brings his wife breakfast in bed, while he eats his alone in the kitchen.70
Later, Joyce added other stories about Bloom, Mrs Riordan, and her grandnephew on the facing
verso,71 which he numbered ‘6b’. Lastly, on another, related manuscript Joyce added the parodic
finale of the scene (numbered ‘6c’) about ‘the ravenhaired daughter of Tweedy’ (see U 306.20–3;
U-G 12.1003–7).72
Though still in a rudimentary state on the episode’s fragmentary earlier proto-draft, Joyce
assembled almost all the elements of the scene on the episode’s fragmentary (p.236) later
proto-draft,73 but these versions are radically different from what appears in Ulysses. Most
obviously many of the characters present at the pub on the earlier and later proto-drafts simply
disappear and, just as importantly, some of the dialogue has yet to be assigned to any character
at all. As Michael Groden puts it, ‘Joyce’s method of characterization [in “Cyclops”] results in the
transfer of much dialogue intact from draft to draft while the speakers change’.74 Furthermore,
in an unusual creative move, Joyce abandoned much of the narrative he had already written
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when he incorporated the text into Ulysses. Since the scenes on both proto-drafts are
substantially similar and much easier to read on the later one, I will focus my discussion on it. It
begins in the midst of a racially charged debate that is centred on an ad hominem attack on
Bloom. Much altered and broken up in Ulysses, the opening will initiate the episode’s climactic
confrontation between Bloom and the Citizen. The prevalent aggression in the scene
demonstrates the general anti-Semitism of the assembled Dubliners, but also includes at least a
partial recognition of Bloom’s good traits. Then, surprisingly, it concludes with an unnamed
character’s unpleasant verdict on Stephen Dedalus as well. In fact, none of the characters comes
through the scene unscathed, and Stephen obviously plays no part in the scene in the published
book:
Hynes wanted to get him away before Bloom came back for the next round.
— ^<Come on.> change the venue^, citizen, says he. Come where the booze is
cheaper.
But Cusack was blue mouldy for a fight. The porter was up on him.
— His country, says he, a bloody jew. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. His country. No
man’s land.
— Hath not a jew eyes, says O’Madden Burke.
He [Bloom] is always coming out with a quotation from Shakespeare or the melodies. He
was a schoolteacher one time. Don’t know how he knocks it out now. Always the silk
umbrella on show. Gentleman, patriot, scholar and judge of malt.
— Well, says JJ, if you grant the Jew human impulses why can’t he love his country too. I
mean, logically, why not?
— Why not? says young Dedalus, when he is quite sure which country it is.
Old Mac Hugh began laughing and says he, settling his specs
— That’s Gallic, says he. Paris did that to you, says he.
Bit of a sharper that fellow, son of Si Dedalus. He was in Paris in the quartier latin and he
came back an atheist. He’ll never be as good a man as his father anyhow.75
While Hynes is the one who tries to diffuse the situation on the later proto-draft, Joyce had
simply left the character unnamed on the earlier version, using a long dash as a placeholder for
the name until he determines who the character will be.76 More generally, the note that
prompted this scene indicates that Joyce had planned this scene before he wrote the earlier
proto-draft, and that he specifically attributed its racially charged conclusion to Stephen
Dedalus: ‘Jew: (p.237) love his country when sure which it is. (SD. P. [Paris] M’H
[MacHugh)]’.77 The other men laugh, congratulate Stephen on his witticism, and attribute it to
his sojourn in Paris. Much has been made of the fact that it is Stephen who delivers this bigoted
slur on the proto-drafts.78 There are many possible reasons why Joyce may have constructed the
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scene in this way, but—odd as it may seem—I maintain that, at this stage, he was simply more
concerned with the fact that the pointed gibe against Bloom is part of the story than he is with
the implications of how this will reflect on the representation of his characters, even on Stephen
Dedalus. Regardless, the characters in the published episode are different from the ones who
are actually named in the earlier versions of the scene. In a complete reversal of the dialogue on
both the episode’s earlier and later proto-drafts, Stephen Dedalus is not even present at Barney
Keirnan’s in ‘Cyclops’, and J. J. O’Molloy, who previously was the voice of moderation, delivers
what was Stephen’s punchline verbatim to John Wyse Nolan. Expanded and separated by other
dialogue and a parody, this is how this pivotal scene appears in Ulysses:
— But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
— Yes, says Bloom.
— What is it? says John Wyse.
— A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
— By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same
place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
— Or also living in different places.
— That covers my case, says Joe.
— What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.
— Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
[…]
— And after all, says John Wyse, why can’t a jew love his country like the next fellow?
— Why not? says J. J., when he’s quite sure which country it is.
(U 317.21–33 and 323.02–4; U-G 12.1419–31 and 1628–30)
Returning to the scene on the later proto-draft, it transitions from this generally anti-Semitic
topic to more specific rumours that ridicule Bloom’s marital difficulties and sexuality. The fact
that some of the assembled men are mistaken about Bloom’s work as a schoolteacher and do not
know how he ‘knocks it out’ shows the fluidity of Joyce’s sense of characterization even
concerning so central a character as Leopold Bloom and lends support to my contention about
Stephen Dedalus’s malleable role in these stories. It also leads Ned Lambert to tell the men a
story about the Blooms when they lived at the City Arms. Although based in part on some of the
different fragments on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft, there are many changes. All the versions of the
story emphasize that the Blooms were known to argue and that Molly is best remembered for
her good looks and long black hair, but the story has turned against Bloom completely. In the
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later proto-draft version he is reputed to be a hard worker and is remembered for having
justifiably stood up to Cuffe (p.238) when he lost his job, but the focus of this story is an attack
on Leopold’s masculinity and on him as a husband:
— Talking about Gaelic says Ned you should have seen our friend B. [Bloom] chopping up
raw onions for the missus for her complexion
— When was that? says Hynes
— When he had a job up in the knacker’s yard then, says Ned. Cuffe’s the salesmaster’s.
He was staying up in the City Arms Hotel there near in Prussia street.
<— Wasn’t they going to be divorced>
Stink Burke was there at the time. He told me about our friend chopping the onions in the
kitchen. You should hear him taking off the two of them chewing the fat. Bloom with his
but don’t you see and but on the other hand and the wife screeching his head off.
— She’s a bloody awful bitch by all accounts, says Ned.
— I don’t know about that says J.J. she was the belle of Dublin in her day. Black hair down
to her middle. I suspect the fault is on the other side
— How’s that? says Hynes.
— I know what you mean, says Ned. Gaffney told me a wrinkle about that. Said she used to
be in tears there with Mr O’Dowd that keeps the hotel. I don’t think our friend does the
trick of the loop at all.
— I know some talk one time that they were going to be divorced, says Hynes.
— Restitution of conjugal rights, says Mac Hugh:
What, Jack?
— Still, they say he’s always dancing attendance on her. Brings up her breakfast in the
bed every morning and has his own bit down in the kitchen.
— Separatio a mensa et a thoro, says J.J.
<— Ay, says Ned, that’s right.> Separation from bed and breakfast, says young
Dedalus.
— Breakfast in bed! says Ned, its something else she wants in the bed. What you call a
rough and tumble.
— Call it specific performance, says J.J.79
It is significant that Joyce eliminated almost all of the storyline about the Blooms’ marital
troubles from Ulysses, even though he had written about them for this scene at least twice. This
is something Joyce usually does not do, which demonstrates the growing prominence of stylistic
aspects over plot in the book at this stage of the genesis of the book. In the published version,
Bloom’s considerate behaviour towards his wife and the discussion of a possible divorce are
dissimulated, though some of the slanderous remarks about his masculinity persist.
Furthermore, while the otherwise unknown Gaffney disappears, this is the first mention of ‘Stink
Burke’ as the source of a story about the Blooms at the City Arms. By the time Joyce wrote the
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, he has become the better-known ‘Pisser Burke’,80 and, as
Joyce wrote the subsequent manuscripts, he attributes to him almost all the scandalous stories
about the Blooms while they are at the City Arms. Joyce has Molly think of him in ‘Penelope’ as
well: ‘that other beauty Burke out of the City Arms hotel was there spying around as usual ôn
the (p.239) slip^ ^+always where he wasnt wanted if there was a row on+^ youd vomit a
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better face’ (U 715.26–8; U-G 18.964–7). Joyce constructed her recollection as an addition on the
Rosenbach manuscript,81 and added to it on the second proof level,82 based on this note: ‘Pisser
present row at City Arms’.83 Then, on the third proof level, he has her conclude: ‘there was no
love lost between us thats 1 consolation’ (U 715.28–9; U-G 18.967).84
There are other, different stories about the Blooms at the City Arms Hotel as well. For example,
though he may have had an ulterior motive for doing so, Leopold befriended one of their
neighbours, Mrs ‘Dante’ Riordan. Readers of Ulysses are first introduced to her in
‘Lestrygonians’, but she has a significant prehistory as Stephen’s governess in Chapter I of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the later novel, Stephen never thinks of her. In fact, all
the stories about her in Ulysses centre on her life after she left the Dedalus home and became
the Blooms’ fellow resident in the City Arms. This is Bloom’s first memory of her as it initially
appeared in print: ‘Old Mrs. Riordan with the rumbling stomach’s Skye terrier in the City Arms
hotel. Molly fondling him in her lap. O, the big doggybowwowsywowsy!’ (see U 166.13–15; U-G
8.847–9).85 But Joyce wrote a quite different story about Bloom and Mrs Riordan for ‘Cyclops’. In
keeping with the episode’s aggressive tone, it is not surprising that the men in Barney Kiernan’s
pub recall another embarrassing incident about the Blooms. Like most of the early stories Joyce
wrote about the couple for ‘Sirens’ and then for ‘Cyclops’, it too is framed as malicious male
gossip. On the earlier ‘Cyclops’ proto-draft, none of the speakers is named, and even the name
of the person who first put the gossip in circulation is simply left blank.86 As is often the case,
the emphasis is on the storytelling process when Joyce first wrote the story, rather than on the
storytellers. But on the episode’s later proto-draft,87 he has Ned Lambert tell the story to the
men at the bar: Joe Hynes, J. J. O’Molloy, and Lenehan. Then, once Joyce came up with the
stylistic device of the episode’s nameless narrator, he recounts the story in Ulysses.
The most basic point is that Bloom hoped Mrs Riordan would leave him something in her will,
but he turned all the women against him with a good-intentioned, but misguided adventure with
her grandnephew. Though the reason why Bloom flattered the old woman always remains
consistent, it is intriguing to discover that in this version the men accuse Bloom of having
adopted a similar ploy with Molly’s mother in order to marry her daughter. As I discuss in
‘Molly’s Mysterious Mother’ in Chapter 4, Joyce only included Lunita Laredo in the stories of
Ulysses at the last possible moment before Ulysses was published. But in 1919 Joyce was
exploring quite different ideas about Molly’s mother than the ones he (p.240) actually used, as
is clear from the note that inspired this additional aspect of the story in ‘Cyclops’: ‘LB made up
to mother-in-law’.88 This is another example of a story Joyce conceived and wrote, but then
abandoned. Furthermore, whereas the men disparage and ridicule him for his actions, Bloom
maintains that he was only trying to educate the young man about the consequences of too
much alcohol. This is how these interrelated stories appear on the earlier ‘Cyclops’ proto-draft:
— I’ll tell you a bloody good one —— told me. There was an old one up in the hotel, a Mrs
Riordan with some money ôf her own^ and Bloom of course got inside her^, to be the
whitehaired boy^. ^Doing the molly coddle.^
^Same as he made up to his mother-in-law, says ——^
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^— Is that how he got to marry her?
— Commend me to a jewman, says
— I see, says ——. That explains the milk in the cocoanut & the absence of hair on the
animal’s chest^
Playing bézique with her every night ând wouldn’t eat meat on Friday because she was a
bitch for religion^. Suppose he thought he’d ^<be remembered> get some of the
wampum^ in ^<the> her^ will. Anyway she had a young chap there, grandnephew
of hers and Bloom put in for giving him German lessons ——
— Is he a German? says ——
— I don’t know what he isn’t, says ——. One day, by God, he took the young chap out for a
walking lesson but, by God, when they came back to tea he was boosed ^drunk as a boiled
owl^
— Who? Bloom?
— No, the young fellow, ^^ <blind> <^limp^>^ to Jaysus^ laughing in their

faces like a fool. You should have heard the old one and Bloom’s missus and the landlady.
^Roasted him, by God^ ^herrings^. Gave him all sorts. ^<And> Poor^ Bloom said
he did it to teach him the evils of drink.
(see U 293.15–29; U-G 12.504–18)89
Most of these narrative elements are recognizable as they appear in Ulysses,90 and,
significantly, the formerly unnamed source of the story has once again become Pisser Burke.
Although this was not previously so in the drafts, he is the main informant about the lives of the
Blooms when they are at the City Arms Hotel in Ulysses. For example, the narrator recounts how
Pisser Burke was telling me in the hotel the wife used to be in rivers of tears some times
with Mrs O’Dowd crying her eyes out with her eight inches of fat all over her. Couldn’t
loosen her farting strings but old cod’s eye was waltzing around her showing her how to
do it. What’s your programme today? Ay.
(U 302.06–10; see U-G 12.839–43)
(p.241) In fact, in Ulysses, Joyce assigned Pisser Burke a much older story as well. Joyce wrote
this one as another fragment on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft:
There was an ^<arrangement> put up job^ between them, Father Cowley said.
About ten she’d ^<telephone down to> ring up^ the ^<husband> hubby^
about the ^poor^ child and if Bloom had ^<[run]> raked^ in ^<anything he
was> the poor begob^ off ^with him^ in a bound of shakes ^saying the Christ was
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had^. There was nothing wrong with the child ât all^. But old Mat Dillon spotted the
game.91
And this is how it appears in Ulysses:
pisser Burke was telling me card party and letting on the child was sick (gob, must have
done about a gallon) flabbyarse of a wife speaking down the tube she’s better or she’s
(ow!) all a plan so he could vamoose with the pool if he won
(U 321.17–20; U-G 12.1566–9)
The story only first appears in ‘Cyclops’ on its Rosenbach manuscript where it is similar to the
version in Ulysses,92 but Joyce’s alterations are significant. Like the other earlier versions of this
kind of disparaging story about Bloom, originally it is Cowley who tells it to some unnamed
listeners, but in the later version the nameless narrator recounts it, and once again Pisser Burke
becomes the source of the gossip. By amalgamating the telling of these stories to Pisser Burke at
later stages of rewriting them, Joyce is consolidating this fundamental aspect of the storytelling
mode to provide a more consistent foundation and coherent depth to the narrative. While the
story might be about the expectant Molly in the earlier version, in Ulysses it is more clearly
focused on Milly being ill. Furthermore, as is the fate of many characters in the earlier versions
of these stories, Matt Dillon simply disappears from this scene completely. In all the versions,
the men conflate Bloom’s fatherly cares with innuendos about his schemes to get money.
Joyce returns to the stories about Bloom and Mrs Riordan in ‘Ithaca’ and most of them already
appear on the episode’s proto-draft. For example, he added the start of the following question
and answer: ‘Had they [Leopold and Stephen] a ^personal^ link beyond that in the past’ (see U
633.05–23; U-G 17.477–86).93 Though condensed, Joyce already established much of the
storyline, but he further specified the dates when she lived with the Dedaluses on a missing
document. On the episode’s proto-draft, she ‘had lived in Stephen’s parents’ house during the
Parnell split from 1890–92’, but Joyce changed the dates to ‘1 September 1888 to 29 December
1891’ in Ulysses, thereby creating a more precise intertextual temporal link with the break with
the Dedalus family that must have followed the heated Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait.
Joyce added a completely new question and answer to this sequence on the ‘Ithaca’ Rosenbach
manuscript:
What distinct different memories had each [Leopold and Stephen] of her now eight years
deceased?
(p.242) The older, her bezique cards and counters, her Skye terrier, her suppositious
wealth, her lapses of responsiveness: the younger, her lamp of colza oil before the statue
of the Immaculate Conception, her green and maroon brushes for Charles Stewart Parnell
and for Michael Davitt, her tissue papers.
(see U 633.30–634.02; U-G 17.503–8)94
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While some of the elements are closely related to Stephen’s memories in A Portrait, the cards
and the dog only become instrumental aspects of Mrs Riordan’s overall characterization in
Ulysses. Joyce further balances her representation by including her in Molly’s memories at the
start of ‘Penelope’. He had established the necessary context on the episode’s draft, which
already began with her recollection of a remarkable morning at the City Arms Hotel when,
rather than go down and join the other hotel guests, he asked Molly ‘to get his breakfast in bed
with a couple of eggs’ (U 691.01–2; U-G 18.01–2). Joyce later filled all the open space around the
episode’s title on the draft with the story of Mrs Riordan and her dog. Molly claims to have seen
through the whole charade and recalls how he was just
^pretending to be ill laid up with a sick voice ^doing the <usual tragic> His
Highness^ to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that ^died &^
never left us a farthing with her dog that was always ^smelling my fur^ edging to get
under my petticoat^
(see U 691.03–15; U-G 18.03–15)95
He continued to add to Molly’s memory on several subsequent manuscripts, alternating between

positive and negative judgments about the old woman. On one or more missing intermediary
documents, Joyce has Molly criticize her for leaving her money ‘all for masses for herself’ and
recalls ‘^her talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get
shut of her and her^ dog’.96 On the Rosenbach manuscript, he added Molly’s criticism of
Leopold who ‘thought he had a great leg of’ Mrs Riordan, though Joyce has her balance her
judgment by recalling that ‘still I like that in him polite to old women like that’.97 Joyce added
further bitter things she recalls about Mrs Riordan; for example, she was the ‘^greatest^ miser
êver was actually^ afraid to lay out fourpence for her methylated spirit telling me all her
ailments’, which Joyce balances with another addition: ‘she was a welleducated woman’
nonetheless.98 Joyce continued to elaborate Molly’s memories of her on the typescript and on
the first proof level.99 Then, as a flourish on the third proof level, he added Molly’s final verdict
about Mrs Riordan: ‘I hope Ill never be like her’ and with that the old woman fades out of
Ulysses.100
Joyce also wrote a story about one of the few social events the Blooms recall having attended
together after they married. In fact, the pleasant carriage ride (p.243) through the Featherbed
pass in the Wicklow mountains on the way back to Dublin is one of the very few truly rural
scenes in Ulysses. In his 1921 chronology of some of the events in the book, for 1894 Joyce has
the Blooms leaving Lombard Street and lists the big fire at Arnott’s, Val Dillon’s tenure as Lord
Mayor, the death of Phil Gilligan, Professor Goodwin’s concert with Molly in the choir, as well as
the Glencree dinner.101 The dinner was a swanky affair, with lots of fancy food and drink,
speeches, and music, but the ride back in the jaunting car was the evening’s highlight. Typical of
the stories about the Blooms during this period, the oldest known version of this story about the
Glencree dinner is one of the many topics of the Dublin men’s gossip. Actually, Joyce only
established the echoes of the story as a shared memory between the Blooms afterwards. In the
manuscript record of Ulysses, Lenehan first tells M’Coy the story of the annual dinner to benefit
the Glencree reformatory in ‘Wandering Rocks’, and the Blooms are the central focus of the tale.
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This version appears on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript,102 which Frank Budgen helped
Joyce prepare at the start of 1919, though it may have been (at least in part) an older story that
Joyce wrote years before, but had yet to incorporate into Ulysses.
Seeing Bloom scanning the book carts at Merchants Arch prompts Lenehan to recall a ‘damn
good one about comets’ tails’ that he wants to share with M’Coy. While the latter wants to
recount the story of another year when his wife sang there, Lenehan has a more pointed
revelation he wants to share:
— But wait till I tell you, he said. We had a midnight lunch too after it too and when we
sallied forth it was blue o’clock in the morning. Coming home it was a gorgeous winter’s
night on the featherbed mountain. Bloom and Chris Callanan were on one side of the car
and I was with the wife on the other. We started singing glees and duets: Lo, the early
beam of morning. She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt’s port under her belly
band. Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights! She
has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
— I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body
shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
— The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She’s a gamey mare and no
mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris
Callanan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole
jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knew them all, faith.
At last she spotted a weeny one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God,
she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callanan, sure that’s only what you
might call a pinprick. By God, he wasn’t far wide of the mark.
(see U 225.09–29; U-G 10.552–74)103
This is how the story first appears in print and, though Joyce made some minor alterations (for
example, the fourth member of the party only became Chris (p.244) Callinan on the episode’s
first proof level),104 the point was clear from the start. The focus of the story is Molly’s
sexualized body as well as gibes about Leopold’s interest in science. While this may just be
another bit of salacious gossip about Molly’s ample curves, what sets the story apart from the
other, similar stories is that the men nonetheless think well of Bloom:
— He’s a cultured chap, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or
garden . . . . . you know . . . . . There’s a touch of the artist about Bloom.
(see U 225.35–7; U-G 10.581–3)105
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The next time the story of the night of the Glencree dinner appears in the manuscript record is
Bloom’s brief recollection of it in ‘Nausicaa’. Thinking of Molly’s first lover, he remembers how
she fell into a heavy sleep after the long drive home that night, and then comments that the
‘Lord mayor had his eye on her too. Val Dillon’ (U 354.20–1; U-G 13.892–3). In fact, the
repetition of these key elements helps to unify the various retellings of this story in Ulysses. The
entire scene remains identical from its first appearance on the episode’s draft to Ulysses and the
thrust of the memory is always the fact that other men are attracted to Bloom’s wife.106 Then
Molly recalls that same night in ‘Penelope’ as well. Thinking of the various ‘goodfornothings’
who ‘squander every penny piece he earns down their gullets’, she recalls that ‘poor Paddy
Dignam’ was also at the Glencree dinner that night (U 723.33–5; U-G 18.1278–9). The first time
this tangential mention of the evening appears is on the main text of the episode’s draft that
Joyce wrote in 1921,107 but it is impossible to know how much older a storyline it may have
been. Then, as an addition on the ‘Penelope’ Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce added a much more
detailed reprise of Molly’s memory of that night. Lenehan’s losing tip causes her to recall how
he was making free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back ^that long joult^ over
the featherbed mountain I wish I could have picked that chicken out of my fingers it was
so tasty and browned ând as tender as anything^ those forks ând fishslicers^ were
hallmarked silver too I wish I had some I could easily have slipped a couple into my muff
(see U 701.22–9; U-G 18.426–34)108
The basis of the addition is simply Molly’s admission that she knew perfectly well what Lenehan
was up to that night and did not put a stop to it. Then, with an addition to the memory on the
episode’s third proof level,109 Joyce further tied together the stories of that night by confirming
her husband’s suspicions: ‘after the lord Mayor looking at me with his dirty eyes Val Dillon’ (U
701.23–4; U-G 18.428–9). On the fifth and final proof level before Ulysses appeared, he added
her verdict on him: ‘that big heathen’ (U 701.24; U-G 18.429).110
(p.245) The Blooms ‘on the rocks in Holles Street’: 1895–6
11. ‘Sirens’:
Late 1917–Early 1919 Fragments NLI MS 7B, p. [11r]
Early 1919 Later Draft NLI MS 9, pp. [6v]–[7r]
June 1919 Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 16–17
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
November 1919–January 1920 Draft Cornell 56A, p. 26
February–March 1920 Earlier Draft NLI MS 11B, p. [2v]
15. ‘Circe’:
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16. ‘Eumaeus’:
January–February 1921 Later Draft Buffalo MS 21, pp. [6r] and [8r]
Mid–Late February 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 39
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [4v], [12r], and [13r]
July–Mid-September Faircopy Manuscript for Rosenbach MS, pp. 9 and [22v]–23
1921 Typescript
15–Mid-November 1921 Third Proof Level Harvard Pl D.iii
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl D.iv
Having lost his job at Cuffe’s, the now unemployed couple moved once again. Like the stories
about the Blooms at the City Arms Hotel, the ones about them in their next home also have their
foundation in malicious male gossip, but then Joyce wrote further repetitions of the stories as
the Blooms’ own memories and dispersed them selectively in various episodes in the book. By
reprising both the narrative and, more specifically, the verbal elements of these relatively few
stories, these tales are paradigmatic of how stories like this function in Ulysses. Obviously, they
reinforce the narrative cohesion of the book, but the reiteration of these stories from different
perspectives also pushes the boundaries of the representation of fictional intersubjectivity as
well.
A genetic approach to these stories uncovers the particular techniques Joyce used to create the
networks of signification that make the book a watershed in the development of modernist
literature. For example, the first mention of the Blooms’ new home in Holles Street is the
subject of another unconnected fragment on the earlier ‘Sirens’ manuscript (see U 257.18–
258.12; U-G 11.466–97). Although in a very rudimentary state, what Joyce had written of the
story is quite similar to (p.246) how it will eventually appear in the published episode. Once
again it is Cowley who recounts another tale about the Blooms to the assembled men. This time
it is about how they ‘were hard up at the time’ and had to find other ways to make ends meet. It
starts off as a discussion about how Bloom was in the ‘clothes line too when they lived in Holles
Street’, but ‘Mrs Marion Bloom’ immediately becomes the main subject of the gossip. Then the
scene concludes abruptly with Simon Dedalus’s quip that Molly ‘has left off clothes of all
descriptions’. Initially, Joyce wrote that ‘The wife used to buy up opera cloaks and dresses out of
houses in Marrion Square and sell them so much a week’. Later, he added another story on the
same manuscript page and they become merged when they are repeated several more times in
Ulysses. This other story is about how ‘The missus […] used to play the piano in the coffee
parlour’.111 As far as we know, Joyce wrote the public telling of these stories before he wrote the
Blooms’ memories of these events.
He continued to amplify and intertwine these strands on the earlier ‘Sirens’ draft with a pair of
additions in the margin of the page that slowly built up the story about how Ben Dollard needed
a ‘wedding garment’ for a performance and had ‘to get a loan of dresscoat from’ Bloom, but that
was the entire extent of this part of the story at that stage. Joyce added the rest of it almost as it
appears in Ulysses by the time he wrote the later ‘Sirens’ draft. While there was no mention at
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all of old Professor Goodwin’s botched performance on the earlier fragment, Joyce also
incorporated this newer storyline with an addition on the later draft by turning Molly’s night
into a fiasco because ‘He [Professor Goodwin] was a crotchety old fellow in the primary stage of
drink’ (U 257.23; U-G 11.471).112 And the new scene continues:
— Bloom turned in handy ^that night^, Mr Dedalus said. Where’s my pipe, by the way?
He wandered back to the bar. Father Cowley laughed again
— Well. I saved the situation, Ben, what? he said.
— You did, Ben Dollard ^<said> averred^. By God, I remember that. And those tight
trousers too. By God, that was a brilliant idea of yours, Bob.
Father Cowley’s <ears and> face blushed ând his^ ^purply^ ^lobes^
— I knew he was hard up, he explained. She used to play the piano in the coffee palace.
The waiter in the Grosvenor gave us the tip. ^<Do you> You^ remember? We had to
search all Holles Street. Old Clo’, what?
(see U 257.28–258.04; U-G 11.476–89)113
This is the first instance of any part of this scene in the extant manuscript record, but it is
already basically similar to how it will appear in Ulysses. Typical of the evolution of the episode
more generally, Joyce nonetheless continued to refine the phrasing as well as some of the other
aspects of the story on subsequent manuscripts. For example, in Ulysses the men find out where
the Blooms live from the more indistinct ‘chap in Keogh’s’ rather than from the generic ‘waiter
in the Grosvenor’ as Joyce puts it on the later ‘Sirens’ draft. It is not clear what Joyce intended
with this reference to the stylish hotel on Westland Row, or why he dropped (p.247) it from
Ulysses, nor are we given any further information about who the ‘chap in Keogh’s’ might be.
This is one of the numerous instances when, rather than building up such specific details, Joyce
purposely elided more concrete (though nonetheless vague) factual references from the stories.
More importantly, Joyce had yet to come up with Simon Dedalus’ signature description of the
Blooms as being ‘on the rocks’ during this period. Written in 1919, this is an early seminal scene
that captures almost everything we find out about the Blooms’ lives during this difficult period.
The specific ways in which Joyce disseminated certain elements of these intertwined stories—
both the events and the language—resound throughout the book. Besides the men’s gossip, this
is also one of the couple’s pivotal shared memories from this time. On the early ‘Penelope’ draft,
Molly remembers the night the men dropped in to borrow the ‘wedding garment’ as well:
Ben Dollard with his base barreltone the night he borrowed the trousers în Holles
street^ to sing out of squeezed and squashed into them and grinning all his <fat>
Dollard face he did look <like> a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been a
spectacle on the stage imagine paying 5/- in the preserved seats for that
(see U 724.03–8; U-G 18.1285–9)114
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This version is almost identical to its subsequent appearances, though as usual Joyce revised the
memory, specifically by amplifying Molly’s critical description of Dollard’s face and
performance. Once again, we see how Joyce worked on the storyline first and only subsequently
located it ‘in Holles street’ (and therefore in 1895–6) as an addition. Furthermore, it has now
come full circle from the first presentation of Bloom’s recollection of Molly’s humorous
description of Dollard’s voice in ‘Lestrygonians’:
She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and
you’d think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn’t that wit. They used to call him big Ben.
Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone.
(U 147.14–16; U-G 8.117–20)
Though they happen in a piecemeal manner and in different ways, these very precise repeating
elements serve to establish the narrative texture and verbal connections between the various
characters’ memories. These echoes create the semblance of depth in the characters’ lives and
thereby provide the ground for a unified foundation to the stories in Ulysses for readers to
discover. This process of establishing the semblance of shared memories with specific verbal
repetitions continues in a more radical way in ‘Nausicaa’ when Bloom recalls the hard times the
couple endured in those years. He thinks: ‘Ten bob I got for Molly’s combings when we were on
the rocks in Holles street’ (emphasis added; U 353.07–8; U-G 13.840–1).115 The chronology of
the development of this lexical marker about the Blooms at this juncture in their lives is clear.
Joyce established it as Simon Dedalus’ phrase in (p.248) ‘Sirens’ on a missing document before
the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript in mid-1919 (U 257.37–258.03; U-G 11.485–8).116 Then,
about six months later, he reprised this exact phrase as an echo on the ‘Nausicaa’ draft,117 and
that is how it becomes a textual memory that is available to distinct characters in the book. Like
the complex echoing in ‘Sirens’ of ‘Mrs Marion Bloom’ from ‘Calypso’ that I discuss in ‘ “Bold
hand”: Blazes Boylan in “Calypso” ’ in Chapter 2, the repetition of the formulaic phrase ‘on the
rocks in Holles street’ is a hallmark of the more elaborate workings of the later styles of Ulysses.
While the repetition of the couple’s shared joke about Dollard’s voice gives the semblance of the
realistic workings of shared memories, the repetition of Simon Dedalus’ phrase ‘on the rocks in
Holles street’ in Bloom’s musings is exemplary of how Joyce deployed the more complex
mechanisms of textual memory in Ulysses. In fact, Joyce creates even more expansive networks
of signification in the book through the innovative conjunction of both of these kinds of
traditional and experimental narrative methods.
Molly’s singing gig in the Dublin Coffee Palace hotel when they lived in Holles Street is another
story that we first read about as a rumour from the men at the bar in ‘Sirens’ and then Leopold
and Molly both recall it in other episodes. Late at night, in ‘Eumaeus’, as Bloom compares the
commercial practices of the cabman’s shelter with the coffee place where Molly worked, we
read that ‘he had a distinct and painful recollection they paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy
who had been prominently associated with it at one time, a very modest remuneration indeed for
her pianoplaying’ (U 589.36–590.01; U-G 16.797–9). This story was well established on the later
‘Eumaeus’ draft and it appears virtually unchanged in Ulysses.118 Though not generally reliable,
with this final narrative element Joyce has covered all the stories about their time in Holles
Street that he lists for 1895 on his later chronology: ‘Holles St. Ben Dollard’s concert. MB Coffee
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Palace. Cuffe’s City Arm’s Hotel’,119 but there are a few other stories scattered throughout
Ulysses about this phase of their lives. Selling Molly’s combings is not the only confession about
this period we find out about from Bloom. In ‘Eumaeus’ we read: ‘Still, candour compelled him
to admit he had washed his wife’s undergarments when soiled in Holles street’ (U 587.31–2; see
U-G 16.716–17), which was an idea Joyce had already established at least by the time he
prepared the later ‘Eumaeus’ draft.120 We read another repeated story that Joyce elaborated on
the later ‘Circe’ draft when Bloom confesses to Bello: ‘I tried ^<them> hers^ on only once.
In Holles Street. ^We were hard up.^ Î washed ^<them> her things^ to save the
laundry bill.^’ (see U 502.17–18; U-G 15.2986–8).121 Without further access to the earlier
‘Eumaeus’ draft that is in private hands, it is impossible to know which was the original telling of
the story and which is the repetition.
Molly reveals more disreputable stories about their lives during this period in ‘Penelope’ as well.
In Ulysses, she recalls the time ‘when he said I could pose for a picture naked to some rich
fellow in Holles street when he lost the job in Helys and (p.249) I was selling the clothes and
strumming in the coffee palace’ (U 704.29–31; U-G 18.560–2). This story started off as an
addition on the episode’s early draft,122 but there was no mention of her ‘selling the clothes’ at
that stage. Joyce added that bit of information on a missing document before the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript,123 thereby conjoining everything we know about Molly’s work from the
earliest telling of the tale in ‘Sirens’ several years before. Furthermore, Bloom’s role in this
adventure was more pointed on the ‘Penelope’ draft. Rather than merely giving his permission
as we are told in Ulysses, she claims that he ‘wanted me to pose’ (emphasis added).124
Regardless, we never find out whether or not Molly actually posed nude for that photograph.
But, as we read elsewhere, when the Blooms’ finances improve the following year, Leopold had a
proper photograph taken of his wife by James Lafayette of Westmoreland Street. The way Joyce
has this image of Molly circulate in various episodes is also paradigmatic of how he constructs
stories and so characters in Ulysses. The first time we read about it is in an oblique aside in
‘Oxen of the Sun’ that Joyce first wrote as an addition on the episode’s earlier draft. There
Bloom recalls Molly’s photo in these terms: ‘Her ^<memory of a> image of that^
voluptuous female loveliness which the pencil of Lafayette has preserved for posterity’ (see U
397.21–3; U-G 14.1220–2).125 But it is only in ‘Eumaeus’ that we get enough further information
to make sense of this iconic memento of his wife that he keeps with him all day. There Leopold
Bloom asks his late-night companion:
— Do you consider, by the by, he said, thoughtfully selecting a faded photo which he laid
on the table, that a Spanish type?
Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large sized lady with
her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion, as she was in the full bloom of
womanhood, in evening dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion to give a liberal
display of bosom, with more than vision of breasts, her full lips parted, and some perfect
teeth, standing near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was In Old
Madrid, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue. Her (the lady’s) eyes,
dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about something to be admired, Lafayette of
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Westmoreland street, Dublin’s premier photographic artist, being responsible for the
esthetic execution.
— Mrs Bloom, my wife the prima donna Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom indicated. Taken a
few years since. In or about ’96. Very like her then.
(U 606.24–37; see U-G 16.1425–39)
None of this scene is on the later ‘Eumaeus’ draft and first appears almost as it does in Ulysses
on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.126 This is obviously an odd exchange between the men
under the circumstances, but it would have been all we (p.250) read about it if Joyce had not
reminded himself to reprise the topic in ‘Penelope’ with a late note. It seems that the initial
prompt simply reads ‘MB’s photo’, which Joyce added to by relying on another note—‘drapery
photo show no age’127—to create the following additions on the episode’s third and fourth proof
levels in this way:
^showing him my photo its not good of me I ^+ought to have got it taken in drapery that
never looks out of fashion+^ still I look young in it I wonder he didnt make him a present
of it altogether and me too after all why not^
(see U 724.20–2; U-G 18.1302–5)128
Joyce does not represent how Leopold told Molly that he showed her photo to Stephen. This too
is more appropriately read as an absent textual rather than a shared memory between the
couple. But there are some stories that only the husband and wife would know, though we only
read about it from her. Molly also recalls a particular night that first appears as part of the main
text on the ‘Penelope’ draft like this:
when I wouldn’t let him touch me in Holles street one night he slept on the floor half the
night naked and wouldn’t eat any breakfast or speak he forgets that but I don’t I’ll make
him do it again if he doesn’t mind himself
(see U 723.01–7; U-G 18.1245–51)129
The notes that prompted the scene obliquely suggest that the impetus of these ideas at this
stage was Leopold’s response to what became a story about being denied sex by his wife and her
threat to do so again: ‘LB slept naked on floor’ and ‘LB wouldn’t eat’.130 But the description of
the sex became more explicit and the emphasis clearly shifted towards Molly’s point of view.
Another note—‘I petted him’—suggested an addition on a missing manuscript,131 but a more
significant alteration happened on the Rosenbach manuscript when Joyce made the following
change: ‘I wouldn’t let him ^<touch> lick^ me in Holles street’ (see U 723.01; U-G
18.1245),132 which is almost exactly how it appears in Ulysses. This was part of another pair of
coordinated additions Joyce made on the Rosenbach manuscript. In the first she criticizes all
men: ‘man man tyrant as ever for the one thing’ (U 723.01–2; U-G 18.1245–6). Then, in the other
addition, she reveals that she gave in to his entreaties after all, but also manages to criticize her
husband in particular: ‘so I thought I stood out enough for one time and let him he does it all
wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure’ (U 723.04–6; U-G 18.1248–50). Then, as a final
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flourish, Joyce turned to another note to create another memorable addition on the fourth proof
level: ‘his tongue is too flat or I dont know what’ (U 723.06; U-G 18.1250).133 So much for
Molly’s opinion of their sex life in those days.
(p.251) Better days

The move to Ontario Terrace: circa 1896–1902
4. ‘Calypso’:
Mid-June–2 August Second Proof Level Buffalo PP 5.1
11. ‘Sirens’:
Early 1919 Later Draft Buffalo MS 5, pp. [6v] and [7v]
September 1919 Serial Publication Little Review VI.5, p. 49
13. ‘Nausicaa’:
February–March 1920 Earlier Draft NLI MS 11A, p. [1v]
15. ‘Circe’:
16. ‘Eumaeus’:
January–February 1921 Revised Earlier Draft ‘Eumeo’ MS, p. [18v]
January–February 1921 Later Draft Buffalo MS 21, p. [22r]
Mid–Late February 1921 Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach MS, f. 44
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [front cover verso]–[1r]
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy Manuscript Rosenbach MS, pp. 1–[1v] and [19v]
According to Joyce’s late chronology,134 Leopold finally got a new job in 1896 at the insurance
firm of David Drimmie & Sons, and so the Blooms’ lives took a turn for the better. The first time
we read about his change of employment is in ‘Lestrygonians’ when Davy Byrne asks Nosey
Flynn:
— What is this he [Bloom] is? Isn’t he in the insurance line?
— He’s out of that long ago, Nosey Flynn said.
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(U 168.27–8; U-G 8.939–40)
(p.252) Like many of the stories about the Blooms’ married life, there is very little information
about this period as well, but in ‘Nausicaa’ Bloom briefly thinks of a seemingly memorable day
when he had a row with his wife before going to work: ‘And the day I went to Drimmie’s without
a necktie. Wrangle with Molly it was put me off ’ (U 353.11–12; U-G 13.844–5). Both these scenes
in ‘Lestrygonians’ and ‘Nausicaa’ are exactly the same from their earliest appearances in the
manuscripts to Ulysses.135 Joyce added all of Molly’s memories about her husband’s work at
Drimmie’s on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript as well, and this brings up the story of a
special night at the theatre. According to Molly’s version, which Joyce added to at different
times on the Rosenbach manuscript, her period came on her during the performance:
every 3 or 4 weeks usual monthly auction isn’t it simply sickening that night it came on me
like that the one time we were in a box that Michael Gunn gave him ^to see Mrs Kendal
and her husband at the Gaiety^ something he did about insurance for him in Drimmie’s I
was fit to be tied though I wouldn’t give him with that gentleman of fashion staring down
at me with his glasses and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his soul
that’s dead I suppose millions of years ago Î smiled the best I could all in a swamp
leaning forward as if I was interested^ having to sit it out then to the last tag I won’t
forget that wife of Scarli in a hurry supposed to be a fast play about adultery
(see U 719.17–26; U-G 18.1109–18)136
As we can see in this transcription, initially Joyce had the Blooms attending a performance of
The Wife of Scarli, thereby providing an intertextual link to several overarching themes in
Ulysses, particularly that of the adulterous couple. The choice of plays also helps to date the
recollection since it was first performed at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on 22 October 1897,
something Joyce would have known and expected some of his readers to look up.137
Nonetheless, Joyce later added that the Blooms were there ‘to see Mrs Kendal and her husband
at the Gaiety’, which confuses Molly’s account of what was on the bill that night, but serves to
reinforce other, different intertextual links to the various mentions of the actress’s performance
in Dublin on Bloomsday, specifically in ‘Wandering Rocks’. This memory is an excellent example
of the way Joyce uses thematic echoes across episodes to construct the Blooms’ shared
memories of particular occasions. Here the repeated elements include the Bloom family’s long-
standing interest in Spinoza as well as to the way men ogle Molly. In this case, the recollection
in ‘Penelope’ is a reprise of Bloom’s version of that night in ‘Sirens’, which Joyce first wrote
more than two years before as a group of interrelated additions on the episode’s later draft.138
Although he kept revising it at each stage until it appeared in Ulysses, it achieved a relatively
stable and recognizable form when it first appeared in print: (p.253)
Night Michael Gunn gave us the box. Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked that best. Wiped his
nose in curtain too. Custom his country perhaps. That’s music too. Tootling. Brasses
braying asses. Doublebasses helpless, gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows.
Woodwind like Goodwin’s name.
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She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore, lowcut, belongings on show. Clove her breath
was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question. Told her what Spinoza says in that
book of poor papa’s. Hypnotised, listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle
staring down into her with his operaglass for all he was worth. Met him pike hoses.
Philosophy. O rocks!
(see U 272.35–273.10; U-G 11.1050–62)139
Joyce will later reprise almost all the elements Bloom remembers in Molly’s recollection of that
same evening at the theatre in ‘Penelope’; for example, that Gunn gave them the box that night,
that Molly ‘looked fine’ with her ‘belongings on show’, as well as the ‘Chap in dresscircle staring
down into her with his operaglass for all he was worth’. As a further intratextual echo, the eager
man will later be included amongst the extended list of Molly’s lovers in ‘Ithaca’ as the
‘unknown gentleman in the Gaiety theatre’ (U 683.23–4; U-G 17.2138).140 Just as Bloom’s
memory is associated with music because it is the guiding motif of ‘Sirens’, when Joyce included
Molly’s memory of that night he stressed motifs that are basic to ‘Penelope’, specifically her
menstrual cycle.
Steady work also brought another move back to the south side of the Liffey, this time to Ontario
Terrace in Rathmines. Bloom has several fond memories of their time there, all of which are
closely related to Milly. Not only does he remember a particular night when she walked in her
sleep (U 645.28; U-G 17.860), but in ‘Eumaeus’ he also recalls the time he tried to bring home a
lame dog. Joyce had established the analogy between Bloom’s well-intentioned earlier plan to
bring home a dog for Milly and his offer to take Stephen Dedalus home on 17 June 1904 as an
addition on the earlier ‘Eumaeus’ draft.141 Then it appears in a slightly expanded form on the
episode’s later draft like this:
The crux was it was a bit risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue as
on the night he misguidedly brought home a newfoundland dog with a lame paw (not that
the cases were êither^ identical ôr the reverse^ though he [Stephen] had hurt his
hand) to Ontario Terrace as he very distinctly remembered
(see U 611.09–14; U-G 16.1604–9)142
In keeping with this episode’s motifs of disguise and false identities, Joyce decided to elide the
kind of dog it was (even though it was a Newfoundland dog on both previous drafts) when he
wrote the Rosenbach manuscript, so that in Ulysses it is described more ambiguously as ‘breed
unknown’ (U 611.12; U-G 16.1607).143 Joyce only connected the story of the lost dog with his
daughter as he revised the second proof level of ‘Calypso’, when he added the story of Milly’s
wish for a (p.254) dog,144 which he got almost verbatim from the following note: ‘Milly dog to
pass time’ (see U 65.09–10; U-G 4.451–2).145 This is yet another example of the complex ways in
which Joyce constructed the interconnected stories in the book.
The new job and address also brought about a change in the Blooms’ domestic arrangement. As
far as we know, this is the first time in their married life that they could afford to have a young
‘skivvy’ live with them. Unfortunately, this boon brought with it some unexpected difficulties
that Joyce elaborated as he continued to write the book. The earliest version of the story appears
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in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ both in the book and its manuscript record. Two related notes—‘domestic
servant’ and ‘LB Kiss a skivvy, drawn from the lowest strata of society’—prompted its first traces
as an addition on the episode’s earlier draft:146
He says this, a censor of morals, who <was not> did not scruple beneath his own roof
and oblivious of the ties of nature to enter into illicit relations with a domestic servant
drawn from the lowest strata of society!
(see U 398.33–6; U-G 14.921–3)147
Joyce relied on further notes to amplify the story in the next version on the later ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ draft and I have indicated those that appear verbatim in a bold font:
He says this, a censor of morals, â very pelican in his piety^, who did not scruple,
oblivious of the ties of nature, to enter into illicit relations with a female domestic drawn
from the lowest strata of society! ^<Nay, was not a scouring brush the shield of her
honour> Nay did not the hussy’s scouring brush the shield of ^Hagar’s^ honour^.
(see U 398.33–399.01; U-G 14.921–5)148
Joyce reprised this story in ‘Circe’, and it first appears on the episode’s intermediary draft like
this:
^First Watch
Call the woman MacArdle
(Mary MacArdle, a slipshod servant girl approaches with scouringbrush & pail)^
Second Watch
Another! What do you tax him with? What is the offence complained of?
Mary
He surprised me ^from behind^ in the scullery, your Worship, when the missus was out
with a request for ^the use of^ a safety pin. He interfered with my clothing, Your worship,
^so he did^ and pinched me till I took the scouring brush to him.
Second Watch
(to Bloom) Have you anything why sentence should not be passed upon you.
(see U 436.11–437.17; U-G 15.858–94)149
(p.255) Joyce recycled several of the elements directly from the rendering of the scene in ‘Oxen
of the Sun’, specifically her handy scouring brush, but this is the first time he assigned the
young woman a name, though it is different from how it appears in Ulysses. On the later ‘Circe’
draft she is clearly the more familiar Mary Driscoll that we know from the book. Joyce also
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added her memorable description of the encounter: ‘He surprised me from behind in the
^<scullery> rere of the premises^’, as well as a new finale:
Bloom
You ^counter^ assaulted me.
Mary Driscoll
I had more respect for the scouringbrush. I remonstrated with him, your lord, and he
remarked: keep it quiet.
(see U 437.12–16; U-G 15.889–93)150
Joyce continued to expand the scene on several of the episode’s later manuscripts, but we get a
more ample version of the incident from Molly in ‘Penelope’. It started off as an addition in the
left margin of the first page of the episode’s draft, but Joyce continued it by filling in what open
space there was at the bottom of the page, and then he added further blocks of text until he had
established the basic elements of the scene like this:
like that slut, that Mary, padding up her false bottom to excite him ^bad enough to get the
smell of those other ^painted^ women off him once or twice I had a suspicion by getting
him to come near me^ ît was all his fault of course^ stealing my potatoes and oysters
^2/6 a dozen he ought to give it up now at his age^ for her aunt, if you please, common
robbery it takes me to find out a thing O yes her aunt was very fond of oysters I told her
what I thought of her ^couldn’t even touch him if I thought he was with a dirty ^liar and^
lover like that one ^then ^<propos> suggesting^ she cd [could] eat at our table at
Xmas day no thanks you not in my house^
(see U 691.28–692.08; U-G 18.55–74)151
With an addition, Joyce has Molly make it clear that ‘it was all his fault of course’, but much of
her ire is focused on the young woman. Besides wanting to provide another version of her
husband’s escapade, a conceptual note may have been the prompt for the new direction of
Molly’s version: ‘Pen [Penelope] upbraids impure servant’.152 According to Molly, the young
woman was enticing Bloom, though she believes that ‘he ought to give it up now at his age’.153
Worse yet, Molly caught the cleaning girl stealing. Joyce simply left blank what indiscretions
Bloom might have to commit for Molly to lose interest in him. Then, on a missing manuscript
Joyce named the young woman ‘that Mary we had in Ontario terrace’.154 But he (p.256) also
added entirely new twists to the story with several interrelated additions on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript as well:
suggesting me to go out to be alone with her I wouldn’t lower myself to spy on them
the garters I found in her room the Friday she was out that was enough for me a little bit
too much^ her face swelled ôn her^ with temper when I gave her her week’s notice
Î saw to that^ better do without them altogether do out the rooms myself quicker only
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for the damn cooking and throwing out the dirt I gave it to him anyhow either she or me
leaves
(see U 692.01–8; U-G 18.67–73)155
All of the phrases in the bold font can be traced to notebook entries, the most interesting of
which is ‘LB to be in house with her wdn’t [wouldn’t] lower myself to spy on them’.156 While
Molly seems to know all about Bloom’s indiscretion, as we will see in the next section, there are
still more things he does not know about Molly after all these years.
Molly takes a lover: Lieutenant Stanley Gardner
18. ‘Penelope’:
July–Mid-September 1921 Faircopy Manuscript Rosenbach MS, pp. 5–6 and [13v]
24–Late November 1921 Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iv & Harvard Pl B.iv
Whatever one may think of Molly’s lovemaking tryst with Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan on 16 June 1904,
it is a basic storyline in Ulysses. Nonetheless, it probably comes as a bit of a surprise to many
first-time readers when Molly admits to an extramarital affair before Bloomsday. The revelation
is only made in ‘Penelope’, and the news is particularly unexpected because neither Bloom nor
the over-zealous list maker of Molly’s lovers in ‘Ithaca’ knows anything about it (U 683.18–27; U-
G 17.2132–42). As we discover in bits and pieces, her partner was a certain Lieutenant Stanley
Gardner who must have been dispatched to Dublin on his way to South Africa during the second
Boer War. Therefore, their encounter took place sometime between the outbreak of hostilities in
October 1899 and the peace agreement on 31 May 1902, though Molly does not give us any
precise information about when she and Gardner were together.
It is also unclear when Joyce first included the affair as a remarkably memorable event in Molly
Bloom’s life. Gardner’s name appears on the ‘Penelope’ draft, and so the scenario could have
been one of Joyce’s long-standing plans for the book, (p.257) but that seems unlikely. In fact,
Molly only mentions him once and merely as an aside on the episode’s draft, and there is no
reference to him in any of the early notes.157 As I discuss in ‘Molly’s First Lover’ in Chapter 4,
about midway through the episode Molly confuses her memories of Gibraltar and Dublin when
she thinks, ‘no he [Mulvey] hadnt a moustache that was Gardner’ (U-G 18.872–3; see U 713.11).
That a man she knew named Gardner had facial hair was all that was known about him at that
stage in the development of Ulysses. If Joyce had planned the affair, there was no indication of
it. In fact, Mulvey is clearly the point of that particular story at that stage. Nonetheless, as Joyce
continued to write ‘Penelope’, Gardner took on a more prominent role in Molly’s memories about
her life, but again the stories about him were often motivated by other points that Joyce was
trying to make, rather than a specific focus on highlighting Molly’s indiscretion. Regardless,
Joyce must have expanded the stories about Molly and Gardner on one or more missing
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manuscripts after the ‘Penelope’ draft because he is already a well-established fixture in Molly’s
memories on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.
The first time Molly thinks of him in Ulysses is when she recalls that she ‘touched his [Bloom’s]
trousers outside the way I used to Gardner after’ (U 698.20–1; U-G 18.312–13). This story first
appears on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript,158 though that she did so ‘with my ring hand’
was something Joyce only added on the episode’s fourth proof level,159 presumably to make this
memory of the other affair appear more scandalous. It is based on a simple late note, though as
usual it is not at all evident that Joyce intended to use it in this context when he took it: ‘MB ring
hand’.160 It is probably no accident that the next time Molly thinks of Gardner in Ulysses is when
she compares him to her husband and thinks of Boylan: ‘but he [Bloom] never knew how to
embrace well like Gardner I hope hell [Boylan will] come on Monday as he said at the same time
four’ (U 699.02–4; U-G 18.331–3). This storyline also first appears on the episode’s Rosenbach
manuscript and it is typical of Joyce’s strategy of presenting Molly’s oscillating attitudes towards
everyone.161 Here she slights Bloom and then revels in her desire for Boylan. Once Joyce had
written these stories on the Rosenbach manuscript, he did not alter them at all.
Molly’s next mention of Gardner is the most substantial bit of information there is about him,
but Joyce only embedded the story about her lover after he had written the more general context
of her rambling thoughts (U 700.12–32; U-G 18.383–98). Again, this only first appears on the
Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript, though Joyce revised it significantly there. The context is her
criticism of Bloom’s current political interest, which she calls his usual ‘trash and nonsense’, but
then she concedes that ‘still it must have been him he knew there was a boycott’ (U 700.17–20;
U-G 18.384–7).162 Joyce only made it clear that Molly was (p.258) referring to Arthur Griffith
(and presumably his protest against the British King and Queen’s visit to Dublin in August 1903)
with an addition on the Rosenbach manuscript: ‘he says that little man he showed me without
the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffith is he well he doesnt look it thats all I can
say’ (U 700.18–20; see U-G 18.385–6).163 On the base text of the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’
manuscript, Molly goes on to think, ‘I hate the mention of their politics after the war that
Pretoria and Ladysmith’, and her political opinions turn back on themselves and simply end with
her uncritical comment: ‘I love to see a regiment pass in review’ (U 700.20–31; U-G 18.387–
98).164 Joyce included the first specific reference to Gardner as he was amplifying this storyline
on the Rosenbach manuscript.165 Then Joyce adds to Molly’s list of Boer War battles when she
recalls:
Pretoria and Ladysmith ând Bloemfontein where Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn
Somerset Lt Infantry killed they could have made their peace in the beginning or old oom
Paul and the rest of the ôther^ old Krugers go and fight it out between them instead of
dragging on for years killing any men there were^ I love to see a regiment pass in review.
(see U 700.21–31; U-G 18.388–98)166
He continued to add to Molly’s memories of Gardner on several different documents, starting

with the fact that ‘he was a lovely fellow in khaki’ on the typescript,167 which was prompted by
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the simple note ‘khaki’.168 At the same time, Joyce added a much more sentimental and
passionate aspect to their love story:
Im sure he was brave too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal
lock my Irish beauty he was pale with excitement about going away or wed be seen from
the road he couldnt stand properly and I so hot as I never felt
(U 700.23–6; U-G 18.390–3)
He also elaborated both the romantic and the militaristic aspects of the story on the episode’s
fourth proof level. On the one hand, Joyce has Molly recall that Gardner was ‘just the right
height over me’ (U 700.23; U-G 18.390),169 which for once was a fact that was specifically
destined for the character that Joyce attributed it to as the following very late note makes clear:
‘MB likes man slightly taller Gardner’.170 On the other hand, he also has her complain: ‘with
their fever if he was even decently shot it wouldnt have been so bad’ (U 700.29–30; U-G (p.259)
18.396–7).171 Such is the manner in which Joyce created Molly’s complex ways of looking at life.
Molly thinks of Gardner again later in the episode and this time she links her thoughts about him
to Mulvey once again. Joyce was trying to make several points at the same time as he made this
interconnected addition on the Rosenbach manuscript. The context was that she had wanted to
give Mulvey a ‘memento’ to remember her by when he left, but there was little to choose from in
Gibraltar.172 With an addition on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript, Joyce has her reveal
that:
he gave me that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck that I gave Gardner going to south Africa
where those Boers killed him with their war and fever but they were ^well^ beaten all the
same as if it brought its bad luck with it still it must have been pure 18 carrot gold
because it was very heavy
(see U 713.07–10; U-G 18.866–70)173
Coming full circle, Joyce included this in the context of the first mention of Gardner he had
written, but he probably wrote the descriptions of Gardner’s death that I discussed earlier
before he wrote this additional echo. This kind of oscillation is typical of Joyce’s representation
of Molly. Throughout the episode, she thinks both kind and unkind things about other people,
which makes her that much more human.
Following the usual pattern of setting up contradictions in Molly’s thoughts that is a hallmark of
‘Penelope’, Joyce added the pleasant memory that she remembers that ‘Gardner said no man
could look at my mouth and teeth smiling like that and not think of it’ (U 713.25–6; U-G 18.888–
9). But, on the typescript, he later added her fear that she ‘was afraid he mightnt like my accent
first he so English’ (U 713.26; U-G 18.889–90).174 Joyce pointedly had Molly’s thoughts move
back and forth as he continued to revise the episode’s fifth and final proof level, just days before
Ulysses appeared. He wrote: ‘all father left me in spite of his stamps Ive my mothers eyes and
figure anyhow he always said theyre so snotty about themselves some of those cads he wasnt a
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bit like that he was dead gone on my lips’ (see U 713.26–9; U-G 18.890–2).175 Gardner’s fixation
on Molly’s lips is the last we hear of him in Ulysses.
Notes:
(1) NLI NB 5B, p. [10v].
(3) See the chronology on NLI NB 5B, p. [10v].
(5) Harvard Pl D.ii.a and Harvard Pl D.iii.a; see JJA 21: 324 and 21: 340 and 342.
(6) See Buffalo NB 2b, p. [3r]: ‘? houses were we in at all’ (Herring, Notes and Drafts, 5.19; this
is Joyce’s question mark).
(7) Joyce summed up the parameters of Rudy’s life in his 1921 chronology. For 1892 he wrote
‘Rudy conceived. Greystones’, and then for 1893: ‘Rudy n et † [is born and dies]’ (NLI NB 5B, p.
[10v]).
(8) Harvard Pl D.iv; see JJA 21: 360. Perhaps it was merely an oversight, but Joyce has Molly
elide the death of her father. Presumably it happened after the Blooms were married, but there
is no information about when or how Major Brian Tweedy died in Ulysses. See the section on
Tweedy in Chapter 4 for more information.
(11) Harvard Pl 10.i and Buffalo PP 6.1; see JJA 17: 204 and 22: 320.
(13) This type of voyeuristic sexual triangle is a recurring structural device in Ulysses and
particularly in Finnegans Wake.
(14) Emphasis added; Buffalo TS 16.c, p. [19r]; see JJA 16: 345.
(17) See Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 6.79.
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(21) NLI NB 5A p. [3r].
(23) NLI NB 5B p. [2v].
(25) Emphasis added; see NLI MS 14, p. [14v].
(26) NLI NB 5A p. [18r].
(29) NLI NB 4, p. [4v]. This is a typical example of the way Joyce was able to transform and
amplify his usually matter-of-fact notes into the voice of Leopold Bloom.
(30) This story can be traced through a circuitous route to one of Joyce’s earliest Ulysses
notebooks. Under the heading ‘Leopold’, he wrote: ‘bought Neave’s Food for his son before
birth’ (NLI NB 3, p. [2r]), which he transferred in part to another note-repository as ‘bought
Neaves Food for son’ (BL ‘Cyclops’ NS 10.95).
(36) Rosenbach ‘Oxen of the Sun’ MS, f. 13.
(38) Buffalo TS 13.d.11, p. [1r]; see JJA 14: 379.
(39) Simplified transcription; Harvard PP 36.1 and Buffalo PP 36.2; see JJA 26: 331 and 336.
(40) Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 15.4951.
(41) Emphasis added; simplified transcription; Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS III, pp. 30–1.
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(43) Harvard Pl III-13.i; see JJA 21: 139.
(44) NLI MS 14, p. [12r].
(45) NLI NB 4, p. [9r] and BL ‘Penelope’ NS 3.23, respectively.
(46) This is also an exemplary instance of the restoration work achieved in the Gabler edition of
Ulysses. The typist of this part of ‘Penelope’—probably not Robert McAlmon—inadvertently
skipped Joyce’s addition on its Rosenbach manuscript (p. [24v]) and so it did not appear in any
edition of the work before 1984.
(50) NLI MS 14, pp. [14v]–[15r].
(51) NLI MS 14, p. [15r].
(52) NLI MS 14, p. [14v].
(56) Thom’s, 1844.
(57) Thom’s, 1975.
(58) Harvard Pl D.iii.a; see JJA 21: 340 and 342.
(59) BL ‘Cyclops’ NS 7.29–30.
(60) Emphasis added; NLI MS 7B, p. [11v].
(61) Simplified transcription; emphasis added; NLI MS 7B, p. [11v].
(62) I discuss the first story further in ‘Memories of Lombard Street West’ in Chapter 6 and the
other in ‘The Blooms “on the rocks in Holles Street” ’.
(63) NLI MS 7B, p. [13v].
(64) NLI MS 11A, p. [1v].
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(67) NLI MS 14, p. [5r].
(70) Buffalo MS 8, p. [22r] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 170–1; see JJA 13: 125).
(71) Buffalo MS 8, p. [21v] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 170; see JJA 13: 124).
(72) NLI MS 10, p. [3v].
(73) Buffalo MS 6, ff. [2v]–[4r] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 183–6; see JJA 13: 134.d–g).
(74) Groden, ‘Ulysses’ in Progress, 135.
(75) Emphasis added; Buffalo MS 6, f. [2v] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 181; see JJA 13:
134.d).
(76) Buffalo MS 8, p. [21r] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 170–1; see JJA 13: 123).
(77) BL ‘Cyclops’ NS 5.76–7.
(78) See, for example, Groden, ‘Ulysses’ in Progress, 136.
(79) Buffalo MS 6, f. [4r] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 181–2; see JJA 13: 134.g).
(80) See Rosenbach ‘Cyclops’ MS, f. 28, for example.
(82) Harvard Pl C.ii; see JJA 21: 269.
(84) Harvard Pl C.iii.a; see JJA 21.277.
(86) Buffalo MS 8, p. [21v] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 170; see JJA 13: 124).
(87) Buffalo MS 6, f. [3r] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 183; see JJA 13: 134.e).
(88) BL ‘Cyclops’ NS 5.01.
(89) Buffalo MS 8, p. [21v] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 170–1; see JJA 13: 124).
(90) Joyce added a cautionary ending to the tale on the episode’s first proofs: ‘And sure^, more
be token,^ the lout I’m told after was in Power’s, the blender’s, round in Cope street going
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home footless in a cab five times a week after drinking his way through all the samples in the
bloody establishment’ (Harvard Pl 34.i; see U 293.26–9; U-G 12.516–18; see JJA 19: 122).
(91) NLI MS 7B, p. [10v].
(93) NLI MS 13, p. [10v].
(94) Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS I, p. [7v].
(95) NLI MS 14, p. [1r].
(99) Huntington TS, p. 1 and Harvard Pl A.i.a; see JJA 16: 299 and 21: 147.
(101) See NLI NB 5B, p. [10v].
(102) Rosenbach ‘Wandering Rocks’ MS, ff. 18–19.
(107) NLI MS 14, p. [13r].
(109) Harvard Pl B.iii.a; see JJA 21: 240.
(110) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 242.
(111) NLI MS 7B, p. [11r].
(112) NLI MS 9, p. [6v].
(113) NLI MS 9, p. [7r].
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(115) Besides its colloquial meaning, ‘without means or money’ (see Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 11.485),
Joyce was certainly prompted to use the phrase ‘on the rocks’ because of its relevant Homeric
correspondences to both ‘Sirens’ and ‘Nausicaa’.
(116) Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ MS, ff. 16–17.
(119) NLI NB 5B, p. [10v].
(122) NLI MS 14, p. [4v].
(124) In all the versions Molly maintains that this happened when Bloom lost his job in Hely’s,
but this complicates the chronological narrative sequence in the book since elsewhere we find
out that Bloom lost that job in 1893. It could be that Bloom got his job back at Hely’s at this
stage, only to lose it again, though it is more likely that Joyce simply mixed up his own account
and meant to write ‘when he lost his job at Cuffe’s’ in this context.
(125) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 11B, p. [2v].
(126) Rosenbach ‘Eumaeus’ MS, f. 39.
(127) Buffalo NB 2b, p. [2v] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 4.04) and BL ‘Penelope’ NS 6.51,
respectively.
(128) Harvard Pl D.iii and Harvard Pl D.iv; see JJA 21: 350 and 359.
(129) NLI MS 14, p. [12r].
(130) BL ‘Penelope’ NS 4.16 and 4.09.
(132) Emphasis added; Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, pp. [22v]–23.
(133) Harvard Pl D.iv; see JJA 21: 358 and Buffalo NB 2b, p. [3v]: ‘LB’s tongue too broad’ (see
Herring, Notes and Drafts, 6.02).
(134) NLI NB 5B, p. [10v].
(135) Rosenbach ‘Lestrygonians’ MS, f. 22 and Cornell MS 56A, p. 26; see JJA 13: 225.
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(137) Slote, ‘Notes’, U-G 18.1117.
(138) NLI MS 9, pp. [6v] and [7v].
(139) Little Review VI.5, p. 49.
(140) I discuss the list of Molly’s lovers in ‘Some Impression of Boylan in “Ithaca” ’ in Chapter 8.
(141) ‘Eumeo’ MS, p. [18v].
(143) Rosenbach ‘Eumaeus’ MS, f. 44.
(145) NLI NB 5A, p. [1r].
(146) BL ‘Oxen of the Sun’ NS 16.33–4.
(147) NLI MS 11A, p. [1v].
(148) Simplified transcription; Buffalo MS 18, p. [5r]; see JJA 14: 121. Also see BL ‘Oxen of the
Sun’ NSS 4.55 and 14.79.
(149) NLI MS 12, p. [6v].
(151) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 14, pp. [front cover verso]–[1r].
(153) Two other notes helped frame the scene: ‘LB proposed servant eat at their table’ and ‘MB
couldn’t touch him if she thought ——’ (NLI NB 5A, p. [17v] and BL ‘Penelope’ 4.91,
respectively).
(155) Emphasis added; simplified transcription; Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. [1v].
(156) NLI NB 4, pp. [10v]–[11r].
(157) NLI MS 14, p. [7r].
Page 47 of 48
Life Goes On
(164) See NLI NB 4, p. [9r].
(166) Emphasis added; Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, pp. [5v]–6. Another late note probably inspired
the thrust of the additional text: ‘peace at any price Boers killed Gardner Bloemfontein’ (NLI NB
4, p. [11r]). Later Joyce specified Molly’s interest by adding that what bothered her was the fact
that they were ‘killing any ^fineloking^ men there were’ on the episode’s typescript (emphasis
added; Huntington TS, p. 12; U 700.29; U-G 18.396; see JJA 16: 310).
(168) NLI NB 4, p. [11v].
(170) Buffalo NB 2b, p. [3r] (see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 5.44). Joyce’s patterns of use of his
vast storehouse of notes are contradictory. He did not use another note that he had also set
aside for the couple: ‘Gardner picked glove she him’ (Buffalo NB 2b, p. [3r]; see Herring, Notes
and Drafts, 5.24).
(172) Joyce further intertwined the stories of the fate of Molly’s lovers by reassigning an idea he
initially had for Mulvey to Gardner: see ‘Mulvey † [died] because amulet’ (NLI NB 4, p. [11r]).
(175) Simplified transcription; Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 255.
Page 48 of 48
7 Eccles Street


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
7 Eccles Street
17 June 1904
Luca Crispi
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.003.0008

This chapter analyses how the various styles of the later episodes shape a reader’s
understanding of the impact of Molly’s affair with Boylan on Leopold and Molly as individuals
and as a couple. While ‘Circe’ merely reflects Leopold’s paranoid fantasies, the seemingly
objective style of ‘Ithaca’ masks his seemingly more realistic fears and feelings towards his wife
and her lover. One might expect Molly to present a more rounded representation of Boylan, but
the overly subjective style of ‘Penelope’ makes her version of him highly suspect. This chapter
documents the connection between the twin foundational stories in Ulysses that Joyce
established in 1918, at least three years before the book was published: the adultery plotline,
and the couple’s momentous statement of their love on Howth. The latter event is transformative
in the characters’ genesis that cyclically connects new beginnings and open endings in the
process of becoming the Blooms.
Keywords: style, interpretation, adultery plotline, sexuality, foundational stories
Robert M. Adams remarks that ‘[Leopold] Bloom remembers 1893 and 1894 very well indeed; he
remembers 1898 to 1902 hardly at all.’1 In fact, there are no stories in Ulysses that can be
specifically dated from 1900 to 1903.2 Therefore, I want to conclude by examining what effect
Boylan and Molly’s tryst in the Blooms’ bed in 7 Eccles Street has on Leopold and Molly. Not
only is it obviously the most significant event that takes place on 16 June 1904, but the husband
and wife’s complementary yet contrasting reactions to Boylan and the adulterous couple’s
lovemaking that afternoon comprise both some of Joyce’s first ideas and final touches to the
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characterization of Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy Bloom as individuals and as a couple.
Furthermore, I also examine how the various stylistic devices by means of which this
information is presented in the final two episodes of the book distort the readers’ interpretation
of this storyline.
Fantasies of Molly and Boylan in ‘Circe’
15. ‘Circe’:
July–December 1920 Intermediary Draft NLI MS 12, p. [19r]
December 1920–January 1921 Mixed Faircopy Rosenbach MS, ff. 62–62a
Mid-February–17 April 1921 Typescript Buffalo TS 13.h, p. [21r]
19 December 1921–Early January 1922 Seventh Proof Level Harvard Pl 59.i
3–9 January 1922 Eighth Proof Level Texas PP 33.1
Before returning home, Leopold Bloom has a hallucinatory vision at Bella Cohen’s brothel of his
worst fears about Molly and Boylan’s rendezvous. Although it was just a brief exchange, Joyce
had established that Boylan and Lenehan would also pay a visit to Bella Cohen’s brothel in
‘Circe’ on the episode’s intermediary draft (see U 525.29–526.16; U-G 15.3738–55),3 but at that
stage Joyce had yet to (p.261) determine that Boylan’s errand there was to consort with Molly
herself. The descriptions of Boylan and Lenehan are just as we know them generally in Ulysses:
the one straw-hatted with a red flower between his teeth and the other with the yachting cap,
which has been his signature accoutrement since his first appearance in ‘Two Gallants’ in
Dubliners. Boylan’s vulgar exchange with Lenehan was already as it is in Ulysses, but with that
the scene simply came to an end with Zoe and Florry laughing together, and then the storyline
reverts to Bella’s conversation with Lynch. The scenario was certainly predictable and, like so
much else in the episode, it is simply a recycling of earlier material from the book. In this case,
it is the Boylan imagery in other episodes and, most particularly, a repetition of Bloom’s
preoccupations that Joyce established on the later ‘Sirens’ draft. Nonetheless, the most
disturbing aspect of the fantasy—when Bloom ushers Boylan in for ‘a little private business with
your wife, you understand?’—first appears on the Rosenbach ‘Circe’ manuscript (U 526.17–
528.15; U-G 15.3756–816).4
The physical disposition of the text on these manuscript pages suggests that Joyce had already
written the scene somewhere else and that he continued to write it as he prepared the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript. The scene there is almost as it will appear in Ulysses, but some of
Joyce’s additions are significant. Bloom was already attired as a manservant on the Rosenbach
manuscript, but Joyce only gave him the telling ‘antlered head’ on which Boylan hangs his hat on
the episode’s seventh proof level,5 less than two months before Ulysses appeared. The next
exchange is also on the Rosenbach manuscript: Boylan tips Bloom and asks if Madam Tweedy is
still in her bath. Already on this version of the scene, Marion permits Bloom to observe, and
Boylan helps him get a good view: ‘(to Bloom over his shoulder) You can apply your eye to the
keyhole’.6 Joyce elaborated this aspect of the story on a now missing typescript page with this
later addition: ‘and play with yourself’. He further determined the scenario with yet another
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addition on the eighth proof level: ‘while I ^just^ go through ^her^ a few times’ (U
527.17–19; U-G 15.3787–9).7 On the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript Bloom simply thanks
Boylan, but as an addition there Joyce amplified Bloom’s solicitousness by having him provide
his rival with the accessories he requires.
Then, on a now missing typescript page, Joyce developed the scene in a new direction by having
Bloom make a further request: ‘May I bring two men chums to take a snapshot?’ (U 527.20–1; U-
G 15.3791–2),8 which he continued to expand on the seventh and eighth proof levels in
coordination with the other additions. Joyce had already written the scene in ‘Circe’ where the
barmaids from the Ormond also make their appearance, thereby reinforcing the connection with
the events and preoccupations in ‘Sirens’. Further enriching the fantasy, now Joyce makes them
witnesses to Boylan’s lovemaking as well. He had already written the couple’s fabulous orgasms
as they appear in Ulysses, as well as about Bloom’s excitement while watching the event, but on
the typescript Joyce further (p.262) exaggerated Bloom’s encouragement of Boylan when he
gives instructions to his friend with the camera:
BLOOM
(His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself.) Show! Hide! Show! ^Plough her!^ More!
^Shoot!^
(U 528.14–15; see U-G 15.3815–16)9
All in all, this entire scene says more about the continuing stylistic and thematic evolution of
‘Circe’ than it does about the sexual dynamics between Boylan and Molly, though there is still a
lot more to discover from Leopold and Molly’s different reactions to the affair once they are
home together.
Some impressions of Boylan in ‘Ithaca’
4. ‘Calypso’:
9. ‘Sirens’:
15. ‘Circe’:
17. ‘Ithaca’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Proto-draft NLI MS 13, pp. [7v]–[8r], [10r], [11r], and [14r]
August–Late October Faircopy for Rosenbach Blue MS II, pp. 26–8
1921 Typescript
As Leopold enters and then lies head to toe beside his wife in their marital bed in the early hours
of 17 June 1904, it is not surprising that the narrator ultimately turns to the topic of Boylan and
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Molly’s recent escapades there. It is often argued that ‘Circe’ is the climax of Ulysses, but what
is revealed about Leopold’s thoughts and actions in ‘Ithaca’ is the finale of Bloom’s day. As has
long been recognized, the information and sentiments in this episode are not to be taken at face
value. In fact, much like Molly’s thoughts in ‘Penelope’, which ought to be read with a clear
awareness of the episode’s stylistic lens, so too the representation of Bloom’s thoughts and
reactions in ‘Ithaca’ must be viewed critically, but for different reasons. Whereas it is a
particularly subjective bias that tinges the representation of Molly’s thoughts in ‘Penelope’,
readers must be wary of the narrator’s ostensible (p.263) objectivity in ‘Ithaca’, particularly
when it comes to such sensitive issues as Bloom’s feelings on the current and future state of his
marriage.
Many of the related questions and answers in ‘Ithaca’ about Boylan (especially what will become
U 683.01–685.15; U-G 17.2114–94) already appear in some form on the episode’s proto-draft,
but these fragmentary texts are only developed in a rudimentary fashion and are dispersed over
many, mostly unrelated pages. For example, on the proto-draft there is no transition from the
questions and answers about Bloom in his library to the ones that describe him lying next to
Molly. There he considers the physical sensations of the bed as well as the traces of its recent
foreign occupant. In the first question, the narrator bluntly asks: ‘What did his stretching limbs
feel?’.10 As usual, Joyce relied on his notes to fashion the various answers. On the one hand,
Bloom encounters the more tangible ‘warmth of her full body’ as well as the remains of ‘crumbs
& potted meat in bed’;11 ‘these he removed’.12 This leads directly to the next question: ‘Did he
like the warmth?’ and the banal answer that Joyce first wrote: ‘^<Yes> More^ if it had been
combined with a cool pillow’,13 which he recast in Ulysses at a later stage, as I will discuss more
fully. Joyce’s almost complete dependence on notes suggests that in their rudimentary state this
short cluster of questions and answers on the proto-draft was part of a new and still quite
dynamic storyline, which Joyce greatly expanded on subsequent manuscripts. In fact, another
note led him in an entirely different, more disturbing direction. Bloom then feels ‘The imprint of
a human form not his în bed^ ^male^’; this idea was inspired by the following note: ‘He feels
imprint of BB’.14 Boylan is always represented synecdochically, and here it is by means of the
physical and psychological impressions he has left in 7 Eccles Street. But in this case, unlike the
leftover flakes and crumbs that Bloom can more easily brush away, he will find this other
presence much more difficult to dispel from his bed and from his mind.
Not just the notes, but the questions and answers they prompted on the proto-draft are raw and
blunt. This is quite different from the more elaborate and dispassionate style in which they are
presented in the published episode. Rather than the more direct formulation in his notes—‘He
feels imprint of BB’—the questions and answers in Ulysses stylistically sanitize Bloom’s
psychological tribulations and mask the strong emotive force of scenes:
What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?
New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the
imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat,
recooked, which he removed.
(U 683.08–11; U-G 17.2122–5)
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7 Eccles Street
Joyce later added another question and answer about Bloom’s cautious ingress into the bed on
the facing page of the episode’s proto-draft. The narrator simply asks: ‘How did he enter?’ and
the resounding answer is ‘Prudently’, which is repeated (p.264) twice, so as ‘^not to disturb
her^’,15 but the following note indicates that Bloom had a more basic and pressing concern: that
‘She moves over in bed’,16 and so makes some room for him once again in their bed. On the one
hand, Bloom enters the bed prudently because he is aware that the ‘drooping serpents brass bed
quoits’ might wake his wife.17 This is both a caring gesture and presumably an effort to avoid
starting a conversation with her, which happens nonetheless. On the other hand, Bloom also
enters ‘Prudently always reverently’ because he is aware that ‘it was his bed in which she ——’.
At this stage, the idea simply ends with a long dash that leaves the point incomplete (or simply
unstated), but then in the margin Joyce tentatively rewrote the description of the bed as the one
in which Molly ‘had been conceived in Gibraltar in which her marriage had been consummated
and in which [blank space]’.18 Once again, Joyce left the rest of the line unfinished, with just a
blank space for the most recent adventure in the history of their bed. This is already quite
recognizable as a rudimentary form of the much expanded and nuanced version that appears in
Ulysses. While the bed itself was the primary focus of this question and answer on the episode’s
proto-draft, this evolved as Joyce rewrote the text on one or more missing manuscripts before it
appears on the Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ manuscript. By then, Joyce coupled Bloom’s prudence and
reverence with his ‘circumspection’ and ‘solicitude’ as he enters the bed ‘lightly, the less to
disturb’, but at this stage the narrator also fills out its various functions.19 In Ulysses, it is ‘the
bed of conception and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of breach of marriage, of
sleep and of death’ (emphasis added; see U 683.01–7; U-G 17.2114–21). Both stylistically and
conceptually, this answer is more balanced, but it clearly places the recent betrayal at its
fulcrum.
A few pages further on in the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft, the question, ‘He [Bloom] smiled?’, suddenly
appears without any logical or narrative connection to the text blocks around it.20 Nonetheless,
this very basic question and answer lead to what Hugh Kenner has called ‘the most famous list
in Ulysses’.21 Prompted by the note ‘Boylan thinks he’s the first’,22 Joyce wrote this initial
version of the answer: ‘It amused him that each man fancied himself the first to enter the breach
whereas he was the last of a series.’ Based on the final version of twenty-five purported lovers in
Ulysses, Kenner writes that Molly was ‘long regarded as a hardened adulteress, a misconception
which deprives Bloomsday of its special tang. Its conceptions were nearly forty years being
challenged’.23 Kenner then makes his own list of gallant men who worked doggedly since at
least 1959 to vindicate Molly’s reputation: Richard Ellmann, Robert M. Adams, and David
Hayman.24 Then, he concludes: ‘No, this is a list of past occasions for twinges of Bloomian
jealousy, and there is no ground for supposing that the hospitality of Molly’s bed has been
extended to anyone but her husband and Boylan.’25
(p.265) Joyce adumbrated an illuminating initial list of Molly’s purported lovers on the ‘Ithaca’
proto-draft that supports Kenner’s observations and provides a more ample ground for
understanding the context of the ‘Bloomian jealousy’ that some readers recognize when
confronted by the indecorous catalogue in Ulysses. It reads: ‘through Penrose, —— —— —— ——
Bloom, Holohan, Bodkin, Mulvey —— —— —— ——’ (see U 683.18–27; U-G 17.2132–42). This is
little more than a conceptual note that Joyce must have elaborated on one or more missing
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manuscripts before it next appears on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript,26 which is almost
how it appears in Ulysses. It is significant that already at this stage Joyce named Penrose first in
the series, especially since both Leopold and Molly make it clear that the weak-eyed young man
did little more than catch a momentary glimpse of her as she emerged half-dressed from the
bath.27 From the start, the list’s trajectory suggests that it was never intended as an accurate
enumeration of Molly’s lovers, few as they actually are. The list’s unreliability is confirmed by
the fact that his name is followed by four long dashes that are typical of Joyce’s writing
technique at particularly early stages of composition. They are merely reminders to fill in the
names later on. Conversely, it is surprising that Bloom’s name appears next here, since he is
excluded from the list in all the subsequent versions and most obviously in Ulysses. He is the one
member of the series that does not need to be included. Furthermore, while it seems clear why
Lieutenant Stanley Gardner’s name does not appear in the list—the narrator knows that Leopold
does not know about him28—Boylan’s name is noticeably absent from the list at this stage; this is
particularly puzzling since a note about him was probably the impetus for the entire question-
and-answer sequence.
Joyce continued the provisional collection of lovers with ‘Holohan’ and ‘Bodkin’, neither of whom
is included in the final version of the answer, and these names take the list in a decidedly
unexpected direction. Although they are simply stand-ins at this stage (not much different from
the dashes, since they too make their unnoticed exits before the litany of men appears in
Ulysses), they clarify Joyce’s ideas about the list in a way that is not evident in any other version
in manuscript or print. Presumably, the first man might be Hoppy Holohan, who is a recurring
character in Dubliners and even has a bit part in Ulysses. On the one hand, his name in this
context may suggest that Joyce had already determined that the list would include a few unlikely
Dubliners on whom the narrator wants to cast spurious suspicions that serve to impeach Molly’s
past. On the other hand, there is also ‘a gentleman named Holohan’ who was a minor figure in
Nora Barnacle’s Dublin life as well, and since the following two names are also closely tied to
Nora it seems clear that Joyce actually had this man in mind when he compiled this early version
of the list of Molly’s lovers. Joyce mentions this Holohan in a crucial 1909 letter from Dublin that
he wrote to Nora, who had remained in Trieste with their children: (p.266)
Is Georgie my son? The first night I slept with you in Zurich was October 11th and he was
born July 27th. That is nine months and 16 days. I remember that there was very little
blood that night. Were you fucked by anyone before you came to me? You told me that a
gentleman named Holohan (a good Catholic, of course, who makes his Easter duty
regularly) wanted to fuck you when you were in that hotel, using what they call a ‘French
letter[’]. Did he do so? Or did you allow him only to fondle you and feel you with his
hands?29
With this biographical context in mind, it would be difficult to think of a more revealing name for
Joyce to have used (even as a placeholder) in this prototype list of the men Molly stands accused
of having been with. Like many of the men in the list in Ulysses, this Holohan was simply
someone ‘who wanted to fuck’ Nora (emphasis added), the rest is all Joycean jealousy. Then the
name Bodkin also connects the list with the story of one of Nora’s first boyfriends. Much of what
we know about him comes from a transcription of the recollections of Molly’s ‘closest friend in
Galway’, Mary O’Holleran, that Richard Ellmann records in his biography:
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Nora knew another boy whom she was very fond of Michael (Sonny) Bodkin he was going
to University College here he was a very handsome young man with a beautiful head of
black wavy hair he was a great admirer of Nora but she was too young and afraid to be
seen with the boys.30
In a further biographical twist to the many ways in which Joyce creates the characters in his
fiction, Ellmann also notes that Nora told her sister that she was attracted to Joyce ‘because he
resembled Sonny Bodkin’.31 As is well known, this is the same Michael Bodkin who served in
part as the inspiration for Michael Furey in ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners. To fill out the pair of Nora’s
Galway lovers, Joyce also included Mulvey, who was indeed Molly Tweedy’s first lover in
Gibraltar, but as we find out in ‘Penelope’ they never shared a bed: ‘how did we finish it off yes
O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I
wouldnt let him touch me inside my petticoat’ (U 711.24–7; U-G 18.809–11).32
Then this name is followed by another series of four dashes, thereby indicating that Joyce
wanted the series to proceed as we read in Ulysses: ‘Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan and so each and on
to no last term’ (U 683.27; U-G 17.2141–2). The answer to this provocative question becomes
much more elaborate, hypothetical, and abstract in the next extant version, the Rosenbach
manuscript.33 By that stage, all the original suitors were dropped, except for Penrose, who still
leads the charge, and the number of Molly’s lovers has reached a staggering two dozen, ranging
from the generic ‘unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre’ to the much more troubling name
of Boylan (U 683.23–4; U-G 17.2137). Joyce must have compiled this unlikely cortège on one or
more missing manuscripts, but once they appear on the Rosenbach manuscript the list remains
virtually unchanged until Ulysses.
(p.267) Though they are in various different and much less-developed forms, many of the
following questions and answers in Ulysses are grouped together on yet another page of the
‘Ithaca’ proto-draft.34 Only here does Joyce confront the crucial question of Bloom’s attitude
towards Boylan after the events of the day. The question at this stage is straightforward: ‘How
did he think of Blazes?’ Calling him by his sobriquet may have just been shorthand for Joyce, or
else it was meant to indicate Bloom’s pointed attitude towards his rival. Regardless, it is elided
from Ulysses. Though rearranged and framed differently, the answer on the proto-draft is based
on a seemingly simple notesheet entry: ‘LB somewhat bored by men’s eyes on MB’.35 Joyce
renders this much more poetically on the proto-draft: ‘Often he had seen that light in men’s eyes
on her, first with alarm, then with understanding, then with desire, now with fatigue’,36 which is
surprisingly similar to how it appears in Ulysses, though it had undergone its telltale stylistic
overhaul by then (see U 684.01–5; U-G 17.2147–53).
In general, it is Bloom’s magnanimity that is most evident at this stage, just as it is in Ulysses.
Joyce’s conclusion about the day is that ‘It was not the end of the world’ and that ‘Theft, fraud,
murder, arson, cruelty to children were worse things’.37 But still another note prompted him to
take a different tack: ‘LB & BB duel, blackmail’.38 As Joyce continued to revise and add to this
simplistic scenario, the narrator has Bloom consider a duel with Boylan, but Bloom’s (and
Joyce’s) dislike of violence is manifest when Bloom instantly decides against it. He even briefly
entertains the possibility of divorce, but then reflects on his own role in the lovers’ triangle and
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drops the matter (see U 685.20–9; U-G 17.2200–9). His one true act of revenge on the proto-draft
is to emphatically call Boylan a ‘Billsticker!’.39
Whereas Bloom initially appears quite magnanimous on the proto-draft, Joyce assiduously made
his reaction more decisive and critical. At first, the narrator has him reflect that Boylan is ‘ône
of few,^ had right, was still young, not mean’. And, in a separate addition, Joyce framed how
Bloom initially appraises Boylan as a rival who is ‘Handsome, vigorous wellproportioned <but>
a smart business man but nothing more’.40 The fairness and equanimity of Leopold Bloom’s
opinion is to the fore in this version, but this slowly evolved to become the more complex answer
on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript:
What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and last occupant of
the bed?
Reflections on his vigour ^(a bounder)^, corporal proportion ^(a billsticker)^,

commercial ability ^(a bester)^, impressionability ^(a boaster)^.
(see U 683.28–31; U-G 17.2143–56)41
As is evident in this transcription, the transformation of the question and answer from the
episode’s proto-draft to its Rosenbach manuscript shows how Joyce emphasized the way in
which the narrator’s interpolations are meant to represent Bloom’s ambivalent reaction to
Boylan. Initially, the answer was objectively bland (p.268) and relatively positive, but the
coordinated additions make it highly ironic and judgmental. While this answer remained the
same, Joyce made a similar strategic change on its Rosenbach manuscript with another related
question:
With what ântagonistic^ sentiments were his subsequent reflections affected?
Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity.
(U 684.06–8; U-G 17.2154–5)42
Again we see how Joyce’s single addition made Bloom’s sentiments more negative. The reasons
for Bloom’s envy and jealousy were new to the Rosenbach manuscript and remained relatively
unchanged.
Also, in one of the many additions on the ‘Ithaca’ proto-draft that help to structure what became
this extended and multi-faceted series of questions and answers (see U 684.06–685.19; U-G
17.2154–99), Joyce noted that Boylan had been ‘a friend of 3 years standing 1901–1904’.43 Then,
another relatively late addition on the same page is the first explicit mention that the two men
have known one another ‘since meeting in Mesias’ ^[…] their common tailor^’. As the following
note makes clear, this was an idea Joyce had already decided on, but only found an opportunity
to include it in the life stories of the lovers’ triangle at this stage: ‘LB met BB at Mesias’.’44 On a
missing manuscript before the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, this became the answer to the
question of why Bloom felt ‘Abnegation’ about his current marital situation (see U 684.24–30; U-
G 17.2169–76).45 Although Joyce only included this idea in ‘Ithaca’ in 1921, he had set up the
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possibility of a correspondence between the men’s tailor and hatter two years earlier with a
coordinated set of additions (highlighted in the bold font here) that first appear on the ‘Sirens’
typescript for the Little Review:
a young gentleman, stylishly dressed in an indigoblue serge suit made by George

Robert Mesias, tailor and cutter, of number five Eden quay, and wearing a straw hat
very dressy, bought of John Plasto of number one Great Brunswick street, hatter.
(U 268.16–20; U-G 11.880–3)46
This is a telling example of the complex ways in which Joyce established correspondences over
many years on different documents for different episodes.47 In this case, Joyce dressed Bloom
with a hat from Plasto’s on the ‘Calypso’ Rosenbach manuscript in February 1918 (see U 55.04;
U-G 4.69–70),48 but he only first gave him a suit from Mesias’ on the intermediary ‘Circe’
manuscript by the end of 1920 (p.269) (U 450.10–11; U-G 15.1301–2).49 Then he continued to
reinforce the common connection between the men throughout Ulysses for the next two years.
The climax of the question-and-answer sequence about Boylan in ‘Ithaca’ comes a few pages
earlier on the proto-draft,50 when in answer to the most basic of all questions—‘What?’—Joyce
describes Bloom kissing ‘Her rump, plump melons’ (as Joyce has it in his note) and ‘on each in
their furrow then lastly because beauty is equal in every part her hole behind’ (see U 686.24–7;
U-G 17.2240–3).51 What follows in Ulysses, Molly’s questioning of Bloom’s activities that day and
his replies, is not present on the episode’s proto-draft. Instead, Molly stirs, Bloom recovers her
nightdress, as well as the sheet, the blanket, and the bedspread, and then, surprisingly, after all
that has happened, he thinks to himself: ‘It was the end of a perfect day’.52 Of course, this
formula does appear in Ulysses (see U 680.23; U-G 17.2071: ‘What imperfections in a perfect day
did Bloom […]’), but in that context it certainly seems to be a stylized ironic statement. If this
declaration had appeared on an earlier manuscript (one that preceded the stark psychological
and emotional transformations that Ulysses underwent as Joyce wrote ‘Circe’ in 1920), it would
not have been that surprising. In fact, I presume that Joyce was transcribing this scene verbatim
from an earlier missing version of this question and answer, but the idea that Joyce allowed this
assertion to stand on the extant proto-draft in 1921 is unusual. In this way, the proto-draft of
‘Ithaca’ is a remarkable snapshot of the persistence of some older ideas as Joyce was
substantially transforming this all-encompassing late episode, and so the book.
Molly fleshes out Boylan in ‘Penelope’

Manuscript:
18. ‘Penelope’:
Spring–Summer 1921 Early Draft NLI MS 14, pp. [1r]–[2r], [3r]–[5r], [8r], [11r]–
[12r], and [13v]–[16r]
July–Mid-September Faircopy for Rosenbach MS, pp. [1v]–7, 9–10, 14–15, and 20
1921 Typescript & Buffalo MS 22, f. 1
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Manuscript:
18. ‘Penelope’:
16 August–Mid- Typescript Huntington TS, pp. 4, 6, and 11
October 1921
17–Late October First Proof Level Harvard Pl C.i
1921
2–Early November Second Proof Level Harvard Pl D.ii.a
1921
15–Mid-November Third Proof Level Harvard Pl A.iii.a & Harvard Pl D.iii.b
1921
24–Late November Fourth Proof Level Harvard Pl D.iv
1921
If Boylan is represented as a flat and caricatured figure up to this point in Ulysses, readers
might expect Molly to provide a more personal and rounded perspective on (p.270) her lover in
‘Penelope’. Though she does reveal much that readers would not know otherwise about him, she
too is merely another mediating figure in the narrative representation of Hugh E. ‘Blazes’
Boylan. Her husband is the first thing on Molly’s mind at the start of the episode, but thoughts
about Boylan crop up quite early and reoccur sporadically throughout, often triggered by
unexpected associations that are anchored in the way in which Joyce wrote the episode. Molly’s
thoughts characteristically go from one subject to another, but, unsurprisingly when it comes to
Boylan in particular, most of them have to do with sex. Significantly, Joyce has three of the
episode’s final eight ‘sentences’ start with her thoughts about Boylan and two of those end with
thoughts about her Poldy. In fact, Joyce often establishes an overt oscillation between her
thoughts about her husband and her lover.
At the start of the episode on the ‘Penelope’ draft, her thoughts go from Bloom’s supposed
infidelity, ‘yes because he couldn’t do without it that long ^so he must do it somewhere^’, to
her thoughts about the couple’s sex life together. Then she remembers their last night of
lovemaking and inevitably thinks of the start of her most recent affair:
and the last time he [Bloom] came on my bottom was the night Boylan ^<was squeezing
my hand> gave my hand a great squeeze^ singing the young May moon she’s beaming
love going along by the Tolka with the full moon because he has an idea about him and me
in any case God knows he’s a change in a way not to be always doing that ^wearing the
same old hat^
(see U 692.11–18; U-G 18.77–84)53
Although it is not possible to know which version Joyce wrote first, this is an exact reprise of
Bloom’s memory in ‘Lestrygonians’ of the night Molly and Boylan first signalled their passion to
one another (U 159.25–9; U-G 8.587–91).54 By mid-1918, Joyce had certainly written the
‘Lestrygonians’ version of the lovers touching hands during a moonlight stroll, which was three
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years before he wrote Molly’s version of the scene in ‘Penelope’. Like all the details of the
proposal on Howth that both Leopold and Molly recall in exactly the same way as well, the
description of that night with Boylan never changed in any of its particulars over the many years
Joyce elaborated it. In fact, both the husband and wife’s memories of the lovers’ first approach
were always the same from the first extant version of the scene; for example, the setting by the
Tolka, the full moon, the song, and the clasping of hands. Given the delicate nature of this
experience, this is the most unsettling of the couple’s shared memories in Ulysses. Many reasons
could account for the possibility that their recollections of the events that night would be almost
identical, even though it is quite unlikely that they would have discussed it with one another in
such similar and specific terms. Therefore, it seems more relevant to consider the repetition of
so many specific details as one of the many different forms of textual memory that Joyce
explores as an experimental mode of representing (p.271) intersubjectivity in Ulysses. This is
also one of the ways Joyce makes scenes like this resonate so clearly for readers.
Bloom’s at least passive complicity in facilitating the affair is also a well-established fact on the
episode’s draft. Here Molly thinks: ‘because he has an idea about him and me’, and later in the
episode she also thinks that the reason he sent Milly to Mullingar was ‘on account of me &
Boylan that’s why he did it I’m sure the way he plots and plans everything out’ (see U 692.15
and 716.30–1; U-G 18.81 and 18.1007–9).55 But there are also some new elements in Molly’s
version of the scene on the episode’s draft that Joyce continued to elaborate on subsequent
manuscripts. For example, Molly later reveals something that Bloom did not see. Only she knows
what happened between the lovers as they grasped each other’s hands: ‘Î just pressed the
back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back^’ (U 692.13–14; U-G 18.79–80).56 While
Joyce strove to emphasize a correspondence between the couple’s memories of that night, he
also took the opportunity to elaborate Molly’s own perspective of the affair in ‘Penelope’.
Correspondingly, he also added her ideas about finding a younger man on the episode’s
Rosenbach manuscript: ‘ûnless I paid some ^nicelooking^ boy to do it since I can’t do it
myself a young boy would like me I’d confuse him a little looking at him^’ (see U 692.18–20; U-G
18.84–6),57 which was based on the following explicit note: ‘pay boy to fuck her’.58
The transition in Molly’s thoughts from sex in general to her first encounter with Boylan is
already a set pattern on the episode’s draft. She thinks that there is ‘no satisfaction în it^
^pretending to come^ ^for the woman having to finish it herself^ anyhow it’s done now with all
the talk of the world about it people make ît’s only the first time after that its just
ordinary^’ (U 692.32–5; U-G 18.98–101), which continues directly with: ‘I wonder is he [Boylan]
awake’ (U 693.21; U-G 18.124).59 The transcript shows how Joyce created Molly’s thoughts here
in a convoluted and piecemeal manner with multiple separate additions that he wove into the
distinctive representation of the flow of her thoughts in ‘Penelope’. Although clear and simple on
the draft, Joyce continued to refine and elaborate the complex ways in which Molly’s thoughts
move from one subject to another. It started off with the idea that men in general get all the
pleasure from lovemaking and her admission that the adultery is ‘done now’. But, as he revised
these few lines, Joyce focused on Molly’s feelings about sex with two separate but related
additions: ‘pretending to come’ and ‘for the woman having to finish it herself’. The following
note inspired the latter addition: ‘MB finish it herself’,60 and, while the note was specifically
about Molly, Joyce has her comment refer to all women.
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In Ulysses, it seems that this line of thought ends with Molly’s self-justification of her adultery
—‘its only the first time after that its just the ordinary’—only to go on to another topic. But the
creative process reveals a different trajectory. This line was in fact an addition to a much longer
addition on the episode’s draft that was specifically about Molly’s desire to kiss any other man,61
which is how her thoughts (p.272) continue in the book. But once Joyce integrated the various
additional fragments he had written into a unified text, the aside can be read specifically as her
defence of her adultery with Boylan, rather than as a statement of her more simple and general
desire to kiss a stranger, which was probably based on a much less sexualized and more general
idea: ‘openly kiss man friends’.62
The episode’s style encourages readers to follow the many possible ways in which Molly’s
meandering thoughts blend into one another. Correspondingly, the manuscripts reveal how
Joyce’s conception of her thoughts creates the possible networks of association for the reader to
discover in the text. He continued to amplify the stories with further additions. Also on the
Rosenbach manuscript, he has Molly think: ‘I wish some man or other would take me sometime
when he’s [Bloom is] there and kiss me in his arms’,63 which was based on the clear but
unpoetic note: ‘wish some man wd [would] kiss me in his [presumably Bloom’s] presence’.64
Then, the following clipped note suggested a further elaborate addition on the typescript: ‘hot
paralysis Kiss’ that became ‘there’s nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost
paralyses you’ (see U 693.02–3; U-G 18.105–6).65
Returning to the storyline on the draft, Molly next wonders whether Boylan might also be awake
at that late hour, but she knows the answer: ‘I suppose not because ^he had all he could do to
keep himself from falling asleep after the potted meat sandwiches and that claret yes
because^’ (see U 693.27–8; U-G 18.131–2).66 This line of thought was partly based on Joyce’s
plan that Molly would ask herself: ‘was I in it (dream)’,67 which he may have combined with a
more prosaic note—‘Is he thinking of me?68—as well as the more generic comment that ‘he
smelt of some kind of drink’.69 Joyce used all of these notes to fill in the intervening ideas that
float through Molly’s mind. In fact, he continued to interrupt the flow of Molly’s thoughts with
other disparate ideas, usually based on his storehouse of notes. It is often astounding to follow
the different things Joyce manages to achieve with what appear to be such ordinary building
blocks.
Then, on a missing document before the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce added several lines that
serve to introduce Molly’s question about whether Boylan might be awake, and they too were
based on previously unrelated notes that happen to be near one another on a notesheet: ‘I
wonder was he satisfied’ and ‘1 thing I didn’t like the way he slapped me behind going away I’m
not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking of his father’s’.70 Joyce incorporated both
these notes almost verbatim and did not change them afterwards. However, when he
transformed the latter note into the text he tempered Molly’s indignation by having her reveal
that at the time she ‘laughed’ it off (see U 693.19–21; U-G 18.121–4). Boylan’s slap crudely
objectifies Molly, turning the tables on the way in which he is usually represented as a
composite of objects: for example, his straw hat and shoes. His vulgar gesture not only reveals a
cruder side to his already disreputable characterization, (p.273) but also effectively reinforces
the rumours that the narrator of ‘Cyclops’ revealed earlier in Ulysses. It seems almost everyone
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in Ulysses knows about Dirty Dan Boylan’s business tricks (U 306.13–19; U-G 12.996–1002); that
is also an integral part of who Boylan is in the book.
Molly’s thoughts on the ‘Penelope’ draft remain focused on Boylan’s sexual potency: ‘he must
have come three or four times in me with that tremendous big brute of a thing he has like iron
or some kind of a thick bar standing all the time’ (see U 695.03–4/694.02–3; U-G 18.143–8).71 We
only have Molly’s quite vivid description of the sex scene, and Joyce built up her version from
various notes he had stored away; for example, ‘BB 4th. time’ and ‘Big one he has’.72 Although
Joyce dropped the telling fact that she had let Boylan ‘come three or four times in
me’ (emphasis added) by the time the line next appears on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript,
he nonetheless continued to add to the erotic imagery on its draft,73 and again Joyce found the
prompt in a note in a different repository: ‘BB’s prick imagined vein was going to burst’,74 which
is clearly recognizable in the text of Ulysses. Nonetheless, Joyce’s notes are often more explicit
than what wrote for the published, public work. He continued to add to Molly’s thoughts about
the encounter on the episode’s later manuscripts as well.75 With an addition on the Rosenbach
manuscript, Molly comments that ‘he hasn’t such an amount of spunk in him ^when I made him
pull out and do it on me^ considering how big it is’ (see U 694.09–11; U-G 18.154–6),76 but on a
missing intermediary manuscript Joyce had already added the revealing fact that ‘the last time I
let him finish it in me’ in this telling (emphasis added; U 694.11–12; U-G 18.156–7).
Molly’s revelations continue on the episode’s draft like this: ‘^<because> no^ I never in all my
life felt anyone had one ^<like> the size of^ that ^to make you feel so full^’.77 These thoughts
about Boylan lead Molly to think about men in general: ‘like a Stallion driving it up into you
^because that’s all they want out of you^ ^with that ^determined^ vicious look in his
eye^’ (see U 694.04–8; U-G 18.149–53).78 The last addition was inspired by the following note,
though it is not at all clear whether it was meant to be about Boylan or some other man Molly
thinks about in ‘Penelope’: ‘vicious glint in his eye’.79 Joyce continued to make the scene even
more critical and general based on his notes; for example: ‘making us with a big hole like that in
us’.80 Then in Ulysses her thoughts trail off to what she put up with in childbirth, which makes
her think of Mina Purefoy and her many children. Next Molly thinks, ‘supposing I risked having
another not off him [Boylan] though (p.274) still if he was married Im sure hed have a fine
strong child but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him’ (U 694.21–3; U-G 18.166–8). Molly’s
thoughts may have been related to the following note: ‘Prefer child of his by other woman (not
risk her womb)’.81 These thoughts about Boylan’s relative merits bring the episode’s first
‘sentence’ full circle and back to her thoughts about her husband. Notwithstanding the fact that
Bloom in the end usually comes out the winner in Molly’s comparisons, the oscillation of her
opinions about other people and things more generally is one of hallmarks of the episode’s style
and so of the representation of her character in Ulysses.
Although still part of the first ‘sentence’ on the ‘Penelope’ draft, by the time he wrote the
Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce pointedly started the new second ‘sentence’ with Molly’s thoughts
about Boylan: ‘they’re all so different Boylan talking about my foot now how did that excite
him’ (see U 696.28–9; U-G 18.246–7).82 This idea was clearly prompted by the following note:
‘How did my foot excite him?’.83 As usual, the third-person pronoun in the note does not make it
clear if it was meant to refer to Boylan when Joyce took it, especially since according to Molly
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her husband is more of a fetishist than her lover. The principal storyline was about how she
attracted Boylan’s attention with her seductive shoes, but initially Joyce did not specify where or
when this flirtatious encounter took place. He only added the details that make it Molly’s
earliest memory of Boylan later with a series of interrelated additions on the Rosenbach
manuscript. For example, the first time she remembers seeing and being seen by him was in the
Dublin Bakery Company with his two sisters: ‘even before he was introduced when I was in the
D.B.C. with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was wiggling my foot and him looking when I
stood up and <went out>’ (see U 696.29–32; U-G 18.247–50).84 The fact that Molly was teasing
Boylan with her tight shoes at that first encounter is also part of another addition on the
episode’s Rosenbach manuscript: ‘because I was crossing them when we were in the other
room’,85 but Joyce only added the telling detail that Molly was actively pursuing Boylan on its
third proof level: ‘I went there for tea 2 days after in the hope but he wasnt’ (U 697.02–4; U-G
18.258–60).86
Boylan slips from Molly’s thoughts for about a hundred lines, but returns surely enough. As she
thinks of the heartfelt night Bloom kissed her sixteen years ago, she criticizes him as well. As an
addition that first appears on the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce has Molly think, ‘but he [Bloom]
never knew how to embrace well like Gardner’ (U 699.01–2; U-G 18.331–2).87 Memories of her
previous lover prompt her to think of her current one: ‘I hope hell [Boylan will] come on Monday
as he said at the same time four’ (U 699.03–4; U-G 18.332–3). The gist of the idea was on the
‘Penelope’ draft,88 but, like the comment about Gardner, Joyce only specified the time when
Boylan arrived at 7 Eccles Street on a missing intermediary manuscript, presumably based on
the following generic note: ‘She likes person (p.275) comes always same hour’.89 This makes
Molly think about her upcoming tour to Belfast with Boylan as her manager and companion. The
flow of her thoughts on the episode’s draft was primarily focused on what she will get out of it
from Boylan, but Joyce embedded various different storylines within it as he expanded this
reverie on several documents. He first returned to the issue of Boylan’s arrival ‘at four’ as an
addition on the draft. Molly thinks to herself: ‘I knew his knock must have been a bit late
because it was after 3 when I saw Dedaluses coming from school when I threw the penny to that
old sailor <and I hadn’t even [changed]>’ (see U 699.14–17; U-G 18.343–6).90
Afterwards, Joyce made a significant number of additions on one or more missing documents
that first appear on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript,91 many of which are based on notes.
As a new opening segue, Molly recalls that ‘I was just beginning to yawn with nerves’ (U 699.12–
13; U-G 18.341–2). A typically ambivalent note is probably the source of this addition: ‘yawning
nerves Mulvey’.92 It could either refer to Molly’s reaction to her first lover, or may have been
intended as one of Mulvey’s amorous ticks. Either way, the other man is dropped from the story
completely, and it becomes a revelation about Molly’s nerves as she waits for her current lover.
Joyce also specified Molly’s version of Boylan’s telltale knock based on another note: ‘his
tattarattat’.93 This further intertwines her impressions with Bloom’s more angst-filled imagined
version of the scene in ‘Sirens’: ‘with a loud proud knocker with a cock carracarracarra cock.
Cockcock’ (U 271.10–11; U-G 11.983–4). Joyce also added just a few bits of information about
how Molly preened herself for her lover’s arrival, but significantly expanded her thoughts about
the trip to Belfast ‘this day week’; that is Thursday, 23 June 1904. She is relieved that
‘^<Poldy> he’ has to go to Ennis so he cannot spoil her plans with Boylan.94 On the Rosenbach
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manuscript, she thinks that ‘it wouldn’t be pleasant if he did [go to Belfast] suppose our rooms
at the hotel were beside each other and any fooling went on’ (see U 699.20–2; U-G 18.350–1).95
Molly’s thoughts became even more revealing as Joyce elaborated the scene on a missing
manuscript: ‘I couldnt tell him [Bloom] to stop and not bother me with him [Boylan] in the next
room’ (U 699.22–3; U-G 18.352–3). She knows that this would have serious consequences: ‘then
he’d [Boylan would] never believe the next day we didn’t do something it’s all very well a
husband but you can’t fool a lover after me telling him we never did anything’ (see U
699.24–6; U-G 18.354–6).96 Joyce stored away this bit of wisdom in one of his notes for Molly as
well: ‘Can’t hide thing from lover’.97
Nonetheless, many of the other elements about the story of the concert tour to Belfast are
already set on the ‘Penelope’ draft as well, including Molly’s more (p.276) mercenary interest
in Boylan: ‘he can buy me a nice present up in Belfast ^they’ve lovely under linen up there^
êxciting^ or cd [could] go round shopping with him ôr a nice one of those kimonos^ he has
plenty of money’ (see U 700.36–701.07; U-G 18.404–11).98 The details of Molly’s explicit plans of
using Boylan for her benefit clarifies what she is reported to have asked Bloom in ‘Calypso’: ‘Is
that Boylan well off?’ (U 67.14; U-G 4.527–8). With the basic elements of this storyline set in
place, once again Joyce added context to further frame the scene on a missing intermediary
manuscript: ‘^his father made his money over selling the horses for the cavalry well he could^
buy me a nice present up in Belfast âfter what I gave him^’ (see U 700.35–7; U-G 18.403–4).99
But Molly’s concern with how Boylan feels about her is more explicit on the episode’s draft: ‘if I
cd [could] find out whether he loves me or not’.100 In Ulysses, she just wants to know whether
he ‘likes me’ (U 701.08–9; U-G 18.412–13). As usual Joyce built Molly’s complaints about
Boylan’s size and vigour in bed on several manuscripts from a variety of notes in different
notebooks: ‘BB’s weight, prick tore her’,101 ‘hips scrooching into me’, and ‘hairy chest’;102 all of
which become ‘^<lying> scrooching^ down on me like that all the time with his big hipbones
he’s heavy too with his hairy chest for this heat’ (see U 700.10–12; U-G 18.415–16).103
What became ‘sentence’ three in Ulysses is framed by Molly’s erotic memory of her afternoon of
lovemaking with Boylan. Already on the draft, it began and ended and was centred on the most
carnal scenes in the book, though Joyce pointedly strove to balance Molly’s thoughts with other
memories of her life as a mother and wife. It started exactly as it appears in print: ‘he made
them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to
laugh’ (U 704.19–20; U-G 18.535–6).104 As in Ulysses, she also thinks ‘I’ll get him to keep that
up’, and then her thoughts move on to memories of when she was breastfeeding (see U 704.21;
U-G 18.537). He added all of Molly’s intervening thoughts and memories on later manuscripts,
and thereby purposely disrupted the links between Molly’s thoughts about Boylan on the draft.
Looking at her breasts, she thinks: ‘this one not so much there’s the mark of his [Boylan’s] teeth
still where he tried to bite the nipple I had to scream out aren’t they fearful trying to hurt
you’ (see U 705.15–17; U-G 18.568–70).105 Joyce presumably added this to counterbalance her
more pleasant thoughts on the episode’s draft about how ‘the skin feels much smoother O much
an hour he was at them by the clock’.106 In all the versions, Molly’s thoughts about Boylan’s
interest in her ‘titties’ alternate with thoughts of being a wife and mother, but Joyce only
pointedly connected them with an addition about Boylan on the episode’s final proof level: ‘like
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some kind of a big infant I had at me they want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those
men get out of a woman’ (U 705.29–30; U-G 18.582–3).107
(p.277) Like the start of this ‘sentence’, its finale is almost exactly as it appears in Ulysses on
the episode’s draft, though Joyce continued to add significant phrases. The words in bold font
here are the full extent of what he wrote first. He added everything else (usually as disconnected
fragments) in the margin or on the facing page of the draft:
I can feel his mouth O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here ^now
someone to let yrself go with^ Î’ll try to dream it^ when he made me ^<come>
spend^ the 2nd time ^tickling^ his finger in my hole behind Î was coming for about
5 minutes I had to hug him after O Lord^ ^God I wanted to shout out all sorts of things
^<fuck> shit^ ^who knows the way he’d take it they’re not all like Poldy^ Î noticed the
contrast when he … … …^ I want to know a man better though^ Î gave my eyes that
look with my hair a bit loose at the moment and my tongue just between my lips^ Friday
one Saturday two O Lord I cant wait till Monday
(see U 705.30–706.04; U-G 18.584–95)108
Many of these various additions on the draft can be traced to Joyce’s disparate notes: ‘MB
stretches at the thought’,109 ‘Dreams BB in her bed’,110 ‘MB wants to say. “Fuck” ’,111 and the
‘way he takes it’.112 Nonetheless, these additions show how Joyce strove to have Molly think of
her husband even in the midst of her most sensual memories of Boylan, though Bloom often
reappears in a negative light. On a missing document before the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’
manuscript, Joyce added ‘theyre not all like him [Bloom] thank God’ and also elaborated the
contrast between her lovers: ‘he [Boylan] does it and doesnt talk’ (U 705.37–706.02; U-G 18.591–
2).113
Molly’s thoughts return sporadically to her erotic encounter that day. As she is about to relieve
herself (and ‘sentence’ seven is about to end), Molly has the pleasant thought that ‘I bet he
never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are the smoothest place is right
there’ (U 720.14–16; U-G 18.1144–6), which is another addition Joyce made on a missing
intermediary manuscript between the draft and its Rosenbach manuscript.114 Other thoughts
occupy Molly in ‘sentence’ seven, but Boylan makes a tangential appearance when she criticizes
Poldy: ‘he’s such a born liar too no he wouldn’t have the courage with a married woman that’s
why he wants me and Boylan I suppose’ (see U 723.09–10; U-G 18.1253–4), which Joyce wrote
almost exactly as it appears in Ulysses on the early draft.115 This candid revelation may have
been prompted by the even more explicit idea that ‘LB couldn’t adulter go gets BB to do it’.116
This absolutely fundamental note illuminates the subtext of the adultery plotline in Ulysses and
Joyce’s ideas about his characters’ motivations in ways that are only implicit in the published
work.
(p.278) Already by the time Joyce wrote the episode’s draft he had determined that Molly’s
thoughts would return to Boylan’s offensive whack, thereby emphasizing the circularity of her
thoughts in ‘Penelope’. There she thinks about him ‘Slapping us behind like that ôn my
bottom^’ (see U 726.08; U-G 18.1369),117 but at that stage he had her provide a self-serving
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excuse for his disrespectful behaviour: ‘its because they were so plump and tempting in my
short petticoat they excite me a bit sometimes’ (U 726.22–3; U-G 18.1378–9). Joyce added
everything in between these thoughts on several different manuscripts. Although later Joyce
added that ‘he [Boylan] couldn’t resist’ on a missing manuscript,118 he had already decided to
complicate Molly’s views as he revised the ‘Penelope’ draft. He added a new opening to the
‘sentence’ there that immediately changes the tone of her recollection—‘no that’s no way’—and
continued the extended process of elaborating her criticisms with a relatively long addition on
the facing page: ‘has he no refinement nor no delicacy în him^’.119 In another addition, he has
her think: ‘that’s what you get for letting them get too familiar’ (see U 726.07; U-G 18.1368),120
which became ‘thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place’ on the faircopy
manuscript and then never changed again (U 726.10; U-G 18.1371).121 But, with other additions
on the episode’s second proof level, Joyce made sure that the reader would presume that Boylan
did not need much encouragement to act the way he did. For example, Molly pictures him
‘standing out that vulgar way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired’ and ‘sure you might
as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something better to say an old lion
would’ (U 726.12–13 and 20–2; U-G 18.1373–4 and 18.1377–8).122
Joyce continued to intensify Molly’s criticisms of Boylan in these lines as he revised the
episode’s later proofs as well. Joyce has her call him ‘the ignoramus’ on its third proof level, and
he has her comment that he ‘doesnt know poetry from a cabbage’ on the fourth.123 Joyce only
provided Molly with the reason why Boylan slapped her bottom on the final proof level: it seems
it was ‘because I didnt call him Hugh’ (U 726.09–11; U-G 18.1369–71).124 The addition of this
specific bit of information is transformative. In effect, by assigning a motive and so making his
slap a reaction to something Molly said, Joyce completely altered the scene and the reader’s
perception of Boylan. Whereas, previously, the spanking could have been interpreted as
demeaning, provocative, or just flirtatious, now we read that he was responding to what he
considered to be a personal slight against him, an insult that he probably did not expect or
particularly appreciate after their pleasurable liaison. With this addition, presumably Molly
becomes the only person who calls him Blazes to his face in Ulysses. Although Joyce added it
quite late, the context he supplied for Boylan’s rude gesture gives the lover more depth of
character than anything else we are told about his emotional range in the book. Nonetheless, if
it was meant at least in part to condone his action, at the same time Joyce continued to further
elaborate (p.279) aspects of Boylan’s ill-mannered persona by having Molly recall that he was
‘pulling off his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so barefaced without even
asking permission’ (U 726.11–12; U-G 18.1372–3). As he continued to formulate the lovers’
dynamics, Molly’s (and so the reader’s) perspective on Boylan is made that much more
equivocal, which is the point of his representation in Ulysses.
At the end of the episode and so the book, Molly’s thoughts about her lover are intertwined with
thoughts about her husband and the repercussions of her affair. As elsewhere, her thoughts
about Poldy are already ambivalent on the episode’s draft. On the one hand, she thinks, ‘I’ll just
give him [Poldy] one more chance first I’ll get up early in the morning’, but on the other, she
threatens to ‘throw him up his eggs and tea’ (see U 729.25–32; U-G 18.1497–505).125 Then she
plots:
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I know what I’ll do I’ll go about rather gay singing a bit now and again then I’ll start
dressing myself I’ll put on my best shift & drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that
to make him stand I’ll let him know if that’s what he wanted that his wife is fucked O
damn well fucked ^too^ not by him four or five times running
(see U 729.33–730.02; U-G 18.1506–12)126
Molly had already thought of the number of times she and Boylan had ‘fucked’ that afternoon,
and in Ulysses this is a direct echo of this spiteful outburst, but the manuscript record shows
that Joyce wrote that tally after he had written this version at the end of the episode. In the
midst of her criticisms of other women, Molly thinks of their lovemaking: ‘let them get a
husband first thats fit to be looked at and a daughter like mine or see if they can excite a swell
with money that can pick and choose whoever he wants like Boylan to do it ^<5 or 6> 4 or 5^
times locked in each others arms’ (U 713.29–32; U-G 18.892–5). None of this was on the
‘Penelope’ draft and it first appears on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.127 The changes in
tallies in these related commemorations are also directly linked, though Joyce ended up
swapping the numbers around. It went from ‘5 or 6’ to ‘4 or 5’ in the earlier count on the
episode’s first proof level, and conversely from ‘4 or 5’ to ‘5 or 6’ in the later one on its second
proof level.128 It seems that at one point they were to match, but Joyce decided it would be
better to have Molly exaggerate her boast when it came to thoughts about informing her
husband of it. Joyce continued to make coordinated additions on the early draft. On the one
hand, he has Molly proclaim that ‘it’s all his [Bloom’s] own fault if I’m an adulteress prove him
right’ (see U 730.05–6; U-G 18.1516),129 though Joyce decided to delete the telling last phrase
on the next version and so in Ulysses. There it reads: ‘serve him right its all his own fault if I am
an adulteress’, which can be traced to one of the earliest notebooks Joyce compiled for Ulysses
in 1918: ‘adulteress all his own fault serves him right’.130
(p.280) This demonstrates the early and determining role of the adultery plotline as well as its
intrinsic dependence on the primary structural foundation of the book: the love story of the
Blooms that Joyce was also writing in 1918. Like Penelope, Joyce weaves and unweaves Molly’s
oscillating recollections of her lover and her husband, but with the final ‘Yes’ of Ulysses he
leaves the reader with the timeless kiss that Leopold and Molly share on Howth Hill sixteen
years before Bloomsday: a transformative event in the characters’ genesis that cyclically
connects new beginnings and open endings in the process of becoming the Blooms.
Coda
While the three intersecting timeframes of the book ultimately conclude on its last pages—the
lovers’ first assignation has happened, the 16th has become the 17th of June, and the stories as
well as the characters’ recollections about them have ended—there will always be more to
explore in the book and the manuscripts that produced it, and so our understanding of Joyce’s
masterpiece will continue to evolve as long as we read Ulysses. In other words, while the
fictional lives of the characters came to an end when Joyce stopped writing Ulysses, the life of
the book will continue endlessly for its readers. In Becoming the Blooms, I followed just one path
through the critical terrain of Ulysses, but there is much more to uncover in the vast canvas of
its documentary and textual history, and many other approaches will certainly be deployed to
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unravel the complexities of the book. Taking a step back from the details I have discussed here,
my research will follow some of the various patterns of composition and storytelling in Ulysses
that genetic criticism also makes evident.
Notes:
(2) In his late chronology, Joyce just noted ‘LB Freeman: Eccles St’ for 1903 and ‘Milly
Mullingar’ for 1904 (NLI NB 5B, p. [10v]).
(3) NLI MS 12, p. [19r].
(4) Rosenbach ‘Circe’ MS, ff. 62–62a.
(6) Rosenbach ‘Circe’ MS, f. 62a.
(7) Texas PP 33.1; see JJA 26: 273.
(8) See ‘B.B to LB – snapshot’ (NLI NB 5B, p. [11v]).
(9) Buffalo TS 13.h, p. [21r]; see JJA 15: 269.
(10) NLI MS 13, p. [8r].
(11) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 14.12.
(12) NLI MS 13, p. [8r].
(13) NLI MS 13, p. [8r] and see BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 14.11.
(15) NLI MS 13, pp. [7v]–[8r].
(18) NLI MS 13, p. [7v] and see ‘Hist. [History] of LB’s bed. Molly conceived there’ (BL ‘Ithaca’
NS 2.58).
(20) NLI MS 13, p. [11r].
(21) Kenner, ‘Ulysses’, 142.
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(24) Kenner, ‘Ulysses’, 144, note 1.
(26) See Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS II, p. 27.
(27) I discuss the Penrose incident more fully in ‘ “Happy. Happier then” ’ in Chapter 6.
(28) I discuss Molly’s only other real extramarital affair in ‘Molly Takes a Lover: Lieutenant
Stanley Gardner’ in Chapter 7.
(29) Joyce to Nora Barnacle Joyce; 7 August 1909; SL 158.
(30) Ellmann, James Joyce, 158.
(31) Ellmann, James Joyce, 243.
(32) I discuss her Gibraltar courtship in ‘Molly’s First Lover: Lieutenant Harry Mulvey’ in
Chapter 4.
(34) NLI MS 13, p. [14r].
(36) NLI MS 13, p. [14r].
(37) NLI MS 13, p. [14r].
(39) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 15.58.
(43) NLI MS 13, p. [14r].
(45) See Rosenbach ‘Ithaca’ Blue MS II, p. 28.
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(47) Joyce radically altered this sentence from the episode’s collateral Rosenbach manuscript to
the typescript (Buffalo TS 9, p. [16r]; see JJA 13: 73), but its Rosenbach version is revealing
nonetheless. Furthermore, although Joyce decided not to include this information in Ulysses, on
the Rosenbach ‘Sirens’ manuscript it is clear that Joyce thought of Boylan as being younger than
Molly. He is described as ‘a young stylishly dressed în blue^ gentleman wearing a straw hat of
a blond complexion, age about thirty years’ (emphasis added; f. 30).
(49) NLI MS 12, p. [6v].
(50) NLI MS 13, p. [10r].
(51) BL ‘Ithaca’ NS 14.43 and NLI MS 13, p. [10r].
(52) NLI MS 13, p. [10r].
(53) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 14, p. [1r].
(54) I discuss Molly and Boylan’s first encounter in ‘Darker Thoughts of Blazes Boylan in
“Lestrygonians” ’ in Chapter 2 and elsewhere.
(55) NLI MS 14, pp. [1r] and [8r].
(58) NLI NB 5A, p. [17v].
(59) NLI MS 14, p. [2r].
(61) NLI MS 14, p. [1v].
(64) NLI NB 4, p. [11v].
(65) NLI NB 4, p. [9r] and Huntington TS, p. 4; see JJA 16: 302.
(66) NLI MS 14, p. [2r].
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(70) BL ‘Penelope’ NS 5.36 and 5.42–4, respectively.
(71) Simplified transcription; NLI MS 14, p. [2r]. These lines were misplaced by the printers for
the first edition of Ulysses, but the error is not recorded in the Historical Collation in UCSE.
(72) BL ‘Penelope’ NSS 3.22 and 1.80–1, respectively.
(73) NLI MS 14, p. [1v].
(74) NLI NB 5A, p. [18r].
(75) For example, on the Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ manuscript, he added her comment that ‘he must
have eaten oysters I think a few dozen’ (p. [2v]; U 694.03–4; U-G 18.147–8; see NLI NB 4, p.
[10r]). This is obviously just a clichéd superstition, but it serves to reinforce Bloom’s unspoken
fears in ‘Lestrygonians’ about Boylan’s preparations for the rendezvous (U 89.14–21; see U-G
6.192–9), something Joyce could expect readers to recall.
(77) NLI MS 14, p. [2r].
(78) NLI MS 14, pp. [1v]–[2r].
(82) NLI MS 14, p. [3r] and Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, p. 4.
(86) Harvard Pl A.iii.a; see JJA 21: 184.
(88) See NLI MS 14, p. [4r].
(90) NLI MS 14, p. [3v].
(92) NLI NB 5A, p. [18r].
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(94) As part of a general strategy to meld the subjects of her rambling thoughts, Joyce changed
Molly’s name for her husband to the more neutral pronoun on the episode’s typescript
(Huntington TS, p. 6; see JJA 16.304).
(96) See Huntington TS, p. 11; see JJA 16: 309.
(98) NLI MS 14, p. [4r].
(101) NLI NB 5A, p. [17v].
(102) NLI NB 4, pp. [11r] and [12r], respectively.
(104) See NLI MS 14, p. [5r].
(106) See NLI MS 14, p. [5r].
(107) Texas PP 44.1; see JJA 27: 245.
(108) Emphasis added; NLI MS 14, pp. [4v]–[5r].
(115) NLI MS 14, p. [12r].
(117) NLI MS 14, p. [14r].
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(118) See Buffalo MS 22, f. [1r]; see JJA 16: 293.
(119) NLI MS 14, p. [13v].
(120) NLI MS 14, p. [14r].
(121) See Buffalo MS 22, f. [1r]; see JJA 16: 293.
(122) Harvard Pl D.ii.a; see JJA 21: 327–8.
(123) Harvard Pl D.iii.b and Harvard Pl D.iv; see JJA 21: 351 and 21: 362.
(124) Texas PP 45.1; see JJA 27: 269.
(125) NLI MS 14, p. [16r]. These two lines follow one another on the episode’s draft, but Joyce
added everything else about Molly going to the market to see the fruit sellers and possibly find
some interested man on several layers of proofs.
(126) NLI MS 14, p. [16r].
(127) Rosenbach ‘Penelope’ MS, pp. 14–15.
(128) Harvard Pl C.i and Harvard Pl D.ii.a; see JJA 21: 259 and 21: 330.
(130) See Buffalo NB 2a, p. [2r]; see Herring, Notes and Drafts, 14–15.
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Appendix 1 A Brief Overview and Glossary of the Kinds of Ulysses Manuscripts
and Documents


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.281) Appendix 1 A Brief Overview and Glossary of the Kinds of Ulysses

Manuscripts and Documents
Luca Crispi
Overview
For Ulysses, there are five basic kinds of manuscripts: Notes, Drafts, Faircopies, Typescripts,
and Proofs; they survive as follows.
Broadly speaking, today there are over one hundred pages of notes for Ulysses in three special
collection holding libraries: the British Library, London; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin;
and the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University
of New York.
There are about thirty-nine holograph drafts: twenty in the Poetry Collection; two in the Rare
Books, Manuscripts, and Archives, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; sixteen in the National
Library of Ireland; and at least one in an anonymous private collection.
There are over eight hundred pages of a mixed faircopy manuscript in the Rosenbach Museum
and Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
There are also over one thousand four hundred pages of typescript, almost all of which are in
the Poetry Collection, as well as a partial printer’s typescript for the ‘Penelope’ episode in the
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Finally, there are about five thousand pages of galley and page proofs for the first edition of
Ulysses that are variously housed in the Houghton Library (Harvard University, Cambridge,
MA), the Poetry Collection, the Firestone Library (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ), and the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas, Austin).
There are further Ulysses manuscripts elsewhere, and many others that are still missing, some
of which will most likely come to light in the future.
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Joyce was never the kind of writer who paid much attention to the quality of the tools of his
trade.1 His notebooks, paper, pencils, pens, and crayons were almost always of the most
ordinary and inexpensive varieties. Like his notebooks, most of the copybooks in which he wrote
the various drafts of Ulysses were also simple jotters and children’s exercise books that he could
easily acquire at almost any local stationer’s shop in Trieste, Zurich, Paris, or even on holiday.
Then, at decisive junctures in the compositional process, he also used loose sheets of paper on
which he prepared most of the different faircopy versions of the episodes of his book.
Joyce did not write Ulysses from its first to its last word consecutively. Instead, at least initially,
he wrote the episodes in a non-sequential order as the contours of the work evolved and
expanded over several years. Joyce had been working on Ulysses since at least (p.282) 16 June
1915,2 which was about five and half years before the book was finally published on 2 February
1922; but all the drafts that survive for the book date from 1917 to 1921. Before the discovery of
further drafts of Ulysses beginning in 2000, all of the then-known manuscripts—with the
exception of a draft of ‘Proteus’—cluster around the middle of the book from ‘Sirens’ to
‘Eumaeus’. The newer manuscripts enrich our understanding of most of the episodes—
particularly ‘Proteus’, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, ‘Sirens’, Cyclops’, and all of the end of the book,
from ‘Oxen of the Sun’ to ‘Penelope’—but a significant number of manuscripts are currently still
unknown. In fact, Joyce only began retaining his drafts relatively late, and, in general, what has
survived is based more on chance than a concerted effort on his part to keep a substantial
record of his work on Ulysses. In the most pragmatic fashion, more often than not he simply
discarded his manuscripts once he had recopied them because he simply did not need them any
longer. Joyce also misplaced or lost many other manuscripts and notes as he travelled across
Europe. Fortunately, Sylvia Beach, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and, most importantly, Paul Léon each
played important parts in preserving Joyce’s manuscripts.
The extant manuscripts coincide with the effort to publish Ulysses in serial publications and then
as a book. With these goals in mind, Joyce began writing and rewriting the individual episodes
successively from late 1917 through mid-1921, elaborating the text at each stage. Predictably
enough, the earlier drafts of an episode are the most chaotic because he would often crowd
whatever open space he found on the page with more text. These earlier drafts are usually the
messiest and most difficult to decipher, at times even for Joyce. Nonetheless, he usually wanted
to incorporate what he had already written, including the interlineal, marginal, and verso page
additions. Therefore, Joyce methodically crossed through the text in coloured crayons as he
rewrote it in later versions. In fact, this practice is just an extension of his method when he took
words and phrases from his notebooks. Unsurprisingly, this is a common procedure with other
writers as well. In general, his cluttered earlier drafts were always merely stages towards more
legible drafts.
Hampered by poor eyesight, but prompted by his creative impulses, every stage of rewriting was
an occasion to develop the text. As far as we know, Joyce recopied all of the Ulysses manuscripts
by hand more than once before he passed them on to various typists. From Stephen Hero to
Finnegans Wake, Joyce developed certain note-taking and compositional practices that he used
throughout his writing career. For example, he usually filled the right-hand page of a copybook
first, leaving himself a wide and expanding left margin. He then filled the margins as well as the
left-hand page of a copybook with further revisions and additions, returning to the same
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manuscript again and again to add words, phrases, and sentences, as well as paragraphs, in
pencil and in ink, between the lines, in the margins, and then in any handy available space.
Joyce’s principal concern was to transfer all of the text he had written on the prior manuscript to
the subsequent one, but as the author he was not constrained to act simply as a scribe when he
recopied the older versions of the text. In fact, he regularly revised the text as part of the
process of rewriting earlier versions. This makes attempts to ‘repair’ or ‘correct’ the text
particularly problematic for critical editors. These later drafts are more uniform: the margins
are more stable and the additions are generally less numerous, but even they are just the next
phase in the creative process. At each stage, Joyce added further (p.283) words, sentences,
paragraphs, whole sections, and even episodes to Ulysses. Unlike other writers (Yeats and
Beckett, for example), Joyce rarely deleted anything that he had already written, although he
often substantially revised his texts at almost every juncture for different reasons.
From September 1917 to February 1921, Joyce quite systematically rewrote his drafts yet again,
sequentially episode by episode, but at these junctures he was doing so in his most legible hand
as what is generally understood as the ‘faircopy’ manuscripts of Ulysses. The composite
Rosenbach manuscript of Ulysses is comprised of over 800 folios, of which almost 700 are loose
leaves, which Joyce inscribed on only one side. But Joyce wrote the ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’
Rosenbach manuscripts in two copybooks that are more similar to Joyce’s draft manuscripts
than they are to the other faircopy manuscripts.
The majority of these so-called faircopy Rosenbach manuscripts were intended to provide a
more readable copy of the text for the typists, although Joyce still made further alterations to
these newer copies. Another reason he recopied his drafts in a clear and legible hand, usually on
better-quality paper, was because he was selling it piecemeal to John Quinn, the New York Irish-
American lawyer who had unsuccessfully defended the editors of the Little Review in court. He
was also an important patron and collector of the arts, specifically of modernist literature and
paintings. In 1923–4, Quinn put his vast collection of rare books, manuscripts, and art for sale at
auction. A. S. W. Rosenbach, one of the most influential manuscript and book dealers of his era,
acquired Quinn’s Ulysses manuscript.
As I will discuss more fully, due to various exigencies, the extant Rosenbach ‘faircopy
manuscript’ of Ulysses is a mixed document. For some of the episodes, the faircopies were
certainly used to produce the extant typescripts, and these in turn were used to set up the Little
Review instalments of Ulysses and then, separately, the first edition of the book. On the other
hand, for other episodes the Rosenbach manuscripts were clearly not used to produce the
typescript that subsequently generated the published texts. Finally, only some individual pages
and sections of the Rosenbach manuscript were used to produce the typescripts of the ‘Lotus
Eaters’, ‘Nausicaa’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, and ‘Circe’ episodes. A likely explanation for at least part
of this unusual situation is that the numerous additions and changes Joyce made to some of the
pages of the manuscripts made them too unsightly to serve as a commercially viable faircopy
manuscript. Therefore, he rewrote them—often making significant changes in the process that
did not appear in any lifetime edition of Ulysses—so that they would be suitable for sale to
Quinn.
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Joyce began to have his manuscripts typed at the end of 1917 so that Ulysses could appear
serially in the Little Review in the United States and the Egoist in Britain. In general, he must
have given the typists precise instructions to leave a wide left-hand—and almost no right-hand—
margin on the page because he knew from experience that he would use that space for further
additions and corrections, just as he usually did when he wrote by hand. Most of the typescripts
of the first fourteen episodes that appeared serially in little magazines were typed in at least
three copies. Joyce similarly corrected and revised at least two of these copies at the same time,
but as far as is known he only cursorily revised a third, and it is believed that this was usually
the copy he retained, and they are the ones that are known to survive. He then sent at least one
copy to Ezra Pound, who passed it on to the Little Review for serial publication. Joyce expected
to be able to further revise the published Little Review text for the printing of Ulysses, but this
sensible strategy became untenable for various reasons when the actual plans were finally in
place to publish the book in Paris.
Only five instalments of Ulysses appeared in the Egoist from January-February through
December 1919: ‘Nestor’, ‘Proteus’, ‘Hades’, and a portion of ‘Wandering Rocks’. On the (p.
284) other hand, Ulysses appeared in twenty-three issues of the Little Review from March 1918
to September-December 1920, but its editorial policy of ‘Making No Compromise with Public
Taste’ caused the magazine to be censored and subsequently suspended—and for Ulysses to be
banned in the United States. Interesting as it is as a material and historical publication, it is
important to bear in mind that the Little Review text of Ulysses is completely collateral to the
main line of textual transmission of the book. Joyce never saw proofs of any setting of any
instalment. In fact, he was often unaware that particular issues of the magazine had appeared in
print. Furthermore, since the Egoist was set from Harriet Shaw Weaver’s copies of the Little
Review, it is even further removed from the direct line of textual transmission that produced the
Shakespeare and Company first edition of Ulysses.
Although later in life Joyce (reluctantly and unsuccessfully) tried to learn to use a typewriter,
this technique of writing did not suit his creative methods. Therefore, he relied on an odd
assortment of typists, often friends, as well as friends of friends, only some of whom even owned
their own typewriters. Many factors contributed to the problem of getting Ulysses into print
accurately as Joyce wrote it (or wanted it written). Not only was his handwriting often difficult to
read even on the faircopy manuscripts (especially for amateur typists), but Joyce also continued
to make numerous and substantial additions and changes to the text on the typescripts when
they were returned to him. It is important to note that Joyce was not in the habit of checking the
typescript against the manuscript that had been given to the typist: generally he simply worked
on the typescript as a new instantiation of his text. He kept at least one copy of the typescripts
at the time, and he further revised these same 1917–19 typescript copies in 1921 in the pre-final
preparation of the text for the book’s eventual publication. It was only during the final stages of
preparing Ulysses to appear in book form that Sylvia Beach and Joyce began using secretaries
and other professional typists, though they introduced a different set of problems for the
accurate transmission of the text as Joyce wrote it.
In mid-April 1921 Beach and Maurice Darantiere, Master Printer, Dijon, signed a contract to
print and publish Ulysses, but the book was far from done.3 Joyce still had to finish writing the
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last two episodes, and these would then have to be typed as well, which caused all sorts of
unexpected problems of their own. Furthermore, Joyce made a concentrated round of
corrections, revisions, and additions to the typescripts of the earlier episodes based on his
storehouse of notes. Like most authors, he was supposed to make all of his changes on the
typescripts before the printer began the process of typesetting. This was not how things turned
out. The printer began setting the galley proofs of the first five episodes of Ulysses
—‘Telemachus’ through ‘Lotus Eaters’—from 11 to 17 June 1921 while Joyce was still writing
‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’. Joyce corrected and revised the first set of placard proofs and returned
them to Darantiere who assumed that these placards were sufficient for that stage of the
process, so the printers moved on to the next stage of setting the text in page (p.285)
proofs as gatherings. Then they sent these second proofs to Joyce and Beach to check the
changes they had incorporated (and subsequently for their final approval for publication).
Instead, Joyce took the opportunity to further substantially revise these clean proofs. When
Darantiere realized the amount and kinds of changes Joyce had made again on these proofs, the
printers took the unexpected and costly step of reverting back to the placard proofs in late
August 1921.
Although the contract stipulated that the printer would prepare up to five sets of proofs for the
author to correct typesetting errors, Joyce needed from five to eleven sets of (placard and page)
proofs to accommodate his changes and additions. No one, including Joyce, anticipated the
amount of revisions as well as the substantial additions that he would make on the proofs. In all,
Ulysses grew approximately one-third longer during the various proof stages. Joyce and Beach
were shocked when they realized that all of the changes on proofs accounted for almost a
quarter of the entire printing costs of the first edition.4 Obviously, without the active
cooperation of Joyce’s publisher and printer, we would not have Ulysses.
Glossary
Amanuensis or Scribal Copy of a Manuscript:
These are handwritten faircopy manuscripts made by someone other than Joyce. While Joyce
wrote most of Ulysses in his own hand, when he was ill or too busy working on another episode,
he relied on friends and associates to transcribe his manuscripts to provide clean copy for a
typescript and, in one case, for sale to John Quinn. The Rosenbach manuscript of ‘Wandering
Rocks’ is partially in Frank Budgen’s hand (presumably at Joyce’s dictation) because Joyce was
suffering from a recent eye attack and needed to complete the episode for publication in the
Little Review. Furthermore, when Joyce had secured the publication of Ulysses by Shakespeare
and Company, Sylvia Beach recruited her sister, Cyprian, and her friend, Raymonde Linnosier,
to transcribe portions of ‘Circe’ to fill in a lacuna in the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript as well
as to assist the typists.
Episode: Manuscript: Active Dates:

10. ‘Wandering Composite Rosenbach MS for the January–February 1919:
Rocks’ Typescript Zurich
15. ‘Circe’ Buffalo MSS 13.b & d January–May 1921: Paris
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Collateral Faircopy Manuscript:

These are the most unusual manuscripts in the Ulysses archive. Given the variations in the text
between these manuscripts and the typescripts that were used to set up the different episodes of
Ulysses in print, it is not entirely clear when or why Joyce wrote them. Joyce certainly prepared
these manuscripts in part as clean faircopies for sale to John Quinn, but that cannot account for
the wide disparity in places between the text on these manuscripts and the earlier drafts, or
between the text on these manuscripts (p.286) and the typescripts of those episodes. Since
Joyce almost always wrote in a linear, accretive manner, whereby later manuscripts contain
more and further advanced text, in effect portions of these manuscripts are ‘authorial fakes’ that
do not correspond to the typescripts (and presumably whatever documents were used to
prepare the typescripts); therefore, they also differ in places from all the printed editions prior
to the 1984 U-G edition.
The authority of these manuscripts in the line of textual transmission is at the crux of some of
the debates about the editorial decisions made in the preparation of UCSE and so of U-G. In the
chapters I have discussed several examples when significant differences between the texts on
the collateral Rosenbach manuscripts and the typescripts impact the reading text of several
episodes in the first edition of Ulysses and in U-G. There are numerous and sometimes
substantial variations in the text between the Rosenbach manuscripts and the typescripts for
certain episodes, but there is not enough textual or contextual information to determine the
precise relationships between the extant individual ‘faircopy’ manuscripts and their related
typescripts. Obviously, the situation is different for different episodes. On the one hand, it is
possible that for some episodes certain (now lost) manuscript(s)—separately and differently—
produced both its Rosenbach manuscript as well as its typescript. On the other hand, one or
more subsequent manuscripts most likely intervened between the Rosenbach and the
typescripts, or possibly at times vice versa. Although the complexity of the textual issues
surrounding the collateral Rosenbach manuscripts for certain episodes has been well known
since the mid-1980s, further textual, material, and historical research still needs to be carried
out. Until further manuscripts appear, all we can do is speculate about the textual relationships
between the extant documents. For further information about this kind of manuscript, see
Faircopy Manuscripts for Typescripts, Intermediate Faircopy, and Mixed Faircopies.

4. ‘Calypso’ Rosenbach MS February 1918: Zurich
6. ‘Hades’ Rosenbach MS March–May 1918: Zurich
7. ‘Aeolus’ Rosenbach MS January–May 1918: Zurich
8. ‘Lestrygonians’ Rosenbach MS January–July 1918: Zurich
9. ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ Rosenbach MS Autumn 1918: Zurich
11. ‘Sirens’ Rosenbach MS June 1919: Zurich
Draft:
This is a pre-faircopy holograph manuscript; that is, it is written in Joyce’s hand and was not
intended as a copy-text for the episode’s typescript. When there is only one such manuscript for
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an episode, I have simply used the term draft to differentiate it from the sometimes several
drafts for other episodes. For further information on this kind of manuscript, see Earlier Drafts,
Intermediate Drafts, Later Drafts, and Proto-drafts.

9. ‘Scylla and NLI MSS 8A–C Summer 1918: Zurich
Charybdis’
13. ‘Nausicaa’ Buffalo MS 10 & Cornell MSS November 1919–January 1920:
56A–B Trieste
18. ‘Penelope’ NLI MS 14 Spring–Summer 1921: Paris
(p.287) Earlier Draft:

I use this term in a comparative sense when there are one or more subsequent manuscripts
before the faircopy. As far as is known, there are no extant first drafts of any episode, though
there is quite often first-draft material on most, if not all, of the Ulysses manuscripts. Also see
Drafts, Intermediate Drafts, Later Drafts, and Proto-drafts.

11. ‘Sirens’ NLI MS 7B Late 1917–Early 1919: Zurich
14. ‘Oxen of the Buffalo MSS 11–12 & NLI MSS February–March 1920: Trieste
Sun’ 11A–B
15. ‘Circe’ Buffalo MS 19 Late Spring 1920: Trieste
16. ‘Eumaeus’ Private Collection Revised in January–February 1921:
Trieste & Paris
Faircopy Manuscript for Typescript:

Joyce wrote these holograph manuscripts to provide a clean copy of the episodes for the typist
and subsequently for sale to John Quinn. For further information about this kind of manuscript,
see Collateral Faircopy Manuscripts, Intermediate Faircopy, and Mixed Faircopies.

1. ‘Telemachus’ Rosenbach MS September–October 1917: Zurich
2. ‘Nestor’ Rosenbach MS October–Early December 1917: Zurich
3. ‘Proteus’ Rosenbach MS December 1917: Zurich
10. ‘Wandering Rocks’ Composite Rosenbach MS January–February 1919: Zurich
12. ‘Cyclops’ Rosenbach MS September–October 1919: Zurich
16. ‘Eumaeus’ Rosenbach MS Mid–Late February 1921: Paris
17 ‘Ithaca’ Rosenbach MS August–Late October 1921: Paris
18. ‘Penelope’ Rosenbach MS & Buffalo MS July–Mid-September 1921: Paris
21
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First-Order Notebook:
Joyce built all of his works from words, phrases, and fragments of text that he culled from a
myriad of printed sources, which he then slowly and carefully made his own. He compiled his
notes in simple pocket notebooks, usually in pencil. He may also have used intermediary slips of
paper for his note-taking, though none of the loose sheets survives. Frank Budgen vividly
captured these preparatory stages of the writer’s creative labour:
In one of the richest pages of Ulysses Stephen, on the sea shore [in ‘Proteus’], communing
with himself and tentatively building with words, calls for his tablets. These should have
been library slips, acquired by the impecunious and ingenious poet from the library
counter [at the National Library of Ireland]. On that occasion he had forgotten to provide
himself with this convenient writing material, and was forced to use the fag-end of Mr.
Deasy’s letter. As far as concerns the need for tablets, the self-portrait was still like, only
in Zürich Joyce was never without and they were not library slips, but little writing blocks
specially made for the waistcoat pocket. At intervals, alone or in conversation, seated or
walking, one of these tablets was produced, and a word or two scribbled on it (p.288) at
lightning speed as ear or memory served his turn. No one knew how all this material was
given place in the completed pattern of his work, but from time to time in Joyce’s flat one
caught glimpses of a few of those big orange-coloured envelopes that are one of the
glories of Switzerland, and these I always took to be store-houses of building material. The
method of making a multitude of criss-cross notes in pencil was a strange one for a man
whose sight was never good. A necessary adjunct to the method was a huge oblong
magnifying glass.5
Joyce used first-order notebooks to jot down words and phrases directly from his reading
sources, though throughout his writing career Joyce almost never recorded the sources of his
notes. He wrote these notes hastily and only for himself, which accounts for the appearance of
his handwriting in this kind of notebook (as opposed to the meticulous way in which he wrote his
manuscripts for his typists and other readers). Then, with variously coloured crayons, he
habitually crossed through the words he had incorporated into his writings. He did not use one
particular crayon colour for different episodes as some scholars had thought previously. Instead,
whether working on Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, Joyce would systematically use one colour
crayon to cross through the notes he used on a particular draft level (that is, during the same
phase of composition or revision of the text).
Although there must have been many similar notebooks (as well as a wide variety of loose sheets
with such notes), only one example is extant: Buffalo NB 2a, which Joyce compiled in Zurich in
early 1918. There was at least one further early (presumably first-order) Ulysses notebook that
Joyce compiled in 1918 in tandem with Buffalo NB 2a, but it survives only in the form of a partial
amanuensis’s transcription in Buffalo Finnegans Wake MS VI.C.16, pp. [232]–[74], which is also
catalogued as Buffalo MS VI.D.7, a so-called ‘Missing [Ulysses] Notebook’.6
Intermediate Draft and Intermediate Faircopy Manuscript:

These manuscripts are later versions of the episode’s previous holograph manuscripts and were
written before a subsequent extant version of the text. For further information about this kind of
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manuscript, see Earlier Drafts, Later Drafts, Collateral Faircopy Manuscripts, Faircopy
Manuscripts for Typescripts, and Mixed Faircopies.
Intermediate Draft:
Episode: Manuscript: Dates:
15. ‘Circe’ NLI MS 12 July–December 1920: Paris
Intermediate Faircopy Manuscript Fragment:

14. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ Cornell ‘Oxen’ MS May 1920: Trieste
(p.289) Later Draft:

These manuscripts are the last extant drafts before the faircopy, which Joyce prepared from
either the intermediate or earlier drafts.

3. ‘Proteus’ Buffalo MS 3 Autumn 1917: Zurich
12. ‘Sirens’ NLI MS 9 & Buffalo MS 5 Early 1919: Zurich
14. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ Buffalo MSS 13–14 & March–May 1920: Trieste
NLI MS 11C &
Buffalo MS 15 &
NLI MS 11D &
Buffalo MSS 16–18 &
NLI MSS 11E–F
15. ‘Circe’ NLI Quinn MS July–December 1920: Paris
16. ‘Eumaeus’ Buffalo MS 21 January–February 1921: Paris
Manuscript:
This is a general term that refers to all the documents in the production of the text and the book
(including all holograph documents, typescripts, proofs, etc.). See Appendices 2–4 for further
information about each kind of manuscript.
Mixed (Collateral and for the Typescript) Faircopy Manuscript:

These are holograph manuscripts that Joyce wrote to provide a clean copy of the episode for the
typist, but some individual folios are collateral to the extant typescripts. He probably rewrote
these pages in most cases so that they would be suitable for sale to John Quinn. For further
information about this kind of manuscript, see Collateral Faircopy Manuscripts, Faircopy
Manuscripts for Typescripts, and Intermediate Faircopy.
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5. ‘Lotus Eaters’ Rosenbach MS February–May 1918: Zurich
13. ‘Nausicaa’ Rosenbach MS January–February 1920: Trieste
14. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ Rosenbach MS May 1920: Trieste
15. ‘Circe’ Rosenbach MS December 1920–January 1921: Paris
Page Proof:
The process of getting a book printed is usually comprised of two basic stages: placard proofs
(a.k.a. galley proofs; see Placard) and page proofs. Page proofs are the latter settings of the text
in a printer’s proofs. For Ulysses, these page proofs were printed as sixteen non-consecutive
pages; that is, these sheets were printed as a signed gathering with eight thirty-seven-line pages
of text on each side that were folded in such a way that the pages become sequential for the
published book.
The publisher usually provides the printer with a complete, final working manuscript—either an
author’s handwritten manuscript, or, preferably, a clean, professionally prepared typescript—
from which the process of setting the work in print begins. Usually, the author returns several
sets of corrected placards to the printer, who then sets up the gatherings of page proofs for the
final printing of the book. The author indicates at each stage what corrections and revisions still
need to be made. Based on the contract between the publisher, the printer, and sometimes the
author, a certain number of proof settings are provided until the final proofs are all ‘signed off’
for the book to be printed. Then, in general, the printed gatherings are assembled, the covers
are attached, and so the book is ready. Joyce’s manual (p.290) artistry was matched by his
printer’s artisanship in preparing the book: Ulysses was all set, printed, gathered, stitched, and
bound with paper covers by hand. For further information about these manuscripts, see
Appendix 4.
Placard:
These manuscripts are the initial settings of Ulysses in proofs. These proofs are also known as
the setting of the text in ‘galleys’, a term that comes from the long metal trays of typeset text
from which proof sheets are pulled. This initial phase of proofs for Ulysses is more accurately
understood as a setting of text as ‘galleys in page’ because, although the text is set continuously
down the sheet, it is already separated into thirty-seven-line page-length blocks. Ulysses
placards are most often comprised of eight pages of text printed on only one side on
inexpensive, often pulp paper, set in four vertical columns of two pages each. The proofs were
set as eight unnumbered pages of text, four across and two high, arranged with the second page
printed below the first, the fourth below the third, the sixth below the fifth, and the eighth below
the seventh. There are many instances when a single placard setting contains text for two
consecutive episodes. For further information about these manuscripts, see Appendix 4.
Proof Level:
This is an editorial convention established in UCSE as a standardized reference system for the
various stages in the process of setting the text in both placard and page proof. While there are
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some instances when an episode’s notional proof level coincides with a particular manuscript,
more often a single proof level is comprised of several sets of placards or page proofs, and at
times a single level will combine placards and page proofs. For further information about the
different proof levels for each episode, see Appendix 4.
Proto-Draft and Fragmentary Texts:

These manuscripts are storehouses of text blocks and fragmentary texts that Joyce wrote or
rewrote and then collected before he created the coherent linear narrative line that readers of
the various published episodes would recognize. The extant evidence suggests that Joyce
frequently compiled fragmentary, non-sequential collections of previously written texts, which
he often further revised before incorporating them into a narrative of the episode.
Episode: Manuscript: Active Dates and Location:

3. ‘Proteus’ NLI MS 7A Mid-Late October 1917: Locarno
11. ‘Sirens’ NLI MS 7B Late 1917–Early 1919: Zurich
12. ‘Cyclops’ Buffalo MS 8 & NLI MS 10 Mid-June 1919: Zurich
12. ‘Cyclops’ Buffalo MS 6 Summer 1919: Zurich
17. ‘Ithaca’ NLI MS 13 Spring–Summer 1921: Paris
Although lost in transit to Buffalo, Joyce wrote what appears to have been a similar kind of
proto-draft of ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.7
(p.291) Second-Order Notebook and Notesheet:

These note-repositories are a compilation of first-order notes under either ‘subject’ (NLI NB 3)
or the book’s episode headings (all the other notebooks and notesheets). While Joyce used some
of the first-order notes in the earliest drafts of Ulysses, he most likely consolidated the majority
of his disparate first-order notes into these secondary note-repositories. In general, Joyce was
quite methodical in the way he organized the later ‘episode’ notebooks and notesheets. The
notebooks are physically similar to the copybooks in which he wrote the drafts of Ulysses, while
the latter are large folded folio sheets of paper. Joyce wrote all of the headings first, underlined
them in coloured crayon, and then filled the pages as he came across words and phrases in the
earlier note-repositories that he thought were appropriate to one or another episode, although it
was not uncommon for him to ultimately use a note in a different episode. Quite pragmatically,
Joyce often started on the right-hand (recto) page of the notebook and, when that was full,
would continue on the facing left-hand (verso) page, so that he would have a two-page opening
of related notes before him as he revised his texts. He sorted his older notes in the main body of
the page and left himself an ever-expanding left-hand margin—just as he did with his drafts—
because he knew that he would use that space to add yet more words and phrases. Joyce would
also fill the margins of these note-repositories with words and phrases in any open space, and
often in several different directions.
Early ‘Subject’ Notebook:
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Manuscript: Active Dates and Location:

NLI NB 3 Mid–Late October 1917: Locarno
BL Notesheets (BL ADD MS 49975):

Episode: Folio Numbers: Active Dates and Location:
12. ‘Cyclops’ ff. 6–8 Mid-1919: Zurich
13. ‘Nausicaa’ ff. 9–10 Late 1919: Trieste
14. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ ff. 11–15 Early–Mid-1920: Trieste
15. ‘Circe’ ff. 16–21 Spring–Summer 1920: Trieste and Paris
16. ‘Eumaeus’ ff. 22–3 Early 1921: Paris
17. ‘Ithaca’ ff. 24–7 Mid-1921: Paris
18. ‘Penelope’ ff. 28–9 Mid–Late 1921: Paris
Later Episode Notebooks:

Manuscript: Active Dates and Location:
NLI NB 5A January–February 1921
NLI NB 5B February–May 1921
NLI NB 4 February–May 1921
Buffalo NB 2b Summer 1921
(p.292) Serial Publication:

These are the first appearances of Ulysses in print in the Little Review and in the Egoist. Joyce
did not read proofs for any of the episodes in the serial publications and the text was not
properly set and only semi-professionally copy-edited. Therefore, these documents are
completely out of the direct line of textual transmission. Nonetheless, in those cases when the
episode’s typescript is missing, it is possible to collate the text on the Rosenbach manuscript,
the Little Review, and Ulysses to determine the additions and changes that Joyce must have
made on the missing typescripts from 1917 to 1920. Since the relatively small portions of
Ulysses that appear in the Egoist were set from printed copies of the Little Review, only lightly
copy-edited by Harriet Shaw Weaver, they are twice-removed collateral documents in the direct
transmission of the text.
Ulysses in the Little Review:

Episode: Volume: Page Numbers:
1. ‘Telemachus’ IV.11: March 1918 pp. 3–22
2. ‘Nestor’ IV.12: April 1918 pp. 32–45
3. ‘Proteus’ V.1: May 1918 pp. 31–45
4. ‘Calypso’ V.2: June 1918 pp. 39–52
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Episode: Volume: Page Numbers:

5. ‘Lotus Eaters’ V.3: July 1918 pp. 37–49
6. ‘Hades’ V.5: September 1918 pp. 15–37
7. ‘Aeolus’ V.6: October 1918 pp. 26–51
8. ‘Lestrygonians’ V.9: January 1919 pp. 27–50
8. ‘Lestrygonians’ V.10-11: February-March 1919 pp. 58–62
9. ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ V.12: April 1919 pp. 30–43
9. ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ VI.1: May 1919 pp. 17–35
10. ‘Wandering Rocks’ VI.2: June 1919 pp. 34–45
10. ‘Wandering Rocks’ VI.3: July 1919 pp. 28–47
11. ‘Sirens’ VI.4: August 1919 pp. 41–64
11. ‘Sirens’ VI.5: September 1919 pp. 46–55
12. ‘Cyclops’ VI.7: November 1919 pp. 38–54
12. ‘Cyclops’ VI.8: December 1919 pp. 50–60
12. ‘Cyclops’ VI.9: January 1920 pp. 53–61
12. ‘Cyclops’ VI.10: March 1920 pp. 54–60
13. ‘Nausicaa’ VI.11: April 1920 pp. 43–50
13. ‘Nausicaa’ VII.1: May–June 1920 pp. 61–72
13. ‘Nausicaa’ VII.2: July–August 1920 pp. 42–58
14. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ VII.3: September–December 1920 pp. 81–92
(p.293) Typescript for Ulysses in the Little Review: Joyce had these manuscripts prepared
for the serial publication of episodes 1–14 (‘Telemachus’– ‘Oxen of the Sun’). Subsequently, he
used the same typescript documents for the printing of the Shakespeare and Company 1922 first
edition of the book. Therefore, the same manuscripts contain three differentiable levels of text:
1) the text as typed, 2) Joyce’s earlier revisions of the typescripts for the Little Review from 1917
to 1920, and 3) his later round of revisions of the typescripts of the episodes in Ulysses in Paris
in 1921. In most cases, it is not known who the typists were, but most of the typists were not
professionals. In fact, some were Joyce’s friends and acquaintances, including Claud Sykes and
Robert McAlmon. For further information about these manuscripts, see Appendix 3.
Episode: Kind of Manuscript: Active Dates for the Active Dates for
Manuscript: Little Review: Ulysses:
2. ‘Nestor’ Partial Typescript Buffalo TS 1 December 1917: April–June 1921
Zurich
3. ‘Proteus’ Partial Typescript Buffalo TS 2 January 1918: Zurich April–June 1921
4. ‘Calypso’ Partial Earlier Buffalo TS February 1918: April–June 1921
Typescript 3a Zurich
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Episode: Kind of Manuscript: Active Dates for the Active Dates for
Manuscript: Little Review: Ulysses:
4. ‘Calypso’ Partial Later Buffalo TS March–May 1918: NA

Typescript 3b Zurich
6. ‘Hades’ Partial Typescript Buffalo TS 4 Early–Mid-1918: June–August 1921
Zurich
7. ‘Aeolus’ Complete Buffalo TS 5 Mid-May 1918: June–August 1921
Typescript Zurich
8. Complete Buffalo TS 6 Summer 1918: Zurich June–August 1921
‘Lestrygonians’ Typescript
9. ‘Scylla and Complete Buffalo TS 7 Late 1918–Early June–August 1921
Charybdis’ Typescript 1919: Zurich
10. ‘Wandering Partial Typescript Buffalo TS 8 February 1919: June–August 1921
Rocks’ Zurich
11. ‘Sirens’ Complete Buffalo TS 9 June 1919: Zurich September 1921
Typescript
12. ‘Cyclops’ Partial Typescript Buffalo TS October–November September 1921
10 1919: Zurich
13. ‘Nausicaa’ Complete Buffalo TS February–March September–Mid-
Typescript 11 1920: Trieste October 1921
14. ‘Oxen of the Complete Buffalo TS June 1920: Trieste September–Mid-
Sun’ Typescript 12 October 1921
(p.294) Typescript for Ulysses:

Once Joyce, Sylvia Beach, and Darantiere had made an arrangement for the Shakespeare and
Company publication of Ulysses, she arranged for the typing of the final four episodes of the
book in Paris.
Episode: Kind of Manuscript: Manuscript: Active Dates:

15. ‘Circe’ Partial Typescript Buffalo TS 13.h Mid-February–Mid-October 1921
16. Complete Typescript Buffalo TS 14 February–March 1921
‘Eumaeus’
17. ‘Ithaca’ Composite Typescript Buffalo TSS 15.c & October–Early December 1921
15.g
18. Complete Typescript Buffalo TS 16 16 August–September 1921
‘Penelope’
I have listed in alphabetical order the terms I use throughout the book to categorize the Ulysses
manuscripts. But since Joyce almost always used his manuscripts in a fairly straightforward,
consecutive manner, it is also possible to list them by kinds in a chronological fashion as follows:
Notebooks:
First-Order Notebook
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Second-Order Notebooks and Notesheet
Drafts:
Proto-Draft and Fragmentary Texts
Earlier Draft
Intermediate Draft
Later Draft
Faircopies:
Faircopies for Typescript
Mixed (Collateral and for Typescript) Faircopies
Collateral Faircopy
Typescripts:
Typescripts for the Little Review and Ulysses
Typescripts for Ulysses
Proofs:
Placard
Page Proof
Notes:
(1) I wrote an earlier version of this overview for the ‘Ulysses in Process’ installation in the
‘James Joyce and Ulysses at the National Library of Ireland’ exhibition (Dublin, June 2004–March
2006), and subsequently revised and expanded it for publication online as ‘A General Survey of
Joyce’s Ulysses Manuscripts’ in my ‘A First Foray’, GJS 11 (2011).
(2) Joyce wrote (in German) to his brother, Stanislaus Joyce, about his recent breakthrough with
his new book: ‘I have written something. The first episode of my new novel Ulysses is written.
The first part, the Telemachiad, consists of four episodes: the second fifteen, that is, Ulysses’
wandering: and the third, Ulysses’ return home, of three more episodes’ (16 June 1915; SL 209).
(3) On 21 December 1924 Beach and Joyce signed a contract granting Beach the right to
administer Joyce’s works in all countries except the United States and Great Britain. They then
signed a separate contract for the printing and sales of Ulysses throughout the world on 9
December 1930 (see Buffalo MSS XVIII.E.2, Miscellaneous Material Related to Joyce’s Works:
Ulysses: The Later Editions and Translations, folders 10 and 44). Both contracts were legally
binding under French law. On 4 February 1932, ten years after the first two copies of Ulysses
were delivered to her shop, Beach wrote as follows to Paul Léon, who was acting on Joyce’s
behalf in this matter: ‘I hereby agree to cancel the contract between us [Joyce and Beach] for
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Ulysses, and to give up my claims to this work for future editions’ (Buffalo MS XII,
Correspondence from Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company, Beach to Léon, folder 1).
See Keri Walsh (ed.), The Letters of Sylvia Beach (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),
139.
(4) The printing of Ulysses cost Shakespeare and Company 42,492 francs. This is twice as much
as Darantiere had originally estimated on 25 April 1921, and over 20% more than the gross
retail price of the entire deluxe 100-series of the first edition that was printed on handmade
paper and signed by Joyce (see Buffalo MSS XVIII.E.1: Miscellaneous Material Related to Joyce’s
Works: Ulysses, First Edition, folder 21).
(5) Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 176–7.
(6) For an imaginative recreation of the notebook with many source identifications, see Danis
Rose and John O’Hanlon (eds), The Lost Notebook: New Evidence on the Genesis of ‘Ulysses’
(Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1989).
(7) See Bernard Gheerbrant, James Joyce: Sa Vie, Son Œuvre, Son Rayonnement (Paris: Librairie
La Hune, 1949), n.p., item 254. Also see John Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of
James Joyce [1882–1941] (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 140, item 5.b.iii.
Slocum and Cahoon’s description is based on ‘hasty notes made by one of the compilers during a
private examination of the library in the spring of 1949’.
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Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.295) (p.296) Appendix 2 A Census of the Extant Ulysses Manuscripts by

Episodes
Luca Crispi
1. ‘Telemachus’: 1917–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Kind of Manuscript: Manuscript: Active Dates: JJA:
Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript September–October 1917: Zurich NA
The Little Review IV.11: March 1918, pp. 3–22
Five Levels of Proofs: 11 June–20 September 1921: Paris
Kind of Manuscript: Manuscript: Location: Active Dates: JJA:
First Level: Placards Pl 1.i–3.i Harvard 11–28 June 17: 02–27

Second Level: Page Proofs PP 1.1, 2.1 Buffalo 27 June–2 August 22: 05–73
Third Level: Page Proofs PP 1.2, 2.2 Buffalo 8–Late August 22: 21–89
Fourth Level: Placards Pl I.i–III.i Harvard 18 August–2 September 17: 96–123

Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 1.3, 2.3 Texas 5–20 September 22: 51–105
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2. ‘Nestor’: 1917–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript October–Early December 1917: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 1 December 1917: Zurich 12: 237
The Little Review IV.12: April 1918, pp. 32–45
Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 1 April–June 1921: Paris 12: 237
Five Levels of Proofs: Mid-June–21 September 1921: Paris

Fourth Level: Placards Pl III.i–V.i Harvard August–2 September 17: 124–40

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3. ‘Proteus’: 1917–21 (Locarno, Zurich & Paris)

Earlier Proto-draft NLI MS 7A Mid–Late October 1917: Locarno NA
Later Draft Buffalo MS 3 Autumn 1917: Zurich 12: 238–58
Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript December 1917: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 2 January 1918: Zurich 12: 259
The Little Review V.1: May 1918, pp. 31–45
Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 2 April–June 1921: Paris 12: 259
Five Levels of Proofs: Mid-June–21 September 1921: Paris

Fourth Level: Placards Pl V.i–VII.i Harvard August–2 September 17: 141–58

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4. ‘Calypso’: 1918–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach Manuscript February 1918: Zurich NA
Earlier Typescript for the Little Buffalo TSS 3.a February 1918: Zurich 12:
Review 270–1
Later Typescript for the Little Buffalo TSS 3.b March–May 1918: Zurich 12:
Review 263–6
The Little Review V.2: June 1918, pp. 39–52
Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 3.a and .b April–June 1921: Paris 12: 263–71
Six Levels of Proofs: Mid-June–21 September 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 6.i–8.i Harvard Mid–18 June 17: 61–78

Second Level: Page Proofs PP 4.1, 5.1 Buffalo Mid-June–2 August 22: 173–236
Third Level: Page Proofs PP 4.2, 5.2 Buffalo 8– Late August 22: 189–253
Fourth Level: Placards Pl VII.i–IX.i Harvard Late August–2 September 17: 161–79
Sixth Level: Page Proofs PP 5.4 Texas 21 September 22: 281–85
5. ‘Lotus Eaters’: 1918–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Mixed Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript February–May 1918: Zurich NA
The Little Review V.3: July 1918, pp. 37–49
Eight Levels of Proofs: Mid-June–6 October 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 8.i– Harvard Mid-June–28 June 17: 78–93

9.bis.i:
Second Level: Page PP 5.1 Buffalo 30 June–2 August 22: 239–
Proofs 48
Third Level: Page Proofs PP 5.2 Buffalo 8–Late August 22: 257–
64
Fourth Level: Placards Pl IX.i–XI.i Harvard Late August–2 17: 180–
September 200
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 5.3, 6.1 Texas and 5–20 September 22: 268–
Buffalo 317
Sixth Level: Page Proofs PP 5.4, 6.2 Texas and Mid–26 September 22: 287–
Buffalo 333
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The Little Review V.3: July 1918, pp. 37–49
Eight Levels of Proofs: Mid-June–6 October 1921: Paris

Seventh Level: Page PP 6.3 Buffalo 27 September–1 22: 347–9
Proofs October
Eighth Level: Page PP. 6.4 Texas 1–6 October 22: 363–5
Proofs
(p.299)
6. ‘Hades’: 1918–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach Manuscript March–May 1918: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Buffalo TS 4 Early–Mid-May 1918: Zurich 12:
Review 273–
84
The Little Review V.5: September 1918, pp. 15–37
Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 4 June–August 1921: Paris 12: 273–84
Six Levels of Proofs: Late August–6 October 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 10.i–12.i Harvard Late August–2 17: 203–54

September
Second Level: Pl 10.ii–12.ii Harvard 6–15 September 17: 211–62
Placards
Third Level: Page PP 6.1 & Pl Buffalo and 6–19 September 22: 318–26 &
Proofs & Placards 11.iii, 12.iii Harvard 17.237–70
Fourth Level: Page PP 6.2, 7.1 Buffalo 21–26 September 22: 344–95
Proofs
Fifth Level: Page PP 6.3, 7.2 Buffalo 27 September–1 22: 350–411
Proofs October
Sixth Level: Page PP 6.4, 7.3 Texas 1–6 October 22: 366–427
Proofs
(p.300)
7. ‘Aeolus’: 1918–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach Manuscript January–May 1918: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 5 Mid-May 1918: Zurich 12:
286–
302
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The Little Review V.6: October 1918, pp. 26–51
Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 5 June–August 1921: Paris 12: 286–302
Six Levels of Proofs: August–11 October 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 13.i–16.i Harvard Late August 18: 03–87
Second Level: Placards Pl 13.ii–16.ii Harvard 23 August–19 September 18: 12–95
Third Level: Placards Pl 13.iii– Harvard 12–19 September 18: 21–84

15.iii
Fourth Level: Page Proofs PP 7.1–9.1 Buffalo Late–26 September 22: 396,
23.02–71
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 7.2–9.2 Buffalo 26–30 September 22: 412,
23.03–87
Sixth Level: Page Proofs PP 7.3–9.3 Texas Early–11 October 22: 428,
23.04–363
8. ‘Lestrygonians’: 1918–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach Manuscript January–July 1918: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 6 Summer 1918: Zurich 12: 304–
22
The Little Review V.9: January 1919, pp. 27–50
The Little Review V.10-11: February-March 1919, pp. 58–62
Typescript for Ulysses: Buffalo TS 6 June–August 1921: Paris 12: 304–22
Seven Levels of Proofs: August–Mid-October 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 16.i–19.i Harvard Late August 18: 88–145
Second Level: Placards Pl 16.ii–19.ii Harvard Early–19 18: 96–153

September
Third Level: Page Proofs PP 9.1–11.1 Buffalo 22–26 September 23: 72–174
Fourth Level: Page Proofs PP 9.2–11.2 Buffalo 26–30 September 23: 88–190
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 9.3–11.3 Texas and Buffalo 3–11 October 23: 104–
207
Sixth Level: Page Proofs PP 10.4, Texas and Yale 3–Mid-October 23: 141–
11.4 233
Seventh Level: Page PP 10.5, Texas Mid-October 23: 143–
Proofs 11.5 239
(p.301)
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9. ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: 1918–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Draft NLI MSS 8A–C Summer 1918: Zurich NA
Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach Manuscript Autumn 1918: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 7 Late 1918–Early 1919: Zurich 12: 350–71
The Little Review V.12: April 1919, pp. 30–43
The Little Review VI.1: May 1919, pp. 17–35
Seven Levels of Proofs: 17 August–14 October 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 19.i–23.i Harvard 17 August–5 September 18: 146–220
Second Level: Placards Pl 19.ii–23.ii Harvard Mid-September 18: 154–228

Third Level: Page Proofs PP 11.1–13.1 Buffalo Mid–26 September 23: 175–326
Fourth Level: Page Proofs PP 11.2–13.2 Buffalo 26–30 September 23: 191–342
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 11.3–14.3 Buffalo Early October 23: 208–379, 24.35
Sixth Level: Page Proofs PP 11.4–14.4 Yale and Texas 7–13 October 23: 224–380, 24.51
Seventh Level: Page Proofs PP 11.5 Texas 12–14 October 23: 240
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10. ‘Wandering Rocks’: 1919–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Composite Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript January–February 1919: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 8 February 1919: Zurich 13: 02–30
The Little Review VI.2: June 1919, pp. 34–45
The Little Review VI.3: July 1919, pp. 28–47
Seven Levels of Proofs: 25 August–24 October 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 24.i–27.i Harvard 25 August–5 September 18: 230–92
Second Level: Placards Pl 24.ii–27.ii Harvard Mid-September 18: 239–300
Third Level: Page Proofs & Placards PP 14.1–15.1 & Pl 28.i Buffalo & Harvard Late September 24: 03–84 & 18.303–5
Fourth Level: Page Proofs & Placards PP 14.2, 15.2 & Pl 28.ii Buffalo & Harvard 28 September–Early October 24: 019–100 & 18.306–8
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 14.3, 15.3, 16.1 Buffalo Early October 24: 36–138
Sixth Level: Page Proofs PP 14.4, 15.4, 16.2 Texas and Buffalo Mid-October 24: 52–154
Seventh Level: Page Proofs PP: 16.3 Texas 17–24 October 24: 167–70
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11. ‘Sirens’: 1917–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Partial Earlier Draft & Fragments NLI MS 7B Late 1917–Summer 1919: Zurich NA
Later Draft NLI MS 9 & Buffalo MS 5 Early 1919: Zurich NA & 13: 32–56
Collateral Faircopy Rosenbach Manuscript June 1919: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 9 June 1919: Zurich 13: 58–80
The Little Review VI.4: August 1919
The Little Review VI.5: September 1919
Typescript for Ulysses: Buffalo TS 9 September 1921: Paris 13: 08–80
Five Levels of Proofs: 5 September–27 October 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 28.i–32.i Harvard & Princeton 28 September–Early October 19: 06–89
Second Level: Placards Pl 28.ii–32.ii Harvard & Princeton Early October 19: 14–97
Third Level: Page Proofs PP 16.1–18.1 Buffalo & Rosenbach 8–14 October 24: 139–241
Fourth Level: Page Proofs PP 16.2–18.2 Buffalo 12–19 October 24: 155–257
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 16.3–18.3 Buffalo 17–27 October 24: 171–273
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12. ‘Cyclops’: 1919–21 (Zurich & Paris)

Earlier Fragmentary Texts Buffalo MS 8 & NLI MS 10 Mid-June 1919: Zurich 13: 83–132 & NA
Later Fragmentary Texts Buffalo MS 6 Summer 1919: Zurich 13: 134.a–h
Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript September–October 1919: Zurich NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TS 10 October–November 1919: Zurich 13: 144–68
Additional Manuscript for Proofs Buffalo MS 9 Late September 13: 172–3
The Little Review VI.7: November 1919, pp. 38–54
The Little Review VI.8 December 1919, pp. 50–60
The Little Review VI.9: January 1920, pp. 53–61
The Little Review VI.10: March 1920, pp. 54–60
Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 10 September 1921: Paris 13: 144–68
Nine Levels of Proofs: 30 September–3 November 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 32.i–37.i Harvard 30 September–Early 19: 90–210

October
Second Level: Placards Pl 32.ii–37.ii Harvard Early October 19: 98–218
Third Level: Placards Pl 34.iii–37.iii Harvard 6–17 October 19: 137–226
Fourth Level: Page Proofs & PP 18.1–19.1 & Pl 36.iv– Buffalo & Harvard 10 October–3 November 24: 242–50, 25: 02–10 & 19: 191–
Placards 37.iv 234
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 18.1–19.1 Buffalo 17–19 October 24: 258–66, 25: 49–64
Sixth Level: Page Proofs PP 19.3 Buffalo 19 October 25: 65–80
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Nine Levels of Proofs: 30 September–3 November 1921: Paris

Seventh Level: Page Proofs PP 18.3, 19.4, 20.1 Texas and 25–26 October 24: 274–82, 25: 22–150
Princeton
Eighth Level: Page Proofs PP 19.5, 20.2, 21.1 Texas 10–17 November 25: 97–180
Ninth Level: Page Proofs PP. 19.6, 20.3 Texas and Mid-November 25: 115, 25: 119–34
Princeton
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13. ‘Nausicaa’: 1919–21 (Trieste and Paris)

Draft Buffalo MS 10 & Cornell MSS 56A–B November 1919–January 1920: Trieste 13: 175–214 & 13: 215–44
Mixed Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript January–February 1920: Trieste NA
Typescript for the Little Review Typescript: Buffalo TS 11 February–March 1920: Trieste 13: 272–93
The Little Review VI.11: April 1920, pp. 43–50
The Little Review VII.1: May–June 1920, 61–72
The Little Review VII.2: July–August 1920, pp. 42–58
Typescript for Ulysses: Typescript: Buffalo TS 11 September–Mid-October 1921: Paris 13: 272–93
Five Levels of Proofs: 21 October–25 November 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 38.i–41.i Harvard 21–Late October 19: 237–98
Second Level: Placards Pl 38.ii–41.ii Harvard 25 October–Early November 19: 245–306

Third Level: Page Proofs PP 21.1–23.1 Texas & Buffalo 8–Mid-November 25: 181–252
Fourth Level: Page Proofs PP 22.2–23.2, 25.1–26.1 Buffalo 18–19 November 25: 205–68 & 26: 03–8
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 22.3–23.3 Texas 23–25 November 25: 223–85
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14. ‘Oxen of the Sun’: 1920–21 (Trieste & Paris)

Earlier Draft Level Buffalo MS 11 & February–March 1920: Trieste 14: 05–25
Buffalo MS 12 & 14: 28–56
NLI MS 11A & NA
NLI MS 11B NA
Later Draft Level Buffalo MS 13 & March–May 1920: Trieste 14: 59–64
Buffalo MS 14 & 14: 67–79
NLI MS 11C & NA
Buffalo MS 15 & 14: 81–5
NLI MS 11D & NA
Buffalo MS 16 & 14: 87–94
Buffalo MS 17 & 14: 97–110
Buffalo MS 18 & 14: 113–32
NLI MS 11E & NA
NLI MS 11F NA
Intermediate Faircopy Fragment Cornell ‘Oxen’ MS May 1920: Trieste 14: 135–9
Mixed Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript May 1920: Trieste NA
Typescript for the Little Review Buffalo TSS 12 June 1920: Trieste 14: 171–98
Partial Printing in the Little Review VII.3: September–December 1920, pp. 81–92
Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 12 September–Mid-October 1921: Paris 14: 161–98
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Five Levels of Proofs: Late October–7 December 1921: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl 41.i–44.i Harvard & Princeton Late October–Early November 19: 298–352
Second Level: Placards Pl 42.ii–44.ii, 45.i–46.i Harvard & Princeton 3–Mid-November 19: 317–80
Third Level: Page Proofs PP 23.1–24.1 Buffalo Mid-November 25: 253–306
Fourth Level: Page Proofs PP 23.2–24.2, 25.1–26.1 Buffalo Mid–Late November 25: 269–364 & 26: 03–8
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 23.3–24.3, 26.2 Texas Late November–7 December 25: 286–371 & 26: 19–25
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15. ‘Circe’: 1920–2 (Trieste & Paris)

Earlier Draft Buffalo MS 19 Late Spring 1920: Trieste 14: 201–59
Intermediate Draft NLI MS 12 July–December 1920: Paris NA
Later Draft NLI Quinn MS July–December 1920: Paris NA
Mixed Faircopy for Rosenbach December 1920–January 1921: NA
Typescript Manuscript Paris
Composite Typescript Buffalo TSS 13.d–h January–May 1921: Paris 14: 261–379,
Documents 15: 002–298
Composite Typescript Buffalo TSS 13.h Mid-February–Mid-October 15: 155–298
1921: Paris
Additional Manuscript Buffalo MS 20 September 1921: Paris 15: 300–6
for Typescript
Eleven Levels of Proofs: 20 October 1921–Mid-January 1922: Paris
First Level: Placards Pl Y.i–Z.i Harvard 20 October–Early 20: 59–102

November
Second Level: Pl Y.ii–Z.ii Harvard 9–Mid-November 20: 67–106
Placards
Third Level: Placards Pl 47.i–49.i & Harvard 15–Late November 20: 03–110
Y.iii–Z.iii
Fourth Level: Page PP 26.1–27.1 & Pl Buffalo & 22–Late November 26: 09–52 &
Proofs & Placards Y.iv–Z.iv Harvard 20: 83–114
Fifth Level: Page PP 26.2–27.2 & Pl Buffalo 3–Early December 26: 26–68 &
Proofs & Placards 50.i–56bis.i 20: 33–164
Sixth Level: Page PP 28.1–31.1 Texas & 8–Mid-December 26: 71–204

Proofs Buffalo
Seventh Level: Page PP 29.2–31.2 & Pl Texas & 19 December 1921– 26: 121–210
Proofs & Placards 57.i–63.i Buffalo Early January 1922 & 20.167–
234
Eighth Level: Page PP 32.1–33.1 Buffalo & 3–9 January 1922 26.225–74
Proofs Texas
Ninth Level: Page PP 32.2, 34.1– Texas & 6–Mid-January 1922 26.241–331
Proofs 36.1 Buffalo & 27.03–5
Tenth Level: Page PP 35.2–36.2 Texas & 13–Mid-January 26.311–36 &
Proofs Buffalo 1922 27.19–22
Eleventh Level: Page PP 36.3 Texas 16–Mid-January 26.337–40 &
Proofs 1922 27: 23–42
(p.308)
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16. ‘Eumaeus’: 1921–2 (Trieste & Paris)

Revised Earlier Draft Private Collection: ‘Eumeo’ MS January–February 1921: Trieste & Paris NA
Later Manuscript Buffalo MS 21 January–February 1921: Paris 15: 321–68
Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript Mid–Late February 1921: Paris NA
Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TSS 14.i and .iv February–Early December 1921: Paris 15: 370–403
Five Levels of Proofs: 8 December 1921–Late January 1922
First Level: Placards Pl III-1.i–5bis.i Harvard 8–Mid-December 1921 20: 237–368
Second Level: Placards Pl III-1.ii–5bis.ii Harvard 13–Late December 1921 20: 245–370
Third Level: Page Proofs PP 36.1–38.1 Buffalo 11–Mid-January 1922 27: 09–112
Fourth Level: Page Proofs PP 36.3, 37.2–38.2, & 39.1 Texas 16–25 January 1922 27: 29–137
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 37.3 & 39.2 Texas Late January 1922 27: 73–129
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17. ‘Ithaca’: 1921–2 (Paris)

Proto-draft NLI MS 13 Spring–Summer 1921 NA
Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach Manuscript August–Late October 1921 NA
First–Third Typescripts Buffalo TSS 15.c & 15.g October–Early December 1921 16.01–212
Three Levels of Proofs: Mid-December 1921–30 January 1922
First Level: Placards Pl III-6.i–13.i Harvard Mid–Late December 1921 21: 03–140
Second Level: Placards Pl III-6.ii–13.ii Harvard 29 December 1921–Early January 1922 21: 19–144
Third Level: Page Proofs PP 39.1–43.1 Texas Late–30 January 1922 27: 138–288
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18. ‘Penelope’: 1921 (Paris)

Draft NLI MS 14 Spring–Summer 1921 NA
Faircopy for Rosenbach MS & Buffalo MS 22 July–Mid-September 1921 NA &
Typescript 16: 293–
7
Typescript Huntington TS & Buffalo TSS 16 August–Mid-October 16: 299–
16.a–c 1921 349
Five Levels of Proofs: 17 October 1921–31 January 1922
First Level: Placards Pl A.i–E.i Harvard 17–Late October 1921 21: 147–366
Second Level: Placards Pl A.ii–E.ii Harvard 2–Early November 1921 21: 163–368
Third Level: Placards Pl A.iii–E.iii Harvard 15–Mid-November 1921 21: 179–372

Fourth Level: Page Proofs Pl A.iv–E.iv Harvard 24–Late November 1921 21: 195–376
Fifth Level: Page Proofs PP 43.1–46.1 Texas Late–31 January 1922 27: 213–77
Page 25 of 25
(p.310)
Appendix 3 A Chronological List of Extant Ulysses Manuscripts and
Typescripts


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.310) Appendix 3 A Chronological List of Extant Ulysses Manuscripts and

Typescripts
Luca Crispi
I. October 1917–January 1918: ‘Telemachus’ (1) to ‘Proteus’ (3) for the Little
Review (Locarno and Zurich)
Active Dates: Episode: Kind of Manuscript: Manuscript: JJA:
Mid–Late October 1917: 3. ‘Proteus’ Earlier Proto-draft NLI MS 7A NA
Locarno
Autumn 1917: Zurich 3. ‘Proteus’ Later Draft Buffalo MS 3 12:
238–58
Late 1917–Summer 1919: 11. ‘Sirens’ Partial Earlier Draft & NLI MS 7B NA
Zurich Fragments
September–October 1917: 1. Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach NA
Zurich ‘Telemachus’ MS
October–Early December 2. ‘Nestor’ Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach NA
1917: Zurich MS
December 1917: Zurich 2. ‘Nestor’ Typescript for the Little Buffalo TS 1 12: 237
Review
December 1917: Zurich 3. ‘Proteus’ Faircopy for Typescript Rosenbach NA
MS
January 1918: Zurich 3. ‘Proteus’ Typescript for the Little Buffalo TS 2 12: 259
Review
II. February 1918–November 1919: ‘Calypso’ (4) to ‘Cyclops’ (12) for the Little
Review (Zurich)
Page 1 of 6
(p.310)
Typescripts
Active Episode: Kind of Manuscript: JJA:

Dates: Manuscript:
February 4. ‘Calypso’ Collateral Rosenbach NA
1918 Faircopy MS
February 4. ‘Calypso’ Earlier Buffalo TS 12:
1918 Typescript 3a 270–1
the Little
Review
March–May 4. ‘Calypso’ Later Buffalo TS 12:
1918 Typescript 3b 263–6
the Little
Review
February– 5. ‘Lotus Mixed Rosenbach NA
May 1918 Eaters’ Faircopy for MS
Typescript
March–May 6. ‘Hades’ Collateral Rosenbach NA
1918 Faircopy MS
Early–Mid- 6. ‘Hades’ Typescript Buffalo TS 12:
May 1918 for the Little 4 273–84
Review
January– 7. ‘Aeolus’ Collateral Rosenbach NA
May 1918 Faircopy MS
Mid-May 7. ‘Aeolus’ Typescript Buffalo TS 12:
1918 for the Little 5 286–
Review 302
January– 8. Collateral Rosenbach NA
July 1918 ‘Lestrygonians’ Faircopy MS
Summer 8. Typescript Buffalo TS 12:
1918 ‘Lestrygonians’ for the Little 6 304–22
Review
Summer 9. ‘Scylla and Draft NLI MSS NA
1918 Charybdis’ 8A–C
Autumn 9. ‘Scylla and Collateral Rosenbach NA
1918 Charybdis’ Faircopy MS
Late 1918– 9. ‘Scylla and Typescript Buffalo TS 12.350–
Early 1919 Charybdis’ for the Little 7 71
Review
January– 10. ‘Wandering Composite Rosenbach NA
February Rocks’ Faircopy for MS
1919 Typescript
February 10. ‘Wandering Typescript Buffalo TS 13: 02–
1919 Rocks’ for the Little 8 30
Review
Early 1919 11. ‘Sirens’ Later Draft NLI 9 & NA &
Buffalo MS 13: 32–
5 56
Page 2 of 6
(p.310)
Typescripts

Dates: Manuscript:
June 1919 11. Collateral Rosenbach NA
‘Sirens’ Faircopy MS
June 1919 11. ‘Sirens’ Typescript Buffalo TS 13: 58–
for the Little 9 80
Review
Mid-June 12. ‘Cyclops’ Earlier Buffalo MS 13: 83–
1919 Fragmentary 8 & NLI MS 132 &
Texts 10 NA
Summer 12. ‘Cyclops’ Later Buffalo MS 13:
1919 Fragmentary 6 134.a–h
Texts
September– 12. ‘Cyclops’ Faircopy for Rosenbach NA
October Typescript
1919
October– 12. ‘Cyclops’ Typescript Buffalo TS 13:
November for the Little 10 144–68
1919 Review
(p.311)
III. November 1919 to June 1920: ‘Nausicaa’ (13) and ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (14) for
the Little Review (Trieste)
Dates: Manuscript:
November 13. Draft Buffalo MS 13: 175–
1919– ‘Nausicaa’ 10 & 214 & 13:
January Cornell 215–44
1920 MSS 56A–B
January– 13. Mixed Rosenbach NA
February ‘Nausicaa’ Faircopy MS
1920 for
Typescript
February– 13. Typescript Buffalo TS 13: 272–
March ‘Nausicaa’ for the Little 11 93
1920 Review
February– 14. ‘Oxen Earlier Draft NLI MSS NA & 14:
March of the Level 11A–B & 05–56
1920 Sun’ Buffalo
MSS 11 and
12
March–May 14. ‘Oxen Later NLI MSS NA
1920 of the Draft 11C–F & &
Sun’ Level Buffalo 14:
MSS 13 59–
and 18 132
Page 3 of 6
(p.310)
Typescripts

Dates: Manuscript:
May 1920 14. Intermediate Cornell 14:
‘Nausicaa’ Faircopy ‘Oxen’ MS 135–
Fragment 9
May 1920 14. ‘Oxen Mixed Rosenbach NA
of the Faircopy for MS
Sun’ Typescript
June 1920 14. ‘Oxen Typescript Buffalo TS 14: 171–
of the for the Little 12 98
Sun’ Review
(p.312)
IV. Late Spring 1920 to February 1921: ‘Circe’ (15) for Ulysses (Trieste and
Paris)
Late Spring 1920: Trieste 15. Earlier Draft Buffalo MS 19 14: 201–59
‘Circe’
July–December 1920: Paris 15. Intermediate Draft NLI MS 12 NA
‘Circe’
July–December 1920: Paris 15. Later Draft NLI Quinn MS NA
‘Circe’
December 1920–January 15. Mixed Faircopy for Rosenbach NA
1921: Paris ‘Circe’ Typescript MS
January–May 1921: Paris 15. Composite Typescript Buffalo TSS 14: 261–
‘Circe’ Documents 13.d–h 379, 15:
002–298
V. January–Late February 1921: ‘Eumaeus’ (16) for Ulysses (Trieste and Paris)
January–February 1921: 16. Revised Earlier Private ‘Eumeo’ NA
Trieste & Paris ‘Eumaeus’ Draft MS
January–February 1921: Paris 16. Later Draft Buffalo MS 21 15:
‘Eumaeus’ 321–
68
Mid–Late February 1921: 16. Faircopy for Rosenbach MS NA
Paris ‘Eumaeus’ Typescript
(p.313)
VI. Spring–Summer 1921: ‘Ithaca’ (17) and ‘Penelope’ (18) Drafts for Ulysses
(Paris)
Spring–Summer 1921 17. ‘Ithaca’ Proto-draft NLI MS 13 NA
Spring–Summer 1921 18. ‘Penelope’ Draft NLI MS 14 NA
Page 4 of 6
(p.310)
Typescripts
VII. April–June 1921: ‘Nestor’ through ‘Calypso’: Revised Typescripts for

Ulysses (Paris)
April–June 1921 2. ‘Nestor’ Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 1 12: 237
April–June 1921 3. ‘Proteus’ Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 2 12: 259
April–June 1921 4. ‘Calypso’ Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 3 12: 263–71
VIII. June–Mid-September 1921: ‘Hades’ (6) through ‘Cyclops’: Revised

Typescripts for Ulysses (Paris)
June–August 1921 6. ‘Hades’ Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 4 12: 273–84
June–August 1921 7. ‘Aeolus’ Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 5 12: 286–302
June–August 1921 8. ‘Lestrygonians’ Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 6 12: 304–22
June–August 1921 9. ‘Scylla and Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 7 12: 350–71
Charybdis’
June–August 1921 10. ‘Wandering Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 8 13: 02–6,
Rocks’ 13.08–30
September 1921 11. ‘Sirens’ Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 9 13: 08–80
September 1921 12. ‘Cyclops’ Typescript for Ulysses Buffalo TS 13: 144–68
10
(p.314)
IX. February–Mid-October 1921: ‘Nausicaa’ (13) through ‘Eumaeus’ (16):

Revised Typescripts for Ulysses (Paris)
Mid-February–Mid- 15. ‘Circe’ Typescript Buffalo TS 13.h 15: 155–
October 1921 298
February–Early 16. Typescript Buffalo TS 14.i 15: 370–
December 1921 ‘Eumaeus’ and .iv 403
September 1921 15. ‘Circe’ Additional Manuscript Buffalo MS 20 15: 300–
for Typescript 6
September–Mid-October 13. Typescript Buffalo TS 11 13: 272–
1921 ‘Nausicaa’ 93
September–Mid-October 14. ‘Oxen of Typescript Buffalo TS 12 14: 161–
1921 the Sun’ 98
X. July–Early December 1921: ‘Ithaca’ (17) and ‘Penelope’ (18): Faircopies and
Typescripts for Ulysses (Paris)
Page 5 of 6
(p.310)
Typescripts

Dates: Manuscript:
July–Mid- 18. Faircopy for Rosenbach NA & 16:
September ‘Penelope’ Typescript MS & 293–7
1921 Buffalo MS
21
16 August– 18. Typescript Huntington 16:
Mid- ‘Penelope’ for TS & 299–
October Ulysses Buffalo TSS 349
1921 16.a–c &
16:
311–
49
August– 17. Faircopy for Rosenbach NA
Late ‘Ithaca’ Typescript MS
October
1921:
Paris
October– 17. Typescript Buffalo TSS 16: 01–
Early ‘Ithaca’ for Ulysses 15.c & 15.g 212
December
1921
Page 6 of 6
(p.315)
(p.316)
Appendix 4 A Chronological List of Ulysses in Proofs: June 1921 to January
1922 (Paris)

Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.315) (p.316) Appendix 4 A Chronological List of Ulysses in Proofs: June 1921

to January 1922 (Paris)
Luca Crispi
June–August 1921: 1. ‘Telemachus’–5. ‘Lotus Eaters’
Active Dates: Setting Level: Manuscript: Location: JJA:

11–28 June First Level of 1. ‘Telemachus’ Pl 1.i–3.i Harvard 17: 02–27
11–28 June First Level of 2. ‘Nestor’ Pl 3.i, 4.i Harvard 17: 27–40
14–18 June First Level of 3. ‘Proteus’ Pl 5.i, 6.i Harvard 17: 43–60
Mid–18 June First Level of 4. ‘Calypso’ Pl 6.i–8.i Harvard 17: 61–78
Mid-June–28 First Level of 5. ‘Lotus Eaters’ Pl 8.i–9bis.i Harvard 17: 78–93
June
27 June–2 Second Level of 1. ‘Telemachus’ PP 1.1, 2.1 Buffalo 22: 05–18,
August 66–73
29 June–2 Second Level of 2. ‘Nestor’ PP 2.1, 3.1 Buffalo 22: 77–82,
August 117–23
29 June–2 Second Level of 3. ‘Proteus’ PP 3.1, 4.1 Buffalo 22: 123–32,
August 167–70
Mid-June–2 Second Level of 4. ‘Calypso’ PP 4.1, 5.1 Buffalo 22: 173–236
August
30 June–2 Second Level of 5. ‘Lotus Eaters’ PP 5.1 Buffalo 22: 239–248
August
August–September 1921: 1. ‘Telemachus’–10. ‘Wandering Rocks’

8–Late August Third Level of 1. ‘Telemachus’ PP 1.2, 2.2 Buffalo 22: 21–89
Page 1 of 7
(p.315)
(p.316)
1922 (Paris)
August–September 1921: 1. ‘Telemachus’–10. ‘Wandering Rocks’

8–Late August Third Level of 2. ‘Nestor’ PP 2.2, 3.2 Buffalo 22: 93–
139
8–Late August Third Level of 3. ‘Proteus’ PP 3.2, 4.2 Buffalo 22: 139–
202
8– Late August Third Level of 4. ‘Calypso’ PP 4.2, 5.2 Buffalo 22: 189–
53
8–Late August Third Level of 5. ‘Lotus Eaters’ PP 5.2 Buffalo 22: 257–
64
18 August–2 Fourth Level of 1. ‘Telemachus’ Pl I.i–III.i Harvard 17: 96–
September 123
August–2 Fourth Level of 2. ‘Nestor’ Pl III.i–V.i Harvard 17: 124–
September 40
August–2 Fourth Level of 3. ‘Proteus’ Pl V.i–VII.i Harvard 17: 141–
September 58
Late August–2 Fourth Level of 4. ‘Calypso’ Pl VII.i–IX.i Harvard 17: 161–
September 79
Late August–2 Fourth Level of 6. ‘Lotus Eaters’ Pl IX.i–XI.i Harvard 17: 180–
September 200
Late August–2 First Level of 6. ‘Hades’ Pl 10.i–12.i Harvard 17: 203–
September 54
Late August First Level of 7. ‘Aeolus’ Pl 13.i–16.i Harvard 18: 03–87
Late August First Level of 8.‘Lestrygonians’ Pl 16.i–19.i Harvard 18: 88–
145
17 August–5 First Level of 9. ‘Scylla and Pl 19.i–23.i Harvard 18: 146–
September Charybdis’ 220
23 August–19 Second Level of 7. ‘Aeolus’ Pl 13.ii–16.ii Harvard 18: 12–95
September
25 August–5 First Level of 10. ‘Wandering Pl 24.i–27.i Harvard 18: 230–
September Rocks’ 92
September–October 1921: 1. ‘Telemachus’–10. ‘Wandering Rocks’

5–20 Fifth Level of 1. PP 1.3, 2.3 Texas 22: 51–105
September ‘Telemachus’
5–20 Fifth Level of 2. ‘Nestor’ PP 2.3, 3.3 Texas 22: 106–152
September
5–21 Fifth Level of 3. ‘Proteus’ PP 3.3, 4.3 Texas 22: 153–216
September
5–21 Fifth Level of 4. ‘Calypso’ PP 4.3, 5.3 Texas 22: 219–67
September
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1922 (Paris)

5–20 Fifth Level of 5. ‘Lotus PP 5.3, 6.1 Texas and 22: 268–317
September Eaters’ Buffalo
6–15 Second Level of 6. ‘Hades’ Pl 10.ii–12.ii Harvard 17: 211–62
September
6–19 Third Level of 6. ‘Hades’ PP 6.1 & Pl Buffalo and 22: 318–26 &
September 11.iii, 12.iii Harvard 17.237–70
12–19 Third Level of ‘7. Aeolus’ Pl 13.iii–15.iii Harvard 18: 21–84

September
Early–19 Second Level of 8. Pl 16.ii–19.ii: Harvard 18: 96–153
September ‘Lestrygonians’
Mid-September Second Level of 9. ‘Scylla Pl 19.ii–23.ii Harvard 18: 154–228
and Charybdis’
Mid-September Second Level of 10. Pl 24.ii–27.ii Harvard 18: 239–300
‘Wandering Rocks’
Mid–26 Third Level of 9. ‘Scylla PP 11.1–13.1 Buffalo 23: 175–326
September and Charybdis’
21–26 Fourth Level of 6. ‘Hades’ PP 6.2, 7.1 Buffalo 22: 344–95
September
21 September Sixth Level of 4. ‘Calypso’ PP 5.4 Texas 22: 219–67
22–26 Third Level of 8. PP 9.1–11.1 Buffalo 23: 72–174
Mid–26 Sixth Level of 5. ‘Lotus PP 5.4, 6.2 Texas and 22: 287–333
September Eaters’ Buffalo
26–30 Fourth Level of 8. PP 9.2–11.2 Buffalo 23: 88–190
26–30 Fourth Level of 9. ‘Scylla PP 11.2–13.2 Buffalo 23: 191–342
Late Third Level of 10. PP 14.1–15.1 & Buffalo & 24: 03–84 &
September ‘Wandering Rocks’ Pl 28.i Harvard 18.303–5
Late–26 Fourth Level of 7. ‘Aeolus’ PP 7.1–9.1 Buffalo 22: 396,

September 23.02–71
26–30 Fifth Level of 7. ‘Aeolus’ PP 7.2–9.2 Buffalo 22: 412,
September 23.03–87
26–30 Fourth Level of 9. ‘Scylla PP 11.2–13.2 Buffalo 23: 191–342
27 September– Seventh Level of 5. ‘Lotus PP 6.3 Buffalo 22: 347–9
1 October Eaters’
27 September– Fifth Level of 6. ‘Hades’ PP 6.3, 7.2 Buffalo 22: 350–411
1 October
28 September– Fourth Level of 10. PP 14.2, 15.2 & Buffalo & 24: 019–100
Early October ‘Wandering Rocks’ Pl 28.ii Harvard & 18.306–8
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1922 (Paris)

28 September– First Level of 11. ‘Sirens’ Pl 28.i–32.i Harvard & 19: 06–89
Early October Princeton
30 September– First Level of 12. ‘Cyclops’ Pl 32.i–37.i Harvard 19: 90–210
Early October
October 1921: 6. ‘Hades’–18. ‘Penelope’

1–6 October Eighth Level of 5. ‘Lotus PP 6.4 Texas 22: 363–5
Eaters’
1–6 October Sixth Level of 6. ‘Hades’ PP 6.4, 7.3 Texas 22: 366–427
3–11 October Fifth Level of 8. PP 9.3–11.3 Texas and 23: 104–207
‘Lestrygonians’ Buffalo
3–Mid October Sixth Level of 8. PP 10.4, 11.4 Texas and 23: 141–223
‘Lestrygonians’ Yale
Early–11 Sixth Level of 7. ‘Aeolus’ PP 7.3–9.3 Texas 22: 428,
October 23.04–87
Early October Fifth Level of 9. ‘Scylla PP 11.3–14.3 Buffalo 23: 208–379,
and Charybdis’ 24.35
Early October Fifth Level of 10. PP 14.3, 15.3, Buffalo 24: 36–138
‘Wandering Rocks’ 16.1
Early October Second Level of 11. Pl 28.ii–32.ii Harvard & 19: 14–97
‘Sirens’ Princeton
Early October Second Level of 12. Pl 32.ii–37.ii Harvard 19: 98–218
‘Cyclops’
6–17 October Third Level of 12. Pl 34.iii–37.iii Harvard 19: 137–226
‘Cyclops’
Mid-October Seventh Level of 8. PP 10.5, 11.5 Texas 23: 143–239
‘Lestrygonians’
7–13 October Sixth Level of 9. ‘Scylla PP 11.4–14.4 Yale and 23: 224–380,
and Charybdis’ Texas 24.51
8–14 October Third Level of 11. ‘Sirens’ PP 16.1–18.1 Buffalo & 24: 139–241
Rosenbach
10 October–3 Fourth Level of 12. PP 18.1, 19.1 & Buffalo & 24: 242–50,
November ‘Cyclops’ Pl 36.iv–37.iv Harvard 25: 02–10 &
19: 191–234
Mid-October Sixth Level of 10. PP 14.4, 15.4, Texas and 24: 52–154
‘Wandering Rocks’ 16.2 Buffalo
12–14 October Seventh Level of 9. ‘Scylla PP 11.5 Texas 23: 240
and Charybdis’
12–19 October Fourth Level of 11. PP 16.2–18.2 Buffalo 24: 155–257
‘Sirens’
Page 4 of 7
(p.315)
(p.316)
1922 (Paris)
October 1921: 6. ‘Hades’–18. ‘Penelope’

17–24 October Seventh Level of 10. PP: 16.3 Texas 24: 167–70
‘Wandering Rocks’
17–27 October Fifth Level of 11. ‘Sirens’ PP 16.3–18.3 Buffalo 24: 171–273
17–19 October Fifth Level of 12. PP 18.1–19.1 Buffalo 24: 258–66,
‘Cyclops’ 25: 49–64
17–Late First Level of 18. Pl A.i–E.i Harvard 21: 147–366
October ‘Penelope’
19 October Sixth Level of 12. PP 19.3 Buffalo 25: 65–80
‘Cyclops’
20 October– First Level of 15. ‘Circe’ Pl Y.i–Z.i Harvard 20: 59–102
Early
November
21–Late First Level of 13. Pl 38.i–41.i Harvard 19: 237–98
October ‘Nausicaa’
25–26 October Seventh Level of 12. PP 18.3, 19.4, Texas and 24: 274–82,
‘Cyclops’ 20.1 Princeton 25: 22–150
25 October– Second Level of 13. Pl 38.ii–41.ii Harvard 19: 245–306
Early ‘Nausicaa’
November
Late October– First Level of 14. ‘Oxen of Pl 41.i–44.i Harvard & 19: 298–352
Early the Sun’ Princeton
November
November 1921: 13. ‘Nausicaa’–18. ‘Penelope’

2–Early Second Level of 18. Pl A.ii–E.ii Harvard 21: 163–
November ‘Penelope’ 368
3–Mid- Second Level of 14. ‘Oxen Pl 42.ii–44.ii, 45.i– Harvard & 19: 317–80
November of the Sun’ 46.i Princeton
8–Mid- Third Level of 13. PP 21.1–23.1 Texas & 25: 181–
November ‘Nausicaa’ Buffalo 252
9–Mid- Second Level of 15. Pl Y.ii–Z.ii Harvard 20: 67–106
November ‘Circe’
10–17 Eighth Level of 12. PP 19.5, 20.2, Texas 25: 97–180
November ‘Cyclops’ 21.1
15–Mid- Third Level of 18. Pl A.iii–E.iii Harvard 21: 179–
15–Late Third Level of 15. ‘Circe’ Pl 47.i–49.i & Harvard 20: 03–110
November Y.iii–Z.iii
Mid-November Ninth Level of 12. PP. 19.6, 20.3 Texas and 25: 115,
‘Cyclops’ Princeton 25: 119–34
Page 5 of 7
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(p.316)
1922 (Paris)
November 1921: 13. ‘Nausicaa’–18. ‘Penelope’

Mid-November Third Level of 14. ‘Oxen PP 23.1–24.1 Buffalo 25: 253–
of the Sun’ 306
18–19 Fourth Level of 13. PP 22.2–23.2 Buffalo 25: 205–68
November ‘Nausicaa’
Mid–Late Fourth Level of 14. ‘Oxen PP 23.2–24.2, Buffalo 25: 269–
November of the Sun’ 25.1–26.1 364 & 26:
03–8
22–Late Fourth Level of ‘15. PP 26.1–27.1 & Pl Buffalo & 26: 09–52
November Circe’ Y.iv–Z.iv Harvard & 20: 83–
114
23–25 Fifth Level of 13. PP 22.3–23.3 Texas 25: 223–85
November ‘Nausicaa’
24–Late Fourth Level of 18. Pl A.iv–E.iv Harvard 21: 195–
Late Fifth Level of 14. ‘Oxen of PP 23.3–24.3, Texas 25: 286–
November–7 the Sun’ 26.2 371 & 26:
December 19–25
December 1921–Early January 1922: 15. ‘Circe’–18. ‘Ithaca’

3–Early Fifth Level of 15. PP 26.2–27.2 & Pl Buffalo 26: 26–68 &
December ‘Circe’ 50.i–56bis.i 20: 33–164
8–Mid-December Sixth Level of 15. PP 28.1–31.1 Texas & 26: 71–204

‘Circe’ Buffalo
8–Mid-December First Level of 16. Pl III-1.i–5bis.i Harvard 20: 237–368
‘Eumaeus’
Mid–Late First Level of 17. Pl III-6.i–13.i Harvard 21: 03–140
December ‘Ithaca’
13–Late Second Level of 16. Pl III.1-ii–5bis.ii Harvard 21: 19–144
December ‘Eumaeus’
19 December Seventh Level of PP 29.2–31.2 & Pl Texas & 26: 121–210 &
1921–Early 15. ‘Circe’ 57.i–63.i Buffalo 20: 167–234
January 1922
29 December Second Level of 17. Pl III-6.ii–13.ii Harvard 21: 19–144
1921–Early ‘Ithaca’
January 1922
January 1922: 15. ‘Circe’–18. ‘Penelope’

3–9 January Eighth Level of 15. PP 32.1–33.1 Buffalo & 26: 225–74
‘Circe’ Texas
6–Mid-January Ninth Level of 15. PP 32.2, 34.1–36.1 Texas & 26: 241–331 &
‘Circe’ Buffalo 27: 03–5
Page 6 of 7
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1922 (Paris)
January 1922: 15. ‘Circe’–18. ‘Penelope’

11–Mid- Third Level of 16. PP 36.1–38.1 Buffalo 27: 09–112
January 1922 ‘Eumaeus’
13–Mid- Tenth Level of 15. PP 35.2–36.2 Texas & 26: 311–36 &
January ‘Circe’ Buffalo 27: 19–22
16–Mid- Eleventh Level of 15. PP 36.3 Texas 26: 337–40 &
January ‘Circe’ 27: 23–42
16–25 January Fourth Level of 16. PP 36.3, 37.2–38.2, & Texas 27: 29–137
‘Eumaeus’ 39.1
Late January Fifth Level of 16. PP 37.3 & 39.2 Texas 27: 73–129
‘Eumaeus’
Late–30 Third Level of 17. PP 39.1–43.1 Texas 27: 138–288
January ‘Ithaca’
Late–31 Fifth Level of 18. PP 43.1–46.1 Texas 27: 213–277
January ‘Penelope’
2 February 1922: Ulysses is published.
(p.317) (p.318) (p.319) (p.320)
Page 7 of 7
(p.321)
Bibliography


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.321) Bibliography
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Page 16 of 16
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Index


Luca Crispi

Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718857.001.0001
(p.331) Index
Adams, Robert M. (Surface and Symbol) 62, 67 n. 5, 73, 98, 186–7, 192, 217, 260, 264
adultery plotline 42
Leopold’s view of 58 see also Bloom, Leopold
list of Molly’s lovers 264–6
Molly’s views on adultery 271–2, 275, 277 see also Bloom, Molly
one of oldest stories and in Ulysses 28–9, 280
third temporal axis of book 29
Agendath Netaim 185
Alexander Thom & Co 218
Alfonso XIII, King of Spain 137
Alfred, Lord Tennyson 124
Anna Livia (character) 198
Apjohn, Percy (character) 75, 95–6
Arbutus Place 185–6, 190
Archimedes 91, 93, 103
Aristotle 19
Arnott’s 86, 243
Artifoni, Armidano 76 n. 32
Attridge, Derek (The Singularity of Literature) 1–2
Bal, Mieke 16 n. 22, 18
Bandmann-Palmer, Millicent 66, 69
Bannon, Alec. (character) 40, 142, 197–200
barmaids at the Ormond Bar (characters) 31–2, 36, 54–5, 261 see also Douce, Lydia; Kennedy,
Mina
Barnacle Joyce, Nora 128 n. 99, 139 n. 179, 159 n. 70, 165 n. 107, 168, 172, 265–6
Barney Kiernan’s pub 61, 76, 224, 237, 239
Bateman, Kate 66
Page 1 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Beach, Cyprian 285

Beach, Sylvia xx, 25, 103, 228, 282–5, 293, 295
Belfast 275–6
Bell, G. K. A. 168–9
Bennett, Arnold 11–12
Benstock, Shari (‘Is He a Jew or a Gentile or a Holy Roman?’) 81 n. 54
Bérard, Victor (Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée) 33, 114 n. 22
Bergan, Alf (character) 61–2
Bloom, Ellen Higgins (character) 80–2, 108
Bloom, Leopold (character)
attitude towards wife’s affair with Boylan 28, 41–3, 47–8, 56–7, 59–60, 261, 267–8
employment 101–2, 190–1, 218, 231, 233–5, 237–8, 245–6, 248–9, 251–2
high school pissing contest 94–5
known as ‘Mackerel’ 95
masturbation and fetishes 70, 98–9, 101–2, 109, 159, 162–3, 274
other meetings with Stephen Dedalus 150–3, 192–3
passivity and resignation 28, 30, 41, 46, 59, 203, 222–3, 271
photograph of 96
poetic ability 96–7, 179
political views 98, 103–7, 118, 156, 191–2, 257–8
problem of squaring the circle 102–3
remembers Milly’s birth and childhood 38–41, 46, 78, 170, 183, 197–206, 220, 241, 253–4
sense of happiness 16, 29, 38–9, 78, 122, 143, 147, 172, 175, 181, 185, 190, 194, 203, 223,
232
sexualized thoughts of other women 36
suspicion that he is a Mason 49, 193–4, 227 see also Mason and Masonry
thinks of father’s death 71
thinks of Molly’s garters 11, 49
thinks of Molly’s body 40, 42, 44, 128, 145, 249, 269
thinks of Rudy’s death 60, 81, 122
‘unconquered hero’ of Ulysses 28–30, 53, 56
wants painting of Molly 147
Bloom, Millicent ‘Milly’ (character)
birthday gift to her father 200, 204–5
calls Boylan ‘Blazes’ 39–40
letter to parents 38–41, 128, 200
menstrual cycle 198, 201–2
similar to her mother 137–8, 198–9, 201–3, 208, 212–13
works in photo shop 78, 197–8, 200, 203–4, 209 see also Mullingar
Bloom, Marcus J. (character and dentist) 76, 119
Bloom, Marion (Molly) Tweedy (character)
calls Boylan ‘Blazes’ 34, 278
calls Leopold ‘Poldy’ 11, 132, 156, 159, 177, 197, 207, 221, 243, 274–5, 277
Page 2 of 13
(p.331)
Index
concert tour 44, 46–7, 49, 63, 71, 118, 275

contrary and oscillating attitudes 115, 122–3, 129–31, 136–7, 166–7, 173, 181, 257, 259,
270, 274, 276, 280
first kiss 127, 129–31
Greystones concert 221, 231
(p.332)
known as Marie Fallon and Marie Powell 35, 112, 196
letters she has received 39, 126, 128–9, 133–4, 136, 201
marital bed 99, 113–15, 262, 264
Mansion House concert 112, 193, 196–7, 233, 243
name spelled Mollie 148 n. 25, 185, 204 n. 64
never thinks of Rudy by name 228
reading books 39–41, 127, 158–9
referred to as Mrs Marion Bloom 37, 39, 41, 47, 59
sexualized representation of 35, 41–2, 44, 48–9, 64, 111–12, 128, 134–5, 145, 149, 168, 207–
8, 212, 249, 276–8
professional singer 40, 46–7, 63, 109, 112, 148–9, 194–5, 231, 243, 248
thinks of Milly 178, 192, 199, 206–16, 273 see also Gibraltar
Bloom, Rudolph Virag (character)
interest in photography 78, 203–4, 209
proprietor of Queen’s Hotel, Ennis 72–4
Bloom, Rudy (character)
associated with Stephen Dedalus 220, 223, 225, 228–9
burial 224, 229
date of birth and death 220, 224, 227–8
day of his conception 218, 220–2
spectral or ghostlike 220–2, 225–7
Bodkin, Michael ‘Sonny’ 265–6
Boer War 63, 95, 256, 258–9
Boylan, ‘Dirty Dan’ (character) 63–4, 123, 273
Boylan, Hugh ‘Blazes’ (character)
appearance and attire 28, 30, 32–4, 43, 48–9, 51–3, 55, 60, 261–2, 263–4, 268, 272
as ‘conquering hero’ 29–30, 33–4, 55–6
central to conception of Ulysses 29, 39
financial status 41–2, 276
first night dance with Molly 41–2, 44, 46, 270–1
management of Molly Bloom’s concert tour 44, 47, 49, 63, 275
management of Myler Keogh 47–8, 61–2
mediated impressions of 30, 43, 263, 270
name 32–4, 40–1, 51, 60–3, 266, 278
‘Seaside girls’ 39–41, 49
sexual potency 273, 279
slaps Molly’s behind 272, 278
Page 3 of 13
(p.331)
Index
time of rendezvous with Molly: ‘at four’ 29, 47 n. 65, 49–50, 53–8, 275
younger than Molly 268
Breen, Josie (character) 46, 141–2, 155–6, 165, 167, 180
Brighton Square 160, 165
British and British empire 103 n. 45, 104–5, 115, 118, 124, 170, 206, 258
Budgen, Frank 5, 76 n. 32, 122, 243, 285, 287
Burke, Pisser (character) 238, 240–1
Bushmills 124
Byrne, J. F. 33
Canada 104, 129
Cappoquin 134
Catholicism and Catholic Church 67, 81, 87, 121, 126–7, 266
character traits 9–10, 17, 20–2, 46, 112, 135, 162–3, 166
Citron, Mr and Mrs (characters) 46, 185–9
Citron, J. 186
City Arms Hotel 218, 230–44
Clanbrassil Street 85, 94–5, 185
Clarke, Lotty (character) 99–100
Clifford, Martha (character) 36, 55, 66, 89, 142
College Green 95
Collins, Dr Joseph (The Doctor Looks at Literature) 177–8
Collins, Wilkie 158–9
Cohen, Bella (character) 67 n. 6, 99, 102, 185 n. 1, 260–2
Cohen, ‘old’ (character) 114 n. 21, 115
Connolly, Conny (character) 210, 214
Costello, Peter
(Leopold Bloom: A Biography) 8 n. 14, 14, 83
(James Joyce: Years of Growth, 1882–1915: A Biography) 73, 91–2 n. 90
Cowley, ‘Father’ Bob (character) 34–5, 56–7, 112, 145, 193, 196, 241, 246
Cuffe, Joseph (character) 234–5, 237
Cuffe & Sons 218, 231–3, 238, 245, 248, 249 n. 124
Cunningham, Martin (character) 43, 71–3, 76, 222
Currie, Gregory (Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories) 18
Dame Street 191
Darantiere, Maurice 284–5, 294
d’Arcy, Bartell (character) 109, 195–6
Darwin, Charles 104
Davitt, Michael 104, 106, 242
Davy Byrne (character) 48–9, 251
Davy Byrne’s pub 46, 48, 62, 76, 168
de Kock, Paul 59–60
Dedalus, Simon (character) 32, 35–7, 54, 73, 111–12, 148, 192, 196, 220, 228, 246–8
Dedalus, Stephen (character) 5, 23, 66 n. 4, 90, 108
Page 4 of 13
(p.331)
Index
in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 14, 89 n. 75, 242

in Ulysses 9, 67 n. 6, 81, 83, 87, 94, 105, 105 n. 152, 109–10, 119, 150–3, 169, 192–3, 223–6,
228–9, 236–7, 239, 241–2, 249–50, 253
(p.333) Deppman, Jed (Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes) 27 n. 38
Devan, Tom and Harry (characters) 209, 214
Dignam, Paddy (character) 40, 61, 148–9, 190, 224
Dignam, Patrick Jr (character) 52
Dillon, Floey (character) 141, 150–1, 153, 177
Dillon, Matthew (character) 45, 119, 140, 142–50, 155, 182, 229, 241
Dillon, Lord Mayor Val (character) 243–4
Dlugacz (character) 185
D’Olier Street 42, 48
Dollard, Ben (character) 34–5, 246–8
Dolphin’s Barn 95, 131, 140–4
Dorris, John M. (Lack of Character: Personality and Behavior) 19 n. 30
Douce, Lydia (character) 32, 34, 52, 60
Doyle Henny (character) 142–3
Doyle, Luke and Caroline (characters) 140, 142–4, 146–7, 155, 182–3
Drimmie & Sons 218, 251–2
Driscoll, Mary (character) 254–5
Dublin Bakery Company 274
Dublin Coffee Palace 246, 248–9
Dublin zoo 100
Dubliners 32, 108, 265
‘Counterparts’ 234
‘The Dead’ 139 n. 179, 195, 266
‘Grace’ 72
‘A Painful Case’ 79 n. 47
‘Two Gallants’ 261
Duke Lane 49
Dunne, Miss (character) 51, 53
Dwenn, Mrs (character) 129
Eccles Street 8, 29, 47, 53, 59, 90 n. 80, 94, 99, 113, 115, 118, 181, 200, 218, 223, 260, 263, 274
Eden Quay 268
Eglinton, John (character) 70 see also Magee, William Kirkpatrick
Ellis, Mrs (character) 89–91
Ellmann, Richard
(James Joyce) 66 n. 2, 128 n. 99, 155 n. 48, 172, 177, 214 n. 107, 264, 266
(‘The Limits of Joyce’s Naturalism’) 47 n. 65
Emery, Lawrence K. [pseud] see Leventhal, A. J. (‘Con’)
England and English 49, 74, 127, 259
Ennis, Co Clare 72–4, 77, 82, 275
Erasmus High School 91, 93
Page 5 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Erin’s King 170–1

Europa Point 133
Exiles 28 n. 1
Featherbed Mountain and pass 243–4
Ferrer, Daniel
(Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes) 27 n. 38
(‘What Song the Sirens Sang … is No Longer beyond All Conjecture’) 31
fictional subjectivity 17, 79
Fiedler, Leslie (‘Bloom on Joyce; or, Jokey for Jacob’) 17 n. 23
Finnegans Wake 3, 7 n. 12, 21–3, 25 n. 13, 70, 108, 163, 198, 221 n. 13, 282, 288
Firtree cove 129, 134
Fleming, Mrs (character) 45
Flynn, Nosey (character) 46–9, 61–2, 251
Fordham, Finn (Lots of Fun at ‘Finnegans Wake’) 21–2
Forster, E. M. 17 n. 24
Foster, William Edward ‘Buckshot’ (character) 106 n. 158
Freud, Sigmund 19
Frow, John (‘Spectacle Binding: On Character’) 18
Gabler, Hans Walter (UCSE) 3, 15, 25, 58, 103, 103 n. 45, 135 n. 144, 186 n. 8, 229 n. 46
Gaiety Theatre 47 n. 65–6, 69, 170, 214, 252–3, 266
Galbraith, Mrs (character) 188
Gallaher, Mrs Joe (character) 215
Galway 128 n. 99, 266
Gardner, Lieutenant Stanley (character) 132, 136, 161, 164, 256–9, 265, 274
genetic criticism 1–2, 6–7, 14–15, 23–7, 280
Gibraltar 16, 35, 98 n. 121, 112–14, 115–16, 126–8, 130, 132–4, 136–9, 158, 174, 185, 207, 257,
259, 264, 266
Gilligan, Philip (character) 86–7, 95, 243
Gladstone, William Ewart 104, 107
Glasnevin cemetery 42, 71, 79, 81, 148, 203, 222
Glencree dinner 46, 243–4
Gogarty, Oliver St John 168–9, 172–3
Gold Cup race 34, 48–9
Goodwin, ‘Professor’ (character) 46, 112, 193, 196–7, 201, 233, 243, 246, 253
Goldberg, Owen (character) 95
Golding, Richie (character) 55–7, 233
Gordon, General Charles George 116, 124
Gordon, John (Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back) 84 n. 60
gossip and rumours 11, 14, 36, 49, 58, 61–3, 64, 73, 112, 193, 231–3, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243–8,
273
Goulding, Richie (character) 55–7, 233
Grafton Street 34, 52, 120
Great Brunswick Street 268
Page 6 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Griffith, Arthur 258

Groden, Michael
(Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes) 27 n. 38
(‘The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts’) 175 n. 142
(‘Ulysses’ in Progress) 3, 236, 237, n. 78
(p.334) Groves, captain (character) 116, 123–5, 138–9, 172–3
Gunn, Michael 252–3 see also Gaiety Theatre
Harcourt Street 91, 196
Harold’s Cross Road 160–2
Harvey, W. J. (Character and the Novel) 6–7, 17–18
Hatch Street 101
Hayman, David 264
(‘Dr J. Collins Looks at J.J.’) 177 n. 47
(Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning) 57 n. 92
Hely, Charles Wisdom (character) 190
Hely’s Ltd 190–1, 217–18, 231, 248–9
Herring, Phillip
(Joyce’s Notes and Early Drafts for ‘Ulysses’) 33
(Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ Notesheets in the British Museum) 68 n. 8, 91 n. 87, 114 n. 22, 148 n. 25
Holles Street 36, 218, 245–50
Holles Street maternity hospital 150
Holohan, Hoppy (character) 265
Holohan, Mr 265–6
Homer and Homeric 5, 68 n. 8, 70–1, 193, 247 n. 115
Hooper, Alderman John (character) 182–3
Howth Hill 28, 92–3, 123, 142–3, 146, 157, 167–75, 270, 280
Hozier, H. M. (The Russo-Turkish War) 116
Hume Street 44, 45 n. 56
Hungary and Hungarian 65, 67 n. 5, 68–9, 74, 76, 78, 81, 89
Royal and Privileged Hungarian Lottery 193–4, 196, 218, 233
Szombathely, Hungary 67–8, 74 n. 28, 89
Hyman, Louis (The Jews of Ireland) 185–6, 188
Hynes, Joe (character) 62, 236, 238–9
Igoe, Vivien (A Biographical Dictionary) 85
intertextual and intratextual 12, 70–2, 234, 241, 252
Irving, Washington (‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘Sleepy Hollow’) 142–4
Islandbridge 63–4
Jackson, Holbrook 9–10
Janusko, Robert 152–3
Jews and Jewish 63, 67, 68 n. 8, 74, 76, 78 n. 39, 81, 91 n. 86, 109 n. 6, 110, 154, 185, 188 n. 17,
189, 193, 226, 231, 235–7, 240
Johnston, Reverend Albert Edward 85
Johnston, Reverend Gilmer (character) 85
Page 7 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Joyce, John Stanislaus 72, 148 n. 23

Joyce, Stanislaus 169, n. 125, 282 n. 2
Kane, Matthew 72
Kelleher, Cornelius ‘Corny’ (character) 148
Kelly, Bridie (character) 101
Kendal, Marie 252
Kenilworth Square 159
Kennedy, Mina (character) 32–3, 170
Kenner, Hugh 264–5
(‘The Rhetoric of Silence’) 47 n. 65
(‘Ulysses’) 103 n. 145
Kenny, Peter (‘Joyce Papers 2002’) xvi, 4 n. 7
Kernan, Tom (character) 148
Keyes, Alexander (character) 29, 186–7
Khartoum 116, 124
Kiberd, Declan (‘Ulysses’ and Us) 17 n. 23
Kidd, John 186 n. 8
Kildare Street 48
Kimmage 144
Lacan, Jacques 19
Lamb, Charles 93, 101
Lambert, Ned (character) 61, 148–9, 190, 237, 239
Laredo, Lunita 108–11, 154, 239–40
Leah see Bandmann-Palmer, Millicent; Bateman, Kate; Bloom, Rudolph Virag
Leinster Road 159
Lenehan (character) 32, 34, 53–4, 239, 243–4, 260–1
Léon, Paul 282, 284 n. 3
Leonard, Paddy (character) 49, 61
Leventhal, A. J. (‘Con’) 12
Liffey 54, 185, 231, 253
Litz, A. Walton 3
Lombard Street West 122 n. 61, 185, 189–90, 196–7, 217–18, 223, 231, 243
Lord Napier, General Robert Cornelis 115
‘Love and War’ (duet) 35
Lynman, Stephany (‘Revision and Intention in Joyce’s “Penelope” ’) 174 n. 40
Lyons, Bantam (character) 34, 49
Lyons, J. B. (Thrust Syphilis Down to Hell and Other Rejoyceana) 169 n. 124
McBride, Margaret (‘At Four She Said’ and ‘At Four She Said II’) 47 n. 65
McDowell, Gerty (character) 93, 99
M’Coy, C. P. (character) 47, 89, 203, 243
Magalaner, Marvin 23–4
Magee, William Kirkpatrick (John Eglinton) 91 n. 86, 168
Magrane, Daniel (character) 103–4
Page 8 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Malone, Reverend Charles (character and curate of the Church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar)
87
M’apparì (aria) 145
Marshall, Isaac 73–4
Martello Tower 169
‘Martha’ (comic opera) 36
Martin Harvey, Sir John (The Only Way) 80
Masliansky, P. 186
Mason and Masonry 49, 193–4, 226–7
(p.335) Mastiansky, Mr and Mrs (characters) 185–6, 188–9
memory and memories
private 13, 138, 173, 195, 199
shared 13, 128, 131, 140, 142, 145, 150, 167–76, 194, 197, 243, 247–8, 250, 252, 270
textual 70, 93, 248, 270 see also gossip and rumours
Menton, J. H. 148 n. 23
Menton, John Henry (character) 45, 148–51, 190
Merchants Arch 243
Mesias, George Robert (character) 268
metempsychosis 45
modernism and modernist 2, 12, 20, 23, 27, 68, 70–2, 84, 245
Moisel, Basseh, Elyah Wolf, and Rebecca Ita 186, 188
Moisel, M. and Nisan 186, 188
Moisel, Mr and Mrs (characters) 185–6, 188
Moisel, Philip (character) 188
Moore, Thomas
(‘The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Hall’) 170
(‘The Young May Moon’) 46
Moorish wall 128, 130–1
Morley, John, the 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn 104–5
Mulligan, Malachi ‘Buck’ (character) 9, 67 n. 6, 197–8, 220
Mullingar 39, 78, 138, 142, 200, 202–3, 211, 213, 216, 271
Mulvagh, William 128 n. 99
Mulvey, Lieutenant Harry (character) 110, 123, 158–9, 163, 172–3, 180, 206, 265–6, 275
confused with Gardner 132
date of tryst 137–8
departure 127, 130, 137
gave Molly Claddagh ring 136, 259
letter to Molly 126, 128–9, 133–4, 136
married to another woman 130, 135, 138
moustache 131–2, 257
photo of 159
sailor on H. M. S. Calypso 137
soiled handkerchief 130–1, 133, 135–6, 266
Page 9 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Murray, Josephine 155

Murray, Willy (character) 61
National Library of Ireland xii, xvi–xvii, 2, 4, 24, 24 n. 34
National Museum of Ireland 48–9, 55, 76
Niemeyer, Carl (‘A Ulysses Calendar’) 1 n. 1, 140 n. 1
Norris, Margot (‘Don’t Call him “Blazes”: Hugh E. Boylan’s Narrative Caricature’) 33, 51
Northumberland Road 104–5
Odyssey Press 228
Offenbach, Jacques (La fille du tambour-major) 112
O’Hara’s Tower 129
O’Holleran, Mary 266
olla podrida 129
Ontario Terrace 218, 251–5
Ormond Hotel and Bar 30–2, 34–8, 50, 52–7, 59–60, 111, 145, 170, 261
Owen, Rodney Wilson 31
parallax 45
Paris 19, 25, 67, 81, 169 n. 125, 177 n. 147, 209, 237
Parnell, Charles Stewart 104, 191, 241–2
Pater, Walter (Marcus the Epicurean) 151–3
Peake, Little (character) 233–4
Penrose (character) 187, 195, 265–6
Phoenix Park murders 66–7 n. 4, 84
pisto madrileno 129
Plasto, John (character) 268
Pleasants Street 184–5, 190
Plevna 113–6, 124
Plumtree’s potted meat 191
Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New
York xii, xiv–xvi, 4, 281, 284 n. 3, 285 n. 4
Ponchielli, Amilcare (La Gioconda) 41–2, 143 n. 8
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 7 n. 12, 14, 21, 89 n. 75, 108, 239, 241–2 see also
Dedalus, Stephen
Poulaphouca waterfall 99
Powell, Josie see Breen, Josie
Powell, Marie (character) 35, 112, 196
Powell, Sargent-Major Malachi 35, 112, 155 n. 48
Power, Jack (character) 43–5, 71–3, 76
Prezioso, Roberto (Piccolo della Sera) 172
Protestantism and Church of Ireland 75–6, 85, 91 n. 86, 95, 148
Purefoy, Mina (character) 273
Quinn, John 209 n. 103, 283, 285, 287, 289
Rabaté, Jean-Michel (James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism) 25 n. 35
Page 10 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Raleigh, John Henry (The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom) 8 n. 14, 14, 83–4, 86 n. 70, 99 n.
25
Rathgar 87, 146, 159
Raymond Terrace 185, 217–18, 220, 222, 231
Raymonde, Linnosier 285
realist, realism, realistic, and realist technique 10, 12, 16, 20, 22, 68–9, 72, 87, 213, 217, 248
Red Bank restaurant 42–3, 48
Rehoboth Terrace 142, 160
(p.336) ReJoyce (2004 centenary) 4
rendezvous see adultery plotline
rhododendrons 169–73
Richmond Penitentiary 222
Riordan, Mrs ‘Dante’ (character) 235, 239–42
Robinson, George Frederick Samuel, the first Marquess of Ripon 104–5
Rochford, Tom (character) 49
Rorke’s Drift 116, 124
Rose, Danis 186 n. 8, 288 n. 6
Roundtown (a.k.a. Terenure) 119, 140, 145–6, 149–52
Rubio, captain (character) 127
Rubio, Mrs (character) 126–7
St Francis Xavier Church 194
St Kevin’s Parade 185–7
Sandymount Strand 92, 99, 143
Santry 85–6
Schork, Joe (‘Kennst du das Haus Citrons, Bloom?’) 186 n. 9
Senn, Fritz (Inductive Scrutinies) 115 n. 28
Shakespeare, William 69–70, 72, 83, 236
(Antony and Cleopatra) 170
(Hamlet) 70
Shakespeare and Company see Beach, Sylvia
Simpson, Georgina (character) 155–6
Sinico, Mrs (character) 79–80
situational contexts 9, 14–15, 22–3, 26–7, 125, 147
South Circular Road 222
Spain and Spanish 109–10, 113 n. 19, 126, 129, 134–5, 137, 145, 185, 249
Spinoza, Baruch 252–3
Stanhope, Mr and Hester (characters) 123, 132, 138–9, 158, 172–3
Stonier, G. W., ‘Leviathan’ 12 n. 21
storytelling 2, 5–6, 13–14, 68, 71, 194, 232, 241, 280
takes precedence over characterization 62, 93, 112, 239
Sugarloaf Mountain 194
Sweny’s pharmacy 109
Switzers 210, 214
Page 11 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Swords 86–7
textual intersubjective consciousness 12, 70
Thornton, Mrs (character) 51, 129, 220, 228
Tierney, Andrew (‘Major Malachi Powell and Ulysses’) 35 n. 25, 112 n. 14, 155 n. 48
Tolka river 46, 270
Trieste 19, 142, 169, 209 n. 103, 265
Tweedy, Major Brian (character) 35, 108, 111–20, 123–4, 126, 142, 220 n. 7, 235
Tweedy, Henry R. 44, 45 n. 56, 119
Turnbull, Charles and Donald (characters) 95
Tutto è sciolto (aria) 59
Union Jack, The 126
United Ireland (newspaper) 191
Valera y Alcalá Galiano, Juan 127 n. 96
Vance, James Noy 91 n. 90
Vance, Mr (character) 91–3
Vining, Edward 70
Virag, Lipoti (character) 67–8, 100, 102
von Phul, Ruth (‘ “Major” Tweedy and His Daughter’) 110 n. 11, 115 n. 28
voyeur and voyeurism 161, 187, 221 n. 13, 233
Wade, Francis (character) 103–4
Waiting (song) 145
Wallace, W. J. R. (Faithful to our Trust) 91 n. 86, 93 n. 97
Wallace, William Ross (‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle’) 170
Waterford 44, 45 n. 56, 119, 134
Weaver, Harriet Shaw 54 n. 77, 282, 284, 292
Weekly Irish Times 73–4
Wellesley, Arthur, 1st Duke of Wellington 124
Wellington, Fredrick V. (‘A Missing Conversation in Ulysses’) 47 n. 65
Wellington Quay 54
Westland Row 66, 118, 246
Westmoreland Street 89, 141, 155, 249
Wicklow 192, 243
Wilkins, Mr and Wilkins, William (character and Headmaster of Erasmus High School) 93
Wilson, Rawdon
(‘The Bright Chimera’) 6, 18, 19 n. 31
(‘On Character: A Reply to Martin Price’) 18 n. 25
Wollaeger, Mark 118 n. 42
Wolseley, Sir Garnet 116, 124
Yeats, William Butler 91 n. 86, 283
Zurich 31, 33, 169 n. 125, 226, 281
Page 12 of 13
(p.331)
Index
Page 13 of 13

Joyce's Creative Process and The Construction of Characters in Ulysses Becoming The Blooms

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Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses:

Becoming the Blooms

Print publication date: 2015 Print ISBN-13: 9780198718857

Abbreviations and Conventions

Individual Ulysses Manuscripts

Quotations and Citations

3 The Genesis of Leopold Bloom

4 Marion Tweedy—Becoming Molly

5 The Courtship of Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy

Appendix 2 A Census of the Extant Ulysses Manuscripts by Episodes

Appendix 3 A Chronological List of Extant Ulysses Manuscripts and Typescripts

University Press Scholarship Online