A Bloomin’ daft idea that gives me no Joyce

AS the country prepares to go ‘Joyce mad’ on Sunday, Dave Kenny explains why he never shared his father’s love of Bloomsday

BLOOMSDAY. The mention of it makes my scrotum tighter than a Cavan man’s wallet. All those Joycean poseurs in faux Edwardian boaters and bonnets, poncing about the Martello Tower in Sandycove. All that pretentious goatcrap about “Hegelian ratiocinations” and “ineluctable modality”. All those whimsical pictures of David Norris doing the splits, or some plonker in round glasses eating a kidney. It would make you want to eat your own kidney.

The majority of Ulysses’s ‘celebrants’ have never read it. For these Joyce ‘fans’, Bloomsday is not a celebration of an impenetrable book about Dublin, but an excuse to raid the back of the wardrobe, sound well-read and get pissed.

For years, my old man led the Bloomsday charge down the hill from Glenageary, to Fitzie’s pub in Sandycove. He had an ad hoc sartorial approach to the day. His favourite ‘Joycean’ outfit was a purple-striped jacket, worn over grey slacks. The ‘jacket’ was a short dressing gown he had been given as a Christmas present, but never worn. It might have been my mother’s. Either way, he looked like a deck chair with legs.

There was a cravat, too, plumped up like stately Buck Mulligan. Cravats remind me of BBC suburban-dinner-party dramas of the 1970s, in which the cravat-wearing host is happily playing charades with his guests, unaware that his moustachioed best friend is rogering his missus under a pile of coats in the spare bedroom. Cravats, to my post-punk mind, shriek: ‘w*nker’.

“Dad, you look like a w*nker. Please don’t go out dressed like that.”

“It’s Joycean.”

“You look like you’ve just mugged a gay tramp and stolen his clothes.”

“Bugger off.”

He would set off on his little flannel legs, straw hat perched at a rakish angle, sometimes with a walking stick. I suppose dad enjoyed himself, and there’s a lot to be said for that. I’d forgive all the pretentious Joycean tosh to have him back, to slag him off. We were never closer than when we slagged each other off.

My father, at least, had a tenuous connection to Joyce. In 1956, he wrote a history of the Abbey Theatre, The Splendid Years, in which his aunt reminisced about being its first leading lady. She was acquainted with Joyce. I don’t know if they were friends, but family legend suggests they were on more than nodding terms. I think of it every Bloomsday — and shudder.

It was June, 1979. Bored with torturing my Action Man in the rockery, I went for a rummage in the garage. It was full of dad’s family’s past, jumbled with gardening tools and petrified paintbrushes. On one raiding mission, I recovered a kid-leather pilot’s helmet; on another, an ancient, reel-to-reel recorder. The garage never failed to yield up some treasure.

In behind the mildewed carpet remnants, bags of old clothes and an antique chemical toilet, I found a locked suitcase. I dragged it outside and prised it open with a trowel. It contained a tiny, old Remington typewriter. The sun glistened on its black ribbon, outlining old letters, typed by dead hands.

Its keys looked like organ stops. I bashed out a tune, watching the hammers high-step like a case-room chorus-line. I typed until the stiff keys loosened — and then stiffened again.

Over the course of the summer, the typewriter moved around the garden. It was a fort for my Airfix GI soldiers. It was a satellite, launched with a tea-towel parachute from the swing. It was used as a counterbalance in an unsuccessful hammock experiment. It was cast against type, so to speak.

School came around and the typewriter remained in the garden. December came. Moss crept over its rusted lettering. By February, it was overgrown. Then, one day, it disappeared. It picked up its ribboned sentences and memories of broken nails, and vanished.

Many years later, my dad and I discussed what his Abbey memorabilia might be worth to a modern collector. He hammered me with an unexpected question.

“Did you ever come across an old typewriter when you were rummaging around the house as a boy?”

“I can’t really remember,” I lied.

“That’s a shame,” he said. “It must have been thrown out when we were clearing the garage. It was probably worth a few bob.”

I can’t remember if he made eye contact.

“Auntie Maire left it to me,” he said. “It once belonged to James Joyce, you know.”