On Joyce: “I just assumed he was someone they knew”

Actress Fionnula Flanagan says:

Like James Joyce, I was born and raised in Dublin. Those years of the grey post-war fifties, seem to me now, looking back, to have been a time when Dublin was cobwebbed, as it were, by a leftover Edwardianism of a uniquely Irish kind. Many of the landmarks of Joyce’s world remained, their coinage unchanged and in common usage — street names, certainly, newspapers and adverts, shops and pubs, churches, restaurants and monuments, the turn of phrase, the prejudices, the mythologies, the past.

My father, Terry, knew Dublin intimately, loved it fiercely. He would take us children on Sunday “rambles” into the inner city during which odysseys he talked, nonstop, of its history. Bloom-like, we walked everywhere. On Saturday nights in my Grandma Flanagan’s front parlor, while my aunts sipped port and conversed in whispers about “women’s ailments”, my father and my uncles sang operatic arias loudly, drank whiskey, and hotly argued Irish politics. Shades of “The Dead” and “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” although I didn’t yet know of the existence of those stories. Of course I also didn’t know I was living in the geography of the very world Joyce had known and then recreated so brilliantly in his writings. Whenever my parents quoted or paraphrased him, casually — as in “Joyce understood that” or “As Joyce said …” — I just assumed he was someone they knew, an acquaintance from the vigorous Dublin intellectual set of their youth. But Joyce was everywhere in my childhood, in all the ordinary things we did that made up the fabric of our lives. We went to funerals in Glasnevin Cemetery — half my family is buried there — and on very special occasions we were treated to lunch at Jammets. We tramped out to the Shelley Banks and watched the Liverpool boat until it was just a speck, then raced miles out to find the tide on Sandymount Strand; we spied on the naked men swimming in the Forty Foot below the Martello Tower, where Buck Mulligan held his shaving bowl aloft. In summer the Howth tram swayed us to the top of the Head with its rhododendrons blazing purple and we tumbled on the grassy mound where Molly Bloom gazed out over Dublin Bay while Poldy pressed her to say “yes”. I went to school in Eccles Street and walked by No. 7 twice a day. Of course the Blooms had lived there. Lived there still, had anyone asked me. For all that the house is gone, they are there yet.

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