Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses, is now a pretty well-organised affair, with Joyce fans and event junkies dressing in Edwardian gear and following the trail Joyce's Ulysses took around the city on 16 June, 1904.
But the inaugural event, in 1954, was somewhat different. On that day, poets Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin, novelist and Irish Times columnist Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan), and Joyce's cousin Tom Joyce, a dentist, set off in two horse-drawn carriages. The plan to follow the whole path of the book was somewhat undermined by the fact that O'Nolan was tremendously drunk (which, by that stage in his life, was an everyday occurrence. This short film of the jaunt was recorded by John Ryan, editor of the literary magazine Envoy.
*Trigger Warning: drunken poets relieving themselves against a wall
Read more about the first Bloomsday here.
And to find out the rather scurrilous reason Joyce set his magnum opus on 16 June, 1904, read Christopher Hitchens' essay, Joyce in Bloom.
