James Joyce, ‘Ulysses’ and the Mullingar connection
In 1900 and 1901, James Joyce lived in Mullingar – He never forgot the town
By Ruth Illingworth
One hundred years ago, on February 2, 1922, one of the most significant literary works of the 20th century was published in Paris. ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce has, as Joyce predicted, been delighting and baffling scholars and readers ever since.
‘Ulysses’ is set in Dublin on June 16, 1904. The two main characters in the novel are Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Bloom is an advertising salesman and Dedalus is a teacher. Other characters include Molly Bloom, Leopold’s actress wife, her lover, Blazes Boylan, and Buck Mulligan, who is a friend of Dedalus.
The novel follows Bloom and Dedalus as they travel back and forth across Dublin and eventually meet one another.
‘Ulysses’ is a loose reworking of the Greek Epic, ‘The Odyssey’, with Bloom a version of the Greek hero, Odysseus/Ulysses, and Dedalus a version of Ulysses’s son, Telemachus.
Joyce began writing ‘Ulysses’ in 1914 while he was living in the Italian city of Trieste. Parts of the novel were serialised in an American literary journal in 1918-19 and the complete novel was published on Joyce’s 40th birthday.
‘Ulysses’ is very much associated with Dublin. The novel is set in the city and is a vivid portrayal of the place as it was on the June day in 1904 on which James Joyce first "walked out" with Nora Barnacle, the Galway girl who would become his life partner and the mother of his two children.
All the main characters live in Dublin and all the action takes place there – however, the novel also has many associations with Westmeath and Mullingar. Joyce had lived in Mullingar for a number of weeks and memories of the local people and places stayed with him.
Joyce in Mullingar
In the summer of 1900, Joyce’s father, John Joyce, had been hired by Westmeath County Council to sort out the Electoral Registers for Mullingar, which were in "a confused state". James accompanied his father to Westmeath and may have helped him with the work.
While in Mullingar, Joyce wrote his first literary work-a play entitled ‘A Brilliant Career’. The Joyces may have stayed at Levington Park on the shores of Lough Owel, then the home of the county council secretary, W F Levinge.
They may also have stayed with Phil Shaw, a photographer and shopkeeper, who ran a stationery business and sub-post office on Earl (now Pearse) Street. His shop was located in the building now occupied by Fagan Office Supplies and Toymaster.
Much of the work on the electoral rolls would have been done in the Courthouse, which then housed the council offices, and in Cathedral House. Other places Joyce visited included the Greville Arms Hotel, the Westmeath Examiner Office and a bar and grocery business on Mount Street run by Patrick Connellan.
Joyce lived in Mullingar for a couple of months in the summer of 1900 and spent a further number of weeks here in the summer of 1901. Mullingar was the only place in Ireland outside Dublin in which he lived.
A few years later he left Ireland for good. But the memories of the Westmeath capital stayed with him as he wrote ‘Ulysses’. One of the characters in the novel is working in Mullingar and another is from the town.
Milly Bloom in Mullingar
Leopold and Molly Bloom have a lively teenage daughter called Milly. She has just celebrated her 15th birthday. As he has his breakfast, Leopold reads a letter from Milly thanking her parents for their birthday presents. She is living in Mullingar and is learning the "photo business".
In the novel, her employer is called Mr Coughlan, but the shop in which she works is clearly Phil Shaw’s. She tells her parents that she is "getting on swimming" in the photo business. "We did great biz yesterday, Fair Day and all the beef to the heels were in."
Milly had a busy social life too. She went to a concert in the Greville Arms and on a picnic to Lough Owel with friends. There was also a boyfriend called Bannon –"a young student", whose cousins are "big swells".
‘Only two and six return.’
After reading the letter, Leopold Bloom wonders whether he should travel down to Mullingar to see Milly. The train fare from the Broadstone Station is "only 2/6 return". Bloom had done a favour for a friend of his called McCoy, a clerk with the Midland Great Western Railway Company, and Bloom thinks that he should "have tried to work McCoy for a pass to Mullingar".
Later, as he crosses the Royal Canal on his way to a funeral, he recalls a journey along the canal on a barge called the Bugabo – "Athlone, Mullingar, Moyvalley."
Bannon and ‘the Photo Girl’
Milly’s boyfriend Alec, Bannon appears in ‘Ulysses’ in the company of Stephen Dedalus outside Holles Street hospital. Also there is Buck Mulligan’s brother Malachi, who has visited the Bannon family in Westmeath. Milly is described as being "a skittish heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel". He calls her "the Photo Girl" and "the bold, bad girl from the town of Mullingar".
Later in the novel, Leopold Bloom finds himself in "Nighttown" the notorious red light district of Dublin. He has a fevered dream in which he sees his daughter in Bannon’s arms in a brothel.
The name Bannon was probably picked by Joyce from his Mullingar memories. One of the prominent officials of Westmeath County Council in 1900 was A C Bannon. A number of Bannons lived close to Levington Park on the shores of Lough Owel. The name of Milly’s employer, Mr Coughlan, was also probably a local name. A family of that name lived close to the Courthouse in 1900/01.
Mary Molesworth of Belvedere
One of the minor characters in ‘Ulysses’ is Fr Conmee. Conmee was a real person, a Jesuit priest from Athlone who had taught Joyce in Belvedere College and Clongowes.
As he walks through Dublin, Conmee thinks about the tragic figure of Mary Molesworth, Countess of Belvedere, imprisoned in her home in Westmeath for 30 years by her husband, Robert Rochfort. Fr Conmee imagines Mary, after she is freed, wandering along the shore of Lough Ennell at Belvedere House, "a listless lady, no more young".
The story of Robert Rochfort’s treatment of his wife fascinated Joyce and he contemplated writing a play about the Rochfort marriage – although he never actually did. Part of his interest in the story stemmed from his having attended Belvedere College in Dublin. The school had once been the town house of the Rochfort family. Molesworth Street is named after Mary’s family.
‘Why I Left the Church of Rome’
As he heads towards the National Library, Bloom passes Fr Connellan’s bookshop in Dawson Street and notes a copy of Connellan’s book, ‘Why I Left the Church of Rome’, in the shop window. Fr Connellan was a Sligo man who had once served as a curate in Athlone. He had left the Roman Catholic Church and become a passionate evangelical Protestant and staunch anti-Catholic.
Connellan had a Mullingar connection. Some of his relatives had moved to Mullingar and set up a grocery and pub business on Mount Street. Joyce and his father would have visited that place when they were working next door in the courthouse. Connellans’ is now Larry Caffrey’s Bar and Lounge.
‘Tea, Tea, Tea’
Leopold Bloom visits the National Library to check on an advertisement he saw in the Kilkenny People newspaper. The advertisement had been placed in the paper by a tea, wine and spirit merchant called Alexander Keyes. Bloom wants the ad for another client and hopes to reprint it in The Freeman’s Journal in an embellished manner.
The ad is for ‘Tea, Tea, Tea’. A similar advertisement used to appear weekly in the Westmeath Examiner and other local papers for Connellan’s Bar and Grocery business. Connellan’s Tea, Wine and Spirit Merchant was famous for the quality of its tea. The ‘tea’ advertisement remained in Joyce’s memory and was simply transposed from Westmeath to Dublin and Kilkenny in the pages of ‘Ulysses’.
The use of the name ‘Keyes’ and a reference to the emblem of the cross keys in the advertisement may be an echo of another Mullingar place name. The western end of Austin Friars Street was known as the Cross Keys when Joyce was in Mullingar.
The Freeman’s Journal
Bloom goes to the office of the Freeman’s Journal, which was one of the most prominent newspapers of the day. One of the reporters at the Journal was a Corkman called Michael Toibin. He had been in Mullingar in 1900/01 when Joyce was there and met James and his father. Toibin was working for the Westmeath Examiner at that time and he married a niece of the editor of the Examiner, John P Hayden. Toibin does not feature in ‘Ulysses’ but he did appear in another of Joyce’s works, ‘Stephen Hero’, as Garvey, a reporter for the Westmeath Examiner.
Stephen Dedalus in Mullingar
The character of Stephen Dedalus featured not just in ‘Ulysses’, but in Joyce’s earlier novel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man’. Stephen is in many ways an alter ego of Joyce. ‘Portrait’ was published in 1914 and was a reworking of an earlier book entitled ‘Stephen Hero’, which Joyce abandoned and largely rewrote.
Only half the manuscript of ‘Stephen Hero’ survives, but it was published after Joyce’s death. ‘Stephen Hero’ has a chapter set in Mullingar, where Stephen goes to visit his godfather, Mr Fulham. Fulham’s house appears to be Levington Park, and the name Fulham was probably borrowed from a family of that name living in Mount Street.
Stephen travels to Mullingar by train and is met at the station and driven around the town by a character known as ‘Dan the Jarvey’. During his stay in Mullingar, Stephen also visits the Westmeath Examiner office, has a drink with the reporter Garvey in the Greville Arms and chats up the barmaid there who has the whole life and soul of the town at her fingertips and knows all the local gossip.
He meets an old acquaintance called Nash, who tells him that Mullingar is "a God forsaken hole", and along with Nash and Garvey comes across a tragedy at the Dublin Bridge when the body of a woman patient from the asylum is taken from the canal.
Stephen’s visit to Mullingar is not mentioned in ‘Ulysses’. At one point, however, he wonders "what the weather is like down in Westmeath".
Remembering the connection
In 1975, Mullingar author Leo Daly published his groundbreaking work, ‘James Joyce and the Mullingar Connection’. Leo’s book was the first to highlight the links between Joyce and Mullingar and the ways in which Joyce remembered and was shaped by the town.
Leo also wrote a number of short plays focusing on Joyce’s time in Westmeath and also organised concerts and other entertainments to celebrate Bloomsday (June 16) and Joyce’s birthday (February 2).
The Greville Arms Hotel has a waxwork figure of Joyce in the Ulysses Bar. The James Joyce restaurant in the hotel was opened by Joyce’s nephew, Ken Monaghan. There is a copy of a 1925 edition of ‘Ulysses’ on display in the hotel museum.
The Ulysses Bar also displays photos of Joyce and of Mullingar as it looked when he was living here, and a framed copy of an article by former Westmeath county librarian, Marian Keaney, entitled ‘Blooming in Mullingar’, detailing the Mullingar connections in Joyce’s writings. A plaque commemorating Milly Bloom is located on the wall of Fagan Office Supplies and Toymaster on Pearse Street, the location of Phil Shaw’s stationary business and post office and photo studio.
A mural of Joyce has been created on the wall of Chambers bar in Mount Street across the road from where Joyce and his father worked and there is also a plaque commemorating Joyce and his visits to Mullingar in the Market House. Caffrey’s Bar also contains photos of the author who drank and dined in what was once Connellan’s Tea, Wine and Spirit Merchants.
• This article is dedicated to the memory of Leo Daly (1920-2010), Joycean scholar and Mullingar historian.