ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  & published by Galileo

  A Shorter Finnegans Wake

  Flame into Being

  Here Comes Everybody

  Honey for the Bears

  Nothing Like the Sun

  First published in the UK in 2025

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  ISBN: 9781915530844

  Introduction to Ulysses first published by

  Book of the Month Club

  Copyright © 1982 by Anthony Burgess

  Blooms of Dublin first published by

  Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd

  Copyright © 1986 by Anthony Burgess

  Introduction to this volume by

  Andrew Biswell © 2025

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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  Contents

  Introduction by Andrew Biswell

  Foreword to James Joyce’s Ulysses

  A Shorter Ulysses

  Blooms of Dublin, A Prefatory Word

  Blooms of Dublin

  A Shorter Ulysses and Blooms of Dublin

  Introduction by Andrew Biswell

  Anthony Burgess’s involvement with James Joyce began in 1933, when he read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Moving on to Ulysses a few months later, the second book ignited a flame which never stopped burning. Burgess knew himself to be in the presence of a totally original work of fiction. Summing up his initial response to Joyce in a later BBC radio interview, he said: ‘The language of Ulysses is always getting in the way. It’s not a deliberate set of puzzles or tricks, but an attempt to show that speech, the love of language, plays as much a part in our lives as other properties of life.’

  At sixteen, Burgess was ready to be excited by language as a protagonist or character within the fiction. His own Anglo-Irish background meant that some of Joyce’s language was already familiar to him, although he had never previously seen it written down. He was also energised by the idea of Ulysses as an affirmative work, which had little time for clichés or verbal taboos. In all the ways that mattered, the discovery of Joyce’s techniques determined the kind of writer that Burgess himself would become. His Joycean inheritance is richly evidenced in the boldly unconventional novels which followed, such as A Clockwork Orange, Tremor of Intent and Napoleon Symphony.

  In 1933 Ulysses was banned in Britain – the legal prohibition was not lifted until November 1936 – so Burgess had to borrow a copy from his history teacher, who’d smuggled the two-volume Odyssey Press edition from Germany. This, too, was part of the fascination of the novel, which was said at that time to be the dirtiest book in the world. As a schoolboy who felt a strong curiosity about ‘obscene’ literature, Burgess felt compelled to seek out Joyce’s novel, along with other banned books such as The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  Having been attracted by the scandal, he stayed for the verbal fireworks and formal innovations, enjoying the fact that each chapter was narrated in a different style. Thirty years later, his enthusiasm for Joyce led to the composition of a full-length critical commentary, Here Comes Everybody, in which he writes in detail about each of the major works, with particular emphasis on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This book led to an invitation to make a television film about Joyce’s Dublin, broadcast on the BBC as part of their Monitor series, produced by Jonathan Miller. In February 1965 Burgess flew to Dublin with the director, Christopher Burstall, and the crew. While they were there, they discovered that number 7 Eccles Street – a real address given to the fictional Leopold and Molly Bloom – was in the process of being demolished. Burstall bribed the demolition workers to go to the pub, and he filmed Burgess standing inside the remains of the house, gathering the last moving images of Eccles Street before it was destroyed.

  In 1966, Burgess was asked by Peter du Sautoy at Faber to edit A Shorter Finnegans Wake, an introductory volume which includes around 40 percent of the original work. The purpose of Burgess’s truncated text was to guide readers gently into Joyce’s puzzling narrative labyrinth, with the help of an exegetical introduction and passages of commentary within the text to explain what had just happened, and what was about to happen. The book was a critical and commercial success: it outsold the full-length version of Finnegans Wake for many years, and was still in print twenty years later. Joseph Campbell, the co-author of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, wrote that Burgess’s shorter edition was ‘a sensible and sound contribution,’ which was bound to lead new readers to ‘the big black book itself.’

  Burgess’s expertise as a Joyce scholar had already been recognised by the editors of the Times Literary Supplement, who, throughout the 1960s, sent batches of new critical books about Joyce for anonymous review. In 1973 Burgess published Joysprick, a non-fiction book about Joyce’s language.

  A Shorter Ulysses and Blooms of Dublin both came out of the period when Burgess was deeply immersed in Joyce and his fictional cosmos. The typescript of A Shorter Ulysses was discovered in 2003, ten years after Burgess’s death, at his house in Bracciano, near Rome. The house had been locked up and abandoned for nearly 20 years, and the literary works discovered there have now found a permanent home in the archive of the Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.

  The typescript, which is published here for the first time, is a radical boiling-down of Joyce’s most expansive novel. Whereas Ulysses occupies 695 pages of text in the Penguin edition of 1969, Burgess reduces this to just 91 pages, cutting more than 85 percent of the novel. From one point of view, this approach might look like a brutal reduction, but it also has the effect of foregrounding the episodes that Burgess thought were essential to the book and its effects. Chopping away at the text was one way in which he hoped to bring out the key elements of the novel. And, of course, he expected that readers who were intrigued by what they discovered in A Shorter Ulysses would go on to tackle the whole novel.

  Burgess’s other important purpose in reducing the novel to its bare minimum was to remind the reader that novels are concerned with plot. He wrote of A Shorter Finnegans Wake that his edition had ‘attempted to cut to the narrative bone and show that there was a story there’ – and he was guided by the same principle when editing A Shorter Ulysses.

  To prepare the typescript, Burgess bought two copies of the 1969 Penguin edition of Ulysses and removed the pages from one, stapling them together into sections and interspersing episodes from Joyce’s text with his own typewritten commentary. From the second copy he razored out shorter sections and paragraphs that he wanted to include in the edition, pasting them into the commentary pages as required. The collection of pages with deletions and commentary was filed away in an A5-sized blue folder labelled ‘A Shorter Ulysses’.

  Burgess’s second copy of the Penguin edition is annotated, and it seems likely that he used it when he was teaching a course on Ulysses at City College, New York (CCNY), in the academic year 1972-1973. This allows us to establish that he must have been working on A Shorter Ulysses between April 1969, when the book was published, and June 1973, when he finished teaching in New York and returned to Italy, where the manuscript was later discovered. The likeliest composition date is 1970 or 1971, after which he turned his attention to Blooms of Dublin.

  Burgess was not the first editor who had attempted to cut down Joyce’s text. T.S. Eliot presented 55 pages from Ulysses and extracts from three other books in his edited volume Introducing James Joyce: A Selection of Joyce’s Prose, published by Faber in 1942. Eliot writes in his introduction: ‘I have found my choice restricted to the earlier part [of Ulysses]. The later episodes tend not only to be longer, but are less comprehensible in isolation.’ Harry Levin also included sections from five chapters (‘Nestor’, ‘Hades’, ‘The Wandering Rocks’, ‘The Sirens’ and ‘Penelope’) in The Essential James Joyce, along with critical and explanatory notes. Burgess knew both of these books, and he understood himself to be working in a tradition of introductory volumes which included the early Joyce biography by Herbert Gorman and James Joyce’s Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert, a critical book prepared under the close supervision of Joyce himself, with the invisible hand of the author guiding the pen of the critic.

  Although much of Ulysses was originally published in serial form, with chapters appearing in The Little Review and other periodicals, after the complete book had appeared Joyce refused permission for further publication of separate episodes. In a letter to T.S. Eliot dated 22 February 1932, he wrote: ‘Ulysses is a book
with a beginning, middle and an end and should be presented as such.’ But these objections did not prevent Eliot from printing selections from Ulysses in his Introducing James Joyce ten years later, presumably with the blessing of Joyce’s heirs and executors.

  One of Burgess’s aims in A Shorter Ulysses is to illustrate the range and variety of Joyce’s writing: he includes selections from seven of the novel’s eighteen chapters or episodes, with generous extracts from the more complicated second half. The centre of his interest is ‘Circe’, the chapter set in Bella Cohen’s brothel, which Burgess describes in Here Comes Everybody as resembling an opera libretto by Wagner. The technique of this section, he writes, ‘is less concerned with dream than with hallucination. The characters are presented directly to us, in dramatic form, and they meet their fantasies directly.’ When Leopold Bloom is confronted by the spirit of his dead son at the end of this chapter, Burgess comments that ‘only the hardest-hearted of readers’ will fail to be moved.

  Among the material he decided to leave out is ‘The Oxen of the Sun’, a chapter featuring extended parodies of famous English authors. Burgess regarded this material as ‘tedious, gaseous, inflated’ – and therefore inessential to the main business of the novel.

  The main audience for A Shorter Ulysses is surely the large group of would-be readers who are put off by the length and density of Joyce’s novel, and for whom a shorter version with commentary offers a less intimidating way in. Burgess never doubted that Joyce was, potentially at least, a writer for everybody, and his critical books and musical adaptations add up to a consistent project whose aim was to democratize Joyce and to make his work available to anyone who was curious about it.

  Burgess’s Shorter Ulysses is comparable in its intentions to Philippe Delerm’s recent (and highly popular) reduction of Marcel Proust’s great novel, in which more than 3000 pages of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu are distilled to 271 pages of extracts, with a linking commentary by Delerm.

  In a conversation with a friend, reported by Richard Ellmann in his 1959 biography, Joyce predicted that Ulysses would ‘keep the professors busy for centuries.’ More than a century after the novel was first published, some professional scholars of Joyce – the people referred to, not always approvingly, as the Joyce Industry – are still known to be disputatious. We can be sure that A Shorter Ulysses will give them plenty of new things to argue about.

  One of the last photographs of Burgess, taken shortly before his death in November 1993, shows him holding a copy of Ulysses: it’s the 1992 Minerva paperback edition, to which he’d contributed an introduction. We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that he wanted to revisit his favourite novel as he approached the end of his life. In his introduction, Burgess writes: ‘The creation of human community in fiction is the closest the novelist can get to the creation of a cosmos. [Ulysses] may certainly be taken as Joyce’s attempt to build for himself an order which is a substitute for the order he abandoned when he abandoned the Church.’ As a fellow Catholic who had turned his back on the church at sixteen, Burgess felt a similar yearning for music and literature as systems which promised to bring structure to the apparent chaos of existence.

  BLOOMS OF DUBLIN

  Burgess began working on a stage musical adaptation of Ulysses in 1965, shortly after he’d completed Here Comes Everybody. He obtained permission from Peter du Sautoy, a director of Faber who was also one of Joyce’s executors. Over the next six years, he produced about two thousand pages of draft typescripts and scores, although his progress was delayed by the illness and death of his first wife, marriage to his second wife, relocation to Malta, teaching and lecturing in the United States, relocation to Italy, and the production of three novels, two other stage plays, and a book of literary essays.

  Like A Shorter Ulysses, Blooms of Dublin offers another interpretation of Joyce’s novel, this time in a purely dramatic form. Originally planned as a three-hour Broadway musical, the libretto is both a faithful adaptation and a travesty of Joyce’s story. Apart from reducing the overall number of characters and voices, Burgess makes a few significant changes to the final chapters: in this version Stephen says goodbye to Bloom and hurries off to begin writing Ulysses – whereas it is far from certain that the Stephen character in the novel will ever become a writer.

  In his essay, ‘Musicalising Ulysses’, Burgess points out that many of the novel’s main characters are either musicians or involved in the music business: Molly Bloom is a professional soprano; Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan arranges concerts for a living; Stephen Dedalus is a tenor; Leopold Bloom displays, through his interior monologues, a wide knowledge of popular songs and the operatic repertoire.

  Part of the fun of composing Blooms of Dublin was the opportunity to plant references in the score that only other musicians would notice. Burgess identifies some of these in his essay: ‘How many will notice that the closing cadence of a very vulgar song called ‘Copulation Without Population’ is based on the opening bars of Tristan und Isolde; or that Bloom’s song in Glasnevin Cemetery [‘Warm, Full-Blooded Life’] has orchestral quotations from Martha, The Bohemian Girl, Puccini’s La Bohème and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?’ Even the popular numbers and bawdy songs seem to be freighted with hidden meanings.

  Burgess wrote to his London agent, Deborah Rogers, on 6 August 1971, to announce that he was on the point of completing the script and rehearsal score for Blooms of Dublin. By 5 July 1972 the full version was finished, and Burgess sent this out to possible producers via his New York agent, Robert Lantz. On 21 June 1973 the actor Zero Mostel read the script and telephoned Lantz to say that he was ‘very interested’ in playing Leopold Bloom on Broadway. He suggested that his long-time collaborator Burgess Meredith (better known as the Penguin from Batman and the boxing trainer Mickey Goldmill from the Rocky films) should direct the musical. Sadly, it was not to be: Meredith was too much in demand as an actor, and Zero Mostel died in 1977.

  As the Joyce centenary drew closer, there was another opportunity for Burgess to have his adaptation played and heard. He approached John Tydeman, a radio drama producer at the BBC, with the idea of an Anglo-Irish co-production. This project was taken up with great enthusiasm, and a distinguished cast of Irish actors and singers was assembled. Sadly, the decision was taken to cast both an actor and a professional singer for each of the principal roles, with the result that their voices sound rather different. Listening to the recording of the 1982 radio production, it can be difficult to work out which character is speaking or singing at any given point.

  Burgess flew to Dublin to attend the recording sessions from 13 to 17 January 1982, although there was trouble with the cast. There were complaints about some of the bawdy lyrics, and some members of the women’s chorus insisted on leaving the recording studio while ‘obscene’ words were being sung or spoken. Burgess recalls some of these difficulties in his foreword to the libretto, reprinted in this volume.

  The radio version of Blooms of Dublin, directed by John Tydeman and produced by Michael Heffernan, was broadcast simultaneously by BBC Radio 3 and Raidió Teilifís Éireann on 1 February 1982. Richard Ellmann sent an approving letter in which he said: ‘At first it perplexed me as I heard Joyce’s words with occasional variations, but gradually I found myself caught up in it, and the second half seemed to me even better than the first. What especially pleased me was that unlike the film Ulysses [directed by Joseph Strick] your work met head on the difficulties of the hard chapters, and extracted from them as from the more obvious ones all the humour that is present in them though usually ignored.’

  One way of thinking about Blooms of Dublin is to see it as another Shorter Ulysses, written for the benefit of a mass audience which was not necessarily familiar with the novel. While Burgess maintained that he had preserved the essence of Joyce’s novel within the frame of a Broadway musical, an unsympathetic critic might argue that he was trying to find a popular audience for a defiantly anti-popular work, which could only be done by simplifying and distorting the source material.

  That said, Burgess’s adaptation is always alert to the elements of popular music which are foregrounded in Joyce’s text – the frequent quotations from ‘Just a Song at Twilight’ and ‘My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl’, for example – and it brings out the atmosphere of Irish folk songs, music-hall numbers and Edwardian drawing-room ballads, which turns out to have been present all along in Ulysses.