father malachi o’fylnn: Introibo ad altare diaboli.

  the reverend mr haines love: To the devil which hath made glad my young days.

  father malachi o’fylnn: (Takes from the chalice and elevates a blooddripping host) Corpus Meum.

  the reverend mr haines love: (Raises high behind the celebrant’s petticoats, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck) My body.

  the voice of all the damned: Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella!

  (From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)

  adonail: Dooooooooooog!

  the voice of all the blessed: Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!

  (From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)

  adonai: Goooooooooood!

  (In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions sing Kick the Pope and Daily, daily sing to Mary.)

  private carr: (With ferocious articulation) I’ll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!

  old gummy granny: (Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen’s hand) Remove him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. (She prays) O good God, take him!

  bloom: (Runs to Lynch) Can’t you get him away?

  lynch: He likes dialectic, the universal language. Kitty! (To Bloom) Get him away, you. He won’t listen to me.

  (He drags Kitty away.)

  stephen: (Points) Exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit.

  bloom: (Runs to Stephen) Come along with me now before worse happens. Here’s your stick.

  second watch: I don’t want your instructions in the discharge of my duty.

  private compton: (Pulling his comrade) Here, bugger off, Harry. Or Bennett’ll have you in the lockup.

  private carr: (Staggering as he is pulled away) God fuck old Bennett! He’s a whitearsed bugger. I don’t give a shit for him.

  first watch: (Taking out his notebook) What’s his name?

  bloom: (Peering over the crowd) I just see a car there. If you give me a hand a second, sergeant...

  (The crowd disperses slowly, muttering, down the lane.)

  But they give him no hand. The good Samaritan is left alone with the dead-out poet.

  bloom: Eh! Ho! (There is no answer; he bends again) Mr Dedalus! (There is no answer) The name if you call. Somnambulist. (He bends again and, hesitating, brings his mouth near the face of the prostrate form) Stephen! (There is no answer. He calls again) Stephen.

  stephen:(Groans) Who? Black panther vampire. (He sighs and stretches himself, then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels)

  Who ... drive ... Fergus now.

  And pierce ... wood’s woven shade? ...

  (He turns on his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.)

  bloom: Poetry. Well educated. Pity. (He bends again and undoes the buttons of Stephen’s waistcoat) To breathe. (He brushes the wood shavings from Stephen’s clothes with light hands and fingers) One pound seven. Not hurt anyhow. (He listens) What!

  stephen: (Murmurs)

  ... shadows... the woods.

  ... white breast... dim ...

  (He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his body. Bloom holding his hat and ashplant stands erect. A dog barks in the distance. Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. He looks down on Stephen’s face and form.)

  bloom: (Communes with the night) Face reminds me of his poor mother. In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him ... (He murmurs) ... swear that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or arts ... (He murmurs) in the rough sands of the sea... a cabletow’s length from the shore ... where the tide ebbs ... and flows ...

  (Silent, thoughtful, alert, he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)

  bloom: (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!

  rudy: (Gazes unseeing into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)

  Bloom takes Stephen home to Number 7 Eccles Street and gives him a cup of cocoa. But Stephen won’t stay the night – instead he walks out into it, alone, poor, destitute but now, having met Bloom, possibly capable of writing ULYSSES. Molly Bloom, in bed, hears all about it. Perhaps Stephen will come back to the house and give her Italian lessons while she helps his singing voice. Perhaps Stephen will be lover-son-Messiah. We don’t know what happens on June 17, 1904, but the book ends in hope, elation, affirmation. The unspoken words are all Molly’s.

  Try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7½d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar 11d a couple of lbs of course a nice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

  Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921

  BLOOMS OF DUBLIN

  A Musical Play based on

  James Joyce’s Ulysses

  A PREFATORY WORD

  This musical version of Ulysses was first presented on 1 February, 1982, to celebrate the hundredth birthday of James Joyce. As befitted a homage to an author of essentially auditory imagination, it was presented as a radio production, though it was initially conceived for the American stage. A draft of both the libretto and the score had been available in 1971, when I was living in New York, and Zero Mostel, a Jewish comedian of immense talent, was ready to be signed up as the singing Leopold Bloom of the project. He had made the mere acting part of Bloom his special property in Burgess Meredith’s production Ulysses in Nighttown, but that had been when his own age approximated to that of the character. There is no vagueness about Bloom’s age as there is about Hamlet’s: he is thirty-eight, close to middle age by the standards of Edwardian Dublin, young by our own. In 1971 Zero Mostel was in his sixties and too old for the rôle, though he himself did not think so. He died shortly after, and the project, like so many in the musical theatre came to nothing.

  I myself, who had admired him in Fiddler on the Roof wanted the Israeli actor Topol for the part, but he was never available. In my novel Earthly Powers, published in 1980, I indulge in an act of wish-fulfilment by placing a character very much like Topol in the lead of a successful Broadway production of a work identically titled with this and containing, partially cited, identical lyrics. With two years to go before Joyce’s centenary, it seemed to me important to turn the dream into a compromise reality by converting the draft stage script into one suitable for radio. A radio production appeared feasible and, after the expressed enthusiasm of John Tydeman and the late Michael Heffernan, proved capable of realisation. I converted the draft score into a complete orchestral one, actors and singers were engaged in Dublin and London, and the whole work was recorded in the studios of Raidío Teilifís Éireann in the January of 1982. Feverish but immensely efficient postproduction work in the BBC studios in London brought the recording to completion with dubbed-in Dublin sounds (the very church clock of Sandymount, the very ravens of Glasnevin cemetery) and the work was put out simultaneously from Dublin and London on the eve of Joyce’s hundredth birthday.

  There was little doubt as to how British listeners would respond – with guarded pleasure, with contempt, with indifference. It was feared that Irish listeners would react more positively, with a stock response of anger and resentment. Their ears would not be innocent: the very name of James Joyce, even and especially to those Irish who have not read him, is the trigger to a kind of mythical response of vituperation among men and shudders among women. The Irish trouble began even before the work was recorded. Tydeman, my wife and myself arrived in Dublin on the Feast of Epiphany to find all Ireland shrouded in snow. This was nature’s response to Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, in which ‘snow is general all over Ireland’ – a meteorological phenomenon unheard of in that mild wet land washed by the Gulf Stream. There was no transport available from the centre of the city to the RTE studios at Donnybrook, and there seemed no hope of the various actors, singers and orchestral players involved keeping their appointments.

  But, miraculously, everybody turned up in order to decide not to perform. The first task was to record the music; the acting would come a day or so later. Neither chorus nor orchestra was prepared to participate in an act of centennial homage to one of Dublin’s greatest sons. Joyce was obscene, an atheist, a scoffer at the holy sacraments, a forcer into sin of a decent Catholic girl from Galway. He might be dead, and he might have been born a hundred years before, but that in no wise mitigated his crimes against religion and public morality. His book, which no one had read, was filthy. A chorus tenor asked me: ‘Have you read the bloody thing at all? It’s bloody unreadable, for a bloody start. And it’s a bloody tangle of dirt, filth and uncleanliness.’ The local musicians’ union informed its members that they could not refuse to perform on moral grounds, so the recording went ahead under heavy protest. A second violinist declared: ‘I’ll play, but I won’t play well.’ This threat was fulfilled.

  But, in general, professional integrity prevailed over moral doubts. When a dirty word appeared in the sung text, it was, naturally, only to be sung by males, and the ladies were sent out of the studio. The passage which caused most misgiving, and was as responsible as any for the book’s first banning, appeared only in the acting script, and it was performed by English actors, so Dublin morality was not seriously sinned against. It is this passage which continues to militate against the presentation of the work on the public stage, especially in America. Privates Compton and Carr, in the Nighttown scene, break into foul language which represents the temporary death of reason and decency, as well as the mindless tyranny of British rule over Ireland. A production envisaged in Baltimore in 1985 was, despite careful preparation and the labour of creating a reduced orchestral score (seven hundred pages of it), cancelled because of this language. And yet that language cannot be omitted or modified, because it is an artistically contrived dramatic climax. There is very little allegedly obscene language in Ulysses, and such as we find is always in the service of a legitimate aesthetic shock. When Bloom describes the Middle East as the ‘grey shrunken cunt of the earth’ he is using an exactly appropriate term. Change it to ‘womb’ and the biting force of the consonants vanishes. Make Private Carr change ‘fucking’ even to ‘bloody’ and the climax is muffled.

  After the radio performance put out by RTÉ, a Dublin paper headlined its report with ‘Ireland Heard. Ireland Survived.’ The critical response was generally, as it should be, both warmer and more acute in the Irish press than in the British. Little could be said against the text, which is mostly a direct transcription of Joyce’s own (though passages of my invention were flatteringly assumed to be by the master). Critical attacks on both sides of the Irish Sea were mostly reserved to the music. Such musicological journalists as the late Hans Keller, who seethed and raged in The Listener, made a dangerous assumption before, or instead of, permitting their ears to submit without prejudice to the music of one who makes no professional claim to be a musician. If I do not normally practise as a musician, that is for personal and commercial reasons which are my own affair. But I began my artistic career as a composer, am academically trained in the craft, and wrote a score which may not be impugned as the mere work of a bungling amateur.

  One of the advantages of composing Blooms of Dublin for radio was the opportunity this gave for employing a fuller orchestra than would be possible in the commercial theatre, as opposed to the subsidised opera house. The proposed production in Baltimore could not accommodate more than a couple of keyboard instruments, a clarinet or trumpet, and a percussionist. Recording in Dublin, I had the resources of the RTÉ orchestra. I did not avail myself of all its available wind, using only a flute doubling piccolo, an oboe doubling English horn, two clarinets (one of them doubling bass clarinet) and a bassoon doubling double bassoon, with the same limitation in the brass section – one trumpet, one horn, one trombone. But I needed a harp, all the resources of percussion, and a full body of strings. I also needed a full chorus, which RTÉ has. A further advantage of a radio production was the possibility of handing over the singing roles to professional singers, reserving the spoken words to professional actors. Unseen, the changeover is imperceptible. An acting Molly is rarely a singing Molly. An acting Bloom has rarely the gift of a fine baritone. The binary becomes unitary on radio.

  The fact that professional singers and a fair-sized orchestra were considered necessary seems to point to the need to adapt Ulysses as an opera rather than as a Broadway-style musical. Certain parts of Joyce’s text have in fact been set symphonically, even atonally, notably in Matyas Seiber’s cantata Ulysses, which, despite the claim of its title, is only a setting of a few words from the ‘Ithaca’ episode. I set the same words myself – ‘The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit’ – but with a tired simplicity appropriate to the end of a long day, not with the elaborate Schoenbergian contrivance of Seiber. The view of some critics regarding Blooms of Dublin as a musical experience was that I had fulfilled about ten per cent of the available musical potential of Ulysses. I am inclined to agree, but I was concerned with a deliberate imitation – the exploitation of the basic narrative of the book as a demotic music-hall experience. I think Joyce himself might have been more sympathetic to this than to a Wagnerian enlargement.