Ulysses: Two Introductions

BOOK REVIEWS lowing her frail husband to do all the work, Squires and Talbot show us a woman who was a full partner in the construction, restoration, and maintenance of the many homes the two of them inhabited in their eighteen years together. In this biography Frieda lives on for only 60 pages after Lawrence's death, but she does so with great élan, dressing colorfully and outrageously into her seventies, speaking her mind, negotiating her deals (she who had "never had a purse" when her husband was alive), and remaining youthfully vivacious and hence attractive into old age. As the authors elegantly sum up: "Frieda was like Virginia Woolf's heroine Clarissa Dalloway: 'What she liked was simply life.'" IUDITH RUDERMAN __________________ Duke University Ulysses: Two Introductions Jefferson Hunter. How to Read Ulysses, And Why. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. χ + 117 pp. Paper $13.95 Bernard McKenna. James Joyce's Ulysses: A Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. xi + 247 pp. $49.95 CHAMPION JOYCEAN Fritz Senn likes to say that everything written about James Joyce contains at least one error. It is certainly true of Joyce's birth certificate, which spells his middle name wrong, and of his tombstone, which memorializes a wrong birthdate for Nora Barnacle Joyce, the woman buried beside him, and it would take a hardier spirit than myself to propose any work of biography or criticism before, between , or since—including, God wot, any of my own—as an exception to the rule. In considering these two introductory studies of Ulysses, then, it is well to keep in mind that infallibility was never an option. Both commit errors, because everyone does. But it is also true that there is such a thing as a batting average, and that a high one is better than a low one. Also: although Joyce's work is full of people who get things wrong, it is always in contexts where recognizing that fact is the difference between reading with or without understanding. You cannot, for instance, read the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses with understanding if you have not figured out that Leopold Bloom did not really predict the winner of the Ascot Gold Cup, that everyone who thinks he did has gotten it wrong. There are scores of cruxes like that in Ulysses, and they all matter. 335 ELT 46 : 3 2003 And so, so does this matter: that although everyone makes mistakes, Hunter's book makes a few, and McKenna's makes a ton. It is the difference between the blight man was born for and the above-and-beyond. I begin with Hunter in what I hope may be taken as friendly criticisms toward a revised later edition of his generally admirable book. One, the picky: Joyce does not completely withhold any interior monologue from Blazes Boylan (11); he gives him three words of it. "Flesh," listed in Hunter's reprinting of Joyce's schema for Ulysses (21), belongs in the column for "Organ," not "Art." The "greenhouses" in which Bloom envisions a quack doctor posting ads are not "outdoor privies" (52)— there were and are, heaven knows, nothing of the kind in downtown Dublin—but enclosed urinals. The Flotow opera remembered in Ulysses is Martha, not "Marthe" (66), although Joyce did have a fling with a woman ofthat name. The time of Molly's assignation with Boylan is 4:00 p.m., not 4:30 (86); 4:30 is the hour when, Bloom thinks, the affair was consummated. Two, the not-so-picky: it is probably not true that Stephen is paying for the Martello Tower (24); the state of his finances argues against the inference, and his interior-monologue words "I paid the rent" may plausibly be Mulligan's, remembered, not Stephen's own thoughts to himself. Stephen has not "just buried" his mother (29); she died almost a year ago. Hynes's unexpected money in "Cyclops" comes not from having taken Bloom's supposed tip on the Gold Cup (70), but from Bloom's having alerted him to the availability of the paymaster. Last—an old issue, this—Bloom almost certainly does not, before falling asleep, ask Molly for breakfast in bed the...