A Touch of the Artist: The Years of Ulysses, 1914–1922

Abstract

In Ulysses, the Blooms live at 7 Eccles Street. Joyce came to know the address because he visited J. F. Byrne there, notably on that afternoon and evening, into the night, when Byrne had reassured him about Nora’s loyalty and Cosgrave’s ‘blasted lie’; Byrne lived in the house from 1908 to 1910, with two female cousins. Shortly before Joyce left Dublin in 1909, he visited the house once again, and he and Byrne took a long walk through the streets of Dublin. At one corner, they weighed themselves in a penny weighing machine and then walked back to Eccles Street — where Byrne discovered that his key was in his other trousers, up in his bedroom. Unperturbed, and not wanting to disturb his cousins, he climbed over the area railing, dropped down to the basement level and opened an unlocked door. Byrne was five feet, nine-and-a-half inches tall, and his weight according to the machine was eleven stone and four pounds (that is, 158 pounds), precisely the height and weight of Leopold Bloom, who had — in Joyce’s fictional world — lived in the house a few years before Byrne moved in.² (Fortunately, no one ‘really’ lived there in June 1904, so Joyce could feel free to use it for the Blooms’ address.)

As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore.

Sylvia Beach

Jim says that he writes well because when he writes his mind is as nearly normal as possible.…

Stanislaus Joyce

He’s not one of your common or garden … you know … There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.

Ulysses ¹