By Stuart Mitchner

So the first thing I do is buy “Finnegans Wake” and I read a chapter and it’s GREAT and I dug it and I felt like — here’s an old friend!

—John Lennon

John Lennon came into the world on October 9, 1940, a little less than 100 days before James Joyce left it on January 13, 1941. That the singer songwriter from Liverpool and the writer from Dublin arrived and departed in such close proximity should be of no more earthly significance than the fact that Joyce died of natural causes in Zurich four decades before Lennon died violently in New York City. A month before he was murdered, Lennon made sure an image of Finnegans Wake appeared in a video for his song, “Just Like Starting Over.” A copy of the Viking edition is prominently displayed among Lennon’s possessions around 1:17 into the film.

Overflowings

All week my mind’s been humming with Joyce and Nora, Bloom and Molly, Bloomsday, lost fathers and lost sons, and something else Lennon said about reading Joyce: “It was like finding Daddy.” So I’ve been reading Lennon into Joyce and Joyce into Lennon, who would fall about laughing at wordplay like “poached eyes on ghost.” I imagine him doodling an appropriate image and maybe having it made into a t-shirt. And in the hilarious phantasmagoria of Nighttown, when a cake of lemon soap sings “We’re a capital couple Bloom and I, he brightens the earth. I polish the sky,” I can hear Lennon cackling behind me and sneering Hard Day’s Night-style, “Give us a kiss, Poldy.”

Cleaning up in the kitchen after a Father’s Day — Bloomsday dinner, I’ve got the Beatles playing on the Bose Wave and Joyce in mind as I listen to “A Day in the Life” with its “four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire” and “now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall,” and I think of the classroom scene early in Ulysses wherein Stephen Dedalus, after being told that the great goal of human history is “the manifestation of God,” gestures toward an open window and the sound of boys playing football and says, “That is God — a shout in the street.” As for those boys at play outside the window, I’m seeing John, Paul, George, and Ringo romping in the field to the frantic beat of “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

“She’s So Heavy”

As I’m playing Abbey Road, Joyce squints through his spectral specs at the famous cover and sees Lennon leading his mates across the famous crossing, looking quite the Joycean dandy in his white suit and white shoes. JJ is tuned in for sure when JL’s “Come Together” comes on with its litany of absurdities and surrealities: “walrus gumboot,” “spinal cracker,” “mojo filter,” “feet down below his knees, hold you in his armchair, yeah you can feel his disease, got to be good-lookin’ ‘cause he’s so hard to see.”

Thinking of the long midnight ramble of Molly Bloom, I skip ahead to Lennon’s massive battle hymn of need, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” which reminds me of the first time I read the love letters Joyce wrote to Nora (“you hot little girl”) in 1909, notably the one that begins, “There is some star too near the earth for I am still in a fever-fit of animal desire.” After telling her that he never uses “obscene phrases in speaking” and “hardly smiles” when men tell “filthy or lecherous stories” in his presence: “Yet you seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend.”

Writing in his mid-20s as he was about to put the finishing touches on the first incarnation of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce tells his “little wild-flower of the hedges,” it was her lips “which first uttered an obscene word … that night in bed in Pola.”

Being There

It was Pula, not Pola, in May-June 1966, and it was in Yugoslavia, not Austria, and John Lennon and the Beatles were keeping me company on my little transistor radio singing “Rain” and “Paperback Writer.” In my copy of Richard Ellman’s James Joyce (1960), there’s a photo of the Berlitz school where Joyce taught, next to the Roman arch of Sergius, above which I left a penciled message to let the world know that I, Kilroy, once lived there. I saw the same view through the window of my room, which I was sure must be the very room that Joyce and Nora had occupied after he failed to find work at the Berlitz school in Trieste.

According to Ellman’s biography, the friend who met their boat at the wharf “smiled to see them, ragged from travel, Joyce proud and impervious, Nora confused and curious in a strange-looking hat, descending the gangplank with their one old suitcase out of which bulged indifferently bits of dirty clothing and miscellaneous necessaries.”

In March 1905, Joyce and Nora left for Trieste, where the job at Berlitz had finally become available. The city would be the birthplace of their children Giorgio and Lucia, and Joyce would finish The Portrait and begin Ulysses there. Before he left Pola he formally announced to his brother Stanislaus that he had determined to consider himself “a voluntary exile.”

That image of the old suitcase bulging with dirty clothes reminds me of the pack I’d purchased along with a U.S. Army sleeping bag from a street merchant in Turin the previous summer and carried to India and back. My five weeks in Joyce and Nora’s Pola were my last as a single male. On June 21, I had a date in St. Mark’s Square with the rest of my life.

Bloomsday

June 16, 1904, the day of Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle and the date on which he sets Ulysses is celebrated outside Ireland in places as far afield as Australia and New Zealand, Prague and the Hungarian town of Szombathely, the fictional birthplace of Bloom’s father.

As Colm Tóibín pointed out during last week’s virtual spotlight tour of the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibit “Happy Bloomsday, James Joyce,” one of the displayed letters from Nora to Joyce is unpunctuated throughout, a typographic model Joyce follows in Molly Bloom’s prodigious monologue, which ends Ulysses with the words, “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

“Flower of the Mountain”

The credits for this song, which is adapted from Molly’s monologue, are shared by Kate Bush and James Joyce, whose estate granted the singer licence to the material in 2011. From the moment I heard 20-year-old Kate sing “Feel It” (“oh feel it, feel it, my love, see what you’re doing to me”), I knew she’d take on Molly Bloom one day. Now I’m trying to imagine Joyce looking up from the manuscript of the Penelope chapter to see this lovely woman of Irish ancestry whirling through an enchanted forest on her way to “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

I’m not sure why but I’ve never been much drawn to either of Bush’s recorded versions of Molly’s unpunctuated erotic rhapsody. I’d rather listen to her sing “Wuthering Heights” or “Running Up That Hill.” Or “Cloudbusting.”

A Sutherland Surprise

I’ve been looking for ways to remember the actor Donald Sutherland, who died at 88 the day after Bloomsday. If you want to see the man in his prime, I recommend Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970), where he’s everything a 35-year-old actor could dream of being: he’s funny, both charming and cranky, and he moves at times with the style of a very lanky Chaplin. It’s fun to see him as a young one-picture director paying homage to his idol Fellini, and dazzled to the depths by Jeanne Moreau, she singing “La reve est la” cuddled up beside him during a dream sequence horse and carriage ride.

However, I prefer him as Dr. Wilhelm Reich in the Terry Gilliam-Kate Bush 1985 music video for “Cloudbusting,” which is nicely directed by Julian Doyle. Apparently Bush had to sell him on the idea after he turned it down; she knocked on his door, he opened, looked out, no one was there. Then he looked down and there was wee Kate, all ready to play the part of his son Peter in the video. I’ve been enamoured of Kate Bush for many years but never has she looked as loveable as she does when helping Sutherland push his gigantic contraption up “that hill.” As for the actor, it’s clear to see that he loves the part and the woman he almost didn’t see when she knocked on his door.