JOYCE TO THE WORLD: A VIEW OF HIS WOMEN

At a certain period in American college life, if you hadn’t read one other word of James Joyce, you were likely to have devoured Molly Bloom’s long, erotic, stream of consciousness soliloquy in “Ulysses,” her night thoughts as she lies beside her sleeping husband Leopold.

There was nothing else then to equal it for style or, more important, for sexual candor, in a time when “Tropic of Cancer” was still a black-market import item.

A kindly professor once told a class of us that you could always locate the soliloquy fast by dropping a library copy of “Ulysses” on its spine; out of habit, the book would fall open to Molly. I’m not sure he was serious, but I suspect he was correct.

Molly’s night ruminations are the centerpiece of Fionnula Flanagan’s amazing film, “James Joyce’s Women,” which began life as a one-woman stage production in 1977 and which, highly praised by Sheila Benson and other critics, is now doing nicely at the Beverly Cineplex temple of multiple movies, and opening in several other cities.

It is a marvelous six-role performance; Fionnula Flanagan is a handsome and gifted actress, and Molly’s soliloquy is still more than mildly startling in its verbal and now visual candor, even in a far more carelessly permissive age. But, like the film as a whole, the soliloquy is above all a revelation of the genius of James Joyce and of the insights of this difficult, obsessed writer into the souls of men and women alike.

Male authors, including more recently the makers of adult films, often project their own male sexual fantasies onto their female characters and call it (or imagine it to be) female sexuality. The charge, with some justice, has been made against Hemingway, O’Hara and Ian Fleming among others.

Joyce is quite another matter. “He asked about sex,” Fionnula Flanagan says. “He wrote everything down. He was forever asking Nora (his wife) about her dreams and noting them down, recording her turns of phrase. At his death they found hundreds, maybe thousands, of his tiny notebooks, filled with his notes about everything.”

Flanagan, born in Dublin, was raised on James Joyce. Decades after he had left Dublin for good (in 1904), years after he had died (in Zurich in 1941), he was still a staple of Dublin conversation.

“ ‘As Joyce used to remark,’ ‘As Joyce has pointed out,’ they used to say. Misquotes, most of the time, but there he was, a presence a young child could almost imagine in the street.”

But Edwardian-Joycean Dublin was also a physical presence in Flanagan’s early years. “There were still the vestiges of the Dublin he’d re-created from abroad,” she says. “Now there are the car parks and ugly modern buildings and endless dull housing tracts, but before you could still see the city of ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’

“What fascinated me was that he wrote so truthfully. I met his characters at musicales my grandmother used to give. There would be small glasses of sherry, and the children, who sat on the stairs, were given raspberry cordial.”

But the talk, the non-stop talk of the days before television or even commercial radio, was delicious, and the joy of it has obviously not ceased for her. Talk, you realize in her presence, can be an art form.

Like many a subsequent actress, Flanagan began with parlor performances, dramas built around her three props, a crown, a blue robe and a tapestry waistcoat. She ruled, she says, with an iron hand (“I think I really wanted to be a mogul”), bribing the reluctant by letting them wear two of the props.

She was bilingual (Gaelic and English) and found early that she had a flair for languages generally. She went off to the Switzerland, supporting herself as a maid at a hostel while learning to be an interpreter of French and German. She worked as an interpreter in Florence for two years--”as a way of paying for the time I spent gawking at statues and paintings.”

Back home in Ireland, she taught languages, was accepted by the Abbey Theatre School and then tossed out as a troublemaker, but not before she established herself as a professional actress. She did “The Trial” in Gaelic at the Dublin Theater Festival, then on Irish television, where she won the Irish equivalent of an Emmy. Thereafter she worked at The Gate Theater, then in England at the Bristol Old Vic, the Royal Court (a “Twelfth Night” with Malcolm McDowell) and on the BBC.

In 1967 she played Gertie MacDowell in Joseph Strick’s film of “Ulysses,” one of the roles she reprises in “James Joyce’s Women,” a seaside soliloquy (which helped get the novel banned here in 1918) in which she and Bloom gaze each other, wordlessly and yards apart, into ecstasy.

She came to the Unites States in 1968 to repeat her role in the London hit, Brian Freel’s “Lovers.” In 1973 she played Molly for the first time in Zero Mostel’s revival of “Ulysses in Nighttown” at the huge Wintergarden Theater in New York.

She had by then already been to and had decided to settle in Hollywood. (Her psychiatrist husband specializes in alcohol and cocaine rehabilitation.) “But it had already begun to dawn on me that if I was to work as an actress my fate would be left to the casting agents. Was I supposed to wait six months between roles?”

Her first notion was of a one-woman show in which she would play strong women, from Rosa Luxemburg to Edna St. Vincent Millay, although the only unifying thread was that they were her personal favorites. But the favorites included Molly and Gertie, and as she thought more about Joyce, it struck her that without women, Joyce might possibly never have been published.

Sylvia Beach published “Ulysses” despite the real chance of going to prison for it. The American Harriet Shaw Weaver supported Joyce for years, several thousand dollars’ worth. Nora Barnacle, the hotel maid he saw one day in 1904 and ran off to exile with, somehow kept their impoverished and migratory lives together. (Flanagan says a study of his letters showed that the Joyces had 37 mailing addresses in one year.)

Burgess Meredith, who directed “Ulysses in Nighttown,” came up with a way to do what became “James Joyce’s Women,” which he then directed in its premiere production in Costa Mesa in 1977. The production almost died at birth from its success, and a confusion over rights.

A lawyer rather casually said the James Joyce estate in London had granted the rights. On the verge of an opening in Minneapolis, it appeared the estate had not, and Flanagan had to rush off to London and spend six weeks laying siege to the estate, prowling about dusty law offices.

“It wasn’t a question of sang-froid (cold blood),” she says; “You began to wonder if there was any sang there at all. I was, of course, from the worst place in the world, in their eyes, Hollywood, and I didn’t even have a big studio behind me.”

But at length she encountered Jane Lidderdale, OBE, a strong-souled woman in her 70s who had been the guardian of the Joyces’ daughter, Lucia, who spent most of her life institutionalized as a schizophrenic.

Flanagan performed the whole first act of “James Joyce’s Women” for Lidderdale in her Chelsea sitting-room, and Lidderdale, convinced of its reverence for Joyce, went persuasively to the estate.

“I received a very nice contract,” Flanagan says, “and after a few months they wrote and told me to stop sending them the reviews; they accepted that it was splendid.”

Getting the film made was another peril-strewn project, but she finally engineered a co-production between Irish television and Universal, shooting in Ireland with a television crew. But she was so dissatisfied with the first results, done partly on tape, partly on 16-millimeter film, that she told Universal she wanted to re-do the taped material on film (although she didn’t request more money; “they thought I was daft, I’m sure”).

She went broke three times, she says, but the end product, cut to 90 minutes from an original running time of more than two hours, seems as satisfying to her as any item of obsessive love can hope to be.

The candor of Joyce’s vision of Dublin is crucial to her love of Joyce, and of Dublin, but her love also begets her anger at the Irish stereotypes of stage and screen: “the women as mothers, devout, self-sacrificing and repressed; the men as colorful drunks, the priests who burst into song at the drop of a choir.”

There has to be an alternative to the cheap stereotypes, she says. ‘I come from a different, non-tourist Ireland: poverty, starvation, civil war that bleeds over both sides of the border, rampant alcoholism, a depressed place where not too many eyes are smiling. It didn’t take a famine to start the tradition of willing exiles, exiles as priests and teachers, a tradition then carried on by artists like Wilde and Joyce himself.

“There are virtues, too, a good tradition of women in public life, a favoring climate for artists. You just have to see it whole.”

As James Joyce, you might say, tried to do.