Bellying Up for a Beer With James Joyce

For a late-night literary pub crawl, it was remarkably clear-headed. Elizabeth Graham had just bellied up to the “bar” and launched into the “Sirens” section, some erudite blarney about Leopold Bloom, Big Ben Dollard and a “candlestick melodeon oozing maggoty blowbags,” whatever that means. Shadows loomed in the trees and doorways surrounding UCLA’s Rolfe Hall Sculpture Courtyard, and the nippy air had a touch of old Eire about it.

It was almost midnight, nearly 12 hours into a marathon reading of “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s madly inventive 1922 novel, and so far a raucous band of UCLA graduate students, faculty stalwarts and a Hollywood celebrity or two were managing to keep the meandering story on its wayward track. But stately, plump Kevin Patrick Cooney (OK, he’s really kinda laid-back and svelte) knew that in the wee small hours to come it would be hard to stay focused on the epic task at hand. Where’s Jerry Lewis when you need him?

“Once we get to 7 a.m. we’ve pretty much made it, because there’s a coffee shift that comes in,” said Cooney, a third-year grad student and chair of the event. Gazing around at the dozen or so people who hadn’t nodded off, he added, “This is a pretty good audience for this time of night.”

As things turned out, Cooney’s scholarly confidence wasn’t misplaced. The Thursday-into-Friday round-robin recitation went off with nary a glitch, as scores of readers plowed through Joyce’s 740-page Modernist masterpiece in a snappy 27 1/2 hours.

That’s roughly the amount of time that elapses during “Ulysses” itself, an episodic distillation of the events of a single day in Dublin--June 16, 1904--as played out in the lives of three main characters: Stephen Dedalus, a smarty-pants young teacher; Leopold Bloom, a bumbling Jewish ad salesman; and Molly Bloom, his lusty, acerbic spouse.

Yet, whether spoken out loud or lying flat on the printed page, reading “Ulysses” has never been for the faint of heart or the short of patience. For generations, Joyce’s alternately bawdy and transcendent book has been confounding scholars and baffling undergraduates, some of whom in despair have pronounced its title “Useless.”

“Joyce himself was famous for saying that he’d put so many puzzles and conundrums in it that it would keep scholars busy for centuries,” said UCLA English professor Jack Kolb, who gave a talk on “Ulysses” on the first day of the marathon. “It took the remainder of the 20th century to recognize the achievement of ‘Ulysses,’ that it was coherent, that it did hold together, and that it wasn’t, as some early critics said, ‘unreadable.’”

Now in its seventh year, the fund-raising marathon was expected to net about $15,000 to support scholarships and study grants for UCLA grad students in English. In years past, the annual event has tackled such size XL works as “Moby-Dick,” “Bleak House” and “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Over the years, the marathons have raised more than $60,000 for graduate activities and generated plenty of their own folklore.

There was the time the lawn sprinklers accidentally went off in the middle of “Bleak House,” dousing the audience along with a painted backdrop of London houses that had been loaned by Paramount studios. “It woke everybody up, believe me,” said Annie Reynoso, a Hollywood producer and coordinator of the Friends of English, an alumni support group.

Another year, a young man and woman, apparently overcome by the anarchic ethos of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” went streaking nude through the courtyard--and straight into a bicycle cop. They barely managed to throw their clothes back on before backup officers arrived on the scene.

Nothing that sensational occurred at this year’s marathon, which got underway at noon on Thursday. But there were some memorable moments. The first was a cameo appearance by actor Elliott Gould, one of a half-dozen celebrity readers, who took the opening crack at Chapter 1. “Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton, “ Gould intoned in a fine stage-Irish brogue.

To lend authenticity, the reader’s podium was decked out as a replica of Barney Kiernan’s, the bar that figures prominently in the novel, complete with fake beer taps and a large mirror. To one side hung an oversized map of turn-of-the-century Dublin, showing all the key landmarks of Joyce’s book: Martello Tower, the Bloom residence at 7 Eccles Street, and so on. Portraits of the artist as a young man stared out from a nearby pair of trees.

Asked later whether he considered “Ulysses” to be the 20th century’s greatest novel, as many scholars claim, Gould pondered for a moment. “I would select ‘Charlotte’s Web,’” he said finally. “E.B. White was a nice guy.”

Maybe he wasn’t joking, because “Ulysses,” with its stream-of-consciousness interior monologues, obscure historical references and parodies of various literary genres, can be a bit of a slog--despite its author’s high-minded intentions. In telescoping the action of the book and elevating its characters to mythic levels, Joyce was recasting (tongue in cheek) everyday modern life as an epic. Well-versed readers would also recognize strains of Homer’s 8th century BC narrative poem “The Odyssey,” in which Ulysses, a Greek hero of the Trojan War, undergoes 10 years of tribulations before reuniting with his long-suffering wife, Penelope. “It’s the old boy-gets-girl story,” said grad student Sean Silver, who was sporting a tweedy knit cap and raffish wool vest for the occasion.

Though the marathon was broken into roughly 15-minute reading segments, some participants lasted only a fraction of that time. Several readers confessed they’d never made it through the entire novel. Journalist Lawrence Grobel, who read immediately after his friend Gould, used a phonetic cheat sheet to help him with the Latin phrases sprinkled throughout the book. Actor David Birney admitted that he couldn’t make much of the book when he read it for the first time in college. Reading it aloud, Birney said, made it easier to glimpse the story behind Joyce’s pyrotechnic style. “When you read it on the page you’re experiencing only the ghost of the author’s voice,” he said.

Yet actor Peter Dennis, who said he’d never seen a page of the book before, confirmed its oral suppleness with a note-perfect sight-reading. “It’s the magic of the words and the rhythm of the words,” he observed. “Joyce is rhythm.”

Among those listening on a small emerald-green patch of grass were a group of sixth-graders from Gael Blair Academy, a private Pasadena school. “There are funny things. I caught myself laughing,” said Alexandra Haffner, 12. A few feet away her teacher, Nick Love, sprawled on the turf, following along in his book. “We read the whole ‘Odyssey,’ the Fagles translation, most of Virgil, most of the ‘Aeneid,’ a lot of Ovid,” said Love, who’d doffed his shoes, socks and black leather jacket. “I think they’re not paying much attention, but I think something soaks in.”

As the afternoon ebbed and the audience dwindled to a couple dozen intrepid listeners, the reading took on the feel of a college dorm bull session-cum-performance art piece. Bottles of Harp beer materialized. Sweaters, wool coats and sleeping bags were hauled out. Votive candles were lighted and placed around the courtyard, enhancing the ceremonial feel. The smell of clove cigarettes mingled with ribald stage directions and other unsolicited advice from the crowd.

“C’mon baby, work it!” yelled grad student Peter Terpinski as his fellow student Elizabeth Graham, back for another 15-minute round, waded through one of Joyce’s interminable lists. Graham obligingly whipped off her scarf, then her topcoat, without skipping a beat.

Terpinski whooped and hoisted his bottle of Foster’s in salute. “That’s one of the things that’s great about Joyce,” he said. “With all his disgusting frat-boy humor, he never really grows up, despite his erudition. Joyce just loves to [mess] around. The other thing I admire about this book is Joyce’s stamina. There’s this boundless energy.”

Somehow, the students’ energy held up as Friday morning dawned and the campus slowly started coming back to life. By 3 in the afternoon they were heading down the home stretch, as Irish actress and L.A. resident Bairbre Dowling, the last of 215 readers, took the podium to cap off Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy. “I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls,” Dowling read, her warm, husky voice dissolving the ornery syntax into sensual poetry.

Recapping the long day’s journey, English department chairman Thomas Wortham noted that, “the extravagance of staying up all night is something one remembers having done in sweet retrospect.”

“Maybe next year we’ll just get a book on tape and play it and everyone can go home,” he joked.

All in all that seemed unlikely--as unlikely as the thought that one perfect summer day in Los Angeles could be spent remembering a summer day in Dublin long, long ago.