Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes. A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday

Foreword and Introduction Foreword Frank McCourt The title of the thesis I wrote at Brooklyn College in May 1964 was "Oliver St. John Gogarty: A Critical Study." Critical, my arse. I was no more qualified to write a critical study of Gogarty than I was to drive an eighteen-wheeler in a New York City rush hour. But the professors accepted it (some admired it) and here it is before me. Here, bristling with footnotes and backed up, not merely with one thirty-one-item bibliography, but also with a supplementary bibliography to show I knew my way around Catullus and Horace and Petronius and could show how indebted Gogarty was to them, how he often imitated them. If you're holding this book in your hands you must know that Oliver St. John Gogarty was, for a while, a pal of James Joyce. You'll know how they knocked around together, Gogarty roistering, Joyce watching, watching, and making notes. The thesis opens with a quote from Gogarty's It Isn't This Time of Year at All: It is with the unruly, the formless, the growing and illogical I love to deal. Even my gargoyles are merry and bright; my outer darkness by terror is unthronged. My thoughts are subjected to no rules. Behold the wings upon my helmet and my unfettered feet. I can fly backwards and forwards in time and space. My comment on the above was, "The words are carefree, heroic and joyous. They come from the pen of Oliver St. John Gogarty, surgeon, poet, athlete, wit, senator, aviator, and close friend of great Irish literary figures." What I omitted in this catalogue of Gogarty's activities and talents was his friendship with the man who made him immortal, James Joyce. It was an immortality Gogarty did not relish, an immortality that plunged him into a resentment of Joyce from which he never emerged. You are now wondering: Why is this man going on about Gogarty when it's Joyce we're concerned with here? Here is the answer: I wrote my thesis on Gogarty because I admired him, his diversity, his talents, his devil-may-care attitude toward life. If offered the chance for another life, I would ask to be reincarnated as Oliver St. John Gogarty. I could have attempted a thesis on Joyce but the world was already busy with a thousand such tomes. So...I saw Gogarty as the next best thing, a door to the work, the mind, the life of The Master. Nineteen sixty-four, the year of my forgettable thesis, was the sixtieth anniversary of Bloomsday. (Richard Ellmann had published his masterly biography in 1959.) Joyceans might have marked June 16 on their calendars in 1964 but you'd search in vain for the kind of celebration the day has engendered since. In certain places Ulysses, all of it, is read by people, some who haven't the foggiest notion of what they're reading. Still, the book sings in your head for a long time and you won't forget its characters-Bloom, Stephen, Molly, Blazes Boylan, or scenes. It's your life. At these readings there is still a thrill in the crowd with the opening line that Joyceans know refers to my man, Gogarty: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead...." We're off on a journey through Dublin and Ireland and family and Catholicism and eroticism and love and infidelity. The journey ends on a powerful, tumescent note, "yes I will Yes." (Note the uppercase Y on the final Yes. This is not an end but a beginning.) Let us digress a bit here. Joyce won't mind and I'm sure you won't. Here is a strange fact: Neither Joyce nor Proust ever won the Nobel Prize. Wags have suggested they were ignored because the members of the Nobel Literature Committee were incapable of reading their work. Another fact: According to the American publisher, Random House, Ulysses was "the number one novel in the twentieth century." Number one in what way? Number of people who actually read it? NumTully, Nola is the author of 'Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes. A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400077311 and ISBN 1400077311.