yes I said yes I will Yes.: A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday

by Nola Tully (Editor), Frank McCourt (Foreword), Isaiah Sheffer (Introduction)

On the fictional morning of June 16, 1904—Bloomsday, as it has come to be known—Mr. Leopold Bloom set out from his home at 7 Eccles Street and began his day’s journey through Dublin life in the pages of James Joyce’s novel of the century, Ulysses . Commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes offers a priceless gathering of what’s been said about Ulysses since the extravagant praise and withering condemnation that first greeted it upon its initial publication.

From the varied appraisals of such Joyce contemporaries as William Butler Yeats (“It is an entirely new thing. . . . He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time”) and Virginia Woolf (“Never did I read such tosh”), to excerpts from Tennessee Williams’ term paper “Why Ulysses is Boring” and assorted wit, praise, parody, caricature, photographs, anecdotes, bon mots, and reminiscence, this treasury of Bloomsiana is a lively and winning tribute to the most famous day in literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Ireland

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2004

Reviews

[Mike]

Five stars for Joyce nerds only. This book is a small and excellently put together compendium of Joyce analyses, appreciations, miscellany, and resources. Well worth the brief read.

[Barry Levy]

Appropriately enough, I began reading this book on June 16, Bloomsday, in anticipation of that night's annual festivities at Symphony Space, where actors would read aloud passages from Joyce's "Ulysses" and musicians would play Irish melodies. Frank McCourt, who wrote the book's Forward and "Angela's Ashes," and Isaiah Sheffer, who wrote the Introduction and who had been instrumental in creating "Bloomsday on Broadway" at Symphony Space, have since passed on.

On the evening that I attended the celebration at Symphony Space, Frank McCourt's brother Malachy, seated in his wheelchair, turned in a lively, spirited set of performances, imbuing each role with characteristic Joycean bravado and gusto.

And as for the book in question, editor Nola Tully manages to cover a great deal of ground in less than 150 pages with both intelligence and humor on such subjects as censorship, scholarship, typography, history and biography, while honoring James Joyce's massive literary achievement and
Bloomsday as it is celebrated every June 16 around the world.

[Mark]

This is my second trip through this miscellany which goes far afield from Bloomsday.

[Pat]

A must for every fan of Bloomsday.
Great bibliography.

[Diann Blakely]

A romp through the history of Bloomsday and related Joyceana, including the holiday's origin: the 24-hour span on June 16, 1904, during which the action in Ulysses takes place, YES I SAID YES I WILL YES, makes for delightful reading. Edited by Nora Tully, the volume's many treasures include an undergraduate theme written by Tennessee Williams, who didn't like ULYSSES. The more admiring Isaiah Sheffer, coordinator of the famous annual Bloomsday celebration held at the Norton Symphony Space in New York, serves here as introducer and suggests that the Irishman's painful, lifelong trouble with his eyes, as well as his passion for vocal music, means that his greatest pleasure in writing came not from the images he created but from the verbal music he composed. Sheffer believes that Joyce experienced his own creation as a viscerally immediate polyphony meant to be read aloud: "To look out...at a theatre full of hundreds of listeners, is to take in a sea of attentive and frequently smiling faces, smiling at the pleasure of a particular passage, or just smiling with a look of wild cognition that says 'Oh! Now I get it!' "

Other readers' responses, presented in sidebars and brief sections throughout YES I SAID YES I WILL YES, range from Hemingway's characteristically laconic "Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book" to Nabokov's assertion that "in Bloom's mind and in Joyce's book the theme of sex is continually mixed and intertwined with the theme of the latrine." Virginia Woolf went further in her own writings, in the least harsh of which she says that she "is reminded all the time of some callow board school boy.... [O]ne hopes he'll grow out of it, but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely." Judging from letters in which Joyce asks Molly/Nora to refrain from washing her underwear so that he could revel in its fecal deposits...well, perhaps people were right to be afraid of Ms. Woolf.




(ending revised from piece originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE / Village Voice Media, 2004)

[Holly Raymond]

I'm not sure what the point of this book is. Kind of just some assorted trivia about Ulysses, I guess, which is fine but... but it feels like a cash-in for Ulysses, and what a weird fucking thing to have a cash-in product for. Just conceptually confusing. I paid like a dollar for it, so I can't be too harsh.

[Lee Klein]

Mostly skimmed this collection of quotes and little essays and synopses of Bloomsday celebrations around the world. Worth it to find out that an 800-page handwritten manuscript of Ulysses is housed in Center City Philadelphia. Otherwise seemed sort of filled with filler. Not bad for a buck used online.

[David Macpherson]

It is a pretty good olio of things about Bloomsday and Joyce. I would have liked more about Bloomsday personally. I bought this book nearly five yeaers ago at the City Lights Books Shop on my honey moon, I am happy that I finally got around to reading it

[Nick Black]

meh, if you're going to read everything about the man you're going to read everything; at least this is short.