Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living
By Declan Kiberd
Cover design by Faber
Image; photograph by Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos
Faber, 2009

A woman in a striped bathing suit sits on a merry-go-round, absorbed in a book. Behind her, the grass has the tired, dusty look of late summer. Her long legs end in an unglamorous bunch of knobbly toes, the nails tipped with silvery polish. It looks like an ordinary, private moment on a summer day – but the woman is Marilyn Monroe and her book is that daunting classic, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The copy she’s reading is the 1934 Random House edition, published when it won the obscenity trial that had kept Ulysses from appearing in the US. Ernst Reichl designed the jacket (missing here) and the binding: note the front cover’s bevelled edges and distinctive stamping.

The picture was taken in 1955 by Magnum photographer Eve Arnold, who explained that Monroe kept Ulysses in her car and dipped into it from time to time: “She loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it – but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively.” She is reading the end of the book, the famous soliloquy of Molly Bloom (eight sentences, 50 pages, no punctuation – but entirely comprehensible, really). Molly is a character not unlike Joyce’s wife Nora, who asked her husband, “Why can’t you write sensible books that people can understand?”

With Ulysses and Us, the Irish literary historian Declan Kiberd wrests Ulysses out of the domain of academic “technocrats”, as he calls them, and hands it to the common reader. He offers himself as a companion on the journey, arguing that Ulysses is a brilliant, funny book with much to teach us about everyday life, and deserves to be more widely read.

Kiberd’s is a noble if quixotic dream. I wish him well, and hope to see more copies of Ulysses being read on merry-go-rounds in neighbourhoods everywhere.