Time was when Ulysses rejoiced in the reputation of being the world’s filthiest book, naughtier by far than Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Fanny Hill or The Perfumed Garden. The American comedian Allan ­Sherman had a novelty hit with a song called Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, a lament from a lonely boy at ­summer camp that contained the deathless couplet “And the Head Coach wants no sissies/So he reads to us from something called Ulysses.” Nor was it only the philistines and the censors who thought this way. Edith Wharton declared that James Joyce’s novel was “a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind)”. Virginia Woolf was sniffy, too. English-speaking fans of the book had to smuggle it back from France and read it furtively: one Cambridge don (Mansfield Forbes) was so panicked at the thought of being caught with it that he ­bundled up his illegal copy and threw it in the Cam.

This was all very silly, to be sure, and yet it was in these hysterical conditions that the novel, published in 1922, made its way from being the fad of a few hundred bohemians and intellectuals to its present status, as one of the incontestably great modern novels; perhaps the greatest of all novels. If Declan Kiberd’s observations are right, though, this has been a sorry kind of victory. Today, he suggests, the book has become a notoriously incomprehensible bore, almost wholly the property of academic Joyceans, and is seldom if ever read by anyone not forced to the task. (Surely an exaggeration?) As he sums up: “A book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them.”

So one of the two main burdens of Ulysses and Us is to take the new reader gently by the hand and make a painless journey through the 18 chapters of the novel (instead of following Joyce’s hidden Homeric scheme, Kiberd names each section after its main activity: Waking, Eating, Ogling and the rather sickly Parenting). He explains the drift of the action, elaborates on the reason for Joyce’s spendthrift way with styles, and points out incidental felicities. All of which is well done; anyone who has tackled Ulysses and grown alarmed at its apparent difficulties will find themselves soothed and enlightened. In this respect, Kiberd’s work takes its place as an honourable successor to all the other guidebooks to Joyce for the non-specialist, including Anthony Burgess’s two lively volumes Joysprick and Here Comes Everybody. It may be thrown as a life-saver to anyone drowning in the torrents of Joyce’s prose.

The more debatable aspect of Kiberd’s study is his attempt to re-brand Ulysses as what he calls a “wisdom book”, though the less dignified term “self-help book” seems to be lurking in the background. Briefly, Kiberd contends that we are meant to learn ethical lessons from the book — for example, to admire and emulate Leopold Bloom’s pacifism, generosity and aspirations for global harmony. Now, one of the reasons for loving Ulysses is to share in Joyce’s relish for the humblest aspects of the everyday — his sense of democracy extends to objects and actions as well as people — but there are solid reasons for doubting that he saw himself primarily as a preacher of doctrines, however humane. (Kiberd pointedly does not mention, for example, Joyce’s funny song about his alter ego, the resolutely apolitical and uncommitted “Mr Dooley”.) As the American poet Alice Goodman memorably put the point: it is not the business of art to tell you to eat your greens.

Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd
Faber £14.99 pp399

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