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One of the two fourwheelers that the 1954 contingent of Bloomsday pilgrims used in their unsuccessful attempt to follow Leopold Bloom's path through Dublin. The right front tire clearly shows how it is constructed of individual pieces of solid rubber. In Ulysses Leopold stopped at Davey Byrne's pub for a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola cheese sandwich. By now generations of Bloomsday tourists have experienced their first dismaying encounter with gorgonzola at Davey Byrne's.
Source:
Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin seated on horse and carriage outside Davy Byrnes pub, Bloomsday, Duke Street, Dublin, June 16, 1954.
Reproduction rights owned by National Library of Ireland (call no. WILPK11).
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Bloomsday for Cab Drivers / 20
The Fourwheeler / 2
Bloomsday originated in 1954 when a cavalcade of Irish writers in two antique fourwheelers and a car attempted to follow Leopold Bloom's route through Dublin.
For an event that became one of Ireland's premier festivals the inaugural Bloomsday was distinctly inauspicious. Novelist John Banfield summarised the fiasco in "Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday" (New York Times, June 13, 2004):
Banfield's unkind characterization of the pilgrims as "Lestrygonians" refers to the race of giant cannibals that Odysseus encountered on his way home from Troy. The Lestrygonians ate several of his men and then destroyed eleven of his twelve ships by hurling huge rocks at them from the cliff tops.
Bloomsday (a term Joyce himself did not employ) was invented in 1954, the 50th anniversary, when the novelist Flann O'Brien and the writer and magazine editor John Ryan organized what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the ''Ulysses'' route. Accounts of the venture are given by Ryan in his book of reminiscences, ''Remembering How We Stood'' -- renamed by Dublin wits ''Remembering How We Staggered'' -- and in ''No Laughing Matter,'' a biography of O'Brien by the poet Anthony Cronin, who was one of the pilgrims. Cronin's downbeat version of the ''structured and, in a way, humorless'' event is probably the more accurate one. The tour began at the architect Michael Scott's house beside the Martello tower in Sandycove [the opening scene of Ulysses, about eight miles north of Dublin], where the effects of the drink that Scott had laid on caused a scuffle between O'Brien and the poet Patrick Kavanagh. As might be expected, matters went downhill from there, and the pilgrimage was abandoned halfway through, when the weary Lestrygonians succumbed to inebriation and rancor at the Bailey pub in the city center.