From the tribute of devoted fans to heavy sessions by Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien, the day of James Joyce’s Dublin epic has become a global phenomenon

In June 1924, James Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver of how “there is a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day – 16 June”. Joyce was referring to the date on which Ulysses is set, in 1904 – a date which the author chose to mark the first time he went out with the woman who would become his wife, Nora Barnacle. The day is now marked with celebrations of the novel around the world.

Back in 1924, however, Joyce told Weaver that “they sent me hortensias [hydrangeas], white and blue, dyed”, adding somewhat gloomily, “I have to convince myself that I wrote that book. I used to be able to talk intelligently about it.” (He’s even gloomier when he mentions his current project, Finnegans Wake, telling Weaver: “If ever I try to explain to people now what I am supposed to be writing, I see stupefaction freezing them into silence.”)

“That was the beginning of the term Bloomsday,” said Gordon Bowker, author of James Joyce: A Biography. The blue and white flowers, believes Bowker, could have been a reference to the cover of the first edition of Ulysses, which was printed in those colours, or to the blue of the seas on which Ulysses sailed, or possibly to when Bloom is dressed “in youth’s smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips” in the novel’s Nighttown episode.

Sylvia Beach, founder of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of Ulysses in 1922, claimed Bloomsday as her invention, says Bowker. But he says the earliest use of the term was probably by Ezra Pound in a January 1922 article, and in a review of Ulysses by Valerie Larbaud in April 1922. Beach, however, “probably initiated” the celebrations around the book as a means of promoting it. “Being a good American saleswoman, she thought it was a good idea,” says Bowker, pointing to a 1925 letter from Weaver to Beach, in which she wrote “thank you for the three snapshots taken on ‘Bloomsday’ 1925”.

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In June of 1929, Beach was part of a celebration of Bloomsday and the publication of the French translation of Ulysses organised by the bookseller and publisher Adrienne Monnier, her partner. Monnier put on a charabanc trip out of Paris, in which Joyce participated, along with Samuel Beckett, his son Giorgio and others.

In true Bloomsday style, “Samuel Beckett got outrageously drunk. They kept stopping for drinks along the way and it was said that he was thrown off the bus for causing a rumpus,” says Bowker. “But Beckett himself said he decided to leave the trip.”

Joyce’s last Bloomsday would take place on 16 June 1940, when the author was trapped in Vichy France, two days after Paris fell. He died the next year, and according to Mark Traynor, managing director of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, the next time the event was properly marked was in Dublin in 1954.

“It was a small event but it was reflective of the book’s growing recognition. Even though it was largely confined to the artistic community in Dublin, it recognised the growing significance of the work and of Joyce’s international contribution to literature,” says Traynor.

Organised by the publican and critic John Ryan, participants in the 1954 Bloomsday included the authors Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien. “They attempted to retrace the journeys taken by the characters in the book, starting at the tower and making their way to Sandymount Strand. They had a horse and carriage, but they were all heavy drinkers, and although the plan had been to re-enact the whole book, according to accounts, by the time they reached the city centre, they abandoned that and spent the night in the pub,” says Traynor.

Footage of the event on YouTube shows a chaotic affair, punctuated by impromptu urination stops and staggering. “It was a bit half-arsed,” says Traynor.

Traynor is expecting up to 8,000 people to attend the various Bloomsday events in Dublin on Thursday – ranging from breakfasts in period costume to walking tours of the city and parties – and believes that the 16 June celebration really started to take off in 1982.

“Joyce remained in the wilderness throughout the decades. Although he was never an officially banned author … he remained a peripheral figure,” he says. “The sense that that had changed was in 1982, the centenary of his birth, when a large Joyce symposium was held to coincide with Bloomsday. It brought in people from all over the world, and although it was an academic symposium, an effort was made to do walks around the city and to engage people in a non-academic way.”

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Bloomsday “has grown more and more since then”, according to Traynor. Today, 16 June sees festivities around the world, from New Zealand to Brazil.

“I wouldn’t say Joyce would necessarily have encouraged it, but he was quite canny at promoting himself, so I think he probably would have been pleased about the fact that people are celebrating the book in that way,” says Traynor, pointing to a despondent note made by Joyce on 16 June 1924: “Will anybody remember this date?”

Bowker also thinks Joyce would have welcomed the celebrations. “He did enjoy going out and getting drunk himself, having a knees-up, so I think he probably wouldn’t have disapproved altogether.”