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Tag Archives: Bloomsday


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Birth of Anthony Cronin, Poet, Activist, Critic & Editor

Anthony Gerard Richard Cronin, Irish poet, arts activist, biographer, commentator, critic, editor and barrister, is born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, on December 28, 1923.

After obtaining a B.A. from the National University of Ireland, Cronin enters the King’s Inns and is later called to the Bar.

Cronin is known as an arts activist as well as a writer. He is Cultural Adviser to Taoiseach Charles Haughey and briefly to Garret FitzGerald. He involves himself in initiatives such as Aosdána, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Heritage Council. He is a founding member of Aosdána, and is a member of its governing body, the Toscaireacht, for many years. He is elected Saoi, a distinction for exceptional artistic achievement, in 2003. He is also a member of the governing bodies of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland, of which he is for a time Acting Chairman.

With Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Con Leventhal, Cronin celebrates the first Bloomsday in 1954. He contributes to many television programmes, including Flann O’Brien: Man of Parts (BBC) and Folio (RTÉ).

From 1966 to 1968 Cronin is a visiting lecturer at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, and from 1968 to 1970 he is poet in residence at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He reads a selection of his poems for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive in 2015. He has honorary doctorates from several institutions, including the University of Dublin, the National University of Ireland and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.

Cronin begins his literary career as a contributor to Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art. He is editor of The Bell in the 1950s and literary editor of Time and Tide (London). He writes a weekly column, “Viewpoint,” in The Irish Times from 1974 to 1980. Later he contributes a column on poetry to the Sunday Independent.

His first collection of poems, called simply Poems (Cresset Press, London), is published in 1958. Several collections follow and his Collected Poems (New Island Books, Dublin) is published in 2004. The End of the Modern World (New Island Books, 2016), written over several decades, is his final publication.

Cronin’s novel, The Life of Riley, is a satire on Bohemian life in Ireland in the mid-20th century, while his memoir Dead as Doornails addresses the same subject.

Cronin knows Samuel Beckett from when they do some work for the BBC during the 1950s and 1960s. He gives a prefatory talk to Patrick Magee‘s reading of The Unnamable on the BBC Third Programme. Beckett is not impressed, saying, “Cronin delivered his discourse… It was all right, not very exciting.” Cronin later publishes a biography of him, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996), followed on from No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (1989).

In his later years, Cronin suffers from failing health, which prevents him from traveling abroad, thus limiting his dealings to local matters. He dies in Dublin on December 27, 2016, one day short of his 93rd birthday.

Cronin firstly marries Thérèse Campbell, from whom he separates in the mid-1980s. She dies in 1999. They have two daughters, Iseult and Sarah. Iseult is killed in a road accident in Spain. He secondly marries the writer Anne Haverty who, along with daughter Sarah, survives him.


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Bloomsday, Commemoration & Celebration of Writer James Joyce

Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on June 16, the day his novel Ulysses (1922) takes place in 1904, the date of his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.

The first mention of such a celebration is found in a letter by Joyce to Miss Weaver of June 27, 1924, which refers to “a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s Day – 16 June.”

The day involves a range of cultural activities, including Ulysses readings and dramatisations, pub crawls and other events, some of it hosted by the James Joyce Centre in North Great George’s Street. Enthusiasts often dress in Edwardian costume to celebrate Bloomsday, and retrace Bloom’s route around Dublin via landmarks such as Davy Byrne’s pub. Hard-core devotees have even been known to hold marathon readings of the entire novel, some lasting up to 36 hours.

The James Joyce Tower and Museum at Sandycove, site of the opening chapter of Ulysses, hosts many free activities around Bloomsday including theatrical performances, musical events, tours of the iconic tower and readings from Joyce’s masterpiece.

In 1954, on the 50th anniversary of the events in the novel, artist, critic, publican and founder of Envoy magazine, John Ryan, and the novelist Brian O’Nolan organise what is to be a daylong pilgrimage along the Ulysses route. They are joined by Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Tom Joyce (Joyce’s cousin, representing the family interest) and A. J. Leventhal, a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin. Ryan engages two horse-drawn cabs, of the old-fashioned sort, in which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends drive to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. The party are assigned roles from the novel. They plan to travel around the city through the day, starting at the Martello tower at Sandycove where the novel begins, visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce called Nighttown. The pilgrimage is abandoned halfway through when the weary pilgrims succumb to inebriation and rancour at the Bailey pub in the city centre, which Ryan owns at the time, and at which in 1967 he installs the door to No. 7 Eccles Street (Leopold Bloom’s front door), having rescued it from demolition. A Bloomsday record of 1954, informally filmed by John Ryan, follows this pilgrimage.

On Bloomsday 1982, the centenary year of Joyce’s birth, Irish state broadcaster RTÉ transmits a continuous 30-hour dramatic performance of the entire text of Ulysses on radio.

A five-month-long festival, ReJoyce Dublin 2004, takes place in Dublin between April 1 and August 31, 2004. On the Sunday before the 100th “anniversary” of the fictional events described in the book, 10,000 people in Dublin are treated to a free, open-air, full Irish breakfast on O’Connell Street consisting of sausages, rashers, toast, beans, and black and white puddings.

The 2006 Bloomsday festivities are cancelled, the day coinciding with the funeral of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey.

(Pictured: Firstbloom (L to R) John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Brian O’Nolan, Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce (James Joyce’s cousin); Sandymount, 1954)


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Birth of Frank Delaney, Novelist, Journalist & Broadcaster

frank-delaney

Frank Delaney, Irish novelist, journalist and broadcaster, is born in County Tipperary on October 24, 1942. He is the author of The New York Times best-seller Ireland, the non-fiction book Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea, and many other works of fiction, non-fiction and collections.

Delaney begins working as a newsreader for the Irish state radio and television network RTÉ in 1970. In the early 1970s he becomes a news reporter for the BBC in Dublin, and covers an intense period of violence known as the Troubles. After five years of reporting on the violence, he moves to London to work in arts broadcasting. In 1978 he creates the weekly Bookshelf programme for BBC Radio 4, which covers books, writers and the business of publishing. Over the next five-and-a-half years he interviews over 1,400 authors, including Anthony Burgess, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen King.

On television, Delaney writes and presents for Omnibus, the BBC’s weekly arts series. He serves as the Literature Director of the Edinburgh Festival in 1980, and hosts his own talk show Frank Delaney in the early 1980s, which features many cultural and literary personalities. Afterward, he creates and presents Word of Mouth, the BBC’s radio programme about language, as well as a variety of radio and television documentaries including specials on James Joyce, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway in Paris, and the Shakespeare industry. He presents The Book Show on the Sky News satellite channel for many years.

Delaney’s first book, James Joyce’s Odyssey (1981), is well received and becomes a best-seller in the UK and Ireland. He writes and presents the six-part documentary series The Celts: Rich Traditions and Ancient Myths (1987) for the BBC, and writes the accompanying book. He subsequently writes five books of non-fiction (including Simple Courage), ten novels (including Ireland, Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show and Tipperary), one novella, and a number of short stories. He also edits many compilations of essays and poetry.

After moving to the United States and settling in Kent, Connecticut in 2002, Delaney writes the screenplay for an adaptation of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (2002), which stars Martin Clunes and is shown on ITV in Britain, and in the Masterpiece Theatre series in the United States. His articles are published by newspapers in United States, the UK and Ireland, including on the Op-ed pages of The New York Times. He is a frequent public speaker, and is a contributor and guest on National Public Radio (NPR) programmes.

On Bloomsday 2010, Delaney launches Re:Joyce, a series of short weekly podcasts that go page-by-page through James Joyce’s Ulysses, discussing its allusions, historical context and references.

Frank Delaney dies in Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut on February 21, 2017 after suffering a stroke the previous day.