Treasures: Dublin Comes to Delancey

NOT LONG AGO, a Philadelphia socialite named Lenni Steiner held her wedding on the second floor of No. 2010 Delancey Place.

The setting offered everything a bride could hope for, in some ways. A perfectly proportioned room, sunlight pouring through enormous windows, soft white walls that seemed to glow from within. But then again, there were other things. A menu of hors d’oeuvres quoting Ulysses, for instance. The lunch menu quoted Ulysses as well. And brown, brittle pages from the manuscript sat out on display.

“This book,” Steiner says, “this book changed my life. It’s ultimately a story about affirmation, and we wanted that in our wedding.”

There’s a whole culture of people like Steiner, who seek out Ulysses, study it, read it aloud, even act it out. One Philadelphia performance artist wrote and produced a play about it: not the story of Leopold Bloom’s fictional day in Dublin, but the story of the manuscript. And each June 16th — the day of Bloom’s stroll — hundreds, even thousands of people gather outside No. 2010 Delancey Place for public readings of the book Joyce himself called, in his playful way, “usylessly unreadable.”

“Ach, Joyce, he wrote about my hometown,” says John Timoney, the former Philly police commissioner who was born in Dublin. For several years, Timoney read at the Bloomsday event, with his worn Irish accent, and even donned a period straw hat. “Ulysses is one of those novels that lots of people talk about but very few people have finished. Including me. But that’s all right — the reading is the fun.”

Barsanti invited me to read at a recent Bloomsday. I was shocked, when I arrived, to see the crowd outside No. 2010. They all wore fancy dress, for starters. And they all gripped copies of a broadsheet newspaper that announced itself as the Bloomsday Herald in old-fashioned type. It looked like a paper delivered a hundred years too late. The day’s largest headline read FICTIONAL MAN DRAWS REAL CROWD, and below that, “Low Prose For High Minds.” It featured a black-and-white photo of 2010 Delancey Place, and at the bottom a quaint advertisement reading, “Congratulations Lenni and Perry.”

People spoke more politely than they might, on another day or another street, and an air of gentleness filled the block, a bittersweet echo of a different place — a different Dublin, a different Philadelphia — and time. I saw Fergie Carey, proprietor of Fergie’s Pub and general Irishman-about-town, holding forth while a pair of young women listened, enraptured by the lilt of his voice. He would read to the crowd from the book’s “Eumaeus” section with no sign of hesitation, as though coasting on the memory of peat fires and gray skies from the greener side of the sea.