Alec Bannon
Alec
Bannon
In Brief
Ulysses keeps its readers waiting for hundreds of
pages to see if Bloom will cross paths with co-protagonist
Stephen Dedalus, a young man in whom he takes a paternal
interest on June 16. For much lower stakes, it also shows him
becoming aware of one Alec Bannon, a young man who has shown a
romantic interest in his daughter Milly, and here too the book
raises the possibility of a meeting. Bannon probably had a
real-life model, though identifying him has proved difficult.
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Near the end of Telemachus Mulligan tells a young man
at the swimming hole that his brother is "Down in Westmeath.
With the Bannons." The young man says, "I got a card from
Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo
girl he calls her." The reference, it eventually becomes
clear, is to Milly Bloom, who has taken a job in a
photographer's shop in Mullingar, the seat of County
Westmeath. Reading a letter from his daughter in Calypso,
Bloom's antennae tingle when he reads the words, "There
is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his
cousins or something are big swells." He ponders this
information: "Young student.... Then he read the letter again:
twice. / O, well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not?
No, nothing has happened. Of course it might. Wait in any case
till it does. A wild piece of goods. Her slim legs running up
the staircase. Destiny. Ripening now."
Bloom does not know Mulligan and his friends, but he picks up
from Milly's words the sexual implications that they bandied
about in the earlier chapter. Instead of vicarious thrills he
feels parental anxiety. So some tension is created ten
chapters later when Alec Bannon shows up in the hospital
commons room where Bloom is sitting with Mulligan and others.
A mutual acquaintance has "chanced against Alec. Bannon in a
cut bob (which are now in with dance cloaks of Kendal green)
that was new got to town from Mullingar with the stage
where his coz and Mal M’s brother will stay a month yet till
Saint Swithin and asks what in the earth he does there, he
bound home and he to Andrew Horne’s being stayed for to crush
a cup of wine, so he said, but would tell him of a
skittish heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel,
and all this while poured with rain and so both together on to
Horne’s. There Leop. Bloom of
Crawford’s journal sitting snug with a covey of wags."
Oxen of the Sun does not say that anyone in the
hospital room introduces this new arrival to Bloom, or that
Bannon talks about his "skittish heifer" after joining the
company. But near the end of the chapter, amid the wild whirl
of words describing a retreat to a nearby pub, the young men
gossip about Bloom to one another: "Digs up near the Mater.
Buckled he is. Know his dona? Yup, sartin I do. Full of a
dure. See her in her dishybilly. Peels off a credit. Lovey
lovekin. None of your lean kine, not much. Pull down the
blind, love.... Got a prime pair of mincepies, no kid. And her
take me to rests and her anker of rum. Must be seen to be
believed. Your starving eyes and allbeplastered neck you stole
my heart, O gluepot...."
These salacious comments about Molly are followed soon after
by some remarks about Milly: "Les petites femmes. Bold
bad girl from the town of Mullingar. Tell her I was
axing at her.... / No fake, old man Leo. S'elp me,
honest injun. Shiver my timbers if I had.... / Bloo?
Cadges ads. Photo's papli, by all that's gorgeous.
Play low, pardner. Slide. Bonsoir la compagnie."
It is often difficult to grasp what people are saying in the
final pages of this chapter, but the thrust of these sentences
seems clear: the girl Bannon has chatted up in Mullingar is
Leopold Bloom's daughter, and Bannon should probably "Play
low," "Slide" off, say "Bonsoir" to all the company if
he wants to avoid an uncomfortable encounter.
Neither Ellmann nor Bowker has anything to say about
Bannon—nor do Jackson and Costello, John Joyce's
biographers—but Vivien Igoe notes that "Joyce met Mr A. E.
Bannon, when John Stanislaus Joyce was working on the
electoral register in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, in 1900 and
1901. Bannon was a local man who had made a name for himself
through his work as the district councillor for Mullingar.
John Stanislaus Joyce knew Bannon through his work and it is
likely that on his visit to Mullingar with James that he
stayed in his house at Portloman on the shores of Lough Owel. Members of the
Bannon family are buried in the cemetery at Portloman."
These facts cohere with Milly's news that "We are going to
Lough Owel on Monday with a few friends to make a scrap
picnic" and that Bannon's "cousins or something are big
swells." The generational alignments seem off, however. Could
the hormonal young man who is so keen on Milly really have
been modeled on a "local man who had made a name for himself
through his work as the district councillor for Mullingar"?
May Igoe, in other words, possibly have identified the wrong
Bannon? It would be interesting to know if A. E. Bannon had a
son or nephew whom John's son James could have met in
Portloman.
