Griped

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The 1922 text reads, "Bob Cowley's outstretched talons griped the black deepsounding chords." So too does the version of the chapter's second half that Joyce published in The Little Review in September 1919. The fact that he oversaw both productions confers some authority on this spelling, though of course he missed hundreds, even thousands, of clear mistakes in the first edition. Still stronger support comes from the so-called Rosenbach manuscript that Joyce wrote out by hand and sold shortly before the first edition came out. It is much harder to imagine him mis-writing a common word than to imagine a compositor (especially a French one who spoke no English) mis-setting the type. 

Several new editions of Ulysses were published in the 1930s, and these Odyssey Press texts are generally of high quality. But Joyce was too preoccupied with other things at this time (including Finnegans Wake) to devote himself to the work of editing, and even the editor he appointed, Stuart Gilbert, admitted that he was only lightly involved. Probably someone else involved in the work, then, saw fit to change "griped" to "gripped," presumably correcting what seemed to be a type-setting error. As has happened all too often in the annals of editing Ulysses, this effort to correct an error resulted in the introduction of a new one.

The most common intransitive sense of "gripe" today––making petty and nagging complaints––seems utterly inapplicable in the context of the Sirens sentence. But the verb derives from the same roots as "grip," and when used transitively it can have similar meanings. The OED lists senses such as "to make a grasp"; "to grapple with, come to close quarters with"; "to lay hold of, seize, catch, grasp"; and, most pertinently, "to clutch. seize firmly, or grasp tightly with hand, paw, claw, or the like." Such meanings are a little stronger, more savage and predatory, than the usual connotations of "grip." In the context of Father Cowley's piano playing, they convey a sense that he is attacking the keys.

Ben Dollard wants to sing The Croppy Boy in "F sharp major," which is "Six sharps." Quite apart from the challenge of transposing the song from the key in which it was published (A major, according to a source cited by Slote), this is difficult playing, far out of the common run of familiar keys and calling for the pianist to use every black key of the instrument. Thinking on the fly about which notes to strike and reaching far back into the keyboard to play all those high and widely spaced black keys, Cowley looks like a savage raptor, impaling his prey with "outstretched talons."