The New York James Joyce Society

Abstract

As a married graduate teaching assistant with a child and working on a masters degree in English, my principal income in 1958 was only about twenty percent of what it had been in my former calling, the used car business. What psychic income there was in the automobile business died with my father the year after I got my B.A., and when I returned to graduate school, I needed even more urgently to continue working part time as a singer and producer of radio commercials until I could land a full-time teaching job. At Temple University I took Joyce with Mabel Worthington, who at the time was working on an index for her co-authored book with Matthew Hodgart, Song in the Works of James Joyce. Since I had access to a studio in the Temple University radio station on Tuesday nights (making singing commercials for the Clements agency), and to professional Philadelphia actors who could do Irish accents, I offered to make a demonstration tape of a chapter of Ulysses with the actual music referred to in the text as background for Bloom’s thoughts. Mabel agreed to accept it in lieu of a term paper and I was on the way to a career glossing Joyce’s musical references. When I completed the M.A. at Temple I got a job at the State University of New York, College of Fredonia, and a scholarship to complete my Ph.D. at Buffalo, a major Joyce manuscript repository, where I was privileged to work with Tom Connolly. Fredonia’s specialty in the New York State system was music, and many of its undergraduates were card-carrying members of either the musicians union or the American Guild of Variety Artists. The campus radio station was right next door to my office, and after I smoozed around for a month or so with the student staff and faculty director, I thought