Frank McNally on the Bloomsday fitness progamme (and why Virginia Woolf will never be as popular as Joyce)
An underappreciated aspect of James Joyce's literary legacy - one that might surprise the man himself - is the extent to which he encouraged healthy living, including dietary restraint and aerobic exercise. Well, he encouraged it one day a year, at least.
After filing the Bloomsday 'colour' piece for this newspaper on Monday, I checked the health app on my iPhone to find it had clocked up an impressive 21,792 steps (15.4km) since morning: well above the 10,000 benchmark for the Fitbit generation.
That didn't include a Dublin Bike trip from Dorset Street - scene of my unsuccessful attempts to find a mutton kidney - out to Glasnevin Cemetery and back.
So I wondered in passing if Joyce scholars had ever worked out how many steps Leopold Bloom walked on 16th June 1904. But is the Pope a Catholic? Yes, of course they had.
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The first person I asked, Trinity College English Professor Sam Slote, had retraced Bloom's trajectory ('some suppositions involved') and counted 22,203 steps. Which was gratifyingly close to my total, although I hadn't tried to follow the whole route.
Further investigation led me to a study, conducted from Kentucky in 2012, on 'the physical fitness of Leopold Bloom'.
This was in general unremarkable (the fitness, not the study). As readers of Ulysses will know, Bloom had a bit of a belly, was called 'lardface' in Barney Kiernan's pub, and at 38 – although young by today's standards – was a man of advanced middle aged in 1904, when male life expectancy was a mere 47.8 years.
On the other hand, the study's author Jeff McClung calculated that given his reported height of 5ft 9½ (176.5cm) and weight of 11 stone 4 (71.8kg), Bloom had a Body Mass Index of 23.0, still exemplary in 2025.
By McClung's count, the hero of Ulysses walked 8.99 miles (14.48 km) on 16th June 1904, slightly less than I did last Monday; although he went to Sandymount Strand, unlike me, and spent a lot longer wandering around the red-light district.
Perhaps the standout finding, however, was that Bloom's calorific intake for the day came to a mere 1200 kcal. Or 1400, 'if he ate the second Bunbury cake that he bought to feed the birds'. Considering the 3,009 kcals he is estimated to have burned, that still left a deficit of at least 1609kcals. Sure the poor man was starving.
***
A literary commemoration you heard a lot less about this week, I'm guessing, was Dalloway Day, or 'Dallowday' as some have suggested calling it. Named for Mrs Dalloway, from the 1925 book of that title by Virginia Woolf, it even had a centenary going for it this year.
Yet despite describing the events of a single day in June, more than a century ago, and using the same stream-of-consciousness style Joyce pioneered, it doesn't appear to have lent itself to the sort of fancy dress re-enactment that makes Bloomsday a niche tourist attraction at home and a cultural export worldwide.
Woolf had very mixed feelings about Joyce's masterpiece. She liked the start of it, up to and including the 'Hades' episode (set in Glasnevin). But overall, she looked down her perfectly formed high-society nose at both the author and his work:
'An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.'
Still, in Mrs Dalloway, she paid a kind of homage to Ulysses. And writing style aside, even her life mirrored Joyce's. She was born a week before he was in 1882 and died (albeit a self-inflicted death) only two months after him in 1941.
In an article for the Guardian back in 2016, 'It's Time We Celebrated Dallowday', one of her more devoted fans pondered why Woolf's book couldn't be commemorated in the same way Joyce's is in Dublin and around the world.
One reason may be that it lacks the epic quality of Ulysses. Or perhaps, conversely, it doesn't have enough fine detail, including a specific date. It's set on a Wednesday in mid-June, while literary detectives say the year had to be in 1923.
Based on the calendar for that year, this reduces possibilities to the 13th or 20th, and historic weather reports make the 13th more likely. Even so, this year's main centenary commemoration in London was held - indoors, in a library theatre - on the 18th.
Maybe Woolf was too well bred to bother with such vulgar detail. Whatever the reason, she kept the timing vague: 'For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin…It was June.
'The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh, and all the rest of it…'
Yes, Royal Ascot was happening in her book too. But unlike Bloom, Mrs Dalloway didn't accidentally tip the 20-1 winner of the Gold Cup. For that and other shortcomings, she will never be truly loved.
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