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Read By: JIM NORTON w/ Marcella Riordan
Ulysses is one of the greatest literary works in the English language. In his remarkable tour de force, Joyce catalogues one day – 16 June 1904 – in immense detail as Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin, talking, observing, musing – and always remembering Molly, his passionate, wayward wife. Set in the shadow of Homer’s Odyssey, internal thoughts – Joyce’s famous stream of consciousness – give physical reality extra colour and perspective. This long-awaited unabridged recording of James Joyce’s Ulysses is released to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of ‘Bloomsday’. Regarded by many as the single most important novel of the twentieth century, the abridged recording by Norton and Riordan released in 1994, the first year of Naxos AudioBooks, is a proven bestseller. Now the two return – having recorded most of Joyce’s other work – in a newly recorded unabridged production directed by Joyce expert Roger Marsh.
Run Time: 27h 16m
An interview with Jim Norton:
Jim Norton is a Dubliner through and through. He was born in Dublin, his father had a grocer’s shop on Grafton Street, and he was educated by the Christian Brothers from a young age to the time he started work at 18. Like Stephen Dedalus, he roamed the streets of Dublin and, as a nascent actor, listened to the sounds and voices of the characters around him, the high and low. And it is this enormously rich tapestry of sound that he has mined for the seemingly endless characters in his remarkable recording of the unabridged Ulysses, with Marcella Riordan as Molly, for Naxos AudioBooks.
‘James Joyce said he wrote Ulysses to keep the academic community active for generations,’ smiles Norton. ‘It is for others to intellectualise and decide what it is all about. Of course I studied it and read books about it. But when I came to record it, I had to trust my instincts. The most important thing is the narrative. You have to keep your audience with you as you tell the story. Joyce may be changing literary styles, showing off how he can go from one writer to another. But my job is to tell the story so that people listening are keen to know what happens next. I am fascinated by all those references, but it is no help to me when I am reading it.’
For a natural actor this is what performance is all about, and Jim Norton admits that he has ‘always found acting easy.’ He first made his mark on Dublin as a boy soprano, singing for the radio station RTE from the age of 10. He knew then that performance was his vocation, though the Christian Fathers took a different view. They tried to ensure that he would follow a more conventional path of bank manager or civil servant, and they used the methods of the time to instill a sense of humility amidst all that success – it was an education that Norton will never forget. ‘It was dreadful and hateful. From an early age I learned to defend myself against all kinds of abuse,’ he recalls.
Coming from a working-class family he won a scholarship to senior school, learnt to survive, and continued, with the support of his family, to sing until his voice broke at the age of 17. He was also helped by the supportive fraternity of the actors and singers he worked with. ‘They would say quietly to me that it wasn’t pronounced CenerenTOLa but CenerENtola, that a Shakespearean word was spoken like this, not like that.’
He sang. He played a leading role in a radio soap called The Foley Family. Finding that accents came easily to him, he played a wide range of boys and youths including the title role in a dramatisation of Tom Sawyer – the Mississippian twang not proving a problem. ‘I was like a sponge,’ he recalls. ‘One day I woke up sounding like Paul Robeson and that part of my life was over.’
He learned the piano from Gerard Shanahan, who used to accompany John McCormack. When it was clear that he wouldn’t become a pianist, he switched to singing lessons, learning the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolff. Shanahan told him how McCormack worked. The Irish tenor would stand on the concert stage where he was due to perform that evening, and recite the songs he was to sing. Shanahan would sit in the auditorium and listen. Only when McCormack had finished reciting the words would they turn to the music. Jim never forgot this story, for it emphasized the importance of the words, even for a singer like McCormack.
Jim Norton left school at 18. His other great interest was athletics and he thought about becoming a sports reporter. He worked as a copy runner for the Irish News Agency, but by 19 he was on the RTE radio repertory company, doing 15 parts a week. It was everything, from drama, to the morning story, to a news or sports bulletin, to a drop-in quote in a feature. And always, the experienced actors helped him with scripts, with pronunciation, and recommended works he should read. Brendan Behan wrote radio plays which Norton performed. It was all live – and a hugely stimulating time.
Sometimes I would be in early and not leave until 11pm. I would walk home through the empty, dark streets of Dublin. So that I knew what it was like for Stephen Dedalus!’ He read Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck. He sat and read Catullus at the back of Dun Laoghaire pier. And James Joyce: Ulysses. To Jim, it wasn’t unapproachable or difficult because the voices he read on the page were the voices he met every day as he walked in Dublin.
After six years on the Rep, Jim branched out to theatre and television. He performed in the two famous Dublin theatres, The Abbey Theatre and the Gate Theatre on numerous occasions in classics and new plays. His father, now running the company that owned his old grocer shop, came to see him only rarely – or so Jim thought. Fairly recently, Jim met an old friend of his father’s who told him that in fact his father came to see most of the plays he was in – but he was so worried that something would go wrong he came secretly, with a few friends. Jim never knew.
Jim Norton’s extensive performing career has now taken him around the world, in film, on stage, in radio and voice-overs. For years he divided his time between the West Coast of the US and London. Despite his ability to assume any accent, he has found himself playing Irishmen time and again. He is a well-recognised figure in the streets of Dublin for his characterisation of Bishop Len Brennan in the television sit-com Father Ted.
In the 1990s Jim developed a close working relationship with the young Irish playwright Conor McPherson, who wrote a series of parts for him. For nearly two years Jim appeared in The Weir, in London, on Broadway, and elsewhere, to widespread acclaim. He was in the complete recording of Beckett plays on DVD. After completing the unabridged recording of Ulysses, he went to Australia to make a film.
Having recorded almost all James Joyce’s published work – much of it for Naxos AudioBooks –, Jim regards the unabridged Ulysses as one of the most important events of his career. An actor who prepares carefully whatever the job, he admits that his first impressions almost always find their way into the final performance. ‘I get a feeling of a character when I read a script for the first time, and it tends to stay with me no matter how much work we do in rehearsals.’ This was true of his preparation of Ulysses. ‘I am very intuitive. If I try to analyse the character too much it disappears – it is like trying to pick up a piece of mercury.’ And he knows that when the curtain goes up something special occurs. ‘You just do it. You can prepare but you have to leave room for things that just happen.’
This is true also in a recording studio, when it is just the reader and the microphone. ‘I always imagine someone to whom I am reading. In the case of Ulysses, I was reading for Jez, the engineer. He was very keen and responsive and said he had always intended to read Ulysses but had never done it. So, he was the person I read it to. I wanted to make sure that I took him with me, that he understood everything. At the end of every evening I would ask him whether he had. It was my way of making sure that I was still telling the story.’
Despite the numerous personalities who appear in Ulysses, Jim was never stumped for characterisation. ‘I felt I knew all those people – some who were not very nice. I remembered teachers, people I knew. This was my revenge,’ he smiled.
This new recording of Ulysses unabridged is the second time he has approached the work. The abridged recording of just 5 hours, made nearly a decade ago, was much easier. But a second recording meant that Jim could rethink individuals. ‘Leopold Bloom really benefits from the unabridged version. I have an enormous affection for him – he is such a fully rounded character – Everyman, of course. He has the fallibility, the sexual insecurity, the wish for a full and happy life. He is a thrusting male but sensitive as well – in a way, Joyce was creating the new man here. Doing Ulysses unabridged meant I could get to know him better. Stephen Dedalus, by contrast, is more prissy, spiky, closer to Joyce himself.’
One of the great challenges in reading Ulysses is the constant change of the narrator: the person speaking in the foreground. It required constant vigilance to stay with the shifting sands – who is telling the story, who is watching or being watched. At no point could Jim relax and go on automatic pilot.
Jim Norton has lived with Ulysses for 40 years, returning to his old hard-back copy of the Bodley Head edition time and time again. Having spent so much of his working life in radio, or recording for cassette and CD, it was the completion of a dream to record the unabridged Ulysses for the centenary year of Bloomsday. It brings to full circle his Dublin heritage after so many peripatetic years.
Yet even now he can’t quite draw a double bar-line to signify closure.
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