Bloom, born in 1866, is 38 years old in the novel. Joyce
began writing Ulysses at age 32 and published it on
his 40th birthday. By this time in his life he had
metamorphosed considerably from the brilliant student and
rebellious poet imaged in Stephen Dedalus. He was supporting a
common-law wife and two children with an assortment of
low-paying jobs, struggling desperately to publish his works
in the face of brutal censorship forces, and beginning to
suffer the serious health problems that would plague him for
the rest of his life. His "epic of the body," as he once
called Ulysses, reflects his maturation from a young
man of great intellectual promise into a middle-aged man
defined by major life experiences.
Countless details tie Bloom to the man who conceived him. The
name on his birth certificate, "Leopold Paula Bloom"
(Ithaca) jokingly reproduces the mistake that caused
the future novelist to be officially registered as "James
Augusta Joyce" (Ellmann, 21). It also suggests an androgynous
interest in female experience that Joyce shared. Bloom's
unprepossessing physicality, his lack of male bluster and
dominance, his pacifism, his social marginality, his markedly
anal sexuality, his voyeurism, his passion for female
undergarments, his less than brilliant employment history, his
religious apostasy, all encourage readers to identify him with
the author.
So too do Joyce's frequent indications that Bloom would love
to be a writer. The story he
reads in Calypso makes him think of writing
something similar that might earn him a bit of money, and his
experience in the cabman's shelter in Eumaeus renews
this aspiration to "pen something out of the common
groove." Ithaca recalls snatches of verse
and acrostics that he composed as a young man. Lenehan says in
Wandering Rocks, "There's a touch of the
artist about old Bloom." In context, all of these
implications of equivalence between the uneducated and
clownish Bloom and the sophisticated Joyce seem equivocal,
wry, mocking. But there is more to it than that. Bloom thinks
constantly, sensitively, and creatively about his world, in
patterns that make his interior monologue, if not the equal of
Stephen's self-consciously brilliant thoughts, at least a
worthy counterpart to them. Ellmann remarks justly that
Bloom's "monologue is a continuous poetry, full of phrases of
extraordinary intensity" (362).
But Bloom encompasses many other features that were not part
of Joyce's life, beginning with the fact that he is descended
from Hungarian Jews. Ellmann argues that Joyce's chief model
in this regard was his close friend in Trieste, the writer
named Ettore Schmitz but known by the pen name Italo Svevo,
"whose grandfather came from Hungary, and who wore the mustache that Joyce gave
to Bloom, and like Bloom had a wife and daughter.... Schmitz
was in many ways quite different from Bloom; but he had
married a Gentile, he had changed his name (though only for
literary purposes), he knew something of Jewish customs, and
he shared Bloom's amiably ironic view of life. Joyce could not
abide the inner organs of animals and fowl, while Schmitz,
like Bloom, loved them. Some of these are small similarities,
but Joyce had a spider's eye" (374).
Born in 1861, five years before Bloom and 21 years before
Joyce, Schmitz was a prosperous businessman who met Joyce
through the Berlitz school in Trieste. The young, impoverished
teacher and his older, richer student became fast friends who
took long walks through the city streets together, as Bloom
and Stephen do at the end of June 16. Their families became
close (Schmitz's wife Livia was one inspiration for the Wake's
Anna Livia Plurabelle), as Bloom hopes may happen with
Stephen. And Schmitz gave Joyce abundant
information about Jewish traditions and the Jews living in
Trieste. One of these men, Leopoldo Popper, a Jew of Bohemian
descent, employed Joyce for several years as an English tutor
for his daughter Amalia. Popper ran a company called Popper
and Blum, so one may suppose that Joyce took from him both a
given name and a surname for his protagonist. Ellmann
speculates that Joyce also was smitten with Amalia and modeled
Molly Bloom's dark Mediterranean good looks and her
"seductiveness" on her (342, 376).
Another purported model for Bloom was the otherwise
little-known Dubliner Alfred H. Hunter. Hunter reportedly
played the Good Samaritan
to Joyce in 1904, when the writer accosted an attractive young
woman in St. Stephen's Green, not realizing that she had a
boyfriend nearby. Abandoned by his friend Vincent Cosgrave,
Joyce ended up, as he observed in a notebook, with a "black
eye, sprained wrist, sprained ankle, cut chin, cut hand."
Hunter, whom Joyce had met briefly once or twice, is said to
have come upon the scene, helped the writer up, and taken him
home. Ellmann says that Hunter was "rumored to be Jewish and
to have an unfaithful wife" (162). In fact he was not Jewish,
as Louis Hyman notes in The Jews of Ireland (169),
but Ellmann got his information from Stanislaus Joyce, so
James may very well have supposed him to be so. And Bloom, for
that matter, is only ambiguously
Jewish himself.
Within a few years Joyce was thinking of putting Hunter in a
Dubliners story to be called "Ulysses," which would
follow the man as he wandered
about Dublin. When Ulysses evolved into a novel
Joyce asked Stanislaus and his Aunt Josephine for more
details about Hunter (Ellmann, 375). Several of these made it
into the book, as Vivien Igoe observes in The Real People
of Joyce's Ulysses. Hunter was born in the
same year as Bloom. His wife was named Marion (though they
married considerably later than the Blooms, in 1899), and the
couple lived at a succession of different addresses. She was
the daughter of a professor of music who served as grand
organist of the Dublin Freemasons. Hunter worked as
an advertising canvasser for the Freeman's
Journal from 1902 onwards––another intriguing
link to Bloom.
Inspired perhaps by Hunter's "corporal work of mercy" (Cyclops,
Ithaca), Joyce conceived Bloom as a man of kindness,
compassion, and familial warmth. To some extent, he associated
these ethical dispositions with Jews in general. Frank Budgen
recorded that Joyce said to him of Jews, "Look at them. They
are better husbands than we are, better fathers and better
sons," and Ellmann observes that he quietly valued two
characteristics of Jews: "their chosen isolation, and the
close family ties which were perhaps the result of it" (373).
Bloom is not only a devoted husband and father. He extends his
kindness to a young man whom he has briefly met only twice. He
attends the funeral of an acquaintance with whom he was not
close, and generously contributes money to his impoverished
family. He visits a hospital to inquire about a distant
acquaintance who is in her third day of labor. He gives food
to gulls and to a stray dog. He thinks often of the condition
of being cast out and in need.
Recently, yet another Jewish model for Bloom has been
proposed: "Altman the Saltman," a nickname applied
collectively to Albert Liebes Lascar Altman, his brother
Mendal, Mendal's son Emanuel, and perhaps others in the
family. The Altmans were prosperous Dublin merchants known for
their salt business near the family home at 11 Usher's Island.
In his Ulysses, published in the 1980s, Hugh Kenner
recorded a Dublin rumor that he thought might explain the
outlandish assertion in Cyclops that Bloom gave
"the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith
to put in his paper." Kenner noted that the Dublin writer
Anthony Cronin told him that "Griffith was persistently
rumoured to have a Jewish adviser-ghostwriter" (133). In the
last few years it has been suggested that this nationalist Jew
was Albert Altman. Neil R. Davison, Vincent Altman O'Connor,
and Yvonne Altman O'Connor have argued for this view in
"'Altman the Saltman’ and Joyce’s Dublin: New Research on
Irish-Jewish influences in Ulysses," Dublin
James Joyce Journal 6/7 (2013-2014): 44-72.
[2020, 2023: Neil Davison has continued to write about the
similarities linking Albert Altman and Leopold Bloom. "'Ivy
Day': Dublin Municipal Politics and Joyce's Race-Society
Colonial Irish Jew," Journal of Modern Literature 42.4
(2019): 20-38, explores Altman's complex nationalist political
convictions in the context of the Dubliners story,
suggesting that its engagement with this capitalist but
left-leaning Irish Jew laid the groundwork for the
characterization of Bloom in Ulysses. A book-length
study: An Irish-Jewish Politician, Joyce’s Dublin, and Ulysses:
The Life and Times of Albert L. Altman (University
Press of Florida, 2022), explores both the biographical
material and Joyce's fiction more comprehensively, arguing
that Altman's doubly alienated position as a Jew in Ireland
and as an Irishman in the British empire gave Joyce rich
inspiration for his conception of Bloom as an outsider.]
If the Altman hypothesis becomes widely accepted, it seems
likely to force a substantial rethinking of Bloom's relation
to the cause of Irish independence. Unusually for Dublin Jews,
the Altman brothers were passionate nationalists who supported
Parnell, Home Rule, and the Land League. They were
peripherally associated with the Invincibles who carried out
the Phoenix Park murders and also with the escape of the
Fenian James Stephens. But many other, more personal details
link Bloom to "Altman the Saltman."
Although Albert (born in the early 1850s) and Mendal (b.
1860) were older, wealthier, and more politically important
than Bloom, the circumstances of their lives coincide in
seemingly countless ways. Like Bloom's father in the 1860s,
the Altman family emigrated to Ireland (from Prussian Poland
rather than Hungary) in the 1850s. Albert Altman was Jewish
but was expelled from Mary's Abbey synagogue in Dublin for
marrying a Catholic, Susan O'Reilly from Cork, and after the
death of Susan he married a Protestant woman, Victoria Olive
Corbett, in Belfast—echoing Bloom's Jewish-Catholic-Protestant
allegiances. His father Moritz Altman (né Shraga Moshe ben
Aharon) died after ingesting poison, like Rudolph Bloom (né
Rudolf Virag). His son Albert Denis (called Bertie, somewhat
like Bloom's Rudy) died shortly after birth. And according to
family lore his daughter Mary (known variously as Mim, Mimi,
Maimie, or Maimy—her name resembles Milly) spurned the
advances of James Joyce.
The connections continue. Mimi was a singer. Mendal Altman
had daughters named Cissy and Edy, like the girls on the beach
in Nausicaa. His son Emanuel worked as a health
inspector in Dublin's Cattle Market where his great adversary
was the cattle dealer Joe Cuffe, Bloom's erstwhile employer.
Albert Altman was a freethinker influenced by the atheist
writer Charles Bradlaugh. He was a teetotaler who espoused the
cause of Temperance, but he drank liturgical wine. He suffered
the antisemitic slurs of sundry Dubliners as Bloom does, and
he stood up to them to defend his people and their cultural
traditions. Neither assimilationist nor exclusionary, he
wished to be known as an Irishman who happened to be Jewish.
Like Bloom, he advocated for various kinds of civic
improvement: modernization of city fire brigades,
establishment of a municipal manure-treatment facility,
construction of the Main Drainage
sewer lines, and bringing the tramway system owned by William Martin Murphy
under municipal control. Albert was elected as a Councillor for the Usher's
Quay ward in 1901 and he was succeeded by Mendal in 1907. He
died in a blaze of publicity in 1903 shortly after exposing a
scandal when he claimed that leading Councillors were dilatory
in paying their rates to the disadvantage of the less
well-off. (Many thanks to Vincent Altman O'Connor for getting
me interested in these resemblances.)
At least four other men figured in Joyce's imagination of
Bloom, none of them Jewish to my knowledge. One was his close
friend John Francis Byrne (the Cranly
of the novels). On a September evening in 1909 the two men had
supper at Byrne's house, walked around Dublin, and returned.
While walking "They stopped at a penny scale and weighed
themselves, then went back to 7
Eccles Street, where Byrne discovered he had forgotten
his key. Undismayed, he agilely let himself down to the front
area and entered the house by the unlocked side door; then he
went round to the front and admitted his companion. In Ulysses
Bloom, returning to the same address at about the same hour
with Stephen Dedalus, finds himself in a similar predicament
and solves it in the same way. Bloom's height, five feet nine
and a half inches, is Byrne's height, and his weight, eleven
stone and four pounds, was the very weight which Byrne had
registered on the scale" (Ellmann, 290).
Several men's faces entered Joyce's imagination as he wrote.
In her book Shakespeare and Company (1960), Sylvia
Beach recalls Joyce having told her that Bloom resembled
George Holbrook Jackson, a British writer born in 1874 whom
Joyce probably met in London. At Joyce's request she wrote to
Jackson requesting that he send her a photograph of himself,
but when she showed Joyce the photo of Jackson smoking a pipe,
he remarked that it was "not a good likeness. He doesn't look
as much like Bloom in it" (97). In Nausicaa Gerty
MacDowell provides another visual image: she says that, except
for the mustache, Bloom looks just like John Martin-Harvey, the
dreamily handsome stage and screen idol. And in Penelope Molly
recalls that, when he was courting her, she thought Bloom
looked like the dashing Lord
Byron, "though he was too beautiful for a man." It seems
clear that, although Bloom is frequently the object of
derision or contempt in Ulysses, Joyce did not intend
for him to lack sex appeal.
A brief note such as this one, keyed to a few (well, quite a
few) actual people who may have contributed to Joyce's
protagonist, can only begin to delineate his protean
qualities. Many more discoveries await the attentive reader of
the novel. Indeed, it has been said more than once that by
reading Ulysses we come to know Bloom in more depth
and detail than we know our closest friends and family
members.
