Happy Bloomsday! Over the past few years, to mark this special day, I’ve had a tradition of reflecting on Joyce’s powerful but little-discussed influence on the poetry of the New York School, as you can see in these posts about how Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery felt about Joyce’s magnum opus.
This year, I wanted to pay tribute to one of the most overt and important examples of Joyce’s special place in the New York School canon: the work of the late Bernadette Mayer (who passed away in November 2022), and especially her most explicitly Joycean project, Midwinter Day, in which she, like Joyce in Ulysses, undertakes a radical experiment in turning a single, ordinary day into an epic, book-length work of literature.
Mayer frequently acknowledged that Joyce, and Ulysses in particular, played a formative role in her development as a writer and artist. In a 2010 interview with Adam Fitzgerald, Mayer discussed her early adventures in self-education, which led her to tackle a series of great, long works, including Joyce’s novel, which she explains she liked best of all:
~~~~~
“BM: I took a year off to read all the long books. The Cantos. The Waste Land. Paradise Lost. Ulysses. Better than school, I’ll just read all these books. I’m sure I was inspired by Bill [Berkson] to read the books by their size. Milton kind of left me cold. I felt like reading him was like an achievement that you wanted to get to the end.
AF: “No man ever wished it longer.”
BM: Right!
AF: What about Joyce?
BM: Well, of all of those books, I really enjoyed Ulysses the most. To read it just like that—I don’t think many other people have done, where you just read it from beginning to end—is pretty astonishing. You’re all of a sudden living in a different world. So I like that book. I remember I had gotten in trouble in Catholic school for reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And they said, ‘If you didn’t have such good marks, we’d throw you out.'”
~~~~~
Not surprisingly, critics have often noted Joyce’s important role as a source for Mayer’s entire body of work — from her fascination with the mundane and daily, her exuberant formal experimentation, her devotion to creating extremely long, inclusive works (like Memory, Studying Hunger, and Midwinter Day) that seek to capture as much of the world and experience as possible, to her interest in tracking the movement of thought and consciousness.
In a letter Mayer wrote to Bill Berkson in 1977, about 2 years before she wrote Midwinter Day, she acknowledged (with some self-deprecation) her long-standing ambition to try her hand at doing her own take on Joyce’s quotidian epic: “I’m always getting ready to do my version of Ulysses. Now that is really presumption.”
Not long after this letter, Mayer seemed ready to take her shot. On December 22, 1978, she undertook an unusual experiment that she had been planning for weeks: she wrote an entire book-length poem during and about the events and thoughts she experienced on that particular day. The poem recounts an ordinary day in the life of a young woman, her husband, and two young children in the small town of Lenox, Massachusetts, where Mayer and the poet Lewis Warsh had recently moved from New York City. As the poet Alice Notley has noted, Midwinter Day is an “epic poem about a daily routine.”
But despite the parallels, Midwinter Day doesn’t merely pay homage to Joyce — it also comments on, critiques, and subverts its model. As Maggie Nelson has pointed out, Midwinter Day both echoes and “tampers with the modernist obsession with charting the path of human consciousness over the time span of a single day — an obsession epitomized not only by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but also by Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce chose June 16th for Bloomsday; Mayer chose December 22 as her parameter — the shortest day of the year, and nearly the polar opposite of Joyce’s date on the Zodiac.” As Nelson argues, the poem “ends up staging quite a struggle with its (mostly male) literary forerunners.”
Mayer’s sharp ambivalence towards her male predecessors is threaded throughout the book, but it’s particularly evident near the start when she writes “Freud Pound & Joyce / Are fine-feathered youth’s fairweather friends / I take that back, better not to mention them / Or it’s the end.”
Even while she warns herself not to mention these domineering male forbears (right after mentioning them), Mayer does encourage us to see the connection to Joyce from the very start: as ypu can see in the images above, Midwinter Day’s first word (complete with an oversized capital S) directly alludes to the famous beginning of Ulysses. Where Joyce wrote “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” Mayer writes “Stately you came to town in my opening dream”).
Although the “you” addressed in this opening passage may be Mayer’s husband Lewis (as is the case throughout the book), it could also be an invocation of the muse, a nod to the conventions of the epic as a genre — in other words, the “you” who came to town could be Ulysses itself. This long poem might start with a nod to an inspiring but daunting source of inspiration that has arrived, in stately fashion, just in time for this “opening” section (indeed, “lately you’ve been showing up a lot” she acknowledges, just as she sets out on her own long-planned journey through a capacious day).
As I wrote in my discussion of Mayer in my book Attention Equals Life: with this typographical and verbal echo, Mayer “alerts us right away that she will be putting her own subversive stamp on this mini-genre [of works that encompass a single day]. If those landmark modernist works were radical attempts to shift the scale of the novel to the daily life of ‘ordinary’ people, Midwinter Day not only extends that project but also takes it in a notably different direction. First, the events of those novels seem momentous in contrast to the much more mundane ordinariness of Mayer’s day, in which nothing conventionally ‘dramatic’ happens at all (by far the biggest moment of conflict is a toddler’s tantrum in the town’s public library—a far cry from, say, the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway [or the wild events of the Nighttown section of Ulysses]). Second, Mayer pointedly replaces the concerns of the Joycean everyday (largely male and urban) with the thoughts and actions of a woman caring for little children in a small town.”
“Furthermore, unlike those examples, Mayer’s poem is not a fictional representation of a single ‘day in the life.’ It was actually written on a single day, by a woman who was also a primary caregiver to two young children. In that sense, Midwinter Day ups the ante on its predecessors and their claims about the everyday: it becomes a performance piece and feat of endurance. It is also a feminist refusal to abide by strict divisions of labor and the engrained belief that the domestic and the intellectual are incompatible.” (For more, see the rest of my chapter in Attention Equals Life).
I think it’s safe to say that one of the most remarkable and increasingly influential poems of the later 20th century grew out of the author’s desire to do her own “version of Ulysses.” In so doing, Mayer also created one of the more distinctive, pointed, and revelatory of the seemingly infinite number of responses to Joyce’s towering monument of modernist fiction.
Several years ago, the poet Becca Klaver began staging a series of annual events and group marathon readings on December 22 to mark the day Midwinter Day was written on and about — and as Klaver notes, she too did so with Ulysses, and its yearly festival, in mind as a model: she refers to these readings as a “global anniversary party I instigated so that Midwinter Day might become a literary holiday like Bloomsday.”
It seems only fitting that this new Mayer tradition has already begun to take off — for many of us, Midwinter Day Day now stands alongside June 16th, Bloomsday, the date that marks one of its own crucial, inexhaustible predecessors.