“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bronze medal round his neck” is not exactly how James Joyce’s Ulysses begins. Though stately, plump Buck Mulligan does come from the stairhead in that first sentence, what he is bearing is a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. No, Buck Mulligan is no Olympic bronze medalist in Joyce’s novel. In fact, as of the day the novel takes place, June 16, 1904, there had only been two modern Olympics. The games of the third modern Olympiad would start in St. Louis, Missouri, about a month after the fictional Leopold Bloom walked the streets of Dublin on that day in June. Yet two years after Ulysses was published in 1922, Oliver St. John Gogarty, the Irish poet on whom Joyce’s Buck Mulligan is based, did win a bronze medal at the 1924 Parisian Olympic Games.
The “usurper” of the first chapter of Ulysses is not secretly an Olympic-level swimmer — even if he does go for a dip in that initial chapter — but Gogarty was without doubt a decent athlete. In his younger years he was a cyclist and swimmer, and he later played professional football in Dublin. However, his medal was not received for any physical feat of athleticism. Oliver St. John Gogarty, the real Buck Mulligan, was honored instead for his poetry, receiving his bronze medal in “mixed literature.” Surprised? An Olympic medal for literature?
Yes, between 1912 and 1948, art competitions were included in the Olympic Games. Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, founder and father of the modern Olympics, intended these artistic competitions to be a part of the games since their inception in the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until 1912 that they were finally included. The idea was that artists, like the athletes, would compete, and they would do so by creating works of art which would use sport as their subject.
Sport has been a subject of art since before the ancient Olympics, where artistic expression played a major role. Sculptors made statues of the athletes, such as the famous piece by Myron titled Diskobolos (or Discus Thrower). Poets were often commissioned to write epinicians in honor of Olympic victors, to memorialize them and their accomplishments. Simonides, for example, wrote an epinician on Aeginetan wrestler Crius which Aristophanes makes reference to in his extant play Clouds.
Though the Olympics ended in 394 AD when emperor Theodosius I suppressed them in an effort to impose Christianity upon the Roman Empire, the arts’ interest in sport has obviously continued throughout the ages. Whether it’s bullfighting in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or the baseball players and spectators that make up Norman Rockwell’s The Dugout, the subject of sport allows entrance into many of the eternal themes because the sacrifice and the preparation, the competition and the determination, the victories and the defeats, form a microcosm of human experience.
There were five art categories for which medals were awarded from 1912 to 1948: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. Some of these were further divided into sub-categories and given multiple medals.
For the 1936 Olympics, there was even a proposal to add an additional art competition, and give out medals in a film category, but the proposal was rejected. After the 1936 Games, World War II broke out, and thus the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were cancelled. The art competitions were featured in one final Olympics, the first post-war games of 1948 in London. By the time of the 1952 Olympics, the inclusion of the art competitions was opposed for various reasons. Instead, the host city agreed to hold an art festival and exhibition to run concurrently with the games. This tradition has continued for the last 60 years.
There have been a few justifications given for the decision to do away with the artistic competitions, but the most oft-repeated answers are that there was no governing body to oversee the competitions, and that while Olympians were supposed to be amateurs, artists were professionals. The first is easy to fix: create a governing body. And the second argument would be moot today since professionals now participate in the Olympics. (If Kobe Bryant isn’t a professional athlete, then Salman Rushdie is not a professional writer.)
In the mid-to-late 20th century, the stable ideal of the Olympian as “amateur” began to erode. The prominence of full-time, state-sponsored “amateur” athletes in Eastern Bloc countries complicated — if not entirely erased — the line between amateur and professional athletes. Thus, after the 1988 games, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) let the individual federations that oversee each sport decide what determines eligibility for their specific competition. This is why professionals don’t compete in boxing and wrestling, yet they do in many other sports (i.e. the aforementioned Kobe Bryant in basketball).
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An undeniable polymath —sometime amateur, sometime professional — Oliver St. John Gogarty seemed to have a finger in every pie. James F. Carens, in his book on Gogarty, Surpassing Wit, compiles a substantial list of the man’s accomplishments:
In his youth, journalist, medical student, classical scholar, cyclist, and swimmer; then, Sinn Feiner, associate of Free State leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins; nose and throat specialist and surgeon in Dublin for twenty years or more and in London, too, towards the end of his practice; archer, horseman, and aviator; a Senator for more than a decade and the most outspoken and flamboyant critic of de Valera, during the thirties, when sheer drabness seemed to have settled permanently on Ireland; at the age of sixty-one, an expatriate who became a lecturer, a journalist once more, a New Yorker, and an American citizen: Oliver Gogarty crammed a dozen lives into one.
An extensive list, yet one that leaves out perhaps his most important preoccupation: his poetry (poetry which not only won the Olympic medal, but also prompted William Butler Yeats to include seventeen of his poems in Yeats’ poetry anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, more than many of the major modernist poets).
Gogarty certainly was a man of many interests, and as Carens points out, “Gogarty’s nature was as multifarious as his interests, and as paradoxical as much of what he wrote.” Furthering this chameleon-like depiction of Gogarty, the Irish writer Lord Dunsany once wrote, “To sit at dinner with Oliver Gogarty is to be entertained by the many personalities which he will assume in the course of the evening.”
So who was this chameleon? This odd Olympian? Was he anything like the Buck Mulligan of Joyce’s fiction?
He was born in Dublin on August 17, 1878, to physician Henry Gogarty and his wife Margaret. He was the first of four children. Before the age of ten, his father died from a burst appendix. Subsequently, he was sent to a number of boarding schools, ending at Clongowes Wood College (the school in which much of Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is set). The original sketches of Portrait, known as Stephen Hero, included a different character possibly modeled after Gogarty.
In fact, another Gogarty biographer J. B. Lyons claims a whole slew of characters in Joyce’s oeuvre had their origin in the bronze medalist:
Gogarty was also the model for Doherty in Stephen Hero and Robert Hand in Exiles. He lent something, too, to the creation of a number of characters in Dubliners: the self-satisfied Ignatius Gallagher, the ne’er-do-well Jimmy Doyle in ‘After the Race,’ and Lenehan in ‘Two Gallants.’
Of course, the Gogarty that most people “know” is the one that is caricatured by Joyce in the character of Buck Mulligan. It was while Joyce was writing Stephen Hero that Gogarty took residence in the Martello Tower, and Joyce stayed there for a time (a situation which forms the basis for the first scene in Ulysses). As in the novel, tensions were high, and the living situation didn’t last long, ending in a quarrel over money, hurt feelings, and some late night gunplay.
The two had met at the National Library in 1903, first conversing about Yeats. They grew interested in one another, but always with an eye toward getting the upper hand — each quite obviously considering himself the greater of the two. Joyce, who had to borrow money from Gogarty, felt it a great injustice that a “genius” should have to borrow from a “hack,” and as Joyce’s biographer Ellmann explained, “From the start the two young men felt as much rivalry as friendship.” After their falling out at Martello Tower, they rarely spoke.
But before Ulysses was published, knowing that they had quarreled at Martello Tower, and perhaps fearing Joyce would portray him negatively, Gogarty attempted reconciliation, though Joyce wanted no part of it. Finally, Gogarty apparently told him that he didn’t mind if Joyce portrayed him in a negative light so long as the book was true literature of great quality. Joyce’s response: “Do you really mean that?”
At first it seems he may have. Upon the publication of Ulysses, Gogarty’s response to his alter ego wasn’t overwhelmingly negative. He laughed the caricature off for the most part, and throughout his life he oscillated between this good humor and annoyance with regards to the situation. As with many things one learns when researching Gogarty, his reaction to Joyce’s caricature of him was multiplicitous. At one point he even joked that when Joyce “paid me the only kind of compliment he ever paid, and that is to mention a person in his writings, he described me shaving on the top of the tower. In fact, I am the only character in all his works who washes, shaves, and swims.”
Yet there was no denying that he was bitter towards his old friend. And understandably so, for though Buck Mulligan is an enjoyable wit and an engaging presence in the book, he isn’t exactly the kind of character that seems likable were he to live in the real world. Not that Stephen Dedalus, the Ulysses character modeled after Joyce himself, is entirely likable either. Neither of them compare to the lovable Leopold Bloom.
There’s an interesting story told in the Lyons biography that highlights Gogarty’s bitterness: Late in life in a tavern in NYC, Gogarty slapped down a literary quarterly on the bar, shouting “That’s what we’ve come to!” One of the articles about Joyce and his “knowledge of midwifery” clearly annoyed Gogarty. He yelled, “The fellow once spent an evening with me in Holles Street Hospital and now some character in Canada is probably getting a Ph.D. for analysing his profound knowledge of midwifery.”
Many of their contemporaries had differing opinions on whether Buck Mulligan was a fair and accurate portrayal of Gogarty. Writer James Stephens said of Joyce’s characterization, “Joyce made him out a terrible snob. Of course he is, but a brilliant mind.” Another Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin claimed, “Joyce did him an immense cruel injustice in Ulysses by presenting him to posterity as something approaching the nature of an insensitive lout whose only function in life was to offset the exquisite sensitivity and delicacy of Stephen Dedalus.”
Ben Lucien Burman, in a piece on Gogarty titled Portrait of a Friend from Ireland, spoke of the reputation that preceded Gogarty (mostly due to his association with Mulligan) and how wrong it was: “I had heard he was a professional Irishman and a frightful snob. While he had somehow gained the impression that I was a professional, hundred-per-cent American. Never were two judgments more wrong.”
Burman claimed that Gogarty was, “like most great men, a paradox.” Because he was such a paradox, such an complex character, Carens hit upon something when he wrote that “Gogarty seems to elude us even as we gain a sense of his manysidedness.” And sadly the further he recedes into the past, and becomes eternally associated with Buck Mulligan, the more the real Gogarty will forever elude us.
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Oliver St. John Gogarty is just one of a number of interesting art Olympians whom it’d be better not to forget. Though arguably no major artist received a medal, there are a handful of other fascinating figures in the arts that became decorated Olympians in these artistic competitions: John Russell Pope, the American architect best known for designing D.C. monuments such as the National Archives, the Jefferson Memorial, and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art; Jack Butler Yeats, the Irish artist brother of poet William Butler Yeats; Lauro de Bosis, the Italian poet to whom Thornton Wilder dedicated his novel Ides of March; Mahonri Young, the American sculptor who created numerous monuments in Salt Lake City, yet is probably best known as the grandson of Brigham Young; David Wallin, a respected Swedish artist; Josef Suk, an acclaimed Czech composer and pupil of Dvořák; Percy Crosby, the American cartoonist best known for the Skippy comic strip, which was a major influence on Peanuts creator Charles Schulz; Arno Breker, a German sculptor who did extensive work for the Nazis; Jean René Gauguin, the French/Danish sculptor son of artist Paul Gauguin; Laura Knight, an influential English impressionist painter; Paul Landowski, the French sculptor best known for the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janiero; and Werner Egk, an acclaimed German composer now featured on a postage stamp in that country.
Interestingly enough, there were also two individuals who managed to win medals in both athletic and artistic competitions, and they were American marksman and sculptor Walter W. Winans, and Hungarian swimmer and architect Alfréd Hajós.
Who else might have been an Olympian had these art competitions continued? Could Don DeLillo’s End Zone have won him a medal? What about Jean-Phillipe Toussaint’s Zidane’s Melancholy? Or David Markson’s “A Day for Addie Joss”? Maybe Andy Warhol’s Muhammed Ali? What about Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull if they created a film category? Or maybe, as with the Olympic art competitions of yesteryear, no major artist would have entered competition and won? But then, perhaps, some unknown artist may have been discovered through medalling? Someone with as interesting a story as Oliver St. John Gogarty? Who knows?
If I had the ears of the IOC, I’d say: Bring the art competitions back!
Why not? Right? We could use a few new stately, plump bronze medalists.
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