Buck Mulligan - Inspiration

Inspiration

The character of Buck Mulligan is partly based on Oliver St. John Gogarty, a close companion with whom James Joyce fell out shortly before leaving Ireland. Joyce formed the intention of modeling a character on Gogarty very early in his writing career; an entry on Gogarty in his 1909 Trieste notebook contains a number of phrases that would later be used in Ulysses, and two Stephen Hero-era character sketches feature subjects (called "Goggins" and "Doherty") who closely resemble Mulligan.

Various details of Mulligan's character parallel those of his real-life inspiration. Gogarty was a medical student at the time of his acquaintance with Joyce; he had also studied classics at Trinity, had been to Oxford, was known to have saved men from drowning, and was friendly with George Moore. The authorship of one of Mulligan's songs, "The Ballad of Joking Jesus", can be traced to Gogarty. Mulligan's full name, "Malachi Roland St. John Mulligan", contains allusions to Gogarty; in addition to sharing one of the same middle names, their full names have the same metrical arrangement, and "Roland" recalls Gogarty's first name by its popular association with the phrase "a Roland for an Oliver." A 1907 letter from Joyce to his brother stating that "OG's mother is 'beastly dead'" may also indicate that Gogarty, like Mulligan, used this phrase in reference to Joyce's own mother.

Gogarty also resided for a time in the Sandycove Martello Tower; unlike Mulligan, however, he paid the Tower's yearly rent himself. He had originally inquired after renting the Tower with an eye to sharing it with Joyce, who was in need of a place to live while he worked on Stephen Hero, but the plan for cohabitation fell through after the pair quarreled in August 1904. Joyce, however, did stay at the Tower for six days in September, together with Gogarty and an Oxford friend who became the inspiration for Haines.

Contemporaries of Joyce and Gogarty, on reading Ulysses, differed over the extent to which Buck Mulligan was a fair and accurate portrayal of Oliver Gogarty. Gogarty himself, though he held largely negative views on Joyce's work, once wrote positively of his role in Ulysses: "When 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." Padraic Colum felt that Buck Mulligan, in addition to being an accurate portrait of Gogarty's distinctive speaking-style and mannerisms, was in fact "much more alive than Oliver Gogarty in his later years", while Seán Ó Faoláin disagreed, saying that "Joyce did an immense and 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."