The unfortunate but now-consequently-famous friend of James Joyce who stood as the model for Buck Mulligan is Irish physician and bawdry-poet Oliver St John Gogarty.

Gogarty was much respected by Dublin literary society in later years and the rift between him and Joyce is a fairly unsolvable knot of which man might, in the final analysis, prove to be the greater ego. Particularly interesting in this judgement is Joyce biographer Richard Ellman’s assertion that Gogarty was the man who got Joyce drinking and, as Simon Dedalus might say, “tickled his catastrophe.”