Okay, people who doubt that it’s definitely James Joyce have brought up the writing of two other authors: Homer and Tennyson.
The problem with it being Homer is that he never wrote anything that you could read that is “something called Ulysses.”
As for Tennyson, while one might prescribe it as a prophylactic against sissyhood, it’s not the kind of thing that would horrify parents to the point where they would consider pulling their kid out of camp.
So, James Joyce it is.
Cerebral, intellectual folks like us SDMB regulars KNOW that any kid reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in hopes of finding salacious sex scenes will be sorely disappointed.
But for a long time, Ulysses WAS censored because it was considered a dirty book. I’m sure Allan Sherman never read Ulysses, but he used it as shorthand for porn because it was so widely (and so WRONGLY) considered smutty.
“We’re gonna go sneak into an R-rated movie! It’s called Barton Fink!”
I’m not getting this particular angle in support of it being James Joyce’s book that is being referenced.
Granting up-front that applying logic to the discussion may be perilous when cleverness and rhyme were perhaps of greater concern to Sherman:
Why would any counselor at a summer camp risk reading a book to young campers that (rightly or wrongly) had a reputation of being “smutty”? Alan Sherman’s song was released in mid-1963. Prevailing attitudes at the time would not have been very forgiving of such an action.
How, exactly, would the head coach’s reading from Joyce’s Ulysses achieve his stated goal of toughening up his charges and ensuring there were no sissies in the ranks? Several here have acknowledged that Tennyson’s poem would be much more likely to succeed in this endeavor than would Joyce’s often incomprehensible novel.
The youngster’s mention of what the head coach was doing was but one of a long list of things that had happened to him at camp. The great majority of them fall into the category of whining that a homesick child might do, and a parent might ignore with a benign smile (e.g., rain, poison ivy, fear of getting eaten by a bear) or write off as exaggerations (malaria had been completely eradicated in the U.S. a decade earlier). From the child’s perspective, enduring readings from a long poem with ancient references would certainly engender more of that whining, no less so than readings from a possibly “smutty” novel.
The kid wants to go home (at least until the last verse, when he completely changes his tune and asks his parents to “kindly disregard this letter”). The song doesn’t set up any necessity for his “horrified” parents to “pull him out of camp” due to something shocking or salacious. Until the rain stops, he’s just not having any fun.
The point of Ulysses was that the kid wanted his parents to disapprove of the camp experience. That’s the whole point of the song before the end. In1963 the parents would have remembered Ulysses as a banned book from their childhood. The sissies reference was about homosexuality not toughening up the campers. And as others have mentioned, few people would recognize the reference as being anything else except the book by James Joyce.
It’s a parody song. What a real-life camp counselor might do is irrelevant to the issue. As you say below, many of the kid’s complaints are obviously exaggerations or just made up.
I was 12 years old when Sherman’s song came out. I knew all the words, and loved it. Even I knew Joyce’s Ulysses was a dirty book. (I managed to snag a copy a few years later and was sorely disappointed.) Neither I nor anyone else I knew would have had the slightest idea about Tennyson’s poem. Given that the source is a novelty song, and the continuing notoriety of Joyce’s work, there’s really no doubt the reference is to Joyce.
Odysseus=Ulysses , and sometimes Homers work is translated as such.
I disagree. The point of the song is the kid wants his parents to take him home on the basis of him not having any fun and being away from the comforts of home, not because he wants them to “disapprove of the camp experience.”
Nothing that he recounts that has any realistic basis (i.e., the rain, the poison ivy) with the possible exception of ptomaine poisoning (which is also likely an exaggeration) would cause any reasonable parent to “disapprove of the camp experience.” He’s just being a whiny kid.
Can you explain this connection further? How would reading from Joyce’s book ensure that the campers were not or would not become gay?
Few pre-adolescent boys in 1963 would have even grasped the meaning of the term “sissies” when applied to homosexuality. All would have been very familiar with it in the sense of a weak, non-athletic boy.
I grant you that the Joyce book was probably more top-of-mind. However, it’s possible that Tennyson’s poem might not have been a completely unknown quantity. We forget, since the concept is miles away these days, that much fine literature was routinely taught in high school English classes in a bygone era.
The coach would have been at minimum in his 30s, meaning he came through high school in the early 50s or even before that, at which time it would not have been inconceivable he might have encountered Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”
Again, I’ll concede that logic might not have a big hand in the lyrics Sherman wrote. I’m only saying despite the evidence that may support Joyce’s novel being what he had in mind, there are also factors that weigh against this. I’m just having a little fun exploring some of them.
Not that I have ever seen. The name of the work in English is almost universally given as The Odyssey. Please give a cite for a version of Homer’s work in English that was titled Ulysses and might have been known to a camp counselor in the 1960s.
I was 11 years old when the song came out. Neither I nor anyone else I knew would have had the slightest idea about James Joyce’s Ulysses. And I don’t think I led a particularly sheltered life…I was a very average suburban kid. Your pre-adolescent experience must have been quite different from mine.
As I intimated in my previous post, I would bet the odds of my encountering the Tennyson poem in the course of the next few years would be higher than those of my encountering Joyce’s book.
No, most of it isn’t complaints about not having fun. The only complaints of this nature are that “it’s raining,” and maybe “the counselors hate the waiters” (but this one is mainly to set up the rhyme for “alligators.”) Most of his complaints are about being put in life-threatening danger (getting lost in the woods, bears, alligators, ptomaine, malaria), not being bored. Making the parents think his moral fiber is being threatened is much more probable than a complaint that the coach is being boring.
I would characterize it more as “grasping at straws.” 
Weak justification.
As I observe above, I was under 10, and knew about Joyce’s Ulysses by then.
Sherman was a pal of Hugh Hefner, which was heavily involved in fighting censorship in those days. Joyce’s book would certainly be on Sherman’s mind when he wrote the song. It’s much more likely than a Tennyson poem being there. Sherman wasn’t Horace Rumpole.
Evidently. I grew up in the Bronx. (Sherman attended schools in New York, Chicago, LA, and Miami.) Knowing that Joyce’s Ulysses was considered a dirty book was not exactly obscure knowledge even among kids.
On the other hand, as I said I encountered the Joyce book itself in my early teens. We covered some Tennyson poems in high school but I don’t recall one of them being Ulysses.
That’s only important if you completely discount an unreliable narrator. Personally I think a more satisfying interpretation is that the coach decided to toughen them up on a rainy day by reading to them from the Odyssey thinking it would be the literary equivalent of the sword and sandal movies of the era. While we know that the title is The Odyssey I don’t have any difficulty believing that the kid would relate the event to his parents as “Something called Ulysses.”
If you prefer the mental image of the coach reading to them about Stephen Dedalus watching Buck shave, then I won’t argue with your interpretation. However I think both are quite reasonable.
How does one say “grasping at straws” in Greek?
Of course, the counselor doesn’t actually read from Ulysses, and the kid doesn’t know what Ulysses actually says. All he knows (like I did) that it is supposed to be a dirty book. If he read the actual book he would be disappointed (as I was). The actual content of the book is irrelevant.
We come from very different cultural milieux. I would be willing to bet that if you took a survey of American kids who were 11 or 12 in 1963, taking care to be inclusive of geography, race, economic strata, etc., you would find a lot more who would give my answer than would give yours.
Allen Sherman’s songs were not aimed at children. It was adult satire. Most kids didn’t know about the book at that age, or any poems by that name, some might recognize the character from the Iliad or the first name of a president, that’s about it. The song was aimed at adults in the 60s, many of the references were from 40s and 50s popular culture. No matter what Allen Sherman intended the reference to be the vast majority of those who heard it would be thinking of James Joyce’ Ulysses, or not understand it at all.
And as I said, the likelihood of any of these complaints succeeding in convincing his parents that he is in “life-threatening danger” is exceedingly small. After all, if one kid gets “ptomaine poisoning after dinner,” wouldn’t many if not all of them get it? Far more likely Leonard just had a tummy ache.
The parents of a kid who received the letter Sherman is composing would simply laugh it off as exaggeration (uh, what camp in the northeastern portion of the U.S. would have alligators in its lakes?) and write back “We’ll see you in two weeks.”
In my view, the only thing the James Joyce theory has going for it is the book’s notoriety at the time. Nothing in the song itself supports this theory. Since the kid refers to “something called Ulysses,” it’s apparent he is unaware of that notoriety, and thus unaware that a reading of it would send up any red flags with his parents. This is merely another in a long line of his “complaints,” and has no more force than any of the others.
In the meantime, I’m still looking for an (admittedly logical) explanation of how reading from Joyce’s Ulysses would serve the head coach’s stated purpose…whatever one may interpret “wants no sissies” to mean. And one for how any adult of the time would get it into his head to read it to pre-teen kids in the first place without realizing that the loss of his job would surely ensue.
Maybe Sherman was indeed prepared to wave away these many inconsistencies, all for the sake of one clever rhyme…or maybe there’s another explanation that’s better supported by the evidence.
I don’t disagree with any of this. But the discussion of whether kids knew or didn’t know the Joyce book was not really relevant to the song, but rather just a side note in response to Colibri’s comment that “Knowing that Joyce’s Ulysses was considered a dirty book was not exactly obscure knowledge even among kids.”
I come down on your side, that “Most kids didn’t know about the book at that age.” This includes the one who was the writer of the letter. Meanwhile, I think a substantial number of adults in 1963 would at least recognize the name Ulysses as representing a strong, adventurous character…whether from the Homer original or the Tennyson poem…and thus see a tie-in with the “toughening up” angle.
I’m looking for a little internal logic within the song’s lyrics, and I find none that supports the Joyce interpretation. So you have to be willing to wave all of it away in favor of the simple notoriety angle. I’m just saying “Maybe…maybe not.”
The Kirk Douglas movie. 
Seriously, though, the narrator of the song is trying to convince his parents to bring him home.
He mentions things like poison ivy and ptomaine, which will frighten them about his physical safety.
He mentions Ulysses, which will frighten them about his moral safety.
Homer or Tennyson would not do it. Joyce would.