Tower of Literary Power

The James Joyce Museum (left) is an addition to the 1804 Martello Tower at Sandycove, located above the strand about 14km (8.6 miles) southeast of the Dublin city center.

Among my personal ambitions for this journey was to learn more about the Irish author James Joyce and to visit Dublin locations associated with him. It wouldn’t be my first time doing that. Kathleen and I came to Dublin for a few days in early January 1987 so she could research her Irish ancestry in order to obtain an Irish passport. I don’t exactly understand the arrangement whereby Ireland and the U.S. allow for dual citizenship between them, but Kathleen succeeded and eventually obtained Irish citizenship and the passport (her two brothers and our daughter likewise now enjoy that benefit). While visiting the repository of Irish vital statistics with her, I did a bit of research myself and came away with a photocopy of the small strip of paper that was the birth certificate of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Feb . 2, 1882).

During that visit 35 years ago, a Dublin cousin of Kathleen’s drove us to two sites linked to Joyce: one of the many places his family lived (their finances, which started out strong, grew weaker over time and they moved often), as well as the Martello Tower in Sandycove, south of the city along the shore of Dublin Bay. The tower is one of the best-known Joycean attractions — a large round stone fortification built in 1804 as one in a string of more than two dozen such towers that formed a defensive line stretching along the bay and to its north and south (the British were concerned that Napoleon might set up a base in eastern Ireland from which to attack them across the Irish Sea). The Martello Tower at Sandycove, No. 11, was also the place where Joyce not only lived for a brief spell, but where he sets the opening scenes of his best-known work, the novel “Ulysses.” Seeing the tower in the dark that evening 35 years ago, I didn’t know its full history or what to make of it. I don’t remember being impressed.

Recently, however, in preparation for this longer visit to Dublin, I learned that a museum of Joyce artifacts, letters, and the like is attached to the tower (has been since the 1960s), and it welcomes visitors, asking only for donations. So on the second day of our visit to Ireland, September 21, we took the DART train south to a Dublin suburb, walked less than a mile along a beautiful seashore and this time got to see the tower from the inside.

In the 1804 design of the Martello towers, a large cannon supported by a bulky wooden scaffold could rotate 360 degrees on the inner & outer rails visible here. Its range was about a mile. The coast of Dublin Bay was dotted with a couple dozen of the Martello Towers and effectively threatened any vessel coming within a mile of the shore. We were told that no Dublin Martello cannon was ever fired against an enemy. ¶ Here’s one of the reasons I think this structure is worth knowing about: The opening you see in the wall is the stairhead referred to in the first sentence of Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” which reads: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Another reason for wanting to learn more about this tower is what occurred inside it 100 years after it was erected. (See below.)

The museum, for those who want to know about Joyce, is excellent if small. It owns many priceless items, including a guitar he once played, his steamer trunk, a tie he gifted to the playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, letters written by and to him, drawings of him, and many other artifacts, including Joyce’s death mask (photo below). The tower is fascinating, particularly the round interior room where Joyce’s friend, Oliver St. John Gogarty, invited him to live in late summer 1904. The attached photos tell more of the Joyce relationship with the tower, including what is alleged to have happened there one night not long after Joyce moved in.

The place beneath the striped robe, where the brown valise lies, is where Joyce spent the first of his six nights in the tower in September 1904, at the invitation of a friend and fellow writer, Oliver St. John Gogarty, who had secured a lease and turned this room into an apartment. When a third man, Samuel Chenevix Trench, joined them, Joyce gave up his spot to Trench and slept where the bed in the photo is presently situated. In the caption for the next photo I recount what allegedly happened a few nights later. (Incidentally, none of the furnishings & objects in the “living quarters” of the tower are original but rather period pieces suggestive of past usage.
As a writer of fiction, Joyce was noted for his hyper-realism and for writing real people and real locations into his narratives. In “Ulysses,” his friend Gogarty becomes Buck Mulligan, Trench is Haines, and Joyce himself is Stephen Daedalus. The incident that’s alleged to have happened on the sixth night of Joyce’s stay at the No. 11 Martello tower (it is not fully told in the book) is that Trench awoke from a nightmare in which he was menaced by a black panther. He reached for his handgun and started firing. Gogarty grabbed the gun and fired at “all the tinware of the tower,” as Gogarty, in a later memoir, would call the pots & pans on the shelf above Joyce’s bed. Joyce was startled, left the tower, and several weeks later left Ireland with his paramour, Nora Barnacle. Joyce and Nora would never return intending to live together in Ireland and instead would take up residence first in Trieste, then in other cities, Zurich and Paris primarily, where he wrote his stories and novels.
A tie that Joyce owned and later gave as a gift to Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright and novelist who was a admirer of Joyce, to the point that he became the elder writer’s secretary. Beckett gave the tie to the Joyce Museum at Sandycove.
ONE OF TWO PLASTER CASTS TAKEN FROM THE FACE OF THE BODY OF JAMES JOYCE, SHORTLY AFTER HIS DEATH IN ZÜRICH ON THE 13TH OF JANUARY 1941 … (Caption by James Joyce Tower & Museum, Sandycove.) I took all the photos in this post at the museum.

Launch on Landing

This is a new blog. I’m starting it to keep my friends & family up to date on three months of travels through Ireland, the U.K., France and Czechia (the Czech Republic). I say “up to date,” but I’m posting this on October 12, already more than three weeks into our journey. So, sort of like space-time, my timeline curves, due to the pull of gravitational laziness.

And technological under-performance. Regarding this software, the WordPress system of creating & maintaining blogs or websites or both, I’m a full-on newbie. Therefore I also face an enormous learning curve, which bends toward irregularity as I grope along trying to catch up. My initial hope for these posts, for example, imagined they would appear as we carried on and things occurred, more or less chronological with the events they recorded. That’s not going to happen. The fact that I actually managed a first posting is providential. As of this writing we are less than 40 hours from leaving Dublin for Liverpool, where I expect our experiences to spike in excitement. It would be nice if I was conversant with the rudiments of WordPress by then. Which means that events of the past three weeks, if worthy of a narrative, will appear when they appear.

All right, let’s get started.

We left Anchorage on September 18. After 26 hours of travel, door to door, we settled into our downtown Dublin hotel room, exhausted and worried over how long it would take before we could feel we had something to look forward to instead of dragging our asses for a week or more. But the next morning (Sept. 20), after a night of inadequate sleep, we went down to the hotel dining room and were jolted deliriously awake by a magnificent buffet breakfast. The abundance and range of food choices and its quality amounted to a fanfare announcing that we were on vacation and off to a good start. (For those who are curious, we were staying at Jurys Inn Dublin Parnell Street, part of a chain and a good and not too expensive hotel very well located.)

Soon we were walking south through sunny Dublin streets. We crossed the Liffey River, wound our way past a corner of the Trinity College campus, past the statue of Molly Malone and her disappearing neckline, and ended up at a pub and entertainment venue called the International Bar. At every street crossing we explicitly reminded ourselves to look right for oncoming left-side-of-the-road traffic. It’s one thing to sit inside a car moving around a comparatively quiescent town like Anchorage and another when, only two days later, unsteady because of a 9-timezone lag, you’re walking through crowds and crossing busy streets in a heavily motorized city like Dublin. We would later return to Dublin after exploring other parts of Ireland and Belfast, yet still we lack any real confidence on these streets. The other day I thought it was clear to cross a sharply curving single-lane roadway at an expansive intersection, but halfway across I had to scamper like a terrorized animal because of a huge onrushing bus whose driver apparently wanted to kill me.

Jack, a Dublin theatre artist and amateur historian, leads a version of the “1916 Rebellion” historical tour on September 20, 2022. Dublin Castle behind him was the scene of some of the violence of the 1916 Easter Rising.

The International Bar is a comedy club. Kathleen and I and some 15 others were there to meet an actor and amateur historian who calls himself Jack. He would lead our group to major sites associated with the 1916 Rebellion, as the tour is named. The locations — Dublin Castle, the General Post Office, and others — are places where Irish revolutionaries instigated a violent uprising against their United Kingdom overlords (they chose Easter Week to set off their bombs and engage street battles with British soldiers and Irish constabularies due to the Easter “rising” of Jesus in the Christian iconography). No need here to recount the history of the next half-dozen years of violence and civil war that gave rise to a new nation, the Republic of Ireland (which notoriously did not include six counties of Ulster province — Northern Ireland). That history is available in many places online. However, this saga of the Irish independence movement dogged our travels throughout the island, including our visit to Belfast in Northern Island. It’s inescapable. Only a few hours ago, for instance, we toured Kilmainham Gaol (Jail) a few miles to the southwest of the city center, which is a site bitterly linked with the rebellion. So I hope to bring forward still more bits about our experience related to the events that a century ago gave Ireland its independence after 700 years of British rule.

Historical and other walking tours like The 1916 Rebellion have become a habit of Kathleen’s and mine. They’re an easy way to acquire a reasonably full picture of how specific locations fit into the larger narrative of important events. We’ve taken tours of sites linked to the birth of the Nazi Party in Munich, the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, World War 2 events in Prague and Paris, the Battle of Gettysburg, and key Spanish Civil War sites in Barcelona and Madrid. The tour leaders are generally knowledgeable authors, students or, like Jack in Dublin, artists with a passion for history.

So on that first day we quickly stepped into the role of inquisitive tourists getting our lick of Irish history, which was delivered exceptionally well. Jack is a slight, middle-aged Irishman, serious and talented. Occasionally he sang an Irish folk ballad to enhance the lesson. It became obvious he doesn’t think well of the English. When the recent death of the queen came up, he shrugged without sympathy.

Jack outside the G.P.O. on O’Connell Street, near the end of the tour. (We never got his surname.)