NYSL TRAVELS
James Joyce's Dublin

"I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book," James Joyce told his friend the artist Frank Budgen as he was laboring on his epic novel Ulysses in Zurich.

In voluntary exile from his native Ireland, Joyce wrote with Thom's Directory, a Dublin city reference book at his elbow and often sought in letters to relatives and friends precise details of various locations. Dublin also provided the backbone for Joyce's other major works: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegans Wake. "...the personality of the city is present in an almost human way," notes the Trinity College scholar David Norris, "lightly buried under the texture of the prose."

In recent years I have discovered Dublin by literally walking in the steps of James Joyce and his characters and in so doing have enjoyed a dual love affair. I always carry a copy of Ulysses and one of the literary maps or guides available at Dublin's proliferating shrines to the writer whose books were proscribed during his lifetime.

Ulysses takes place on the single day and evening of June 16, 1904 which commemorates the author's first walk about town with Nora Barnacle who would become his life companion. Over the last 20 years the date has been celebrated as Bloomsday in honor of Leopold Bloom, the hero of the novel. Bloom, a Jewish advertising salesman, wanders about the city, sometimes crossing paths with Stephen Dedalus, a young writer who is Joyce's alter ego.

The Dublin inhabited by Joyce and his Everyman was an Edwardian backwater of the British Empire, a city of gaslight, horsedrawn carriages, outdoor plumbing and many unpaved streets. The magnificent Georgian houses and squares built in the 18th century, Dublin's golden age, for the Anglo-Irish landowners attending the short-lived Irish Parliament had been lapsing into slums. Grinding poverty confronted faded elegance. Revolution was more than a decade in the future. The Irish Literary Revival led by William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory was unfolding in theaters and meeting rooms but the prickly 22-year-old Joyce did not participate in the movement.

This Dublin, recalls the actress Fionnula Flanagan, was "frozen in amber like a fly until World War II." Then real estate developers, unrestrained by civic pride or preservation instincts, demolished many of the architectural gems. About 20 years ago, dedicated urbanists like David Norris, professor of English studies at Trinity College Dublin and a member of the Irish Senate, began to reverse the destructive tide. The centenary of Joyce's birth in 1982 further stimulated efforts at recognizing the writer's work and preserving his environment.

As a result Dublin today is a rewarding destination for Joycean pilgrims whether scholars or novitiates. Despite the lacunae caused by those earlier wrecking balls Joyce's Hibernian Metropolis survives in the midst of a vibrant Irish capital he would scarcely recognize. Ireland in the 1990's has become one of the most flourishing economies in Europe. With political and cultural straitjackets removed, Dublin is the magnet for young writers, film makers, artists and even food connoisseurs.

The very best time to explore Dublin through James Joyce's life and fiction is on a Bloomsday or the week leading up to it, an enlarged celebration called Bloomstime. The capricious Irish weather is inclined to present a sunny face in late spring and apart from scheduled literary events, the streets are filled with actors and mimes giving impromptu performances.

Still, any season is conducive to discovering James Joyce on his own turf. Just remember to take an umbrella and puddleproof footwear.

Dublin is a pedestrian's city, welcoming to the inquisitive saunterer. Haste has not yet seeped into the Irish consciousness nor have Dubliners speeded up to the pace of New York or London. Robert Nicholson, curator of the James Joyce Museum, reckons that Leopold Bloom covered 18 miles of city streets in as many hours, about half on foot, the rest by tram and horse-drawn carriage.

Bloom did not follow a straight course in his meanderings. Moreover, Nicholson reminds us, the third major character, Molly Bloom, spends practically the entire time in her bed. I am therefore proposing a series of walks, loosely but not exclusively based on chapters in Ulysses. There are references to Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait as well because numerous characters appear in more than one book and their hapless lives are played out in the heart of Dublin and some of its outlying districts.

These excursions are by no means comprehensive and their design is idiosyncratic since it is based on my own literary infatuations. Not everyone will want to see the back wall of the building in which Nora Barnacle worked as a chambermaid or choose to eschew a search for Nighttown and Bella Cohen's vanished brothel.

In the course of a day, the literary tourist like the fictional folk in Joyce's other books will repeatedly encounter the River Liffey. His "dear dirty Dublin" is one of those cities whose aspect is determined by a river--and a dear dirty river it is, too. The Liffey rises in the Wicklow mountains to the south, descends to bisect the city and them empties into the Irish Sea. Joyce made the Liffey a character in Finnegans Wake, his last and most challenging novel. Anna Livia Plurabelle, the matriarchal figure of the Wake, is at times transposed into the Liffey. (Livia is the Latin name for Liffey.)

O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die
when you hear. [FW 196.1]

Sources are identified as follows: Dubliners (D), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (PA), Ulysses (U), Finnegans Wake (FW).

EXCURSION 1:
Telemachus, Nestor, Nausicaa, Lotuseaters

At the Westland Row station for DART, Dublin's above-ground train system, head in the southerly direction of Bray for a 20-minute ride to Sandycove. Leaving the station take the nearest side street and proceed toward the water ("the snot-green sea" of Dublin Bay.) Turn right and walk along the coast road toward the round gray fortification. The Martello Tower was built in 1804 by the British as a safeguard against a feared Napoleonic invasion that never materialized.

In the summer of 1904, Oliver St. John Gogarty, a young medical student and poet rented the tower which had just been demilitarized by the British army and invited James Joyce to stay there with him. During the brief visit the friendship ruptured. Joyce repaid Gogarty by casting him as the insensitive character of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.

The entrance to the James Joyce Museum is tucked behind a white-walled residence of stark modern design by Michael Scott, a noted Dublin architect. The ground floor of the museum is given to a bookstore, a gift shop and exhibits of memorabilia. All are worth scrutiny but best climb straight to the roof of the tower where on a Bloomsday Joyceans will be perched on the parapets reading aloud.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

-Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

--Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

After walking around the parapet and gazing out to sea in recollection of Stephen Dedalus, climb down the spiral staircase to the Round Room, the principal living area and the setting for the breakfast scene. A ceramic black panther stands guard in front of the hearth, a reminder of the nightmare suffered by the English guest Haines (and his original Samuel Chenevix Trench) which prompted the gun blasts that provoked Stephen (and James Joyce) into leaving the tower.

Now we can peruse the exhibits on the first floor. They range from a pandybat such as the one administered to Stephen at Clongowes Wood College in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to numerous manuscripts, photographs and letters exchanged between James and Nora Joyce and their friends. An essential purchase in the bookstore is Robert Nicholson's The Ulysses Guide: Tours Through Joyce's Dublin.

Leaving the Tower and bearing left, repeat after Buck Mulligan the ballad of joking jesus. This should take us to the Forty-Foot perched at the edge of the cliff. Now as in Joyce's time hardy members of the Sandycove Bathers Association plunge into the scrotumtightening sea [U4/78] in weather foul or fair. On Bloomsday, in the interest of fidelity to the text, Joyceans follow Buck Mulligan and take the leap in the buff.

In the novel Stephen parts company with Mulligan and Haines and proceeds to his teaching job at a school in Dalkey, a distance of about one mile. Nicholson conjectures that he walked along Sandycove Avenue East to Breffni Road and its continuation on Ulverton Road to the village of Dalkey, celebrated in the works of several Irish writers, in particular the playwright Hugh Leonard.

At the corner of Dalkey Avenue and Old Quarry is "Summerfield", an estate once occupied by the Clifton School. There Joyce instructed the sons of wealthy Protestant families for a brief period in 1904 and used its obnoxious headmaster as a model for Mr. Deasy.

--Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews...do you know why? [Mr. Deasy asked Stephen]
--Because she never let them in, Mr. Deasy said solemnly.
A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. [U30/437]

Walk along Dalkey Avenue, turning left into Cunningham Road until the Dalkey Railway Station. Take the train in the northbound direction City-Howth until the Landsdowne Road station. In June 1904 Joyce was living in a rented room at 60 Shelbourne Road.

Turn right from the station and proceed via Newbridge Avenue toward the Sandymount Strand beach. In Chapter 13 Nausicaa Leopold Bloom observed Gerty MacDowell at twilight seated on the rocks. En route, we will pass the Church of St. Mary Star of the Sea. Its Benediction service furnishes the background parody for Bloom's and Gerty's silent flirtation.

Then they sang the second verse of the Tantum Ergo and Canon O'Hanlon got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and he told Father Conroy that one of the candles was going to set fire to the flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right and she could see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and she swung her leg more in and out. [U296/552]

As the priest restores the Blessed Sacrament to the tabernacle and the choir sings "Laudate Dominum omnes gentes" fireworks from a bazaar nearby illuminate the sky behind the church causing Gerty to reveal her underwear and Bloom to satisfy his passion.

And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dew stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft! [U300/736]

Earlier in the day Stephen Dedalus had walked by the very same spot meditating (Chapter 3 Proteus) and back on Newbridge Avenue Leopold Bloom had joined the mourners bound for Paddy Dignam's funeral (Chapter 6 Hades.)

I suggest we return to the train station and then to the center of the city. Get off at the Westland Row station where we started. At the foot of Westland Row, Sweny's the chemist at 1 Lincoln Place still dispenses the fragrant lemon soap Bloom bought for Molly in the Lotuseaters episode.

Mr. Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax. --I'll take this one, he said. That makes three and a penny. [U69/512]

Lemon soap is the Joycean's emblematic souvenir. Expect to pay an Irish pound or more.

EXCURSION 2:
Calypso, Penelope, Ithaca, Wandering Rocks

Let us go straightaway to the James Joyce Centre at 35 North Great George's Street to pick up literature and guidance, particularly the map So this is Dyoublong?/ The City of Dublin in the Writings of James Joyce. The Centre is the hub of Bloomsday events and of other literary activities the year round. Ken Monaghan, son of Joyce's sister May, discourses with brutal frankness on the family's tragic history and leads a tour of the neighborhood.

The rose-brown brick mansion with its door colored in robin's egg blue stands in the middle of a block of Georgian houses developed in the late 1700's for Protestant landowners when they came to town to attend the Irish Parliament. In 1800 the Act of Union legislated in Westminster abolished that body; the aristocrats gave up their urban residences and during the 19th century the elegant quarters began to decay.

In its time many notables lived in the houses along the street. The plaque at Number 38 announces that Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, provost of Trinity College and tutor of Oscar Wilde, was one such resident. Mahaffy disapproved of Joyce, a student at University College, the Catholic institution on St. Stephen's Green and cited him as proof that "it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigenes of this island__for the corner-boys who spit in the Liffey."

Twenty years ago, David Norris bought a house across the street and was instrumental in efforts to retrieve the block. Norris found a link to Ulysses that led to the founding of the Centre, thereby saving Number 35 from demolition. In 1904, one Dennis MaGinnis had operated a dancing school on the ground floor under the Italianized name of Professor Denis J. Maginni. Joyce turned him into one of the transient characters in his novel.

Framing the entrance to the tearoom at the back of the Centre is the door of 7 Eccles Street, holiest of Ulysses icons. Joyce gave this nearby address of his loyal friend John Francis Byrne to the Blooms in the novel. There the reader first meets Leopold in Chapter 4 Calypso when he prepares the "mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." [U 45/1]

Upstairs in her bedroom Molly Bloom has her adulterous interlude with Blazes Boylan and in a 30-page reverie concludes the book with an affirming "..and yes I said yes I will Yes." [U643/1608]

At the head of North Great George's Street is Belvedere College on Great Denmark Street. Joyce attended the Jesuit school from the ages of 11 to 16 after his father wheedled a scholarship for him from Father John Conmee, the headmaster. The priest was rewarded with roles in Portrait and Ulysses. Chapters 2 to 4 of Portrait take place at this 1786 Adam-style building which, like the Joyce Centre, boasts interior plasterwork by the noted stuccadore Michael Stapleton. From the street one can glimpse the chapel in which Stephen Dedalus listens to a terrifying sermon on hell. Until 1960 students at Belvedere were discouraged from reading the work of its most famous alumnus.

The Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses begins here.

The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to three.

Rather than follow his journey through Dublin I prefer to linger in this neighborhood which has a wealth of identification with Joyce's writing.

Proceed right on Great Denmark Street for one block and turn left into Upper Gardiner Street to St.Francis Xavier Church. The real-life Father Conmee served as its superior. In Portrait, Stephen struggles to decide whether he has a vocation.

He was passing at that moment before the Jesuit house in Gardiner Street and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order. [PA Chapter 4]

In the Dubliners story Grace, the businessmen's retreat__ "washing the pot" on a Thursday evening-- is held in this church.

Take the first left into Dorset Street. Eccles Street is the second street at the right. The Mater Private Hospital occupies the site of Number 7. On the left side of Dorset is Hardwicke Place and St. George's Church. This Protestant house of worship serves as a marker in several chapters of Ulysses __as Bloom sets out for the butcher, visits Bella Cohen's brothel in Tyrone Street and, in the penultimate chapter, when he and Stephen part after midnight at the house in Eccles Street.

"The belfry of St. George's Church sent out constant peals" on a summer Sunday morning in the Dubliners story The Boarding House (at 29 Hardwicke Street,) stiffening Mrs. Mooney's resolve to shame Mr. Doran into marrying her daughter.

Hardwicke Street dead ends at Frederick Street. Turn left one block until Parnell Square (Rutland Square in Ulysses time as Paddy Dignam's funeral procession wends its way to Glasnevin Cemetery.) The Writers Museum at the north end of the square merits a serious visit. A center of the Irish literary tradition, it includes a bookshop, an antiquarian book search service and a pleasant cafeteria.

Oliver St. John Gogarty's home is at Number 5 Parnell Square across the street from the Rotunda Hospital, a respected medical facility since 1745 but more noteworthy in Joyce's writing for its concert hall. The Gate Theatre on Cavendish Row, also part of the Rotunda complex, maintains its legendary reputation for classical and avant-garde productions.

At the base of the square the Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue of Charles Stewart Parnell, heralds the start of O'Connell Street, the great wide boulevard of Dublin's north side. In Joyce's time it was Sackville Street. Parnell, the patriot who led the Home Rule Movement in the 1880's and was toppled by a love affair, is a defining figure in Joyce's political consciousness. He reappears constantly in Joyce's writing, most pointedly in the Christmas dinner scene in the first chapter of Portrait and in the Dubliners story Ivy Day in the Committee Room.

At the Gresham Hotel at the top of O'Connell Street Joyce set the epiphanic scene in the Dubliners story The Dead. Gabriel and Gretta Conroy spend the night at the Gresham after his aunts' party. In their room the young husband learns of his wife's earlier love. Gabriel stands at the window as the story concludes.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Turning from the sublime to the tacky, Joyce would surely have been appalled by the statue purporting to represent his heroine Anna Livia in a pool of water in the middle of O'Connell Street. Dubliners who are much given to nicknaming their properties refer to the monument as "the floozy in the Jacuzzi."

EXCURSION 3:
Aeolus, Lestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis,
Wandering Rocks, Oxen of the Sun.

Let us catch up with Leopold Bloom at noon IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS in front of the General Post Office on O'Connell (Sackville) Street. He is returning from Paddy Dignam's funeral, an excursion we will take later on. In Bloom's time, a column in the middle of the street commemorated the British victory at Trafalgar in 1805 and served as one of the city's important transportation hubs.

*Before Nelson's Pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey...begins the Aeolus chapter. Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.[U 96/1]

(Later in the chapter, under the heading DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN Stephen Dedalus will recount "The Parable of the Plums" about two elderly women climbing the pillar's spiral staircase to get the best views of Dublin.)

Admiral Lord Nelson, "the onehandled adulterer" and his base were destroyed in a mysterious act of sabotage in 1966, and the trams have long since been replaced by buses. But the General Post Office, functioning with notable efficiency, remains a sacred landmark in Irish history. On Easter Monday in 1916 when Joyce was living in Zurich working on Ulysses, nationalist insurgents occupied the building for a bloody week of rebellion. Lines from the Proclamation of Independence read by the poet Patrick Pearse are posted near the main door. As a college student Joyce had briefly studied the Irish language with Pearse whom the British would execute for his part in the Rising.

Bloom heads for Prince's Street on the south side of the GPO and enters the offices of the Freeman's Journal to place an advertisement for the tea merchant Alexander Keyes. In the adjacent offices of the Evening Telegraph, Stephen Dedalus tries to persuade the editor Myles Crawford to publish a letter about bovine foot and mouth disease by the schoolmaster Garrett Deasy. The building fell victim to the destruction visited on the area in 1916 but we can still recall the wealth of Homeric themes and symbols--and for this former journalist the ambiance of an old-fashioned newspaper office-- with which Joyce endowed the chapter.

The characters in Aeolus leave the newspaper by its exit on Middle Abbey Street. No visit to literary Dublin is complete without attending a performance at the Abbey Theatre, founded by Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats in Lower Abbey Street on the other side of O'Connell. But that is an evening's pleasure and at this point we will follow Leopold Bloom into O'Connell Street heading toward the bridge over the Liffey. We are in the Lestrygonians episode at 1:10 P.M.

Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red jububes white.
A sombre Y.M.C.A. man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of Graham Lemon's, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr. Bloom.[U 124/1]

The sign "the Confectioner's Hall" still hangs over the store which housed Lemon's sweetshop. Along this stretch of the boulevard a few postboxes of the British imperial era survive with the royal seal implanted on the red ground.

The hugecloaked Liberator's form__ the monument to Daniel O'Connell, the father of Catholic emancipation in 1829 __ which Bloom had passed earlier in the morning in the Dignam funeral procession punctuates the end of the boulevard. Bloom looks to the right along Bachelor's Walk, a Liffeyside quay. He spots Stephen's sister Dilly Dedalus outside Dillon's auction house and surmises she has been trying to sell family possessions to keep the household afloat. "Good Lord, that poor child's dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It's after they feel it." [U 124/41] In the next chapter Wandering Rocks she will corner her ne'er-do-well father Simon Dedalus and extract a shilling from him. The scenes evoke the cruel reality of the Joyce family's descent into destitution after their father squandered his inheritance.

Crossing the O'Connell Bridge Bloom looks down at the traffic on the muddy Liffey. Barges from the Guinness Brewery, still a potent presence in the city, and gulls "flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quaywalls." He looks ahead to the Ballast Office at the corner of Aston Quay and its famous clock set to 25 minutes behind Greenwich time which was Irish time before 1914. The building has been reconstructed and its clock, set ahead and moved to where it is no longer visible from this spot.

We are on the south bank of the city, on Westmoreland Street, one of its more bustling crossroads.

Hot mockturtle vapor and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured out of Harrison's. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr. Bloom's gullet. [U 129/232]

In front of the restaurant, which is still in operation, Bloom chats with Mrs. Josie Breen. Further ahead on the other side of the street he remarks on the imposing curved facade of the Bank of Ireland.

Before the huge high door of the Irish house of Parliament a flock of pigeons flew. Their little frolic after meals. Who will we do it on? I pick the fellow in black.

Two hundred years ago in the Georgian era the building housed the Irish Parliament. Its former chambers are open to the public during banking hours. In Portrait Stephen Dedalus goes to the Bank of Ireland to cash in prizes he won as a student at Belvedere so that he can shower his impoverished family with food, theater tickets and gifts. [PA Chapter 2]

Across Westmoreland Street from the bank at the beginning of College Street is the commanding statue of the poet Thomas Moore. He [Bloom] crossed under Tommy Moore's roguish finger. They did it right to put him up over a urinal; meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for women. Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. [U 133/414] The statue of the author of The Meeting of the Waters, situated next to a men's toilet, inspired a chronic Dublin joke.

Behind Moore looms the campus of Trinity College. Ireland's distinguished institution of higher learning was established by Queen Elizabeth I in 1592 and over the centuries educated the likes of Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. Although Bloom probably never set foot inside the gates (Catholics were forbidden by their bishops to attend until fairly recent times) it's worth a Joycean digression to do so, at the very least to see the Book of Kells, the 9th century illuminated manuscript of the Gospels in the Library.

Dodging traffic on College Green, one of the most frenetic of Dublin's hubs (in Joyce's time a tram intersection), follow Bloom around the periphery of the College along Nassau Street, the boundary of the fashionable commercial quarter. It includes several bookstores with Irish inventory. [Fred Hanna on Nassau Street; Waterstone's in Dawson Street and Greene's Bookshop, Ltd. in Clare Street.] On June 10, 1904, Joyce encountered an auburn-haired young woman walking on Nassau Street and asked her for a date four evenings later. Nora Barnacle was working at Finn's Hotel at the corner of Clare Street. The rooming house long since ceased operation but when the leaves are off the trees on the College playing fields its name can be discerned on the side wall of the building.

We will peel off from Nassau Street at this point.

Grafton Street gay with awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints, silkdames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing in the baking causeway. [U 137/614]

Grafton Street, now a pedestrian mall, is still Dublin's foremost shopping center. He passed, dallying, the windows of Brown Thomas, silk mercers. Cascades of ribbons. Flimsy China silks. Bloom considers buying a pincushion for Molly at Brown Thomas, still a possibility today.

Bewley's Oriental Cafe at Number 10 Grafton Street is one of a chain of century-old coffee houses in which Joyce and his friends gathered to talk. Its popularity and the quality of its moderately priced fare endure.

We turn left into Duke Street with Bloom so that we can order the very same lunch at Davy Byrne's "the moral pub" at Number 21. The gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy wine remain on the menu after nine decades, the cheese still deliciously biting on strips of Irish brown bread."

...fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that... [U 142/818]

Bloom leaves the pub and turns right toward Dawson Street, follows a blind man into Molesworth Street until Kildare Street where he catches sight of Blazes Boylan. To avoid meeting his wife's lover Bloom swerves right toward the National Museum. No Dublin tourist should miss its collection of Celtic antiquities.

After inspecting ancient Greek statues on the ground floor, Bloom proceeds to the neighboring institution on Kildare Street, the National Library of Ireland. This is the setting for the Scylla and Charybdis chapter in which Stephen Dedalus expounds his theory about Shakespeare and Hamlet to a group of Dublin intellectuals. At the head of the stairs is a monument to T. William Lyster, the Quaker (or in Joyce punctuation quaker) librarian who presides over the session. To the right are the reading room and the librarian's office in which Stephen holds forth. [U 154/142]

Leaving the National Library, turn left and proceed to the end of Kildare Street. The entrance to the Shelbourne, Dublin's grande dame hotel opened in 1867, faces the north side of St. Stephen's Green, one of Europe's loveliest parks.

But the trees in Stephen's Green were fragrant of rain and the rainsodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts. The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with in a moment when he entered the sombre college he would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel Whaley. [PA chapter 5]

Stroll through the Green to its south side and notice the bust of James Joyce just beyond the bandstand where concerts are given at lunchtime in summer. "The sombre college" is Newman House of University College Dublin (alma mater of Joyce and of Stephen Dedalus) which occupies a pair of noble Palladian buildings at Numbers 85/86 St.Stephen's Green South. Constructed in the mid-1700's as private residences, they were taken over a century later by the first Catholic university established in Ireland. John Henry Cardinal Newman served as rector. One can visit the spartan room in which Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet and scholar lived as well as the Physics Theatre in which the dean of studies challenges Stephen Dedalus's views on aesthetics and Stephen attends a deadly science class. The Commons Restaurant in the basement has a Michelin star and a celebrity clientele.

Walk around to the east side of the Green bearing right into Merrion Row and Merrion Street until we reach another enchanting oasis framed by Georgian houses, Merrion Square. The house at Number 1 belonged to Sir William Wilde, the physician father of Oscar. Joyce chose the spot for his first date with Nora Barnacle on June 14; she stood him up.

Follow along the north side of the square to Holles Street and the National Maternity Hospital, setting for the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses in which Bloom visits Mrs. Purefoy while Stephen Dedalus drinks and philosophizes as he awaits Buck Mulligan.

Returning to Merrion Square, look at other houses with famous former residents such as Daniel O'Connell's at Number 58, W. B. Yeats's at Numbers 52 and 82. George Russell (A.E.), editor of the Irish Homestead and one of the real life characters who make an appearance in Ulysses, had his office at Number 84.

EXCURSION 4:
Eumaeus, Sirens, Wandering Rocks, Cyclops

Discussing these and kindred topics they made a beeline across the back of the Customhouse and passed under the Loop Line bridge where a brazier of coke burning in front of a sentrybox or something like one attracted their rather lagging footsteps. [U503/100]

It is 12:40 A.M. and Leopold Bloom, in the hope of sobering up Stephen Dedalus after their wild evening in Nighttown is trying to lead the younger man to the cabman's shelter on Custom House Quay.

I am proposing a walk focused on the River Liffey which we will criss-cross from the north bank to the south and in the process recall not only James Joyce's writings but highlights from Dublin's earlier history that shaped his mindset. We should begin, therefore, at the city's proudest public building, the Custom House situated two quays east of O'Connell Bridge.

It took a decade beginning in 1781 to construct this imposing structure of of Portland stone and granite. James Gandon was the architect. Harps are etched into the capitals of the front columns. A copper dome with four clocks surmounted by a 16-foot statue of Hope resting on an anchor gives it a soaring quality particularly when the illuminated building is viewed at night from the opposite bank of the Liffey.

In this penultimate episode Eumaeus, Bloom is bound for his home on Eccles Street, but since we we have already covered this territory in Excursion 2 we will head in the opposite direction. Walking west past O'Connell Bridge we cross the river by the Halfpenny Bridge to Wellington Quay on the south bank and go under the Merchants' Arch.

We have plunged into the Temple Bar area, one that has been transformed in the 1990's from derelict to super-trendy. Joyce would be amused by its current reputation as Dublin's Left Bank, a homing ground for rock 'n' roll royalty and celebrities from the film, art and fashion colonies of Europe and the United States. In Joyce's time, the narrow cobblestone streets and crooked lanes were dotted with second-hand bookstores, some of which still survive. In the earlier episode Wandering Rocks, Bloom buys a copy of Sweets of Sin [U 194/610] for Molly from a bookseller under Merchants' Arch while in nearby Bedford Row Stephen is scanning the slanted bookcarts. [U 199/836] "I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes". In this poignant scene, he meets his sister Dilly who has just paid a penny for a tattered French primer.

__What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French? She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips...
__Here, Stephen said. It's all right. Mind Maggy doesn't pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone.
__Some, Dilly said. We had to.
She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.
We.
Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite.
Misery! Misery!

Let us trace Bloom's footsteps as he strides along Wellington Quay, Sweets of Sin in his pocket, and crosses Grattan Bridge (formerly Essex) to the north bank of the Liffey. Yes, Mr. Bloom crossed bridge of Yessex. To Martha I must write. Buy paper. Daly's.

The stationery store on Ormond Quay Upper is gone but Bloom's destination, the Ormond Hotel at Number 8, is where at 4 P.M. on a Bloomsday Joyceans invariably congregate. This is the setting for the Sirens episode, the musical chapter of Ulysses, which begins with an overture as a viceregal procession passes by.

*Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew.Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
....[U 210/1]

The Ormond has undergone several refurbishings over the century but it is still just dreary enough to permit a re-enactment of the episode in which Leopold Bloom, Simon Dedalus, Blazes Boylan and several other characters from previous chapters converge to chatter and listen to songs. In the bar which is still at the right of the entrance Boylan orders a sloegin to drink before setting off for his rendez-vous with Molly. On the left, rechristened "the Siren Suite", is the dining room in which Bloom sups on liver, "mashed mashed potatoes" and cider while he broods over what must be transpiring in his bedroom on Eccles Street.

In strict chronological order we would move along to the Cyclops chapter, Joyce's satirical take on Irish nationalism and bigotry, in which a citizen and his dog harass Bloom. The episode unfolds in Barney Kiernan's pub at Number 9 New Britain Street, a short distance from the Ormond Hotel up Arran Street. The actual pub, a hangout for a clientele drawn from the Four Courts, no longer exists so we might as well survey the law complex from Inns Quay adjacent to the Ormond. Aso designed by James Gandon, and a frequent point of reference in Joyce's writing, the Four Courts were destroyed during the Irish Civil War in 1922 and scrupulously reconstructed.

Back across the Liffey we go via Richmond Bridge to Merchants' Quay. At the corner of Winetavern Street is the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, known to Dubliners as Adam and Eve's. Born as an underground church in the 17th century when Catholic worship was severely repressed in Ireland, its nickname derives from a nearby tavern of that era.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.[FW 1]

In the opening lines of Finnegans Wake, Joyce's reversal of the nickname, according to scholars, signals that further games will be played with language and with concepts of time and space.

Miss Julia Morkan, one of the hospitable sisters in the Dubliners story The Dead, is the leading soprano in the choir of Adam and Eve's. "The dark, gaunt house" in which the women conduct their genteel lives is two quays beyond at 15 Usher's Island. According to Richard Ellmann, the Morkan ladies were modeled after Joyce's great-aunts who ran a music school from their home at that address and gave an annual Christmas party. Joyce's father, like Gabriel Conroy in the story, carved the goose and made a speech. Though much the worse for wear including fire damage to its roof, the house still maintains its elegant Georgian facade and the rooms on the first floor in which the party takes place are intact. John Huston used the exterior for the filming of The Dead in 1987.

The Guinness Brewery, founded in 1769 and an industrial enterprise whose influence on the Dublin economy and culture cannot be exaggerated, dominates the area west of Usher's Island. Bloom doubted that it was possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub on every corner and in that respect nothing has changed. "Be interesting some day get a pass through Hancock to see the brewery," Bloom mused [ U125/46] Today he would not have to use influence. The entrance to the brewery and its visitors center are at the end of hilly Watling Street. A block away in Crane Street, the Guinness Hop Store, a museum and exhibition space, offers tastings of "the wine of the country" as Joyce labelled the ubiquitous Guinness stout.

We are now in the oldest part of Dublin and although the Joycean links diminish we should not overlook certain major sights. The residential area around the brewery is called the Liberties, because in medieval times the land belonged to two cathedrals and was therefore excluded from municpal jurisdiction. A slum in Joyce's time, it has in recent years achieved some cachet as background for popular films and novels.

From the top of Watling Street let us take the winding path of Thomas Street to Patrick Street until the spire of St. Patrick's Cathedral comes into view. The Anglican cathedral has a medieval provenance dating to 1191 but its most illustrious association is with Jonathan Swift. The author of Gulliver's Travels ("A hater of his kind" as Stephen Dedalus referred to him) [U 33/109]__served as its dean for 30 years in the early 1700's. He is buried in the cathedral with his beloved Stella.

Within St. Patrick's Close is Marsh's Library, the oldest public library in Ireland. Built in 1701 by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, another eccentric cleric, it still retains the wire cages into which readers were locked in order to safeguard its rare book collection.

Moving down toward the river we come to Christ Church, the rival Anglican cathedral to St. Patrick's and the oldest building in the city. The Norman lord who had it built in 1169, Richard de Clare, a.k.a. Strongbow, is buried in the nave.

Dublin Castle, just east of Christ Church, was erected on the ruins of a Danish fortress in 1204 and has been the seat of municipal power ever since. In Joyce's time it was the official residence of the English viceroys. Martin Cunningham, a character in the Dubliners story Grace who figures in several episodes of Ulysses, worked at the Castle in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office. With the establishment of the sovereign nation of Ireland or Eire in 1937, Dublin Castle lost its colonial aspect forever.

Wood Quay, where the Vikings laid anchor in 840, lies ahead. We have completed a partial circle of the Liffey. Let us wave goodbye to the river with Anna Livia Plurabelle in the last lines of Finnegans Wake.

Away a lone a last a loved a long the [ FW 628/15]

There are two Dublin sites relevant to Joyce and his writing that I hesitate to offer as walking tours except to the hardiest pedestrians. Both are located more than two miles north of the center of the city over routes that provide scant opportunities for scenic pauses although there are enough within Glasnevin Cemetery and Phoenix Park to recommend them as morning or afternoon excursions. Both can be reached by public bus from Upper O'Connell Street and Parnell Street. Bicycle and taxi are also options.

EXCURSION 5:
HADES

On Bloomsday, Joyceans in Edwardian garb make the trip to Glasnevin Cemetery in hired horsedrawn carriages. The most dedicated rent a hearse for this replay of Paddy Dignam's funeral. The procession begins at the deceased's home, Number 9 Newbridge Avenue in Sandymount [Excursion 1] and proceeds along streets covered in Excursions 2 and 3 until it reaches the North Circular Road and Phibsborough Road. Total authenticity is impossible. There can be no halt to let a herd of cattle pass by and one-way motor traffic patterns force diversions from the 1904 route.

Pick up the Hades episode at the Finglas Road entrance to the burial grounds. The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air. [U83/486]

Dubliners call Prospect Cemetery Glasnevin after the surrounding area. Opened in 1832 as a national cemetery available to all regardless of religious, political or other affiliation, Glasnevin gives eternal rest to the mighty and to the humble; the latter are arranged in plots for Irish Republicans killed in the Civil War, cholera victims of 1849, smallpox victims of 1872 and members of religious orders.

Ireland's leaders, both friends and foes, are buried here: Daniel O'Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera. Female revolutionaries such as W.B. Yeats's love Maud Gonne and Countess Constance Marckiewicz. Writers like James Clarence Mangan, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Brendan Behan. A writer's parents, John Stanislaus and May Joyce. In Hades the father appears as Simon Dedalus, weeping as he passes the grave of his long-suffering wife.

I'll soon be stretched beside her. Let Him take me whenever He likes. [U86/650] Richard Ellmann attributes the exact words to John Stanislaus, inconsolable after May's death.

Celtic motifs and Victorian architecture predominate. The 168-foot round tower of granite in memory of O'Connell, an example of early Irish Christian design, soars from the entrance walk.

Mr. Power's soft eyes went up to the apex of the lofty cone. __He's at rest, he said, in the middle of his people, old Dan O'. But his heart is buried in Rome. How many broken hearts are buried here, Simon! [U86/642]

To the left is the mortuary chapel in which Dignam's funeral service is conducted. Bloom comments on the priest's ritual. Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over everybody. Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something.

Afterwards Bloom and the other mourners follow the coffincart toward Dignam's grave. Robert Nicholson in The Ulysses Guide suggests taking the cypress avenue by the chapel, turning left at the bottom, and right at the next intersection.

The Botanic Gardens are just over there. It's the blood sinking in the earth gives new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy. Every man his price. Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable for fruit garden. A bargain. [U 89/770]

The National Botanic Gardens Bloom glances at over the cemetery wall are a 50-acre park and horticultural preserve of international rank. An uplifting place to visit after Bloom's lugubrious musings.

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time. Last time I was here was Mrs. Sinico's funeral. [U 94/996]

Emily Sinico, an unhappily married woman rebuffed by a man she met at a concert, dies in an accident at a railroad station in the Dubliners story A Painful Case.

Before leaving we might pay our respects to Joyce's parents and to his father's hero Parnell. Retracing our steps to the intersection, the Joyce grave is near the path at the right. On the other side of the path is a massive rock of Wicklow granite inscribed simply with one name, Parnell. The anniversary of his death on October 6, 1891 has been known ever after as Ivy Day because mourners clipped ivy leaves from the cemetery wall. Hence the Dubliners story about political intrigue Ivy Day in the Committee Room.

EXCURSION 6:
Wandering Rocks, Aeolus, Penelope, Finnegans Wake

William Humble, earl of Dudley, and Lady Dudley, accompanied by lieutenant colonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the viceregal lodge...
The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted by obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern quays. The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the metropolis. [U 207/1176]

The Viceregal Lodge, now the residence of the President of Ireland, is in Phoenix Park, one of Europe's largest public recreational areas and a significant landmark in Joyce's writings. Opened in 1747, it includes the residence of the United States Ambassador, playing fields for cricket, hurling, and polo and the magnificent Dublin Zoo whose most famous alumnus was the lion in the MGM logo.

The route of the cavalcade in Wandering Rocks encompasses familiar geography explored in Excursions 3 and 4 as the various characters strain to watch the procession go by.

One of the most sensational crimes in Ireland's violent political saga was committed in Phoenix Park. In 1882 Lord Frederick Cavendish, Under-Secretary for Ireland, and an associate were stabbed to death by an Irish nationalist group, the Invincibles. The assassins were betrayed by an informer and hanged.

The Phoenix Park murders occupy a lengthy section of the Aeolus episode under the headline THE GREAT GALLAHER as Myles Crawford, the newspaper editor, recalls coverage of the crime. That was the smartest piece of journalism ever known. Ignatius Gallaher, a reporter, planted clues to the getaway route in an advertisement in the Weekly Freeman. [U 111/628] Gallaher, a condescending scribe, appears earlier in the Dubliners story A Little Cloud.

In the Penelope episode, Molly Bloom plans the menu for an improbable picnic with her husband and lover "in the furry glen or the strawberry fields" of Phoenix Park. [U 629/948] The Furry is a wooded nook near the Knockmaroon Gate, the Strawberry Fields lie beyond the Gate on the north bank of the Liffey.

For anyone embarked on the daunting task of deciphering Finnegans Wake, Joyce's most inscrutable work, a visit to Phoenix Park (Phornix Park) does much to clear the head. Strolling within its Irish greener-than-green boundaries amidst active human beings helps to rescue the book from its extreme abstraction and brings its puzzling characters to life.

Mind your hats goan in! Now yiz are in the Willingdone Museyroom. This is a Prooshious gunn. this is a ffrinch. Tip. This is the flag of the Prooshious. Saloos the Crossgunn! Up with your pike and fork! Tip. (Bullsfoot! Fine!) This is the triplewon hat of Lipoleum. Tip Lipoleumhat. This is the Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape...[FW 8/9-18].

Now come close to the Wellington Monument, the 205-foot granite obelisk near the main entrance of the park commemorating the victories of the Duke of Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars.

Finnegans Wake is set in Chapelizod, in Joyce's time a pastoral neighborhood along the Liffey bordered by Phoenix Park to the north. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a local publican, wrestles in his guilt-ridden dream with allegations that he committed a crime in Phoenix Park. Three soldiers say they saw HCE behaving inappropriately toward two young girls__

of having behaved with ongentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the swoolth of the rushy hollow whither, or so the two gown and pinners pleaded,...but whose published combinations of silkinlaine testimonies are, where not dubiously pure, visibly divergent, as wapt from wept, on minor points touching the intimate nature of this, a first offence in vert or venison which was admittedly an incautious but, at its wildest, a partial exposure with such attenuating circumstances (garthen gaddeth green hwere sokeman brideth girling) as an abnormal Saint Swithin's summer and, Jesses Rosasharon!) aripe occasion to provoke it. [FW 34/19-30]

Reading this passage in the politically febrile summer of 1998 how can one doubt the prescience of James Joyce or fail to appreciate the Viconian theory of the cyclical flow of history on which he based the Wake.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• James Joyce, Dubliners
  
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  

Both works are contained in The Portable James Joyce / with an introduction by Harry Levin. New York, Viking Press, 1966. This edition is recommended to the traveler. 820.81J

• James Joyce, Ulysses: The corrected text edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York, Random House, 1986. FJ
  
• James Joyce, Finnegans Wake. New York, Viking Press, 1939. FJ

• Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revised edition, New York, Oxford University Press, 1982. 92 J89E
• Brenda Maddox, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1988. 92 J892M
• A. Nick Fargnoli and Michael P. Gillespie, James Joyce A to Z, New York, Facts on File Inc. 1995. 823J
• Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce's Dublin. London, The Grey Walls Press, 1950. 92 J89H

Also in the Visitors Reports of The New York Society Library, James Joyce in the New York Society Library by Marylin Bender Altschul, February 1996.

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