James Joyce visited Ireland for the last time in 1912 and died abroad in 1941. While he was living in Paris in those far-off days before the second World War some of his younger compatriots made the pilgrimage to his home there.
Those who knew or met Joyce while he was in Ireland are of course long since passed away and those of the succeeding generation who met him in Paris have not outlived the 20th century - with one happy exception. The only living Irishman (so far as we know) to have had a meeting with Joyce is Maurice James Craig, architectural historian and man of letters, author of Dublin 1660-1860: A Social and Architectural History.
Recently, in his comfortable retirement home in Blackrock, the now 86-year-old Dr Craig recalled the circumstances of that encounter. He had been given the loan of a first edition of Ulysses by a Belfast writer named Richard Williams, who wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Rowley.
"In 1938 I was 19 years of age, spending the spring and summer in Paris - or to be exact in St Germain-en-Laye and later in Versailles - between leaving school and going up to Cambridge. . .I wanted to meet certain great men just because they were great men and, young as I was, I would have those meetings 'under my belt', as it were, for a long time to come." In this spirit the youthful Craig called to Joyce's Paris flat in June 1938. A few years later, he says, he would not have had the nerve.
Nora Joyce answered the bell and asked who he was. When he said he was from Ireland she disappeared and returned with Joyce, who was tall and slender with a very soft handshake. Craig told Joyce that he was a young Irishman from Belfast. "I have read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses," he said "and I have come to see you."
They spoke of music, a subject in which they were both interested. Joyce respected Hamilton Harty, the eminent conductor and composer born in Hillsborough, Co Down, whom Craig had also met. He told Joyce that Harty's father was the organist of Hillsborough Cathedral. "It's one of the few churches you get into on a weekday," he said, and Joyce remarked, "Well, the difficulty with my church is getting out of it."
Craig told Joyce that since coming to Paris he had seen a performance of the opera Salammbo, based on a novel by Flaubert and scored by the popular composer Ernest Reyer. At the mention of Reyer's name Joyce said, "Ah! Le Wagner des pauvres!"
Joyce at this time was still working on "Work in Progress", later to be published as Finnegans Wake. He asked Craig to help him find the words of two ballads which he wanted to make use of. These were Follow Me Up to Carlow and another ballad which contained the line "May the Lord in His mercy be kind to Belfast".
"Work in Progress" was being serialised in an avant-garde literary magazine called transition, published by Eugene and Maria Jolas. (The title Finnegans Wake had been kept secret from everyone but Nora until it should be ready for publication in book form.) Joyce suggested that Craig should meet Eugene Jolas. He sat with Jolas at a pavement café but cannot recall what he as a young man fresh from school could have had to say to the literary publisher. However, he received a letter from Joyce shortly afterwards saying that he must have had a remarkable effect on his friend Jolas, because Jolas immediately came back to him and guessed the name of his book. Joyce said he hoped Jolas would keep it a secret until the last full stop was written, adding "(There is none)".
Craig soon afterwards sent Joyce the words of Follow Me Up to Carlow, but by the time he succeeded in finding the source of the line "May the Lord in His mercy be kind to Belfast", Joyce had died. (It came in fact from a poem on the United Irishman Thomas Russell, which was included in a collection edited by Charles Gavan Duffy, and refers to Russell's passing through Belfast as a prisoner before his execution in 1803.)
In the meantime the line had worked on Craig's mind and stimulated him into writing four stanzas of a poem which expresses his own love-hate relationship with his native city, which he had left to live in Dublin.
It is now attributed to Craig in the Oxford Dictionary
of Quotations.
"The bricks they may bleed
and the rain it may weep
And the damp Lagan fog lulls
the city to sleep.
It's to Hell with the future,
we'll live in the past ,
May the Lord in his mercy be
kind to Belfast."
Maurice Craig treasures a cutting from The Irish Times of April 10th, 1948 containing a poem entitled The City with a note saying: "Translated from the Greek of C.P. Cavafy by Hubert Butler in memory of James Joyce and Trieste."
It begins:
"You said: 'I'll seek some
other land, far off, with sails
unfurled.
I'll find a worthier town than
this and some serener clime."
But the second stanza continues:
"You'll find no other lands,
my friend, speeding with
sails unfurled.
Your city will go with you.
Through its streets and
squares
You'll still be strolling,
as you strolled,
despite your prayers."
These lines are indeed poignantly applicable to Joyce in the octave of the 101st anniversary of Bloomsday.