FROM THE ARCHIVES:Following the unexpected death of James Joyce in Zurich in January 1941,
The Irish Timesprinted tributes from a number of people who had known him well, including this one from one of his oldest friends, CP Curran. – JOE JOYCE
WITH JOYCE dead in Zurich, and an end made to a 40 years’ friendship, one’s thoughts inevitably revert to the first meeting. It was at my first lecture at University College. The class was in English literature, and the lecturer began with Aristotle’s Poetics, as seemed to me very right in the circumstances. Towards the end of the lecture the professor put in some remark about Stephen Phillips, who had just written “Paolo and Francesca”. He asked had anyone read it, and then immediately: “Have you read it, Mr Joyce?” A voice behind me said Yes; I looked around, and saw my first poet.
I grew very familiar with that figure in the next three years, and in my eyes it did not change much in the next 40. Tall, slim and elegant; an erect and loose carriage, an up-lifted, long, narrow head, with a chin that jutted out arrogantly; firm, tight shut mouth, blue eyes that for all their myopic look could glare suddenly or stare with indignant wonder; a high forehead that bulged under stiff-standing hair. Some of these items changed later.
The elegant adumbration of a beard tentatively came and went, and the eyes that since then saw and suffered so much were obscured by powerful lenses; but the graceful figure and carriage remained the same, and the cane that replaced the famous ash-plant of his later Dublin days still swung casually, disguising but aiding the dimmed vision.
That is how he looked in Paris, where he lived in the years between the two wars, in different apartments from the Faubourg to the Invalides. The talk within might be as much in Italian as in French, but there were pictures by Jack Yeats looking down from the walls-pictures, I need hardly say, of Anna Liffey – and above them a great wood-carving of the Arms of Dublin, that once looked out on the Liffey herself.
And gradually the spirit of Dublin would prevail. He would sing old Tudor songs and Dublin street ballads in an admirable tenor voice, trained years before in Dublin by Signor Palmieri when he won distinction at the Feis Ceoil in 1904. I once asked Joyce when was he coming back to Dublin. “Why should I?” he said. “Have I ever left it?”
And of course he never really had. He contained Dublin. His knowledge of the town by inheritance, by observation, by memory was prodigious, and he was at pains to keep his picture of it up to date. When he challenged me to mention some new feature of Dublin to justify his return, I could only instance the new smell of petrol.
If Dublin were destroyed, his words could rebuild the houses; if its population were wiped out, his books could re-people it. Joyce was many things, but he was certainly the last 40 volumes of Thom’s Directory thinking aloud.
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