Sir, – Now that the James Joyce Central Bank coin flap is again in the news (“Call for charity gift over Joyce coin error”, Home News, May 25th), the words of Joyce’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, are again being quoted: “the most unlikely likeness of Joyce ever produced”. Probably not so.
Surely the most unlikely likeness of Joyce ever produced was done in Paris in 1929 by the Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi. It consisted of nothing more than three vertical lines and a Celtic spiral. It is on the cover of Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce. Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Joyce, remarked when he saw Brancusi's image: "The boy seems to have changed a good deal". Three years later, in 1932, when Stephen was born, Joyce wrote the tender poem Ecce Puer (Behold the Boy) that linked his new grandson with his recently deceased father. Now, in this flap about unlikely likenesses, grandson and great-grandfather are linked again. And so, as the old artificer himself said: "the Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin". – Yours, etc,
DENIS COTTER,
Dover Road,
Middleburg, Virginia, US.