Once you've been to Aran, you never quite get it out of your mind or your mind's eye. Now Dr Eoin O Dochartaigh of Galway comes up with some of his impressions which go back to his childhood and "watching Maurice McGonigal painting up at the Dun itself when he stayed en famille at Kilmurvey House". And how many thousands have been in that house of memories? Eoin remembers when "as children we watched as the gangplank on the Naomh Eanna was held for Brendan Behan, who was gradually making his way by sidecar to the boat, rounding the corner of the `American', perched on the edge of his seat, singing away." He also remembers as a boy, when working in a guest house in Cill Ronain, one of his jobs was to bring a "charming little elderly lady who travelled alone, who stayed a number of days, for her daily walk and to tell her about Aran. We walked out the road to Cill Einne, a route Synge describes in The Aran Islands. She was friendly and very interested in people we met. In those days one invariably stopped to talk (in Irish in my case) about the weather, the turf boats from Connemara, the fishing, the Spanish trawlers in the bay, the Ceile, how many people were on the boat. And was the post sorted out yet? Did the papers come?
"Her name was Sylvia Beach. I was to learn that it was she who had published James Joyce's Ulysses in Paris." Shakespeare and Co was a home from home, he writes, for a generation of literary giants: Joyce, Pound, Gide and many more. "When told of Ulysses, I remember feeling she had a whiff of danger about her. In her own book, Shakespeare and Company, she gives vivid and moving descriptions of the trials and tribulations of Joyce, Nora Barnacle and the children during their years in Paris: and the birth of Ulysses, which she recognised from the beginning as a work of genius. Ever since, when things Joycean are mentioned, I remember the little `spideog' of a woman, our lovely chats and our walks out the road to Cill Einne: my brush as a boy with the world of modern literature.
"I was at the Joyce bookcase in Kenny's Bookshop in Galway yesterday. One small photo is attached to the bookcase. It is one of Joyce and Sylvia Beach indoors at Shakespeare and Company. How pleased she would have been to see Nora Barnacle's house lovingly restored and open to the public in Galway's Bowling Green." There was a lovely bulletin of news of people one knew, in his letter, also an evocative photo taken by himself of the re-thatching of the Man of Aran cottage which O'Flaherty had built for the making of his film, and reproduced in a calendar. Much of this, Eoin had told in a recent broadcast on Raidio na Gaeltachta. Of stories of Aran there is no end.