Joyce’s Dublin

The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbicans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushed-back chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. . . .

--James Joyce, “Ulysses”

Although this city is known for its great writers--Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde--no one is linked more intimately to Dublin than James Joyce.

While not Dublin-born, Joyce lived in more than 15 places in the city. Even after he had left to work on the Continent, he never forgot his Dublin days. His masterpiece, “Ulysses,” published in Paris in 1922, recounts the wanderings of its lead character, Leopold Bloom.

But instead of journeying between the Mediterranean isles as Homer’s Ulysses did, Bloom makes his way through the maze of Dublin’s streets in a single day. That day, Thursday, June 16, 1904, is now known as Bloomsday.

The 300,000-word novel opens at the Martello Tower on Scotsman’s Bay at Sandycove, where another of the book’s characters, Stephen Dedalus, lives. Joyce, too, once called the tower home for a brief time.

Located eight miles from the center of Dublin, it is one of a number of towers erected by the British in 1804 to defend the coast against a possible invasion by Napoleon.

Now a Joyce museum, it contains, among other items, his waistcoat, guitar and a death mask.

The day I arrived at the tower from Dublin, the Irish Sea was a soft blue-gray, and a slight breeze blew thin white clouds across a Wedgwood blue sky.

Entering through an eight-foot-thick walled entryway, I noticed a guest book on a table presided over by a bespectacled young man who bore something of a resemblance to the young Joyce I’d seen in photographs.

I breathed in the cool, stone-moist smell of the room, and it was almost as if I could sense the ghosts of the tower’s turn-of-the-century inhabitants. I picked up the pen and signed my name.

Two doors led into the 40-foot tower’s living quarters--a round room with a fireplace lit by two slanted apertures. It must have been here, I imagined, in this writer’s loft, that Joyce spent his time, weaving his words.

Author Oliver St. John Gogarty was the principal tenant of the tower during the short time Joyce lived there. Like Joyce, he also left a record of their stay.

Gogarty accepted Joyce’s fictional account in “Ulysses,” but contended that Joyce, rather than having lived in the tower for two years, stayed there for only a few days. The rent, though only 8 a year (about $14 U.S. today), was beyond Joyce’s means.

According to records, Joyce came to the tower at age 22 with his small trunk on Sept. 9, 1904 to live with his friend, Gogarty.

Joyce and Gogarty had common interests. Both wrote poetry, although in markedly contrasting styles, and both aspired to be doctors.

Joyce, in fact, enrolled briefly at the University of Paris Medical School in 1902, then dropped out when the chemistry course proved too difficult. Gogarty was a medical student at Trinity College in Dublin for 10 years.

Supporting themselves did not come easily. Joyce copied his poems on expensive paper, and Gogarty tried to hawk them for 1 each. They were not successful.

Those days with his friend in the tower affected Joyce, and many moments spent there were eventually incorporated into “Ulysses.”

Joyce did, however, take some literary license.

He did not, for example, live in the tower on June 16, the day on which the events in “Ulysses” take place.

Bloomsday is probably when Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who later became his wife. The evocation of past love at the end of “Ulysses” seems to be a tribute to that meeting.

Joyce wrote a letter to Nora from the tower on Sept. 10, 1904. By then, Joyce was in love with her, and on Sept. 13 she visited the tower.

Gogarty and Joyce had their differences. Gogarty saw Joyce as gloomy and impenetrable, lost in thoughts of his novel or of Nora.

Joyce’s stay at the tower ended on Sept. 14, when another guest, Dermot Trench, began to hallucinate, envisioning a panther in the fireplace.

Trench shot at it. Gogarty snatched the revolver and also fired at the fireplace, and at the pans above it, in an apparent effort to calm Trench’s madness.

After witnessing this event, Joyce dressed and, without saying a word, left the tower.

He walked the eight miles to Dublin. Later, he wrote to James Starkey, who had replaced him as a boarder at the tower:

“Dear Starkey,

My trunk will be called for at the Tower tomorrow (Saturday) between 9 and 12. Kindly put into it a pair of black boots, a pair of brown boots, a black felt hat, a raincoat and the MS of my verses which are in a roll on the shelf to the right as you enter. Also see that your host has not abstracted the twelfth chapter of my novel from my trunk. . . . “

The night following the shootings, a life-changing decision was reached. Joyce and Nora agreed to leave Ireland together.

Years later, in 1909, Joyce paid a visit to Dublin and again met Gogarty, who tried to dissuade Joyce from turning their broken friendship into fiction.

Frustrated, he finally said: “Well, I don’t give a damn what you write about me, so long as it is literature.”

Joyce agreed and they shook hands.

I climbed the narrow, winding staircase to the top of the tower.

From the roof, there is a spectacular view of the Irish Sea and the coastal headlands and islands. Directly below is the spot where Gogarty loved to bathe in the sea three or four times a day, and where Joyce, who didn’t care as much for bathing, often walked.

Something of Joyce still seemed to be here . . . arguing with his friend . . . longing for Nora . . . walking the beach below.

But most of all, absorbing the atmosphere that became a part of him and a part of his book.

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The Joyce Tower is open April through October, Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday from 2:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. It is closed between 1 and 2 p.m. From November through March, guests need an appointment.

Contact the Dublin & Eastern Regional Tourism Organization, 1 Clarinda Park North, Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, Ireland.

For more information on travel to Ireland, contact the Irish Tourist Board, 757 3rd Ave., 19th Floor, New York 10017, (212) 418-0800.