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The successive pages accessible from this index originated as a draft-version of the article on Joyce printed in The New Dictionary of National Biography (OUP 2004), an edition of that immense reference work which gathered up the biographies of major figures omitted from earlier ones and referred to therein as “Lost Lives”. Among them, for example, was a companion article on W. B. Yeats written by Roy Foster and these were afterwards published separately by Oxford University Press in a paper-bound series of smaller books called Very Important People as James Joyce (Oxford 2007).
As it appeared in both of these publications, it includes some emendations to the text which I had supplied. These were dictated by Oxford house-style - naturally enough - and others motivated by an editorial preference for shorter sentences that my own characteristic manner of writing exhibited in that original. While numerous defects where caught and remedied, the whole seemed a distortion of what I had written at the hands of one who frankly called herself an intern and whom I judge to be young and confident and very bright. I sensed, too, that she might have felt entitled to show an Irish student of literature how to write her mother tongue. The reader of the present version might be the best judge of that and I offer no other defense.
I have chosen to reproduce my original here without those sophomoric improvements, though the one error of any account remains in place in spite of our joint efforts at producing the best text. This concerns the location of the “Christmas Dinner” scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - whether in the Bray house vacated by the Joyce family between November 1891 and the beginning of 1892, as Richard Ellmann states the facts in his life of Joyce (1959; rev. edn. 1982), or in the Blackrock house to which they moved during an interval which obviously spans the Christmas celebrations. (Standard biography comes down on the side of a Bray venue though there exists a lease on the new property dating from October 1891 and the move might have been at any time in the interim.
Today the Joyce home at 23 Carysfort Avenue is still standing at the end of a terrace of Victorian stuccoed houses which has been sheered off at the east wall of same to make way for the widened Merrion motorway in the 1990s. My own preference for Carysfort Avenue was determined by a personal visit I made to that house while the terrace was still intact. There I learnt from a tenant there that it was the property of the Dominican teaching order whose convent and school stands at the top of the road at the with Brookfield Terrace. (I was then living with my parents on Avoca Avenue which begins are an elbow at the top of Convent Avenue, which runs up from Brookfield at the junction with Carysfort and Edward Terrace.)
The tenant further told me that the furniture within the house largely came with it, including a mirror over the dining-room mantelpiece with a characteristic eagle, wings outstretched and beak agape. If this was not enough to suggest a connection with the rhyme about the eagle that treatened to pull out Stephen's eyes, there was also a pair of stained-glass portraits set in the inside doorway of the hall which depicted Dante and Beatrice - the former with a linen cap or rather spinsterish appearance. I naturally put two and two together and and concluded that this was the scene of the famous family tiff about Charles Stewart Parnell.
Shortly after the publication of the little book I have mentioned above, I received a message from Bob Isaacson, my old friend from California MA days at the University of California at Santa Barbara congratulating me on it and pointing out that the location ascribed to the dinner scene was wrong - or at least unorthodox. It is still a matter of sorrow to me that I did not photographed the interior of the house as it then stood. (I was an amateur photographer.) Life took me to other lands after doctoral graduation and by the time I returned to Dublin the house had changed. It was unoccupied and I did not see inside but the Florentine couple had been replaced by the kind of bathroom glass used by builders on poorer accommodation.
[ For more details about my visit to the Joyce’s Blackrock home, see Sect II, n.1 below - as attached.] |