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The roof of the Martello tower in Sandycove, South Dublin, is where “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” first ascended from the stairwell, shaving bowl in hand. The setting of the opening of James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses — published 102 years ago on Joyce’s 40th birthday, February 2 — is today a museum celebrating his masterpiece and life.
The book forensically recounts a day in the life of protagonist Leopold Bloom. Today, Alice Ryan, curator of the James Joyce Tower and Museum, helps retrace the steps not only of the book’s characters, reanimated through the cold, draughty tower frozen in time, but of Joyce and his friends.
Oliver St John Gogarty, an aspiring poet and the inspiration for Buck Mulligan, had befriended Joyce in 1902. Two years later, he rented this demilitarised Martello tower — small forts built by the British at the beginning of the 19th century against the threat of Napoleonic invasion — and invited Joyce to join him.
The tower’s three storeys are connected by a tremendously narrow, winding staircase. Joyce stayed in the upper chamber, modestly appointed with whitewashed stone walls, bare wooden floors, a naked table with two chairs and a hammock in the corner.
But he would spend just six nights there. Gogarty’s plan to share the digs long term with Joyce was not to be. The pair had already fallen out a month earlier following Joyce’s publication of “The Holy Office”, his poem criticising the writers of the Irish Literary Revival. Now, an incident in the tower was to seal the split.
Late on Joyce’s sixth night, another friend of Gogarty’s, Samuel Chenevix Trench (the prototype of Haines in the novel) was awoken by a nightmare about a black panther. He moved to shoot it but Gogarty grabbed his revolver and jokingly shot some pots and pans on the shelf above Joyce’s bed — today lined up in exactly the same spot. Terrified, Joyce fled, walking 15km north to his father’s home in the city, never to return. He and Nora Barnacle, his future wife, left Dublin just over three weeks later to travel Europe.
The museum’s enthusiastic volunteers have playfully placed a replica of the beast snarling by the fireplace.
Why, after his traumatic stay, did Joyce choose the tower for the setting of “Telemachus”, the first episode of Ulysses? In the book it is referred to as the “omphalos”, ancient Greek for navel or centre, and also meaning a conical stone artefact, shaped like the tower. It’s “all about beginnings”, says Ryan.
On top of the somewhat bellybutton-shaped tower on a clear December day, my view encapsulates the “awaking mountains”, as Joyce termed them, and the sweep of the bay from Sandycove, where Ulysses begins, to Howth, where it ends.
The museum also boasts an exceptional collection of Joyce’s belongings. A waistcoat, intricately embroidered by his grandmother and originally worn by his father, was donated by Samuel Beckett in the 1960s. Joyce’s last walking stick, appearing as Stephen Dedalus’s “ashplant” in the book, is displayed, as well as a rare first edition of Ulysses.
More than a century after the publication of Ulysses, widely esteemed to be one of the finest books ever written, in translations from Icelandic to Malayalam, the tower where it all begins sees visitors from around the world, ranging from scholars and artists to promenading Dubliners.
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