Our hosts, the Irish National Economic and Social Council, had laid on a short cultural trip for us this afternoon, and we experienced one of those chance privileged moments that sometimes come along unexpectedly. We visited Sandy Cove, Forty Feet and the Martello Tower where James Joyce very briefly stayed (for just six days). The tower is now a museum and the curator told the tale of Joyce and his host, Oliver St John Fogarty, wonderfully well. Afterwards, we climbed up through the tower and visited the spaces that were forever immortalised by Joyce in the opening passages of his first great novel, Ulysses. This would have been privilege enough, but when we got back to the museum space who should we see but Seamus Heaney, Nobel Literature Prize Winner and one of the greatest living poets! It was a magic moment. The tale of how Fogarty’s tower (he was the one paying the rent) became immortalised as the Joyce tower (in Ulysses it is Joyce the narrator who pays the rent) is one of the all time great stories of literary revenge.
0 Comments
2 Pingbacks