JOYCE'S
DUBLIN
107
the crises of his life. He even lived for a short time in her house.
In
his notebook I found this brief sketch of his cousin Kathleen Murray–
Katsy-who at that time was a pretty child. It is one of his "Epiphanies"
and seems to reflect a happy state of mind.
She stands, a book held easily at her breast, reading the lesson.
Against the dark stuff of her dress her face, mild-featured with down–
cast eyes, rises softly outlined in light, and from a folded cap set care–
lessly forward a tassel falls along her brown, l'i :lglctted ha:l'....
What is the lesson that she reads--of apes, of strange inventions, or
the legends of martyrs? How deeply meditative, how reminiscent is this
comeliness of Raffaello!
It
is pathetic to read that in the end his aunt kept the copy of
Ulysses,
which my brother had sent her, under lock and key as if it
were the book of Antichrist, tha t she burnt all the letters he had written
her over many years, and that as she lay dying, it seemed to prey on her
mind, for she kept saying "The book ... the book."
Again the black shadow of the Church fell across this almost
filial relationship. But my mother's confessor, too, had advised her to
put my brother and myself out of the house "before we corrupted the
other children." Intolerance and persecution have always been the arms
of the Church, and if it protested loudly against the outrageous trial of
Cardinal Mindszenty, forced humbly to confess the errors of his
conduct-a companion picture to Galileo's-that is not on principle,
but because the Church strongly disapproves of the methods of
the Inquisition when applied by laymen. Through the spy-hole of
the confession, it comes-like the totalitarian systems, which, in fact,
are modeled on it, and like them in the name of an inhuman ideology–
between parents and children, between lover and sweetheart, between
man and wife, between friend and friend, with this only difference that
totalitarian systems, being new, deem it wiser to exert their influence on
the young.
But is it "James Joyce's Dublin"? In the sense that there was a
London of Dickens and a Paris of Balzac recorded till the trump of
doom, most certainly it is; but in the sense that he is appreciated in his
own city, most certainly it is not. Though not officially banned-the
Irish as a people always prefer underhand, devious ways-his master–
piece may not be sold openly in Ireland, nor even legally imported. The
people who defend him appear to be lone wolves who have contacts
with the continent. There has been a Joyce Exhibition in Paris, another
in London, and another in New York. When the Irish Minister in
