BOO KS
229
youthful and dedicated faces with the grave dignity of an older Irish
generation. Byrne has even wound up his career (which was mainly that
of a journalist) with his own equivalent of a
Finnegans Wake-a
uni–
versal cipher, which he calls "Chaocipher" and claims to be unbreakable,
and which he has, so far vainly, tried to offer to the U.S. Government.
Just before sitting down to write this note, I was visited by a
Finnegans
Wake
expert who hasn't come around to writing down the results of
years of research because he hasn't got to the bottom of that book yet.
I urged him to try to crack Byrne's cipher first.
The book has some interesting and touching things about Joyce.
We get a good picture of the slender frail young man whose explosive
laugh could rattle the panes of the National Library in Dublin. It is
interesting to learn that Eccles Street, the Ithaca of Leopold Bloom,
was in fact the home of Byrne's family, and it is even more interesting
to watch Byrne, another elephantine memory, checking on Joyce's ac–
curacy about the details of that house-a spectacle a little like two bull
elephants jostling each other in a jungle clearing. But there are obviously
a lot of very interesting things that Byrne does not choose to tell, and
somebody, probably Mr. Breit, should try to induce him to talk-at least
on those matters where no violation of personal confidences are involved.
In 1927, for example, Byrne visited Joyce in Paris after a separation
of many years; Joyce was at work on
Finnegans Wake,
talked to Byrne
about it, and had the latter read pages of the manuscript aloud because
Joyce wanted to hear a fresh Dublin accent speaking his own curious
and wonderful words. Byrne, with his taste for ciphers, must have been
interested in the work and must have heard some revealing comments
from the master himself; but in this autobiography he announces he is
going to guard a seven-sealed silence about the
Wake.
That generation
of Dubliners would seem to have loved their ciphers.
William Barrett
the hans hofmann school of fine arts
52 west 8th street
new york city
phone gramercy 7-3491
morning • afternoon • evening
