‘My dear little runaway Nora, I am writing this to you sitting at the kitchen table in your mother’s house! I have been here all day talking with her and I see that she is my darling’s mother and I like her very much. She sang for me The Lass of Aughrim, but she does not like to sing me the last verses in which the lovers exchange their tokens. I shall stay in Galway overnight…..’
James Joyce began this charming letter to Nora on August 26 1909, at the beginning of his first visit to Galway ostensibly to introduce their four year-old son Georgio to his grandmother, and for Joyce to meet her after his elopement with her daughter Nora five years previously, but principally to see where Nora grew up.
Nora was born in the maternity ward of the Galway workhouse, then acting as a hospital, in 1884. Her father Thomas Barnacle was a baker, and her mother Annie (nee Healy ), a seamstress and dressmaker. They lived in a two-roomed mid-terrace house, with a small yard, at 4 Bowling Green, practically in the heart of the town. Following the birth of her two sisters, Nora was sent to live with her grandmother Catherine Healy at Whitehall, just a few short streets away.*
‘How strange life is, my dear love?’ the letter continues, ‘ To think of my being here! I went round to the house in St Augustine Street where you lived with your grandmother, and in the morning I am going to visit it pretending I want to buy it in order to see the room you slept in.’
The Dead
From the night they left Dublin together Nora and Joyce were almost never apart until his death in Zurich 1941. An exception was the year 1909, when Nora remained in Trieste with their two-year-old daughter Lucia, while Joyce made two trips back to Ireland.
He was having difficulties getting Dubliners published. This consisted of fifteen short stories of middle-class Dublin life, sensationally culminating in The Dead where Gretta Conroy’s tells her husband her heart-torn memory of her first boyfriend Michael Fury ‘who died for love’.
At a family Christmas party, her memory is prompted by one of the guests singing The Lass of Aughrim which reminded her of Michael, who used to sing it for her. At the end of the evening, when Gretta is alone with her husband, she weeps as she reveals that it was Michael’s insistence on coming to meet her on a wet, winter’s night, while he was already suffering from tuberculosis, that killed him. She describes how she heard gravel thrown up against her window, and ran down into the garden.
“I implored him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live.”
Michael eventually goes home, and about a week later she heard he was dead and buried in Oughterard, where his people came from. “O, the day that I heard that, that he was dead!”
When she sleeps, her husband is deeply moved, jealous, and quietly dismayed by this revelation. He wonders, as he watches the snow fall outside their hotel window, what other secrets the dead maintain in peoples memories.
Gretta is of course Nora, the major source of inspiration for Joyce. She had already told him about her teenage love for Michael Sonny Bodkin, who was a student at UCG, and how he died of TB which deeply affected her.** Joyce weaved Nora’s story of disappointed love, as he does into all his major writings, changing details here and there but always retaining the spoken voice of her passion.
In one of many of his supreme compliments to Nora, he concluded a letter to her about this time: ‘ I know and feel that if I am to write anything fine and noble in the future I shall do so by listening at the door of your heart.’
Accusatory letters
The welcoming home at Bowling Green must also have come as a restful surprise to Joyce whose days in Dublin did not go well. Publishing Dubliners was becoming a nightmare.***
He had met several of his former acquaintances, some of whom remembering his departure with a young country girl, and his previous reputation, kept their distance. One of them, Vincent Cosgrave took the opportunity to imply that Nora had been unfaithful to him during their courtship, unleashing in Joyce a tirade of anguished and accusatory letters to poor Nora, who was utterly innocent of any such betrayal. Eventually John F Byrne convinced him that he was a victim of some kind of grudging malevolence.
He had met his old friend Oliver St John Gogarty, and it was a disaster. Joyce was a penniless, unpublished writer at the time, while Gogarty, a successful doctor, showed off his home in the city with a rose garden, as well as his medical practice in Ely Place, and a sophisticated wife. Joyce backed away in disgust.
The Barnacle home was of course too small for Joyce to stay but he was equally welcomed by Nora’s uncle Michael Healy who happily put up the visitors at his home at 18 Dominick Street. Joyce and Michael were to become warm friends.
Joyce’s letter that evening concludes: ‘I have asked them for a photograph of you as a girl but they have none.
Who knows darling but next year you and I may come here. You will take me from place to place and the image of your girlhood will purify my life again.’
Next week: The Joyce family come together to Galway 1912.
NOTES: *There is some anecdotal evidence that Nora and her granny lived for a while at Nun’s Island, before moving to Whitehall. Whitehall was the cul-de-sac at the east end of St Augustine St., now a pedestrian entrance to the Eyre Square Shopping Centre.
** When Nora met Joyce she was first attracted to him, as she told a sister, because he resembled Sonny Bodkin.
*** Joyce submitted the book18 times to a total of 15 publishers. The London house of Grant Richards agreed to publish it in 1905. Its printer, however, refused to set one of the stories (Two Gallants ) ), and Richards began to insist Joyce remove a number of other passages. Joyce protested, but eventually did agree to some of the requested changes. Richards eventually backed out of the deal.
Joyce resubmitted the manuscript to other publishers, and about three years later (1909 ) he found a willing candidate in Maunsel & Roberts of Dublin. Yet, a similar controversy developed and Maunsel too refused to publish it, even threatening to sue Joyce for printing costs already incurred. Joyce offered to pay the printing costs himself if the sheets were turned over to him and he was allowed to complete the job elsewhere and distribute the book, but when Joyce arrived at the printers they refused to surrender the sheets. They burned them the next day. Joyce managed to save one copy, which he obtained "by ruse". He then returned to submitting the manuscript to other publishers, and in 1914 Grant Richards once again agreed to publish the book, using the page proofs saved from Maunsel as copy .
Joyce did return again to Dublin later that year with some businessmen from Trieste who were hoping to invest in Ireland’s first cinema at Mary Street. It didn’t work out, but Joyce booked the men into Finn’s Hotel where Nora worked when they both first met. Joyce asked to see the room where Nora slept.
The Nora Barnacle house at Bowling Green was miraculously saved from further deterioration by Mary and Sheila Gallagher who purchased the property in 1987. It is a literary gem in every meaning of the word. At a time when 15 Usher’s Island, the house where Joyce’s maternal grand-aunts lived, and taught music there, and where he sets his story The Dead, is to become a tourist hostel, shows that Ireland still has difficulty protecting its literary heritage.
For this week’s Diary I am leaning on Joyce County - Galway and James Joyce by Ray Burke, published by Curragh Press, 2016, and Nora - A biography of Nora Joyce by Brenda Maddox, published by Hamish Hamilton 1988.
