part 3: Ireland, for the first time

 

Martello tower, Portmarnock, northeast of Dublin

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The Martello towers make for quite an interesting story. Rather than retell it in this blog, here’s a link to an excellent and extensive article, full of surprises, in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martello_tower

There are eighteen of these towers surviving on the Irish coast (and several times that number around the world). The Irish batch date to the years of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (from 1802 up to Irish independence in 1922), a time when the British feared a sea invasion by Napoleon’s forces.

The name is a misrendering of “Mortella” (hey, it happens to the best of us), a place name in Corsica where the first such thick-walled round fortress was built by the Genovese in 1565.

“Are those curtains in the window?” you ask. Yes indeed. This Martello tower, like a small number of others around the world, is now a private residence. Is that dreamy, or what?

By the way, my dear friend James Joyce lived briefly in a Martello tower on Dublin Bay, when he was twenty-two. Very briefly—just a few days. What prompted him to leave is worth a quick telling. Joyce’s close friend Oliver Gogarty was living in the tower with “a disturbed character” (who later shot himself) named Trench:

  1. Joyce had good reason to be wary of [Trench]. This was confirmed on the night of 15 September 1904. Trench awoke screaming from a nightmare in which a black panther was attacking him. He reached for his revolver and shot at the fireplace near to where Joyce was sleeping. Afterwards Trench fell asleep, but soon woke again raving about a panther. Not to be outdone, Gogarty grabbed his own gun, saying “Leave him to me!” and shot at the pots and pans directly above Joyce’s head. Joyce was too angry or scared to say anything. He dressed quickly, climbed down the ladder and marched off into the night.

  2. [from Ian Pindar’s biography Joyce, London: Haus, 2004, pp. 43–44]

The episode resulted immediately in Joyce’s declaring his hatred of Dublin to his girlfriend, Nora, and the two—just three months into a relationship—set out for Paris. The frightening incident showed up in his fiction as the “tower episode” in the opening of Ulysses.