Sir, – In his article on James Joyce's father (An Irishman's Diary, February 21st), Frank McNally refers to the many changes of address the family endured as John Stanislaus lost the habit of work, took to drink and tried to make ends meet by moving from one house to another, each poorer than the last.
Describing Joyce's second family home in Rathmines, Frank McNally states that it was the setting for the Christmas dinner argument over the Parnell divorce which Joyce vividly portrays in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In fact this scene (in all senses of the word) belongs to Bray. In A Portrait references to place are much more subtle and fleeting than they are in Ulysses but there is one that clinches it for the house in Martello Terrace where the Joyce family lived from 1887-1892.
While waiting for dinner, Simon Dedalus talks of having been out walking and adds with the characteristic verve his son so admired: “we got a good breath of ozone round the Head today”. The period in which the family lived in the house in Martello Terrace largely frames Joyce’s crucial childhood years away at Clongowes which he renders with such sensitivity in his autobiographical novel. In the opening pages there is another allusion to the terrace in the mention of “the Vances” who “lived in number seven”. The Vances had a chemist shop on Bray’s Main Street: to this day a pharmacy on the site still bears their name. – Yours, etc,
PAUL O’HANRAHAN,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.