Volume 53, Number 7 · April 27, 2006
Happy Birthday, Sam!
By Colm Tóibín
If you walk down Kildare Street in the center of Dublin, past the National Library, and take a right turn into South Leinster Street, and look then at the old building on the opposite side of the street which backs onto the playing fields of Trinity College, you will see the sign. It is written in now-fading letters high on the gable end of the building. It says simply: 'Finn's Hotel.' This was what Richard Ellmann called 'the slightly exalted rooming house' where Nora Barnacle worked. Close to here, on June 10, 1904, she locked eyes with the young James Joyce. They stopped to talk, the two young strangers, and they arranged to meet four days later on a corner of Merrion Square, outside the house once owned by Sir William and Lady Wilde, where their son Oscar was raised, the site of many parties. When Nora failed to turn up, Joyce wrote to her the next day, 'I hear nothing but your voice... I wish I felt your head over my shoulder.' The day afterward they met, and James Joyce made that day into Bloomsday, the day of all days for Irish literature, as he made the name of the hotel into the working title of his last book, Finnegans Wake.
Feature, 3013 words
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