'Up In His Hat':Joyce and John Francis Byrne: The Wicklow Connections

Abstract

Abstract:Joyce's writings are replete with references to Wicklow places and characters. This is not surprising, given Dublin's proximity to County Wicklow and the fact that much of Dublin's population comprised first or second-generation Wicklow natives, amongst them John Francis Byrne (1880-1960). A contemporary of Joyce in school and a close companion in university, Byrne spent much of his boyhood and early manhood among family friends and relatives in Wicklow. He became the model for the character cranly in Stephen Hero and a Portrait, and the house in Eccles Street, Dublin, in which he briefly resided, and where he was visited by Joyce in 1909, became the Bloom residence in Ulysses. Byrne spent most of his later life in the United States, but visited Joyce in Paris twice during the 1920s and 1930s, when their renewed friendship seemed to have been a source of mutual delight. However, Byrne was later to discover himself described in Joyce's published correspondence and in Stanislaus Joyce's memoir, My Brother's Keeper in terms that angered him. He also experienced some frustration when his own memoir, silent Years, received more attention for what it said about Joyce than for what he considered to be his pioneering work on encryption. In recent years, in a world of cyber-technology, Byrne's work on encryption has won him a measure of posthumous celebrity that eluded him in his own lifetime.