James Joyce Tower and Museum

Listen first. Below you, the Irish Sea moves against granite rocks with a slow, steady wash. Gulls call overhead. The wind here carries salt and seaweed, and it comes straight off Dublin Bay. You are standing beside a squat, round tower of grey stone at Sandycove, on the coast south of the city centre. The walls are thick, and the shape is plain. It does not look literary. Yet this small fort is where one of the most discussed novels of the twentieth century begins.

This is a Martello tower. Britain built a chain of them along the coasts of Ireland and England in the early nineteenth century. The reason was fear of a French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. The design copied a round fortress at Mortella Point on Corsica, which had resisted a British attack. The name changed slightly in English, and "Martello" stuck. Around Dublin Bay you can still find many of these towers, set at intervals along the shore.

The invasion never came. The towers were built for cannon and soldiers, but most of them never fired a shot in anger. Over the following century many were sold or left empty. By the early 1900s, this one was available to rent as a private home. It is an odd idea for a house... a round room with thick walls, small windows, and a gun platform on the roof. For a group of young men in Edwardian Dublin, that oddness was part of the appeal.

In 1904 the tenant was Oliver Gogarty, a medical student, poet, and famous wit. He invited a young writer named James Joyce to stay. Joyce was twenty-two, poor, proud, and still largely unknown. Also staying was an Englishman, Samuel Chenevix Trench, who loved the Irish language and Irish revival culture. Three young men, one stone room, and a great deal of talk and drink. The arrangement did not last long.

Here is the story most visitors do not know. Joyce stayed only about six nights, in September 1904. One night Trench woke from a nightmare about a black panther. He grabbed a revolver and fired into the fireplace. Then, by most accounts, Gogarty took the gun and shot at the pans hanging above Joyce's bed. Joyce left the tower that night and walked back to the city. He never returned to live here.

But he took the tower with him. Joyce left Ireland soon afterward and spent most of his life in continental Europe. Years later, he opened his novel Ulysses in this exact place. The book was published in 1922. It follows ordinary Dubliners through a single day, the sixteenth of June, 1904. Its first words describe a character climbing onto the roof above you: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather."

Buck Mulligan is a portrait of Gogarty, and many readers think it is not a kind one. The Englishman in the opening chapter, called Haines, is based on Trench. He even has a nightmare about a black panther in the book. Joyce's own stand-in is Stephen Dedalus, a young, brooding writer. So the opening of Ulysses is fiction, but it is built from real people, a real room, and a real quarrel that happened within these walls.

The tower became a museum in 1962. Sylvia Beach opened it. She was the American bookseller in Paris who first published Ulysses, at a time when many printers would not touch it. The architect Michael Scott, who lived next door, played a central role in the project. Today the museum is looked after by volunteers. Their care gives the place a personal, slightly informal feel, quite unlike a large state gallery.

Inside, the space is compact. You will find letters, photographs, early and rare editions of Joyce's books, and personal objects connected to the writer. Do not expect long corridors of display cases. The main living room has been arranged to suggest the scene of the novel's opening chapter. Stand in it for a moment. The curved walls, the low light, the fireplace... it is easy to picture three young men arguing here late into the night.

Now climb up to the roof, if you can. The stairs are narrow and steep, built for soldiers, not for comfort. At the top is the round gun platform, edged by a low granite parapet. This is where Buck Mulligan shaves in the first pages of Ulysses. From here the view opens across Dublin Bay. On a clear day you can follow the coast north towards Howth, the headland on the far side of the bay.

Look down at the water. In the novel, Mulligan calls it "the snotgreen sea" — a line that still makes readers laugh. Just below the tower is the Forty Foot, a rocky bathing place used by swimmers for generations. People swim here in every season, even on cold winter mornings. In Ulysses, Mulligan goes down for a swim in the opening chapter. So when you see someone dive in today, you are watching a scene the book describes.

Each year on the sixteenth of June, Dublin celebrates Bloomsday, named after Leopold Bloom, the novel's main character. On that day this corner of Sandycove fills with readers, often dressed in Edwardian clothes, straw hats, and long skirts. Some read passages aloud on the roof. Others eat a breakfast inspired by the book. For one day, the line between the novel and the city becomes very thin. It is a good reminder that Joyce wrote Ulysses for and about Dubliners.

Before you leave, stand again at the base of the tower and look up. The granite is weathered, with patches of lichen and the marks of two centuries of sea wind. It was built to watch for an enemy fleet. Instead, it gave a young writer the first page of his great book. As you walk away along the shore, listen once more to the sea against the rocks. It is the same sound that Joyce heard, briefly, here in 1904.