Visiting James Joyce’s Grave with Anthony Kerrigan
In the Fall of 1979, I found myself seated at a dinner next to Anthony Kerrigan, a Guest Scholar at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies and a world-renowned translator of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. A first-semester Ph.D. student at Notre Dame and still very wet behind the ears, I had not yet discovered Borges. I recall, vaguely, that Professor Kerrigan and I punctuated awkward silences by small-talking about Dublin, a city each of us had lived in and loved.
Over the years, I didn’t think much about that chance encounter until, decades later, I surprised myself by writing a scholarly article on Borges and James Joyce and had occasion to engage with Irish Strategies, a volume by Borges that Kerrigan had translated.
Now I’m thinking of that encounter again after happening upon an account Kerrigan published in the Irish Times in 1965 of his visit to Joyce’s grave in Zurich. Joyce died there in 1941, having left his longtime base in Paris for neutral Switzerland at the outbreak of the Second World War.
I have visited the graves of many Irish writers: Brendan Behan’s and Seumas O’Kelly’s in the National Cemetery in Glasnevin on Dublin’s northside, William Carleton’s and John Millington Synge’s and Thomas McGreevy’s in Mount Jerome Cemetery on Dublin’s southside, W. B. Yeats’s in Drumcliff, Co. Sligo, Patrick Kavanagh’s in Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan, Seamus Heaney’s in Bellaghy, Co. Derry, Oscar Wilde’s in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris, Samuel Beckett’s in Montparnasse also in Paris, John Boyle O’Reilly’s (and also that of his biographer, James Jeffrey Roche) in Brookline, Massachusetts, Francis Ledwidge’s in Artillery Wood Cemetery near Boezinge in Flanders . . . I’ve even visited the unlikely final resting place of Donegal novelist and versifier Patrick MacGill in Fall River, Massachusetts. But I have not yet made it to James Joyce’s.
Kerrigan’s article in the Irish Times is headlined “Joyce’s Grave: a pilgrimage.” Purportedly, Joyce claimed that his intention in writing Ulysses was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” Fittingly, then, Kerrigan deploys a narrative strategy similar to the one used by Joyce in the “Hades” episode of Ulysses, which tracks, via what he once referred to as “the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture,” the funeral cortège of the late lamented Paddy Dignam from Sandymount on the southside of the city out to Glasnevin. (Consistent with the Homeric scaffolding of the novel, the cortège crosses three canals and the River Liffey, which Joyce recasts as the four rivers of Hades in Classical mythology.) Like Joyce’s writing, Kerrigan’s first paragraph is a verbal map sketching the route to the Friedhof Fluntern, one stop before the Zoo:
The way there is by No. 5 tram. From the old part of the city (tarts, artists, Spaniards, perverts, pensioners), the natural stop for catching this tram is the Heim Platz, beside the Kunsthaus entrance . . . and directly in front of the Schauspielhaus. . . . The chestnut vendor (“Marroni a 50 centisimi”) told us, using his native Spanish in place of his business Italian, that there was no No. 5 thereabouts; whereupon we caught sight of the car over his shoulder. Ran—only to miss. Spent wait in Schauspielhaus foyer looking at glossy prints of performers on stage in arrested gestures. Took next car—almost missed again—five minutes later.
In Kerrigan’s telling, Joyce’s grave itself is a sobering reminder of the mortality of even those whom we think of as immortals. Buried randomly between two men with German names, their only apparent common denominator being that all three died in 1941, Joyce lay for a quarter-century beneath a simple slab overshadowed by his neighbors’ upright tombstones “three times the size” of his.
Kerrigan’s pilgrimage to Joyce’s grave ends with a rather macabre musing on the great writer’s remains: “What would he look like now? Buried with his spectacles on? His eyepatch has outlived the eyeball, the glasses, the suit?” Perhaps Joyce himself provides an appropriate answer to those questions when, in “Hades,” he has his character Joe Hynes reflect at the grave of Irish parliamentary nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell: “He’s there, all that was mortal of him. Peace to his ashes.”
In 1966, a year after Kerrigan’s visit to Zurich, Joyce’s remains were reinterred in a larger plot that allowed his wife, Nora Barnacle, who died in 1951, to be buried alongside him. (Reportedly, when Joyce’s father learned the surname of the young woman his son ran off with to Europe in 1904, he remarked: “She’ll stick with him.” Obviously, she did). The new grave is marked by a bronze sculpture of Joyce by American-born artist Milton Hebald. Eventually, the Joyces’ son Giorgio and Giorgio’s second wife joined them in that plot.
But recently that plot has thickened (as it were) in the form of a movement to have Joyce’s remains reinterred again, this time in Dublin, in time for the centenary celebration of the publication of Ulysses in 2022. (Joyce received the first copy of the novel, published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, on his fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922.) Some evidence suggests that Nora Barnacle always thought of her husband’s grave in Zurich as temporary, and that she inquired about repatriation of his remains to Ireland, though she also found comfort in its proximity to the Zoo, reportedly telling a visitor, “He was awfully fond of the lions—I like to think of him lying there and listening to them roar.” The public debate about reinterment (which now seems to have quieted) has been polarizing. Most diehard Joyceans believe that Joyce should be left to rest in peace in the city that provided him comfort and security during both World Wars. But proponents of his return to Dublin, including members of the Dublin City Council, seem to have an eye on the marketability to tourists of such a move.
Joyce last visited Dublin in 1912. He had many reasons for not returning during his lifetime, some of them centered on the negative reception that his published work received at home, some involving his feeling at odds with the conservative values of the society he had left behind. Tellingly, in the hours after his death on January 13, 1941, the secretary of the Department of External Affairs in Dublin sent a message to the charge d’affaires in Bern asking, “Did he die a Catholic?” He then instructed his subordinate not to attend the funeral.
Anthony Kerrigan died in 1991. I wonder how he would weigh in on the reinterment question. I suspect that he would appreciate the memory of Joyce published in the Irish Times on the day after his death by his university classmate and longtime friend Con Curran. Celebrating Joyce’s obsessive — and possessive — inscribing of Dublin and environs from various ports of call (Paris, Rome, Pola, Trieste) throughout his writing career, Curran recalled how he had once asked Joyce when he might be coming back to Dublin. His reply: “Why should I? Have I ever left it?”
Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He retired in December of 2019 after 35½ years as Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. His articles, essays, and reviews on literary and cultural matters have been published in a wide variety of scholarly journals and general-interest magazines, and his poems and short fiction have been published in literary journals and magazines on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border and on both sides of the Atlantic. His two books of poems — What Really Matters and Delivering the News — were published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.