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172 J A M E S [ 1904 ]into the tower's living quarters, a round room with a fireplace,lit onlyby two slanted apertures which Joyce calls grandly 'barbicans.' An interiorstaircase, in the wall away from the sea, goes down to the powder magazine,now defused as a storage room, to which another key—a huge onemade of copper to avoid sparks—gave admission. Further below is a toilet.The staircase also went up to the tower top, enclosed by a stone deck,with a raised emplacement in the center as the only vestige of the swivelgun and two howitzers which once dominated the approaches.*The tower commands one of the finestviews on the Irish coast, ofScotsman's Bay which lies directly in front, bounded on the south by thetower's battery and on the north by the Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown)harbor. Immediately adjacent is the 'Gentlemen's Bath' or Forty Foot,a diving pool among the rocks. Farther north can be seen the promontoryof Howth, which Joyce would claim later as the head of his dead gianthero,Finnegan, 'extensolied over the landscape.' To the south are theMuglins and Dalkey Island, and far beyond them is Bray Head, whichaccording to Ulysses may be seen from the tower on an exceptionallyclear day. Gogarty said courteously later that it was Joyce who like StephenDedalus rented the tower from the Secretary of State for War, butthe records show it was Gogarty who did so and paid the £8 annual rent.Life in the tower was free and easy and not very wild. But it waspleasant to think of it as a haven of unrespectability in 'priestridden Godforsaken'Ireland; 82 Gogarty liked to call it the omphalos both because it resembleda navel and because it might prove 'the temple of neo-paganism'as important to the world as the navel-stone at Delphi. 83Rumors of a newcult were allowed to circulate, not entirely in mockery. Nietzsche was theprincipal prophet, Swinburne the tower laureate. There were many visitors,among them Arthur Griffith, whose Sinn Fein ('Ourselves Alone')movement, as it would soon be called, was just gathering momentum,and young writers such as Joseph Hone and Seumas O'Sullivan.Besides Joyce there was one other guest in the tower, Samuel ChenevixTrench, a member of an old Anglo-Irish family. Trench, whom Gogartyknew from Oxford, had embraced the Irish revival so passionately,and to Joyce so offensively, that he called himself Dermot Trench andhad his new name confirmed by deed poll in 1905.! He was just backfrom a canoeing trip through the country, and felt that he now knewwhat Ireland was really like. Gogarty introduced Joyce to him with arising tone of wonder, 'This is the man who intends to write a novel infifteen years.'t 85* The tower has been somewhat altered to make it a Joyce museum,t A Dublin wag thereupon cried out in the Old Testament manner, 'Samuel, Samuel,where art thou, Samuel?' 84ftOn Sunday, September 12, the tower sustained a visit from William Bulhrj, lately tromArgentina but the more ardently Irish for that. 'That Southern X chap SENOR Bulhn,

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