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[Aetat. 1-12 } J O Y C E I I I1882-1894I'll close me eyes. So not to see. Or see only a youth in his florizel, a boyin innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed.—Finnegans Wake (621)James Joyce liked to think about his birthday. In later years, fond ofcoincidences, he was pleased to discover that he shared his birth year,1882, with Eamon De Valera, Wyndham Lewis, and Frank Budgen, andhis birthday and year with James Stephens. That February 2 was Candlemashelped to confirm its importance; that it was Groundhog Day addeda comic touch; and Joyce made it even more his own by contriving, withgreat difficulty, to see the first copies of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wakeon that white day.He was baptized on February 5 at St. Joseph's Chapel of Ease, Roundtown,now the Church of St. Joseph, Terenure, by the Reverend JohnO'Mulloy, C.C. 1His sponsors were Philip and Ellen McCann, to whomhe was related through his great-grandmother, John O'Connell's wife.Philip McCann was a ship's chandler at 2 Burgh Quay in Dublin; Joycesuggests in Stephen Hero that it was McCann who paid his godson's waythrough University College from 1898 to 1902, but McCann died in1898, 2 and does not seem to have left money for the purpose. A moregenuine connection between him and Joyce came about throughMcCann's story, told to John Joyce, of a hunchbacked Norwegian captainwho ordered a suit from a Dublin tailor, J. H. Kerse of 34 UpperSackville Street. The finished suit did not fit him, and the captain be- .rated the tailor for being unable to sew, whereupon the irate tailor de- \nounced him for being impossible to fit. The subject was not promising, 'but it became, by the time John Joyce had retold it, wonderful farce, andit is one of the parables of native and outlander, humorous but full ofacrid repartee, which found their way into Finnegans Wake. If that bookever reached his father in the afterworld, James Joyce once said, John23