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[ Aetat. 44-47 ] J O Y C E 579Wake; * 'could he quit doubling and stop tippling, he would be the unicornof his kind.'t Stanislaus summed up his opinion of the new bookby saying, 'You have done the longest day in literature, and now you areconjuring up the deepest night.' This was the firstdetermined attack byan intimate upon Finnegans Wake, and Joyce duly reported it, but withoutcomment, to Miss Weaver. 7He could discount his brother's judgmentthe more readily, however, because of Stanislaus's objections toepisodes of Ulysses.After Stanislaus had returned to Trieste, the Joyces received visits fromEileen Schaurek, who was taking her two children from Trieste to Irelandfor a visit, from Nora's uncle Michael Healy, t and from old Dublinfriends like Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington and Harry Sinclair. Joyce alwaysreceived Irish visitors cordially, and delighted in testing his memory, andtheirs, by naming all the shops in order along O'Connell Street, or byquestioning them about other people and places he had known. When ashop had changed hands he was a little disgruntled, as if a picture hadbeen removed from his museum. Now that Mrs. Murray was dead, heseveral times sent friends to interview his father so as to rescue fromoblivion some small fact about family history or Dublin gossip. JohnJoyce co-operated as well as his memory allowed, 8but occasionally balkedat some query about an unimportant person and asked his interviewer,is Jim mad entirely?'In May, Joyce found he had overworked on the third book of FinnegansWake, the section dealing with Shaun; he nevertheless carried it tocompletion and sent it to Miss Weaver on June 7, 1926, with a ratherurgent request for her opinion. Soon after he suffered an attack in his lefteye so serious as to necessitate a tenth operation during this same month.After it he made slow progress, unable until July 15 to perceive objectswith the operated eye, but he showed himself, with his now famous blackpatch, in company. By August 11 he went with Nora to another wateringplace, Ostend. The porter of the Hotel de l'Ocean, where they stayed,entertained him by always answering the telephone with the words, Tcile portier de l'Ocean,' a position Joyce envied. Ostend proved to his9liking, especially the strand, and he went so far as to run six or sevenkilometers along it, a burst of exercise out of keeping with his usuallanguor during these years. In another seizure of energy, he took sixtyfourlessons in Flemish, and worked some Flemish words into his descriptionof the man-servant Sockerson in Finnegans Wake. j> 10At Ostend Joyce renewed acquaintance with Juda de Vries, his oldZurich friend, who had become a dentist and was now, as Joyce wrote*P- 467.tP. 462.t Healy was a daily communicant. Joyce enlisted Thomas McGreevy to accompany himon a search for a hotel as close as possible to a church, so that Healy would not get wet,or walk far without food, in the mornings during his visit.J P. 370.