Courtney McGrailThe World of Books
On a recent trip to the Vorarlberg to attend a literary conference as the guest of the provincial government, my wife and I found ourselves one day at the railway station in the town of Feldkirch.
In the ticket hall the frieze was decorated with a tribute to the writers of the district, most of them of them alas not known to us. But on the frieze over the door to the platform in huge letter was a quotation from no less a person that James Joyce.
He was recorded as saying in 1932 that it was on the platform at Feldkirch that the first intimation of his masterwork Ulysses first came to him. This was in 1915 when Joyce, his wife and two children were attempting to reach the safe haven of neutral Switzerland.
This was a touch-and-go adventure. It must have struck him that they were on a sort of odyssey across Europe, one which would eventually lead them to Zürich and after the war on to Paris. But at this moment in 1915 Dubliners had already appears the year before, and A Portrait of the Artist was due to be published soon (in 1916, in fact).
His imagination must have gone back to recalling his reading of Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses when he was at Belvedere, and more than that to think about his abandoned short story called ‘Ulysses’ which dealt with a certain Mr Hunter’s day in Dublin. He realised that a whole life could be expressed through a record of the passing events of a single day as his chief character went about his affairs in Dublin. And so was conceived the novel Ulysses.
We were in Feldkirch that day to see the building which as once been a famous Jesuit college, the Stella Matutina, to which students from a host of counties went. One of them was the subject of my interest, Arthur Conan Doyle. His Jesuit mentors at Stonyhurst had (with the agreement of his mother and his god-father, who managed certain family funds) for a last year before he went onto to medical school, a sort of transition year.
This final year in the hands of the Jesuits though enjoyable did not do much to preserve his already inspired religion.
We were actually staying in Bregenz, a town at the end of Lake Constance (or the Bodensee as it is called locally). And there we came upon the track of even earlier Irish connections. For it was here that Sts Columbanus and Gall passed on their missionary journey. There exists a delightful late medieval miniature showing them in a boat crossing the lake.
Monastery
Nearby, just over the Swiss border, lay the famous monastery of St Gallen, one of the great Irish foundations of that creative missionary period.
Much, much late, of course, Austria provided refuge for many of the Wild Geese of the 17th Century. There they and their families settled and left their mark, not just on the army, but on public life. Count Taafe is still recalled as the influential prime minister of the Emperor Franz Joseph.
All of this just goes to illustrate the role that Irish people, and not just Irish writers, having played in the creation and nurturing of European culture. Our roots in Europe go down into the earliest foundation of Europe as we know it today. This absorption of Irish people on European affairs, and their long role in European history, contrasts so greatly with the little islanders mentality we have seen so recently displayed by our neighbours. And which some here to (an even smaller island) would like to imitate.
During our visit to Austria as it was confirmed in our minds, at least, that Ireland’s place is in Europe, certainly culturally, if not politically.