SHORTER NOTICES
James Joyce's Dublin. By Patricia Hutchins. (Grey Walls Press. Ifs.) THIS is a first-clastpicture-book with a very intelligent. text. The idea of trying to recapture as much as possible of the Dublin of 1904 and of the young man James Joyce who lived in it, and wrote about it for the rest of his life, was a good one in any case. The perfect book on thit subject would have to be written by somebody who lived there at ;be time or by somebody who has lived there for long enough to be able to follow all the remaining clues that Joyce left behind, and it is possibly too late already for that book to be written. But what could be done with an exact knowledge of Joyce's work, with a remarkably good collection of old photo- graphs and with a good camera, Miss Hutchins has done. The - linking text contains much new and interesting information about Joyce's life in Dublin, but it also manages to be very readable and pleasing in its own right. The photographs are nearly all good and many o€ them are unfamiliar. There are some pictures of expanses of sand that seem to have got in by mistake and there is a picture of Dun Laoghaire taken, apparently at sunset, from Joyce's Martell° Tower, which readers of Ulysses, remembering its magical opening chapter, will most likely regard as the record of a missed opportunity ; for the time to take this picture was early in the morning and with the camera facing in another direction. But to what Lengths have Joycean exegesis and piety gone that such photographs are taken at all!. Yet it remains true that this is a valuable and in some ways even a beautiful book.
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