The acquisition by the National Library of the "Circe" manuscript of James Joyce's Ulysses goes a long way to ending the anomalous situation whereby virtually no Joyce manuscripts were kept in this State. Even that other great exile, Samuel Beckett, has left quite a number of manuscripts to Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied and taught. And due to the generosity of the Yeats family, the National Library has very extensive Yeats holdings.
The fate of Joyce's manuscripts, like that of Joyce himself, followed a circuitous route. But at no point, given the difficult history involved, was Joyce in the least interested in seeing them end up in Ireland; on the contrary, in fact. In the case of Ulysses, Joyce urgently needed the money the sale of the manuscript would bring him, so perhaps inevitably it ended up in the United States and is now almost entirely in institutions there: the current document is a happy exception.
Almost from the time it first emerged that this manuscript would be on the market, the National Library of Ireland appeared its most fitting destination. No one could say that institutions in the United States do not have their share; and it would not be desirable for the document to continue in private hands, because however well-intentioned such an individual would be, there would always be the risk of the manuscript being withdrawn from scholarly scrutiny for whatever reason. The National Library will combine maximum scholarly access to the document with the maximum security that is obviously essential.
It is problematic to speak of the arrival of this manuscript in Dublin as a "homecoming" - Joyce's relationship to his native land is far too complicated for such an easy formulation. The circumstances of that relationship meant that not one line of Ulysses was written in the country with which it deals; that Joyce considered himself entirely detached from all other writers and all institutions in this State; and that one can hardly speak of a "homecoming" when the document has never been here before, save for a brief exhibition in the James Joyce Centre prior to its sale.
Having said that, however, it would have been difficult to be in Dublin Airport yesterday as the "Circe" episode finally arrived and not to be moved at the presence of this manuscript in the city with which it is so inextricably linked. In a sense that is deeper than the well-known estrangement and exile, Dublin was Joyce's element, his imaginative, if not his physical, world - and it is a world he has immortalised.
It is worth adding that the National Library is an institution where Joyce himself studied and where some of the most evocative passages of A Portrait and the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses are set. The writer's links with it are strong.
The fact that Ireland now both wants, and can afford to acquire a manuscript of this calibre, is perhaps testimony enough to the altered nature of the State that so coldly ignored one of its greatest writers throughout his life; and it is quite appropriate, and indeed rather inevitable, to see the arrival of this manuscript in the National Library yesterday as a form of belated amends for history's nightmare.