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In Paris, just over one hundred years ago, James Joyce ought to have been enjoying the acclaim that followed the publication two months previously of his novel Ulysses.
Instead, he was alone and afraid, catastrophising about a holiday that his partner and children had just begun in Ireland.
The reason for his distress was that his partner and muse, Nora Barnacle, had gone to Ireland in defiance of his pleadings.
The January 1922 Dáil vote to accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty had not stopped murder and lawlessness. Civil war was looming.
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Joyce persuaded Nora to linger in London for 10 days, but she was eager for their now teenage children to see their grandmother and aunts in her native Galway. Her only previous return to the home she had left in 1904 had been in 1912, some years before Joyce’s writing had begun to earn acclaim and regular remuneration.
During that 1912 visit Joyce had written to her from Trieste, where they were then living, that he could “neither sleep nor think” and that he had wakened their son Georgio “three times for fear of being alone”. He then impulsively followed her to Galway and stayed there with her for nearly a month “as I am afraid to stay here – afraid of myself”.
His fears and worries were far greater in April 1922. In the intervening decade he had lost close friends in the 1914-1918 war, the Easter Rising and the War of Independence. One of his closest friends at university, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, was impetuously murdered by a British army officer who had arrested him while he was trying to stop people looting during Easter Week, 1916. Another university contemporary, Tom Kettle, had been killed in the trenches during the first World War.
Barely a year before Nora left for Galway, a third classmate, George Clancy, the mayor of Limerick, was murdered inside the front door of his own home in the presence of his wife Molly. He was hit by seven bullets. She was shot on the wrist when she moved to protect him.
Clancy had featured as "Davin" in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man and he would appear as "Madden" in Stephen Hero (not published until 1944). He is mentioned under his own name, Mr Clancy, in the short story The Dead.
Joyce was always exceptionally afraid of violence. He had fled from Trieste to neutral Switzerland with Nora and their children for the duration of the first World War. "It is impossible to describe to you the despair I have been in since you left", he wrote to Nora after she departed for Galway. "Yesterday I got a fainting fit in Miss Beach's shop and she had to run and get me some kind of drug."
Nora, however, was determined to return to Galway and she crossed the Irish Sea with her children in early April. She was keen to show off the latest continental fashions in the city she had left in poverty and heartbreak nearly 20 years previously.
She and her children, also expensively attired à la mode, would certainly have stood out. Less than 10 years had passed since Joyce had called Galway “a strange dying western city”. It had now been further depressed by foreign and domestic wars and by the misnamed Spanish Flu.
Galway city was tense when Nora arrived. Key buildings were occupied by rival factions of the sundering IRA.
The British army and the RIC had withdrawn in early March, but two convalescing RIC men had been shot dead in their hospital beds a week later.
Éamon de Valera, figurehead of the anti-treaty faction, made veiled threats of civil war carnage at public meetings in Galway city and county.
Nora and her children had to flee Galway when soldiers forcefully took over their city- centre lodgings.
The left by train while Joyce was contemplating sending an aircraft to rescue them, but they had to dive for cover when the train passed through a gun battle as it left the city.
Joyce was haunted by his family’s ordeal for many years afterwards.
He told his aunt Josephine of his upset that “what I had foreseen took place”. He added: “The air in Galway is very good but dear at the present price . . . no doubt you will see Nora some other time when she goes to revisit her native dunghill’.
He did not specify whether the dunghill was the old “dying western city” or the new Irish state.