TEN days before Christmas I made my way through the foggy night to the Richemond Hotel on the Geneva lakeside. It was December 15th, 70 years to the day since James Joyce spent three hours there in animated conversation with Sean Lester, then acting secretary general of the League of Nations.
Thanks to this stopover, recorded in Lester's diary, we know that Joyce, en route to Zurich from Nazi-occupied France, had not ruled out the prospect of returning to Ireland. He had been discussing it with his wife for the previous two or three years but "he felt it would not be very dignified to go home in present circumstances". On the subject of Ireland, he confided to Lester: "I am attached to it daily and nightly like an umbilical cord". And we learn also from Lester's vignette in The Joyce We Knewedited by Ulick O'Connor, that in his exile he was a daily listener to Radio Éireann.
I asked the barman in the Richemond for a glass of Joyce’s favourite beverage, the Swiss white wine, Fendant du Sion, but had to settle for another white wine from the Valais. Joyce who had keepsakes of Dublin around him at all times, may have chosen to relax between trains in the Richemond because it reminded him of the four years the Joyce family spent living in Dublin’s North Richmond Street, their eighth family home.
It would have pleased him also that there was an edifice called the Brunswick Monument looming at the entrance to the hotel, a mausoleum holding the mortal remains of the Duke of Brunswick, and a pleasing reminder of the famous occasion that Joyce appeared on the same bill as John McCormack at the Antient Concert Rooms on Dublin’s Great Brunswick Street (latterly Pearse Street), a reminiscence shared with Lester.
Six years ago, I, Brian Tisdall and other Irish expats in Geneva decided to commemorate the centenary of Ulyssesby organising an event on December 15th. It would also mark Joyce's brief sojourn in the humanitarian capital of Europe, significant mainly for Lester's touching last glimpse of him and his family before he moved on to Zurich, where he died unexpectedly a month later from a perforated ulcer.Given the pressures of the Christmas season, our event did not materialise until January 2005 when David Norris brought his one-man show to Geneva – Do You Hear What I'm Seeing– and helped raise a few thousand Swiss francs for people living with Aids.
On that January night six years ago we had such enjoyment with David Norris as he communicated his love and enthusiasm for Joyce and his native Dublin that we decided to pursue the twin mission of supporting the arts in Ireland and supporting people living with Aids; so the Geneva Literary Aid Society or Glas was born.
Joyce, as a reluctant bank clerk himself, might or might not have been pleased that Glas hitched its wagon to that poster bank for the Celtic Tiger, the Anglo Irish Bank, which readily picked up the costs for all our productions while any profits were handed on to deserving causes such as the Furaha Orphanage in Kenya.
In an early sign of the hubris working its way through the Irish banking system, our patron decided to offload its profitable Geneva subsidiary for the sin of not making enough money. The branch was fortunate to have at its helm Clontarf man Declan McAdams who managed to fend off interest from Iceland to shepherd his staff and customers into the safe hands of a Swiss private bank. Alas, the switch has also led to a temporary halt to Glas’s activity, pending a replacement sponsor.
Nonetheless, in those glorious five years inspired by Joyce and the human glow of Ulysses, a group of mainly Irish expat volunteers spanning the world of humanitarian action and a steady stream of Irish artists and writers raised some €150,000 for orphaned children and others affected by the Aids pandemic.
Those who made the trip included Ronnie Drew and Mike Hanrahan, White Raven, Colm Toibin, Julian Gough, Tim Pat Coogan, Robert Fisk, Denis Conway, Conor Lovett, Maeve Higgins, Robert Fisk, Rita Ann Higgins, Matthew Sweeney, Aidan Dooley and Padraig Rooney. Donal O'Kelly and Trevor Knight have been here twice to stage O'Kelly's masterpiece, Catalpa, and there is now a cow called Catalpa providing milk to orphans north of Mombasa.
On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Joyce’s death on January 13th, 1941, Glas supporters will seek inspiration at his graveside and in Zurich’s James Joyce pub. We may even consider how best to revive Ulick O’Connor’s project to have Joyce’s remains repatriated to Dublin which had the support of the then taoiseach, Jack Lynch.