I am neither a full-time Joycean nor a strict theorist and at a conference filled with both types, my position somewhat resembles that of an atheist at an eucharistic congress. I want, nonetheless, to pay my own tribute to a very great forerunner. Ever since Middlemarch taught me that specialism can be but another word for self-love, I have gone in fear of academic experts. A colleague of mine at University College, Dublin, once pointed out how quickly scholars took on the character of those authors whom they made their sole study. The Yeatsians in his judgement were generally arrogant and autocratic; the Shavians all seemed to have overdosed on the life force; the Beckettians were all permanently depressed; the Gregorians flighty and feminist; the O'Caseyans pedantic and paranoid. But, he added by way of a modest qualification, ‘the Joyceans are usually very nice’.

We think of Dick Ellmann, I suppose, as the essential Joycean: and he was in truth one of the nicest men you could hope to meet. Irish scholars in particular will tell one another of his many acts of kindness done by stealth and discovered long afterwards. As a young man, he bought a couple of paintings by Jack Yeats in order to show some gratitude to the family which had done so much to help him. They lay, neglected, in a corner of his office for years, before a visitor noticed them and told their owner of the fabulous cash value which they now represented.