THE IRISH BRIGADES; OR, MEMOIRS OF THE MOST EMINENT IRISH MILITARY COMMANDERS WHO DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES IN THE ELIZABETHAN AND WILLIAMITE WARS IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY, AND IN THE SERVICE OF FRANCE, SPAIN, ETC. (WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING MEMOIRS OF GENERAL THOMAS PRESTON, OWN ROE O'NEILL, &c, &c.
Dublin, Ireland: James Duffy, 1855. Hardcover. Octavo. Publisher's original red boards, decoratively blind-stamped. Quite worn at extremities, with a one inch closed (flap)tear to top of otherwise wrinkled spine. Yellow endpapers with previous owner's decorative endpaper to front pastedown "(Liber Constantini Curran"), and previous owner's name and date (Richard Lime (??), July 1858" and town name (Illeg.). 464 pp. including index. Fair Only. Item #88663
From the library of barrister/literary afficionado Constantine "Con" Curran, who maintained a lifelong friendship with ...[James] Joyce..." and even "features once by name in Ulysses, when, appropriately enough, Dedalus recalls that he owes him ten guineas. The well known photograph of the becapped Joyce with his hands in his pockets was taken by Curran in his own garden; asked what he was thinking that moment, Joyce said that he was wondering if Con would lend him five shillings. ...According to Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann (qv), he was one of three models for Gabriel in Joyce's ‘The dead’ and gave to the character his high colour and nervous manner. A portrait of the artist as a young man represents him as interested in food, and Joyce sent him a case of wine after the lifting of the Ulysses ban in 1933. He acted in the early years as a sort of literary agent for Joyce, reading the first chapters of Stephen Hero, which were subsequently lost, and petitioning George Roberts (qv) to publish Dubliners. He was, however, among the first to reject a work by Joyce – as editor of the college journal St Stephen's in 1904, he returned the scabrous poem ‘The holy office’ with the comment that it was ‘an unholy thing’. An instinctive diplomat, he managed to be friends with radicals such as Joyce without adopting their views. Known as ‘cautious Con’, he was notably pious – his brother, Monsignor Michael Curran (1880–1960) was rector (1920–39) of the Irish College in Rome – and, with Tom Kettle, Con became honorary secretary in 1906 of the Catholic Graduates and Undergraduates Association. He was among the few in his set who sympathised with those who rioted against the ‘Playboy of the western world’, but combined this with a cosmopolitan outlook – he went on tours of Germany with Kettle in the prewar years and later visited Joyce frequently in Paris.
Curran and his wife actress and suffragist Helen Laird, counted among their friends George Russell (AE), Padraic Colum, Stephen MacKenna, Sarah Purser, and later, Samuel Beckett., and their Wednesday afternoon salons in their home, 42 Garville Avenue, Rathgar, became a Dublin institution."
Price: $100.00