‘Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.’
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

In her later life, my mother occasionally reminisced about the friends of her earlier years, often without naming them. More than once, she spoke of letters she had received from a young man she had known in her college years. From Paris, he had written to her about visiting James Joyce’s atelier. When I asked what had become of his letters, as they might be of interest to Joyce scholars, she replied almost too quickly, ‘Oh, they’re lost now’. She answered so readily and so definitively that I guessed her correspondent had meant more to her than she let on. Perhaps he was identical with a young man she talked about who had fought and died in the Spanish Civil War, and perhaps she was positive the letters were lost because she herself had destroyed them.

Unfacts indeed. We were both wrong on most counts. After my mother’s death in late 2011, a cache of letters written to her during her high-school and college years came to light. Many were from her two older brothers – one a law student at Harvard, the other a medical student in Edinburgh – giving her insight into family dynamics and advice about how to live in the world. One letter included a news clipping about a raid on a speakeasy in 1931, Julius’s Village Café, which is active to this day at the same address in Greenwich Village – as a gay bar now. ...