I suggested a little time ago that the surface indications offered both by Joyce's life and by his writing up to including The Portrait — he does leave Ireland to live with his Nora in Triest, in Switzerland, in France, in Switzerland again, until his death in nineteen forty one, visiting Dublin for the last time in nineteen hundred and twelve — he does give us in Dubliners and The Portrait a sharp sense of the traps he feels he must escape from, the church tentacular, pervasive, the seedy provincialism, the narrowness, the philistine complacency.