Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker, by Zachary Leader (Belknap Press, 464 pp., $35)
Literary biography as a genre has sometimes suffered a lack of respect. Writers themselves are naturally suspicious, fearful even, of those who will come after them, chasing their old schoolmates for interviews and exposing their scabrous private letters to public view. A serious writer’s life is often deliberately uneventful, marked by routine and outward complacency—while inwardly the storm rages. The books produced thereby are the evidence by which the writer asks to be judged. For readers, literary biography is often something of a guilty pleasure. In the wrong hands, it can seem like little more than belabored gossip. Why, we may wonder, do I need to know whether the novelist bought his share of rounds, liked a game of backgammon, stayed friends with ex-wives?
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Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker therefore arrives with an air of special pleading. Leader is the biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow and general editor of the Oxford History of Life Writing. (American by birth, Leader has lived and taught in the U.K. for more than 40 years.) In taking on the life of Richard Ellmann, the intrepid and intellectually formidable American academic whose James Joyce (1959) gave authority and legitimacy to the writing of long literary biographies, Leader is repaying a debt. His own career, and those of other celebrated contemporary biographers such as Claire Tomalin, Peter Ackroyd, and Jeffrey Meyers, would scarcely be imaginable without Ellmann’s example.
Literary biography requires an unlikely set of skills. The ideal biographer must be an indefatigable scholar; skilled in the art of persuasion, to secure the cooperation of his subject’s wary friends and family; both personally ambitious and yet willing to consecrate himself to honoring the life and achievement of another; sophisticated in his critical judgments; and a sound prose stylist. Partly, this is a math problem. Each of these is a relatively rare attribute, so to find them all in one place is necessarily unusual. It is also a problem of personality. The scholar who can remain in a library chair all day reviewing primary sources is unlikely also to be passionate about the English sentence. In Leader’s telling, Richard Ellmann was “driven, competitive, [and] exacting,” a man who “worked all the time,” and—probably much rarer—also “a good man.” For Leader, Ellmann serves as an ideal against which subsequent practitioners must measure themselves.
Outwardly, Richard Ellmann and James Joyce could not have been more different. Joyce, who described himself, not wholly ironically, as “a man of small virtue,” was not respectable and did not care to be so. Indeed, there was something improbable about him; as Ellmann put it, “[f]ew writers have achieved acknowledgement as geniuses and yet aroused so much discontent and reproach as Joyce.”
Joyce’s genius was seated in moldy straw. His father, John, was a genteel fraud, an idler, perennially insolvent, with a passion for the pub and a moving tenor voice. Joyce likewise would not be bound by ordinary expectations, feeling himself exempt by genius from societal judgment. (His work would retrospectively justify that claim.) Of course, sobriety and thrift produce accountants, estate agents, and civil servants—the type of person that, in Joyce’s mind, was probably associated with British imperialism. (He was ambivalent about Ireland but a passionate supporter of Irish independence.)
Joyce’s counter-values led to an itinerant and turbulent life; they also produced Dubliners (1914) and Ulysses (1922). Ellmann finds something admirable in Joyce’s obduracy, which extended from his life to the page. From the reader, Joyce asked and gave no quarter. “He requires that we adapt ourselves in form as well as in content to his new point of view . . . his books are not easy reading. He does not wish to conquer us, but to have us conquer him. There are, in other words, no invitations, but the door is ajar.”
The virtue that Joyce did possess in super abundance was constancy. His only logic lay in keeping going; Ellmann writes of his “tenacity of purpose.” The publication of Dubliners was delayed for nine years due to legal concerns, and the Joyce family was often very poor. Ulysses took seven years to write, with words accruing at the rate of a few hundred a day. Finnegans Wake (1939) took 17 years, during which time Joyce’s health steadily declined. He was an unreasonable man, perhaps. Yet who but an unreasonable man could have survived his life, the exile, the poverty, the publishing delays, the obscenity trials, the failing eyesight—and seen the whole thing through?
By contrast, Richard Ellmann was a more conventional man, a man of institutions. He was raised in Detroit, in a Jewish family of lawyers. (He was sometimes subjected to anti-Semitism, including in the critical response to James Joyce, which he chose to ignore.) He dodged the family firm, served in the Navy and the O.S.S. during World War II, and was Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, where he took a Ph.D. in literature in 1947.
From the very beginning, Ellmann was pointed for the top. His doctoral dissertation on William Butler Yeats, which he researched largely at Trinity College, Dublin, became his first book. He taught at Northwestern, Yale, and Oxford, and his scholarly work was generously supported by a growing postwar infrastructure of foundations, endowed chairs, and accessioning budgets that left European scholars grumbling about American intellectual imperialism.
And yet something wild dwelled within Ellmann, too—something that made him instinctively sympathetic to Joyce. Like Joyce, Ellmann was, in the fullest sense, a writer, with a gift for figurative language and a willingness to push his style in pursuit of elusive realities. (It was said of the owlish and bespectacled Ellmann, who briefly considered a career as a poet, that he didn’t look like he wrote.)
As an ambitious scholar of Irish literature, it probably was inevitable that Ellman would take on Ireland’s greatest novelist. He outhustled and outmaneuvered rivals for access to Joyce’s correspondence and to the papers of his younger brother, Stanislaus. Leader quotes at length from Ellmann’s ingratiating letters to interview subjects. This sort of wrangling is the least glamorous aspect of the biographer’s profession, but Ellmann, with calculated epistolary charm, excelled at it.
James Joyce reset the direction of Joyce studies and presented the writer we still know today. Ellmann makes several core claims. Though all of Joyce’s major work is set in Dublin, Ellmann argues that the novelist’s relation to European modernism, rather than to Irish literature, is the salient aesthetic fact. Ellmann also reframes Joyce’s treatment of Leopold Bloom from Ulysses—no doubt a comic figure in some ways—as essentially earnest rather than satiric. Finally, Ellmann establishes, as against previous assertions that Joyce was a “cold” artist, that the novelist was both a sociable man who preferred ordinary company and a devoted if eccentric father.
Some reviewers of James Joyce complained that Ellmann’s Joyce was not clearly presented. Joyce’s character was indeed complex, inconsistent, hard to summarize. He seems to us to lack the dignity one wants in a major artist, not just in respect of his financial affairs—he was a notorious sponger—and in his alcohol consumption—often excessive, after his father—but in his schoolboy humor, which tended toward the scatological. (Joyce wrote in a letter of his “cloacal obsession.”) He possessed an oceanic and imperturbable self-regard that must have made him, at times, insufferable. Yet there is a vast human tolerance that features in Ulysses and underlies its composition. Ellmann’s Joyce is hard to know because Joyce was hard to know. No one ever contained greater Whitmanesque multitudes. Ellmann sagely left these contradictions, in the spirit of Joyce’s own Bloom, unresolved.
Ellmann begins every chapter of James Joyce with a quotation from his subject’s deliberately obscure last novel, Finnegans Wake. In doing so, Ellmann appears to endorse Joyce’s widow Nora’s claim that it, and not the more celebrated Ulysses, was her husband’s “important book.” Leader believes this was a sign of Ellmann’s “authorial anxiety,” a subtle tribute to the Joyce specialists he knew would stand in judgment of James Joyce. Those specialists, who tend to embrace theory-driven notions of lexical difficulty that Ellmann found tiresome, continue to view “the Wake” as the summa of Joyce’s achievement, a final point of arrival. General readers have not accepted this verdict. In Leader’s telling, neither did Ellmann. “For Ellmann,” he writes, “Ulysses is the pinnacle of Joyce’s achievement. What followed, though Ellmann is careful not to say so, is decline.”
The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Joyce had an arduous and somewhat luckless life and died, at 58, of a perforated ulcer. After a long run of good fortune, Ellmann’s own luck came to an end. His beloved wife, Mary, also a university professor, had a stroke at 51 and was largely wheelchair-bound for the rest of her life. (She outlived Ellmann by two years.) Her care was costly and burdensome, but Ellmann bore that burden stoically. He did eventually have another lover, the novelist Barbara Hardy, whose existence he managed to keep secret from his family, a capacity that Leader deftly links to Ellmann’s war service in the OSS and his intrepid scholarship. His own last years were shadowed by ALS—a tragedy compounded—which made his speech increasingly labored. Nevertheless determined to make a good end, he continued his long labors on a biography of Oscar Wilde. Ellmann died at 69, in Oxford. Oscar Wilde (1987) was published posthumously and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Just as Joyce found his ideal biographer in Ellmann, Ellmann is fortunate to have Leader to take up his cause. Leader speaks of Ellmann’s prose style as “Johnsonian in its psychological shrewdness, balance, and air of authority.” This is well said, and it might equally be applied to Leader. If I have any reservation about Ellmann’s Joyce, it is that I would have liked more of the “speculations, conjectures, hypotheses” that Ellmann himself felt raised a biography to the highest level. Who is better qualified than Leader on either Ellmann’s life or the art of biography?
Leader may have wished, unconsciously even, to efface himself, the better to keep his admired subject in the spotlight. The result of this reticence, though, is that the prospective biographers who make up Leader’s ideal readership are largely left to work out their own conclusions about how the thing should be done. But if Leader is perhaps overscrupulous, he is also judicious, sophisticated, and never less than clear. Ellmann’s Joyce is a fine and unusual book.
Top Photo: Sculptor Marjorie Fitzgibbon’s statue of James Joyce in Dublin (Photo by Joaquin Gomez Sastre/NurPhoto via Getty Images)