‘Ellmann's Joyce' Review: On the Trail of Genius

Wall Street Journal

02-05-2025

Richard Ellmann's 'James Joyce' is widely regarded as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, much as some see Joyce's novel 'Ulysses,' published in 1922, as its supreme work of fiction. 'James Joyce' is a wonderful achievement. In some 900 pages, including ample footnotes, it confronts the strange life of a complex man, giving pleasure on every page. Ellmann circles his subject with a light tread and humorous insight, not without occasional severity, as one might treat a misbehaving family member. Forty-one when the biography was published in 1959, he was a year older than Joyce himself when copies of 'Ulysses' arrived at the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Co., which was also its publisher.
'Ulysses' has proved indigestible to many well-intentioned readers, and not everyone was instantly won over by Ellmann's biography. From the columns of the Times Literary Supplement to the pubs of Dublin, the American academic was criticized for lack of subtlety—bluntly, knowledge—in evoking the atmosphere of early-century Dublin, for accepting Joyce's fiction generally as a record of actual events, and for treating the character Stephen Hero as a straightforward self-portrait. The compliment paid to the book by the critic Frank Kermode, that it 'proceeds without the least fuss,' could be taken as double-edged.
Now we have a biography of the biographer. Zachary Leader guides us through Ellmann's life, from his birth in 1918 into a 'comfortably upper-middle-class' Jewish family in Highland Park, Mich., to his death in Oxford 69 years later. 'Ellmann's Joyce' is also an exercise in that underexposed genre, the biography of a book. Part II provides an account of the making of 'James Joyce.' Mr. Leader, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Roehampton in London, usually writes long: He is the author of a 1,000-page biography of the novelist Kingsley Amis; more recently, he produced two hefty volumes on Saul Bellow. 'Ellmann's Joyce' is more modestly proportioned. It is, the author says, 'neither a conventional biography nor a conventional analytic study.' It sits comfortably between the two.
Ellmann's parents were immigrants from Russia and Romania. Their conscientious adherence to Jewish culture and opposition to 'marrying out' caused a degree of estrangement in their American-born sons, Richard and Erwin, who were drawn to non-Jewish women. There are parallels with Joyce's feelings of constraint in post-Victorian Ireland ruled by a tyrannical clergy. In 1904, when he was 22, Joyce fled to southern Europe with his girlfriend of just a few months, Nora Barnacle ('She'll stick to him,' his father quipped). They went first to the Austrian city of Pola (now Pula, in Croatia), then Trieste, and on to Paris, where they and their children settled, insofar as they settled anywhere. (Giorgio was born in 1905, Lucia in 1907; the Joyces were not formally married until 1931.) In a neat coincidence, Ellmann, feeling hemmed in by family pressure even at the age of 31, eloped with the woman he intended to marry. Ellmann's parents grew to tolerate Mary Donahue, but not her Christian name. To them, she was always 'Joan.'