Book review: Biography of a biography is an onerous read

Irish Examiner

6 days ago

First released in 1959, Richard Ellmann's James Joyce has long been venerated as a supreme example of literary biography. Now, Zachary Leader book has written an account of Ellmann's life and the making his most famous book.
Many readers and critics will, no doubt, question the purpose of writing a biography of a biography. This is a question that Leader appears to anticipate in his introduction when he states, rather baldly, that biography is considered a lesser form by most readers.
He attempts to counter this by quoting Claire Tomalin (another literary biographer) as saying that biography 'can be as interesting as fiction'. Well, she would say that. An author using an introduction to try to justify a book's very existence is an uninspiring start to proceedings.
The book itself, which Leader describes as 'neither a conventional biography nor a conventional analytical study', is divided into two sections. The first deals with Ellmann's life up to the late 1950s and the second addresses the making of James Joyce. This is logical on one level but it gives the narrative a strangely broken feel. In the first section, we're offered a staggering level of detail on Ellmann's life including brief youthful romances, courses he studied, academics he encountered and an endless series of disagreements with his parents (who Leader portrays as a pair of colourful but overbearing divas).
This all comes to an abrupt halt at the end of section one when we leave Ellman in middle age and move into section two, the biography of Ellmann's biography of Joyce. Leader only returns to Ellmann's life 'away from the desk' in the final chapter when we're given a whistle-stop tour of the last three decades of his life.
'Ellmann's Joyce' by Zachary Leader is mostly focused on Ellmann's approach to his research.
Some interesting aspects of Ellmann's character are revealed in the second section such as his ability to charm reluctant gatekeepers into allowing him access to previously unseen materials, his obsession with status academic jobs and his ever-present paranoia that someone else would release a book on Joyce before his 'definitive' version. Beyond these nuggets, this part of the book is mostly focused on Ellmann's approach to his research, people he interviewed, places he travelled to and correspondence with his publisher. Such academic details make these chapters difficult to digest for even the most committed reader.
Ellmann's life, Leader says, 'revolved around strong, clever women'. He appears to have struck up a close relationship with George Yeats (widow of the poet), to the point of writing to her to seek advice on his love life. The greatest contribution to his work was made, unsurprisingly, by his wife, Mary. She was his editor and critic, and her domestic labour enabled him to travel and write.
Their son Stephen has said that, of his two parents, Mary 'was the genius'. At one point, Ellmann was travelling around Europe for weeks at a time while Mary remained in the family home in Illinois.
Pregnant, she looked after two children, a lodger and a dog. Her letters to Ellmann during this period are caustic and hilarious. We're only given snippets but they're more interesting than any of the other correspondence that Leader quotes at length throughout the volume.
The book's biggest issue is, perhaps, Ellmann himself. He was born into a wealthy family, studied at Yale, worked in well paid academic positions and generally lived a comfortable life. This is all very well but it doesn't lend itself to an interesting biography. Leader is an earnest admirer of his subject and the book is thoroughly researched but there is little here to interest the general reader.
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