The epic of James Joyce

New Statesman​

2 days ago

To attempt a biography of a biography is a fresh venture. James Joyce, a life of the innovative Irish novelist who died in 1941, was published to international acclaim in 1959. The validity of its findings, and the prestige of its author, Richard Ellmann, have lasted. In Ellmann's Joyce, Zachary Leader follows the making of James Joyce with empathy for Ellmann, as well as his book and its subject. Above all, Leader, himself the biographer of Saul Bellow, does justice to Ellmann's feats of research, most strikingly by persuading a Joyce contact, Maria Jolas, not to divulge her suitcase of papers to Joyce's son, Giorgio, who would have taken possession and shut the door.
Leader devotes the second half of the book to the 'masterpiece' itself, with chapters on tracking material, the trials of publication, and rivals who raced Ellmann to his finish line. The first half of the book is the run-up: the life of the biographer up to the time he took on Joyce. 'Dick' was born in 1918 in Highland Park, Michigan, north of Detroit, to Jewish immigrants. His father, James, from Romania, was a successful lawyer. His wife, Jean Barsook, came from Kyiv. She loved books and learning, and was a prolific writer of reviews and talks for Jewish organisations. Leader captures Ellmann's personal qualities, his gentleness and unassertive tact, especially in his relations with Mrs Yeats, while gathering vital material for an earlier book on an Irish writer, Yeats: The Man and the Masks.
As a biographer, Leader is as unobtrusive and faithful as Ellmann himself, moving step by step through Ellmann's awards as a student at Yale, his wartime naval service in Charleston, South Carolina, his academic rise at Northwestern in Chicago, and in 1949 his elopement to Paris to marry Mary Donahue, a highly intelligent woman from an Irish-American background. They settled in Evanston, Illinois. Ellmann said that he first became keen on writing a biography of Joyce in 1952 when invited by a local lawyer, James F Spoerri, to look at his collection of 900 Joyce items. At that time, the only biography available was a lifeless one by Herbert Gorman from 1939, with restricted access to material.
It was Mary Ellmann's lot to mind small children at home while her husband prolonged his weeks in Europe, chasing up Joyce papers and numerous contacts. Her touching letters cry out that her life has shut down. Pregnant with a third child in April 1956, she writes, 'I live in a constant horrified contemplation of my own life… alone and burdened with stupid, monotonous work.' For the seven years between 1952 and 1959, there's the research Ellmann put first. His success ensured the dominance of monumental biography for the rest of the century and well into ours.
The most intriguing aspect of writers' lives is the link between life and work: to what extent are sources in what might appear a mundane life changed by the imagination? In Ulysses (1922), Joyce transforms an ordinary Dublin Jew into a modern-day hero, conferring on Leopold Bloom something of himself: his tolerance for weakness, vulgarity, obscenity and lust. Nothing the body does – guzzling, smelling, defecating – is too gross to include in the novel's 'yes' to the human condition. Ellmann, in turn, draws out in Joyce something of his own siding with the life of the mind against violence and prejudice.
Joyce felt an affinity for Jews as thinkers, fathers, wanderers, outsiders, people of the Word. In the 'Aeolus' episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom visits a newspaper office, filled with inflated verbiage and literal 'windbags'. But then comes notice of an orator whose voice lifts above the headlines to speak for Joyce himself. In a torrent of inspired words, Moses comes down from Sinai, radiant from his encounter with the Eternal, and in his hands, the tablets of the law 'graven in the language of the outlaw'. Joyce, too, is devising a language of his own, delivered to readers from on high.
In some ways, Ellmann was different from Joyce: not a drinker nor a cadger of loans and, as Leader puts it, 'emollient' – not given to confrontation. All the more curious, then, to find three scenes in Leader's biography which bring out unwonted heat. One happened during the war when Ellmann had an administrative post in the US Navy. 'Where's that Jew?' a senior officer asked. Ellmann, enraged, grabbed him and had to be pulled away with a warning that he could be court-marshalled.
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Another drama was Ellmann's attraction to non-Jewish women. Furious letters from his father had pressed him in vain not to marry outside the faith. Ellmann hoped to placate his parents with his wife's second name, 'Joan', instead of 'Mary'. Finally, Leader reports that when Ellmann was close to death in 1987, a nurse asked for his religion. 'Jewish,' his daughter, Lucy, suggested. 'None,' Ellmann said firmly.
He was buried not in, but outside, the Jewish cemetery at Wolvercote in Oxford. The funeral ceremony was at New College, where he'd been Goldsmith's professor of English since 1970. Yet though Ellmann, like Joyce, did not hold with a deity, his James Joyce brings out the 'god' in Leopold Bloom. 'The divine part,' as Ellmann put it, 'is simply his humanity.'
Ellmann was kind, quietly courteous, and diplomatic, yet Leader presents a man whose mildness masked boldness. In the late 1950s, it was daring to upend modernist orthodoxy (led by Joyce fans, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot) that Bloom presents a come-down in human nature as he wanders around Dublin on 16 June 1904, undergoing mock-heroic parallels with the adventures of Homer's hero, Odysseus, wandering around the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy. Ellmann is more tolerant, more attuned to Joyce's feeling for warped fellow beings, when he contends that Joyce ennobled the mock-heroic by making it pacifist.
Like Ellmann reporting on Joyce, Leader is careful about truth, its complexity and gaps. One gap is the part played by Joyce's wife in their so-called dirty letters. Joyce teased Nora that one of her letters was 'worse' than his own. Leader has reason to assume that Ellmann did read Nora's letters, but he did not mention them in the biography nor did he publish them in his edition of Joyce's Selected Letters (1975). Nora's biographer, Brenda Maddox, protested that Ellmann's omission diminished Nora. Leader explains this would have been contrary to Ellmann's intention which, it's implied, was protective. Leader grants that Ellmann might have been 'squeamish'. It's this kind of care for nuanced truth that makes for trust in Ellmann's Joyce.
Part of truth-telling, as Ellmann saw it, is to maintain detachment, and this position was in line with the modernist virtue of 'impersonality', laid down by Eliot in an influential essay of 1919. Though Joyce did pose as impersonal when he gave out that a writer should detach from his material like a god 'paring his fingernails', he himself did not practise impersonality. As Ellmann's research made abundantly clear, 'nothing has been admitted into the book [Ulysses] which is not in some way personal and attached' to Dublin life – Bloom, for instance, derives from a Hungarian Jew known in the city, and Bloom's wife, Molly, derives partly from Nora Joyce – but what makes for art is Joyce's will to find the uncommon in what is common.
Does the accuracy vital to biography preclude art? Is this a limited, documentary genre or might imaginative truth co-exist with factual truth? Can biography lend itself to narrative, selection, even subjectivity? The writer Ann Wroe, reconceiving the obituary, believes that the soul is not to be found in lists of achievements but in fleeting intimate moments – 'that unreachable thing'. It's not unlike the 'epiphanies' distilled by Joyce in Dubliners.
One of Ellmann's Oxford colleagues, Bernard Richards, recalls that, in the 1980s, when he asked Ellmann how he was getting on with his biography of Oscar Wilde, 'he said something like 'I am up to 1882.'' How studiedly chronological this is. The line withholds a figure in the carpet (a defining pattern to be discerned in the oeuvre of a great writer, a challenge put forward by Henry James in his tale, 'The Figure in the Carpet'). I say 'withholds' because Ellmann did, at one stage, contemplate a shorter biography and assured his editor that he had a 'coherent' idea of Joyce. The editor vetoed this and Ellmann complied.
Leader is a backer of Ellmann's model of biography as 'record'. The fullest record, it's implied, outdoes other forms of the genre. For him, there's no end to material, no bar to quantity. In the final paragraph of Leader's biography, an agenda comes to the surface: 'This book has been an attempt to show how and why long biographies ought to be written.'
It's a strange conclusion. Does it mean that since Richard Ellmann excelled, all future biography should conform to the outsized model? Surprised though I am, given the fertile diversity of the genre across the ages, I do still affirm, in the words of Molly Bloom, 'yes I will Yes' to Ellmann's determination to put the writer's work at the centre of the life. His subtle readings point to the autobiographical veins in Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and 'The Dead'. And an admiring 'yes' also to Ellmann's integrity when he told me – sitting in a corner over coffee at an Oxford lunch – that he was turning down an opportunity to write the authorised biography of TS Eliot, because this did not come with freedom to state truth.
A revised edition of Lyndall Gordon's 'The Imperfect Life of TS Eliot' is published by Virago
Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker
Zachary Leader
Harvard University Press, 464pp, £29.95
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[See also: Neo-Nazi safari]
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