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New Statesman
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The epic of James Joyce
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. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 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 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Neo-Nazi safari] Related
Irish Examiner
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Biography of a biography is an onerous read
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. Read More Book review: Gripping tale of right v wrong
Business Insider
28-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Warburg Research Remains a Buy on YOC AG (0NN5)
In a report released yesterday, Felix Ellmann from Warburg Research maintained a Buy rating on YOC AG (0NN5 – Research Report), with a price target of €24.00. The company's shares closed last Friday at €14.75. Confident Investing Starts Here: Easily unpack a company's performance with TipRanks' new KPI Data for smart investment decisions Receive undervalued, market resilient stocks right to your inbox with TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter According to TipRanks, Ellmann is ranked #3396 out of 9536 analysts. YOC AG has an analyst consensus of Hold. Based on YOC AG's latest earnings release for the quarter ending December 31, the company reported a quarterly revenue of €11.46 million and a net profit of €2.68 million. In comparison, last year the company earned a revenue of €10.92 million and had a net profit of €2.73 million
Wall Street Journal
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Ellmann's Joyce' Review: On the Trail of Genius
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.'
