‘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.'
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Talk about a perfect storm. On Wednesday, Giancarlo Guerrero's much-fêted debut as principal conductor and artistic director of the Grant Park Music Festival was dampened by relentless rain. Audiences scrunched under the Jay Pritzker Pavilion fringe, only to play musical chairs dodging the structure's many (and ever-changing) leaky spots. When they weren't doing that, seat shuffles and squabbles competed with the evening's violin concerto. But if Guerrero appeared unflappable onstage, it's because he's been there before. He made his sophomore appearance with the orchestra in 2014 under nearly identical circumstances, down to the solo string showcase and contemporary American opener. Despite the lousy weather, that appearance impressed festival musicians enough to fast-track Guerrero to the top of their director wishlist a decade later. 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The Grant Park corps rose above the usual downtown backing track with a fresh, focused Mahler 1. Guerrero cued the unearthly, whistling first bars with an ambiguous gesture that invited the orchestra to melt in freely. Offstage trumpets were piped through the crown of the pavilion stage, sounding mysteriously heaven-sent. When the theme arrived in the cellos, Guerrero maintained their levity and grace throughout the movement — and, in fact, throughout much of the piece, bringing an aerodynamic lightness even to the symphony's final cadence. Because Grant Park 'does things a little differently,' per Guerrero, Friday's performance reinserted Mahler's discarded 'Blumine' movement. Through a complex change of hands, the only surviving manuscript copy of 'Blumine' ended up in in New Haven, Connecticut, where it was rediscovered as part of the Mahler renaissance of the 1960s. If 'Blumine' is heard at all, it's usually as a standalone piece, for good reason: It's arresting but nearly always out-of-place amid the lustiness of the rest of the symphony. Friday's performance gave the same impression — gauzy and subtle, but stopping short of the richness and emotional abandon that would make a better case for its inclusion. Elsewhere, other idiosyncratic touches intrigued and often convinced: more perky staccatos by oboist Alex Liedtke, orchestral accents like bitter twists of a knife in the funeral march, and a slower reading of the klezmer-band interludes. In all, it endorsed Guerrero's warhorse chops as enthusiastically as his new-music acumen. Rain or shine, Grant Park is looking like a fair place to be under his baton.
