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 Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: Neo-Nazi safari]
Related

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

The National

9 hours ago

• The National

Arab Strap on Kneecap, free speech and gigging in Glasgow

Just last month, it was announced that TRNSMT – Scotland's biggest festival – had axed Irish rap trio Kneecap from its line-up, citing "police concerns". It came after fury from politicians over a member of the group allegedly calling for the death of Tory MPs, with First Minister John Swinney weighing in that the band had "crossed the line". READ MORE: Kneecap's Mo Chara expected to request Irish translator following court room blunder Plenty of musicians – including Pulp, Massive Attack, Fontaines DC and Primal Scream – rallied behind the group, arguing there had been a "clear, concerted attempt to censor and ultimately deplatform' them. So with Arab Strap performing just days before TRNSMT kicks off, I was keen to hear where the duo stood on the issue: and frontman Aidan Moffat and instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton didn't shy away. "It's a shame they're not playing," Middleton tells me, as Moffat adds that "no one should be axed for their beliefs." Malcolm Middleton (left) and Aidan Moffat (right) (Image: Kat Gollock) He pondered: "It's funny how the people who bang on constantly about free speech are the people who are trying to take bands like Kneecap off." Moffat went on to say that the festival's organisers were "under a lot of pressure" to axe Kneecap, and that "they've bowed to it". "The irony is that by doing so they've simply amplified Kneecap's voice," he said. Moffat makes a point. After news broke that Kneecap had been axed from TRNSMT, the group announced another gig in Glasgow, three days before their scheduled appearance. It sold out within minutes. And when the trio appeared at the Magistrates Court on Wednesday, where Liam Og O hAnnaidh is accused of displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig, they were met with hundreds of people chanting "Free Palestine". "It always happens," Moffat reflects. "They try and silence someone and they just end up with a louder voice." 'I was shitting myself' As I was preparing to sit down with the duo ahead of their Queen's Park Arena gig on July 4, I was reminiscing on the last time I saw them live, at Edinburgh's Connect festival in 2023. Talking about that gig brings up some fond memories for Moffat, as he tells me: "I spent the first few songs looking at the back between singing and trying to work out where everybody was. "I spotted my daughter, who was nine or 10 at the time, right at the front with her hands over the barrier." He was "shitting himself", he said, "mainly because she does that thing where she demands that you pay her £1 every time you swear". "She'll make a lot of money out of an Arab Strap set," he adds with a laugh. (Image: Kat Gollock) The "added pressure" – as Moffat calls it – of having family and friends come to a gig happens more often in Glasgow than anywhere else. "They're usually our biggest gigs and we have a long history with the city," he says, adding that there's always "a bit more commotion and hassle" with the rush of organising the guest list. Middleton agrees that there's an extra layer to playing in Glasgow, as he points out that "there's more chance of family and friends being there". READ MORE: Folk festival mixing in wild swimming and foraging set for return "You're a wee bit – not on edge – but you want it to be good, you want it to be special," he adds. Arab Strap are taking to the stage in Leeds the night before they play at the Queen's Park Arena. But will they treat their Glasgow gig any differently? "Leeds will be really enjoyable and laid back, in Glasgow we've got to try harder," Middleton says. "Not that we won't try hard in Leeds – there's just more chance of being criticised by people you know." In a moment of panic, he tries to rescue himself: "That sounds terrible, I should shut up. I've not done an interview in ages." Arab Strap are performing at Queen's Park Arena in Glasgow on July 4.

Telegraph

15 hours ago

• Telegraph

My phone has been feeding me footage of Steve Carell in a suspicious way. And I couldn't be happier

On Tuesday this week, my Instagram feed started throwing me footage of the comedian Steve Carell dancing round a stadium in a billowing purple gown. On closer inspection, it turned out that Steve Carell had been giving the commencement address to graduating students of Northwestern University, Illinois, where one of his children is a student, another is a graduate and Steve Carell himself was receiving an honorary doctorate. As a youngster, he attended a summer school at Northwestern, which he credits with sparking his interest in improvisational comedy; he then moved to Chicago to perform at its illustrious Second City club, beginning a career so successful that he now stars in TV series and films where he doesn't even have to be funny. Imagine how easy that must be! Although he's usually funny anyway. At the graduation ceremony, he gave a keynote speech about the importance of kindness – or, as he defines it, 'basic human decency' – before breaking into a dance routine across the stage and out into the crowd. But why did my Instagram feed think I would want to see this? The previous day, I'd been talking about how I'm a massive fan of Steve Carell – did it know? I don't mean that I'd been texting or WhatsApping about it from my mobile phone, never mind posting on Insta itself (which I never do, because I've forgotten my password so can't get in; my profile is frozen to a handful of half-amusing old photos which are going to look so damn pitiful when I'm dead), I mean I'd been talking out loud. To a friend. In a room. Was my phone eavesdropping? I've also been watching a new Netflix series called The Four Seasons, featuring Steve Carell, which dropped in May. Is my Instagram aware of that? It shouldn't be! Dinosaur that I am, I watch TV on a TV. Not a phone. I don't have Instagram on the TV. I'm never logged on to Instagram and Netflix at the same time. Do you have these worries? Do you wonder why you've been sent certain adverts or messages, and what, in your house, is listening closely to everything you're saying? (God knows it's not your husband.) I don't worry too much. I suspect we don't yet need to be too intimidated by the idea of 'smart appliances'. We're told that AI is about to phase out human endeavour entirely, but my laptop can't even find my printer. Are these gadgets really ready to take over the world? My mobile doesn't work in the kitchen! Perhaps this eruption of Steve Carell dancing on my phone is evidence of sinister controlling influences at work. If so, THE JOKE'S ON INSTAGRAM because I enjoyed the footage! I love Steve Carell! I'd watch him do anything! The Four Seasons is an eight-part TV adaptation of Alan Alda's 1981 film of the same name, about a group of college friends who meet for regular holidays. In the first episode, one of the friends (Steve Carell) confides that he's planning to leave his wife, while his wife (Kerri Kenney-Silver) reveals that she's planning a surprise vow renewal to mark their 25th wedding anniversary. And we watch the fallout from there. So it's a copy of an old film, it's broken into a simplistic four-season structure and it hasn't been tremendously well received (60 per cent on the 'popcornometer' at Rotten Tomatoes, a review site I find reliable and trustworthy). And yet I loved it, I loved it. I watched it quickly, one episode at a time but near-nightly over a fortnight, and looked forward with such delight to each evening's instalment. You know the kind of show where you plan your dinner with a bit of celebratory flair, to go with the programme? It was like that. I remember popping to the butcher's for a rack of lamb to accompany episode seven (roasted pink with a garlic and rosemary crumb, Greek salad on the side: perfect for the hot weather) and thinking, 'This is like lockdown all over again.' A lot of the joy is down to the performers. I was familiar with only three of them in advance, but those three were Steve Carell, Tina Fey and (in a cameo) Alan Alda. I could probably come up with 10 actors currently alive whom I'd find equally likeable and watchable as those three, but maybe none that I find more so. The sheer pleasure of slipping into these people's company bought enough time to get used to the ones who were unknown to me and, by the end, I loved them all. If you're happily married, as I think I am, there's additional glee in being reminded how awful divorce must be. If your marriage is wobbly, this might buy you a few more years together, as the view from the parapet is not a pretty one. Steve Carell's character is besotted with his new young girlfriend, but he's required to go skiing with her mindless young chums, can't mention Woody Allen for fear of offence, and has to eat vegan paella. I watched the programme with an anonymous media source whose mind I wouldn't seek to read but, if I did, I would bet that the whole thing acted as a salutary reminder to eat your rack of lamb and be grateful for it. There's no such thing as a free lunch, even a vegan one; as Tina Fey observes, 'Even in a throuple, somebody's got to clean the air fryer.' I can't read your mind either, and I'm probably not even as smart as a smartphone, but I enjoyed this series as much as anything I've seen all year.

Daily Mirror

a day ago

• Daily Mirror

Glastonbury's secret act 'confirmed' as fans spot huge clue just days before

Glastonbury Festival is set to make a triumphant return this year, with the likes of The 1975, Neil Young and Olivia Rodrigo headlining - but there's still a mystery act on the bill Has Glastonbury Festival 's secret act accidentally been revealed? Music fans certainly think so. An American rock legend arriving in London just days ahead of things kicking off at Worthy Farm has people convinced the singer's band is set to play the hush-hush set. The iconic music festival is returning on Wednesday, with British pop band The 1975, folk star Neil Young and his band the Chrome Hearts, and US pop singer Olivia Rodrigo topping the bill. ‌ Glastonbury is running from June 25 to June 29 this year with performances from the likes of US rapper Doechii, UK singer Raye and veteran rocker Sir Rod Stewart, who will be playing during the coveted legends slot. Also performing is Irish rap trio Kneecap, US star Gracie Abrams and alternative pop singer Charli XCX. ‌ The line-up features a number of acts listed as TBA, as well as a mysterious act called Patchwork, who will take to the Pyramid Stage on Saturday. Careful not to draw speculation as to who the act could be, organiser Emily Eavis recently said: "I've been working on Patchwork for a long time." She also admitted that planning for their appearance had taken about a year for "logistical" reasons. Fans are convinced Patchwork are in fact The Foo Fighters, thanks to Dave Grohl being spotted in London recently. The rocker, who last year announced he had become a father again after an extramarital affair, was seen backstage at the Yeah Yeah Yeahs gig at the Royal Albert Hall. Grohl, who posed for a photo with American singer Amanda Palmer at the gig, is no stranger to surprise Glastonbury sets. In 2023, his band performed at the Somerset festival under the alias The Churn Ups - their first major UK gig since the death of the band's drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022. And Glastonbury fans are convinced a similar thing will be happening again this year. "Dave Grohl is in London, likely will be at the festival," one Reddit user penned as the pictures of Grohl hit social media. "Has done bits with John Fogerty in the past and other acts. Surely will be popping up at places this year?" ‌ Another added: "100% he will be milling about – I'd say a couple of guest appearances are a safe bet. Maybe Alanis for a song or Neil Young for an encore." Glastonbury Festival has sold "a few thousand less tickets" this year in a bid to avoid overcrowding, organiser Emily Eavis said earlier this month. ‌ In an appearance on the Sidetracked podcast Eavis, 45, outlined the changes that have been made to this year's festival and said music area Shangri-La is "going full trees and green space" which is "completely the opposite to anything they've done in the past". She also revealed that the festival has managed to buy some land that sits "just on the outside of the site", which will be used for crew members. She added: "We've also sold a few thousand less tickets, so it will be interesting just to see how that affects the dynamics on site." The first group of tickets for the event sold out in 30 minutes last November, with the second lot selling out in fewer than 40. Eavis said times have changed, adding: "There were years where you just couldn't sell out, you just couldn't give them (the tickets) away." Also at the festival, presenters Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw will take to the BBC Introducing stage on June 26 for a live episode of Sidetracked.