Ellmann's Joyce - Zachary Leader

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the complete review - biography / literary

Ellmann's Joyce

by
Zachary Leader

general information | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Ellmann's Joyce
Author:	Zachary Leader
Genre:	Biography
Written:	2025
Length:	358 pages
Availability:	Ellmann's Joyce - US
	Ellmann's Joyce - UK
	Ellmann's Joyce - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

The Biography of a Masterpiece and its Maker

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Our Assessment:

B+ : solid, informative double-biography

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

       Ellmann's Joyce is, as the subtitle explains, The Biography of a Masterpiece and its Maker -- the surnames sufficing to make clear what and who are meant: Richard Ellmann as maker, and his (American) National Book Award-winning 1959 James Joyce-biography the 'masterpiece'. Author Leader is himself a practiced biographer -- notably of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow --, and here turns his attention to a fellow-biographer and the most famous and influential of his biographies, making for a promising-sounding exercise.
       The double-portrait is divided into two main parts, first: 'The Biographer', then 'The Biography' (with a: 'Coda: Last Years', to finish things off). While written with an eye to the work that was to come -- the Joyce-biography --, Leader's presentation of Ellmann in the first part is fairly traditional biography -- though it leads only to 1952, "the year he began to work seriously on the biography". Ellmann's path is then also followed in the next section, but the focus there is on James Joyce and Ellmann's work on it, and while Leader does track and summarize the essentials of the rest of Ellmann's life, specifically (and well) in the Coda, Ellmann's Joyce is not (and not meant to be) a full biography of Ellmann (and so, for example, there's not very much about his work on his later, other big biography, of Oscar Wilde).
       Among the interesting observations Leader makes early on is regarding the "doubleness" of the Jewish upbringing of Ellmann and his brothers, with ties to the religion something that the parents emphasized throughout their lives, yet while:

Few parents could have been more active in Jewish affairs, including the affairs of their synagogue, than James and Jean Ellmann, yet neither Dick nor his brothers received a bar mitzvah.

       (This is one area Leader might have explored in greater depth: on the one hand, Ellmann wrote to his parents when he got married that while his new wife: "has no religion herself, she understands the importance to me of retaining mine" -- while on the other, Leader quotes Ellmann-daughter Lucy noting that: "before he died a nurse asked him what religion he had, if any. I volunteered 'Jewish,' but my father vetoed this and said to me 'none'".)
       Ellmann went to Yale, graduating in 1939 but then continuing to get his MA (1941) and, eventually, PhD (1947) there as well. He also travelled to Europe as a tourist in the summer of 1939 -- even lingering in France into September -- and then served in variety of capacities in the military starting in 1942 (his poor eyesight keeping him out of any combat role). He submitted his proposal for his dissertation (on Yeats) in 1941 -- amazingly, it was: "the first dissertation ever approved by the Yale English Department on a twentieth-century topic". (As Leader quotes, it helped that: "by 1939 he was properly dead, an essential condition to be considered literature at the time".)
       Leader is good on the rising academic -- landing, in 1951, at Northwestern University (as: "the youngest full professor of English in a major university in the United States"). It is here then that the focus turns to James Joyce -- with much of the inspiration and then work however found elsewhere, starting in Dublin in 1945, when Ellmann met Yeats' widow.
       Biographer Leader is a good guide to the work that goes into a biography such as Ellmann's, especially in the hunting down of documentation -- Joyce already then popular enough that there were numerous collectors, and material was spread far and wide --, making contacts, and getting to speak with those with first-hand knowledge of the subject.
       Among the interesting bits is also how long it took Ellmann to figure out exactly what he wanted to write, and what form he wanted the book to take, even as he was already intensively researching Joyce's life. It's interesting also to hear of how he felt and worried about a variety of competitors, and the whole idea of a 'race' being on to publish first (with Ellmann publishing several 'discoveries' in articles before the final book came out). (The whole competition-idea among scholars seems a bit unseemly and/or absurd -- surely it's the end-result that matters, the getting-the-information-out-there, not who does so first, at least when it comes to this sort of subject-matter, but apparently academics need to play these kinds of games.)
       Leader makes one of the essential points about Ellmann's undertaking very well:

For Ellmann, Ulysses is at the center of his understanding of Joyce, both as man and as artist, the place where his character is most fully revealed, the point of connection or conjunction between the Joyce of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the Joyce of Finnegans Wake.

This perspective informs Ellmann's approach, for better and worse, and certainly yields remarkable results in profiling the young(er) Joyce (with Leader offering some impressive examples of Ellmann's thoroughness and detective-work in researching it and making connections between Joyce's life and that work) -- even as it then leaves the later Joyce, and especially the work he devoted those later years to, Finnegans Wake, somewhat at sea.
As Ellmann acknowledges in considering the reactions to the book:

For readers of James Joyce -- even non-Joycean readers such as Ellmann's father -- too little is said not only about Finnegans Wake and the nonrealist elements in Ulysses, but about the role of language as a subject for Joyce, including his skepticism about fiction's claims to faithful representation.

Leader also suggests that:

Ellmann's decision to draw the epigraphs from Finnegans Wake is perhaps a sign of authorial anxiety. They are there to reassure or impress specialist readers.

Among the titbits of interest is also Ellmann's title-thoughts, as he apparently considered titling the book variously: The Golden Codger, The Wistful Tyrant, and Languid Fury, before settling "for a time on 'The Hawk-Like Man". (Unimaginative though it may be, the plain James Joyce seems to have worked out just fine.)
Leader also notes specifically the quality of Ellmann's writing -- the prose of the biography: "literary, at times antique in diction and phraseology", while: "Even those Joyceans who are wary of Ellmann's shaping and tidying, admire his prose". Among his good observations is also that:

Ellmann's prose, like his attitude to Joyce more generally, can be viewed as combining Joycean as well as Yeatsian elements or impulses.

       (Ellmann's dissertation was on Yeats, refashioned then as his first book-publication, Yeats: The Man And The Masks (1948).)
       Leader is also good on the reactions to James Joyce, and also how they changed over time (e.g. how: "In the 1970s, scholars began to chafe under claims that the biography was 'definitive'"). While Leader does explain some of the differences between the first and the revised, second edition (1982) -- noting also its impressive reception (reviewed in the TLS and The New York Times, among others, and awarded both the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize -- astonishing for a revised edition) -- there is disappointingly little about the work involved in that, surely an aspect of the biographer's art that would be of considerable interest; as is, Ellmann's Joyce really is a biography of the first edition of James Joyce.
       Observations as to why certain parts didn't make the original cut are sprinkled in along the way -- Leader noting, for example:

The first (1959) edition of James Joyce gives little sense of the number and nature of the erotic letters -- necessarily, given the prejudices of the day and the influence of Joyce's executors -- and the result, to some, risks distorting our view of what Ellmann called Joyce's "conjugal life."

Leader also notes that Ellmann did not follow Joyce's lead in describing many natural bodily functions -- "though in later years he was bolder", Leader explaining in an endnote that:

Times had changed, and Harriet Weaver, Joyce's patron and executor, had died (in 1961, two years after the publication of JJ). RE was indebted to and admired Miss Weaver and had been careful of her sensitivities.

       Here and elsewhere Leader notes the difficult path biographers face -- also especially with living family, but also acquaintances, and, of course, executors, all of whom want to maintain some control over the story -- and some of how Ellmann navigated this, but here, too, more (and perhaps also more forthrightness, from someone who, after all, must have faced this often himself) would have been welcome. (It's hard to overlook then also that Leader opens his Acknowledgements for this book admitting that: "My first debt is to Ellmann's daughters, Maud and Lucy, who approved the idea of this book" .....)
       The role of personal feelings and sensitivities, and varieties of glad-handing -- cropping up in attempts to elicit information or gain access to documents, as well as in dealing with (or trying to get the better of) 'competitors' and critics -- might also come as something of a shock to readers. Ellmann seems to have been particularly good at persuading people to open up to him or give him (but not others ...) access to material -- but could also be touchy, with Leader even feeling the need to add the parenthetical comment when noting that Ellmann: "bristled at criticism (hardly a unique trait)".
       Overall, Ellmann's Joyce is an engaging and interesting double-biography, of man and work -- an approach that Leader handles well. Arguably, the focus could be even tighter, but Ellmann's life was an interesting one beyond the in/direct work on the biography, and Leader manages a decent balance (though, indeed, some of the glimpses he offers, especially of Ellmann's less-thoroughly covered post-1959 life, suggest that Ellmann would be well worth a biography all on his own).

       I do note that I did find the Index frustrating. There is method to it, but when figures are only more or less incidentally mentioned the reference is consistently not indexed. By way of example:

Patricia Hutchins, at work on the book that would become James Joyce's World (1957), did, too, asking Jolas directly if she knew where Joyce's letters to Harriet Weaver were (a number were in the trunk). In response, as Carol Shloss, Lucia's biographer, puts it, Jolas "equivocated."

The index-entries for 'Hutchins, Patricia' and 'Jolas, Maria' point readers to the page where this passage appears (271), but the index-entry for 'Weaver, Harriet' does not (though it points to numerous other mentions of the significant figure); 'Shloss, Carol' does not appear in the Index at all (and, indeed, a considerable number of incidentally mentioned figures don't rate entries in the Index).
Perhaps the Index-mentions are sufficient for most readers, but my preference is for a more thorough (read: exhaustive) tracking of everyone that gets mentioned, and every mention of them.

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 April 2025

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Links:

Ellmann's Joyce:

Harvard University Press publicity page

Reviews:

Publishers Weekly

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Books on Books
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See Index of Literary Essays

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About the Author:

Author Zachary Leader was born in 1946.

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