This is metabiography: the biography of a biographer. As such, it is a very niche category – James Boswell comes to mind as a biographer who has had his own life written, but there was much more to Boswell than “just” his Life of Johnson.
Richard Ellmann, similarly, had other achievements to his name than his deservedly famous biography of James Joyce, but there is no doubt that he would not be receiving the somewhat less than full biographical treatment here accorded him without the Joyce work.
This truth is recognised in Zachary Leader’s title and also in the structure of the book, which is divided into two roughly equal parts. The first part deals with Ellmann’s life and work prior to embarking on the Joyce biography, the second with the writing and influence of the biography itself.
The years subsequent to that work – which was first published in 1959, with a revised edition in 1982 – are dealt with in a brief “Coda” which brings us to Ellmann’s death in 1987.
Ellmann’s substantial body of writing after the Joyce biography receives minimal attention. There is brief mention of some of it, but nothing like an adequate treatment. We are belatedly informed, on page 347, that this later work “is beyond the remit of this book”.
Instead, the “Coda” is mainly devoted to an account of a long-running affair the esteemed biographer had in Britain with the Victorian era scholar Barbara Hardy. This occurred while Ellmann’s wife, Mary, required care following an aneurysm in 1969.
His children, who were not aware of this liaison, are forgiving in the circumstances. The affair is treated as an afterthought, and for most readers that is all it will be. The chief interest and focus of the life of Richard Ellmann lie elsewhere.
The first part of this biography, then, can be seen as a prelude to the major biographical achievement. It goes from Ellmann’s birth in 1918 in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, to his service in US Naval Intelligence during the second World War.
Then comes his teaching and scholarship in the US, mostly in Northwestern University, followed by his first two books, Yeats: the Man and the Masks, and The Identity of Yeats.
These are, in fact, his main accomplishments other than the Joyce book, and owed much to his early encounters with Mrs George Yeats when he came to Ireland in late 1945. Ellmann, as with the Joyce work, got in early: Mrs Yeats supplied him with much information and much unpublished material, leading to the writing of two seminal Yeats studies.
Leader, a distinguished biographer, with lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow to his credit, provides the fullest account yet available of the writing of the great James Joyce biography. This topic has been studied already, notably by Amanda Sigler and John McCourt, but there is more detail here than previously provided.
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There is also some interesting theorising on the overall qualities of Ellmann’s work. Two main issues arise – one on Ellmann’s methods and purpose in writing it, and the other as to how it stands up and works in today’s world – a long, long time after it first appeared, and even after the revision.
As for the method, Ellmann personally, by all accounts and from my own slight observation, came across as a gentle soul, a “bland and courtly humanist”, as Joyce described his former mentor, Father Conmee. But he could be pretty ruthless when it came to fending off potential competitors, and also at times manipulative in securing his goals as a biographer.
That the methods used in putting this massive work together were not always edifying comes as no surprise. A great deal was at stake and Ellmann seems to have been quite conscious that this was his potential bid for his own immortality – a bid that has indeed succeeded.
As for its current status, at one level it remains as high as ever, since nothing else has come remotely close to replacing it: the most recent effort, by Gordon Bowker, offers next to nothing extra and lacks Ellmann’s depth and insights, not to mention style.
At another level, though, Joyce remains one of the most intensely studied writers today (unlike some other Modernists, his stock has never really fallen) and it is not surprising that various flaws, errors and omissions have been found in Ellmann’s work.
The chronology is sometimes confused and the depiction of Joyce is over-reliant on the attitude of his brother Stanislaus, one of Ellmann’s principal informants. There is too close a match-up between the fiction and the actual life, and there are misinterpretations – one that has recently come to light is in Ellmann’s account of the reconciliation between son and father in 1909.
Leader acknowledges much of this, but still stoutly defends the worth of the biography. And ultimately, I think, he is right. The book has two big advantages: it was written almost as close as could be hoped to the events it depicted, meaning many of the major participants were still alive (despite occasional distortions this might entail) and, perhaps above all, it is compulsively readable.
There is a strong indication that Nora’s side in the famous sexual correspondence with Joyce was destroyed
It is a triumph of sheer style, a paradigm of the biographer’s art, a literary creation like Boswell’s – and to that large extent it never can grow obsolete.
Leader’s own work does not quite scale those heights, nor does it claim to, but it is, really, more than just a biography. It is an exploration of the making of the very craft it exemplifies, a fascinating study of the creation of two legends: that of the writer with whom Ellmann’s work deals and that of the biography itself. It has much to reveal about the interactions among both family and followers of Joyce, both among themselves and with their would-be biographer.
It has its own share of errors – Dublin’s Joyce was not Hugh Kenner’s first book, the Paris gallery where many Joyce manuscripts were displayed and subsequently sold to the US was called La Hune and not La Haine, a pandybat was not a wooden bat but made of hard, reinforced leather (painful personal experience at the receiving end – the mistake is all the more surprising because Stanislaus Joyce is quoted earlier describing it accurately). But it is still a fascinating contribution to the whole enormous complex that now surrounds the name, James Joyce.
One other issue raised by this work needs to be addressed. There is a strong indication that Nora’s side in the famous sexual correspondence with Joyce was destroyed by Ellmann and Maria Jolas in the 1950s. If so – and it’s not certain – we have been consciously deprived of hearing Nora’s voice. What she had to say might well have been deeply uncomfortable for many people at many levels, but that is the whole point: a third party has pre-decided that question for us, leaving us with many unanswerable questions.
Terence Killeen is Research Scholar at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin, and the author of Ulysses Unbound: A Reader’s Companion to ‘Ulysses’
