Ellmann's Joyce by Zachary Leader

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker

By Zachary Leader

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2025

Zachary Leader, no minor biographer himself with seminal works on Kingsley Amis and especially Saul Bellow, devotes his new book to a joint study of a biography and a biographer: Richard Ellmann and his mammoth 1959 biography of James Joyce, titled James Joyce. The first half of Ellmann’s Joyce is the story Richard Ellmann’s life, his time in the Navy, his time as a student at Yale, his courtship and marriage of Mary Donoghue (Leader spells it “Donahue”), and the earliest inklings, in a 1950 Kenyon Review piece on Joyce and Yeats, that he would spend years researching and chronicling Joyce, the writing of the book, and its triumphant publication. This shifts naturally into the book’s second half, which is all about James Joyce itself, the granular details of its research and composition, the flurries of correspondence, the slow, quiet agonies of research that’s intended to be exhaustive and definitive, the nervous expectations about the book’s fate – and then the story of the book’s fate, which will be well known to anybody who’s ever subsequently read anything at all about James Joyce: even now, sixty years after the book’s appearance, it’s still virtually synonymous with its subject, to the extent where other Joyce biographies feel faintly sacrilegious.

 The manuscript was finished in 1958, and the book won the 1960 National Book Award (it was beaten to the Pulitzer by Samuel Eliot Morison’s biography of John Paul Jones), and in between those two bookends, it was the recipient of loud torrents of praise from virtually every quarter of the Republic of Letters, praise such as nonfiction works virtually never receive (certainly nothing like it was to greet the publication of Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women in 1968, for instance).

The critical reception was just about as fulsome as even an egomaniac could imagine, and Ellmann was no egomaniac. Stephen Spender reviewed it for The New York Times; Horace Reynolds gave it knowing accolades in The Christian Science Monitor; the anonymous review for Time magazine rightly predicted that “It will be read as long as Joyce is read”; Dwight Macdonald reviewed it for The New Yorker; Frank Kermode wrote about it for the Spectator; Anthony Powell praised it in the Daily Telegraph; Cyril Connolly, writing in the Sunday Times, complained that he himself isn’t mentioned in the book but happily conceded that “if Joyce is a great writer, then this is a great book.” Almost alone among the titanic critics of the A-list, Anthony Cronin, writing anonymously for the Times Literary Supplement, complained essentially that the book was overdone and overpraised. “It is a pity,” he wrote, “that while so busily putting so much in (and we should be grateful for it all) he appears to have left something out.” (Ellmann was stung a bit by this and promptly wrote a whiny letter, but the immortality of his achievement was his best, unspoken riposte.)

And Leader’s own assessment of the book? Fortunately, amidst this blizzard of reception, he remembers to include it, noting Ellmann’s “freedom from doctrine or schematization” and rather charmingly appreciating the almost Bardic tone Ellmann adopts throughout James Joyce, a tone, Leader rightly notes, that Ellmann used nowhere else. “The prose of James Joyce is literary, at times antique in diction and phraseology,” Leader writes, “… The speech of literary academics can be mannered (I once heard an English professor use the word ‘perforce’ in conversation), but there is no evidence that this was true of Ellmann’s speech.”

Something of antique diction seeps not so much into Leader’s own writing as into the attitude underlying it, which is filled with respect bordering on veneration for both Ellmann and Joyce. He barely glances, for instance, at how much simple fun Ellmann’s book is to read, although he rightly mentions that the biographer so much loved telling stories that well-told stories fill his book. And Leader’s estimation of Ellmann’s curiously tilted dispassion toward his subject is spot-on and refreshingly appreciative. Cronin wasn’t the only Irish critic who found it disconcerting that Ellmann is as eager to criticize as to praise; at virtually every turn, Ellmann is right there at the great author’s elbow, taking note of every petty letter, every drunken pratfall, every dyspeptic lunch, with the scorpion’s sting of judgement often coming right at the end of the story, as when poor Oliver St. John Gogarty stupidly wanted to maintain a friendship with Joyce:

Now Gogarty, who had recently been married, wrote to Joyce in Rome, and Joyce again fended him off, this time with a formal suggestion that they meet in Italy. The reply came from New York, where Gogarty and his bride had gone on their wedding trip; he hoped to be able to accept Joyce’s “kind invitation,” and added, “I suppose I will be gladder to see you than you to see me, but I miss the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.” Stanislaus, informed of this high-flown correspondence, said his brother should have terminated it earlier, but Joyce wanted the wound kept open.

These zingers crop up like clockwork throughout the vast expanse of James Joyce, with almost every anecdote ending with something along the lines of “Like the Irish goddess, the Morrigu, Joyce fed on conflict.” It’s Ellmann’s way of guaranteeing that even readers who are bored by Joyce the man and unimpressed by Joyce the writer will love reading Joyce the book.

And then there’s this book about Joyce the book, an odd and amazing thing for even a deep-pocketed academic press to bring out. Even given the enduring prominence of Ellmann’s James Joyce and the apparently unkillable literary reputation of James Joyce, Ellmann’s Joyce is surely likewise a testimony to Leader’s own status. Leader mentions that Bellow had a wry view of literary biographies and would remark, “I’m a bird, not an ornithologist,” which would make this book what, exactly? Aside from terrific reading, that is?

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News