Posted by languagehat
https://languagehat.com/ellmann-loved-anecdotes/
https://languagehat.com/?p=18206
Seamus Perry reviews Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived), and I find myself enchanted — Ellmann’s book may have been the first literary biography I ever read, and just picking the hefty volume off my shelf makes me want to reread both it and Joyce. Perry begins:
Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate. Leader, himself the distinguished biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, has written an unusual and engaging book, half an account of Ellmann’s life leading up to the Joyce biography, and half a detailed history of the book’s composition and its subsequent place within Joycean scholarship. His admiration for the achievement is palpable and he describes the way Ellmann went about his task with the sympathetic warmth of a fellow labourer; but he is alert, as well, to some of the criticisms that have been made of the enterprise and gives them a fair hearing, so that the overall effect is a sort of primer in the possibilities and quandaries of literary biography. To write the biography of a biography already suggests a certain disciplinary self-consciousness. Ellmann emerges, Leader implies, as exemplary, the biographer’s biographer.
One of the excellences that Empson singled out was the happy chance of timing: the book ‘must be the last of its kind about Joyce’, he wrote, ‘because Mr Ellmann, as well as summarising all previous reports, has interviewed a number of witnesses who are now dead.’ The number of witnesses was in fact immense: Leader calculates that 330 people from thirteen countries are acknowledged somewhere or other in the biography and thanked for (as Ellmann says) having ‘made it possible for me to assemble this record of Joyce’s life’. He was evidently a disarming interviewer and managed to win round several crucial but initially unwilling participants, such as Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, and J.F. Byrne, Joyce’s best friend at university. A good deal of Ellmann’s research methodology was old-style charm. ‘He let them talk,’ one observer recalled. ‘He showed himself grateful for what they told him; now and then with a quiet question he would elicit some particular point of information, and in leaving would express his thanks again. He left them smiling and thinking, what a nice young man!’ He would write graceful follow-up letters: ‘It was very pleasant meeting you both and your charming daughter, and it is nice to know that Joyce had such good company in Zurich.’ Such a remark, Leader says with just a hint of drollery, ‘suggests the role sympathy as well as objectivity played in Ellmann’s approach’: success was sometimes a matter of ‘kindness and calculation combined’.
After some examples of Ellmann’s “tenacity of purpose,” Perry continues:
‘Ellmann loved anecdotes and good stories,’ Leader tells us, ‘and James Joyce is full of them.’ In fact, as he later recalled, the inadvertent prompt for the biography was an anecdote. Ellmann was working on his first book, a study of W.B. Yeats, and became fascinated by the story of the 20-year-old Joyce calling on the poet, seventeen years his elder, with the kindly intention of explaining where Yeats was going wrong as a writer. ‘How old are you?’ Joyce asked after a long and inconclusive discussion. Yeats gave him an approximate answer and Joyce replied: ‘I thought so. I have met you too late. You are too old.’ Ellmann was clearly enchanted: ‘As all mild men must, I was delighted by this arrogance,’ at which point he seems to have become hooked on his new subject. When he interviewed Yeats’s widow in 1945, he was keen to establish the authenticity of the tale and was delighted to find (as he thought) the story confirmed by a draft preface among Yeats’s papers which Mrs Yeats showed him. And yet, elsewhere, Yeats disputed the story, and Joyce himself dismissed it as ‘another story of Dublin public house gossip’, telling an acquaintance ‘even if I’d thought it I wouldn’t have said it to Yeats. It would have been unmannerly.’ ‘Dubliners usually make the remarks which are attributed to them,’ Ellmann says in his biography, and while it is impossible to regret that he proceeded on the basis of this most dubious axiom, you can’t help wondering how robust some of the testimony in his book really is. Empson, for example, took exception to Ellmann’s account of Joyce leaving Nora Barnacle, his intended, alone in a London park for two hours during their elopement while he called on the critic Arthur Symons. ‘She thought he would not return,’ Ellmann says. Empson considered it a libel on Nora’s character to imply that she ran away with a man of whom she could think so dimly, and he was not persuaded when he tracked down the source in the endnotes: an interview with Joyce’s sister Eva almost fifty years after the event, by which time the anecdote had acquired what he called ‘quite a high polish’. ‘This is not really a scientific way to write biography,’ Empson argued.
I said that the book’s warm reception was almost unanimous. One noisily dissenting voice was that of Hugh Kenner and part of his objection was similar to Empson’s. ‘What he asserts is so,’ Kenner says of Ellmann’s book, ‘backed by a reference to an interview with someone whose credibility we have no means of assessing.’ When a second edition came out in 1982, he returned with even more pepper, lamenting Ellmann’s gullible readiness to accept what Kenner called ‘the Irish Fact’, meaning ‘anything they tell you in Ireland’. Kenner took Ellmann’s working principle to be that ‘no good story should be rejected.’ This is hardly fair to Ellmann, who often pauses to take the measure of his witnesses. But it is true that part of the book’s appeal is precisely its character as a sort of oral history, much of it with the high polish of well- told tales. ‘A nice collection could be made of legends about me,’ Joyce wrote to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, and among other things James Joyce provides just that. Did Joyce’s father really say, when he heard that his son had hooked up with someone whose surname was Barnacle, ‘She’ll never leave him’? An interview with Eva is the only source. I have always liked the story of the young artist standing his ground in a newspaper office, refusing to rewrite a negative review of a new book. ‘I have only to lift the window and put my head out, and I can get a hundred critics to review it,’ the editor protests. ‘Review what, your head?’ Joyce answers. Your pleasure is barely dented when you discover that the endnote attributes the story to the memoirs of someone who was not present. […]
It’s not a surprise to learn that it was in locating Ulysses within real historical space and ‘identifying the characters’ who populate it, that Ellmann found himself ‘most exhilarated by my success’. It is true that Ellmann’s phrasing can make the business of writing a novel sound rather Frankensteinian at times: ‘If bits and pieces of Mrs Chance, Signora Santos, Signorina Popper and Matt Dillon’s daughter helped Joyce to design the outer Molly Bloom, he had a model at home for Molly’s mind.’ Ellmann’s friend Ellsworth Mason noted his ‘beaverosity’, but in his own pugnacious way raised the important question of the advantages to be gained by such heroic industry. ‘I do not think that the biographical details you have gathered, most of which were new to me, have clarified anything in my own mind about Joyce,’ he wrote to Ellmann. ‘They rather show that you have been having a fine time in Ireland.’ Well, that’s what friends are for, but still it is worth asking: does the origin of Mrs Purefoy’s name bring anything to a reading of the chapter in which she appears? It feels more like a private diversion on Joyce’s part, rather like his taking the name for the scurrilous Blazes Boylan from a very proper university contemporary who went on to become chief justice: ‘Joyce must have keenly enjoyed his little private joke,’ Ellmann says, but since it is private it is difficult to see what a reader of Ulysses has to do with it.
Ellmann himself conceded that his reader might well ‘wonder what was the point of hunting down problematic live models for the characters.’ But then, although vastly more diligent, he was hardly unusual in doing that: something about the sheer effort of verisimilitude of Ulysses seems always to have encouraged people to look for real people in it. According to Ellmann, the questions on everyone’s lips when the book appeared were ‘Are you in it?’ or ‘Am I in it?’ The conflation of art and life that irritated Mason clearly felt quite natural to its first readers. Joyce played along mischievously. He would tell friends that Molly Bloom was sitting at another table in the restaurant and ask them to guess who she was. ‘This game he continued for years,’ according to Ellmann: the guess was never right. Dr Richard Best, who appears in the chapter set in the National Library, ‘tall, young, mild, light’, was exasperated when people told him he was a character in Ulysses: ‘I am not a character in fiction. I am a living being,’ he protested. Nora Joyce, by contrast, seems to have been blithely untroubled by the idea that novel and history might occupy a shared space. When she was asked whether she was Molly Bloom, she replied: ‘I’m not – she was much fatter.’
That Ellmann shared that quotidian sense of the great novel is clear even from incidental touches: Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street, he says at one point, was ‘a haunt of Joyce and Bloom’, as though one might have bumped into the other. I think the effect is rather magical, but Mason, anticipating Kenner and some other more recent Joyceans, took such a cast of mind to be problematic: by bringing art and life into such close relationship, Ellmann risked abolishing the difference between them altogether. ‘You are weaving both the works and the non-works into a single, supposedly factual, fabric,’ Mason told him in a reprimanding spirit. And it is true, as several commentators have pointed out, that Ellmann does occasionally take a detail from one of Joyce’s books as evidence of the biography that we are then to understand lies behind the book, an oddly circular procedure which assumes, as Kenner said, that ‘if they got into Joyce’s fictions they were originally facts.’ For example: was Joyce miserable at school? Stanislaus said he was perfectly happy, a view corroborated by a fellow student; but Ellmann adduced the evidence of Joyce’s first novel to argue the contrary. ‘A Portrait represents him as unhappy and unwell,’ Ellmann says; but the referent of ‘him’ is Stephen Dedalus, not James Joyce, and even Leader is moved to call the slip ‘culpable’. Similarly, when Ellmann is describing the obnoxious young Joyce visiting Mullingar, he says: ‘Joyce seems to have relished buzzing the local residents with remarks like: “My mind is more interesting to me than the entire country.”’ That would indeed irritate anyone, but the only evidence of Joyce saying it seems to be a passage in Stephen Hero, the first version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is a work of fiction: again, it is Stephen rather than James who is the buzzer in question.
There’s a passage about “sheer abundance, wonderfully exemplifying what Ellmann elsewhere said he looked for in a biography: ‘as many facts as possible, organised of course, and selected, but not transformed to illustrate a thesis’ … Ellmann, too, believed in the authority of detail: ‘What is the name of the town in which the Karamazovs live?’ was the sort of question he liked to ask his class, rather than anything more existential.” Then:
Still, Ellmann’s book is something besides a compendium of Joycean detail. When a journalist praised him for having ‘accumulated such a heavy mass of material on Joyce and asked, in effect, whether he had purposefully refrained from interpreting it’, Ellmann responded, ‘with a charming smile’, that ‘he had been under the misapprehension that he had interpreted it.’ What he seems to have meant was that his book put forward a reading of Ulysses – one that, once again, deviated from what might seem the modernist norm. The novel largely follows the meandering progress of Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin on 16 June 1904, working throughout a parallel between his humdrum adventures and the heroic antics of Ulysses in The Odyssey. The prevailing view at the time, and the one espoused by Pound and Eliot, was that the Homeric parallel was satirically intended, and Bloom ‘a debased or mock-heroic figure, a symbol of decline’. Ellmann was a fine literary critic as well as biographer, and the piece of criticism in James Joyce that has always most impressed me is his account of Joyce’s reimagining of the mock-heroic, something that could only be the work of someone who loved jokes. To say that Bloom is a modern-day Ulysses is funny: when he wags his ‘knockmedown cigar’ in the face of the bigoted nationalist in Barney Kiernan’s bar, for instance, he is a cut-price version of Ulysses brandishing his spear before the monstrous Cyclops. That juxtaposition is, indeed, a piece of mock-heroic, and the point was to comment on the shortcomings of the modern day. But then jokes, as Ellmann says, are not necessarily so simple, and the Joycean complication at work is what Ellmann calls ‘the ennoblement of the mock-heroic’. For the cigar in its way is magnificent, and Bloom’s faltering response to the prejudice he encounters genuinely heroic. Bloom may lack the ancient military virtues, but he possesses the secular qualities of ‘prudence, intelligence, sensitivity and good will’. And he is kind to animals. […]
Something of this rich Joycean mock-heroic energy gets into Ellmann’s own voice: ‘I am endeavouring to treat Joyce’s life with some of the same fullness that he treats Bloom’s life,’ he told a friend. As Leader says, it is a wonderfully witty book, and its wit comes from Ellmann’s keeping fully in mind the heroism of Joyce’s artistic life and the frequent comedy of his human shortcomings. After he is beaten up at school for preferring Byron to Tennyson, he returns home with torn clothes: ‘So his sufferings for his art began,’ Ellmann writes, which is satirical and yet not untrue. The conclusion to his first trip to Paris is similarly pitched: ‘As a last gesture he seems to have gone to a theatre and a brothel, and had himself photographed wearing a heavy, ill-fitting coat and a long-suffering look.’ He is always drily funny on the subject of Joyce’s finances: ‘James saw no reason to limit his brother’s sacrifices to genius, especially when genius had a family to support.’ And there are many variations on the subject of Joyce’s drinking: ‘He engaged in excess with considerable prudence.’ ‘Nobody seems to be inclined to present me in my unadorned prosaicness,’ Joyce complained when he began to be fêted by admirers. Ellmann is finely alert to it, and in tune with the characteristic ‘double aim’ with which Joyce regarded his own heroism. ‘May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’ a devoted young man asks. ‘No,’ Joyce replies. ‘It did lots of other things too.’
The form of Ellmann’s appreciation of Joyce naturally places Ulysses, and more particularly Leopold Bloom, at the heart of the career. Once we get into the world of Finnegans Wake, the realm of the ordinary has dropped out of sight and the mixed nobility of Joycean mock-heroic is no longer easily available. Serious Joyceans, Leader reports, often cite this as a shortcoming, along with Ellmann’s more general lack of engagement with the non-realist elements of Ulysses; but I cannot regret it myself. Ellmann said, as if prophetically, that he wanted ‘to be read by amateurs as well as professionals’. The reason Ulysses appeals most is Leader’s real subject in the biographical parts of his own work, and as Ellmann emulated Joyce, so Leader, on a smaller scale, emulates Ellmann. Ellmann told Stanislaus he wanted to give ‘as accurate a picture as possible of the relatively uneventful outward life’, a task which he supposed ‘close to your brother’s own method in Ulysses’.
I too find it hard to regret Ellman’s venial failings (gullibility, a surfeit of pointless facts), since they are inseparable from what makes his book so good, and of course one can then go on to read other biographies with other slants. But I do wish he hadn’t been so ready to confuse the life with the fiction; it seems to be a hard sin to avoid, but people who write about novelists should try harder. At any rate, I look forward to the reactions of our resident Joyceans.
https://languagehat.com/ellmann-loved-anecdotes/
https://languagehat.com/?p=18206
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