When Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce hit the shelves in 1959, the sheer size of the book (842 pages, 100 longer than Ulysses ) was as dazzling as the degree of detail. Joyce, who had been dead for 18 years, vividly inhabited its chapters, getting drunk, going blind, spending money, spiting enemies, cogitating, and, of course, creating a series of works that immediately made literary history. Moving briskly across the first half of the 20th century (not just a single day in Dublin), Ellmann spun a tale about the formation of a writer whose name could be mentioned in the same breath as Homer’s without irony.
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Ellmann owed his triumph, in part, to being in the right place at the right time. By the early 1950s, he had spent a year at Trinity College Dublin researching his prizewinning dissertation on William Butler Yeats, received a Ph.D. from Yale, and become an ambitious 30-something professor at Northwestern University. Yeats’s widow was ready to provide introductions in Dublin; Joyce’s most important patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and his dear friend Maria Jolas released a trove of unpublished letters. Stanislaus Joyce, his brother, had shared material from his diaries and unfinished memoir. Nelly Joyce, Stanislaus’s widow, unleashed holy-grail-grade manuscripts; so did Jolas. And Sylvia Beach, a fellow American and the fearless publisher of Ulysses, was still knocking around Paris willing to entertain questions.
From the April 1957 issue: Letters of James Joyce
You also need charm, lots of it, to make a biography like James Joyce happen. Ellmann, a virtuosic schmoozer, could get people to do his bidding without ever seeming too pushy. A delivery of coal during the winter; some chocolates, cigarettes, cocoa, or tea in any season—accompanied by a carefully worded request, such offerings could go a long way when he needed to gain (or restrict) access to material.
James Joyce (Ellmann wisely heeded his mother’s advice to drop the subtitle, The Hawk-Like Man) was immediately recognized as a masterpiece—not just a comprehensive life-and-art account of Joyce, but a genre breakthrough. Developing a style that was at once detached and ornate, Ellmann works as a historical novelist, using facts as a springboard for a subtle psychological portrayal intertwined with layered critical interpretations.
Consider, for instance, the moment when the young, unknown Joyce arrives in Rome to take a job at a bank. It’s 1906, a few years after his voluntary exile from Ireland; Joyce is all but penniless at 24. Ellmann wants to capture the way the eternal city, strewn with ruins, acts on someone who is homesick. Joyce’s “head was filled with a sense of the too successful encroachment of the dead upon the living city,” he writes. “There was a disrupting parallel in the way that Dublin, buried behind him, was haunting his thoughts.” Like the newly married, disillusioned Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the young, impressionable Joyce feels psychologically unmoored by his time in Rome. He loves and hates Ireland all at once, and out of this emotional struggle, he will end up producing “The Dead,” the final story in Dubliners. It is set in Dublin, but through Ellmann, we come to appreciate that it is also a ghost story with Roman roots—and a prelude to the universal sweep of Ulysses.
In his quest for a definitive biography of Joyce as a cosmopolitan artist, above the parochial fray, Ellmann downplayed Joyce’s interest in politics. In fact, before Joyce ever published a book, he wrote newspaper articles and delivered lectures in Italian about Irish nationalism and his disdain for British imperialism in his native country, work that shed helpful light on his fiction. “My political opinions,” he summed up in a letter to his brother, “are those of a Socialist artist.” His work is saturated with references to Irish history, politics, geography, and culture—rich in allusions, both explicit and puzzlelike, to major figures and events.
From the December 1946 issue: James Joyce
Still, to say that Ellmann is to Joyce what James Boswell is to Samuel Johnson is not too big a stretch: He didn’t arrive in time to befriend Joyce, but he got to the posthumous scene first; gathered fresh accounts; captured not just the context, but his subject’s character and his creative process. Not least, Ellmann emerged, as Boswell did, with a mold-breaking portrait that has retained an enduring power over the readers and scholars who have followed.
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