Hot on the scent: Ellmann’s life of Joyce

In Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker (Harvard, £29.95/$35), Zachary Leader, the biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, portrays “the influence of the biographer’s life on the biography.”  The first part of his fascinating book describes “where Richard Ellmann lived, what his wife and family were like, who his friends and colleagues were, the social life he led, what and how he taught, and what else he wrote”.  The second part focuses on how Ellmann decided to write the biography of James Joyce, “the factors involved in its making and the nature of the resulting work”. Leader brilliantly conveys the life-writer’s exciting pursuit of Joyce’s family and friends, and his frequent discovery of vital information.

I had personal contacts with many of the leading figures in this book, who gave me a greater understanding of Ellmann’s milieu.  I was a colleague of his close friend Ellsworth Mason; I once helped Joyce’s bibliographer John Slocum break open his safe to get Joyce’s papers; I interviewed Ellmann’s academic enemy Hugh Kenner for my biography of Wyndham Lewis and his rival Harry Levin for my life of Edmund Wilson.  I also met Ellmann’s editor Sheldon Meyer and Sir Isaiah Berlin, who invited Ellmann to teach at Oxford.

I first saw Richard Ellmann (1918-87) at the Modern Language Association conference in New York in 1962, when he entered the vast room to give the impressive keynote address and waved to the crowd like an amiable celebrity.  He wrote nine perceptive, encouraging and helpful letters to me between 1972 and 1982, thanked me for the articles I’d sent, praised my work and tactfully suggested some insights that could strengthen my arguments.  In December 1974 we had lunch at New College, Oxford, and returned to his house at 39 St. Giles for more talk and drinks.  His wife Mary was painfully ill and confined to a wheelchair, and he cared for her with tender devotion.  He successfully recommended me for a teaching job in America and for a Guggenheim Fellowship.  On February 9, 1981 he regretted that he could not accept my invitation to lecture at Colorado: “My trip to Missouri will be extremely difficult to arrange because I cannot leave Mary for long, and I think that is the only excursion I dare make during my short stay.”  In March 1986, during my book tour in England, we had dinner at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford.

Born in Highland Park, Michigan, near Detroit, Ellmann was the son of a prominent Jewish lawyer.  But Richard was a cultural rather than a religious Jew.  He was 5 feet, 9 inches tall, weighed 153 pounds in his 20s, shared defective vision with Joyce and was “almost blind without his glasses”.  Declared 4F by the army during World War II, he could not become an officer, was never sent overseas and felt demeaned by his status as an enlisted man.  His  wartime Navy work was partly supervised by the wealthy scholar Wilmarth Lewis, who had “the temperament of a dissolute Roman emperor—love of sycophants—vanity—cruelty when roused—malice”.

In 1949 Ellmann married the “acerbic, unsentimental and blunt” Irish-Catholic American Mary Donahue.  Born near Boston in 1921, she earned her B.A. at the University of Massachusetts and her doctorate at Yale.  She taught at Minnesota and Wellesley, where she was denied promotion for discouraging students and condemning the Romantic poets she taught.

Always respectful, Ellmann was “pained, patient and propitiating” when his parents disapproved of his marrying a gentile.  His father, who carried a portable Wailing Wall, lamented that Richard and his children would lose their Jewish identity.  He asked, with exaggerated self-pity, “How are we to withstand this strain?  How much can one human being take?”  Mary, who wrote the pioneering Thinking About Women in 1968, said her father-in-law “turned her into a feminist”.  They named their son Stephen for the fictional Stephen Dedalus and for Joyce’s grandson, their daughters Maud for Yeats’ great love Maud Gonne and Lucy for Joyce’s daughter Lucia.

Like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, Richard Ellmann had “prudence, intelligence, sensitivity and good will” and was “tolerant, well-mannered, genial, gentle and level-headed”. He accepted harsh criticism, won favour with deferential modesty and once confessed, “I am sure that my article has many flaws, and I wish I could claim it had been done hurriedly.”  But “he was competitive as well as mild-mannered, fierce in protecting what he saw as his discoveries”.  Bold yet trustworthy, patient and persistent, his “eager beaverosity” was always hot on the scent and he was “one of the canniest literary detectives of any decade”.

After earning his B.A., M.A. and doctorate at Yale, Ellmann taught at Harvard, Northwestern, Yale, Oxford and Emory University in Atlanta.  He remained at Northwestern because “it topped every other salary he was offered and allowed him princely teaching loads. . . . He had one course the first semester, two courses the second semester and every third year off with full pay.”  At 31, he was the youngest full professor at a major American university.  He accepted Yale’s offer in 1968, but managed to persuade Northwestern “to defer his departure for two years, the second year on paid leave.”

He had persuaded Yeats’ widow to cooperate on his Yale dissertation that became his first book.  Though Ellmann didn’t have “a mystical bone in his body” and A Vision is the worst book Yeats ever wrote, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) focused on his spiritual sources and influences.  The Identity of Yeats (1954) later analysed the patterns of his poetry.  Yeats’ mystical obsessions were very different from Joyce’s hard-headed rational views.  With youthful arrogance, Joyce actually told Yeats: “You are too old for me to help you.”

Ellmann regarded Ulysses as Joyce’s masterpiece, but at Northwestern he organized an expert Finnegans Wake reading group to search for all possible puns, allusions and neologisms.  The eminent critic Christopher Ricks justly condemned Finnegans Wake as “tragically wasteful and preposterous and bankrupting”.  Joyce would have included many strange words from accidental typos if he’d composed the novel on a computer.

Ellmann’s biographies opposed and prevailed against the current academic dogmas: first New Criticism that concentrated on explicating the text, then Theory that ignored it.  He said that when doing research in Dublin, “My big problem is people stealing my stuff; and since a lot of other people have the same problem we all live haunted lives.”  But he won the trust of people who knew Joyce, and persuaded them to reveal what they preferred to hide and he was keen to know.  He was always persistent, and recalled that Joyce’s friend and translator Valery Larbaud was “3/4 paralyzed and can only speak a rare word or two, but managed by signs and stammers to give me some rather interesting points.”

He wrote that “Joyce was the first to endow an urban man of no importance with heroic qualities” and that he himself “endeavored to treat Joyce’s life with some of the same fullness that he treats Bloom’s life”.  His “intention was to bring the reader into sympathy with Joyce, his life and his work, while not sacrificing honesty and objectivity”. Joyce’s character was clearly marred by “sponging, drunkenness, selfishness”, but Ellmann believed his “flaws and failings mix with noble abilities and virtues”. One critic wrote: “although he was honest enough to include much that was unflattering about Joyce’s selfishness, his neglect of his children [though he was devoted to the mentally ill Lucia] and his exploitation of his brother while writing Ulysses, he overrode those elements with a narrative of his own about the essential decency of a great artist.”  On completing the book in March 1958 he “felt a sudden pang at finishing and a strange excitement—it seems inconceivable it should be done, even in this form.”  James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (1982) included the whole of the first edition with the new material expertly slipped in.

Joyce believed “Imagination is memory” and no remembered incident in his life was wasted.  His mistaken suspicion that his Trieste friend Ottocaro Weiss had an affair with his wife Nora recalls his earlier unfounded suspicion that his Dublin friend Vincent Cosgrave had slept with Nora before Joyce did.  He portrayed these fears in Richard Rowan’s jealousy in his play Exiles and Leopold Bloom’s response to Molly’s adulteries in Ulysses.

Ellmann bravely and rightly risked censure by publishing in his edition of Joyce’s Selected Letters (1975) his so-called “dirty letters”, meant to excite Nora when he travelled from Trieste to Dublin.  We learn from these letters that Nora was delightfully practiced in frottage.  When Joyce told Nora, “Your letter is worse than mine,” it was high praise indeed.  He recalled that during their early courtship, “You slid your hand inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes.”  This masterful passage combines a dramatic sexual act—softly, tickling, gradually, slowly, and promise of more to come—with his lyrical exaltation and her Madonna-like innocence.

Ellmann worked on Oscar Wilde from 1966 to 1987.  His decision to take on this ambitious project was as momentous for him as it was for Edward Gibbon to plan The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”  In April 1988 I reviewed Ellmann’s life of Oscar Wilde, finished two months before his death: “This sympathetic and humane biography is written with elegance and verve.  Structured like a classical tragedy, it rises to a peak of glory followed by a poignant descent into prison, exile and penury.  It is a portrait of the artist as well as a cultural history of the age.”  Ellmann’s brave struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease was like Joyce’s struggle with blindness.

Some errors have crept into this text, which should read: “northern” (33),

“And will pardon” (108), “MacCarthy” (146), Bard College is only 90 miles north of Manhattan (160), “University of Maine in Bangor” (160), “Macdonald” (180), Ibsen wrote in Danish (187), “Black Evening” (237), “Snot-Green” (243), “The Dead” takes place on Twelfth Night (265 & 320), “square ditch” (305),  “thirteen (not 33) languages” (335), Frederick Morgan was editor of the Hudson Review (336) and “Leopold Bloom” (337).

Zachary Leader also misses some important allusions that illuminate the meaning of his quotations: “Joyce built his art upon a rock”—Matthew 16:18; “lesser-man-than-I” —Montaigne, “On Solitude”; “Thou who hast loved me one whole day and night” —John Donne, “Woman’s Constancy”; Mary Ellmann’s visit to Trinity College, Cambridge, was “heartbreaking” because Tennyson, the subject of her dissertation, had studied there; “Joyce was difficult to see steadily or whole”—Matthew Arnold, “To a Friend”; “whoring after I. A. Richards”—T.S. Eliot, whoring After Strange Gods;  “on-the-make Sammy Glick”—the anti-hero of Budd Schulberg’s novel What Makes Sammy Run?; “TD,” whose meaning Leader finds “unclear,” is the military abbreviation for Temporary Duty, away from your official post.

The Ellmanns’ charmed life was suddenly shattered in New Haven in November 1969 when Mary suffered a ruptured  blood vessel in her brain and a disastrous surgery that left her permanently paralysed on one side.  At home Richard took responsibility for the invalid, bought the food, cooked the meals, paid the bills and did the household chores.  Their sex life ended after Mary’s stroke.  During his years at Oxford he had a secret affair with the Victorian scholar Barbara Hardy, a Jewish professor of English at Birkbeck College in London.  She portrayed their affair in her novel London Lovers (1996).

Ellmann’s life of Joyce—a triumph of style, poise and authority, of clarity, eloquence and readability—received a rapturous response.  Joyce’s friend and translator Stuart Gilbert called it “a biography that we are justified on every count in regarding as definitive.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published The Craft of Literary Biography, The Biographer’s Art and The Spirit of Biography.

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