It covers the Irish writer’s entire life across 800-odd pages, filled with photographs, letters, snippets from his works, letters from friends, and just about everything you could hope for in an all-encompassing portrait of the artist. Ellmann’s James Joyce is the usually the first-thought-of book when talking literary biographies. This review is almost shamefully long, but is written for my own record of quotes and findings. One can either contemplate Brancusi’s version of James Joyce, as seen above, or read Richard Ellmann’s account. Is there a better tribute to this wizard-of-words? No Gordian solution envisioned.īooks, which open up doors to more books and more reading, become magical objects. This biography then offers a rich knot of additional literary threads that I long to disentangle. Not having read Finnegans Wake, sections of this biography I will have to revisit if I ever embark on that work of the night in Joyce's own language.Īn additional attraction of Ellmann’s version is that he is keen in pursuing the writers Joyce met and what he read, as well as in collecting his comments and views on literature. And the puzzle is not just a play on pairs of correspondences, but a meditation of what language, an array of languages, can offer. In moving through the roller coaster of his financial worries, his publishing quests, his riddled obsessions, his emotional penuries, his health issues, his anti-religion fundamentalism, his routes of exile, we are also picking pieces of the magnificent literary puzzle. In this account of a life, we never lose sight of Joyce’s writings. And a very sharp and bookish one at that. Apart from commanding an overwhelming amount of data, so much more than my bombarded brain could absorb, the strength of Ellmann’s account lies in his nature as a literary man. We recognise him in Steven, in Molly, in Bloom, in the Liffey. So in this extraordinary biography of this extraordinary writer we have Ellmann extracting the Self out of the continuous representation of the Self or Selves of James Joyce. From early on for one of them and as a late epiphany to the other. Their lives became their works, as their lives were devoted to their works. Or to escape from it.Īnd then, to add to the pertinence of these two biographies, both Joyce and Marcel Proust constructed their works out of their own lives. I am fascinated by history and as I have some difficulties with absolutes, I prefer to approach art works considering them in their context. After all, and when he was still relatively young, he sought a biographer to record his life. At least Joyce would have not minded being the center of attention. He may have also felt troubled at anyone deluding oneself that one could approach his inner being – as if he had not tried to do that himself. He would have felt dismayed at the prospect of yet another reader who uses a biography as shaky clutches in the futile attempt to approach to a writer. He would have been also irritated when I had read his Marcel Proust: A Life. Of course Marcel Proust would have frown at my reading this. Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more. Whether Joyce is putting the finishing touches on Ulysses, falling down drunk in the streets of Trieste, or talking dirty to his future wife via the postal service, Ellmann's account always shows us a genius and a human being-a daunting enough task for a fiction writer, let alone the poor, fact-fettered biographer. But in addition, Ellmann seems to have an uncanny grasp on Joyce's personality: his reverence for the Irishman's literary accomplishment is always balanced by a kind of bemused affection for his faults. He's also an admirable stylist himself-graceful, witty, and happily unintimidated by his brilliant subjects. For starters, there's his deep mastery of the Irish milieu-demonstrated not only in this volume but in his books on Yeats and Wilde. To be fair, Ellmann does have some distinct advantages. Although several biographers have thrown themselves into the breach since this magisterial book first appeared in 1959, none have come close to matching the late Richard Ellmann's achievement.
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