Where to begin with a book about a book about the writer of a book regularly acknowledged as the most important novel of the twentieth century? It is a question that will surely dog every reviewer of Zachary Leader’s biography of Richard Ellmann’s celebrated biography, the masterly James Joyce.
First published in 1959 and lauded by Anthony Burgess, among others, as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century”, Ellmann’s epic has gone on to form the cornerstone – for better or for worse – of all Joyce scholarship since, while also becoming the first port of call for even the most casual of Joyce readers. Winning the National Book Award for its first edition and, twenty-three years later, the James Tate Black Memorial prize for its second, Ellmann’s biography not only provided academia with more forensically researched material on the life and writings of Joyce than had previously been believed possible to source, but also altered the parameters of what serious biography could be, and challenged accepted notions about the size and nature of the audience such a work might be expected to reach. Throughout Ellmann’s Joyce: The biography of a masterpiece and its maker, Leader – with fine biographies of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow already in his bibliography – returns to Ellmann’s oft-stated wish for James Joyce not only to be considered of the highest scholarly and academic value, but to succeed in appealing to “the general reader” too. Belonging to this latter category myself, I have always been grateful to Ellmann for taking such a democratizing approach to this most despotic of authors, just as I am now to Leader for following suit. Indeed, if the TLS were a different sort of publication, I might be tempted to add that this is because Ellmann’s Joyce not only painstakingly fills in many blanks about Ellmann and the arduous creation of said masterpiece, but also delivers a right rollicking read.
Divided into two parts, “The Biographer” and “The Biography”, the book opens with a deep dive into the Ellmann family history. The son of Romanian and Russian-Ukrainian Jews, who had emigrated to the US at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ellmann grew up in a high-achieving, politically active household in Highland Park, Michigan. The professional achievements of his father, James – as one of the youngest municipal court judges in the state and, later, as…
