James Joyce, New and Revised Edition

by Richard Ellmann

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. To be fair, Ellmann does have some distinct advantages. 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. He's also an admirable stylist himself--graceful, witty, and happily unintimidated by his brilliant subjects. But in addition, Ellmann seems to have an uncanny grasp on Joyce's his reverence for the Irishman's literary accomplishment is always balanced by a kind of bemused affection for his faults. 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.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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Ireland, History, Biography Memoir, Irish Literature, Literature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Richard David Ellmann was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Kalliope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course Marcel Proust would have frown at my reading this. He would have been also irritated when I had read his Marcel Proust: A Life. 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 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. At least Joyce would have not minded being the center of attention. After all, and when he was still relatively young, he sought a biographer to record his life.

My interests are not only literary. I am fascinated by history and as I have some difficulties with absolutes, I prefer to approach art works considering them in their context. It helps to form my viewpoint. Or to escape from it.

And then, to add to the pertinence of these two biographies, both Joyce and Marcel Proust constructed their works out of their own lives. Their lives became their works, as their lives were devoted to their works. From early on for one of them and as a late epiphany to the other.

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. We recognise him in Steven, in Molly, in Bloom, in the Liffey... 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. And a very sharp and bookish one at that. In this account of a life, we never lose sight of Joyce’s writings. 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. And the puzzle is not just a play on pairs of correspondences, but a meditation of what language, an array of languages, can offer. 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.

An 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. This biography then offers a rich knot of additional literary threads that I long to disentangle. No Gordian solution envisioned.

Books, which open up doors to more books and more reading, become magical objects.

Is there a better tribute to this wizard-of-words?

One can either contemplate Brancusi’s version of James Joyce, as seen above, or read Richard Ellmann’s account.

Or both.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

118th book of 2021.

This review is almost shamefully long, but is written for my own record of quotes and findings. Ellmann’s James Joyce is the usually the first-thought-of book when talking literary biographies. 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. Attempting to remotely capture the depth of Ellmann’s book would be fruitless; it feels as if every anecdote, every thought, every moment, of Joyce’s life is within these pages.

As a general rule, I don't like to spend more than a month on a single book, whatever it is. There have been some slips: Infinite Jest took me a month and several days, but otherwise I like to keep all my reading within a month of starting. This biography took me over 2 months to read, savouring everything, underlining things, writing in the margins, attempting to commit it all to memory. The book itself is a hardback-sized paperback with Bible-thin pages and small text. It is a book to take your time with. As far as reviewing it goes, I have settled on a method to attempt to control it: I will write my thoughts and favourite quotes from each 'era' of Joyce's life, ending with a photograph at the bottom of each section (from Ellmann's book) of his corresponding age (thereabouts). So, firstly, his boyhood.

Ellmann, as with all other walks of his life, describes his childhood in detail, and the first chapter of the biography is even about Joyce's family before James. What struck me as early as this, Ellman points out that things that were happening and being said as early as Joyce being under 10-years-old would later find themselves retold in his masterpieces of modernism. It seemed there was nothing that did not escape Joyce's notice or memory. The best anecdote from his early years is simply this, 'James, upon arrival [at Clongowes] was asked his age, and replied, 'Half past six,' a phrase that became for some time his school nickname.' Joyce, when he set on reading, became, as expected, voracious: 'he read a great many books of all kinds at high speed. When he liked an author, as Stanislaus observed, he did not stop until he had read everything by him.' Joyce had an undying love for Dante and Ibsen, both of whom he preferred to Shakespeare by a long-shot. At school he did well enough, but anecdotes such as this one show his characteristic humour,

Joyce and another student, George Clancy, liked to rouse Cadic [teacher] to flights of miscomprehension. In a favourite little drama, Joyce would snicker offensively at Clancy's efforts to translate a page into English. Clancy pretended to be furious and demanded an apology, which Joyce refused. Then Clancy would challenge Joyce to a duel in the Phoenix Park. The horrified Cadic would rush in to conciliate the fiery Celts, and after much horseplay would persuade them to shake hands.

In 1898, when entering University College's 'Matriculation (preparatory) course' he misspelled his name on the register, ''James Agustine Joyce' (a mistake he continued to make until his last year), he was sixteen and a half years old.'


'Joyce sitting in front of the school at Clongowes.'

A little older, Joyce began writing. He had received a complimentary letter from Ibsen himself at eighteen years old in response to an article Joyce had written about one of his plays. His reading continued and Ellmann points out, 'it is hard to say definitely of any important creative work published in the late nineteenth century that Joyce had not read it'. After writing his first play (A Brilliant Career) he dedicated it 'To/My own Soul I/dedicate the first/true work of my/life', which, Ellmann humorously points out, 'was the only work he was ever to dedicate to anyone.' Around this age, Joyce sought out Yeats, a literary figure of Ireland at the time and when they met, was amazingly arrogant and confident.

When Yeats imprudently mentioned the names of Balzac and of Swinburne, Joyce burst out laughing so that everyone in the cafe turned round to look at him. 'Who reads Balzac today?' he exclaimed.

This arrogance characterised Joyce for the rest of his life. In London, when looking for a place to review books for money, he got in an argument with an editor who said that Joyce was not writing to their wishes. He said, 'I have only to lift the window and put my head out, and I can get a hundred critics to review it.' 'Review what, your head?' asked Joyce, ending the interview.' Despite all his arrogance though, he later confided in his Aunt Josephine Murray, ''I want to be famous while I am alive.'' It seems as though Joyce's biggest aid as a young man was his brother Stanislaus, who was the sounding board for all his ideas and a good source of ideas himself. Ellmann includes a 1904 entry of Stanislaus' diary,

Jim is beginning his novel, as he usually begins things, half in anger [...] I suggested the title of the paper 'A Portrait of the Artist', and this evening, sitting in the kitchen, Jim told me his idea for the novel. It is to be almost autobiographical, and naturally as it comes from Jim, satirical.

'June 16, 1904' was a very important day for Joyce, the day that 'he afterwards chose for the action of Ulysses'. Above all, it was his first evening with Nora Barnacle. Their fates were quickly entwined.

The couple went on to London. As yet neither wholly trusted the other. When they arrived in the city, Joyce left Nora for two hours in a park while he went to see Arthur Symons. She thought he would not return. But he did, and he was to surprise his friends, and perhaps himself too, by his future constancy. As for Nora, she was steadfast for the rest of her life.

'Joyce, age 22, in 1904. Asked what he was thinking about when C.P. Curran photographed him, Joyce replied, 'I was wondering would he lend me five shillings.''

Joyce and Nora had just two children together, Lucia and Giorgio (Joyce took the baby [Giorgio] and hummed to him, astonished to find him happy. Then he went out to cable Stanislaus, 'Son born Jim.'' By this point he was working on Dubliners despite not having finished the then titled Stephen Hero. They were now living in Trieste. There's a lot of writing put in by Ellmann about the writing of Dubliners and its later battle to be published which went through many loops, fails, drawbacks. There's even a short but entire chapter on the 'Background of 'The Dead''. Joyce later began befriending other writers, most predominantly, Ezra Pound, who sent a letter to Joyce after hearing about him through Yeats. His first letter to James ended with, 'From what W.B.Y. says I imagine we have a hate or two in common—but thats a very problematical bond on introduction.' There's too much to attempt to cover with the background of his work so I will move into Ulysses, which Ellmann suggests Joyce had been 'preparing himself to write [...] since 1907.'

'The theme of family love, the love of parent for child and of child for parent, runs covertly throughout Ulysses.' Nora was in part Molly Bloom. Leopold Bloom was in part one of Joyce's friends, the man the world would later know as Italo Svevo. Around this period Ellmann puts in that Nora later said to a friend, ''I don't know whether my husband is a genius, but I'm sure of one thing, there is nobody like him.'' By the time Joyce left Trieste and moved to Zurich in 1915, 'He had lived there almost eleven years, half as long as he had lived in Dublin. During this he had published Chamber Music, finished Dubliners, revised Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, written Exiles, and begun Ulysses.' But despite the work he was doing, 'In the first six months of 1915, only 26 copies were sold [of Dubliners], in the next six months, less, in the six months after that, only 7.' Pound was impressed by the first few chapters of Ulysses but when Joyce read passages to Nora, 'she found the language distasteful and offered no encouragement.' Later, Giorgio 'assured his father that he would never write anything so good as Wild West stories.' Pound also later claimed that ''a new style per chapter not required,' but Joyce had no intention of lowering any of his sails.' When Joyce and family came to Paris to stay for a week, they 'remained for twenty years.'

Sylvia Beach and Joyce's first meeting at a party is illustrated. 'Joyce withdrew to another room and was looking at a book when Sylvia Beach, half-diffident, half-daring, approached to ask, 'Is this the great James Joyce?' 'James Joyce,' he responded, holding out his hand to be shaken.' Thus, Ellmann reports the long process Joyce went through to write Ulysses and again, it's struggle to be published and the trial against it, at one point. He famously said, 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.' Larbaud, before Joyce had gone on to write Finnegans Wake, once summed up Joyce's corpus in the most succinct way, proving that everything was leading to Ulysses: 'Chamber Music had supplied lyricism, Dubliners the unmistakeable atmosphere of a particular city, A Portrait clusters of images, analogies, and symbols. In Ulysses, he explained, the principal personages move like giants through a seemingly miscellaneous day.' Nora still had almost nothing to do with Joyce's work.

Copy No. 1000 [of Ulysses] he inscribed to his wife and presented to her in Arthur Power's presence. Here, in Ithaca, was Penelope. Nora at once offered to sell it to Power. Joyce smiled but was not pleased. He kept urging her to read the book, yet she would not.

'Miss Weaver asked him what he would write next and he said, 'I think I will write a history of the world.''


'Joyce in Trieste, age about 30.'

Joyce was asked what he was writing now by August Suter. At the time, Joyce's teeth were giving him more trouble and he had around this point had 17 extractions. His reply to Suter was,

he could answer truthfully, 'It's hard to say.' 'Then what is the title of it?' asked Suter. This time Joyce was less candid: 'I don't know. It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don't know what I will find.' Actually he did know the title at least, and had told it to Nora in strictest secrecy. It was to be 'Finnegans Wake', the apostrophe omitted because it meant both the death of Finnegan and the resurgence of all Finnegans. The title came from the ballad about the hod-carrier who falls from a ladder to what is assumed to be his death, but is revived by the smell of the whiskey at his wake.

And later also said he conceived 'his book as the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the river Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world—past and future—flow through his mind like flotsam.' I write a little bit about Finnegans Wake in my review of it here, to save this being preposterously long, I will mostly avoid quotes concerning it and stick to bits solely about Joyce himself. Around this time Nora was saying things like, 'Being married to a writer is a very hard life,' and to her sister, 'resignedly', 'He's on another book again.' But she also remained that steadfast woman that Ellman promised near the start of the book:

One such evening ended with Joyce alighting from the taxi at his door and suddenly plunging up the street shouting, 'I made them take it,' presumably an angry brag that he had foisted 'Ulysses' upon the public. Nora looked at Laubenstein and said, 'Never mind, I'll handle him,' and soon deftly collected her fugitive.

Joyce's blindness continued getting worse but his work on Finnegans Wake continued. He rejected all requests for interviews and was, I suppose, a sort of J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, sort of writer. His writer friends all spoke poorly of his Work in Progress, as he then called it, and said it was a waste of his good talent. At one point Joyce argued quite simply to a friend, ''It is all so simple. If anyone doesn't understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud.'' Despite his friends' comments, he ploughed on and forgot Ulysses; when it was brought up he said, ''Ulysses! Who wrote it? I've forgotten it.' There are claims that Joyce was unknown in his time, he certainly wasn't what he is now, but he did receive an '$11,000 advance and 20% royalties' on Finnegans Wake from two American publishers. But he often made comments about his legacy. Nora's sister once said on a visit to Madame Tussaud's, ''I want to see you there,'' and Joyce replied, ''You never will.'' (I wonder if that's true, I suppose it could be.) Joyce became closer friends with a young Beckett and this passage I particularly liked, about Joyce once or twice dictating Finnegans Wake to him:

in the middle of one such session there was a knock at the door which Beckett didn't hear. Joyce said, 'Come in,' and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had written and Joyce said, 'What's that "Come in"?' 'Yes, you said that,' said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, 'Let it stand.' He was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator.

There's also a great deal about Lucia, his daughter, who was a schizophrenic and went through many troubles throughout these years, being moved here and there, to different doctors and psychologists, finally Jung himself, whom Joyce did not like because of his criticisms of Ulysses. Nora once complained that Joyce had never really known his daughter and he responded, ''Allow me to say that I was present at her conception.'' For one, Lucia once set fire to her room in a mental asylum and later gave the reasoning to a nurse she had done it because ''her father's complexion was very red and so was fire.'' Joyce wrote to her in a kind tone and visited her. Once she said to him, ''I thought of writing to the Pope,'' and Joyce replied 'banteringly', ''Be careful of your grammar.'' Nora swung the other way and said to some friends, ''I wish I had never met anyone of the name of James Joyce.''


'Joyce with Philippe Soupault, one of the translators of Anna Livia Plurabelle'

After publishing Finnegans Wake in 1939, the Second World War breaking out around Europe, answering the question what will he write next with ''something very simple and very short'', Joyce died in 1941 back in Zurich once again. Nora had hopefully said, ''Jim is tough.'' He had come out of a coma to ask 'that Nora's bed be placed close to his'' and went back into a coma. He resurfaced again to ask his wife and son be called. They were called a 2 o'clock in the morning but at 2.15, Joyce was dead, before they arrived.

When a Catholic priest approached Nora and George about a service she said, ''I couldn't do that to him.'' Elsewhere, wherever she was at the time, Lucia was told about her father's death and replied, ''What is he doing under the ground, that idiot? When will he decide to come out? He's watching us all the time.'' And after Joyce's death, Nora finally settled on a feeling of sadness and love for him, it seemed. She said, ''Things are very dull now. There was always something doing when he was about.'' She wrote to her sister, ''My poor Jim—he was such a great man.'' She even took visitors to the cemetery where he was buried which adjoins a zoological garden and said, ''My husband is buried there. He was awfully fond of the lions—I like to think of him lying there and listening to them roar.''

And to end my longest review to date, my favourite quote from Joyce from the whole 800 pages of his life,

'When a young man came up to him and Zurich and said, 'May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?' Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, 'No, it did lots of other things too.''

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly masterful acheivement. Not only did it shed light on Joyce's life but gave really useful insights into hos work. I especially appreciated the parts relating to Finnegans Wake. This is pushing me to reread that and Ulysses at some stage.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Joyce was the poster boy for the avant-garde no-compromise artist who never had a day job (a little bit of teaching once, couple of months in a bank once) and lived his whole life on handouts from his brother and a few rich American women. At the same time he lived a life of utter bourgeois conformity – no drugs, no affairs, no bizarre sex life. Oh, well, okay, he did have a very scatological, voyeuristic, underwear-fetishistic, masochistic fantasy life – good thing the internet wasn’t around in 1904, he’d never have got anything done at all. Because of the permanent lack of ready cash he dragged his family from one cheap flat to another and from one European town to the next, all the while completely confident he was one of the great geniuses of literature, which he was. No one ever doubted it.
He took his own sweet time producing his works and apart from a few poems and a play, there are only four: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He had a slash and burn attitude to literature – after Dubliners, no more short stories; after Portrait, no more conventional narrative; after Ulysses, no more English language. He ended up too radical even for the serious people from whose hands he fed. After the first couple of parts of FW were issued in pamphlets, they were walking around in a daze, they were on their knees – no more of this please Mr Joyce! His brother wrote :

I don’t know whether the drivelling rigmarole…is written with the deliberate intention of pulling the reader’s leg or not…Or perhaps – a sadder supposition – it is the beginning of softening of the brain.

but Joyce took no notice and carried on his by now completely incomprehensible way for another 16 years and though nobody understood a word of what he was writing they continued to pay him, that’s how much they knew he was a genius.
I’m not so much a Joyce fan as a Ulysses fan. Dubliners is okay but painful and imbued with a sense that you’re meant to assume or know more than what’s on the page. John Gross precisely describes its language as mimicking “the moral conditions which it describes by means of strategically-placed cliches, shabby-genteel euphemisms, jog-trot repetitions”. Not hard to believe then that the stories are as jolly as the onset of toothache. Portrait is also painful but the language is intense, as is the boring hero Stephen Dedalus. It’s an autobiographical novel all about religious oppression and artistic hubris and it’s been a while since those particular themes made my heart sing. But Ulysses is the most outrageous most beautiful and funniest novel ever, so Joyce is forgiven for his portrait of himself as a young arse.
That said, you can’t read Ulysses without some kind of guide. Joyce bragged that his book would keep the professors busy for a hundred years and he wasn’t wrong. He stuffed it full of everything and recast the everything into such sentences as

Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the cross-trees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

or

Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W.

or

In Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton.

or

Time they were stopping up in the City Arms Pisser Burke told me there was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing bézique to come in for a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat of a Friday because the old one was always thumping her craw and taking the lout out for a walk.

How radical is Ulysses? Very. Usually brilliant innovators get their ideas stolen and watered down and recycled, like Impressionist paintings appearing on chocolate boxes, but 80 years have not diminished the strangeness and monumental technical daring of Ulysses. It changes style usually every chapter but sometimes twenty times within a single chapter. It has pages of stream of consciousness. It tries to be honest about the way people actually think and what they do – Bloom in his toilet, Bloom masturbating, but Joyce is presenting him as just an ordinary guy doing ordinary things. And this offended many people and got Ulysses banned for years. Joyce said : “If Ulysses isn’t fit to read, life isn’t fit to live” . Also, I should point out, it has no story (for 750 pages). Well, the story is Bloom and Stephen have slightly trying days and meet by chance in a pub late at night and Bloom, seeing the young man is somewhat drunk, offers to put him up for the night. End. Nobody gets married, nobody dies, nothing to see here, go on home. The whole 750 pages take place over about 18 hours and within that short span it tries to cram everything in. It is written with the most extraordinary language about the most ordinary things. It has the nerve to celebrate the mundane. It’s a paradox – the most artificial book but practically everything in it is real – the characters were based on Joyce’s acquaintance, all the events happened, the dialogue is as Joyce remembered it. And yet the book has many secret patterns and schemes hidden inside it, invisible to the naked eye, counterpointing the diurnal and the eternal, pedestrians and gods. It’s an encyclopedia of the ways language can be used, it’s exhausting and thrilling and if I was an author I’d never ever go anywhere near it, it would depress me too much.

A final word about Finnegans wake, the one nobody reads. (Note: Here’s a painless way to get a flavour of it – Joyce himself reading a section: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtOQi7...)

There are a three great books on literary obsession I’ve come across - Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dwyer, about D H Lawrence, U and I by Nicholson Baker, about John Updike, and The Finnegans Wake Experience by Roland McHugh is the third, in which McHugh details his lunatic quest to read FW “properly”. This begins with him devoting “almost three years” to reading Finnegans Wake and nothing but Finnegans Wake. “Having initially read through any chapter I would spend a week or two repeating the process and then make a frontal assault with dictionaries”… I began to annotate my copy of Finnegans Wake. I transferred information to it in very small writing, using a mapping pen. I could actually get two lines of writing between every two Finnegans Wake lines and I used twelve colours of ink to specify different languages.” The message is clear – if you meet a Joyce fan even remotely like Roland, back slowly away.

Richard Ellman's biography of JJ is great, up there with Leon Edel's Henry James and Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey. If you like large, long, leisurely lives those are the tp three I've come across. JJ appears in Ellman's book as an odd bird, obsessed and unflinching, more well-read than Borges, a bit of a perv, as uxorious as John was with Yoko, a charming friend-maker and altogether one of the nicer geniuses we've had.

Friend of JJ : Hello Joyce, what have you been doing all day?

JJ: I've been working on a sentence.

Friend: One sentence? Well, I suppose sometimes it can be awfully hard to pick the right words.

JJ: Oh no, I've already got the right words. I've been working on which order they should go in.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best biography I have read, regardless of subject. Fluidly written and perfectly balanced between the analytical and the personal. And, more importantly, it tells us about one of the greatest artists our species has ever produced, one whose life deeply informed and influenced his Art.

[Ken]

I picked this up (with some muscular effort) not so much on James Joyce's reputation as on Richard Ellmann's. I'd heard that this was a biographer's biographer, and yes, the book was well done.

Of course, Ellmann had an abundance of material to work with (the letters to and from JJ were innumerable), and that certainly helps. I compare this to, say, Melville. I just read a book about good old Herman and it seems he had a habit of destroying all of his correspondence. This leads to speculation on the part of biographers, a roll of the dice.

Early on, Joyce isn't the kind of guy you'd want to chum up to. Rather arrogant and a tad vain about his intellectual prowess. He was his dad, John's, favorite, though -- and that in a rather large Irish family. Too bad Joyce would leave Ireland (then exclusively write about it) for most all of his adult life. Amazing.

I'm sure I'll most remember how little money Joyce had for most of his life. I mean, the guy lived like a writer (heh). From one lousy rent to another. From one IOU to another. I can't imagine begging people for money like that. Also memorable? Wife Nora didn't read his books. Oh, bits and pieces, sure, but cover to cover? No, thank you. I can relate.

His greatest fame is, of course, the book called Ulysses. It's a day in the life type book, but not everybody understood or enjoyed it. Still, it was nothing compared to the last one, Finnegans Wake (a.k.a. "a night in the life"). Almost nobody understood or enjoyed it. Joyce was convinced it was a ticket to fame, that people would continue to try to figure it out and/or talk about it for decades and centuries to come. Dream on, Jimmy, dream on!

I felt most sorry for his brother Stanislaus, who did so much to support his older brother in his formative days. The poor lad didn't get much in the way of deserved appreciation, though.

Still, Stannie wasn't shy about his opinions, either. Not even when it came to Ulysses. In a letter, he wrote to Jim, "You have done the longest day in literature, and now you are conjuring up the deepest night." It didn't end there. Joyce's dad, when he heard Finnegan would be about a single night like Ulysses was a single day, said, "I hope his night-thoughts are better than his day thoughts." As for wife Nora, she referred to the writing in Finnegan as "chop-suey."

Ah, well. Such are the trials of fame. Being experimental and "different" brings its own risks. And besides, Joyce insisted that Finnegan was more about the music than the meaning. Chopsticks vs. chop-suey, then.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

What important people are saying about Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce.


“Ellmann, in his biography of James Joyce, accomplishes what I had set for myself to do in my Dreams 7.0 series but could only approximate. To wit -- to fictionalize the factual and factualize the fictional.” -- Bill W.”T.”V. Faulman

“Too long.” -- S. Bucket

“Too short!” -- Joseph Frank

“If you will pardon me but I do have some modicum of authority in this field. And I really only have this to say about Mr Ellmann’s book -- he did not sufficiently apply himself to dispelling the myth that I am Noman.” -- Odysseus

“Yes! Ellmann, Yes!” -- Molly

“Ineluctable!” -- S. Dedalus

“I can’t wait for the second volume.” -- Nora

“The very best writing about the very best.” -- NYT

“But if we look at the data we will see a very different story unfold. A story of imperialism, racism, sexism, genocide and violence and so on, the likes of which history had never before witnessed.” -- Noam

“I’m in it!” -- Greg

“Me too.” -- Giorgio

“---------” -- Rudy

“He said ‘French letter’”. Heh heh!” -- Beeves and Butts

“This is the Joyce biography we’ve been waiting for ever since Gorman’s rather inadequate thing.” -- D.T.’s to the Max

“You’re going to want more cowbell.” -- anonymous

“Jim dandy.” -- HCE

“Mine’s better! And it’s auto-.” -- Mark “Samuel Clemens” Twain

“We’re still jung und freuden’d.” -- Lucia

“Quotation marks quotato marks! Bah!” -- James Joyce

“I’ve got a special place prepared...” -- Dante

“My Lucifer=Satan is more real.” -- Milton

“Beg to report!” -- Švejk

“Having read Ellmann’s biography, like reading Finnegans Wake, will certainly make the most entrenched Joyceans almost unendurable to the wider world.” -- J. Morton

“One of the best biographies about a human.” -- Thunder

“Three quarks for Meister Ellmann!” -- Four Old Men

“Too many typos.” -- unidentified gr’r

“Definitive?! Bah! More like Drivel!” -- Hugh Kenner

“Hugh Kenner does it better.” -- Eric

“Joyce ruined fiction. Ellmann ruined biography.” -- Franzen

“Joyce very much liked spanking the maid.” -- Coover

“Thanks and sorry and good luck!” -- Lee K.

“Ten stories high And twenty the deepings....We reed in the rushes Of joycfull mehindings” -- Fion You Allah

“Well you probably see this coming, but in my opinion, Dick’s book about Jim is just * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *” -- Larry Stars

“Puns are the highest form of literature.” — Alfred Hitchcock

“An ode to Joyce which rivals mine own.” -- Earwigger van Beethoven

“Enthralling. A page-turner. Could not put it down.” -- Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce biography is a cathedral of a book, luminous in its detail and filled with the pulse of the Joyce's life.

With scholarly precision and lyrical warmth, he renders Joyce as a restless, striving, deeply human figure whose genius was always at work, even amidst the din of daily life. One senses Ellmann’s admiration not as reverence alone but as something charged, electric, attuned to Joyce’s own rhythm of thought and play.

Reading it felt less like perusing a biography and more like drifting through the very currents that formed Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The boyhood streets of Dublin, the exile’s cafés of Trieste, the fevered vision of Zurich; Ellmann weaves them together in such a way that one feels Joyce’s own voice humming beneath the narrative, whispering, punning, singing. The text itself sometimes seems to bend and refract as Joyce might have liked, bursting with anecdote and intimacy, layered with erudition yet never stifled by it.

What I personally found most moving was how Ellmann captured the fusion of struggle and brilliance, how Joyce’s constant battles with health, poverty and publishers were not mere obstacles but the crucible in which his art was forged. There is an echo of Stephen Dedalus here, forging the uncreated conscience of his race, yet also of Leopold Bloom, wandering, flawed, tender.

This incredible biography is both a guide and an incantation; a reminder that Joyce’s genius was lived before it was written, that his works are not only monuments of modernism but living records of a man who dared to see the world anew. To read this biography is to step closer to Joyce’s flame, and to come away not singed but illuminated. Essential reading.

[Lynne King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where does time go to? I read this years ago.

This book was just recommended to me and searching through the shelves I came across this very dusty book in my biographies' section.

If you want to know everything about Joyce then this is the ideal book for you but it is rather long at over 800 pages, 887 to be precise, including the index. I went through a "biography period" and I seemed to end up with tomes and not books.

There are some fabulous photos of Joyce, and his family, and a splendid one of Joyce with Augustus John. Now the latter was also an excellent person to read about.

Highly recommended read and the only reason I haven't given it five stars is that it could have been shorter.

[Nikos Tsentemeidis · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Ό,τι κι αν έκανε, τα ύφος βασικά του ενδιαφέροντα - η οικογένεια του και το γράψιμό του - ήταν ακλόνητα. Τα πάθη αυτά έμειναν αμείωτα. Η ένταση του πρώτου έδωσε στο έργο του την κατανόηση και την ανθρωπιά του- η ένταση του δεύτερου έδωσε στη ζωή του αξιοπρέπεια και βαθιά αφοσίωση.»

Συγκλονιστική βιογραφία.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work should basically be considered essential reading for all lovers of Joyce. (of course, loving Joyce should also be considered essential) (so, really, this should simply be considered essential)

A moving and powerful work of biography – overflowing with detailed minutiae, abundant quotes (both from Joyce, about Joyce, and in correspondence to Joyce), and a warmth that brings Joyce and family to life – as well as a work of studied scholarship – as much of Joyce’s work was fed by his life and experiences, Ellman weaves Joyce’s work into the biography, and manages to illuminate Joyce’s life and works in tandem.

Joyce’s life was fascinating – relationships with Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Italo Svevo, and Beckett all play prominent roles, while appearances from Proust, William Carlos Williams, Shaw, and Wells (and I’m sure I’m forgetting others) were surprising and delightful – and in turn this book never failed to be fascinating. (and, hey, BBC members: Kay Boyle shows up – one time only – in a footnote!)

To put it bluntly, I loved Joyce prior to reading this book, and reading this book has only strengthened and expanded on that regard. I’ve long been resolved to revisit Joyce’s oeuvre sometime in the next couple years, and emerge from this book certain that I must do so. There is little else I could ask of the work, and in fact would never have thought to ask for it to begin with.

The surface of the life Joyce lived seemed always erratic and provisional. But its central meaning was directed as consciously as his work. The ingenuity with which he wrote his books was the same with which he forced the world to read them; the smiling affection he extended to Bloom and his other principal characters was the same that he gave to the members of his family; his disregard for bourgeois thrift and convention "was the splendid extravagance which enabled him in literature to make an intractable wilderness into a new state. In whatever he did, his two profound interests-his family and his writings-kept their place. These passions never dwindled. The intensity of the first gave his work its sympathy and humanity; the intensity of the second raised his life to dignity and high dedication.

[Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellman is an excellent biographer.

[Eirini Proikaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Η βιογραφία του Τζέημς Τζόυς απο τον Ρίτσαρντ Έλμαν. Έργο τεράστιο και κυριολεκτικά και μεταφορικά. Πάνω απο 800 σελίδες , με πλούσιο φωτογραφικό υλικό, περιλαμβάνει πολλές επιστολές, περιγράφει την ζωή του Τζόυς και της οικογένειας του, την διαδικασία συγγραφής των έργων του και τις δυσκολίες που αντιμετώπισε μέχρι να καταφέρει να εκδώσει τα πρώτα έργα του αλλά και μετά.
Πολύ βοηθητικό για όσους θέλουν να καταλάβουν καλύτερα τον Οδυσσέα, κάτι που ήταν δύσκολο ακόμα και για μερικούς φίλους του Τζόυς στους οποίους έδινε να διαβάσουν κομμάτια του όσο το έγραφε.
" Έδωσα το κεφάλαιο σε ένα-δυο να το διαβάσουν, αλλά όσο κατάλαβαν αυτοί άλλο τόσο καταλαβαίνει ο κώλος μου τι θα πει κοινοβούλιο".
Ακόμα πιο δύσκολο ήταν να καταλάβουν το Finnegans wake και πολλοί προσπάθησαν να τον αποτρέψουν απο την συγγραφή του λέγοντάς του οτι μάλλον τρελάθηκε.
"Δεν αποκλείεται να είναι παραφροσύνη. Θα κριθεί ύστερα απο εκατό χρόνια."
Αυτό που μου έκανε μεγάλη εντύπωση ήταν το πόσο δεμένα με την ζωή του ήταν τα βιβλία του. Οι φίλοι του, οι γνωστοί του, οι εχθροί του, όλοι κάνουν ένα πέρασμα μέσα απο το έργο του. Εμπνέεται απο τα πάντα. Απο μια εικόνα απο τα παιδικά του χρόνια, απο τα μαλλιά μιας γνωστής του, απο μια φράση που ακούει τυχαία στον δρόμο. Όλα βρισκουν την κατάλληλη θέση στο εργο του.
Είχε ένα όραμα και δεν ήθελε να κάνει εκπτώσεις, εργάστηκε σκληρά και για να γράψει αλλά και για να εκδώσει τα βιβλία του ακριβώς όπως τα ήθελε, συνάντησε πάρα πολλές δυσκολίες αλλά και πολλούς ανθρώπους πρόθυμους να τον βοηθήσουν αναγνωρίζοντας την μεγαλοφυΐα του.
Άνθρωπος ιδιόρρυθμος, αλαζόνας, δύσκολος, δεν είχε και την καλύτερη άποψη για τις γυναίκες παρόλο που πολλές γυναίκες τον βοήθησαν στην ζωή του, αγαπούσε την οικογένειά του αλλά την ταλαιπώρησε αρκετά.
Γέλασα με πολλές ατάκες αυτού του περίεργου τύπου σε διάφορα περιστατικά της ζωής του γιατί αυτός ο άνθρωπος είχε εξαιρετικό χιούμορ.
Μου πήρε αρκετό καιρό να τελειώσω το βιβλίο. Δεν διάλεξα και την κατάλληλη εποχή, που να τρέχεις στην παραλία με το τούβλο, είναι και ασήκωτο. Είναι βιβλίο που θέλει τον χρόνο του και ένα βιβλίο στο οποίο σίγουρα θα ξαναγυρίσω για να ξαναδιαβάσω κομμάτια του όταν θελήσω να ξαναδιαβάσω τον Οδυσσέα ή αν πάρω ποτέ την απόφαση να βουτήξ�� στο Finnegans wake.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this truly fascinating biography, Richard Ellman presents the entirety of James Joyce: his family, both natal and his family with Nora; his rather strained relationship with Ireland coupled with a love affair of sorts with the city of Dublin; his varied relationships with contemporary writers in Europe; his love of the musical world; his many relocations throughout the continent; his love of language; and of course his writing. And there are sides I've left out.

While the history of the man is intriguing, its importance is as the background to the books he was to create. Without the reaction against the Catholic Church and Ireland and without the love of Dublin, these books would not have seen the light of day. Ellman provides analyses of each book, from creation through publication, the whole torturous path, and along the way also gives the reader so much enlightening information that assures future reading of any Joyce works will be different. I have marked several sections to be read when I read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and (probably) Ulysses again. And I will definitely read the section for Finnegans Wake if/when I reach that book.

Joyce was undoubtedly a genius, a conflicted man, a difficult man, a man who, in his own way, loved his family but also expected the world and everyone in it to move to his drum. But perhaps that is part of the mark of genius.

Ellman makes some interesting summations near the end of his excellent tome. In this first:

In retrospect, it seems clear that the 'monster,'
as Joyce several times called Finnegans Wake in these
days, had to be written, and that he had to write it.
Readers may still sigh because he did not approach them
more directly, but it does not appear that this alternative
was open to him. In Dubliners he had explored the waking
consciousness from outside, in A Portrait and Ulysses from
inside. He had begun to impinge, but gingerly, upon the
mind asleep. There lay before him, as in 1922 he well
knew, this almost totally unexplored expanse. That the
great psychological discovery of his century was the
night world he was, of course, aware, but he frowned on
using that world as a means of therapy. Joyce's purpose
was not so didactic; he wished, unassumingly enough, to
amuse men with it. (p 716)

And finally, in summing up the life of James Joyce,

The surface of the life Joyce lived seemed always
erratic and provisional. But its central meaning was
directed as consciously as his work. The ingenuity with
which he wrote his books was the same with which he
forced the world to read them; the smiling affection
he extended to Bloom and his other principal characters
was the same that he gave to the members of his family;
his disregard for bourgeois thrift and convention was
the splendid extravagance which enabled him in
literature to make an intractable wilderness into a
new state. In whatever he did, his two profound interests
---his family and his writings---kept their place. These
passions never dwindled. The intensity of the first gave
his work its sympathy and humanity; the intensity of
the second raised his life to dignity and high
dedication. (p 744)

I highly recommend this superb biography to anyone interested in James Joyce, in literary biograpy, or any of Mr Joyce's literary works.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is THE biography of the great Joyce who brought us my favorite book of all time, Ulysses. It provides a fascinating account of Joyce's life and relationships as well of course as the sources and inspirations for his books including Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Finnegan's Wake. It is considered by most as one of the greatest biographies of an author written in the 20th C. I would tend to agree as it is highly readable and full of valuable insights.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's the thing, I believe that Ellmann wrote the "Ellmann bio" of James Joyce for Richard Ellmann. It was written for academia. It was not written as a book to be read, but as a book to be studied.

Rating. I would give it 5 stars, just for the effort of compiling all these details, 4 stars for the clues provided, and 3 for the ability to keep turning the page. The usefulness of the Ellmann bio is its use as a key to understanding the man who wrote of, among others the longest day on record.

There were problems with this biography of James Joyce. It felt like there was too much information about Joyce's private life that I simply did not care to know and did not need to know. It was endlessly repetitive and was largely too painful to read. I would however disagree with Ellmann's depiction of James Joyce. This was a proud man who lived his life as an artist, by his own rules, his own chosen way of life and to his own ends. He was also lucky to have soft landings as there were people there to offer those much needed lifelines.

What Ellmann portrays as difficult and tragic was an incredible success story. Joyce is to be admired for sticking to his vision especially when he knew that failure was not an option. Joyce wrote with the mind-set of a master craftsman composing to the musicality of his words and his incredible memory that absolutely absorbed life!

I believe that his daughter Lucia was a muse. Of course her name was also symbolic. "Saint Lucia was a 4th-century martyr from Syracuse. She was said to have had her eyes gouged out, and thus is the patron saint of the blind." Her illness took a terrible toll on him. His on her.

It actually took all these obstacles to get Joyce where he wanted to go. Joyce in fact told us it was " A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man". It was the life of an anguished artist! Matteus William's quote, "We mature with the damage, not with the years" is applicable to Joyce. He matured and grew to great heights. I've always believed that the measure of a man is not where he is in life, but how far he has come. June 16th, Bloomsday says it all.

Joyce was a man who believed in luck. He remained hopeful. He was brave. He did not give a damn what others thought. He asserted his differences. It might have felt terribly lonely if it were not for Nora, his family and his many friends.

What Ellmann does show us is that it would have been difficult to have to explain yourself as Joyce. People would not understand. People did not understand. People could not understand. Joyce was too smart for us.

Joyce was often silent. He was melancholic with black melancholia. He was disappointed. He asks Nora, "Is there one who understands me? (Ellmann 712) He had debilitating health problems, staggering financial problems but enormous reserves. In his silence, he heard his own answers. Joyce was a lion. He ran wild. He could not stay in one place.

What Joyce did was very difficult. It is an adjective that I keep repeating. It was exhausting. It was crazy, It was EPIC! It had to be written down on paper.

Rumi says, "If you look too closely at the form, you miss the essence." This is true of Ellmann's biography of James Joyce. Joyce's appeal is that his love of words is one that his readers share. We are happy to be amused by his literary word play. We are already a rapt audience. We do not need to know of his private life.

[Mientras Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantástico, es una de las biografías más completas de Joyce

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the literary biography that started the craze for long biographies, only recently broken by brave biographers, often themselves novelists, like Carol Shields' Jane Austen (Penguin). Arguably, Ellman's subject
and his research required a grand scale. This is not always--dare I say, often not--true. So our bookshelves are overladen with fat biographies of doubtful readability. Less true of Ellmann here.
Of course, I read this when I was a Teaching Assistant in a Joyce course, so I had an added impetus to
find it of interest. Find it so I did. For example, in a minute detail that I quote to this day, James Joyce when applying to teach English in Italy, did better on his Italian exam than on his English. Admonitory in this hour of Test Test Test as a presumed improvement to American public ed. If the greatest prose stylist of 20C English did less well on his English test, clearly the exam was wanting--as most general exams prove, upon examination. Exams function best when focused--on a book, on a course, on a proof of the Mean Value Theorem.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

No journeyman biographer like Walter Isaacson, Ellmann writes the life of Joyce out of deep familiarity with his work and Irish literature in general. "I have yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of Finnegans Wake—except perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann," said Edna O'Brien (thanks Wikipedia!) So this book is naturally stylish and literary throughout. Ellmann, who also wrote lives of Yeats and Wilde, goes back to Synge's Playboy of the Western World, which dropped like a bomb in a parochial and impoverished Ireland.

Sympathetic to Joyce but aware of his foibles, Ellmann portrays his early pretensions, the struggle to create a persona everyone undergoes ("this essay may give heart to adolescents who are searching their own work for evidence of literary immortality and not finding much"), Joyce's half innate, half-put-on flakiness/profligacy, his drinking troubles.

Joyce left Ireland early on to live in self-imposed exile. Although his writing would always look back to it - in the finest detail imaginable - he felt somewhat estranged from it, and was not an ardent Irish nationalist (though he did at least dislike the British). His tender marriage to Nora Barnacle began in Trieste (then part of Austria), where Joyce quickly acclimatised to Italian ways. His dominant mode may be summed up as a love of language, rhyme and wordplay, spilling over from English into other European languages and eventually the invented; a deep interest in describing the mind's interior; and certain themes - sex, guilt, masochism, religious misgivings.

I read Ulysses years ago, knowing nothing about its background or even the bare bones of Homer's story (barely recognisable, but still helpful). I was mostly confused, occasionally enraptured. I think that wasn't the best idea, and that some background (this biography, perhaps, or a guide) would have helped, but I also think that to try understand every word is besides the point. It may be doable with Ullyses, though certainly not with Work in Progress (dramatically revealed in 1939 as Finnegans Wake), but to love Joyce must surely be to connect to his games, his love of assonance and rhyme, to rrrroll the tongue and lips over the words gushing out, riverrun... It ought not to be schoolwork; a scholarly analysis of why Joyce made the Ant and the Grasshopper into the Ondt and the Gracehoper (it exists) interests few. But Work in Progress did have few defenders, even among Joyce's staunchest allies.

This book is crammed with funny anecdotes about Joyce, the long-suffering Nora and brother Stanislaus, and bawdy multilingual jokes. It can also be somber when dealing with his relationship with his parents, his daughter Lucia's tragic mental breakdown, and his eye troubles (the details can get quite gruesome). A classic of literary biography.

[Jonty Watt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not usually much of a biography reader but I loved this. I read it because I’m in the process of a deep dive on Joyce, but I understand that it’s also regarded as one of the great literary biographies. As well as being eye-wateringly comprehensive, Ellman coaxes out tiny little details that shed fascinating light on the man as well as his work. In fact, perhaps this book’s most interesting feature is its blend of literary analysis and biographical detail - more important, surely, for Joyce than almost any other author. The short chapters on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake felt like triumphant summations of all that had come before - and each text was, correspondingly, thrown into much clearer light.

Ellman also does not shy away from detailing Joyce’s less appealing aspects, and he never succumbs to hero worship. I think you should probably leave this book feeling absolutely certain that Joyce would have been an incredibly irritating man to have around, and his personal views regarding women seem troublingly incompatible with the depth of humanity he displays in his books. Ellman is by no means an apologist; instead, he adds rich layers of context that facilitate the appreciation of all that is great in Joyce’s works and the dismissal of the problematic bits.

Not sure how this could have been improved but 4 stars nonetheless - it is still a biography, after all.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

What more can you want when it has more than you want?

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

That was incredible.

I listened to this on audio book in addition to reading it. I would listen while I walked at work, and while listening, I was transported to the same places as Joyce, and I felt like I was there next to him, and this made this experience that much more magical. The exceprts at the beginning of each section was delightful, and always sparked the urge to continue the Wake. The book was filled with letters, poems, photos, and hand drawn sketches from Joyce. Just an absolute treat.

Richard Ellmann's book did not seem long enough. Especially, since Joyce lived such a big life, which was displayed in all of his works; he could not do anything small.

"The ingenuity with which he wrote his books was the same with which he forced the world to read them."

I have read A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, DUBLINERS, and ULYSSES. Ellmann's book increased the appreciation for all of these, that much more. To hear the struggles, developments, and creations of all of these were astounding. How could I not appreciate them more?

Now I must complete FINNEGANS WAKE; Even Nora Barnacle thought it to be the best:

"What's all this talk about Ulysses, Finnegans Wake is the important one."

One of the saddest parts in this listening and reading experience, for me, was during the completion of FINNEGANS WAKE. Joyce believed that once he exited the book of the dark, his daughter, Lucia, would be free of her illnesses.

Joyce was arrogant, and knew that he was arrogant, he even reflected on his arrogance when returning to Zurich for the last time, "arrogant in the flash of his own genius, but now he knew too much for his own arrogance." His arrogance was paired with absolute self confidence, the kind of self confidence that I wish I could tap into. He wanted to be remembered, and and he is.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

блистательная биография, довольно жалкая жизнь. читается как роман, и по ходу укрепляет во мнении, что Джойс - едва ли ролевая модель, конечно. но, как известно, жизнь художника и его творчество - вещи часто несовместные. с одной стороны, от того, что знаешь, откуда у него в романах что и кого с кого он писал, а кого с кем комбинировал, к пониманию результата вроде бы не приближаешься, а с другой тривия и детали все же придают текстам некую дополнительную глубину, потому что общий абрис автора все же вырисовывается. обойдемся без спойлеров, ограничимся лишь тем, что в целом житейская ничтожность Джойса существует параллельно/контрапунктом грандиозности его замыслов. а что происходит при этом у Джойса в голове - этого даже Эллманн (Биограф с большой буквы, как называет его Хоружий) не знает - он вообще не трактует фактов, не домысливает и не спекулирует ни на чем, в отдельных местах в отношении объекта сквозит лишь обаятельная сухая ирония.

более частный урок: мало того, что в юности Джойс был тот еще фрукт, что хорошо известно, он еще и полной мере грешил - гораздо непростительнее (лично для меня) - тем, что при риторической критике чужих работ смешивал "я не понимаю / мне не нравится" = "это плохо". тем интереснее в контексте этого выглядит кармическое воздаяние - в равной мере тупая и агрессивная критика Улисса и Финнеганов. интересно, он сам-то осознавал эту кармическую связь? но в целом корень значительной доли его боли душевной в зрелости, конечно, - недостаток референтной критики. по большей части либо безмозглые льстецы, либо просто безмозглые. исключения только подтверждают.

две очень утешительные мысли (сами найдете):
- зачем помогать читателю? публика все равно больше всего ценит лишь то, что может украсть.
- нет такого, чего нельзя было бы перевести

[Ce Ce · Rating 5 out of 5]

James formidable weaknesses...his towering strengths...his weaknesses mined to feed his strengths were uncovered in this exquisite archeological dig. I dreaded turning the last page of this thoroughly captivating portrait of Joyce…one that celebrated his work and achievement without lionizing him.

As Joyce matured I felt the sense of being present with James in the spirit and pace of Ellmann's telling. In fact I am certain I caught sight of J lounging on my sofa. At first a shimmering vapor. As time passed he gradually dandified jauntily and humorously in rather overdone silk pajamas. James Joyce reincarnated in all of his complex devilish glory.

Or maybe there's no difference between the living and dead...and mine was simply one of his revolving addresses...which I think would tickle our pal Jim.

"P.S. The devil mostly speaks a language of his own called Bellyshabble which he makes up himself as he goes along but when he is very angry he can speak quite bad French very well though some who have heard him say that he has a strong Dublin accent." James Joyce, "The Cat and the Devil", written to Stephen, his grandson

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellman's James Joyce was the supreme literary biography of the 20th century. Look no further.

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed look at James Joyce's life that doesn't really try and hide some of his negative aspects, Richard Ellmann's biography is a blast, a book that's both drenched in detail and a compelling read. And it just may change your opinion on one of the best writers of the 20th century.

Most people know Joyce for writing a couple of really dense books, a handful of stories and a book that's almost intentionally unreadable. But there was a lot more to him than such an easy description: he was a talented poet, a gifted writer and a hell of a smart guy: he was fluent in something like a half-dozen languages, for example. He pushed himself and his prose into new territory, taking literature in a place not on anyone's map. I especially enjoyed Ellmann breaking down Joyce's major works and putting them into a context. It's especially so with Finnegans Wake, which he almost always opens chapters with, but he touches on the other books and plays as well.

Ellmann isn't blinded by Joyce. he wasn't an especially nice person: he was pretty loose with other people's money, was an arrogant young man and wasn't always great to Nora. He burned through friendships by the time he died, he was only on casual terms with his brothers and sisters. He was irresponsible, left debts in his trail and for a long time, kept his family in dire poverty thanks to a reckless attitude and a drinking habit. One of his roommates almost shot him as a young man and Joyce, who never forgot a slight, turned it into a memorable scene in Ulysses. He was a gifted writer, but he could be petty, too.

It was interesting to compare it to Brian Boyd's two volume biography of Vladimir Nabokov, which I read back in December. The big problem I had with that was how focused it was on Nabokov's novels: Boyd constantly interrupts his story to spend a whole chapter focusing on each book in detail, breaking down the plot, language, allusions, etc. Here, Ellmann was able to keep himself from devoting page after page to dissecting each book, instead weaving the inspirations into it. Usually it's something like pointing out how a chance remark was reflected in Wake, then quoting that passage as a footnote. I can only think of a couple places where he stops everything to explain something (Ulysses, The Dead) and even then, he does it in a way that doesn't feel it's grinding the book to a halt. I like this approach.

One thing I didn't like was Ellmann's casual dismissal of Nora Joyce. While she's often in the story, he never focuses on her. By book's end, I almost felt like I knew Joyce's son Giorgio and brother Stanislaus better than I knew the woman he spent most of his life living with. Maybe it's because she was a private person but maybe it reflects Ellmann's attitude to someone who never bothered reading any of Joyce's novels. But I felt like he missed an important part of the picture.

Still, on the whole, it's a blast of a biography. Recommended, especially if you've always thought of Joyce as one of those writers that's too hard to get into to bother reading. I'm sure reading Wake is anything but a breeze, but damn, Ellmann makes it sound like a blast.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

During my various employments overseas in the 1960s through the rest of that turbulent century I would often gather with friends from the United Kingdom and the U.S. to discuss books. I found myself woefully ignorant of James Joyce whose reputation among us all was formidable. Some pretended to know him well and tried to impress with how much of a genius they thought he was and how brilliant his works were. Joyce's contemporaries especially thought of him in the same way, at least as I understood it reading about him at that time.

I read Ellmann's biography of Joyce while living with my tiny family in a "box" house in the middle of the Saudi desert. (I recommend a similar expatriate experience for all young families to slow down time.) No distractions there except an occasional mouse that would leave us presents of bottle caps, a string of yarn or an abandoned ice cream stick near a hole by the kitchen sink.

I had always found Joyce tiresome and remote, as if I didn't speak English as my mother tongue and had no European blood in me, especially that of the British Isles or Western European, but of course I did. Only a smidgeon of Irish remains but a plethora of British and a hodgepodge of American in abundance according to what I've been able to dig up studying my parents' ancestral history and from DNA tests (now probably sitting on the shelf of a PRC lab).

By reading Ellmann's excellent biography of Joyce, I erased some of my own ignorance of not only Joyce himself but also literature in general. I think that "James Joyce" by Ellmann should be read by all lovers of literature, and it little matters whether you have read all of JJ's works, some of them or none of them. You will be enlightened and inspired to read him further.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

About a third of the way through this ALREADY and it's pretty damn spellbinding. Ellmann knows and admires Joyce's incredible skill, charming brio, and sheer analytical power.

And the fact that he drove his loved ones, companions, and pretty much all his contemporaries absolutely crazy doesn't escape him for a bit.

The Joyce I've been getting is someone worth reading about, even if he did not happen to be the greatest writer of the 20th Century (my bias notwithstanding).

I'm definitely going to have to get my hands on Ellmann's "yeats" and "wilde" sometime down the road.

He writes with a polished grace and suave irony, with a real reverence for the creative products of a deeply illuminated man. The organization of the book, for such a massive topic, is elegant and accessible.

A scholarly tome which reads like a novel and has all its empirical facts in order? YES!


.....About halfway through now and it hasn't let up. The reader is privy to all the rather dodgy aspects of Joyce's character by now (perhaps even to the extent that his friends and family were!) but the anecdotes (Joyce was gangly man, and a voracious drinker. His "spider dance" has have been hilarious) and witticisms are priceless. And then when they cast light on Joyce's prose works, well...that's just phenomenal.....

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every writer should have biography in this same style as Bosworth's Life of Johnson. You never forget what year is being reviewed or how old the subject was at the time, because it is marked on every page. Straight to the point, like a clock with a transparent face, you see what material was the source of every bit of information, as the letter or anecdote or book is either copied right there or noted in the back. It is a fine example of a well-wriiten bio as well as a good picture of what the man was like. People I think exaggerate Joyce's wildness. Compared to most writers he is pretty tame. He happened to know how good he was and demanded he make it into print.

[Omniurge · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Joyce’s devotees indispensable. Virtuosically weaves biography and analysis in a hyper-dense yet imminently accessible primer on the genius’s life. To read Ellman’s biography is to fortify oneself with the backdrops that pervade Joyce’s work: "Imagination is memory," so he told Frank Budgen. It is not that Joyce’s work cannot be enjoyed without the supplemental biographical detail, but it can sure be appreciated a hell of a lot more. Absorbing, engaging, sad, and at times uproariously funny, Joyce's life is worthy of a Joyce novel.