Benji’s Reviews > Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker > Status Update

He was no longer a Christian himself; but he converted the temple to new uses instead of trying to knock it down, regarding it as a superior kind of human folly and one which, interpreted by a secular artist, contained obscured bits of truth.

Wit can be a way of seeing the world. Johnson describes it as an 'unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other.'

Many of the facts Ellmann collected for James Joyce are mundane or commonplace, the sort most biographers omit. 'Don't you think the way a genius ties his tie is important?' he once asked the Irish filmmaker Sean O'Mordha.

Yeats is always looking to further and to celebrate an aristocracy of culture, while Joyce, who depends more than Yeats upon such an aristocracy to read him, declines to endorse it, and in his work is concerned only with people who, he said, make less than a thousand pounds a year.

I do not think the business of education is to entertain students, or to make them feel good ... if inadvertently in the course of being instructed they should feel good, so much the better.

Although she and her sister Katty corresponded 'continuously' (Lucy Ellmann's word), sometime in the 1980s Katty, described by Lucy as 'very houseproud,' decided, as Lucy put it, 'to throw out all of my mother's letters - purely for tidying purposes ... My father was beside himself when he heard this, claiming that the whole history of our family was in those letters.'

Agnes describes him as 'middle-aged, paunchy and stupid,' the sort of man who 'overcame indifference or hostility by his slowness to comprehend it.'

At one point he owned a bakery, which failed in part because he gave all the bread away at the end of the day, so that eventually this became the only time customers turned up.

In recounting this anecdote in a later letter to Smith, Ellmann observed that 'the interesting thing about the British upper classes is that they actually act just as their caricaturists say.'

Ellmann writes of meeting two 'prize specimens' of the community at the rabbi's house, one of whom irritated him by claiming to be interested in people rather than culture, 'as if the people were independent of the culture. It's bad enough being uncultivated without attempting to justify it.'