Who Writes the Biographer’s Biography?
Zachary Leader’s book on Richard Ellmann’s landmark work on James Joyce asks whether a biographer can be considered an artist.
Michelle Taylor
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Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, 1920.
In 1927—just five years after the publication of Ulysses and five years shy of his 50th birthday—James Joyce decided it was high time for someone to write his biography. At least one whole book had been devoted to the analysis of his work, and more were in progress. Joyce first approached Stuart Gilbert, who was already working on an authorized study of Ulysses with the author’s encouragement and collaboration. Gilbert wisely demurred. So Joyce turned to Herbert Gorman, the author of a critical study, James Joyce: His First Forty Years (1924), and offered him the burden of a lifetime (or at least a decade).
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Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker
by Zachary Leader
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It is not uncommon for writers to authorize a biography for production (and even publication) while they are still alive—they have always understood that posterity is its own kind of celebrity, best nurtured in the here and now. In Joyce’s case, the word author in authorized bears extra weight: Joyce, a nightmare subject who was prone to fantastic paranoia, prodded Gorman when his progress stalled; threatened Gorman (menacingly, through his financial adviser and legal representative, Paul Léon) when he felt disserved by the draft chapters provided (and those withheld); and insisted on correcting Gorman’s page proofs—demanding in at least one case that Gorman tell a bald-faced lie for his benefit—before he would allow the biography to be published. After the book was finished, Joyce delayed the book’s publication so that his slow-going Finnegans Wake could enter the world first in 1939. “I will never write another biography of a living man,” Gorman wrote to his publisher seven years into his decade-long ordeal. “It is too difficult and thankless a task.”
Dead writers, with their pesky heirs and estates, their fans and their scholars, are no cup of tea either. A living writer only multiplies the inherent challenges of biography as a form, what Virginia Woolf called “a perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow,” the impossible meeting of biography’s necessary factuality and art’s more-than-real perfection. Still, for modernists like Woolf, biography offered a natural foil to the novel. She imagined the biographer and the novelist starting with the same building blocks—the real world, real people, and real experiences—but posited that facticity bogged the biographer down while fantasy freed the novelist. “The artist’s imagination at its most intense,” she wrote, “fires out what is perishable in fact; he builds with what is durable; but the biographer must accept the perishable, build with it, embed it in the very fabric of his work.”
Lytton Strachey, another of Woolf’s close friends, had more practical advice for the biographer stumped by the management of facts: “Ignorance,” he maintained in the preface to Eminent Victorians (1918), “is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.” For Strachey, Woolf, and others, the trivia of the real world was an obstacle to the more integrated —and, in Woolf’s words, “rarer” and “intenser”—vision of reality conjured by art. It is no coincidence that Woolf’s most playful and fantastical novel, the gender-bending Orlando (1928), presents itself as “a biography.” It is perhaps at once Woolf’s least and most factual novel, full of true vignettes from real lives translated across time, place, and character. On the other hand, when Woolf was persuaded to write the biography of her friend the artist and art critic Roger Fry, her efforts—cramped by grief and the intimate knowledge of close friendship—fell flat.
Joyce’s irreverence for certain facts in his personal biography, when, for example, they related to his relationship with his father or the precise date of his marriage to Nora Barnacle—when they seemed incompatible with the image he wanted broadcast to the world, in other words—was exceeded by an opposing craze for facticity in his fiction. He felt a need for his work—which skewed, to a debatable extent, autobiographical—to rest on a bedrock of unimpeachable authenticity. When a prospective publisher, George Roberts of Maunsel & Company, wanted Joyce to fictionalize the names of pubs and the railway company mentioned in Dubliners (1914), Joyce (in his own words) “offered to take a car and go with Roberts, proofs in hand, to the 3 or 4 publicans really named and to the secretary of the railway co.” His ambitions for Ulysses were grander. As he told his friend Frank Budgen, he wanted “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” Joyce was aided in this unyielding pursuit of factuality by his aunt Josephine Murray. In a letter to Murray from 1922, for example, Joyce asked whether during the “cold February of 1893”—that is, some 29 years earlier —“the canal was frozen over and if there was any skating.”
As these writers grappled with the intrusion or inclusion of reality in their work, they were also, many of them, preparing a record for posterity, either in the form of propagandistic biographies, in the case of Joyce, or in the form of a copious and well-guarded paper trail. In 1940, a bomb struck Virginia Woolf’s London home in Mecklenburgh Square while she was living in the countryside. The loss made her giddy: Surveying the “heap of ruins” that had once been the Bloomsbury haunts of her youth, she let out “a sigh of relief”; with her base in London destroyed, she felt released from another fact, a heap of facts, the tether of the past. “I sh[oul]d like to start life, in peace, almost bare—free to go anywhere,” she reflected. There was just one thing she wasn’t ready to give up: With “books all over the dining room floor” and the “wind blowing through” her bombed-out sitting room, she “began to hunt out diaries.” The next day, after rescuing 24 volumes from the wreckage, she was thinking, once more, about biography.
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About a year after Herbert Gorman published James Joyce: A Definitive Biography, his subject died, a sad but critically convenient event. Eleven years later, in 1952, an ambitious young professor decided to secure his own place in an adjacent literary pantheon: So Richard Ellmann undertook his monumental, magisterial, and still—to the frustration of many—definitive biography. When it was published seven years later, Ellmann simply and confidently titled it James Joyce.
Joyce’s death eliminated only one of the myriad challenges Ellmann would face in trying to piece together the novelist’s life, which in my copy unfolds over the course of 744 pages, not counting another 68 pages of small-print endnotes. That enterprise—along with the experiences, in his youth and adulthood, that prepared Ellmann to undertake it—is the subject of a new book by Zachary Leader, Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker. A biography of a biographer (and the biography he wrote) might seem like an intellectual exercise for M.C. Escher, but Leader’s meta-biographical approach offers a case study, in effect, for the stakes of thinking about biography as an art. The presumption behind literary biography—behind any artist’s biography—is that art reflects its creator, that in its essence it bears the stamp of the personality, the mind, or the experiences behind it. We come to biography to know better the art with which we are already intimate by seeing the artist more intimately too. Modernist tenets of impersonality—that to create art is to “escape” from personality and emotion, as the extremely personal T.S. Eliot insisted— fail to stand up to the biographer’s and the reader’s scrutiny and voraciousness. If we can understand a biography better by understanding the person who wrote it, as Leader seems to suggest, then it follows that biography is an expression not so much of its subject but of its author. The biographer is elevated to the status of artist, but the prospect of ever understanding another’s life is at mortal risk.
Leader has chosen an excellent work with which to test his implicit theory: James Joyce has the same stature among 20th-century biographies as James Joyce has among 20th-century novelists. After Ellmann’s book was published in 1959, Anthony Burgess declared it the “greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” Ellmann’s work has something close to the aesthetic wholeness that Woolf reserved for literary art: Its narrative—critics will sometimes call it a “story”— knits Joyce’s colorful, meandering personal life together with his writing life, perhaps a little too seamlessly. The biography’s immense scope, its energetic capaciousness for the commonplace, combines with Ellmann’s uncannily meticulous craftsmanship to cast a mirage of comprehensiveness over a life that realistically has to retain some inscrutability, keep some aspects of itself from view. The volume of trivia seems immense, and yet at the same time not a word feels out of place, not a detail unwarranted. In fact, Ellmann incorporated only a fraction of his research into the text, knowingly accumulating context well beyond what he could write because he was keen to, as he said later in a lecture, to get “some sense of the quality or texture of life then.” So Ellmann draws not only from Joyce’s correspondence, taken at the time from a shifting landscape of personal and institutional archives, but also from extensive interviews with figures both intimate (like Joyce’s brother) and incidental (like his colleagues at the Berlitz School in Trieste). More than 300 people are credited within the work, and as a result, the richness of Ellmann’s understanding of Joyce’s world is palpable, delicious.
Yet the perspective from which we inevitably see Joyce is not a plural one—it is Ellmann’s. Ellmann has rightly been criticized for softening the rough edges of not only Joyce’s art but also his character, a shaping effect that is the product not so much of the biographer’s commentary and interpretation on Joye’s personality and choices—Ellmann is light on both—as of the variations in the biographer’s attention, the points where his curiosity generates detail and those where it retreats. Ellmann’s taste is for anecdotes about the genial spendthrift, the bombastic genius, and the ribald everyman, which are as entertaining as they are charming. Elsewhere, he skims over Joyce’s cruel ingratitude toward those who helped him professionally, financially, and even personally, as well as his sexism (Joyce had his publisher Sylvia Beach, for example, arrange his life, organizing doctor’s appointments, bank drafts, and dinners; then, after she had published Ulysses at a significant financial loss, Joyce persuaded her to release the copyright—and any hopes of recouping her expenditure—so that he could pursue another publisher). He treats Joyce’s ambivalent politics with a light touch, and only offers the occasional glance at the political situation of the country from which Joyce exiled himself — its raging debates about what a free Ireland might look like, its bloody fight for freedom from the British Empire, and the Civil War that followed the creation of the Irish Free State. (Less than a paragraph, for example, is devoted to the 1916 Easter Rising.)
Ellmann’s Joyce eventually landed Ellmann himself in the position of Goldsmiths Professor of English at the University of Oxford, a post that would later be held by another of the 20th century’s great biographers — Hermione Lee. Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1996) has something of the monumental status of James Joyce (along with its physical heft), but it was far from the first biography of Woolf to be published. James Joyce came out 18 years after the novelist’s death; Virginia Woolf, by contrast, succeeded its subject by more than half a century. Lee’s advantage (and, in another sense, her obstacle) was that so much of the territory of Woolf’s work and life had already been mapped, painstakingly, controversially, by both scholars and biographers. The traps—among them Woolf’s sometimes radical, sometimes limited feminism, her snobbery, the sexual abuse she experienced as a child, and most impossibly, the illness that ended with her suicide—had not only been laid out but flagged. Writing in another age of biography, and about a writer whose biographical skepticism cut against any desire to craft a neatly encapsulated life, Lee spotlights some of the limits of her cognizance.
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This is not to say that Lee’s biography has not faced its own criticism—scholars in particular are never satisfied, as it is our job not to be. For all their differences, in fact, Lee and Ellmann are both criticized for their frequent recourse to their subjects’ fiction, not as intellectual material but as biographical clue. Even Lee, who has not only Woolf’s letters but also her diaries and memoirs to draw on, will sometimes look, for example, to Mr. Ramsay to illuminate Woolf’s relationship with her father, or to Jacob’s Room and The Waves to reflect on the untimely death of her older brother Thoby. Both Woolf and Joyce self-consciously drew from their lives, from their experiences and the experiences of those around them, to craft their characters and scenes. Joyce wrote some of the Bloom sections of Ulysses, for example, with a photo of Ettore Schmitz (better known by his pen name, Italo Svevo) on his desk; in 1928, on her father’s birthday—about a year after she published To the Lighthouse—Woolf reflected how the novel had soothed some of her grief. “I used to think of him and mother daily,” she mused, “but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back, but differently.”
In Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, who is and isn’t an avatar for Joyce in his own youth, proclaims the writer to be a “priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” We imagine that literary biographers cast their lot with the bread side of things—what were the writer’s daily experiences? But as Ellmann himself suggests in the third sentence of James Joyce, they are most preoccupied with that divine mystery, transubstantiation: “The life of the artist…differs from the lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command his present attention.”
The biographer, like a fish swimming upstream, longs to occupy that impossible space where the flesh is made word, where experience turns into memory, and memory is transmuted into art, where the world is refined and deepened into Woolf’s “rarer, intenser” stuff of fiction. I am perhaps too sympathetic to the impulse that had Ellmann chasing after Oliver Gogarty as a model for Buck Mulligan. To readers like me (and like Woolf), the things of fiction are more real than the facts of a writer’s life; they are, in a sense, facts of a higher order. Ellsworth Mason, Ellmann’s friend and fellow Joyce scholar, thought that Ellmann had “blurred both by trying to write both biography and criticism” and accused Ellmann of “playing a duet with Joyce” in the draft material that he’d read. Mason seems here troubled by the possible conflation of Joyce’s fictive method with Ellmann’s biographical one. While making Joyce out to be more of an autobiographical writer than he was, Ellmann was—even worse—licensing himself to produce fiction, to create something that, more than being truthful, would leave its mark.
If fiction casts some necessary rainbow over the literary biographer’s factual granite, where is the biographer of the biographer to turn? Ellmann’s Joyce shifts and pulses beneath Leader’s book like a tectonic plate, deepening and complicating the already entangled careers of literary critic and literary subject, and challenging the reader to disentangle the crafting of fictional lives from the writing of historical ones—or maybe vice versa.
Like Joyce, Ellmann was ambitious from a young age; also like Joyce, he could be quite sensitive, goaded on by rivalry or injury. In Joyce this sensitivity seems to have produced experiences of shame and fantasies of victimhood that fueled and filled his fiction; they are tendencies he tenderly satirizes in his work. Ellmann’s intolerance of rivals furthered his career, too, exciting him to a ruthlessness perhaps more pointed than Joyce’s. He rushed to publish his first book, Yeats: The Man and the Mask,just a few months before A. Norman Jeffares could release his own W. B. Yeats: Man & Poet, which was based on the same manuscript materials. Having learned his lesson about controlling access to resources, Ellmann later agreed to edit the second volume of Joyce’s letters so that he could delay their publication to succeed his biography. (This is to say nothing of the parallels Ellmann actively courted: Joyce published Ulysses on his 40th birthday; 36 years later, Ellmann closed his preface with the date of his own 40th.)
Reading Leader’s account of Ellmann’s machinations, I couldn’t help but think of a poem by Yeats, one Ellmann must have known well. In “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” Yeats complains about the tedious practicalities of his work with the Abbey Theatre: He reduces “Theatre business” to the “management of men,” imagines the heavenly Pegasus forced to “Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt/ As though it dragged road metal.” Rather than tracking the people who inspired literary characters, Leader’s biography is populated, in part, by the sources who had to be charmed, coaxed, controlled, manipulated, and pushed aside so that Ellmann could clear the path for his work. When a private collector, H.K. Croessman, purchased the papers of Herbert Gorman — Ellmann’s unfortunate biographical predecessor—Ellmann successfully petitioned to be given exclusive access until his biography had been published. Leader’s fascination with what’s difficult mirrors Ellmann’s, and makes greater sense of Ellmann’s minute attention to the many absorbing practicalities of Joyce’s writing life. For Joyce, too, suffered some (mostly self-made) woes of publishing, and Joyce also exhibited a quite frankly astonishing ability to procure what he wanted and needed, ruthlessly shaking down family, friends, and patrons for their time, commitment, and, most importantly, money.
The appeal of James Joyce, however, is not its promise to relate the heroic efforts required of both Joyce and his helpers to bring books like Dubliners and Ulysses to press. Ellmann’s biography still captivates readers because it seamlessly pieces together a range of colorful anecdotes, made lively through Ellmann’s expert craftsmanship, and it helps us to project them, in scrambled, partial, or piecemeal fashion, into Joyce’s dense fiction. In its mass of illustrative detail, we find once more the idiosyncratic disposition on display in Joyce’s singular fiction. It’s almost as if Ellmann is pulling an accordion open, revealing everything that Joyce compresses in order to sound out his world. By contrast, the title of Leader’s book conjures up biographical nesting dolls, biographies of biographers biographizing biographers until the end of literacy. Beneath each literary life related, it suggests, another one is revealed—a less oblique kind of artistic heritage than, say, the elective affinity that writers claim with those of previous generations (or do everything they can to obscure). Even if Leader’s implicit premise is true—even if the biographer creates a subject most like herself, finds or makes the doll in which to encase her smaller likeness—what such a biographer’s biography produces is like a shadow cast by a shadow: an imitation more than an elucidation of the thing.
Like many of his peers and indeed his successors, Ellmann’s friend Mason was wary of the promise of biographical insight. “I do not think the biographical details you have gathered, most of which were new to me, have clarified anything in my own mind about Joyce,” he wrote to Ellmann in the same letter where he accused Ellmann of confusing biography and criticism. “They rather show that you have been having a fine time in Ireland.” There is a New Critical purity to Mason’s insistence on “clarification”: He does not want to see more, only to see more clearly. But perhaps biography is a medium for seeing not more clearly but more deeply, or broadly—for seeing, quite simply, more. What biography can achieve for both the writer and the reader is to move criticism and archival research to a new terrain, one that includes activities more aligned with fandom: visiting an author’s house, taking a literary walking tour. These are all, in their own ways, attempts to restage and deepen the original fictional encounter, to occupy the work again, askance, anew. That writers like Joyce and Woolf filled their work with real sites and sketched some of their characters in the contours of real historical persons only makes this desire—the desire to understand some of the facts behind the fact—more enticing.
It is often assumed that modernist literature’s enduring captivation, its ability to ensnare and obsess, is a product of its obscurity—another kind of fascination with another kind of difficulty. In this view, devotees of Woolf, Joyce, and their ilk are puzzle-solvers trying to parse the tricky syntax, abstruse vocabulary, and dense allusions in their works. Untangling the twisted threads of a writing life might be a puzzle (or a Gordian knot), but it might also be an act of devotion, a pilgrimage made in the faith that if you could just behold the relic—the city, the beach house, the dashed-off letter—it would soothe the fever in your brain. There are 455 boxes in the Richard Ellmann papers at the University of Tulsa. It’s hard not to imagine Leader’s work in that archive as a little bit of a devotional act.
Leader has written an engaging and, moreover, fair account of what was probably the most important literary biography of the 20th century. But I missed there that mysterious thing that biography sometimes borrows from fiction—that shimmer of rainbow that plays across its granite, the scene that, as Woolf writes, “remains bright…lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a poem or a novel, to feel a start of recognition, as if we had remembered something that we had known before.”
After all, it was Hermione Lee’s biography, in the end, and not Woolf’s fiction, that propelled me, three summers ago, to take eight hours of trains down to St. Ives in Cornwall, where Virginia Woolf spent her childhood summers. It was biography, with its wayward details, that bewitched me into begging a bewildered boatman to chart a course for Godrevy Lighthouse, which the Stephen children could see from their summer home in Talland House, rather than the more popular Seal Island, a place unhaloed by modernism’s aura. A boat full of children eager to see seals—and, I hasten add, gratified by the seals at Godrevy Lighthouse—was hijacked for my sake, and for biography’s. So it was that I traveled across what seemed to me to be the real waters of Woolf’s imagination to see a symbol in stone and mortar, to play at a scene I had read a dozen times and taught almost as often. I don’t think it clarified anything about Woolf for me, but I had a fine time doing it.
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