Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker

Leader (The Life of Saul Bellow), an English professor emeritus at the University of Roehampton in London, provides an excellent account of the making of literary scholar Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of James Joyce. Providing detailed biographical background on Ellmann, Leader describes how his time with the Office of Strategic Services during WWII honed his ability to identify patterns in disparate pieces of intelligence, preparing him to make sense of Joyce’s scattered papers. According to Leader, Ellmann became interested in writing about Joyce after learning from W.B. Yeats’s widow, whom Ellmann visited while researching his dissertation on the poet, that a 20-year-old Joyce had once told the elder Yeats “you are too old for me to help you,” displaying an arrogance that Ellmann enviously contrasted with his own “mild” manner. The comprehensive recreation of how Ellmann wrote James Joyce covers his successful efforts to head off other scholars by negotiating exclusive access to important documents and his skillful navigation of tensions between rival keepers of Joyce’s legacy (Ellmann hid from Joyce’s son, Giorgio, that he had access to publisher Maria Solas’s letters from Joyce, fearing that Giorgio would claim them and “lock them away”). The scrupulous research painstakingly brings to life the contentious gestation of the still-definitive work on Joyce. A riveting glimpse inside the biography writing process, this scintillates. Photos. (May)