‘Ellman’s Joyce: The biography of a masterpiece and its maker’ by Zachary Leader

Published last year, this hefty book is a biography of a biographer, being a study of the life of Richard Ellmann (1918 – 1987) with a particular focus on the years that he was researching and writing his great biography of James Joyce which I also read this month.

I enjoyed this and found that it enhanced my appreciation of Ellmann’s Joyce biography in that it explains how he went about the work, and how lucky he was at certain points to get access to letter and to interview people who helped him make the book so comprehensive.

But there is a big problem. This purports to be a biography of Ellman as well as his ‘masterpiece’, but it is by no means complete. His early life is given a very full biographical treatment, Zachary Leader of course being no mean literary biographer himself. Ellmann was an American from a Jewish family who served in World War 2 and married a gentile against his parents’ wishes. One of his children is the novelist Lucy Ellmann who was recently shortlisted for the Booker and is a major source for this book.

Understandably we then get a very detailed account of the writing of ‘James Joyce’ through the 1950s and its reception. But everything thereafter - ie: the final, pretty impressive, 28 years of Ellmann’s life – is truncated and all too briefly summarised into a single chapter labelled ’coda’. This is such a shame as these years were the years in which Ellmann wrote his big Oscar Wilde biography (which was my introduction to his work), moved to Yale and then to Oxford where he was Goldsmiths Professor of English and latterly a fellow of Wolfson College. I would love to have read much much more about this period.

So one rather disappointing aspect, but this was still very much worth reading as a study of how a great biography – one that should properly be considered to be an outstanding work of literature – came to be written.