James Joyce by Richard Ellmann

I have been intending to read this landmark book in the history of biography for years, but always put off doing so due to its size. It runs to almost 900 pages including index and notes, and was quite an undertaking. But I read every page and found it to be every bit as extraordinary as everyone says it is.

Originally published in 1959 and updated in 1982, it is very comprehensive indeed. It proceeds chronologically, taking the reader through James Joyce’s extraordinary life, from his birth in 1882 to his death aged just 58 in 1941. During this time he lived first in Dublin as a boy and young man, then in Trieste, briefly in Rome, then in Zurich during the first world war, back in Trieste, then Paris and finally to Zurich again at the start of the second world war. He and his family were continually moving from flat to flat, always renting and always struggling financially.

He lived with the splendidly named Nora Barnacle and was by all accounts a devoted father to two children, Georgio and Lucia. He spoke several languages fluently, drank a great deal and lived pretty chaotically. His eyesight was always bad and deteriorated through his life, necessitating a dozen risky and often painful operations. He made friends with ease, but also tended to fall out with them easily too. He taught English, wrote articles and tried his hand pretty unsuccessfully at various business ventures. He was always short of money. But he also wrote the four works of extraordinary canonical modernist fiction (Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young man, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake) – none of which I have yet read in their entirety – a play and plenty of poetry. A lot of his poems were light and funny, and written for his own amusement. But their inclusion in this book provides one of its many joys.

Much of the book concerns his struggles in getting his work published, initially because of its unconventionality, but later due to fears of prosecution. This was sometimes related to ‘obscenity’ – Joyce refused to change a word – and the apparent similarity of characters in the books to real people who Joyce had known and often fallen out with. Ellmann does a splendid job of explaining on whom characters in the books were modelled. Frequently the extent of disguise was very limited indeed. These novels are very autobiographical.

This account, based very much on letters and the recollections of people who knew James Joyce, is generally held to represent as much of a reinvention of the art of biography as its subjects books were in the field of literature. It is astonishingly detailed (very much a warts and all treatment), looks to blend literary criticism with life writing and, above all manages to be both admirably scholarly and highly readable. Hugely influential, you can see its legacy in pretty well all the larger, fuller literary biographies that have been published since. An astonishing achievement by any standards.

I found it to be at times both very moving and also funny. Here are some quotations that I jotted down, these first ones relating to John Joyce, James’s father, who was close to him and just as exasperating a character in many ways:

John Joyce applied himself with equal diligence to the begetting of children and the contracting of mortgages on his inherited properties. His first child was born in 1881 and did not survive; he lamented, ‘My life was buried with him’, but was soon solaced by another. During his wife’s second pregnancy, on December 2, 1881, he mortgaged the first of his Cork properties. The second child, James Augusta (as the birth was incorrectly registered), was born on February 2, 1882, by which time the Joyces had moved from Kingstown to 41 Brighton Square West in Rathgar. Three mortgages followed, on March 9, October 18 and November 27 1883, and then Margaret Alice (Poppie) was born on January 18, 1884. On August 5, 1884, another property was mortgaged; John Stanislaus (Stannie) was born on December 17, 1884 and Charles Patrick on July 24, 1886. There were two other mortgages on April 21 and May 6, 1887, and George Alfred was born on his father’s birthday, July 4, 188. Eileen Isabel Mary Xavier Brigid was born on January 22, 1889, Mary Kathleen on January 18, 1890, and Eva Mary on October 26, 1891. Then came Florence Elizabeth on November 8, 1892, who was followed by mortgages on December 24, 1892 and January 13, 1893. Mabel Josephine Anne (Baby) was born on November 27, 1893, and two mortgages, on February 8 and 16, came swiftly after in 1894. The total not including three misbirths, was four boys and six girls. There were no more babies, and after eleven mortgages, there was no more property. John Joyce filled his house with children and with debts.

and then:

To keep one’s equilibrium in 7 St Peter’s Terrace required all possible dexterity. The disarray that had marked the Joyce household since their move from Blackrock to Dublin a dozen years before, changed to near chaos after May Joyce’s death. The house was in disrepair, the banister broken, the furniture mostly pawned or sold; a few scrawny chickens scrabbled at the back for food. John Joyce took out another mortgage for £65 on November 3, 1903, and knew that this would be the last, and that nothing was left of the nine hundred pounds he had obtained a year before by commuting his pension. The house was to drop away from him in 1905. When the new mortgage money moved from his hands to those of the Dublin publicans, he sold the piano, a desperate act for a musical man and one which roused James to fury when he came home to discover it.

Then there are passages where he sums up aspects of Joyce’s life succinctly and beautifully after quoting extensively from one of his articles:

Here, in Chaplinesque caricature, are most of Joyce’s central preoccupations: his financial need, his family, his country, his irreligion, his love of literature. Wives make cuckolds; Italy is, except for the Church, a fraud, and the church is an old whore; Ireland is horrible but unforgettable. His remarks are bitter, but they are also funny.

And this lovely final paragraph right at the end of the book:

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 principle characters was the same that he have 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.

There are some delightful set pieces, such as the description of a meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust in Paris in 1922 that did not go so well and the final paragraphs describing his rather sudden death.

Serious points are conveyed cleverly too such as this one concerning the generosity of an ‘anonymous’ patron (Lady Cunard) who liked Joyce’s work and decided to pay him a pretty generous monthly allowance so that he could devote himself to writing full time:

Her benefaction did not make Joyce rich; no amount of money would have done that; but it made it possible for him to be poor only through determined extravagance.

In fact, as the biography makes tragically clear. By the time Joyce was earning good money from his books, he was spending well in excess of half of it on getting medical treatment for Lucia, whose deteriorating mental condition obsessed him and caused huge anguish in his later years.

One passage was of particular interest to me personally. In the summer of 1929 James and Nora spent a month on holiday in Torquay and stayed in the Imperial Hotel. I know this hotel very well as I stay there regularly for student residentials and writing events in connection with my job. It is lovely, but now very much less pukka than it was in the 1920s. He appears to have been visited there by several friends, including T S Eliot.

Ultimately I think that what makes this such a brilliant book is the way that Ellmann focuses as much on the day to day life as he does on the work. The latter was extraordinary, but the former ordinary in many respects and filled with episodes and events that any reader can identify with. The sections relating to his daughter Lucia’s worsening mental illness and his overpowering love for her are really well done in particular:

His exasperation and despair exfoliated like a black flower.

For me the only major frustration is that this biography ends pretty abruptly with James Joyce’s death. It is, of course, already very very long, but I still would have liked a final chapter to have been added on his legacy and the changing ways in which Joyce’s work has been received and understood. May be it was too early too do that in 1959, but that was not the case in 1982 when the revised edition came out. In all other respects though I got enormous enjoyment from reading this wonderful book.