This is a fascinating tribute to Richard Ellmann, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, and James Joyce’s greatest biographer
June 13, 2025 15:48
This coming Monday is Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the day that James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place. So when better to read a new book about Richard Ellmann, the famous Joyce biographer?
Zachary Leader is one of the best literary biographers of our time. He has published a huge biography of Kingsley Amis and, more recently, an acclaimed two-volume book on the life and work of Saul Bellow. Now he has turned to what one reviewer has called “a book about a book about the writer of a book regularly acknowledged as the most important novel of the 20th century”.
In 1959 Richard Ellmann published his extraordinary biography of Joyce. Divided into two parts of almost equal length, The Biographer and The Biography, Leader’s book tells the story of both that book and its writer. The son of Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, Ellmann was, according to his friend Jeffrey Meyers, “a cultural rather than a religious Jew” and upset his parents by marrying an Irish Catholic woman. Brought up near Detroit, he went on to study at Yale where he later wrote his PhD thesis on Yeats.
In the 1950s Yale had a strict Jewish quota (10 per cent) and university housing segregating Christians and Jews. Yale’s English department did not appoint a Jew until 1947. It is perhaps no coincidence that Joyce was fascinated by the Jewish experience of exile.
Christopher Hitchens, curiously underrated as a critic, argued that Joyce made Leopold Bloom a Jew because the Jewish question was uppermost on his mind.
Certainly, with Bloom, Joyce created one of the most memorable Jewish characters in fiction, and also created another Jewish character, Moses Herzog, after whom Saul Bellow named his most famous hero.
The second part of the book shows how and why Ellmann became a biographer and above all, the extraordinary determination with which he searched far and wide for crucial papers and tracked down all the surviving people in Joyce’s life. Ellmann’s enormous biography minutely documented Joyce’s everyday life while mixing insights into his writing, moving “from life to work, inner world to outer world, analysis to narrative”.
Anthony Burgess called Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, “the greatest literary biography of the 20th century”, and although more than 60 years on it has had its critics, especially Hugh Kenner, few would disagree with Frank Kermode’s judgment that Ellmann’s work would “fix Joyce’s image for a generation”.
James Joyce was a biography which remains a masterpiece more than a century after the publication of Ulysses and Zachary Leader deserves our thanks for this fascinating tribute.
Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and its Maker
By Zachary Leader
Harvard University Press