A life of Joyce’s biographer by a fellow literary gumshoe

Ellmann‘s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and its Maker
ZACHARY LEADER
(Harvard University Press, 464 PP, £29.95)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £26.95 • TEL 020 7799 4064

Richard Ellmann‘s life of James Joyce – over 800 pages of august, Johnsonian prose – is one of the great non-fiction works of our time. Published in 1959, with a revised and expanded edition appearing in 1982, James Joyce has the pleasurable density of a nineteenth-century novel. More than any other biography, it established Joyce as the reversed Dublin modernist and conflicted Catholic whose influence is still felt.

Ellmann was aware of the difficulties involved. It is fantastically difficult to fashion a narrative of of the inchoate facts of anyone‘s life, but Joyce was noted for his determination to protect his privacy and for keeping secret what he wished to keep secret (not least his sexually explicit letter to his wife, Nora Barnacle). To top it all, Joyce often surrounded himself with people who were not well known: waiters, hotel porters, bank clerks. How to track them down?

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