‘Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker’
By Zachary Leader
Harvard University Press, 464 Pages

“Ellmann’s Joyce” is a book about a book about a novelist who wrote books unlike any that had been written before. Put another way, it is a love story, a textual tango between biographer and subject that smolders in archives and is consummated in citations. This book’s author, Zachary Leader, has written lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, the latter in two volumes. Here, Mr. Leader writes a biography of a biography — Richard Ellmann’s “James Joyce.”

“James Joyce” is the definitive life of the Irish author of “Ulysses,” “Finnegan’s Wake,” “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” and “Dubliners.” Ellmann, the Boswell to Joyce’s Dr. Johnson, was a Jewish academic who taught mainly at Northwestern and Oxford. “James Joyce” was published in 1959,  meaning that Ellmann, who died in 1987, enjoyed access to those who knew Joyce. It is a product of a golden age in American literary studies. 

Ellmann was hardly an obvious choice to write Joyce’s life. The son of an upper-middle class son of a successful lawyer and pillar of Detroit’s Jewish community, Ellmann went to Yale, where he studied literature under some of the giants of the age, such as Cleanth Brooks and Chauncey Brewster Tinker. Ellmann’s dissertation on William Butler Yeats was the first approved by Yale on a 20th century subject.

Ellmann’s service during World War II was largely in the Office of Strategic Services, America’s first intelligence agency. Mr. Leader argues that Ellmann’s time handling documents in that office aided him in his calling as a biographer. Yale’s Class of 1943 alone furnished at least 42 men who entered intelligence work. Many of them stayed to form the nucleus of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Leader judges that “Paris post-Occupation was a cultural paradise,” and Ellmann relates visiting Picasso’s atelier with a “whole room full of 74 paintings.” He dined with Proust’s niece, Suzanne Adrienne Mante, in the 16th arrondissement, and wrote to a girlfriend that her “cloak room is larger than your living room.” Ellmann was sent on to London, and from there he first visited Dublin to study at Trinity College and work on a study of Yeats. 

The poet had died in 1939, just five years or so before Ellmann made contact with Yeats’s widow, “Georgie.” He also secured interviews with Yeats’s younger brother, Jack — a painter — and his muse, the actress Maud Gonne MacBride, whose antisemitism he takes in stride. Mr. Leader calls Ellmann “one of the canniest literary detectives of any decade,” and details the means of seduction by which he conscripts these eccentric characters to his task.

Ellmann’s book — “Yeats: The Man and the Masks” — made him something of an academic celebrity. At the age of 31, at Northwestern, he became the youngest full professor of English in a major university in America. He soon turned his acumen to writing a life of the most towering Irish writer of them all — James Joyce. Joyce and Yeats had a contentious relationship, with the novelist telling the poet in 1902, “You are too old for me to help you.”

Ellmann writes that “the sharpness of Joyce’s perception comes from a conviction that all things are worth observing,” and the same can be said of the biographer, who crisscrossed Europe to find every scrap of paper or half-remembered anecdote that could put Joyce into sharper relief. Ellmann, in writing “James Joyce,” resembles more a journalist more than an academic — working sources, collecting quotes, twitchy that he’d get scooped on the beat.

As a prose writer, Ellmann was no slouch. He writes that in Trieste and Rome, Joyce “learned what he had unlearned in Dublin, to be a Dubliner … he felt humiliated when anyone attacked his ‘Impoverished country.’ ‘The Dead’ is his first song of exile.” Ellmann asks Irish filmmaker Sean O’Mordha, “Don’t you think the way a genius ties his tie is important?” He gives Joyce the attention Joyce gave to the protagonist of “Ulysses,” Leopold Bloom. 

The writer Anthony Burgess reckoned that Ellmann had crafted “the greatest literary biography of the 20th century,” but his opus attracted criticism. The scholar Hugh Kenner, whom the literary sage Harold Bloom called “pope to the alternative tradition to that of Ellmann in Joyce studies,” raged against the “professional Irish who own James Joyce and whose branch office is R. Ellmann.” Kenner, in an aside, called Ellman an “on-the-make Sammy Glick.”

Ellmann’s life contained little by way of conventional drama. His parents disapproved of his marriage to one Mary Donoghue — an Irish-American girl from Massachusetts — and insisted on calling her by her middle name, Jean. Still, that turbulence was overcome and Ellmann’s life was happy and productive. By the time the second edition of “James Joyce” was released in 1982, he was staying in splendor at Dublin’s grandest hotel, the Shelbourne. 

When Ellmann was writing “James Joyce” he would sometimes delegate interviews to graduate students. Mr. Leader unearths a sheet of instructions he would give to guide them. One reads, “What was Nora like? Household management? Did Joyce write? What was his day like? What time did he get up? What did he do with his time? Was he teaching English?” Ellmann wrote that Joyce had a “spider’s eye” for detail. So did his biographer.