King Tut’s Tomb

When Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce appeared in 1958, it changed the novelist’s public image forever. Gone was the “impersonal artist, cold and aloof” of the academic seminar; gone, too, was the writer defined by obscenity and scatological sprawl, once banned by the U.S. Postal Service and still unavailable in Irish bookshops. Ellmann showed a Joyce who lived what he wrote about, the poverty, flirtations, quarrels, and debts of lower-middle-class Dubliners, while documenting them in an art which was “the justification of the commonplace.” Centering Ulysses on the marriage of Molly and Leopold Bloom rather than on its obvious artist-figure Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce put the artist’s family at the center of his imaginative life and assembled an unparalleled archive of information, anecdote, and evidence to show readers worldwide the real people and situations repurposed for the novel’s intimidating prose and mind-bogglingly large cast of characters. Joyce had not merely given his fictional family countless real-life details, such as the charwoman he and his wife Nora had employed or the midwife of their children. For the previous fifteen years, he had actually been stirring quarrels with former friends such as Oliver St. John Gogarty or J. F. Byrne in order to create real dramas that could be re-attributed to their fictional counterparts Buck Mulligan or Cranly. His artistic calling, Joyce had promised his brother Stanislaus in 1905, would be to “write tiny little sentences about the people who betrayed me.” Readers learned of the other boyfriend of Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, who had sparked his jealous fears of Nora’s unfaithfulness and provoked the novel’s great “theme of adultery,” and they read that the Blooms’ house at 7 Eccles Street had been Joyce’s own lodging on his trip back to Dublin in 1909 to revisit some of those grievances. Readers also saw how the novel’s most modernist-sounding themes—betrayal of one’s past, self-creation, exile—were really grounded in these same family psycho-dramas. “Nothing has been admitted into the book which is not in some way personal and attached,” Ellmann asserted—even the thrice-baptized Bloom’s Jewishness, not obviously attractive to a vengeful lapsed Catholic like Joyce. For Ellmann Joyce was drawn to the Jews by “their chosen isolation, and the close family ties which were perhaps the result of it,” two features which “he saw in himself as well.”

Zachary Leader’s biography of that biography makes the same move on its author. Ellmann moves from being the academic source of the biography—an impressive critic of Joyce, but not of interest in himself—to the writer whose own preoccupations drove his famous book, and in so doing changed the course of modern criticism. Ellmann’s Joyce drew everything from real life because Ellmann was trained by wartime intelligence to be an expert tracker of sources, and he was writing a book whose future success for general readers would rely on his ability to turn an intimidating modernist experiment back into a life story driven by the protocols of realism. Ellmann’s Joyce was motivated more by personal dramas than by Irish politics because Ellmann hated the insularity of his Jewish upbringing and saw his own urbane internationalism in Joyce’s move out of backward-facing Dublin to write. And Ellmann took a lenient view of the way Joyce made his family suffer for his great work because Ellmann was also over-absorbed in his own research, to the distress of his wife and children.

Leader’s Ellmann emerges as a kindly, confident, and gregarious man who could be professionally calculating. The story of James Joyce is also the story of how he came to dominate the entire academic field, by first winning the confidence of Joyce’s surviving relatives and friends, then getting his first sight of the trunks of unpublished letters, and then, with tact and skill, allowing them to appear in ways which kept the Joyce circle happy while limiting their usefulness to potential rivals until his own biography could appear. At a larger scale, it is also the story of how the criticism and memoirs written by Joyce’s peers and friends became absorbed into and then utterly superseded by the criticism of academic professionals with money to spend. Ellmann partly created the Joyce industry by leveraging some of his own reputation to ensure Joyce’s manuscripts ended up in American university libraries—an investment in the humanities akin to buying a cyclotron for the physicists that guaranteed their deans’ support for future Joyce PhD programs—and, in the process, secured his own scholarly pre-eminence.

The biography of a book, however, will have a different narrative arc than the biography of a writer. Biographers trace the psychological influences and early events that made the person and form the work. After the crowning events that justify the usually unrewarding life hitherto—publication, press notices, changing public opinion—the modern literary biography frequently declines into a rather tedious recounting of awards, voyages, and later-life health problems. The life of a book, on the other hand, really begins at publication, and it lives on through what friends, enemies, and future authors do with it. Ellmann’s Joyce spends three hundred thirty-five pages on the buildup to the biography’s triumphant debut and only twelve pages on its afterlife, but these are in many ways the most interesting and controversial. Ellmann’s compendium of interviews and recollections by people who would soon themselves die made his book indispensable and unrepeatable. Joseph Brooker’s Joyce’s Critics, a deft study of the Joyce industry and its management bust-ups, calls it “a reference point almost as unavoidable as Joyce’s fiction itself,” and it is the only non-Joyce book in the Joycean journals to have its own standard abbreviation, like the O.E.D. But Ellmann’s peers, led by his nemesis, the critic Hugh Kenner, felt that James Joyce was also a work of criticism whose biographical form had downplayed or even betrayed Joyce’s fundamental project. Joyce experimented with language that pushes against the grammar of subjects, acts, and objects: James Joyce was a story about who really did what to whom. Joyce made every character a medium for the chatter and babble of Dublin on June 16, 1904, a cat’s cradle of internal cross-references which means no one’s thoughts are wholly their own. James Joyce had made it sound as if criticism’s job were to unpick the strings and take it all back to unmediated history again, sometimes raiding the fiction as evidence for the way Joyce must have really felt. By affirming that Ulysses was not a satire on modern inanity, as Joyce’s modernist peers had generally thought, but the uncensored representation of an everyman, Ellmann had cunningly aligned Joyce’s artistic center of gravity with his own realism—at the cost of giving short shrift to the anti-realist, linguistic polyphony of the book Joyce worked on for the next twenty years, Finnegans Wake. To the critics who followed Derrida’s enthusiasm for Joyce, the Wake was the culmination of the art, not Ulysses, its reformulated vocabulary showing how language creates the orders of sense rather than reflecting a world unproblematically there for biographers to ground their subjects in.

Ellmann’s Joyce is not blind to the great biography’s problems. Revealing how much Ellmann had himself wanted to be a writer, Leader gently argues that at certain moments of unwarranted inference, “artistic or writerly concerns, specifically about narrative, override archival ones.” He had to make the biography a success with the general reader, who wants stories. Leader also agrees with Ellmann’s student Declan Kiberd that Ellmann tended to survey Joyce’s weaknesses with shrewd, ironic eye, yet always plumped finally for balance—the shabby, sometimes shoddy life ultimately redeemed by astonishing art. Through Ellmann’s use of a Johnsonian style of balanced periods that made readers feel confident that they were getting the all-comprehending, all-pardoning view, the corrosive effects of Joyce’s artistic narcissism on his household and his children were acknowledged, then neutralized. But while it roots such decisions in Ellmann’s literary purpose or his tricky situation with Joyce’s surviving family, Ellmann’s Joyce does not really defend him against the critics’ deeper charge: that biography is inadequate to Joyce because it reduces everything to the level of human-to-human interaction, ignoring large-scale social structure or the randomness of the unconscious. How could it? It is itself a biography. But it is not Ulysses, whose prose shows life on all three levels simultaneously.

The maneuvers necessary to research and then write James Joyce were first described by Amanda Sigler in an article published in 2010, “Joyce’s Ellmann.” Ellmann’s Joyce largely follows her account, but fleshes it out considerably with the family and work backgrounds of its author. Ellmann was brought up in a comfortable, hard-working Jewish household in Highland Park, a suburb of Detroit. His father, James, was a lawyer who had hopes to be mayor, but Highland Park was a Ford town, and in 1936 Henry Ford directly threatened his workers with the sack if they voted Ellmann. Blocked by anti-Semitism and the more all-purpose racism of Detroit’s Black Legion, whose violence would take out Malcolm X’s father, Earl Little, James Ellmann diverted his energies to Jewish and ecumenical causes. From him Richard absorbed the “energy, drive, and zealous cultivation of contacts” the biography would need, but he would also reject his perennial anxiety over how other people saw the family. Studying at Waspy Yale and able to afford European travel with relative ease, Ellmann began to move in a more upper-class and international set than either of his parents, and he bitterly resented their attempts to interfere in his love life with Catholic or Protestant girlfriends. A flair for the life sketch ran in the family: When it looked like Richard might marry into the Tafts, his father’s minutely detailed prognosis of the girl’s real motives and the famous family’s ill-concealed disdain predicted the likely shape of their future life with some facility. Ellmann rebuked such meddling with forthright confidence, but it did not work. His parents, like the Jewish community he briefly lived among in Charleston, Virginia, were obsessed with “what the Protestants think of them” to the point of “downright masochism,” he judged, and their overweening anxiety meant he had to elope with his feminist Catholic fiancée, Mary, rather than face a wedding. That suffocating atmosphere gave Ellmann a basic sympathy with Joyce’s decision to leave Ireland for an international life in Trieste and Paris, Leader suggests, and influenced the biography’s decision that the core politics of Joyce’s life lay in the personal conflicts much more than the speeches Joyce gave in favor of Irish independence from both England and Rome. I suspect it also made him presciently aware of Joyce’s masochistic plot structure in Ulysses. James Joyce was the first work of criticism to perceive the central significance of Bloom’s attraction to masochism, not only as a sexual predilection in Bella Cohen’s surrealist brothel but as a way of organizing his family life and all of June 16, 1904, around acts of willed submission and staged humiliation. Molly may commit adultery, but if Bloom has allowed her to do it, then he can be defeated at one level while still master at another, a psychology acutely relevant to a colonized country. It certainly provoked some of the finest psychological criticism in the book on betrayal as a perverse kind of loyalty. Ellmann connects Stephen Dedalus’s refusal to kneel and pray for his dying mother to Joyce’s own continual testing of Nora’s fidelity, through poverty, his refusal to marry her, his blasphemy, and his obscene fantasies:

His favourite characters are those who in one way or another retreat before masculinity, yet are loved regardless by motherly women. . . . He was thereby enabled to feel that with Nora, as with his mother, he was a prodigal son, full of love and misbehavior.

At a stroke, Ellmann connects this to Joyce’s love-hate relation with Ireland and his prose style:

Dubliners is written on the assumption that Ireland is an inadequate mother, an “old sow who eats her farrow,” and he associates himself with the masticated children . . . worthy of sympathy, too, a sympathy which, if Ireland denies us, the international reader may give. But the reader must be tested like a loving mother by an errant child, must be forced to see the ugly, undecorated reality before he is allowed to extend his pity, a pity compounded of outraged affection, amusement, and understanding.

Seeing the connection between wife and mother is the biographer’s stock-in-trade; seeing its relevance to the modernist prose that taunts the reader by its apparent indifference is a bio-critical lightning flash.

The other major source of James Joyce was Ellmann’s war service. Indirectly, it gave him a clue to Joyce’s aesthetic during a period in post-Occupation Paris. Visiting Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres, which had subsidized Joyce in the 1920s while he began to publish Ulysses with Shakespeare & Company across the street, Ellmann was told that he had to read someone called Henri Michaux. Boldly arranging a visit, he charmed the Belgian artist and writer, and rapidly became the English translator of his prose poems. Michaux helped Ellmann see how art might be created not by beautiful phrases but by the juxtaposition of the most prosaic sentences: “With Michaux, the poetry is not in the metaphor of words, but of situations,” he wrote. Posted back to London, he was placed under Norman Holmes Pearson, the Yale English professor and spymaster whose offices were full of Yale ex-faculty and whose literary circle included T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, and E. M. Forster. The gregarious Ellmann met everyone he could, but as the war work trailed off, he asked his boss for a week’s vacation to visit Dublin and take up an introduction to W. B. Yeats’s widow, George. “Take two,” Pearson told him. The elderly Mrs. Yeats took a fancy to the young American officer and showed him a trunk full of Yeats’s occult manuscripts, an astonishing stroke of luck which set Ellmann off on his first book, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, and gave him the run of literary Dublin.

But the war work had a more direct impact on the Joyce book’s method. Ellmann’s pre-war English degree at Yale had taught him close reading, the value of a writer’s style, but it had not given him any special leaning towards biography. When the war interrupted his studies, Ellmann was posted to the X-2 division of O.S.S., the United States’ counter-intelligence services. There he learned how to use transmissions intercepted from Nazi agents to discern what they knew and when they might be confronted and killed, or turned as a double agent. To pursue this end, X-2 followed MI5’s method of recording everything—the names of spies, the names of subversives, their potential contacts, the transmissions’ broadcast frequencies, even equipment serial numbers—on a huge cross-referenced card index system. They deliberately recruited academic types who “understood the function of trivia, of miscellaneous information” and could “assimilate that data into a coherent pattern that others might miss.” Leader does not make too much of this, but both the pattern-spotting and the contact tracing must have formed Ellmann’s own biographical method. Intelligence operatives think in networks, working out who knows what and what they might have said to others. Ellmann set out to find everyone who might have known or remembered Joyce in Dublin, Paris, Trieste, Zurich, or Pula in Croatia, tracking down servants, publishers, pupils, fellow teachers, doctors, neighbors, shopkeepers, and even fellow guests in a sanatorium. Researching was “like some gigantic financial operation conducted over about eight countries,” he told his publisher, and he employed assistants who knew the local languages better than he could. No contact was too slight to be useful, he told them, “and of course people don’t themselves know the value of their own information.” In person, he would usually introduce himself with a charming letter, send books and gifts, and then, after the interview, supply flattering and grateful notes to the contact about how useful he or she had been to him, while following the leads assiduously. “It is astonishing how much material there is around here,” he told some friends. “Some of it is hard to pry up, but generally if people are reluctant to tell a biographer they have confided something or other to their friends, who have less compunction.”

Good spies also facilitate things for their sources in order to keep the information coming. Ellmann worked around the reserve of Joyce’s onetime friend J. F. Byrne by hearing the latter’s grievances against another Joyce scholar, Ellmann’s rival William Tindall, who had reviewed Byrne’s memoir coldly. By giving Byrne’s book a much warmer review and remaining unruffled by Byrne’s prickliness, he was finally let into Byrne’s confidences about Nora Barnacle’s sexual history and Joyce’s jealousy. As Ellmann became more embedded in the material, he began to help Joyce’s translator Stuart Gilbert, who was supposed to be editing the first selection of letters but had become overwhelmed with the task. Ellmann then took over at Gilbert’s request when hundreds more surfaced, which delayed the biography for years but handily allowed Ellmann to keep the letters out of sight of rival scholars until he was finished. He encouraged Joyce’s elderly brother Stanislaus to get his own rather caustic memoir of their early life published, writing to Oxford University Press on Stanislaus’s account, although he knew its publication would somewhat pre-empt his own. When Stanislaus died with the manuscript unfinished, Ellmann offered his widow, Nelly, his assistance in editing it and seeing it through to publication. Only then did Nelly take Ellmann down into the cellar of their house in Trieste and ask him to sort out the great mass of Stanislaus’s papers, which turned out to include hundreds of unknown letters between the brothers. As a biographer, Ellmann later said, “I had tumbled into King Tut’s tomb.”

Successful operatives have to work out who else knows what and to control the release of classified material. When an important Joyce archive was sold to a collector friend, Ellmann called and arranged that no one else should be given access before his own biography was done. He leaned on Joyce’s editor Harriet Shaw Weaver to block the estate’s permissions when it looked like a rival book titled James Joyce: A Documentary might steal a march on his own. Editing the Gilbert letters and the Stanislaus memoir had given Ellmann unparalleled access to material that none of the competition had, but he was never certain his advantage would last. When the archive came up for auction to give Nelly Joyce a pension, Ellmann knew it would go to a university library and become public. Fearing the “imminent availability to others of some of my best material,” he pressured his departmental chair and the dean at Northwestern University to let him off teaching and let him try to extend his Guggenheim Fellowship grant for another year. The grant turned out to be less than half what he was expecting, but the dean made up the difference, and his faith was rewarded when James Joyce was published to nearly unanimous acclaim and won the National Book Award.

Towards the center of the biography lies one curiously inert piece of Ulysses criticism, however. Though Leopold Bloom is not a hero in any conventional sense, Ellmann argues, Joyce wants his readers to respect him, and he does so through giving us the “continuous poetry” of Bloom’s thoughts, of which he cites a number of examples from the famous internal monologue of episode four, “Calypso.” As Bloom goes out to buy a pork kidney from the butcher for his breakfast, he thinks of the cattle market and its breeders: “slapping a palm on a ripemeated hindquarter, there’s a prime one, unpeeled switches in their hands.” A few moments later in the queue, his thoughts turn to contemporary Palestine: “A barren land, bare waste. Volcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish. . . . The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth.” This, Ellmann says, is both poetry and compelling “verisimilitude.” Most readers since have thought it is rather more than that. Bloom is cued to think about “ripemeated hindquarters” not only by seeing the meat hanging in the butcher’s window but because he is idly scanning a real newspaper advertisement seeking investors in a model Zionist farm near Lake Galilee, complete with a blurred picture of grazing cattle. Simultaneously, Bloom has also been subconsciously excited by the shapely “hams” of his neighbor’s maidservant in front of him in the queue and a memory of seeing her “vigorous hips” as she beat the dust out of a rug in the yard. As the reader of mild S&M novels about circus girls with whips, Bloom in his thoughts about the “unpeeled switches” of the breeders is subconsciously connecting desire for the flesh with punishment—for adultery, for his own breaking of dietary laws, and then, with the “barren land” of the Dead Sea landscape, the punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah. But the phrase “wandered far away over the earth” also suggests a link to the emigrant Irish dispersed through Britain and its other colonies, and to Judaism as the religion whose founding story is about escape from forced labor under an alien empire. Ulysses is a novel whose prose is continually registering agency at impossibly different levels of scale. The verisimilitude of the prose catches the real-world interactions happening at the interpersonal level, but it shows also the relentless flickers of Bloom’s unconscious preoccupations while referring up and out to the superhuman scale of the structural realities of colonialism, empire, and myth at work on levels beyond ordinary awareness.

This is the problem with biography as a medium for Joyce criticism. Biographical accounts are mostly interested in the day-to-day encounters and transactions on a person-to-person scale, using the evidence of letters, bank accounts, and interviews. They usually try to see the larger patterns of a life working at the intergenerational scale or in gender dynamics. But they have to miss out the continually fizzing micro-interactions of someone’s thoughts, second by second, because the evidence is just not there. Nor do they usually wish to submerge the individual life into the aggregation of thousands necessary to generate the great structures of race, power, and class. Ellmann’s biography of Joyce took a wider approach than most, starting with his great-grandfather and recording his moonings over his Triestine pupils with unusual fidelity. But unlike Ulysses, it does not simultaneously try to portray the relentless churn of its hero’s unconscious desires as they happen, second by second, or set Joyce within the global economy of colonialism and its redistribution of human capital, although these are just as much elements of the life as the royalty check.

Ellmann’s Joyce also keeps things mostly at an interpersonal level. Ellmann was well paid for his work, enjoying a salary of over two hundred thousand dollars in today’s money and living with a retinue of servants in Dublin. But there is only passing attention given to the origins of that money in the cultural diplomacy of the fellowship era, in which State Department, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller money poured into networks, conferences, and research students in the hope that disinterested scholarly inquiry might also be a tool for fighting the Cold War. While Ellmann wrote about Irish and French authors, he played his part in shifting the scholarly center of gravity firmly westward through the large-scale purchase of European modernist manuscripts by libraries in the United States seeking to acquire prestige. By preserving those papers in air-conditioned vaults thousands of miles from Paris or London, this process also encouraged students to treat them as works of international art, at some remove from the local and family pressures in which they began. Ellmann wryly described Joyce’s readers as the new “aristocracy of culture” that Yeats had always been seeking to create for himself; his own professionalization of literary research put him firmly among the titled.

The strength of the personal approach, however, is Leader’s concern for the family behind the man. Ellmann’s verdict on Joyce’s parenting had been acerbic: “As a father, Joyce wished to interfere as little as possible with his children’s lives, a principle which was better suited to his own insuperable personality than to theirs.” But the task of bringing up their toddlers single-handedly while her husband was away in Europe researching this book nearly drove Mary Ellmann to despair. She sent angry letters, her husband came home, and the marriage survived, though two of his children, the novelist Lucy Ellmann and the literary critic Maud Ellmann, remember how relentlessly their father would still work, disappearing back upstairs after dinner each night. When Ellmann was offered a professorship at Oxford which would involve less teaching and allow him to finish another project, his biography of Oscar Wilde, he took it, an upheaval which Lucy and Maud, now teenagers, resented. Then disaster struck: Mary suffered an aneurysm, lost much of her speech, and was largely paralyzed for the rest of her life. Ellmann, nearly out of his mind with worry, organized health care, tried to look after his moping daughters, cooked meals, did the vacuuming and continued to lecture as Oxford’s Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature. “Nothing fell off,” Maud recalls. In fact, he had started an affair, which he felt guilty about but kept strictly secret so as not to humiliate the family. Eight more books appeared, and the family never learned the truth until after his death. While Joyce wrote endlessly about betrayal, the O.S.S. operative let no information slip past.