The Books: James Joyce, by Richard Ellmann

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is James Joyce, by Richard Ellmann

You were bred, fed, fostered and fattened from holy childhood up in this two easter island … and now, forsooth, a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul.
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

Richard Ellmann’s magnificent biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959, and a couple of different revised editions have been released since then. Nobody has even come close to approaching Ellmann’s accomplishment, which is why it is still seen as the definitive biography of James Joyce, and probably will for some years to come. Having read the book (of course), it becomes impossible to imagine what else some other biographer might have to add. It’s so giant, so all-encompassing, so authoritative. It’s not just authoritative because of the details of Joyce’s biography, it’s authoritative because of the associations it makes between the life and the books. Joyce was one of the most personal self-referential writers of the 20th century, if not of all time. He did not invent. He used the material from his own life.

One of my pet peeves with biographies of literary people (and also film people, come to think of it), is how literal the biographers can be. “This character represents this person, this is clearly about his time in Paris, this character represents his mother …” Really? It’s that neat? Or, with a biography of an actor: “He took this role because he also had experienced abandonment as a child.” Say what? There isn’t always an A to B correlation between biography and art. Oftentimes, writers don’t even know that what they are writing IS personal. The subconscious is a powerful thing. You can see in Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams working out his feelings for his lost sister Rose … but in the time of writing it, he was worrying about making the characters come out, making the plot work – he wasn’t writing an autobiographical piece on the face of it. This is art. However. Joyce used his pen as a sword, a mirror, and he put everyone he knew, everyone he met, into his books. His books are filled with people, the names tumble over each other, and there is a direct inspiration in his own life for almost every character he created. Richard Ellmann’s book is a biography, but it is also a brilliant work of literary criticism. He doesn’t make the mistake of trying to make James Joyce understandable in a literal way. James Joyce was a genius, and how he turned the rough material of his life and crowded childhood into Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses is, essentially, a mystery. He was a genius. He wrote “The Dead” when he was 25 years old. That cannot be explained. Just bow down before it. HOWEVER. Ellmann’s analysis of how Joyce turned the people he knew into these characters works on multiple levels: it helps explain some of the stories when you know what was behind them. It also helps explain the Ireland in which Joyce grew up. Nationalism was one of Joyce’s main topics. He had ambivalent feelings about nationalism, and his work cannot be properly understood without trying to understand Ireland. You’ll be lost reading his stuff if you don’t know a bit about Parnell, if you don’t know a bit about the Gaelic League, about the Jesuits. While Joyce’s work is universal, it is also the most LOCAL of literatures. Ellmann is brilliant in breaking all of this down.

And he does so in lively entertaining readable prose, another feat that makes his book so remarkable. Ellmann’s biography is huge, a true tome. It’s intimidating just to look at. But it flows. It’s a commitment, don’t get me wrong. But you are in very good hands. I refer to it all the time in my own writing. If I’m going to be writing something about Joyce, I always feel the need to check what Ellmann might have said first. Because it’s all here.

The events of James Joyce’s life are not all that dramatic. He did not fight in a war. He did not tramp through the wilds of Mongolia. He did not fuck around, he didn’t whoop it up with mistresses and lovers by the dozen. He was very bourgeois. Educated by Jesuits, he had a questioning logical mind. He was also a contrarian, but not just for the sake of it. He resisted group dynamics – which was why the Trifecta of Nationalism/Church/Family was something he felt the need to dismantle. The individual was paramount. Any sort of “petition signing” pressure was lost on Joyce. He was his own man. He also was unique in that he did not throw out the baby with the bathwater, unlike many of his contemporaries. He may have had contempt for the machinations of nations and the uses of nationalism. But his consciousness was always turning back to Ireland, despite the fact that after he left in his mid-20s, he never really returned. He left the Church, that process began early for him, and it was a tormenting separation for him (Portrait goes into that dismantling process in detail) – and yet, the Mass continued to inform his work, the catechism, the sacraments … It is very Catholic, his work. He does not dismiss the forms of religion, those were of great use to him. Joyce was complex. He actually thought these things through. He had a reason for everything he did. His anger at the clergy came from the stifling submission required of Irishmen and women – something that didn’t work for him at all, something that seemed to impede humanity, warmth, possibility, art. But back to my original point: the events of his life are pretty conventional. Yes, his family struggled a bit when he was a kid with their finances, his mother died, his father was a raconteur and alcoholic … Joyce got a job with the Berlitz School, and left Ireland with his girlfriend of only a couple of months, Nora Barnacle. That was the big scandal, the big dramatic event. He and Nora lived in sin for many years, but were devoted to one another. They had two children. They lived in varying degrees of poverty in Trieste and elsewhere, as Joyce worked on his books. They eventually got married in 1930, but by that point it was just a formality. They had been together nonstop for 20 years at that point. What is dramatic in Joyce’s life is the WORK. What is dramatic in the story of James Joyce is the books. That’s all.

Ellmann, with his insightful mind and accessible writing, is equal to the task of making the connections between Joyce the man and Joyce’s books comprehensible. (And not only comprehensible, but exciting: You cannot read Ellmann’s book without flipping through all of Joyce’s books at the same time).

Scandal-hunters will be disappointed. There is no scandal with Joyce, outside his books and the upheaval they wrought. Of course, during Joyce’s time, his behavior was scandalous to the extreme: leaving the Catholic Church? Fleeing Ireland with a woman not his wife? Having two children out of wedlock? This was beyond the pale. But with the perspective of time, all of that really just seems like a proper escape for a man too independent to submit to an outside force or institution (at least not without rigorous Jesuitical questioning).

A commenter on Amazon writes, “I’m not sure you can really know Joyce without knowing Ellmann’s Joyce, too.”

I had read Joyce’s books before I read Ellmann’s biography of the man, but I know that once I read Ellmann’s biography, my understanding changed entirely. It deepened, widened, grew. Now that is a good biography.

It is the best biography of the 20th century.

Here is an excerpt from Joyce’s college years. He was already well on his way to becoming a man, the man we would come to know. His feelings on politics/religion/sex/art were starting to be formed, causing consternation in some circles, and amusement in others. But he just kept questioning, even when it caused him pain. He had to follow the questions to their logical ends. His eyes were turned away from Ireland, a radical move in that day and age, when Irish nationalism was so strong and so cloistered. The expectation of Irish artists was to stay in Ireland, do the motherland proud, give voice to the Irish nation, etc. Joyce was, I suppose, expected to follow in that path. But early on, he distinguished himself against his peers. Against the grain. Contrarian. He had already read Ibsen, an event which changed the entire course of his life. He would never be the same again after Ibsen. He’s only 16, 17 years old at this time, so the depth of his individualism is startling, at any time.

Excerpt from James Joyce

In his attitudes Joyce mixed unevenly as yet the qualities he would later solidify. He could juggle strong feelings and detachment from them, in a way that was still callow. His love poems were statements of passions that were largely imaginary, as he granted to his brother, and they went along with strict analyses of women as ‘soft-skinned animals,’ which were only inverted cries of longing. He was beginning to form his position towards the entities of family, church, and state, but was not yet as vehement as he would become. He did not abjure his family, being fond of them, but he did not intend to sacrifice himself either by conforming to their standards or by earning money for their support. His closest companion when he entered the university was his brother Stanislaus, but he gave Stanislaus his company without giving him much affection, and soon began to make him jealous by turning more and more to Byrne and Cosgrave.

As to the church, Joyce probably did not take communion after his burst of piety at Easter in 1897; he allowed himself, however, to be inscribed* in the Sodality at University College and perhaps attended a meeting or two. He also attended, as late as 1901, the inaugural meeting of a Thomas Aquinas Society, though the fact that his name is signed twice and crossed off once, as Kevin Sullivan discovered, suggests his equivocal participation. It was in some such fashion that his religious attitudes expressed themselves; he was still occupied in crossing off his Catholicism. In later life Morris L. Ernst asked Joyce, ‘When did you leave the Catholic Church?’ and he replied unhelpfully, ‘That’s for the Church to say.’ It was becoming clearer to him that, of the two ways of leaving the Church that were open to him, denial and transmutation, he would choose the second. He would retain faith, but with different objects. He could still reprove others for pretending to be Christian and not being so – this was a position he took in an essay written in September 1 1899 on the painting ‘Ecce Homo’ by Munkacsy, lately on display in Dublin:

It is grand, noble, tragic but it makes the founder of Christianity no more than a great social and religious reformer, a personality, of mingled majesty and power, a protagonist of a world-drama. No objections will be lodged against it on that score by the public, whose general attitude when they advert to the subject at all, is that of the painter, only less grand and less interested.

Munkacsy’s conception is as much greater than theirs, as an average artist is greater than an average greengrocer, but it is of the same kind, it is, to pervert Wagner, the attitude of the town. Belief in the divinity of Christ is not a salient feature of secular Christendom. But occasional sympathy with the eternal conflict of truth and error, of right and wrong, as exemplified in the drama at Golgotha is not beyond its approval.

In Trieste later he reproved the Pope for not being Christian enough, his objection being not to impiety but to dilution of feeling. Christianity had subtly evolved in his mind from a religion into a system of metaphors, which as metaphors could claim his fierce allegiance. His brother Stanislaus’s outward rebellion, which took the form of rudeness to his masters at Belvedere and defiance at home – his atheism worn like a crusader’s cross – did not enlist James’s sympathy. He preferred disdain to combat. He was no longer a Christian himself; but he converted the temple to new uses instead of trying to knock it down, regarding it as a superior kind of human folly and one which, interpreted by a secular artist , contained obscured bits of truth. And so he was not inconsistent when, about this time, he urged Stanislaus to moderate his revolt a little in the interests of family harmony.

The demands of his country for national feeling he was prepared to meet, but in his own way. Following Ibsen’s example, he detested the grosser forms of nationalism. Yet it would be a mistake to see Joyce as already buying a ticket for Paris; he probably still expected he could live in Ireland. His later depiction of himself makes him more a cheval on his principles than he had yet become. For the moment his most basic decision was in favor of art’s precedence over every other human activity. The nation might profit or not from his experiment, as it chose. In the creedless church he had found for himself, older than St. Peter’s and more immortal, he would be stubborn and daring. It was not long before he found a splendid quarrel in which to display both traits at their best.

The quarrel came about as a result of what seems, in retrospect, to have been the main cultural event of Dublin in the eighteen-nineties, the opening of the Irish theatrical movement in 1899. On May 8 Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen had its premiere. Rumors about the play had circulated for several weeks before; Edward Martyn had almost withdrawn his financial backing because Cardinal Logue, without reading the play, called it heretical; but other clerical defenders were hastily mustered to take an opposite view and mollify Martyn. In ten years both Yeats and Moore thought the situation ludicrous, but it did not seem so to them or to Joyce, at the time. Joyce, with generous condescension, had already marked Yeats out as the principal living Irish writer; he sat in the gallery at the first performance and watched Florence Farr as the poet Aileel, and May Whitty as the countess. A group of young students booed passages in the play which they considered anti-Irish; and when the curtain fell, as Seumas O’Sullivan has written, ‘a storm of booing and hissing broke out around the seats in which I and a few enthusiasts were attempting to express our appreciation of the magnificent performance.’ Joyce clapped vigorously. It was of course apparent to him that the play’s Christianity was symbolic, not doctrinal. He had no objection to representing Irish peasants as ignorant and superstitious; they were. The theme of a Faustlike scapegoat for the race appealed to him; the countess’s ‘sacrificial exaltation’ was like his Stephen’s, who would contract to suffer with her, or like Lucifer, for his race. Joyce was also moved by the lyric, ‘Who Goes With Fergus?’, which Florence Farr sang; its feverish discontent and promise of carefree exile were to enter his own thought, and not long afterwards he set the poem to music and praised it as the best lyric in the world.

His friends took the opposite view. As soon as the performance was over, Skeffington with others composed a letter of protest to the Freeman’s Journal, and it was left on a table in the college next morning so that all who wished might sign it. Joyce was asked and refused. The signers included Kettle, Skeffington, Byrne, and Richard Sheehy.* They wanted to claim a role for intellectual Catholics in Dublin’s artistic life, but picked the worst possible occasion. Their letter, published in the Freeman’s Journal on May 10, was intended to be patriotic but only succeeded in being narrow-minded. It professed respect for Yeats as a poet, contempt for him as a thinker. His subject was not Irish, his characters were travesties of the Irish Catholic Celt. ‘We feel it our duty,’ they wrote, ‘in the name and for the honour of Dublin Catholic students of the Royal University, to protest against an art, even a dispassionate art, which offers as a type of our people a loathsome brood of apostates.’ The letter must have sounded to Joyce like something satirized by an Ibsen play. His refusal to sign was remembered against him by others, and he resented as much their alacrity to sign. If Ireland was not to be ‘an afterthought of Europe’ – a phrase he devised for it about this time – it would have to allow the artist the freedom and would have to muffle the priest.

*Kevin Sullivan suggests that Joyce’s name was signed by Byrne as a joke. Joyce denied, to Herbert Gorman, that he had ever been a member of the society.

*Father Noon points out that not everyone signed it; but only Joyce made not signing it a public gesture. See p. 90. ‘I was the only student who refused his signature,’ Joyce said proudly later, in an autobiographical outline sent to B.W. Huebsch (Weaver papers).