Richard ellmann joyce biography
James Joyce
This review is almost shamefully long, but is written for my own record of quotes and findings. Ellmann’s James Joyce is the usually the first-thought-of book when talking literary biographies. It covers the Irish writer’s entire life across 800-odd pages, filled with photographs, letters, snippets from his works, letters from friends, and just about everything you could hope for in an all-encompassing portrait of the artist. Attempting to remotely capture the depth of Ellmann’s book would be fruitless; it feels as if every anecdote, every thought, every moment, of Joyce’s life is within these pages.
As a general rule, I don't like to spend more than a month on a single book, whatever it is. There have been some slips: Infinite Jest took me a month and several days, but otherwise I like to keep all my reading within a month of starting. This biography took me over 2 months to read, savouring everything, underlining things, writing in the margins, attempting to commit it all to memory. The book itself is a hardback-sized paperback with Bible-thin pages and small text. It is a book to take your time with. As far as reviewing it goes, I have settled on a method to attempt to control it: I will write my thoughts and favourite quotes from each 'era' of Joyce's life, ending with a photograph at the bottom of each section (from Ellmann's book) of his corresponding age (thereabouts). So, firstly, his boyhood.
Ellmann, as with all other walks of his life, describes his childhood in detail, and the first chapter of the biography is even about Joyce's family before James. What struck me as early as this, Ellman points out that things that were happening and being said as early as Joyce being under 10-years-old would later find themselves retold in his masterpieces of modernism. It seemed there was nothing that did not escape Joyce's notice or memory. The best anecdote from his early years is simply this, 'James, up
James Joyce
Upon its publication in 1959, this book was recognized as the definitive study of Joyce's life. In honor of the James Joyce Centenary in 1982, the author published a new edition, thoroughly revised and expanded. Ellmann's original research led him from Dublin to Joyce's haunts in Europe. In the process he discovered many people who served as partial models for Joyce's characters, networks of association in which they were placed, and he shows how Joyce converted this raw material into brilliant works of fiction. Ellmann gives a fascinating account of the literary milieu in which Joyce worked, and discusses his relationship with Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, Hemingway, Proust, Pound, Larbaud, and Fitzgerald. His dramatic portrait of Joyce as son, lover, husband. father, and artist provides the key to understanding Joyce's revolutionary writings. This new edition, for a new generation, Ellmann feels "may help to assuage some of the curiosity that still persists about this bizarre and wonderful creature who turned literature and language on its end."--Publisher description.
October 25, 1959
All Life Was Grist For The ArtistBy STEPHEN SPENDER
JAMES JOYCE By Richard Ellmann. |
tanislaus Joyce, who bore throughout his life, like an enormous load, all the fame and most of the cares of his more famous brother, once made an entry in the diary he kept as a record of James Joyce's unfolding genius: "Jim is thought to be very frank about himself but his style is such that it might be contended that he confesses in a foreign language- an easier confession than in the vulgar tongue."
This immensely detailed, massive, completely detached and objective, yet loving biography translates James Joyce's books back into his life. One closes it with the impression that everything every friend of his or that he himself said or did, every detail of his family life, became verbalized and stored away in his mind as material he might put into his books. "Ulysses" was selected from sacks of notes of things that might go in. Every detail had to be recorded with what may seem obsessive accuracy. When writing "Ulysses" James Joyce would write to members of his family in Dublin to check on the exact position of a house or some trees in a street.
Reading this book one often has the curious sense of participating in a process of metamorphosis or transubstantiation. His friends and family change into looming phrases in his mind to reappear in his books. But one also has the uncanny impression that the process might be reversed and that his phrases might change back into the people from whom they derive.
Sometimes his own life seems to get completely mixed up with his fiction as though he were living out his own character in his novel (who is also writing the novel). The famous story "The Dead," in which a husband discovers that his wife, before she met him, was loved by a young man who subsequently died, and who- the husband feels- loved her with an intensity that he can never rival, is partl
James Joyce (biography)
1959 biography of Irish writer James Joyce, by American academic Richard Ellmann
James Joyce is a biography of the Irish modernistJames Joyce written by Richard Ellmann, which informs an understanding of this author's complex works. It was published in 1959 (a revised edition was released in 1982).
Reception
Anthony Burgess was so impressed with the biographer's work that he claimed it to be "the greatest literary biography of the century."Edna O'Brien, the Irish novelist, remarked that "H. G. Wells said that Finnegans Wake was an immense riddle, and people find it too difficult to read. I have yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of it—except perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann." Ellmann quotes extensively from Finnegans Wake as epigraphs in his biography of Joyce.
References
- ^Lorraine, Janzen Kooistra (Winter 1993). "The Biography of the Century: Another Look at Richard Ellmann's James Joyce". Biography. 16 (1): 31–45. doi:10.1353/bio.2010.0340. JSTOR 23539556. S2CID 162295867.
- ^Menand, Louis, "Silence, Exile, Punning: James Joyce's chance encounters". The New Yorker, 2 July 2012, pp. 71–75.
- ^Interview, The Art of Fiction No. 82, The Paris Review, Issue 92, Summer 1984.