Yes I Will Read ‘Ulysses’ Yes

When Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce hit the cabinets in 1959, the sheer measurement of the e book (842 pages, 100 longer than Ulysses ) was as dazzling because the diploma of element. Joyce, who had been lifeless for 18 years, vividly inhabited its chapters, getting drunk, going blind, spending cash, spiting enemies, cogitating, and, in fact, making a sequence of works that instantly made literary historical past. Shifting briskly throughout the primary half of the Twentieth century (not only a single day in Dublin), Ellmann spun a story in regards to the formation of a author whose title may very well be talked about in the identical breath as Homer’s with out irony.Discover the July 2025 IssueCheck out extra from this situation and discover your subsequent story to learn.View MoreEllmann owed his triumph, partially, to being in the precise place on the proper time. By the early Fifties, he had spent a 12 months at Trinity Faculty Dublin researching his prizewinning dissertation on William Butler Yeats, acquired a Ph.D. from Yale, and develop into an formidable 30-something professor at Northwestern College. Yeats’s widow was prepared to offer introductions in Dublin; Joyce’s most necessary patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and his pricey buddy Maria Jolas launched a trove of unpublished letters. Stanislaus Joyce, his brother, had shared materials from his diaries and unfinished memoir. Nelly Joyce, Stanislaus’s widow, unleashed holy-grail-grade manuscripts; so did Jolas. And Sylvia Seaside, a fellow American and the fearless writer of Ulysses, was nonetheless knocking round Paris keen to entertain questions.From the April 1957 situation: Letters of James JoyceYou additionally want attraction, a number of it, to make a biography like James Joyce occur. Ellmann, a virtuosic schmoozer, may get individuals to do his bidding with out ever seeming too pushy. A supply of coal through the winter; some goodies, cigarettes, cocoa, or tea in any season—accompanied by a fastidiously worded request, such choices may go a good distance when he wanted to realize (or limit) entry to materials.James Joyce (Ellmann correctly heeded his mom’s recommendation to drop the subtitle, The Hawk-Like Man) was instantly acknowledged as a masterpiece—not only a complete life-and-art account of Joyce, however a style breakthrough. Creating a method that was directly indifferent and ornate, Ellmann works as a historic novelist, utilizing information as a springboard for a refined psychological portrayal intertwined with layered important interpretations.Take into account, for example, the second when the younger, unknown Joyce arrives in Rome to take a job at a financial institution. It’s 1906, just a few years after his voluntary exile from Eire; Joyce is all however penniless at 24. Ellmann needs to seize the way in which the everlasting metropolis, strewn with ruins, acts on somebody who’s homesick. Joyce’s “head was crammed with a way of the too profitable encroachment of the lifeless upon the dwelling metropolis,” he writes. “There was a disrupting parallel in the way in which that Dublin, buried behind him, was haunting his ideas.” Just like the newly married, disillusioned Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the younger, impressionable Joyce feels psychologically unmoored by his time in Rome. He loves and hates Eire unexpectedly, and out of this emotional wrestle, he’ll find yourself producing “The Useless,” the ultimate story in Dubliners. It’s set in Dublin, however by way of Ellmann, we come to understand that it is usually a ghost story with Roman roots—and a prelude to the common sweep of Ulysses.In his quest for a definitive biography of Joyce as a cosmopolitan artist, above the parochial fray, Ellmann downplayed Joyce’s curiosity in politics. Actually, earlier than Joyce ever printed a e book, he wrote newspaper articles and delivered lectures in Italian about Irish nationalism and his disdain for British imperialism in his native nation, work that shed useful mild on his fiction. “My political views,” he summed up in a letter to his brother, “are these of a Socialist artist.” His work is saturated with references to Irish historical past, politics, geography, and tradition—wealthy in allusions, each specific and puzzlelike, to main figures and occasions.From the December 1946 situation: James JoyceStill, to say that Ellmann is to Joyce what James Boswell is to Samuel Johnson isn’t too large a stretch: He didn’t arrive in time to befriend Joyce, however he obtained to the posthumous scene first; gathered recent accounts; captured not simply the context, however his topic’s character and his artistic course of. Not least, Ellmann emerged, as Boswell did, with a mold-breaking portrait that has retained an everlasting energy over the readers and students who’ve adopted.Ellmann the portraitist has now are available for a portrait of his personal. (So did Boswell, although not till two centuries after his one-of-a-kind work was printed.) In Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker, Zachary Chief—who has written partaking lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow—has cobbled collectively a curious two-part chronicle. Half one is a meticulously researched account, woodenly rendered, of Ellmann’s not significantly colourful life up till 1952, when he started work on his Joyce biography. Partly two, Chief explores intimately subjects concerned within the e book’s creation—sleuthing strategies, rivals, reviewers—in addition to its afterlife (a second version appeared in 1982, the centenary of Joyce’s beginning, by which period errors had been unearthed, critiques launched). A coda skims over Ellmann’s life till his dying, in 1987 (and contains what the writer’s blurb payments as “a startling secret,” which will be revealed with out spoiling a factor: The fortunately married Ellmann had a late-in-life affair after his spouse, Mary, suffered an aneurism and was confined to a wheelchair).What you received’t come away with are insights into why Ellmann was so fascinated by Irish writers (he went on to put in writing about Oscar Wilde too), or how the mental questions he requested about his topics would possibly illuminate his personal life and scholarly trajectory. Certainly Ellmann’s Jewishness within the WASP-dominated precincts of elite literary research, I discovered myself pondering, performed a task in priming his curiosity within the outsiders he wrote about. Chief doesn’t pursue such potential connections.So why hassle with a biography of a biographer who spent many years doing what teachers often do: studying, researching, writing, instructing, repeat? If nostalgia was a part of the venture’s attraction for Harvard College Press, that’s solely comprehensible. Ellmann and his achievement symbolize a second in American cultural historical past when pulling off a e book like that was potential: a door stopper with attraction contained in the academy and out. When James Joyce appeared, the rigidly slender siloing of literary fields nonetheless lay forward; for medieval students, 18th-century historians, and Romanticists alike, Ellmann’s e book was an occasion to not be missed.The biography made Joyce approachable for generations of readers. And if some dove into Ellmann to keep away from studying Joyce, others clung to Ellmann for pricey life as they navigated the dense pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s spouse, Nora, dismissed his final work as nothing however “chop suey,” however Ellmann makes use of anecdotes and snippets of Joyce’s conversations in addition to written passages to make it cohere. Finnegans Wake, in his skillful arms, is a tapestry of all of the works Joyce ever wrote, the ultimate and protracted venture of a author who may by no means cease eager about Eire.From the March 1958 situation: The perceptions of James JoyceFor Ulysses, too, Ellmann confirmed how the community of cryptic allusions and the experiments with syntax have been a part of an even bigger plan to seize one thing true in regards to the intricate crosscurrents of life. He wove collectively a whole bunch of biographical tales (some apocryphal) and concise plot summaries in order that the important interpretation was barely noticeable. Ellmann had an “intelligence of expression,” as his buddy Ellsworth Mason famous, that obscured his tendency to lean closely on the fiction as a supply of information about its creator’s life.What saved me turning Chief’s pages have been the glimpses of the educational Atlantis that Ellmann inhabited. Working within the background of this meta-biography is a historical past of literature as a self-discipline in America. Ellmann got here of age throughout a interval of unprecedented abundance. From 1920 to 1970, the higher-education professoriat grew tenfold, and a brand new college press was based yearly or so. Because of the legendary GI Invoice (which, after Ellmann’s stint within the Workplace of Strategic Companies through the conflict, partially paid for his graduate work at Trinity Faculty), undergraduate enrollment exploded, together with federal subsidies for college libraries underneath the Nationwide Protection Training Act.As Ellmann was quietly assembling supplies for his biography, specialization was on the rise in American literature departments, because the critic Erich Auerbach warned, auguring the decline of a common humanities training. Literary subfields that had been outlined by style or historic interval have been giving solution to a narrower deal with single authors of rather more latest classic than Shakespeare and Milton. An infrastructure of professionalism—conferences, together with scholarly journals and societies—had begun to emerge. A author like Joyce, whose works impressed exegetical devotion, was clearly on the forefront of possible Twentieth-century candidates for tutorial canonization, and the arrival of Ellmann’s biography because the Fifties ended helped spur his elevation to Saint James standing within the postwar college.However Ellmann himself was a Joycean avant la lettre. With no “Joyce trade” but in place, he had the liberty to form his topic as he selected. Leaf by way of the mass of footnotes in the back of James Joyce, and also you’ll discover fewer than 20 books of criticism within the combine. Citations abound of unpublished archival sources—mounds of letters, diaries, telegrams—and unique interviews. Measurement counted for the clout of a pioneering endeavor. At one level, Ellmann had envisioned “a brief e book of maybe 150 pages,” combining biography with reminiscences from Joyce’s contemporaries. By 1953, when he signed a contract with Oxford College Press, nervous in regards to the big $1,500 advance, no opponents have been on the horizon, and he had one thing considerably bigger in thoughts that might function an introduction to a barely plumbed topic.From the September 1995 situation: Ulysses in ChineseHis ambition paid off, not simply in attracting a broad viewers, however in advancing his profession, at a time when crossover attraction added to tutorial luster. The accolades poured in for his monumental e book, printed on large-format pages with a dark-blue cowl and gold lettering on the backbone. Ellmann received the Nationwide E-book Award for biography in 1960, and dream-job gives from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford (the place he landed in 1970) quickly adopted. Like Lionel Trilling earlier than him, Ellmann leaned out of the ivory tower and gained stature inside it as departments of literature have been specializing.By the early ’80s, when the revised version appeared and he was at work on Wilde, literary research had already moved in a really completely different path. A decade earlier, Principle (with a capital T ) had arrived from France, and shortly Lacanians and Freudians; Marxists and feminists; deconstructionists, queer theorists, and postcolonialists had flooded the sphere. Whereas the deal with single authors had been a boon for a e book like James Joyce, the emphasis on Principle proved a bane. The earlier approaches to literary works have been now suspect, and new questions got here to the fore: about their standing as commodities in a capitalist system; in regards to the textual content itself as a part of an influence wrestle and language as an expression of the unconscious. Biography Ellmann-style was left trying hopelessly naive in its effort to know the work by understanding its author’s life. The creator was lifeless, as Roland Barthes put it, so what was the purpose of looking for intentionality behind the phrases on the web page?Once I entered graduate faculty within the late ’90s, Joyce was a dartboard for each theoretical pattern accessible. Studying him (and most main authors) in a suitably cutting-edge approach entailed two steps: selecting an accessible idea and making use of it. In Columbia College’s English division, the place I used to be and the place theoretical allegiances have been fierce, I nonetheless went forward and skim Ellmann, contemplating it a responsible pleasure, nearly like cozying up with a romance novel. However I shouldn’t have felt apologetic, nor ought to Chief, who feels compelled to elucidate that Ellmann “had little time” for idea. Ellmann didn’t have to find time for idea. James Joyce has lengthy outlived most of the theoretical interventions that appeared so pressing again then, propelling tutorial careers whilst they deterred nonspecialists from studying Joyce.Ellmann’s Joyce isn’t just a product of its period, however an index of our age. No accountable adviser in a doctoral program in English now would advocate a single-author dissertation if a tenure-track job within the occupation is the purpose—an ever extra daunting one, given the implosion of literature departments, and of so many disciplines throughout the humanities. In a tighter job market, college students aiming to be professors now have to reveal vary as they pursue a specific downside or literary historic interval.The destiny of Ellmann and his Joyce biography highlights the disorienting transformation of literature as a discipline of research. The canons dismantled through the Principle incursion of the Seventies and ’80s launched a extra inclusive world of letters, even because the upheaval left English departments fragmented. Harold Bloom, a lightning rod for controversy, responded with The Western Canon within the mid-Nineteen Nineties. In his survey of principally white, male authors, he argued towards the so-called faculty of resentment, which believes that literature can “save society” or drive social change and reform. The response was swift, and Bloom grew to become a punching bag for leftist critics, who valued literature’s energy to ship social and political messages for the underrepresented.Joyce has made the lower within the twenty first century, however simply barely. I educate graduate college students, most of whom arrive with out ever having learn a narrative from Dubliners, not to mention tackled Ulysses. Literary historians and critics of assorted stripes may be keen to acknowledge his worth, however in academia, Joyce has lengthy since develop into yet another specialised matter. These already intimidated by the problem are prone to be additional delay by the specialists’ gatekeeping.From the October 2013 situation: Why we’re nonetheless struggling to make sense of modernismGiven how not often literary students and critics lately learn outdoors their discipline, simply think about the problem of reaching a wider nonacademic viewers, amongst whom studying in any respect is an endangered pastime. A Nationwide Endowment for the Arts survey revealed that fewer than half of American adults learn greater than a single e book in 2022. If the info have been refined additional to rank studying by style, I’m keen to guess that literary criticism can be near the underside. Which makes Ellmann’s achievement all of the extra outstanding.Having the ability to form sturdy sentences, elegantly weave collectively plot strands, and convey characters to life (even with some ingenious fudging)—that will sound like the plain recipe for any good story. Nonetheless, it’s no small feat, particularly if you happen to add within the strain to offer interpretive steering. All the way in which again in 1938, when he was a Yale senior, Ellmann was satisfied that he had to decide on between two professions: tutorial or author. Fortunately, he managed to be each.This text seems within the July 2025 print version with the headline “The Canonization of James Joyce.”Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its MakerBy Zachary Chief​Once you purchase a e book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.