James Joyce

Although several biographers have thrown themselves into the breach since this magisterial book first appeared in 1959, none have come close to matching the late Richard Ellmann's achievement. To be fair, Ellmann does have some distinct advantages. For starters, there's his deep mastery of the Irish milieu--demonstrated not only in this volume but in his books on Yeats and Wilde. He's also an admirable stylist himself--graceful, witty, and happily unintimidated by his brilliant subjects. But in addition, Ellmann seems to have an uncanny grasp on Joyce's personality: his reverence for the Irishman's literary accomplishment is always balanced by a kind of bemused affection for his faults. Whether Joyce is putting the finishing touches on Ulysses, falling down drunk in the streets of Trieste, or talking dirty to his future wife via the postal service, Ellmann's account always shows us a genius and a human being--a daunting enough task for a fiction writer, let alone the poor, fact-fettered biographer.Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959, & Edns. [1965 &c.]; rev. edn. 1892) - some extracts.

The extracts given here have been chiefly taken from the 1965 edition and otherwise copied from secondary critical sources in which key statements from either edition have been quoted. Pagination alters with the 1982 edition. Other than the introduction, the quotations are grouped here under headings which have been inserted here for convenience and are not found in the text itself.

See also longer extract on the Joyce/Yeats meeting of October 1902 [infra], and an extract on the 1904 “Portrait Essay” [infra].

Introduction
[...] We are still learning to be Joyce’s contemporaries (1965, p.1)

Unimpressive as Bloom may seem in so many ways, unworthy to catch marlin or countesses with Hemingway’s characters, or to sup up guilt with Faulkner’s, or to sit on committees with C. P. Snow’s, Bloom is a humble vessel elected to bear and transmit unimpeached the best qualities of the mind. Joyce’s discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is extraordinary. /
  To come to this conclusion Joyce had to see joined what others had held separate: the point of view that life is unspeakable and to be [3] exposed, and the point of view that is ineffable and to be distilled. [...] To read Joyce is to see reality rendered without the simplifications of conventional divisions. (1965, p.3.)

What other hero in the novel has, like Stephen Dedalus, lice? Yet the lice are Baudelairean lice, clinging to the soul’s as well as the body’s integument. What other hero defecates and masturbates like Bloom before our eyes? Joyce will not make it easy for us either to condemn or adore. If we go on thinking he may be the apostle of brotherhood, he shows us brothers in violent quarrel. If we go tofind him a defender of the family, he presents his central hero as a cuckold. [...]

Joyce is the porcupine of authors [...] He requires that we adapt ourselves in form as well as in content to his point of view (p.4.)

Though Joyce, prophetically enough, called the biographer a “biografiend”, he also supplied the precedent for seeing his subject in all postures in order to know him. His passion for truth, however unpalatable, is a contagion which he would have his readers and his admirers share. (1965, p.5.)

[Joyce’s] greatness not as an effulgence but as a burrowing that occasionally reaches the surface of speech or action. [...]

To be narrowing, peculiar, and irresponsible, and at the same time all-encompassing, relentless, and grand, is Joyce’s style of greatness, a style as difficult, but ultimately as rewarding, as that of Finnegans Wake.’ (1965, p.5.)