A Portrait of the Artist in His Own Work

In what is scheduled to be the big climax of the recent excursions into Joyce, Richard Ellman's biography is a fittingly monumental way to end. The detail, the grasp and the depth of scholarship is, well, awesome as long as the word is not reduced to that mild term of approval it has become among those who don't necessarily know what awe is.

It is 'literary biography' in the purest sense, making every available connection between the life and the work and in Joyce there's more of that than there is in most writers. Like Falstaff being Sir John Oldcastle or Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim being Monica Jones, there would appear to be few characters anywhere in Joyce that aren't made from real people, and people he knew in real life. Up to a point, I dare say that most literary fiction has an element of encoded autobiography but Joyce's work and his autobiography merge into this one thing.

There is as much to admire in Joyce, in his ideas, as there is to have reservations about in his personality but, try as I might, it's not easy to think of a major writer who seems unconditionally likeable. Maybe it is finding that balance between admiration for the work and doubts about the authors in real life that make for much of the fascination of literary biography. Joyce is quoted, at the age of about 16 or 17, as saying,

How could I write the most perfect love songs of our time if I were in love? A poet must always write about a past or future emotion, never a present one....Poetry must have a safety valve properly adjusted. A poet's job is to write tragedies, not be an actor in one.

And that is as good a guide to 'ironic distance' as one is likely to get, especially from one so young. Many writers never go beyond the 'I' of their poems, are never anything but the protagonist in their own work, never see themselves from any other perspective and are always involved in their own tragedies so that they never achieve any more than that one dimension.

At college, Joyce admired John Byrne, who became Cranly in the fiction, 

in a world of foppishness, Byrne had the courage to be plain. But it was his mnner that attracted: he moved about with the air of a man who knows all the secrets but disinclines to exercise the power he threby possesses.

I'm sure we have all seen qualities in others that we would aspire to emulate but don't achieve. If Joyce tried to be like Byrne it came across as more aloof or even disdainful, as one of his outrageous talent almost has a right to do, but it can't be expected to make one eminently likeable. Genius is only compatible with sociability if it is a genius for sociability. Those Shakespeare biographers who imagine the sympathy and humanity of the writing to have also been a feature of his character are assuming more than they should because the writer and the person-in-the-world, to manufacture a Sartrean construction, can't be so easily conflated.

The amount of work that Ellman's 744 pages of text in his 887 page book, by the end of the index, took is unthinkable and he couldn't have done it without such a compelling subject but I'm sure it's heading towards the highest echelons of great books somehow indistinguishable as 'secondary' to the life and work it describes by being as impressive as its primary sources. In some ways perhaps I wish it didn't insist on cataloguing the correspondances between the life and the work to such an extent but with Joyce that is almost the whole point, that they were inseparable. The art and the artist are two different things usually but in Joyce to isolate one from the other is like someone said taking the UK out of the European Union was, like trying to return a cake back into its original ingredients.

It will be a good couple of weeks, in both senses of the phrase, before Ellman's Joyce is finished and there are ever likely to be further thoughts about it here but it should be in its rightful place at the end of the Joyce shelf ahead of the book I've been waiting for for longer than I waited for any other - the biography of Thom Gunn. I've waited so long for that that I'm only at about 80% of the anticipation I once had for it but not having it would make all that waiting a waste of shame. There was a time when it was an ambition to live long enough to read it, if there were ever to be such a thing and so, fingers crossed, it looks like we're almost there.

He's another who had good ideas about taking the artist out of the art but then somehow found that his work was all about him. Maybe that's a trap that it's not possible to avoid. It's a paradox that Schrödinger himself might have enjoyed.