'The greatest literary biography of the century'

The top line on the back cover of my paperback James Joyce by Richard Ellman cites Anthony Burgess proclaiming it 'the greatest literary biography of the century'. Perhaps he thinks Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is better for being first-hand. Paperback is not the ideal format for something as heavy, as it isn't for the three volumes of Proust, but it piles enormous amounts in. One might think it exhaustive if one wasn't aware of more detail in the letters, the biographies of Nora and Lucia but a monumental writer can only be accounted for in such a monument. It might not be essential to know that in Zurich he made the acquaintance of the great musician, Busoni, and met Lenin in a cafe they both frequented but it makes one the more aware of the six degrees of separation. And then there is a huge cast of people only now known to history for their tiny cameo parts in this story.

Never deviating far from his method of tracing the life into the books, Ellman's main theme is to show how all of Joyce's writing was one big autobiography but he provides authoritative commentary on the books as art, too. Of Dubliners, it says,

The reviews were good enough; most of them found the stories cynical or pointless or both,

which would make for a good starting point to discuss for an essay. To be able to appear so but not be makes for 'art' and 'art' was what Joyce devoted himself to, possibly to the detriment of all else in his life.

The much less-known Giacomo Joyce is revealed to be a footnote prompted by a mutual infatuation with an English language pupil, Amalia Popper - no relation to Karl, apparently, that went no further but was important enough to be considered worthy of the effort. And anybody who wonders at the archaic nature of the Joyce poems might be interested in how Joyce,

could still succumb in verse to the Swinburnian allurements of sere, pale souls and the wan waves of time

with only traces of liniguistic invention to make them Joycean.

It has always been disappointing, since finding out, that The Dead is quite so derivative - from previous literary sources, not from Nora's past. That is what Modernism did, though, and being entirely original is not a pre-requisite of art. It is The Dead and Dubliners in general that make me admire Joyce's writing to the extent that I do. To what extent one admires Joyce as a person beyond being the author of his work is another question entirely.