Word: ellmann
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JAMES JOYCE (842 pp.)-Richard Ellmann-Oxford...
...suspected the book of being an enemy code. It was a prophetic incident; for decades Joyce would inspire battles between the code sniffers and the cult worshipers. Once when asked why he put so many puzzlers into his works, Joyce replied: "To occupy my critics for 300 years." Richard Ellmann, professor of English at Northwestern University, worked a mere seven years on this huge biography, but its great and fascinating merit is that it demystifies Joyce without debunking him. It will be read as long as James Joyce is read...
...minute factual detail, Ellmann fashions a Ulyssean portrait that has the lived-with, lived-through intensity of a major novel. Never before have people so painfully close to Joyce stepped so personably out of the shadow of his reputation. There is his father John, a barroom wit and tosspot, would-be singer and doctor, who sired ten children and saddled his brood with eleven mortgages. There is Joyce's wife Nora, a Galway girl with a tart tongue and no head for "that chop suey he's writing," as she once said of Finnegans Wake. There is Brother...
Joyless Omens. As the biographer describes Joyce's literary struggles, the book's only drawback appears: Ellmann is so busy correlating Joyce's life and work that he attempts no critical revaluation. He does not ask if Finnegans Wake is a masterpiece, or a monstrous jungle of word play. Nor does he ask whether Joyce's famed "interior monologue" really reveals anything, or whether T. S. Eliot was correct when he suggested that "it doesn't tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells...
...Stanislaus lived to complete his memoir, Editor Richard Ellmann is certain that he would have pressed the claim that he saved his brother from the triple threat of dissipation, dubious friends and inertia. Joyce never admitted the need to be saved from anything, but Jung himself is reported to have said after reading Ulysses that Joyce would have gone mad had he not written the book...