2 - Biography

Summary

The letter! The litter! And the soother the bitther!

(FW 93.24)

We are still learning to be Richard Ellmann's successors, to overcome Joyce's principal interpreter. This chapter approaches the life of Joyce biography by reflecting critically on its current condition, by diagnosing its symptoms and causes, examining the roles it is failing to fulfil and outlining the obstacles that any future work faces. In my conclusion I will entertain the idea of an ideal biography, however distant or impossible it may appear to be, and suggest what it might avoid and what it might consist of.

A recent survey of current Joycean biography has been carried out by John McCourt where the impression is of a lively field in which the life has necessarily become ‘many lives’, as Ira Nadel, quoting Denis Donoghue, put it in 1999. My view is that its current state is strikingly eccentric. Imagine a city, its downtown area resembling Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast – at its centre stands a monolithic, sprawling, over-used and decaying, charming but distrusted edifice, stylish and gorgeous in detail but also, upon close inspection, with parts tacked on over gaps, creating illusory effects of completion and tidiness and representing a questionable ideological content: the Ellmann building. Intruding upon its grounds are contending but narrower structures, covering stages of Joyce's life: Peter Costello's somewhat drab and uneven picture of the years up to 1915, or John McCourt's colourful account of the role of Trieste.