Arts and Letters

Richard Ellmann was born in Highland Park, Michigan, of Rumanian and Russian Jewish immigrant parents, in March 1918. He went east for his undergraduate and graduate education at Yale, and taught for a year at Harvard; but his literary career began in the summer of 1945, when, on an extended leave from his duties with the OSS in London, he made his first visit to Ireland and, in Dublin, came to know the widow of William Butler Yeats.

Dick had been drafted into the Navy in 1943, and managed to get himself stationed at a headquarters near Paris, where he spent time writing citations for less literate higher-ups. He was recruited into the OSS by Norman Holmes Pearson, his former Yale professor, and served in England for the rest of the war. At Yale, he had been at work on a dissertation about Yeats and varieties of magic. In Yeats's homeland, being introduced to the poet's widow, young Ellmann opined: “Really, I think, Yeats was more a magician than a poet.” Mrs. Yeats was enchanted, and eventually turned over 50,000 pages of unpublished Yeats manuscripts to her visitor: autobiographical notes, drafts of poems, letters, and diaries. Out of all this, in 194 7, there came Yeats: The Man and the Masks. There are those who think it may be Ellmann's best book, if only because it gives somewhat freer play to purely literary and critical considerations than do the later volumes.

Dick joined the English department at Northwestern University in 1951, and remained there until 1968. In his university life—as his classmate and longtime friend Charles Feidelson has put it—he was a member of a recognizable postwar academic species: a teacher with a touch of the poet. Dick Ellmann wrote literary biography and biographically informed criticism; but he wrote in good part for the sheer pleasure of writing, for the joy of elegant and pungent and telling expression. Writing about literary matters for Dick was an action in language—and an action, it can be said, of singular grace.

The life of James Joyce, which appeared in 1959, began as a much more limited endeavor than the monumental 800-page volume it finally became. Once again, Dick endeared himself to helpful individuals—Joyce's relatives and friends and his literary executor Harriet Shaw Weaver among them—and was given access to hordes of materials. Dick's ingratiating manner was anything but a pose. He really was interested in other people, in what they were like and might say to him. (He can be recalled remarking that he had just run into so-and-so, and then giving an enthralled account of what that person had talked about.) It is this same imaginative interest in people that is so palpable in the engaging figures of his biographical narratives.

James Joyce is incontestably one of the great literary biographies of our time: an extraordinarily rich interweaving of the story of James Joyce, of his ancestry and family and associates, of the city and society of Dublin and the country of Ireland, of the several developments of modern and modernist literature. The Joycean writings are born, grow, and live amid these other stories as characters of finally classic stature. Ellmann rarely analyzes a text apart from biographical fact. But Joyce's imagination and language are made present to us, literarily and as biographically suggestive, from the outset. Each of the thirty-seven chapters is headed by a quotation from Finnegans Wake: from atop the opening account of the Joyce ancestry (“Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther?”) to the closing chapter on Joyce's last years in Zurich and his death (“Quiet takes back her folded fields. Tranquille thanks. Adew.”). And in the final monologue of Anna Livia Plurabelle in the same text, Ellmann characteristically finds a recapitulation of the endings of all Joyce's previous books, finds a question addressed by Joyce to Nora Barnacle thirty-four years earlier, finds a memory passed on to him by an American woman friend of having been carried by her father through a fair in Kentucky, detects the North and South Walls of Dublin Bay, and behind the book's closing word, the article the, he lets us hear Joyce saying that it was the least forceful word he could hit upon, “not even a word ... scarcely a sound between the teeth, a breath, a nothing.”

Richard Ellmann's human and literary love affair with Ireland continued through an edition of Joyce's letters and assorted essays into a biography of Oscar Wilde, the book published in 1987. If he felt an intensifying kinship with the literary Irish, it was to an extent because he felt himself, like them, to be an outsider; and even more like them, an observant and a participant outsider; beginning, as well might be supposed, in his undergraduate years at Yale in the late 1930s. Charles Feidelson remembers Dick Ellmann on a spring evening in his junior year, announcing his intention of going out into the Branford College courtyard to watch the activities of “tap-day”: the ritual tapping of juniors for the then socially and racially exclusive senior societies. “You can't possibly expect to be tapped!” Feidelson exclaimed. Of course not, Dick answered; but he wanted to mingle, to see what it was all about, to be there on the scene.

Writers like Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde also appealed to Dick Ellmann because of their theatricality, their grand showiness, and because of the abundant humanity which kept their histrionics in balance. He loved their irrepressible humor and joke making. Dick was himself an uncommonly sweet-natured specimen of humanity, with a mix of gentleness and strength. Thinking back, we evoke a quizzical twisted smile and a fondness for joking. It was Dick who first told some of us the anecdote about the fellow who said that if he were Rothschild, he would be richer than Rothschild ... because he'd do a little teaching on the side.

The Irish aspect was also represented by Mary Donahue, whom Dick met when she was teaching at Wellesley; they were married in 1949. Mary had an enlivening Irish background, and in endless conversations with her, Dick worked out his understanding of the great Irish phenomenon. His dependence, like his attachment, was enormous. When Mary suffered a ruptured aneurism in her brain in 1969, collapsing in the kitchen of their New Haven home—Dick Ellmann now being professor of English at Yale—he said to one of her surgical attendants that if Mary should die, his intellectual life would come to an end.

Oscar Wilde is not less magisterial than James Joyce. Here are the teeming social and cultural milieus that Wilde lived in and passed through: Oxford, London, Dublin, the United States from coast to coast, Paris, Rome. Here is Wilde's internal duality as represented externally by Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Here, needless to say, are plentiful examples of Oscar Wilde's wit; but here as well is the accompanying wit of Richard Ellmann. Quoting from two different descriptions, one by Wilde and one by Henry James, of a recently displayed painting that showed Love, as a beautiful young boy, confronting the gray-draped form of Death, Ellmann observes: “When they come to the beautiful boy, Wilde is all atremble, James all aslant.”

In this biographical story, Wilde becomes perforce a tragic figure; and the story itself is deftly shaped as a tragedy, with the familiar qualities of the overweening, the stubborn fatal choice, the ensuing disaster, the blindness leading through pain to understanding. If Oscar Wilde is not, even so, quite the accomplishment that James Joyce is taken to be, it is only because Wilde was not of Joyce's artistic magnitude by any final reckoning. Ellmann thinks otherwise. The book's closing sentence is this: “Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.”* William Butler Yeats points us towards a judgment on the biography. Wilde, Yeats wrote a friend, was “an unfinished sketch of a great man.” Richard Ellmann has finished the sketch.

His own last phrases apply to Ellmann himself: so generous, so amusing, so right; and, we may add, so staunch. About a year before Oscar Wilde appeared, Dick Ellmann was stricken with what is known as Lou Gehrig's disease: a creeping paralysis from which he died in May 1987. He had been Goldsmith Professor of English at New College, Oxford, since 1970. Not long before the end, there took place at Oxford the election of the university's new chancellor. Dick was virtually immobile and bereft of speech. But he decked himself out in his academic regalia—he was an M.A. Oxon.—and had himself carried down to the Senate House to vote. American as he was, he was bound to have his say on that British field of action.

*Excerpt from Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann. Copyright 1987 by Richard Ellmann. Reprinted by permission of the Richard Ellmann estate.