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Richard (David) Ellmann |
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In Literary Biography (1971), the inaugural lecture for his appointment as Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, Richard Ellmann affectionately quotes James Joyce's description of the biographer as the "biografiend" and Oscar Wilde's aphorism, "Every great man has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography." Ellmann wrote brilliant, and now standard, biographies of each of these authors; neither "Fiend" nor "Judas," he has gone far toward setting the standard for modern critical biography. In his voluminous biographies of Joyce and Wilde he brought to his readers the humanity as well as the history of his subjects and opened new avenues for scholarly criticism and understanding of these artists.
Ellmann fully understood the pitfalls of the biographer in an age when biographical scrutiny has grown more and more intense. The modern biographer, he says in Literary Biography, is "a trespasser even when authorized.... he introduces an alien point of view, necessarily different from that mixture of self-recrimination and self-justification which the great writer, like lesser men and women, has made the subject of his lifelong conversation with himself." Just as the subject is part of his age and time, so too is his biographer.
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