Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce: An Interview Revisited

Richard Ellmann’s great James Joyce biography, first published by the Oxford University Press in 1959, received high accolades. New revised and enlarged editions appeared in 1982 and 1983. Ellmann also edited the second and third volumes of the Letters of James Joyce published in 1966. This essay reprints with an introduction and notes a 1985 interview between Ellmann and Peter Jackman, a lecturer in English at St. Mary’s Teachers Training College, now St. Mary’s University College, Twickenham. In the interview, published in Strawberry Fare, the short-lived college literary magazine, they spoke about Ellmann’s biography, the changes in the revised version, and other Joycean matters. Ellmann died two years after this interview, and his observations may be regarded as among his final meditations on a writer to whom he had devoted so much of his scholarly life. The Strawberry Fare interview is not included in Lonnie Weatherby and Elaine Yarosky’s 1989 bibliography of Ellmann’s work.