Two on Joyce

BOOK REVIEWS reality; and are capable of thinking on two levels of reality at once." The subjects here are Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, and the point is that they have much in common. As indeed, and as many have said already, they do. What is remarkable about Warner's catalogue of instances is that it almost succeeds in making one disbelieve his initially unexceptionable proposition. To begin with, what is the causal connection , as implied by the grammar, between keylessness and urination? Come to that, what exactly is the significance, on planet Earth, of two men urinating on the same day? For the rest, let it be said that the jury is very much out on whether Stephen masturbates on Bloomsday. In any case he definitely does not read any pornography or contemplate any utopia most of us would recognize as such. As for Bloom, although he composes a couplet in his mind he writes no poem; nor is he particularly keen on riddles when compared to some others. And he has different feelings about history—he rather admires Cromwell and Napoleon , for instance—depending on which history it is. The frustrating thing is that none of the difficulties Warner makes for himself in this passage were at all necessary. The point would have been granted. Joyce's Grandfathers seems almost willfully to make a habit of asking for trouble, of putting its worst foot forward. Questionable aperçus that might have been either harmless or cursorily intriguing as obiter dicta are repeatedly presented as central to arguments which do not need them, and which collapse under their weight. In the process, the intriguing enterprise promised at the outset glimmers and fades from view. The problem with Joyce's Grandfathers is not that its argument is not inherently compelling but that it doesn't seem to compel its author. John Gordon _________________ Connecticut College Two on Joyce Morris Beja. James Joyce: A Literary Life. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992. xiii + 150 pp. Cloth $30.00 Paper $12.50 Vincent J. Cheng and Timothy Martin, eds. Joyce in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xvii + 292 pp. $49.95 RICHARD ELLMANN'S monumental biography of Joyce, published in 1959, has been considered by many the greatest literary biography of aU time, rivaling even Boswell's Johnson. Ellmann's revision, published in the centennial year of Joyce's birth, 1982, further solidified this 435 ELT 37:3 1994 status. Ellmann's attention to detail, his ability to discover sources and to glean from them depths of insight, and his stylistic craftsmanship have been roundly and rightly praised. Although Joyce has become the most written about of twentieth-century writers, it was long believed that there was no further biographical work to be done on him. Or rather Ellmann's masterpiece thwarted, by fear of eventual comparison, any potential projects from would-be biographers. But we have entered a critical era dedicated to revisionism. Scholars combing through Ellmann 's papers subsequent to his death have discovered that his biography is by no means complete, that he sometimes suppressed unsavory aspects of Joyce's life so that his apotheosis might remain untainted. Much will be forthcoming from the Joyce industry about these matters. Peter Costello has recently published the first of a new three-volume Joyce biography. Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal, superbly edited by Thomas Staley, offers some glances into Joyce's darker side. Morris Beja's new biography does not attempt any revision of EUmann ; indeed, his acknowledgements proclaim his debt to Ellmann and indicate the more limited scope of his project. Beja sets out to offer us "a literary life," an account of how the life and work comment on each other. He accomplishes his task admirably. His book is engagingly written; his readings of the works, while by no means exhaustive, are satisfying and suggestive. This narrative of Joyce's life touches poignantly on his tragedies and attends to his faults and failures, but is never sensational. Instead, Beja summarizes the correspondences between Joyce's life and work in a manner that is accessible to general readers and useful to Joyce scholars. Joyce in Context presents sixteen...