"Ultimately what the biographer
seeks to
elicit is
less the events
of a writer's life than the
'mysterious armature,' as Ma"arme
called it, which binds the creative
work."
-Richard Ellmann, Preface to
Golden Codgers
The author of
James Joyce, The Identity ot Yeats,
and
Ulysses on the Liftey
takes a less conventional approach
to literary biography in his new book. After co'mparing the
problems of modern biographers with those of Boswell,
he makes a series of forays into that "secret or at least
tacit life" that underlies the surface history of several
modern writers. From internal evidence in finished works,
from earlier drafts, journals and letters, and from the
testimony of friends and lovers, Prof. Ellmann draws
often startling conclusions - about George Eliot and her
Ladislaw, for example, about Ruskin's Venetian honey–
moon, about Maud Gonne in Yeats' symbology, Joyce's
nakedness, and T. S. Eliot's first marriage.
Golden Codgers
Biographical Speculations
RICHARD ELLMANN
1973 220 pp. cloth $7.95
(',., -.w}
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
'\.J..t
2 00 MADISON AV ENUE
NeW 'fOAK , N Y 1Q016
