James Joyce: A New Biography
Praise forJames Joyce, runner-up for the PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award 2013 for Biography:“[Bowker] offer[s] a less awestruck, more warts-and-all account of the writer’s life and character . . . Bowker writes clearly and forcefully . . . Gordon Bowker’s ‘new biography’ is well worth reading, even if Joyce comes across as brilliant but exploitative, admirable as an artist but often mortifying as a man. It’s not always a pretty picture, but it seems like a true one.” —Michael Dirda,The Washington Post“Gordon Bowker’s life, the first significant volume for more than 50 years since Richard Ellmann’s version, is a masterly example of how to trace the life of a writer, particularly one as difficult as Joyce. Mr Bowker begins by skillfully describing his early years in Dublin, filling in the background details of an Ireland which Joyce would draw upon, for the rest of his life, as material for his fiction. Mr Bowker evokes the dark and occasionally cramped conditions of the Joyces’ various family homes, and refers to meteorological reports, school timetables and details of Joyce’s father’s various mortgages, his biography meticulously researched. Out of these facts, a picture of a brilliant but troubled writer emerges . . . It is apt, 90 years after ‘Ulysses’ was published, that Joyce is celebrated on ‘Bloomsday’, June 16th. This biography is an excellent reminder of why he deserves such a celebration.” —The Economist“Gordon Bowker’s James Joyce: A New Biography is a fascinating and insightful portrait of the artist as a young, then middle-aged, and then old man, and goes a long way to explaining the Western world’s most enigmatic literary giant . . . Bowker’s narrative concentrates on the existential struggle of Joyce’s life, going beyond the complex relationship he had with his wife, Nora Barnacle, his muse and template for Molly Bloom. Bowker reveals the yin of this fundamentally bourgeois family man with the yang of his hyper-bohemian and rebellious soul . . . Bowker vividly sets the turbulent life of James Joyce in the context of his time and place, dominated as it was by the über-provincialism of his native Ireland, the land that he loved and scorned, immortalized and repudiated.” —Doug McIntyre,The Lost Angeles Daily News“It is a great boon that British biographer Gordon Bowker, who has written lives of Malcolm Lowry, George Orwell and Lawrence Durrell, should have taken on this task, and better yet that he has produced such a fine portrait of the artist and the man who was James Joyce . . . Instead of being daunted by Joyce having in a sense got there before him, Bowker makes this a strength, as he skillfully presents incidents and experiences both as they happened in life and, suitably transformed to varying degrees, on the page . . . the reader has the best of both worlds, being informed—or in the case of those already familiar with the books, reminded—both of the glories of Joycean fiction and of their roots in his life. Never reductive, genuinely attuned to both Joyce's fictive methodology and his human qualities, Bowker manages to be immensely sympathetic to his subject while managing to preserve necessary critical distance and acuity.” —Martin Rubin,The San Francisco Chronicle“In his unfussy way Bowker gives a sound account of Joyce’s maturation as an artist, one who could weather the many vicissitudes, rejections, and appalling bouts of ill-health with which he had to contend . . . Gordon Bowker has written a solidly readable life of one of the great figures of the twentieth century . . . If it succeeds in bringing new and younger readers to these marvelous fictions, his book is to be warmly welcomed.” —John Banville,The New Republic“Joyce himself emerges from these pages as oddly heroic in his seriousness and perseverance . . . The distance between Joyce the man suffering and Joyce magisterial at his desk seems large and mysterious. The story of his life, told here with verve and pace, nonetheless remains a fascinating version of making it new under the most severe pressures.” —Colm Toibin,The New York Times Book Review“The biographer of Orwell, Lowry and Durrell returns with a massively detailed narrative of the life of the author ofUlysses. Bowker (Inside George Orwell, 2003, etc.) begins with several of the myriad epiphanies Joyce valued—the first, a moment when he was 16 and lost both his virginity and the Virgin (he decided that was fun, and no Jesuit priesthood for me). The author then announces his intentions—to show the complexities and contradictions of the man—and proceeds to do so in detail that is . . . impressive . . . Our guide is wise and the journey is wondrous.” —Kirkus“Bowker’s splendid, insightful, and witty biography illuminates the connection between Joyce’s erotic imagination and humane spirit, offering a clear-eyed celebration of his perverse comic genius . . . Drawing on material published since the 1982 revision of Richard Ellman’s classic Joyce biography, including biographies of Nora herself and their troubled daughter, Lucia, Bowker . . . explores Joyce’s inner landscape, most of it shaped by Dublin and his Jesuit education. Bowker captures the human comedy that surrounded Joyce, describing Ezra Pound, whose review of Dubliners in 1913 launched Joyce’s career, as ‘Literature’s own fairy godmother.’ As Joyce’s reputation grew, he retreated into a circle of friends and family and the increasingly interior world of his writing. His last years were increasingly darkened by illness and concern for his family. Joyce thought his daughter Lucia’s strangeness was untapped genius similar to his own and fought to keep her out of the hands of doctors and clinics—egocentric in the extreme, but far from heartless.” —Publishers Weekly(starred review)“Wonderfully detailed and gripping . . . It is different from most literary biographies because Joyce’s life and work are so tightly bound. Bowker sets it down: there would have been no Stephen Dedalus without James’ father, no Molly Bloom without Nora, no Leopold Bloom without Alfred Hugh Hunter . . . Here we meet the models for everybody . . . And the final success of this book is that when you snap shut the final page there is nothing your hand wants to reach for except a volume of Joyce.” —Chris Proctor,Tribune Magazine(London)“James Joyceby Gordon Bowker is the finest biography of the year . . . but this new work is a consummate and more complete understanding of James Joyce and the source of his inspirations . . . If you care about the making of a new language by the most revolutionary Irish writer who ever lived, you will also find how the persons and incidents in his life became the fragments forUlyssesand more. This is also a brilliant study of young Pound, Yeats, Synge, Eliot. It’s also a potboiler. How could it be anything but? The young James Joyce was licentious, sentient, fearless, and interested in a sexually active world. Literature may be a high form of gossip and this has all the rich and powerful details, as well as a history of European literature in the early 20th century . . . It would be impossible to read this book and not be transported and privileged to be led through the doors and mirrors with this tortured—self-created genius.  Gordon Bowker’s exhaustive research has given us a triumph of literary scholarship.” Ruth Cavalieri,The Washington Independent Review of Books“The strength inJames Joyce: A New Biographyis that Bowker knew exactly what he was dealing with . . . he’s crafted a powerful, insightful, and compelling biography of a man who is scarcely better understood than his work. His tone is confident but never familiar, and very rarely speculative—a pleasure given the trends in recent biography . . . You hold in your hands the best ‘approximation’ of a life—no less, but so much more. It's not a novel, or a soulless two-dimensional collection of facts. Instead, it's a more than capable, fast-flowing narrative that is buttressed by facts that contributed to some of the greatest and boldest literature of the twentieth century . . . A portrait of the artist, and a not so flattering one at that, emerges . . . Bowker’s approach outshines what people come in knowing, destroys rumor, provides fact, and paints a vivid portrait . . . of the scarred life of a genius . . . Each corollary between life and literature, made by Bowker, is enriching and exciting as the knowledge of Joyce’s works (major and minor alike) is continually expanded . . . [A] terrific biography . . . . Read the Bowker, and reach to Joyce.” —Josh Zajdman,Bookslut“[A] deft, accomplished biography . . . It shows Joyce’s recognition of his creative vocation as a gift to the world, though it cost so much in the way of poverty, misery and mortification.” —Richard Davenport-Hines,The Telegraph“No book on James Joyce goes half as far as this one in establishing connections between passages in the classic texts and incidents in the artist’s life . . . This study will be valuable to students as a summation of our current biographical knowledge of Joyce. It captures recurring features of his art [and] shows how difficult he could be even to his greatest admirers; yet it also evokes the heroism of a man who, confronted by poverty, ill health and endless uprootings, somehow found in himself the courage to write epics in celebration of ordinary people and the intricacies of their minds. It is in ...