Faced with this inherent awkwardness, one can take the high road and assert that only the art matters and everything else is gossip. There is clearly a sense in which it does not matter in the slightest that Virginia Woolf was a snob, Philip Larkin a miserable sod, and Patrick White a cranky old coot, since they have given us the best of themselves on the page. When biography is practised as a form of character assassination with the aim of discrediting the creative achievement, it is especially to be resisted. Apart from anything else, if we start purging the corpus of modern literature of scoundrels, egotists, adulterers, cranks, dipsomaniacs, hypocrites, perverts, depressives, religious nuts, and political crackpots, there will be precious little left.

Yet decontextualisation is neither possible nor desirable. A biography is a form of history and, like history, it succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to apply a mediating judgement to its raw material and animate that material with an applied critical intelligence. Without these things, it is no more than a litany of dead facts. The paragons of the genre – Joseph Frank’s magnificent biographical study of Fyodor Dostoevsky (2010) is a recent example – develop an implicit argument for their own relevance. They demonstrate how an understanding of the unique confluence of factors that influence the creative act – the historical moment, the cultural milieu, the idiosyncrasies of the writer’s beliefs and personality, and so forth – can and should ground our interpretation of the work, but also how these might deepen our appreciation.

It is fitting that James Joyce (1882–1941), one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, is also the subject of one of the great biographies. Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce (1959; revised 1982) is exemplary for many reasons, but prominent among them is the fact that he never loses sight of why we are interested in Joyce in the first place. He places the development of Joyce’s literary sensibility at the centre of his account. The book is a trove of information about Joyce’s aesthetic theories and influences, his opinions about other writers, the context and reception of his work, and his methods of composition. It does not merely consider the autobiographical foundations of Joyce’s artistic practice; it also unearths many of the (often obscure) allusions he wove into the fabric of his writing. Ellmann does not elide Joyce’s character flaws, but he approaches his subject with something like personal affection and with a sense of veneration for the work. His biography remains the standard reference for the basic facts of Joyce’s life, but one also comes away from the book with an enriched view of the art, and not just the artist.

To write a biography of Joyce in the shadow of Ellmann is a daunting task, though there are legitimate reasons for doing so. As Gordon Bowker points out in his preface to James Joyce: A Biography, there has been a great deal of scholarly activity in the three decades since the updated version of Ellmann’s classic appeared. There have been book-length studies focusing on Joyce’s formative years in Dublin and the time he spent in Trieste as a young man, as well as biographies of his father, John, his wife, Nora, and his daughter, Lucia. Incorporating the fresh insights these works contain into a new life of Joyce would seem to be a worthwhile undertaking, although it is a credit to Ellmann’s thoroughness that there is nothing revelatory about Bowker’s account.

Bowker is an experienced biographer whose previous subjects have included George Orwell (2003) and Malcolm Lowry (1985). His approach to the problem of literary biography is to play with as straight a bat as possible. He sets out the established facts and records other people’s impressions of Joyce along the way, but is generally unforthcoming about his own impressions. This is in marked contrast to Ellmann, who is not above chuckling at Joyce’s foibles, or pointing out – to blackly comical effect – that as the drunken irresponsibility of John Joyce dragged his expanding Irish-Catholic family from a position of bourgeois respectability into a life of squalid poverty, the Joyces took out mortgages on a series of ever-smaller and less salubrious dwellings at approximately the same rate as they gained new mouths to feed. The contrasting methods of the two biographers are also striking. Where Ellmann often quotes at considerable length from Joyce’s correspondence and other primary sources, Bowker is more inclined to follow the contemporary practice of incorporating his sources into the disinterested march of his own prose.

Bowker’s studious objectivity is fine up to a point, and it is certainly preferable to the disapproving stance adopted in Edna O’Brien’s short account of Joyce’s life (1999), but James Joyce: A Biography is a workmanlike effort. Nevertheless, the basic facts are interesting enough in themselves. As the oldest living child – his mother endured seventeen pregnancies, with ten children surviving into adulthood – Joyce was fortunate to receive a decent education before his family joined Dublin’s underclass. Rejecting the stifling influence of his nation and his religion, he fled to the continent with Nora Barnacle and pursued a literary career characterised by its singular and uncompromising brilliance. On a technical level, Joyce was constantly seeking to extend the boundaries of his art. Having perfected a form, grim urban realism with his first published book of fiction, Dubliners (1914), he moved on to master the psychological Bildungsroman with his second, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), before delivering the epic display of virtuosity that is Ulysses (1922).

What is remarkable is that he succeeded in the face of personal hardship, widespread incomprehension, and concerted resistance. As the critic Harry Levin pointed out, not one of Joyce’s major works was published without some form of protracted struggle. In later years, as he laboured over his last book, Finnegans Wake (1939), his sight deteriorated and he endured more than a dozen painful eye operations, while his family life came under increasing strain as Lucia succumbed to a mental illness.

Joyce was a complex individual who, in certain respects, confirmed Samuel Johnson’s dictum that a man writes better than he lives. He could be proud and self-absorbed, and he seems to have inherited a good deal of his father’s irresponsibility. One of his favourite forms of recreation was to get leglessly drunk of an evening. (His preferred tipple was Tischwein, which Nora called ‘Dishwine’, and which probably did his poor eyesight and his peritonitis no good at all.) He was also compulsively reckless when it came to money. He sailed through life at the expense of others, borrowing freely and repaying infrequently. In early adulthood, his long-suffering younger brother Stanislaus bore the brunt of his fiscal incontinence. Later in life, despite the efforts of his extraordinarily generous patron Harriet Shaw Weaver to grant him financial security, Joyce’s wilful profligacy managed to keep him permanently on the brink of ruin.

Bowker neither condemns nor excuses this behaviour, which is appropriate. But he also fails to offer much in the way of insight into the character and motivations of his subject. To observe that, like most ‘writers of genius’, Joyce was ‘a man of contradictions’ is merely to suggest that he also resembled many non-geniuses. Bowker returns to this point at the conclusion of the book. Having listed the many roles that Joyce played throughout his life, and some of his contradictory characteristics, Bowker proposes that the common thread running through Joyce’s life was ‘literary genius’: ‘Not only did he demonstrate his command of a wide range of styles of writing, from Chaucer to modern slang, but he was able to create his own style, a style which has been immensely influential, emulated but never matched.’

Coming across these words, one is struck not so much by their bland generality, but by the paucity of space Bowker dedicates to the peculiar nature of Joyce’s genius and literary style. The finer points of his art are largely ignored. When Bowker does venture to explain Joyce’s work, his readings do not stray from the conventional. He does not have much to say about Finnegans Wake, in particular. His brief consideration of its thematic basis and its radical technique is perfunctory and superficial. Other than to remark on several occasions that Joyce was compelled by ‘demons’, Bowker provides little understanding of Joyce’s motivations in writing such an outlandish and problematic book.

Bowker is, of course, not alone in being reduced to embarrassed throat-clearing and foot-shuffling by Joyce’s last work. Reviewing the ‘corrected’ edition in the London Review of Books earlier this year, Michael Wood more or less admitted that he had never really managed to read the whole thing. No one blinked – it’s that kind of book. Even those of us who have read all of Finnegans Wake (I have the master’s thesis to prove it, thank you very much) would not claim to understand it fully.

It is clearly a major work whose meaning is important if we are to grasp the kind of writer Joyce was. He worked on it for seventeen years – roughly half his creative life – and clearly saw it as the culmination of his comic vision. He used to keep Nora awake at night laughing about what he had written. Though Finnegans Wake is often obscure to the point of impenetrability, Joyce left many clues about his intentions. It is a book that is archetypally simple on a structural level, but bountifully inventive at the level of the word, and, at least in part, Joyce seems to have conceived of it as a grand statement about the absurdity and futility of all human conflict. But, perhaps most significantly, Finnegans Wake, like all of Joyce’s work, contains much that is autobiographical. In particular, Joyce lampoons himself in the figure of the hapless scribbler Shem the Penman, a tremulous coward and forger who writes blasphemies in an ink made from his own excrement. Somewhere in there, Joyce has probably had the last word, and the last laugh, on his own extraordinary career, as well as at anyone who was ever foolish enough to doubt his talents.