bySeamus Perry reviews Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker for the LRB (Vol. Perry begins:Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann emerges, Leader implies, as exemplary, the biographer’s biographer. But then jokes, as Ellmann says, are not necessarily so simple, and the Joycean complication at work is what Ellmann calls ‘the ennoblement of the mock-heroic’. The reason Ulysses appeals most is Leader’s real subject in the biographical parts of his own work, and as Ellmann emulated Joyce, so Leader, on a smaller scale, emulates Ellmann.