The Shadow in the Garden
Page 5
Smyth, a strong-willed composer and memoirist in her seventies who had become infatuated with Woolf, made her impatient. The novelist’s hectic, stilted letters to her elderly friend are ill tempered to the point of comedy. “And you now,” she writes, “now drop your trumpet, which by the way is upside down, and tell me: about the opera; about the orchestra”—and about a lot of other matters that Woolf makes it clear don’t interest her in the slightest. She is forever putting off her aggressive admirer, bestowing on Smyth praise so extravagant that it verges on hostility; to others she’s snippy: Ethel is a “termagant,” a “catastrophe.” “Ethel’s new dog is dead,” she writes Vita. “The truth is, no dog can stand the strain of living with Ethel.”
But then, writing to her sister Vanessa about her unshakable marriage to Leonard Woolf, she sounds an elegiac note:
We get snatches of divine loneliness here, a day or two; and sanguine as I am I said to L. as we strolled through the mushroom fields, Thank the Lord, we shall be alone; we’ll play bowls; then I shall read Sevigne; then have grilled ham and mushrooms for dinner; then Mozart—and why not stay here for ever and ever, enjoying this immortal rhythm, in which both eye and soul are at rest?
This is the Virginia Woolf whose voice captivates us in the novels. It’s eerie to hear it in a letter, where, as nonfiction, it gives us a vivid sense of the life—the real life, in which the Woolfs have grilled ham and mushrooms for dinner—behind the work. The biographer mines letters for addresses and dates, but if we read carefully, we can glimpse in the dense underbrush of footnotes the living—or once-living—figure, in all its erratic reality.
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A theme runs through the stories of writers pursued by their biographers: call it epistolary pyromania. Henry James was one of the worst offenders: he lit a match to his correspondence with defiant gusto on more than one occasion. “I kept almost all my letters for years,” he wrote to a friend, “till my receptacles would no longer hold them; then I made a gigantic bonfire and have been easier in mind since.”
James was obsessed with fending off predatory biographers. In his story “Sir Dominick Ferrand,” a struggling writer, Peter Barron, discovers a cache of letters by a major literary figure of the recent past, now deceased, in the hidden compartment of a desk that Barron has purchased from a secondhand furniture dealer. He resists the temptation to sell them to the “hungry little editor” of a literary journal called The Promiscuous, choosing—out of pride and honor—to burn them instead. (James was undoubtedly providing a lesson in how biographers should behave.) And in “The Aspern Papers,” reflexively invoked by masochistic biographers as a damning critique of their profession, James’s narrator, a journalist named Geoffrey Aspern, moves into the desolate Venetian palazzo of an elderly woman who had once been the lover of a famous poet, hoping to ferret out letters he suspects are in her possession; she surprises him in the act of opening a desk where he supposes them to be hidden and denounces him as “a publishing scoundrel.”*3
For James, biography was a sport, a game designed to set biographer against subject. In an essay on George Sand, he addressed the issue with a pumped-up rhetoric that verged on paranoia, challenging the “cunning enquirer, envenomed with resistance,” to discover his subject’s traces: “The pale, forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years.” This is James at his word-swaddled worst—defensive, grandiose, beleaguered by the world and its demands. The fact is, he could have incinerated enough letters to burn down Lamb House and still not got his hands on the ones that really mattered—the ones he wrote himself, safely in the hands of his recipients.
I grew weary of reading about these backyard autos-da-fé. Dickens burned his correspondence with his mistress, Ellen Ternan. Flaubert once spent eight hours incinerating a lifetime’s worth of letters. Thomas Hardy was always setting fires in the backyard of Max Gate, his gloomy Dorset manse. (“I have not been doing much—mainly destroying papers of the last thirty years,” he wrote a friend with maddening insouciance.) At the age of twenty-nine, Freud kindled his first conflagration. “As for the biographers, let them worry,” he wrote his wife, Martha Bernays: “I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.” Why not just throw your correspondence in the trash? Because you could end up like Wilfred Barclay, the novelist in William Golding’s novel The Paper Men, who catches his biographer rooting about in the garbage for his letters—“the badger in the bin,” as he’s henceforth known.
But as with journals, intention can be equivocal. T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden urged their correspondents to “destroy” their letters—an even more violent directive than “burn,” which didn’t make it more sincere. If they felt so strongly about the matter, why didn’t they do more about it while they still could? When Kafka directed his friend and executor, Max Brod, to burn his papers—including, by implication, their correspondence—surely he knew, or at least suspected, that Brod would decline. Which Brod did, on the grounds that he knew Kafka didn’t really want them destroyed and was just bluffing.
This ambivalence was not uncommon. Thomas Carlyle left instructions for his heirs regarding the love letters between him and his wife, Jane: “My strict command now is ‘Burn them if ever found. Let no third party read them; let no printing of them or any part of them be thought of by those who love me.’ ” And yet here they are, still with us—thirty-eight volumes in all. Philip Larkin was always threatening to set his papers on fire. “When I see the Grim Reaper coming up the path to my front door I’m going to the bottom of the garden, like Thomas Hardy, and I’ll have a bonfire of all the things I don’t want anyone to see,” he wrote Andrew Motion. (Again with the fire.)
This couldn’t have been what Motion, who was then planning to write Larkin’s biography, wanted to hear. Fortunately for him, the instructions Larkin gave the trustees of his estate were so complicated and contradictory that any decision in regard to the disposition of his papers could be justified. The trustees were given permission to publish “all manuscripts and letters,” yet those same papers were to be “destroyed unread.” Then in still another clause, Larkin stipulated that the trustees were to consult the literary executors “in all matters concerned with the publication of my unpublished manuscripts.” As a journalist wrote in The Independent: “In three breaths Larkin gave his trustees the power to publish his unpublished work, instructed them to destroy it, and told them to discuss the matter with the literary executors.” Is that clear?
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Holed up in the Beinecke Library one day reading the verse journals that Delmore typed on yellow paper, I came across a deft couplet about the afterlife of letters: “These pieces of the self are with my friends / They show me as myself, which never ends.” Never ends is right. Gathering Delmore’s correspondence was turning out to be a big job. For one thing, the letters weren’t all in research libraries, filed in the card catalog, and ready to be brought out by silent librarians gliding across carpeted floors in the hush of a reading room. They were scattered across the country, in their recipients’ desk drawers—or in the memorable case of a literary critic with a hook for a hand, in a box under the bed, which he dragged out with his piratical prosthesis.*4 Still, I depended on these letters and not only as primary sources, territory—in my case virgin—that mapped out the all-crucial chronology of who, what, and where (the why was up to me). They were also artifacts on paper. The stationery itself was a text studded with valuable information: the logo of a hotel, accompanied by a little drawing—the Roosevelt, Manhattan; the Palmer House, Chicago (where Delmore’s father lived for a time); the blotted letters issued from a faulty pen; the addenda in the margins, scrawled in haste. What the biographer is inspecting is so much more than a written communication: it’s a document from a remote period in history, miraculously spared the random attrition of moving house or the impulsive purge, on a rainy afternoon, o
f a chaotic archive because papers annoyingly cascade out whenever you open the cabinet door.
Often my interlocutors had no memory themselves of what treasures were in their possession.*5 It wasn’t until a third interview that one of Delmore’s friends suddenly recalled a cache of letters in his garage—a revelation he delivered while sitting across from me at the Carnegie Deli and contemplating the corned beef sandwich before him. “How could you not remember?” I admonished the forgetful correspondent. “Don’t you realize how important this is?” “For who?” he said. “For literature! For posterity!” I replied in a state of agitation. “What’s that got to do with me?” he said calmly, gnawing on a pickle. In other words: I’m not the one this book is about.
Then there was the psychodynamic factor. My access to the letters was often the subject of heated negotiation, in which I had to prove my worthiness as a biographer and struggle against the resistance of the letters’ owners. There would come a suspenseful moment, a point at which the recipient would visibly hesitate, wrestling with his conscience. Was it ethical to share private correspondence with a young man, still in his mid-twenties, who had never written a book before? Meanwhile I would sit quietly with an air of studied detachment—early on I learned to maintain a psychiatric silence—awaiting its surrender. Confronted with the competing claims of privacy and an impulse to share their treasures with a biographer whose eventual use of them is beyond the owner’s control, my interlocutors had several choices, all of them ambiguous in both motive and outcome: to hand over the letters on the grounds that they ought to be shared for the sake of literary history; to hand them over in order to embarrass or “get even with” their author out of envy, spite, competitiveness, some mischievous impulse, or sheer malice (often unconscious); to not hand them over, driven by a wish to appear principled or by in fact being principled; finally, to prevaricate or stall, requiring the biographer to return again and devote to the recipient more energy, more attention, and more supplicating expressions of need. In virtually every instance, I managed to wrest them loose in the end. Why? It might have been in part the owners’ vanity. After all, having such important documents in their possession meant they were part of the story. Or perhaps it was simply out of a disinterested commitment to the preservation of literary history: these weren’t just anyone’s letters. They belonged to the canon.
Letters often came into my hands, I felt, out of a kind of pity elicited by my doggedness. When I arrived at slip number forty-nine in the Isle of Pines Mobile Home Court in Gautier, Mississippi, to see Delmore’s brother, Kenneth, he greeted me with a quiet kindness, reminiscing about their childhood as he cut up a chicken and handed over to me Delmore’s letters to their parents without hesitation, the arduousness of my pilgrimage having apparently convinced him of the urgency of my claims.
Kenneth was so different from his poet-brother that I could hardly believe they were related. He was an engineer, divorced and working at an industrial site on the Gulf. He was clearly not a reader—there were no books in his trailer that I could see—and he apparently knew almost nothing about Delmore’s career. But it was clear that he cared about his dead brother. In his blue jeans and faded denim shirt, he seemed right out of Flannery O’Connor’s novella, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
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Sometimes I just lucked out. I take down from my shelf a slender volume that I purchased at the Gotham Book Mart on my first visit in the fall of 1971.*6 The Gotham—long since out of business—was on West 47th Street in the Diamond District; for several decades, it was one of the great bookstores of New York. It had a wooden sign over the door in the shape of a boat; on its hull was carved the motto WISE MEN FISH HERE. The proprietor, Andreas Brown, was an irascible presence; whenever you entered the shop, you’d hear him yelling over the phone in his tiny, book-crammed office. I could never quite understand the intensity of his wrath. They were only books, and most of them old out-of-print books. What was there to yell about?
The Gotham was a bibliophile’s dream: floor-to-ceiling bookcases crammed with first editions; a table in the back room piled high with every literary magazine in the English-speaking world; photographs of famous writers on the walls. My favorite was a group portrait of Randall Jarrell, Sir Osbert and Dame Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, Gore Vidal, and seven or eight others, including W. H. Auden, perched on a ladder, and Delmore, cigarette in hand, gazing dolefully at the camera. It is 1948, and he is thirty-five, already teetering on the cliff of his decline. They’re all dead now. When I began visiting the shop in my twenties, Frances Steloff, the founder and original owner, then in her nineties, still drifted up and down the aisles, spectral, white-haired, a ghost out of another time.
“Andy” (as I was allowed to call him a few years into regular patronage of the shop) was also a rare-book-and-manuscript dealer who seemed able to find anything. Over the years, he sold me at a very reasonable price or gave me outright a first edition (sadly, there would be no second) of Genesis; an early poem in Delmore’s own hand;*7 and a signed first edition of Herzog.*8
One day when I was already well into my biography, I came into the store and found Andy in a state of great excitement. He had something to show me. He grabbed a folder off his desk and pulled out a sheaf of typed letters from Delmore. “These came into my hands,” he said—the book dealer’s cagy phrase for a provenance he didn’t wish to reveal. Even now I know only—and this from a selection I edited for Daniel Halpern’s literary journal Antaeus in 1976—that “they are the property of Mr. Andreas Brown of the Gotham Book Mart, who was kind enough to let me print them here.”
They were letters from Delmore to Julian Sawyer, a classmate at the University of Wisconsin and “a strange, haunted figure,” as I wrote, with a fanatical devotion to Gertrude Stein. (“When she arrived in New York in 1934 he met her and fell to his knees on the pier.”) Little more is known of him; according to my prefatory notes in Antaeus, “he committed suicide in the 1950s.” And there the story ends. Where are Sawyer’s heirs? He was gay and had no children.
What remain are the letters, ghostly imprints—“fossils of feeling,” in Janet Malcolm’s marvelous phrase—of a relationship that, for a brief moment, consumed both parties. They vibrate with adolescent urgency; they’re dispatches from—the seventeen-year-old Delmore unashamedly claims, with only a tinge of irony—“the most important being in the world of time”:
It is fifteen minutes after three o’clock, Central Standard Time. It is the last Monday morning of October. The trees near my window have become bare of leaves during the past week. The trees stand against the night of blueness, like tall flowers. As for flowers, (resuming two cadences) the small flowers of the night burn steadily and purely, like the clear eyes of my burning mind, when I am asleep. The sweet stars make me say my prayer in the time that is past, or my new thing which would have been a prayer at the time that is past: The Time is past.
I imagine Sawyer waiting for this letter in his apartment in Washington Heights, reading the fervent words with eager attention. They form not “another piece of the puzzle”—the pieces are infinite and in any case can’t be put together—but a glimpse into a consciousness, an imagination, taking shape. That’s all we know. The two parties to the correspondence—writer and recipient—are long dead; there is only the letter, published in a literary journal that no longer exists.
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Reading Delmore’s letters to Sawyer was exhilarating—here was my subject in the full bloom of adolescence, the most unguarded time of life—but it also felt transgressive. The journals, I had convinced myself, were a deliberate if unacknowledged communion between subject and biographer. Writing journals could seem like talking to yourself—the act of a desperate mind, compelled to utterance by loneliness or an extremity of mental pain. But it was also an act driven by the longing to communicate. Journals are the message in the bottle, discovered by the biographer months or years later. Letters—at least the kind that writers write—are journals
addressed to someone else. However self-conscious, however contrived in tone, they are addressed to a recipient—an Other. The monologue becomes a dialogue. Even in his silence, the addressee influences the tone of the letter’s author. As the eavesdropper, I was less confident about my rights. I couldn’t convince myself that Delmore was writing for his biographer, even though there was considerable evidence that he was.
“It was pleasant to learn that you expected our correspondence to be read in the international salons and boudoirs of the future,” he wrote to James Laughlin in 1951. Now a third party is involved: the biographer. In this epistolary triangle, the writer is addressing both his subject and the future curator of their correspondence. Delmore understood this:
Do you think they will be able to distinguish between the obfuscations, mystifications, efforts at humor, and plain statements of fact? Will they recognize my primary feelings as a correspondent—the catacomb from which I write to you, seeking some compassion? Or will they just think that I am nasty, an over-eager clown, gauche, awkward, and bookish? Will they understand that I am always direct, open, friendly, simple and candid to the point of naivete until the ways of the fiendish world infuriate me and I am forced to be devious, suspicious, calculating, not that it does me any good anyway?