The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  In The Truants, his fascinating memoir of that period,*7 William Barrett described his wonderment at the prominence of McCarthy’s piece on Rahv: “But who was Philip Rahv, I imagine an impatient reader asking at this point. And why is he worth remembering at all?” The news of his death made me sad, but the attention paid him gave me hope. These people were worth writing about. They were important to the culture. They mattered.

  —

  I fretted about Delmore’s obscurity. No one outside the literary world had ever heard of him, and his inadvertently comic name was enough to incite derisive remarks. And how could I explain the nature of my work? When people asked my mother-in-law what I “did,” she described me as “unemployed.” There was a bizarre moment when Annie and I were planning our wedding in the summer of 1975, and I had to go over the details of our marriage announcement with an editor on the “weddings desk” at The New York Times: I had supplied the information that I was writing a book about an American poet, and the editor had quite reasonably inquired as to who that might be. “Um, you wouldn’t have heard of him,” I dilated; but she finally dragged it out of me. “He’s one of my daughter’s favorite poets!” she exclaimed. And yet I remained impervious to her efforts to get me to mention Delmore’s name—which is how the somewhat mystifying information appeared in our wedding announcement of The New York Times for August 3, 1975, that the groom was “at work on a biography.”*8

  I sought reassurance in biographies of—and by—unknown writers. In a secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London, I came across an old book I knew nothing about: Alexander Gilchrist’s biography of William Blake, published in 1863. When Blake died in 1837, he was “a forgotten man,” according to Richard Holmes. His now-classic Songs of Innocence and Experience had sold fewer than twenty copies. The poet Robert Southey described him as “a man of great, but undoubtedly insane genius.”

  When Gilchrist signed a contract to write his biography of Blake, he was a twenty-six-year-old freelance critic and the author of a massive biography of the now-forgotten painter William Etty that had earned the admiration of Thomas Carlyle, the most famous biographer of his day—some would say, apart from Boswell, of any day—and gotten him a contract with Macmillan. Over the next five years, Gilchrist followed Blake’s footsteps through Soho and the Lake District, haunted antiquarian bookshops, interviewed his subject’s contemporaries, and searched museums for undiscovered manuscripts—the biographer’s grail. He even sought out Blake’s grave in the cemetery where he was buried, though none of the “five thousand head-stones” in Bunhill Fields bore his name. Undiscouraged, Gilchrist consulted an old register and closely interrogated the “ex-sexton” on the premises until the plot, mistakenly identified as “80,” was found to be “a spot somewhere about the middle of that division of the ground lying to the right as you enter.” These graveyard pilgrimages are as much a part of the biographer’s ritual as the journey to the subject’s birthplace—rites de passage that mark the literal beginning and the end.*9

  One might ask why such exhaustive sleuthwork is necessary, what it adds to our understanding of the poet’s life and work; but that’s how the biographer works. Sooner ask a dog why it chases after a tennis ball. Once embarked on his biographical quest, Gilchrist did what biographers do: he sought the physical remnants of Blake’s existence out of a determination to unearth all the evidence he could that his subject had once lived.

  I noticed the way he colored in the background of Blake’s daily life. Passing the poet’s former residence, Fountain Court, on his way to work, the scrupulous biographer stopped to take notes: “Blake’s two rooms on the first floor were approached by a wainscoted staircase, with handsome balustrades, such as we find in a house of Queen Anne’s date, and lit by a window to the left, looking out on the well-like back yard below.” And he gave us a dramatic sense of the period: in one vivid scene, Blake is caught up in a mob headed for Newgate Prison during the No-Popery Riots and forced “to go along in the very front rank, and witness the storm and burning of the fortress-like prison, and release of its three hundred inmates.”

  Gilchrist’s book is a sustained elegy—not only to the poet but to the transience of life. “Alas! for tenure of mortal fame!” he laments of Harriet Mathew, a legendary bluestocking “once known to half the Town” who entertained in her grand house at 27, Rathbone Place such luminaries as the memoirist and correspondent Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, much admired by Dr. Johnson (and still read by his acolytes). “As no lettered contemporary has handed down her portrait, she has disappeared from us.” Fretting over the loss of some books by a friend of Blake’s that were translated into German, he bursts out: “O time! Eater of men and books, what has become of these translations?” They had gone the way of all things.

  One of the most moving aspects of this now-forgotten gem is Gilchrist’s deep empathy for his subject: his life of Blake is a work of advocacy. To the charge that the poet was just an eccentric who sat nude in his garden with his similarly unarrayed wife, suffered from hallucinations, and wrote unintelligible poetry—in short, that he was “mad”—Gilchrist gave an eloquent reply. Having quoted the approbative words of several friends, among them the poet William Cowper, “that fine-witted, heaven-stricken man,”*10 he invites the reader to suspend judgment:

  He must go out of himself for a moment, if he would take such eccentricities for what they are worth, and not draw false conclusions. If he or I—close-tethered as we are to the matter-of-fact world—were on a sudden to wander in so bizarre a fashion from the prescriptive proprieties of life, it would be time for our friends to call in a doctor, or apply for a commission de lunatico. But Blake lived in a world of Ideas; Ideas were to him more real than the actual external world.

  What Gilchrist is asking us to do is exercise what Keats famously called Negative Capability, “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—to allow for and condone the infinite mystery of human behavior, its refusal to be explained.

  Gilchrist’s own story turned out to be even darker than his subject’s. At the age of thirty-three, having to contend with a sick child and money woes, he came down with scarlet fever and died within a week, a tragedy his wife attributed to his labors on the book: “The brain was tired with stress of work.” It was published posthumously, after a great deal of additional labor on her part, and greatly acclaimed.

  So biography could be fatal. I wasn’t willing to go that far, but Gilchrist’s book inspired me. I wanted to write a biography that some young writer would come across a hundred years hence in a secondhand bookstore, if such a thing still existed—or at least track down on AbeBooks and have delivered via drone. Delmore Schwartz: What a strange name. Who was he?

  —

  It wasn’t long before I had amassed a modest shelf of books on people who would have been long forgotten had it not been for their exhumation by celebrated writers. In one of his Rambler essays, Dr. Johnson wrote: “I have often thought that there rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be possible.” Thomas Carlyle’s biography of John Sterling, a poet of negligible gifts, dead at thirty-eight, tested this proposition.

  It’s not a work of diligent scholarship. “Who John’s express tutors were, at Passy, I never heard,” Carlyle writes with arrogant insouciance; “nor indeed, in his case, was it much worth inquiring.” A few facts the biographer deigned to supply. Born of middle-class Irish parents on the Isle of Bute, Sterling was an erratic student, directionless at Cambridge, one of a multitude of youthful London literati during what Carlyle refers to, without explanation, as the Talking Era; his father was a powerful columnist at the Times, swanning about the clubs of Pall Mall, and had a bustling house in Knightsbridge. He was, to use Carlyle’s faintly denigrating term, “locomotive.” The son, too, was ambitious. He cultivated friendships with Wordsworth and Coleridge and wrote a “stiff” autobiographical novel; he knew �
�religious, witty, and other distinguished ladies, and [was] admiringly known by them.” Ruddy-cheeked, “singularly beautiful and attractive,” dark blond and nearly six feet tall, he talked in a loud voice as he strode the crowded city streets. He was characterized by “impetuous velocity, all-hoping headlong alacrity, what we must call rashness and impatience”—or in another arresting phrase, “quick feeling.” (My first thought, of course, was that he was bipolar.) In his thirties, he began to suffer from what Carlyle called “downbreaks.”*11

  Sterling’s life was even more unremittingly dolorous than Delmore’s. (My subject, after all, had some ups along with his downs.) He couldn’t get his poems published and had to resort to paying for printed editions—what would now be called self-publishing. Peripatetic to no purpose, he engaged in “swift jerkings” from a plantation in the West Indies to France and Italy and finally to a “pathetic” house in Bristol, piled high with unopened boxes of books. His last years consisted of “poor and ever-interrupted literary labors.” He was beset by intolerable tragedies: his mother and his wife died within two hours of each other, the latter, as was common in those days, during childbirth. To top off these misfortunes, he wasn’t even a good poet—perhaps the worst misfortune of them all. His work, according to Carlyle, was “crude”—a pitiless verdict that liberal quotations from it confirm.

  Nor was Sterling particularly vivid. “His character was not supremely original,” writes Carlyle:

  neither was his fate in the world wonderful. What he did was inconsiderable enough; and as to what lay in him to have done, this was but a problem, now beyond possibility of settlement. Why had a Biography been inflicted on this man; why had not No-biography, and the privilege of all the weary, been his lot?

  The answer Carlyle offers is that his subject was “a representative man,” one whose personal history was, “beyond others, emblematic of that of his Time”—and, it tacitly followed, of all men in all times. Sterling’s life was tragic, “as all men’s are.” To bring him before us in his now-vanished corporeality was the biographer’s job.

  One of the most touching moments in this curious book is Carlyle’s description of an evening spent together in London, at Sterling’s Hotel, “some ancient comfortable quaint-looking place in the Strand, near Hungerford Market”:

  We took leave under the dim skies; and alas, little as I then dreamt of it, this, so far as I can calculate, must have been the last time I saw him in the world. Softly as a common evening, the last of the evenings had passed away, and no other would come for me forever more.

  So far as I can calculate: would it have killed the biographer to nail down this fact? But you could also look at it another way: Sterling was lucky to have as his biographer one of the towering figures of his age, the great defender of biography (“The History of the World is but the Biography of Great Men”), someone who could memorialize him simply because he had passed through the world.

  —

  The most curious volume in the small library of biographies about the obscure that I had by now accumulated was The Quest for Corvo by A. J. A. Symons, published in 1934. As its title suggests, Symons’s book was a life written in the form of a narrative that described how it came to be written—“an experiment in Biography,” as Symons himself described it, capitalizing the genre to lend it added gravity—about a character whose eccentricity was so flamboyant that he was said to have “brought amazement, fear, and repulsion” to everyone he met.

  A novelist who signed his books Fr. Rolfe to create the impression that he was a priest—his fanciful title was a gift, he maintained, from the “former” Duchess of Cesarini-Sforza—Rolfe had been expelled from a Catholic college in Rome and carried out to the street on his bed; supported himself in a remote Welsh village by painting religious banners; been confined to a workhouse for debt; and composed pornographic letters to a prospective benefactor in medieval script. He once painted a mural consisting of 149 self-portraits shown bearing the corpse of Saint William of Norwich—who was made to resemble the portraitist as well. He was a master of invective.*12 He ended his life as a gondolier in Venice, floating about in the lagoons in a boat with hand-painted sails said to resemble “the barge of Cleopatra.”

  Symons was not above inventing scenarios to suit his purposes, but his intention was to create a narrative drama, unveiling his subject by means of sudden discoveries rather than a gradual accretion of detail. Having been introduced to Corvo’s work by a mysterious acquaintance who turns over to him an article on the writer that appeared in a London journal and the letters it prompted, Symons initiates that process familiar to every biographer: the keyed-up missives to possible sources of information (“At once I began to write letters in all directions”); the being-gently-and-sometimes-not-so-gently fended off (“I wish very much that I could help you, but I’m afraid I can’t do so”; “I fear I cannot spare much time”; “I know very little of Corvo”); the correspondence pried from unwilling hands (“I left his chambers with the packet of letters burning under my arm”); the confessions made and information suppressed over the course of interviews; the unpublished books and manuscripts discovered; the “pedantic masterpiece” retrieved; the dates nailed down only to be contradicted; the precise sums of money disclosed (“He wrote for fifty pounds, fifty pounds again, then again for more still”); the addresses learned (“Rolfe became an observed figure at Hotel Belle Vue”); the fugitive ancillary characters introduced and forgotten (“Dr. and Mrs. van Someren found his company a continual source of pleasure”); the telegrams dispatched; the doorsteps darkened; and finally, the thrilling payoffs: “My pertinacity was richly rewarded.”

  As intrigued by the author as by his subject, I was glad to find that there existed a full-length biography of Symons by his brother Julian.*13 A. J. A. Symons: His Life and Expectations turned out to be no less absorbing than The Quest for Corvo. It emerged that “Alphonse”—the trio of initials was designed to cover up his easily mocked name—had been a figure of modest renown in the London literary world between the wars. A collector of rare books, a frequenter of clubs, and a flamboyant dandy, Symons was not a “writer” as such—Corvo would be his only published book; his great contribution to English culture was the founding of the Food and Wine Society. (He also possessed a large collection of antique music boxes.)

  Neurotic, high-strung, and hypersensitive (like Corvo; here was an “overt” match between subject and biographer), Symons possessed, according to his brother, “an angry knowledge of the life that might have been his if all had gone well.” His arrogance and deliberately cultivated hauteur masked a crippling vulnerability: “There can be few men—certainly few so little prepared to tolerate adverse criticism—who have been so eager to submit their work to other eyes for approval.” Yet when it was approved, the praise felt insufficient. (It always does.)

  Symons died, at forty-one, of a “vascular abnormality” that led to a hemorrhage of the brain—an exceedingly rare disease that was somehow appropriate to the strangeness of the whole story.*14

  How could such a rarefied, exotic biography have been of interest to me, a person from Illinois who had never entered a London club and couldn’t distinguish Bordeaux from Beaujolais? “He wore extravagant shirts and ties and hand-made shoes,” observed Julian Symons; the cut of his suits was “extravagantly individual.” I bought my shoes at the Harvard Coop and didn’t own a suit until I got married. But the struggles Symons endured—the doomed love affairs and marital discontents; the money troubles; the health issues, both physical and mental; the family clashes; the wrestling with self-doubt—were universal. Toward the end of his life, he wrote a friend: “Behold me now, struggling to escape from my own toils, and hasten to help me from myself.”

  As if one can.

  *1 It’s since been renamed the Washington Square Hotel and has a “fitness center” and “Internet access.” Hard to imagine Delmore on the treadmill.

  *2 It turned out to be of more than casual importance: in
the 1940s and ’50s, Delmore had carried on a serious affair with Krim’s first wife, a dancer named Eleanor Goff. And there was more to the story, as I would learn.

  *3 The Minetta Tavern in those days was a dingy Greenwich Village bar with wooden booths and grimy windows—unrecognizable as the restaurant, which still retains its name and location, described in the Zagat Guide, where the hip “restaurateur” (a word unknown in Delmore’s day) Keith McNally has “got it goin’ on,” having created a “sceney” redo of an “old Village favorite” where “ ‘you’ll eat like a star’ and probably see a few.” They won’t be the stars in my firmament.

  *4 My first encounter with his name clarified a hitherto puzzling reference in a Lowell poem to a boiling summer afternoon when he and his wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, “drank with the Rahvs in Greenwich Village.” I had thought the Rahvs were some kind of Arabian tribe.

  *5 He reminded the philosopher William Barrett of “a diamond merchant in Antwerp or a mysterious agent on the Orient Express.”

  *6 More than forty years on, I could tell you the brand of cigarette that my intellectual heroes smoked: Clement Greenberg, unfiltered Camels; Harold Rosenberg, Pall Malls; Lowell, the short-lived Trues. It’s hard to recall now, as cigarettes are being phased out of American life—some brands no longer exist—and smoking is often seen as a marker of mental illness, that in those days almost everyone smoked.

  *7 The title referred, in Barrett’s explanation, to “literary aspirants”—its subtitle was Adventures Among the Intellectuals—who “were escaping for a few years into bohemia, playing truant from the ordinary ways of life, hoping to spread their wings and soar for a while.” But it also had, as Barrett recognized, a larger meaning: he and his Partisan Review compatriots saw themselves as intellectual exiles, determined not to be taken in by the various ideologies that competed for their allegiance. They were playing hooky from history.