by James Atlas
Back home, I wrote Bellow to clear up a minor point. He had read In Dreams Begin Responsibilities at the University of Wisconsin, where Charlie Citrine had read Humboldt’s Harlequin Ballads; he had gone to New York on a Greyhound bus, just like Citrine. From this I could deduce that Bellow had written Delmore a fan letter, right? Citrine had written Humboldt a fan letter. Wrong. I was confusing fact with fiction, Bellow tersely replied. He wrote no such letter.
Confusing fact with fiction…the Biographical Fallacy.
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When Bellow’s novel began to circulate in galleys, I managed to wheedle a copy out of his publisher. From the first sentence—“The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit”—to the last scene in a cemetery in “Deathsville, New Jersey,” Delmore’s whole story was there, told through artful flashbacks and twists and turns of the plot.
There was another plot, too, about the narrator’s own frenetic life—women troubles, literary fame, aggravation from an Italian gangster who seemed to have been imported from some other novel (not necessarily by Bellow). To say that Humboldt was Delmore doesn’t begin to convey Bellow’s uncanny act of biographical—and yet fictional—re-creation. I was stunned as I hurried through the fat yellow galley and encountered the very episodes that Bellow had recounted in our interview: Humboldt drinking gin out of a jar in the ramshackle New Jersey farmhouse he rented in the 1950s; hiring a seedy private eye—now named Scaccia—to follow Citrine around; making trouble at Princeton; being hauled off to Bellevue in a paddy wagon. And finally the tragic end in a “decayed” Times Square hotel. On his last night on earth, around three in the morning—“he wasn’t sleeping much toward the end”—Humboldt decided to take his garbage down and suffered a heart attack in the elevator: this was just how it had happened.
Bellow’s ability to capture the speech rhythms of his characters was phenomenal. Humboldt’s manic soliloquys spill over from page to page, arias*5 of angst, rants about the deleterious effects of capitalism on poetry, erudite commentaries on philosophy and popular culture, free associative reflections on the whole of Western literature, “cadenzas”—in Delmore’s vernacular—on “Poetry, Beauty, Love, Waste Land, Alienation, Politics, History, the Unconscious. And of course, Manic and Depressive, always capitalized.”*6
There were moments when I wearied of Bellow’s prose; it felt glib, and it obscured the tragedy of Delmore’s story. “I thought about Humboldt with more seriousness and sorrow than may be apparent in this account,” says Charlie Citrine, apologizing for his comedic soliloquys at the expense of his old friend. If you thought about him with seriousness and sorrow, why not put some of that in?
I was alarmed when I encountered a passage about young scholars “fabricating cultural rainbow textiles” out of the 1940s. “Young people, what do you aim to do with the facts about Humboldt,” asks Charlie Citrine. “Publish articles and further your careers?” It was a relief when he moved on to a rumination about Humboldt. A satirical aside was one thing; a whole portrait I didn’t need. Still, as Citrine remarks of his old friend, for whom malice was a literary exercise, a verbal limbering up: “To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine.” The same could be said of Bellow. If I was going to be made fun of, at least it should be done by a pro.
It was strange to see the figure I’d been living with night and day for two years brought to life by a—the—master of the English language. I felt like an apprentice in Giotto’s scuola, watching as he applied chiaroscuro to some gaunt-faced prince. What incredible luck! The great novelist lighting the way: this would put Delmore on the map.
Which it did. When Humboldt’s Gift was published in the summer of 1975, the critic Richard Gilman, in a front-page review in The New York Times Book Review, pointed out the figure of Delmore lurking within Bellow’s portrait of the tormented genius Von Humboldt Fleisher; in the daily Times review, Anatole Broyard, a friend of Delmore’s from his Village days, declared the protagonist to be “too plainly modeled after the late Delmore Schwartz not to be acknowledged.” The New York Times Magazine published an article by the poet Louis Simpson titled “The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz,” about the Delmore/Von Humboldt connection. And there was my subject’s photograph in Newsweek, which featured Bellow on its cover.
I wished I had listened to that lady on the Times’s weddings desk.
*1 To claim that Bellow’s characters had real-life models doesn’t begin to suggest their proximity. Even Martin Amis, one of his most passionate defenders, acknowledges the claims against his mentor: “When we say that this or that character is ‘based on’ or ‘inspired by’ this or that real-life original, we indulge in evasion. The characters are their originals, as we see from the family froideurs, the threatened lawsuits, the scandalized friends, and the embittered ex-wives.”
*2 Actually, it was on East Huron Street, according to Rosenfeld’s biographer, Stephen Zipperstein. “Isaac Rosenfeld did not die in the room described by Bellow,” Zipperstein reports without censure. “Nor did he die on Walton Place [where Bellow had last visited him]. His new, airy, two-room apartment…was on Huron,” and he had just bought himself “a sporty car.” He had “nice clothes,” he had written Freda. “I have lots of friends.” I cite this instance of wrongness not as an excuse to bang on about the uncertainty of fact but to show how the shading of fact can have a significant effect on the coloration of a whole life. For me, with my attachment to the narrative of squalor in Rosenfeld’s last days (and hence of the self-sacrifice required to be a writer), Bellow’s “furnished room” is preferable to the “sporty car” version (a red convertible yet). Just the facts, please: the facts that suit us.
*3 “People doing articles, academic theses, wrote to me or flew in to discuss Humboldt with me,” recalls Charlie Citrine, the wiseguy narrator of Humboldt’s Gift, pluralizing the singular biographer in his sardonic fashion.
*4 Evelyn had often noticed Bellow staring at her on the El, the elevated train he rode to campus from Chicago when he lived at home on the South Side. “She didn’t think he was so cute,” my mother recalled.
*5 Bellow had a fondness for this word and would use it as the title for the section of comic anonymous soliloquys (most by Bellow himself) at the front of The Noble Savage, the short-lived but valiant literary journal he edited in the 1960s.
*6 I loaned the galley to Bernard Malamud, a friend of Annie’s family, and he called back at eight o’clock the next morning, his voice sounding rueful: “Saul has three words for every one of mine.” As I stood in my underwear clutching the phone and looking blurrily out the window—I hadn’t even had time to put on my glasses—I felt a great sense of privilege in hearing one of America’s greatest novelists compare his prose style to that of a rival. This kind of stuff had never happened in my college course on The Post-War Jewish Novel.
X
“No species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation,” wrote Dr. Johnson, who liked “the biographical part” of literature the most: “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can use.”
By now I’d come to share this view. I had on my shelf three or four of those compact Loeb Classical Library Classics with pallid green covers that I enjoyed in part for their brevity: the lefthand pages were in Latin or Greek, so the books were half as long as they seemed. They had a forbidding academic look about them, but they were fun to read and I learned a lot. That Socrates had been sentenced to death by drinking hemlock did not come as news to me, nor that he was “formidable in public speaking.” But I hadn’t known until I read Diogenes’ biography that he also had a reputation as a courageous soldier who saved Xenophon’s life when he fell off his horse in the midst of a battle. And I loved Plutarch’s Lives, written ca. A.D. 100. They were so vivid, so real, that I might as well have been reading about Cambridge or New York ca. A.D. 1975. Plut
arch had it on good authority that Caesar was “effeminate in his dress and would walk through the market place trailing his long purple robes.” He actually had a comb-over, just like Louis Calhern in the movie: “He regretted most bitterly the loss of his looks through baldness and was often the butt of jokes on the subject by his detractors. For this reason he was in the habit of combing his thinning hair upwards from its crown.” (It explained, too, the omnipresent laurel wreath.) Then there was the Greek soldier Lamachus, who was so poor that “whenever he sent in his accounts for a campaign, he was in the habit of claiming expenses for his clothes and shoes.”
I envied Plutarch his insouciance toward the “facts.” In his world, hearsay was considered evidence. The Cimmerians, he wrote, “lived at the end of the world by the outer ocean in a land of shade and forests so thick that the sun is never visible because of the size and thickness of the trees which extend inland as far as the Hercynii”—a range of mountains whose whereabouts were unknown. For Plutarch, a sufficient citation was “They say.” In his life of Marcellus, he reported that “an ox had uttered human speech, and a boy had been born with an elephant’s head.” (I wished I could get away with that: They say Delmore encountered a tiger outside the White Horse Tavern and spoke to it in a secret tongue.)
Plutarch Credit 10
I was beginning to get a sense of how the biographers of the classical period worked. “The educated man of the Hellenistic world was curious about the lives of famous people,” noted Arnaldo Momigliano, whose great work, The Development of Greek Biography, was my guide: “He wanted to know what a king or a poet or a philosopher was like and how he behaved in his off-duty moments.”
Plutarch was aware of this interest, which encouraged him to depict his subjects as what we would now call “individuals”—human types with special characteristics. “My design is not to write Histories, but lives,” he stressed:
And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the holiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated by others.
With Plutarch, “the souls of men” are, for the first time, the object of the biographer’s focus. Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars could be considered the second biography—he was “some years younger than” Plutarch, according to one classical scholar as casual as her subject about the “no-chronology rule”—introduces the concept of moral character. Nero, Suetonius tells us, was guilty of “insolence, lust, luxury, greed, and cruelty”—though why he was that way, we don’t know: it was simply his “disposition,” his “nature.” Of Nero’s father, we learn only that he died when Nero was three, and of his mother, that she was power hungry. Raised without rules, Plutarch’s Nero is boundaryless—he puts on a wig and wanders the streets at night, picking fights and pillaging taverns; he hits on senators’ wives; he allows a rich friend to spend four million sesterces*1 on a dinner where all the guests wear turbans (which doesn’t sound so bad after all the other stuff he did).
Still missing is the concept of motive. This would come later.
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Einhard’s life of Charlemagne, written around 830, was one of the first biographies by a writer who knew his subject personally. Not that there was any hidden agenda; right at the outset, the biographer disclosed that the emperor was his friend and patron, and made it clear that his biography would be sympathetic. It would give us Charlemagne as his biographer knew him: “strong and well-built,” “tall in stature,” with “a fine head of white hair,” a “mettlesome spirit,” and an air of “imperturbability.” Charlemagne ate and drank in moderation, according to his biographer, and was so fluent in Latin that “he spoke it as well as his own tongue [Frankish].” He was a good father and, whenever he was home, dined with his children. His only failing, it appeared, was that he wouldn’t keep to a healthy diet and ate too much meat. (I sympathize.)
No one could possess all the virtues Einhard attributes to Charlemagne, yet we’re tempted to believe his account of events, “for I was present when they took place and, as they say, I saw them with my own eyes.”*2 Einhard was there, a witness to history: “The many events which are happening in our own lifetime should not be held unworthy of record and permitted to sink into silence and oblivion.” The biographer’s credo, then and now.
Einhard brought his subject closer to us, but it wasn’t until the Renaissance that biographers began to focus attention on their subjects’ physical features as a way of making us see who they were. Machiavelli, in his biography of the warlord Castruccio Castracani, noted: “His hair had a red sheen, and he wore it cut short above his ears, and always, whatever the weather, even if it was raining or snowing, he went about with his head bare.” Boccaccio, in his entertaining biography of Dante, made much of the poet’s handsome looks: “His face was long, his nose aquiline, his eyes rather big, his jaw large, and his lower lip protruded beyond the upper. His complexion was dark, his hair and beard thick, black, and curly, and his expression was melancholy*3 and thoughtful.” Studying the exterior became a way of peering into the interior.
By the time we get to the painter / biographer Vasari, you can make out the lineaments of human character as we understand it; in Lives of the Artists, he used the words “personality” and “temperament” the same way we would use them five centuries later. I noticed the way he considered the motives (a word he didn’t use) that drove his subjects to behave the way they did. “History is the mirror of human life,” Vasari wrote, “not merely the dry narration of events which occur during the rule of a prince or of a republic, but a means of pointing out the judgments, counsels, decisions, and plans of human beings, as well as the reason for their successful or unsuccessful actions.” He also knew a great deal about how human nature works and could generalize persuasively: “Since it rarely happens that talent is not persecuted by envy, it is necessary to do one’s utmost to overcome envy through absolute pre-eminence or to become vigorous and powerful in order to endure under such envious attacks.”
Vasari had an eye for his subjects’ idiosyncrasies. Luca della Robbia, when he was sketching at night and it was cold, would warm his feet “by placing them in a basket of wood shavings.” Or the generous Donatello, who “never placed much importance on money and kept his in a basket suspended on a cord attached to the ceiling from which all his workers and friends could take what they needed without saying anything to him.” Uccello lived alone in his house “with few conveniences, as if in the wild, for weeks and months without allowing himself to be seen.” Was he paranoid, I wondered, always on the lookout for diagnostic symptoms? Or did he just like to be alone?
As I worked my way through the biographical canon, I gradually became aware of another theme: self-consciousness. Know thyself. Juvenal and Plato, among others, had suggested this might be a good idea if one were to live effectively in the world, but when it began to crop up in Renaissance biographies, it resonated with a kind of pre-psychoanalytic insistence. Boccaccio, in his book on Dante, remarked, almost as an aside: “In this world it is of great importance to know yourself.” And Vasari said of Brunelleschi: “He knew himself.” Why did these cautionary words so affect me? They suggested that insight into one’s own motives and character was the key to self-autonomy—that in knowing yourself, you could control your fate, if such a thing is possible.*4 It was out of that struggle that all the interesting dramas in life emerged—and out of those dramas came biography.
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I worried that my biography was getti
ng too long—two years in, I had accumulated more than four hundred typed pages, and Delmore was still in his thirties. John Aubrey’s Brief Lives offered an example of how to make it short. A seventeenth-century writer, scholar, and archaeologist, Aubrey had assembled an eccentric compendium of letters, odd documents, hearsay, manuscripts, and interviews with contemporaries, the longest three or four pages, the shortest just a sentence or two.*5
It was amazing how much you could say in so few words. Mrs. Abigail Sloper was dispatched with extreme brevity: “borne at Broad Chalke, near Salisbury, A.D. 1648. Pride; lechery; ungratefull to her father; maried; runne distracted; recovered.” Thomas Fuller, we’re informed, had “a very working head, in so much that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eate-up a penny loafe, not knowing that he did it.” Critics are always haranguing biographers that their books are too long: surely Aubrey would have escaped this censure.
Perhaps the most interesting character in Brief Lives was its author, a victim of relentless misfortune. His education at Oxford was interrupted by the civil wars; he lost most of his property in lawsuits; much of the biographical material he compiled was either destroyed or appropriated by other scholars. And he had an extremely poor self-image: his own biography, he suggested, should be “interposed as a sheet of waste paper only in the binding of a book.” He had Oedipal issues. “He was, one suspects, made unsure of himself by an obtuse and obstructive father,” Edmund Wilson wrote in an informative introduction to the edition I owned, “and his life became a series of projects that almost invariably ended unsatisfactorily.”