The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  One of Boswell’s heirs had married an Irish peer and moved a huge trove of the biographer’s papers from Auchinlech, his family seat, where they had been languishing, despite occasional sieges by scholars, for a musty interval in their long sojourn through this world, to a castle in Ireland, where they reposed until a later heir woke up to the possible monetary value of the papers and, short of cash (“like all Boswells and sub-Boswells”), responded to a query letter in the Times Literary Supplement from the eminent Boswell scholar Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker. It was Tinker, on a foray to Malahide Castle, who first glimpsed the cache that would become the foundation of Boswell’s posthumous fame. “I felt like Sinbad in the valley of rubies,” he recalled of the moment when the ebony cabinet that contained them was opened and revealed its treasure: thousands of letters and Boswell’s 8,000-page journal. It remained for an avid American collector, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Isham, to acquire the papers after years of tortuous negotiation involving greedy heirs and Scottish courts of law, going broke in the process. Isham eventually sold his collection to Yale, even as more Boswell papers turned up in a croquet box, a hayloft, and the attic of a house in Scotland. These, too, were transferred to Yale, where they repose today.

  Think of it: no Boswell at a public execution, clambering up on the scaffold for a better view; no Boswell consorting with the Queen “in a suit of imperial blue, lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons”; no Boswell and friends in a Covent Garden theatre, “oaken cudgels in our hands,” shouting down a bad play. A close call: it would be as if Columbus had floated around the ocean and failed to find America.

  *11 Pronounced Ear N A, should you have a need to say this name aloud.

  *12 I write this at the age of sixty-seven (no longer in my “mid-sixties”) and hardly think of myself as an “old man.” But I guess in 1840 it was considered old. In a Chekhov story, a man of fifty-eight is identified as old.

  XI

  I read biographies with the absorption of a car mechanic, repair manual in hand, peering under the hood at a steaming engine: What’s gone wrong here? And how do I fix it? In order to write a biography, I had to know how the thing was done.*1

  I read without system the massive multivolume biographies: Leslie Marchand’s Byron, Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner, Richard Sewall’s Emily Dickinson. P. N. Furbank’s two volumes on Forster occupied me for weeks. I snailed through them pen in hand, scribbling notes in the margins. I had the British edition, published by Secker & Warburg,*2 with a painted portrait of Forster as a young man on the cover in a crisp gray suit, seated in a willfully casual pose that somehow managed to intimate his timidity, and a quote from Pindar on the back that was a favorite of Forster’s: “Man’s life is a day. What is he, what is he not? Man is the dream of a shadow. But when the god-given brightness comes a bright light is among men, and an age that is gentle come to birth.”

  The most compelling details, I began to notice, were the ones that instantly made you want to flip to the citations at the back in order to find out where they came from. At lunch with the historian G. M. Trevelyan, who talked a great deal but ate nothing, Forster brooded about the food: “On his own plate, in the middle of a very warm helping of lukewarm mince, mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts, was one sprout which was quite raw, and he kept wondering, as the inspiring torrent poured over him, ‘What a very curious thing. How could it have got in? And how impossible to interest my host in the subject.’ ” Where could the biographer have possibly dug up this odd tidbit? I flipped eagerly to the notes in the back, only to find…no note! The meditation on the raw sprout was on page 70, but there was a barren tundra of notelessness that stretched all the way from 44 to 77. I clucked in frustration. Why was it so often the most salient bits that went unsourced? And always without apology—no explanation of why the very citation you had interrupted your reading to look up had gone missing. Why did biographers, so conscientious that their notes often took up fifty or even a hundred pages of text, feel they had the right to blithely omit the origins of some obscure and tantalizing—tantalizing because obscure—detail? The sprout that arrested Forster’s attention, for instance: had Furbank gleaned it from someone’s journal? A letter? A report on the lunch to a friend, who put it in his journal? And why did it matter? In part, I suppose, because it was a feat of research: how could the biographer possibly know this?

  Lytton Strachey Credit 11

  Furbank is especially good on his subject’s physical features, which he registered with unpitying specificity. That Forster had “a queer pedantic tic of speech” was the least of it. The most damaging descriptions were supplied by the subject himself. An entry from Forster’s journal, written when he was forty-six: “red nose enormous, round patch in middle of scalp…Face is toad-like…The anus clotted with hairs.” (And how was this proctological detail obtained? One doesn’t want to know.)

  Then there was the milieu—the social world, the ancillary characters, the manner of dress and traits of speech. The rector of Stevenage, Mr. Jowitt, “a genial, out-of-doors style of parson, who rode to hounds”; Forster’s tutor, Oscar Browning, who napped while Forster read his weekly essays, a red handkerchief draped over his face; R. C. Trevelyan, the brother of G. M., who fancied himself a poet and “lived his chosen part wholeheartedly, striding about the country with a knapsack, his hair flying, or writing poems in a furrow”: it’s E. M. Forster and His World that Furbank wants to evoke, a particular stratum of English society that he depicts with anthropological exactitude. He shows us the house in Abinger where Forster waited out World War II, “an intensely old-fashioned household” with no electricity or phone or baths; Agnes, the “parlourmaid,” who lugged hot water up to the bedrooms in heavy brass cans; a church fund-raising pageant that contained “ancient Britons in skins gathering fuel in the Abinger woods”—a scene as alien to the American reader as a Nambikwara burial rite.

  I also had to consider how to start the book. In-the-beginning chronology was the safest course, especially after the reader had been forced to scrutinize one of those eye-glazing family trees that preface so many biographies. The standard method would go something like…let me pull a book down from the shelf: “Ann (b. 1747) was the daughter of William Cookson, a successful linen draper in Penrith, and of Dorothy, sister and heiress of James Crackenthorpe of Newbiggin Hall.” This dry and unrewardingly informative sentence occurs on the first page of William Wordsworth: A Life, by Stephen Gill. No throat-clearing here, just a clipped let’s-get-on-with-it.

  Or you could start, as Walter Jackson Bate did, with a general observation: “Samuel Johnson has fascinated more people than any other writer except Shakespeare.” Bate’s purpose here is to make it clear that, despite Johnson’s great and universal fame, there is still much to say about him that is new (which, in this instance, there emphatically was). But I was looking for a more dramatic way into the narrative. I wanted, above all, to tell a story.

  “A writer of lives is allowed the imagination of form but not of fact,” Leon Edel pronounced in Principia Biographica, his useful if somewhat humorless edict on the limits of biography. The “fact” part I got (though I would come to question the whole notion that there was such a thing as fact). It had never occurred to me that the “form” could be so elastic—that, in effect, you could construct a biography however you liked. Richard Holmes had a useful term for this method: “nonfiction story-telling,” biography that has “a protagonist, a time-sequence, a plot, and a dramatic pattern of human cause and effect.” Nonfiction story-telling: that’s what I was after.

  Edel himself had gone about as far as you could in this direction. I couldn’t stop reading his biography of James—two thousand pages, five volumes in all. It went down easily; I ceased work on Delmore for two weeks while I gobbled it up. They were handsomely designed, handsomely made books, with comfortably large type and interleaved folios of photographs. I also liked the way Edel broke up the chapters into manageable size
, then broke them up into still smaller bits separated by roman numerals; it didn’t make you feel, as so many biographies did, that you were traversing an arid desert of type. The narrative was well paced; clearly a lot of thought had gone into the beginnings and endings of sections. Most often he would start with a scene, as in the chapter on James’s friendship with the minor writer Hugh Walpole: “They faced each other for the first time in February 1909 when James came up to London to attend a matinee of The High Bid [a play by Walpole]. He gave the young Hugh dinner at the Reform Club.” This terse stage-setting is followed up with an entry from Walpole’s diary; then a letter from James to Walpole. On their first weekend together at Lamb House, the power of James’s presence renders Hugh mute—normally a problem for a biographer but not in the case of the energetic Edel, who conjectures that “if he did not speak in his diary,” we can turn to a tale of Walpole’s called “Mr. Oddy,” in which “the emotion of their meeting” is represented. Here the obese novelist, “his large Johnsonian body set on his short legs,” is evoked both in his physical form and in his speech, inflected with “the reverberation of the late style.” Note Edel’s agility in giving Walpole the space to invent—to write fiction—while at the same time making the connection between James and Walpole’s fictive protagonist unambiguous. This is how James spoke, he’s informing us; it “rings true.”

  Collecting the data wasn’t even the hardest part. As Boswell noted, it was putting the thing together that really took it out of you. The biographies on my shelves were finished products, printed and bound: there were no facsimiles of biography like the facsimile of The Waste Land, with its cross-outs and additions, whole stanzas revised word by word. I would pick up a handsome finished book—say, volume three of Marchand’s Byron—and marvel at its beauty as a physical object. The elegant cover with its drawing of the poet, the glossy paper of the illustrations insert, the sewn binding, the rough-cut pages: it was a joy to hold in the hand. But it yielded no directives as to how the contents had been made. That I would have to learn for myself.

  As with any trauma, the emotional and physical pain caused by the composition of a biography fades over time. The letter misfiled, the tape recorder that failed to record (this was one reason I took notes), the quote you’d forgotten to write down and now couldn’t find: these lapses a biographer could weather. But what happened when you sat down to write?

  I was drowning in documentation. Manuscripts, clippings, transcriptions of interviews, and Xeroxed articles lay strewn about the floor. I crawled around amid the notecards laid out as if for some immense game of Solitaire until I developed rug burns on my knees. “Omission, generalization, intensification: that’s your clue,” Macdonald had advised me—advice I chanted to myself like a mantra as I faced my chaotic archive every morning. Delmore had never thrown anything out, and my original fear that I wouldn’t have enough documentation soon gave way to despair about how I would get it all in.*3 My study looked as if it had been ransacked. Papers were strewn about; five-by-seven notecards were arranged in little piles; books were scattered everywhere. Of manila folders there were many: some contained xeroxes of Delmore’s typed journals, others his handwritten letters, still others articles from old literary journals yellowed by time.*4 The biographer’s task, said Lytton Strachey, was to collect every scrap of data he could and then “row out over that great ocean of material and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.” The challenge was to keep from falling overboard myself.

  You couldn’t just stuff all this crap anywhere, and if you got the order wrong, you had to type the whole page over. This was before computers; you couldn’t move paragraphs around, cutting and pasting at will. Or rather, you could: but “cutting and pasting” in those days meant snipping out a paragraph and literally pasting it onto a separate page with Elmer’s glue. “You cannot imagine,” Boswell complained to a friend, “what labour, what perplexity, what vexation I have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials, in supplying omissions, in searching for papers, buried in different masses, and all this besides the exertion of composing and polishing; many a time have I thought of giving it up.”

  Who could blame him? I’d thought about it, too.

  —

  It was through Michael Holroyd’s gigantic*5 biography of Lytton Strachey—even the compressed single-volume Penguin edition ran to 1,134 pages—that I fell in love with what might be called the apparatus of biography, the scaffolding or latticework that surrounds the main text.

  If I can recall little of its contents now, I have a very clear memory of the effect it had on me when I first held it in my hands. The “Preface to the Revised Edition” was one of those how-I-wrote-my-book sagas that biographers love to read. Having discovered, in the course of researching his first biography—of the now-forgotten biographer and literary critic Hugh Kingsmill—that no biography of Strachey existed, Holroyd embarked on the usual tortuous biographer’s journey toward authorization or at least access. The executor of the estate was Strachey’s brother, James, the translator of Freud’s collected works—and rumored to be difficult. (What executor isn’t? That’s why they’re apppointed.) “It was therefore with deep qualms,” writes Holroyd forebodingly, that he set out for his first meeting with Strachey at his “red-brick Edwardian house” deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside:

  I arrived at mid-day by a complicated system of trains and taxis, prepared for practically anything—but not for what I actually came across. Though it was cold and frosty outside, the temperature within the house seemed set at a steady eighty degrees Fahrenheit. No windows were open, and to prevent the suspicion of a draught cellophane curtains were drawn against them. There was an odour of disinfectant about the rooms. I felt I had entered a specially treated capsule where some rare variety of homo sapiens was exquisitely preserved.

  After a lunch of “spam, a cold potato each, and lettuce leaves,” James leads the future biographer of his brother to an outbuilding housing the trove whose contents would come to occupy Holroyd for a good part of his life: “In the middle of the building were two great wooden tables piled high with boxes and files, and on the floor were littered innumerable trunks and cases, all full of letters, diaries and miscellaneous papers. Cobwebs and a pall of dust covered everything.”

  Confronted with this chaotic mass of documents, Holroyd experiences the first wild surge of elation known to every biographer who stumbles, at long last, upon the elusive archive that will instantly transform his inchoate dream into a viable project, quickly succeeded by a sense of dread as the magnitude of the chore before him begins to sink in: “I left the house late that afternoon in a profound depression.” He has tracked down “one of the major caches of literary papers in modern times”—to cite Holroyd’s own synecdoche, “a miniature Pompeii.” Now he must dig.

  And dig he did. For the reader curious about Bloomsbury, which Holroyd himself did so much to turn into a humming literary industry, his book is brimming with gossip, often mildly*6 salacious, about the overly refined, overprivileged and overeducated, witty (though perhaps less so than they thought), polymorphously perverse, annoyingly mannered behavior of this infinitely fascinating “set.” Everything about their world, from the quaint country house names (Ham Spray, Lord’s Wood, Chilling) to the minor characters who pass through the narrative (one party included among its guests “a cosmopolitan Jewess”; “a couple of American Negroes, crude, amiable, and inconceivably rich,” one of whom played the banjo; and the mother of the celebrated cellist Madame Suggia, “unable to speak a single word of any known language”); from their coy upper-class nicknames (“Dadie” Rylands, “Pippa” Strachey) to what they talked about (“Henry James and Cymbeline and the essence of Architecture”), seemed bafflingly intricate, as did the interlocking love affairs—the unrequited passions of Ralph Partridge for Dora Carrington, Carri
ngton for Lytton, Lytton for Mark Gertler; the elegance and refinement of their lives, the cleverness of their correspondence, the books they wrote…and, unspoken but ever present, the gossamer evanescence of it all.

  Over the course of more than a thousand tightly packed pages, Holroyd assembled these elements with consummate skill, combining the features of character, daily life, and history just as a novelist would, the authorial voice always in the background, paraphrasing the subject’s thoughts without claiming to know them (“Beauty, truth, intelligence—these were mere trifles, he reflected, dimly expressive of the single inner truth of love”); and then how the world looked and felt and was, as in the great deathbed scene on the penultimate page:

  Early that morning, Stephen Tomlin*7 was urgently called to the house. Other friends and relatives arrived, their cars crunching backwards and forwards on the gravel. The fine frosty weather that had gone on without a break since Christmas still lasted. It was intensely still—the sort of weather Lytton had always loved. A soft golden mist lay over the green meadows and enfolded the elm trees. The sunlight, sprinkling through their branches, seemed to delay and delay, before touching the walls of the house, and streaming through the windows. It was impossible for those who waited not to contrast this beauty with Lytton dying, or to wonder what result might follow for the three [Carrington, Ralph Partridge, and Gerald Brenan], bound together in precarious balance, whom he left behind.

  And not a single quote from a book or letter or diary or interview in the whole paragraph, I noted: it was all in the biographer’s own voice.