The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  Perhaps the most intricate component of this biographical apparatus was the genre known as acknowledgments, a hypnotic litany of family members who had “provided assistance” or “offered shelter”—editors, publishers, librarians, and research assistants—that often ran to several pages, behind each of which, one knew, was a story involving sleuthwork, courtship, perhaps arduous travel, protracted acts of letter extraction, enduring friendship or enmity (or both, in the way of things, one leading to the other) and eventually, a new cohort to mourn, as acknowledgees died off (earning them the dreaded adjective “the late”), so that by the second or third edition, if one were fortunate to have a second or third edition, the drumbeat of those listed who were “late” reached a crescendo, the survivors dwindling to a dozen or two, in the same way that one’s classmates dwindle from one reunion to the next.*8 I made my way through this litany of names as if it were simply another page of text.*9 Holroyd’s acknowledgments read like a group portrait of the British aristocracy and intelligentsia in the mid-twentieth century: the Dowager Lady Abercomway, Lord David Cecil (a biographer of distinction, he qualified as both), the late Aldous Huxley, Lady Mosley, the late Lord Russell, the late Leonard Woolf…They all go into the dark.

  Maybe that was it: the disproportion between the extremity of effort and the inexorable denouement. Everything in life taught you, if you paid close enough attention, that no matter how sturdy an edifice you built, it would eventually tumble down around you. A biography was a tombstone. And who was content with an empty slab? You wanted to put everything into it that you could, make it sturdy and beautiful, built to last. It wouldn’t, any more than the mosaic walls of Pompeii or the slender-columned Temple of Artemis. But did the ceramicist afflicted with this thought under the hot Aegean sun pack up his tiles and go home?

  *1 I also read biographies by novelists, of which there were a surprising number: Graham Greene on the Earl of Rochester, Virginia Woolf on Roger Fry, Evelyn Waugh on Edmund Campion, Anthony Powell on John Aubrey. They were all great books—sturdy additions to the writer’s oeuvre rather than eccentric departures from it. They were writing nonfiction as if it were fiction, in their own distinctive styles, but adapted to the conventions of biography. After a while you forgot it was nonfiction.

  *2 By now, I could distinguish British from American editions of books at a glance, the way it’s possible to identify an Italian or a Spaniard or a Frenchman on the street with the briefest of glimpses; one isn’t even able to put the variation between these outwardly identical European types into words. In books, to start with, there was the typeface, the British dark and formal compared to the lighter American type; also the minuscule type of the index in the British editions. Maybe, in the end, it was simply an aura, a distinction that over the years had become unconscious.

  *3 Years later I came across this sentence from E. M. Forster’s biography of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson: “His other university activities are not important.” Now there’s a basic lesson for biographers! If it’s not important, leave it out. The trouble is that to the biographer everything seems important.

  *4 Reviewing Philip Davis’s fine life of Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates described biography as a literary edifice “constructed out of a small infinity of letters, drafts, notes, manuscripts, printed texts, interview transcripts, etc.” How tidy she makes it sound. My own experience conformed more to Virginia Woolf’s evocation of biographical chaos: “How can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes [the exact number I faced on my first encounter with Delmore’s papers] full of tailors’ bills, love letters, and old picture postcards?” And what do you do with gems that you just can’t find a place for, like this quote from a review of John Haffenden’s two-volume biography of the British critic William Empson that I came across in The Independent:

  To register Empson’s weirdness of character, a touch of hysterical laughter is surely called for. There was, for a start, the grotesquerie of his beard, a star-shaped fan below his chin, or his demure request to a young colleague that he be allowed to kiss his member, or a typical menu for guests in ‘The Burrow,’ his filthy basement: hard-boiled egg in bottled curry sauce followed by a doughnut soused in condensed milk, plus a tumbler of Japanese whiskey.

  Thank god for footnotes.

  *5 I’m aware that I have a tic about the physical size of biographies, on several occasions describing them as “plump” or “thick” and, less charitably, “fat,” as if bulk were somehow a determinant of their value rather than, as is too often the case, a flaw. But why single out these notecard-profligate offenders? They know who they are. Anyway, great biographies that are sometimes taxingly long can still be written: I place in evidence Blake Bailey’s Cheever and John Unterecker’s Hart Crane; there are plenty of others.

  *6 An account of Strachey’s obsession with sodomy leads (not inevitably) to a cochlear fetish. “Among his post-Cambridge writings,” Holroyd dutifully reports, “can be traced the development of more sophisticated sexual deviations, and the suggestion that he could become erotically aroused by other parts of the body, especially the ears.”

  *7 “A brilliant and erratic sculptor, bisexual and deeply melancholic at times, yet perhaps the most acutely intellectual of all Lytton’s younger friends.”

  *8 The acknowledgments page in The New Strachey is in fact less than a page. It’s been whittled down to three terse paragraphs, prefaced by a melancholy sentence that explains its brevity: “The list of people who helped me with the preparation of this biography in the 1960s has become a necrology.”

  *9 The incomparable Richard Holmes, unsurprisingly, has a flair for the form. Having praised his “visionary” typist, he really turns it up: “Finally I would like to greet the unknown student of Calderon who bought me a glass of brandy one stormy night in a crumbling bar overlooking the Arno at Pisa.” I hope the “unknown student” saw this.

  XII

  One day in the mid-1970s, while browsing in the Harvard Bookstore—usually the last stop on my procrastinatory rounds of Harvard Square, after Out of Town News, Bartley’s Burger Cottage, and the Grolier Book Shop—I came across a new edition of James Joyce’s letters, compiled by Richard Ellmann. “He and Nora exchanged letters much more open than Bloom’s and Martha’s,” Ellmann had written of Joyce’s correspondence with his wife in early editions of his biography. Now he was publishing these letters “in the hope,” he explained in a preface, “that readers will countenance [their] value as an extreme of Joyce’s and perhaps of human, utterance.”

  Extreme they were. I had read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy as an exemplar of inspired prurience but also as a major breakthrough in the rise of Modernism. Joyce’s letters to Nora belonged to another realm entirely: they took you not only into the bedroom, not only under the sheets, but into the cavities of the human body, with all its effluences and smells, a realm so taboo that most of us didn’t even go there in private, much less in letters intended for another to read. Yet Joyce had gone there, and reported back to us on his journey into the sexual interior:

  …a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers…

  …to come on your face and squirt it over your hot cheeks…

  …fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside…

  In one scatological passage, so dirty that I feared a clerk was going to come over and ask me to leave the store just for having it in my hands, Joyce describes Nora “squatting in the closet, with your clothes up, grunting like a young sow doing her dung, and a big fat dirty snaking thing coming slowly out of your backside.” As I read this account—beautiful in its own way—of a woman defecating in front of her husband, I thought of the moment in Ulysses where Bloom admires Gerty MacDowell on the Sandymount shore: “Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as juice and queen of ointments could make them.”

  James and Nora Joyce Credit 12

  It didn’t seem strange to me that these sentences were by the same author. Who
else could have written such exquisite prose? Each bore the Joycean imprint: lyrical cadences, vivid images, powerful but suppressed emotions. The sex stuff was exciting to read, but even more exciting was to see how the two passages showed the elasticity of Joyce’s mind. He could write about anything and still be Joyce. No: he could write about anything and not not be Joyce.

  Why had Ellmann waited until now to make these letters available?*1 His explanation was evasive: “At the time when my Volume II appeared, there were several obstacles to publication in its entirety of Joyce’s correspondence with his wife, and of the total of 64 letters, I was permitted to give the complete text of 54, a partial text of 8, and no text at all of the remaining 2. Publication of the missing correspondence has now been authorized.” Behind this bland litany of mathematical precision and passive syntax must have lain some story involving executors, family members, prudish publishers; we wouldn’t learn it here.

  Had Joyce expected these letters to be published? I doubted it, but after I got over my shock, I was glad they had been. To be able to write openly about this shit, as it were, requires an exceptional degree of trust. Joyce’s cloacal riffs were meant to test just how much smut Nora could tolerate—to explore the limits of their intimacy. “Are you too, then, like me,” he asks hopefully, “one moment high as the star, the next lower than the lowest wretches?”

  I wasn’t sure about the “high” part, and Nora’s letters don’t survive, but there are hints that she could keep up her side of the correspondence. “Write more and dirtier,” Joyce instructs her: “Tickle your little cockey while you write to make you say worse and worse.” I could never read these prods without laughing: their lustful exuberance revealed a side of Joyce—proud, lustful, devious, gross—that had been hidden until now. “Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird!” Haha.

  Joyce was one of the few writers whose work I knew in an immersive way. I had read him—except for Finnegans Wake!—with the sharp attention Ellmann demanded; for all his affability, he was an exacting tutor and expected me to be able to trace the connections between Ulysses and The Odyssey as if I’d read them twenty times, as he had. But I was reading in a different way now: it was the creator of Bloom who interested me—not just the figure in the carpet but the figure who walked on it.

  —

  Like every art form, biography is bound by the conventions of the moment—not only the subject’s moment but the biographer’s as well. We forget that sexual behavior we now acknowledge and discuss openly was once hidden beneath the surface of daily life; biographers couldn’t write about it, not only because they didn’t know about it but because it would have disgraced both their subjects and themselves. “The whole truth is not always to be exposed,” warned Boswell. That was the general rule in eighteenth-century England. Boswell himself was so prudish*2 that he once crossed out a line from a letter of Johnson’s to David Garrick: “I’ll no more come behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bubbies of your actresses excite my genitals.”

  Johnson’s sexual relations with his bibulous wife, Tetty, were the subject of much mirth among his circle, but we get only a peek of it in Boswell’s Life.*3 Twenty years Johnson’s senior, she had “cheeks coloured both by paint and cordials,” according to Garrick, who entertained company by mimicking scenes of their “connubial felicity.” When Garrick and Johnson had taught together at a boarding school, Boswell recounted, “the young rogues used to listen at the door of his bed-chamber, and peep through the key-hole, that they might turn into ridicule his tumultuous and awkward fondness for Mrs. Johnson.”

  Further evidence of Johnson’s sexual feistiness turned up in a five-page document found among Boswell’s notes and headed “Extraordinary Johnsoniana-Tacenda” (“to be kept silent”). The transcription of an exchange between Boswell, a painter friend of Johnson’s named Mauritius Lowe, and Elizabeth Desmoulins, a boarder in Johnson’s home, it addressed the matter of whether Johnson was sexually “capable.” Mrs. Desmoulins reported to the gossip-hungry pair that she used to sit by Johnson’s bed while Tetty slept in another room and let him fondle her until he was visibly aroused, at which point “he’d push me from him and cry, ‘Get you gone!’ ”

  A more controversial, even explosive issue looms: was Johnson into sadomasochism? Nothing seems more unlikely: he bestrode the drawing rooms of eighteenth-century London with magisterial authority; his essays in The Rambler were unassailable; he was enveloped in a penumbra of dignity. But there was the inconvenient matter of his relationship with Hester Thrale, long debated by Johnson biographers. Thrale, the wife of a wealthy brewer, made Streatham Park, her elegant country house, a refuge for Johnson from the rigors of city life and served as his confessor. Had she added to her duties as a loyal friend shackling him in handcuffs and whipping him? The main evidence is a letter from Johnson to Thrale in which he refers to “that bondage which you know so well how to render agreeable” and a one-line entry in his diary, “de pedicis et manicis insana cogitatio” (“from the fetters and handcuffs of crazy thoughts”). Thrale confirmed his preoccupation: “the Fetters and Padlocks will tell posterity the Truth,” she wrote in her journal. Among the possessions left behind after her death was an item labeled “Johnson’s padlock.”

  And yet it wasn’t until 1949, when the eminent Johnson scholar Katharine Balderston published an article entitled “Johnson’s Vile Melancholy,” that the subject was raised in public. Balderston posited that Johnson’s fantasy “assumed a masochistic form, in which the impulse to self-abasement and pain predominated.” The “mind-forg’d manacles”—Blake’s phrase—weren’t just in the mind.

  Most biographers have rejected this theory, often violently. In the view of Walter Jackson Bate, Johnson had fears of insanity; the padlock was there to restrain him and maintain his self-control in the event that he was seized with a fit of madness (which he sometimes was). “With touching historical naivete, our minds leap to sex,” Bate adds condescendingly, “in biographies if not in sober histories—at the mere mention of anything connected with either ‘secrecy’ or ‘guilt’ in any human being from the ancient Greeks to the end of the eighteenth century.”*4 John Wain concurred: “If one thing can be taken absolutely for granted, it is that Hester did not engage in any degrading sexual activity with Johnson.”*5 But of course nothing can be taken for granted. All biographers know this—or should.

  The gap between what is known and what it’s permissible to say narrows as we approach the Age of Candor. Johnson’s practices, real or alleged, seem innocent compared to the sinister rituals described by George Painter in his biography of Proust. Apparently the novelist got off on sticking hatpins into rats at brothels or having a chicken killed while he cowered under the protection of a young man dressed as a policeman. Here again it’s not the sex act (if that’s even what it is) that grabs our attention but the outlandishness of the desire. He what? “No doubt his victims represented many things,” Painter writes helpfully, “for rats are among the most powerful, universal, and complex symbols in the inferno of the unconscious, and are regarded with special libido and dread by homosexuals as emblems of aggression and anal birth.” About the chicken, he leaves us in the dark.

  R. W. B. Lewis’s biography of Edith Wharton, published in 1975, describes a florid sex scene from an unpublished short story, “Beatrice Palmato.” (“She flung herself upon the swelling member, and began to caress it insinuatingly with her tongue.”) But the impact of this titillating episode is muffled by the author’s decision to stick it in an appendix, as if to suggest that it was just a fragment of erotica and not part of the story. Wharton was a prim fin de siècle aristocrat—not Linda Lovelace, fellatio doyenne of a later era. How could she have written about that kind of thing?

  Why Lewis felt he had to relegate the sex scene to the appendix is unclear, since he discusses it at length in the narrative. There he relates the story’s plot, which hints at an incestuous affair between Beatrice and her fa
ther that is revealed only after his death in a confrontation with her husband. As they stare at each other in revulsion, the husband becomes aware of “some profound moral perversion of which he had always been afraid to face the thought”—and about which he says nothing.

  “The little fragment is, of course, pure and utter fantasy,” Lewis assures us, and as a story about incest, in all likelihood it is. But it suggests a great deal about Wharton’s avidity for sex—enough, perhaps, that Lewis might have felt he didn’t need to go into the details himself. Her long affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton introduced her to “an intensity and variety of sexual experience that Edith Wharton never dreamed of,” writes Lewis; there’s no need to spell it out. The “Beatrice Palmato” fragment “suggests that Edith Wharton was indeed, of a sudden, an uninhibited woman, eager to experiment—with a kind of generous and innovative energy—in all the modes of sexual enjoyment.” That is all you know and all you need to know. And if it isn’t, you can always turn to the appendix.

  Some biographers relish taking on their subjects’ sex lives; others are content to let this cup pass. Leon Edel handled the debate over the well-known matter of Henry James’s “obscure hurt”—a mysterious affliction that may have prevented him from consummating the act of sex—in a gingerly fashion, attributing the “hurt” to a strained back incurred while putting out a fire in a stable in his role as a volunteer fireman. (He also quoted one of James’s physicians, who described James as having “a low amatory coefficient.”) But Edel, despite his own protracted bout of psychotherapy, was no Freudian. “The physical habits of the creative personality, his ‘sex life’ or his bowel movements, belong to the ‘functioning’ being and do not reliably distinguish him from his fellow humans,” he wrote.