The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  “You put Delmore on the map,” I said—an ingratiating remark but true. I wasn’t the one responsible for “the Delmore revival.” Had it not been for Bellow’s novel, I suspect, my own biography might not have aroused so much interest.

  There was no hurry, I continued; it wasn’t as if he had to decide now. But once again I pointed out how well suited I was to write about him: I was from Chicago, people in my family knew people in his family, my father had grown up in the same Jewish neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago. I reminded him that relatives of the Stones, my parents’ closest friends, had bought Bellow’s uncle’s bakery many years ago…a familiar litany by now.

  I asked if anyone else was working on his biography. Only a woman his “own age” who’d known him for many years, he replied. Her name was Ruth Miller.

  When I suggested that I might write my book “later on,” he said: “After my departure.”

  “No!” I protested. “After you’ve finished your memoir.”

  Our conversation was winding down. Bellow wished me “a good summer.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  After we hung up, I stared out the window for a long time. I felt that Bellow had left the possibility open of my becoming his biographer—had even encouraged it. I would let the idea marinate and write again in a few months.

  —

  Ruth Miller wasn’t Bellow’s first biographer. She had been preceded, a decade earlier, by Mark Harris, a vaguely well-known journalist and novelist whose self-respect had been eaten away by a perception of neglect: the only book of his that had risen above the tide of forgotten novels was Bang the Drum Slowly, about a baseball player dying of Hodgkin’s disease, which got made into a movie starring Robert De Niro. It gnawed at Harris that he wasn’t better known. He had approached Bellow in a spirit of homage, or so he thought, claiming the novelist had “enriched” his life, and presented himself as a self-abnegating acolyte: “In this book I come off the worst,” he says on the first page of his curious memoir/biography. But he emanates resentment. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift coins a term—“contrast-gainer,” someone with flaws who nevertheless stands out in comparison with someone who has more flaws. Harris is a contrast-loser, fretting that he’s “a man of a different and lower class” than Bellow—which he probably was. His book was called Drumlin Woodchuck, from a poem by Robert Frost about a wily species with many escape tunnels “who shrewdly pretends / That he and the world are friends.”

  Bellow never made his position on Harris’s aspirant biography clear. He let Harris tag along to lectures and dinner parties in Hyde Park but never directly acknowledged that he was sitting for his portrait. He was still “groping,” he explained; he was not yet “fini.” He didn’t want to get involved: “There are enough people with their thumbprint on my windpipe.” Yet there he was, dragging Harris to Imported Motors in Lafayette, Indiana, to get his Mercedes repaired.

  The actual work of a biographer held no interest for Harris. “For specific facts you must go to a certified public accountant,” he declares with disdain. He “believes” that Bellow is associated with the Committee on Social Thought; introduced to one of Bellow’s friends in a restaurant, he fails to catch the name: “Stat or Staps or Stat or Stap.”*19 After a decade of purported research, he writes Bellow: “I date this letter your birthday. It is one of the hard facts I have about you.” But even that’s wrong: it turns out that Bellow’s birthday wasn’t July 10 but June 10.*20

  Yet despite his self-absorption, his need to occupy center stage, Harris does in the end manage to capture some essence of Bellow. Driving past a travel agency, Bellow refers to it as a “travail agency”; greeting a neighbor walking his dogs, he calls out, “You appear to be meditating.” No, the neighbor replies; he’s only waiting for the dogs “to go.” I don’t know why I love this anecdote so much, or what it says about Bellow, but it resonates with the strangeness of life. And Harris is funny. Annoyed by Bellow’s then-considerable wealth, he boasts over dinner that he has $60,000 invested in a lucrative mutual fund (this is 1970s money), then worries—his paranoia hovers over the book like a dank cloud—that Bellow will hit him up for a loan. When he calls the novelist’s home, Bellow’s three-year-old son picks up the phone and, mistaking Harris for his often absent father—Bellow is in the midst of one of his divorces—announces that he loves him: “I could not but tell him that I loved him, in turn, and I think that I fooled him with my voice.” He reminds me of Boswell imitating Dr. Johnson’s stammer.

  Always willing to deceive himself, Harris thought he had produced a book his subject would like. He wrote Bellow (a letter that of course went unanswered): “This book is going to be interesting, reliable, unique, kind, loving, appreciative, sound, intelligent, and artistic.” And so it was.

  Bellow didn’t think so. After an excerpt appeared in The Georgia Review, Harris called Bellow to find out what he thought of it, a call that, insanely, he recorded—who did he think he was, Richard Nixon?—later depositing the tape among his own papers at the University of Maryland. “I thought I looked like a turd,” Bellow said. “Bad-tempered. Nasty. Snappish. I don’t see myself that way.”

  It had been a mistake to let a biographer into his life—not that he would learn from it.

  *1 Their names are fading now; a recent article in The New York Review of Books footnoted a reference to Howe, identifying him as “an influential critic in the 1950s and 60s.” To an intellectual of my generation, this is like saying that Frank Sinatra was “a popular singer in postwar America.”

  *2 He was conversant with the classical and major Romance languages; had mastered Hebrew in order to write about the Dead Sea Scrolls; learned Russian, primarily, it sometimes seemed, for the purpose of showing up Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he had a public and foolhardy skirmish over Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin; and undertook, toward the end of his life, to learn Hungarian.

  *3 Wilson admitted that he himself “got bored and depressed” by the end.

  *4 This was the book Dwight and I had argued about on the beach at East Hampton.

  *5 This seemed an inconceivably old age when I first read it in my early twenties, as remote in time as the “sixty-year-old smiling public man” of Yeats’s “Among School Children.”

  *6 Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls, A Window on Russia, The Devils and Canon Barham, The Cold War and the Income Tax, and three posthumous volumes: Letters on Literature and Politics, The Sixties, and Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters.

  *7 What actually happened—to clarify the moment for the sake of giving an accurate picture of life in that long-ago time—was that I was in conversation with a colleague when I heard my phone ring across the room (after a while one grew adept at picking out the ring of one’s phone, even though it was just like the ring of every other phone in the office, in the way that a veteran bird-watcher learns to distinguish a particular bird whistle from what, to an uninitiated ear, sounds identical to other bird whistles) and sprinted to get it, nearly tripping over a pile of galleys in the process. There were no answering machines in those days; you either got to the phone in time or it stopped ringing, leaving you to wonder who the caller might have been.

  *8 He spent a good part of his sixties sitting in the office of the Internal Revenue Service in Utica, New York, negotiating a settlement of the tax bill he had failed to pay out of some combination of principle, neglect, and megalomania. (The Cold War and the Income Tax is a dyspeptic account of his long skirmish with the IRS.)

  *9 Wilson showed up as a character in her first five novels, most witheringly in The Groves of Academe as the Irish writer Henry Mulcahy, “a soft-bellied, lisping man with a tense, mushroom-white face…bad teeth, and occasional morning halitosis.”

  *10 Yielding to the insidious ease of Google, I type in the words “Edmund Wilson penis” and .27 of a second later, up comes an essay by Gore Vidal in The New York Review of Books. With his usual bracing acer
bity, Vidal writes: “Wilson is proud of his ‘large pink prong.’ (Surely, Anaïs Nin said it was ‘short and puce’—or was that Henry Miller’s thumb?)”

  *11 This is not as easy as it sounds.

  *12 An eighteenth-century divan made fashionable by…oh, just look it up if you’re interested. The Internet has spoiled the pleasure to be found in displaying recondite erudition as if you just happened to know it.

  *13 The maiden name of Evelyn Stone. Remember, my mother’s friend who had Alzheimer’s?

  *14 Herzog “put on his fedora, as if he hoped to derive some authority from it.”

  *15 “The driver was wild-looking with an immense Afro like a shrub from the gardens at Versailles.” No one would dare write a sentence like that now.

  *16 Probably named after Maud Gonne, the great love of Yeats’s life.

  *17 In fact, these weren’t the last words James uttered; the Distinguished Thing came for him two months later, but they’re the ones we remember. James’s actual last words were addressed to his sister-in-law, William James’s wife (not to be confused with their sister): “Stay with me, Alice, stay with me.”

  *18 A good question.

  *19 Maggie Staats, later Simmons, a lively and beautiful young woman with whom Bellow fell in love and depicted as Demmie Vonghel, one of Charlie Citrine’s girlfriends, in Humboldt’s Gift.

  *20 Or was it? On Bellow’s birth certificate, the date of birth is listed as July 10, but subsequent biographical and reference works list his birthdate as June 10….It is also possible that Bellow’s mother could have been going by the Jewish calendar…Yet on his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship…And so on and so forth. In my biography of Bellow I would spend several hundred words on the subject. In the end, did it matter when he was born? And yet the facts are often significant in themselves, are the story. That Bellow’s mother might have been calibrating her son’s birthdate by the Jewish calendar (immigrants were habitually negligent about such details) tells you a lot about the culture she came from; the accretion of such facts and near-facts and pseudo-facts builds up a richly detailed portrait of a time and a milieu that is one of the essential features of biography. Facts matter.

  XVI

  The freelance life wasn’t for me; it was too uncertain, and I didn’t have the versatility required to produce articles on culture and politics month after month. Literature was my beat, but you couldn’t make a living writing about the Belknap twelve-volume edition of Byron’s Journals. Also, we had a four-year-old daughter, and Annie was pregnant again. Soon we would be struggling to support two young children in Manhattan. It was time to look for a job.

  After many wheedling letters and phone calls, I managed to claw my way back to the Times, as an editor at the Sunday Magazine. In my absence, the old metal desks had been replaced by burlap-lined cubicles. The phones were now equipped with answering machines.

  I started work in the fall of 1987. One afternoon I was wandering the streets a few blocks from the Times offices on West 43rd Street when I found myself driven inexorably toward the New York Public Library, that lordly edifice whose grandeur Alfred Kazin had celebrated so rhapsodically in New York Jew, recalling “exultant hours in the long sun-filled reading room” where he wrote his first book, On Native Grounds. For Kazin, the library was more than a great civic institution: it was the shrine at whose altar he had learned to worship what would come to be known, in a later, more contentious decade, as “the canon”—the Great Works of Western civilization. I, too, had spent many hours in the library during my Delmore days, climbing the steps of “exhilaratingly smooth marble,” hurrying past “the great catalogue room lined wall to wall with trays of endlessly thumbed cards” to arrive, winded, at my ultimate destination, one of “those great golden tables” shining in the sun.

  There was nothing exhilarating about my situation now. Stone-hearted in a dark suit, I was as lost as I had ever been. My novel, The Great Pretender, had annoyed the critics; the protagonist, Ben Janis, turned out to be a pretentious jerk.*1

  Allan Bloom Credit 16

  “You took a wrong turn,” Roger Straus had said to me that summer, when I was sitting in his office talking about possible subjects. Four floors below us, on Union Square—this was in the pre-gentrification years, before Barnes & Noble, chic restaurants, and the farmers’ market, with its attendant crepes and preserves and gelato stands, arrived on the scene—drug dealers were peddling their wares, muttering “smoke, smoke” beneath the drooping elms. Roger wasn’t angry, just concerned about what “his” author—he thought of us as family—should do next. I remember thinking, How many wrong turns do you get in this life? Is there a fixed number—two? three? ten?—after which you’re so deep in Dante’s “dark wood” that you can never find your way out?

  Longing to escape the deadness and desolation that clung to me like Delmore’s heavy bear, I ducked in the door of a wood-paneled room on the first floor of the library that housed the Dorot Jewish Collection—floor-to-ceiling shelves packed tight with books devoted to the history of My People. As I was browsing, a massive tome, bigger than the Manhattan phone book, caught my eye: it was entitled A History of the Jews of Chicago, by H. L. Meites. I lugged it over to the table and, for the next two hours, sat bent over its time-faded pages like one of my forebears in some Polish shtetl poring over the Talmud in a wooden synagogue.

  Published in 1924, Meites’s book was a compilation of brief portraits of prominent “Chicago Jewry” combined with articles, letters, pamphlets, and miscellaneous other documents chronicling the history of the Jewish community in what I considered—allowing myself some latitude—my hometown. The book was seven hundred pages long, but over that afternoon and on several subsequent visits, I read it nearly cover to cover, beginning with the account of the first Jewish community in Chicago around the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Jewish Burial Ground Society was formed; the growing population of Jews as more immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe; the formation of the Standard Club (in my parents’ and grandparents’ day, only German Jews were admitted); the founding of the Chicago Hebrew Institute, created to supply “comfort kits” to soldiers during World War I (“The splendid showing of the Jews of the West Side in these and other activities gained the respect and admiration of the city”); the construction of Michael Reese Hospital, where my father once practiced; and—this excited me most of all—the contribution of Jews to Chicago culture, the violinists and conductors and opera singers whose heirs I had often heard perform at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall and the Lyric Opera, towed there by my music-mad parents. Interspersed throughout this lively narrative were brief, dictionary-entry-size biographies of prominent Chicagoans—not least among them the author himself, who, I learned from the introduction written by his grandsons, was born in Odessa and immigrated to Chicago with his family when he was twelve years old; one of his major achievements was the establishment of the Jewish Historical Society.

  I would come to know it well.

  —

  On an impulse, I called up Adam Bellow and invited him to lunch. Adam was the son—there were three in all—of Bellow’s second marriage, to Sondra Tschacbasov, a union depicted with great anger and verve in Herzog.

  We agreed to meet at a restaurant in Midtown. When I walked in, the maître d’ motioned me toward a table in the corner, and there he was: the dreamy wide eyes, the handsome aquiline nose…the photograph on the dust jacket of Dangling Man.

  Our conversation was constrained at first. Adam was thirty-one—eight years younger than me. He was an editor at the Free Press, but it quickly became clear that his father was the emotional center of his life. It had been hard to grow up as Saul Bellow’s son. “You didn’t have the freedom to be no one,” Bellow had once said to him.

  Over lunch, Adam told me about Bellow’s brothers, Morry and Sam, who got caught up in the nursing home scandal that I remembered reading about in the Chicago Sun-Times when I was in high school. They both went to jail.
“Just like the books,” I said, recalling the tough, unsentimental machers who populate Bellow’s work.

  “Nothing is made up in my father’s life,” Adam said. “If you want to know about his life, all you have to do is read his books.”

  He asked me what I was working on, and I told him that I was considering several projects: a biography of Cyril Connolly, a book about the New York intellectuals, a history of Chicago. “Anyone who writes my father’s biography—and someone inevitably will—has to be literary in his bones,” he said. But I hadn’t said anything about writing his father’s biography; I had come with no declared agenda, even if I had one. It was Adam who brought it up. I wondered if he was sounding me out.

  —

  The Times’s executive editor, Max Frankel, had gotten it into his head that I should write a profile of Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago professor whose crackpot but eloquent polemic, The Closing of the American Mind, had been at the top of the best-seller list for months. A distinguished philosopher who left Cornell after armed black militants took over a campus building, Bloom had found a home at the Committee on Social Thought, a catchall department for intellectuals who didn’t belong anywhere else. Its faculty was distinguished: the classicist David Grene, the social theorist Hannah Arendt, the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade—and Bellow, a major character in Bloom’s story. It was he who had encouraged Bloom to write the book and helped get it published; he had even written an introduction.

  The “culture wars,” as they were called—a term now as remote in time as the Wars of the Roses—were being hotly fought in those days between a band of conservatives who believed that the Great Books of Western civilization, Arnold’s “best that has been thought and known,” were under assault by Marxist radicals who controlled the English departments of universities across the land and were lobbying to make the curriculum more “inclusive.” Against the threat of black studies, deconstruction, and most insidious of all, “cultural relativism”—the notion that all societies, all cultures, all values are equal—Bloom had made an eloquent case that only the classics could save us.