The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  It was bracing to read this theoretical call to arms, with its obscure references and tangy rhetoric, even if you had to sit there clutching your head in your hands as if you were back at the college library bent over Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. For Bloom, philosophy was a priestly calling; the decadence of modern civilization had corrupted the soul of man; egalitarianism, soft-pedaled by the classical philosophers, was the enemy of the true and the good: “The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, of all men to the extent they desire to know.”

  Bloom and Bellow were close friends; they taught a course on the Great Books together, garbed alike in their bespoke suits, and Bellow spent long evenings in Bloom’s apartment, next door to his own, listening to Bloom rant far into the night about the pending end of civilization. The two men were so inextricably bound up in the public mind that a review of the book in the scholarly journal Academe facetiously attributed its authorship to Bellow, who, the reviewer suggested, had written “an entire coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades.”

  Two months after I started at the Times, I flew out to Chicago on a freezing day in December—the kind of day, Bellow had written, when you half-expected to see a polar bear floating on an ice floe in Lake Michigan. I enjoyed trotting after Bloom while he held forth excitedly on the campus protests around the country that were proving his point. “Look what’s happening at Stanford,” he said, showing me a clip from The Maroon about the latest uproar over the curriculum. “We’re really getting to them.”

  We, of course, included Bellow, his virtual collaborator; and you couldn’t discuss Bloom without discussing Bellow.

  I showed up at his cramped office on the fifth floor of the Social Science Research Building—the same office where I had visited him twelve years before, only this time I had an appointment. It was a wintry Chicago afternoon, and the office was cast in gloom; I recalled from my previous visit that Bellow liked to sit in the dark. He had no wish to illuminate—not for the benefit of a reporter, anyway. He looked fit and dapper in a nubbly brown suit, pale-green shirt, and bow tie. We talked about Bloom’s book for a while; about the perils of fame (“It’s like going through the Inferno without Virgil as a guide”); and about the furor Bloom had created with his incendiary book. Bellow was sardonic on the subject. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, the Proust of the Papuans?”*2 he said. “I’d be glad to read them.” He laughed, and I joined in. I could see that he enjoyed his bon mot, with its consonantal fillip. It was funny, despite its flagrant violation of the code of political correctness.

  Still, the controversy was no laughing matter. Bellow’s comment, spoken in levity, would provide ammunition to those inclined to see him as a racist, an elitist, and a reactionary—a large constituency. He got into these public scrapes in part out of a wish to provoke, I sensed, to stir things up, but also out of principle. If Bellow was guilty of the charges leveled so stridently by the Left, he had his reasons—some of them unconscious, others the product of his own experience; it disturbed him to see the neighborhood he’d grown up in transformed by a new generation of immigrants with different values (to put it delicately), or to watch student radicals occupy universities where his own books were taught.

  I left Bellow’s office elated. He was wry, acerbic, funny, mournful, bitter, shrewd—sometimes all in a single sentence. Boswell tells us that when he was in Dr. Johnson’s presence, the marvelous talk he heard “was not a particular selection from Dr. Johnson’s general conversation, but was merely occasional talk at such times as I had the good fortune to be in his company; and, without doubt, if his discourse at other periods had been collected with the same attention, the whole tenor of what he uttered would have been found equally excellent.” This was also true of Bellow.

  —

  Two days after I got back to the office, Harriet Wasserman, Bellow’s agent, called my boss at the magazine, Jimmy Greenfield, to request an interview on her client’s behalf. It was urgent, she said. That afternoon she bustled into his office; I was called in soon afterward.

  Bellow was concerned that there would be too much about him in the piece, Wasserman had been explaining to Greenfield, a genial Times man who had spent a good part of his life at the paper. Dapper in his tailored pin-striped suit, he couldn’t see what the fuss was about, but Wasserman was beside herself. Zaftig, voluble, and as fussily intense as a Jewish auntie, she had been Bellow’s agent for virtually his entire career; he was her most important client. (Of course, he would have been any agent’s most important client.) As she faced the good-natured editor, she was literally on the edge of her seat. She also admitted that Bellow was worried about his photograph: the Book Review had used one a few years back that he claimed made him “look like a herring that’s been left out in the rain too long.” But he didn’t want a new one taken. Was he annoyed the piece wasn’t about him? I had no evidence for this uncharitable thought. Maybe he just didn’t want to divert attention from Bloom.

  The next day I got a call from Adam Bellow. He’d had dinner with his father the night before, and Bellow was “sore” at me. “He’s very irascible right now,” Adam said. “He’s paranoid about being identified with Bloom.” Ah! So that was it. The Closing of the American Mind had caused much controversy around Hyde Park; Bloom was “taking a lot of heat.” Bellow wanted to keep his distance. “If you want to write more about my father someday, maybe you should hold off writing about him now,” Adam advised.

  I defended myself as best I could. “I’m going to write what I write,” I said firmly. Nevertheless, I dashed off a letter to Bellow assuring him that there was nothing to worry about. My piece was intended to be about Bloom, and it was; Bellow played only a minor role. They were close friends and colleagues; Bloom’s book had been Bellow’s idea. But the piece was about the whole intellectual world of the Committee on Social Thought, a great subject in itself. In the end, it was illustrated by a full-page color photograph of the entire committee on a staircase in the wood-paneled Faculty Club. There was nothing piscine about Bellow’s visage, and I thought it was gracious of him to agree to a photo shoot with his colleagues, all distinguished figures but none remotely of his stature.

  A week after it came out, I heard from Adam. He said his father had received my letter and all was forgiven; I was back in his “good graces.” “You won’t hear from him,” Adam warned me, and he wasn’t sure if Bellow would even read the piece. But the word of mouth was apparently good.

  For the moment, all was well.

  —

  One day I was sitting in my cubicle working on a piece about nuclear throw weights by McGeorge Bundy when a book crossed my desk that was also a bomb—less shattering in its potential impact on society, but momentous all the same. It was a thick paperback, published by Wayne State University Press and entitled Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader. Within was a generous selection of Rosenfeld’s work: book reviews, literary essays, commentaries on Jewish culture, short stories, journals. There was also a reprint of Bellow’s preface to An Age of Enormity.

  I put aside Bundy’s piece and immersed myself in Rosenfeld’s essays, reading in my fevered way until the only people left in the office were the cleaning staff. The literary pieces were exemplary: He could write about Orwell, Stendhal, or Kafka, writers as remote from his own sensibility as they were from one another’s, with a confident ease that showed deep familiarity with their work. His voice as a critic was natural and aphoristic. He raised an eyebrow without (quite) being cruel. The British novelist Henry Green, he wrote, intended “to have you admire his prose.” And of Gandhi’s ostentatious acts of renunciation, he pointed out that failure can be “a kind of egotism.” His elegy to the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem was more than an exercise in nostalgia; it was a lament for the catastrophic disappearance of a whole culture:

  He defined a peculiar intellect
ual and spiritual province of the Jews, revealing the hidden vitality of their religion and the historical viability of their culture. It is a province which is lost to the majority of us today, who know nothing of such blessings, even as that which was once our world, with Kasrilevke*3 its Jerusalem, was lost to the world that engulfed and destroyed it.

  Rosenfeld’s voice was direct, without pretension, engaged; nothing could deflect him from the critic’s job of assessing a writer’s work. But it was also a voice that spoke to me—the same one I’d heard in his novel Passage from Home when I’d first read it so many years before.

  I was leafing through catalogs one day when I noticed that a small publisher named Markus Wiener had issued a reprint of Rosenfeld’s novel. I ordered it instantly: what a perfect occasion to write about him. Graced—or perhaps afflicted—with a limitless and unearned self-confidence, I wrote to Robert Silvers, the fabled editor of The New York Review of Books, alerting him to the existence of the two books and boldly suggesting that I review them. To me, as to everyone else in the literary world, Silvers was a distant, exalted figure—refined, impossibly erudite, genial but forbidding, not just an editor but a person of enormous importance in our culture. He referred to the New York Review as “the paper,” which was like calling Piranesi’s Temple of Neptune a “sketch.”

  A few weeks later, long after I had given up hope, the phone rang. It was Silvers, speaking in his elegant voice, faintly inflected with an English accent. He was “keen” on a review. “Is this part of some longer work?” he asked.

  —

  On a scorching summer afternoon in 1988, on a sudden impulse, I went to visit the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. The streets were empty; molten seams of black tar oozed through the asphalt. Housed in a suite of hushed, carpeted rooms on the third floor, the Berg was a literary researcher’s dream: the walls were lined with hand-tooled leather-bound editions of Dickens and Thackeray; on the long wooden tables were green-shaded lamps. I had spent a few happy afternoons there when I was writing Delmore; the Berg had extensive holdings in modern American literature, including letters from Delmore to Alfred Kazin and other treasures. I remembered that you needed a special card to enter and applied at the desk downstairs, hesitating when asked what it was I had come to see. Finally I wrote down Bellow.

  I pushed open the double glass doors and introduced myself to the librarian, a petite, elegantly coiffed woman in her sixties whom I identified as Lola Szladits, the curator of the Berg Collection; I had read a profile of her in The New Yorker a few years before and recognized her from a drawing that accompanied the article. She had strong features, high cheekbones, and close-cropped gray hair. “May I help you?” she said in a European accent. I remembered from the piece that she was Hungarian, a refugee from Hitler who had come to New York after the war, the only member of her privileged haute bourgeois family to have gotten out. “You’re Mrs. Szladits,” I said. “I’ve read about you.”

  “I’ve read you,” she said when I gave my name. “That’s very different.”

  She invited me to sit down at one of the long tables in the oak-paneled room. “I have something to show you.” She disappeared through a wood-paneled door and returned a few minutes later with a gray cardboard box*4 in her hand. Silently, she placed it before me on the table, like a waiter with some exotic dish the kitchen has slaved over all day and is at last preparing, with great pride and fanfare, to serve the hungry diner.

  Mrs. Szladits lifted the top off with elegant tapered fingers, and I peered inside. It was a manuscript, perhaps two inches thick; typed on the first page in caps was the title THE FUTURE OF THE MOON. And beneath it: by Saul Bellow. “The Library bought it for $66,000,” she said. “We’ve just had it on display.”

  I turned to the first page and read the opening sentence: “Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom.” I glanced away as if someone had shone a flashlight in my eyes.

  I had read Mr. Sammler’s Planet, as the manuscript had come to be called, the instant it was published, as I read all of Bellow’s novels. I still owned the paperback, a Fawcett edition somewhat the worse for wear—the front cover was missing, and sometimes when I picked it up, loose pages fluttered to the floor. I had torn through it in a fit of excitement, intoxicated by the deep thoughts of Artur Sammler, the “Polish-Oxonian” Holocaust survivor, uneasily transplanted to the Upper West Side, whose meditations on history, murder, death, religion, metaphysics, and other big ideas unspool in page-long paragraphs. Now I had the original manuscript before me. I leafed through it with shaking hands. There was no one else in the reading room. Every few pages I came across a handwritten annotation in green ink. Who was this?

  I put the lid back on the box and got up to leave. As I was gathering up my things, Mrs. Szladits came over and said: “Atlas on Bellow. We’ve been waiting for you. Come back. This is a good place for you to hang your hat.”

  *1 The novel contains a riff on Bellow’s hat, and the shadow of Isaac Rosenfeld lies heavily over its pages. Haberdashery and failed Jewish American writers from Chicago: two dominant themes in my work.

  *2 Alas, I have come across the notebook in which I scrawled this now-famous (or infamous) line, and it turns out that the word Bellow used was “Polynesians,” unless I mistranscribed it—which is quite possible, given the splutter of the two p’s that, I distinctly recall, induced such merriment in the novelist and his interlocutor. If it turns out that “Papuans” is a later embellishment (we’ll never know), apologies to the untold number of journalists who have misquoted Bellow’s comic and wildly offensive remark over the years.

  *3 The fictional town in Sholem Aleichem’s stories.

  *4 Unpublished books, typed on white paper, were circulated in this way before the advent of “attachments.”

  Isaac Rosenfeld Credit 17

  XVII

  Like a birder spotting a rare painted bunting in Central Park, I grew flushed with excitement when I saw in the 92nd Street Y catalog that Bellow would be giving a reading that fall. I sent in for tickets so early that the ones I received in the mail were numbered three and four. (I wondered what zealot got there first. And was it a zealot who had invited along a friend, lover, relative? Or were there two separate zealots?) I had invited my friend Judith Thurman, the biographer of Isak Dinesen and another literature-mad soul, to go with me. We met in the lobby just before eight to find the place jammed. A thousand people must have shown up. An usher led us out onto the stage, where folding chairs had been set up to accommodate the overflow. Those, too, were filling up fast, but I told an usher that Judith was five months pregnant—not the kind of thing you can make up—and he gave us two seats in the front row. My chair was two feet from the edge of the stage, in full view of the audience.

  My new friend Lola Szladits gave the introduction.

  Then Bellow walked onstage. The applause was loud and seemed to last for five minutes. He was wearing a gray suit and looked older than a year ago, when I’d seen him in Chicago. He was frail and white-haired but elegant as always. “A greeting like this makes me wonder why I didn’t run for president,” he said wryly.

  He read a passage from Humboldt’s Gift, the one in which Humboldt is living in the rural wilds of New Jersey and his friend Charlie Citrine goes to spend the night—and read it beautifully. In his voice was all the pathos and humor of manic, eloquent, amphetamine-fueled Delmore rattling off references to

  jewboys, goyboys, chorus girls, prostitution, and religion, old money, new money, gentlemen’s clubs, Back Bay, Newport, Washington Square, Henry Adams, Henry James, Henry Ford, Saint John of the Cross, Dante, Ezra Pound, Dostoevski, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Gertrude Stein and Alice, Freud and Ferenczi.*1

  Then he read the closing of Henderson the Rain King—less good, flawed as it is by his penchant for jokiness (riding a roller coaster with a bear named Smolak?), but full of
energy all the same, as when Henderson is bunking in a stable in Ontario: “There the rats jumped back and forth over my legs at night, and fed on oats, and the watering of the horses began at daybreak, in the blue light that occurs at the end of darkness in the high latitudes.” It was thrilling to hear that long, run-on, rhythmic sentence, the ands piling up, the adjectiveless nouns,*2 read in its author’s dry voice with such precise enunciation.

  He read for about an hour, followed by a question-and-answer period. The Y’s procedure was always the same: members of the audience would write down their questions on file cards that had been included with their programs and hand them to the ushers going through the aisles. While he was waiting to receive them, Bellow spotted me and, shielding his brow like a seafaring captain, gave me a warm smile.

  When the stack of cards arrived, Bellow leafed through it and picked out the ones that interested him, muttering aloud, to great laughter from the audience, the best of the rejects (“What are you doing tonight after the reading?”).

  The first question was about what had made him want to become a writer. His answer was right out of Herzog, but he told it well. Stricken with TB at the age of eight, he had been quarantined in a Montreal hospital, where he was visited by a volunteer from the Bible Society who read to him from the New Testament. “I was moved by the Gospels,” he said: “His words and deeds—‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’—were a revelation.”