The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  By the time he was eleven or twelve, he knew he would become a writer: “There was nothing else to do.” He was so proficient—and here Bellow somehow deflected what could have sounded like boastfulness, telling the story in a bemused tone of voice—that a teacher had accused him of plagiarism and demanded that his parents show up at school. “But they had a hard enough time feeding me and weren’t going to see the principal on my behalf.” Much laughter.

  How did he support himself when he was starting out? He went to New York, where it was rumored that you could live on a thousand dollars a year, and reviewed books for The New Republic and The New York Times Book Review, where there was “a very kind editor” who would allow reviewers to take review copies off the shelf and sell them to a used-book dealer on East 58th Street. “Plus you got the five dollars for a brief review.”

  There was a question in the form of a declarative sentence: “Congratulations, killer bee.” The reference was to an article in the Times that had linked Bellow to Allan Bloom and the secretary of education, William Bennett, a blustering reactionary prone to harangues about the importance of reading the classics of Western civilization (I wondered if Bennett had read them himself), identifying the three men, in a lame pun, as “killer B’s.” “I’m glad to be a killer bee in that sense,” Bellow said. “I believe in honoring the old books. I’m not trying to kill off the third world. For all I know, I may be from the third world myself. But I’m soon going to be a Dead White Male,” he said with a laugh. “I believe in being kind to them.”

  Afterward there was a reception, and I talked with Bellow’s agent, Harriet Wasserman. She was very friendly. “It was interesting watching you up there onstage,” she said. I said something about how wonderful it was to hear Bellow read from Humboldt’s Gift. “I could see your lips move,” she said. Rachel, Adam’s wife, came over as the party was thinning out and Bellow was getting ready to leave. “Should I go over and say hello?” I asked her.

  “You should.”

  I followed her out through a back door where Bellow was about to step into a waiting limousine. A photographer was snapping pictures. I approached him tentatively and put out my hand. “That was great, Mr. Bellow,” I murmured. He seemed glad to see me. “How are you, Jim?” Jim. A good sign: when things weren’t going well, I was Mr. Atlas. “I meant to write and tell you how much I enjoyed your article on Bloom, but I’ve been tumbling around in the dryer.” How easily metaphors came to this man. “I told Allan to tell you that I liked it.”

  I mumbled that I hoped to see him soon and floated off into the night.

  —

  A few months later, making my literary rounds, I entered the Gotham Book Mart to find Andy Brown in his office, poring over a thick manuscript bound in black cardboard. “I have something to show you,” he said in a breathless voice: “The catalog of Bellow’s papers that have gone”—again, the passive syntax of the book dealer—“to the University of Chicago.” The circumstances surrounding this transfer were left unclear, but Andy intimated that Bellow had sold them for a lot of money.

  He made a copy, and I took it across the street to the Diamond Deli. The Gotham was in the heart of the Diamond District; walking down West 47th Street jostled by black-hatted Hasidim in their long black frocks, I might as well have been in seventeenth-century Antwerp.

  I studied the contents as I gulped down a corned beef on rye and a can of black cherry soda.

  It was about a hundred pages long and listed the holdings by folder, sorted into manuscripts, published articles, diplomas, transcripts, drafts of lectures, report cards, photographs. The correspondence was of special interest: there were letters from people named Nathan Tarcov, Abel Swirsky, Hyman Slate, Louis Sidran, and—him again!—Isaac Rosenfeld. So Bellow must have replied to these letters. I would find them and, if they were still alive, interview their authors. There was also a collection of taped interviews with friends of Bellow, mostly deceased, conducted by a local scholar. I could sit in the library, put on earphones, and listen to the voices of the living and the dead.

  The next day I was on a plane to Chicago. I had phoned ahead and spoken to the librarian in Special Collections at the Regenstein Library, and she had assured me that there were no restrictions on Bellow’s papers; I could see them whenever I wanted.

  The taxi ride into the city was so familiar—both from Bellow’s descriptions of it and from my own returns home over the years—that I felt as if I were inhabiting one of his books. I experienced Chicago double: through what Bellow had written and through what I saw. (Or were they now the same?) It was bleak, so my mind*3 went to “the big winter-gray Chicago scene” described in To Jerusalem and Back, in which Bellow finds evidence of “a grim power whose materials are streets, bungalows, tenements, naked ironwork, grit, wind.” In Hyde Park, we drove through the University of Chicago neighborhood, home of professors, freelance scholars, graduate students who dawdle for a decade over their dissertations, colleagues like Marshall Hodgson—“a vegetarian, a pacifist, and a Quaker,” as Bellow described him, author of a three-volume work entitled The Venture of Islam—and the sociologist Morris Janowitz, a fervent neighborhood preservationist who saved the bookstores on East 57th Street: the intellectual heart of what is known out there as Chicagoland.

  In the Special Collections Reading Room, I stowed my researcher’s toolkit—pen, notebook, laptop—in a locker and filled out a slip for a manuscript titled “Charm and Death.” I’d seen it listed in the catalog, and it sounded promising.

  A silent librarian glided over and set before me a gray cardboard box.

  “CHARM AND DEATH”—as it was labeled—was a typed, double-spaced manuscript of ninety-seven pages; at the top right-hand corner of the first page was the author’s signature: Saul Bellow. I was always glad to see it.

  The font was old-fashioned: it reminded me of the little portable Smith-Corona I had used in high school. There were revisions, black-ink scrawls, cross-outs in the form of typed x’s, and, on one page, a sentence blacked out. I tried to read it by holding it up to the light, but the black felt-tip pen had done its job. When was it from? Dating a manuscript is to a biographer what carbon-dating a mummy is to an archaeologist: it involves a lot of guesswork. I was stumped until a handwritten date leaped from a margin: 1951.

  I read the first sentence: “Flashing through short light, running through long darkness, externally fast, internally all delay, electrical passages bound by slurs of gritting steel: it was the E Train in its tunnels.” So we were in New York, not Chicago. And here was the second sentence: “Within these sets of chambers, cars, stations, tubes, fixed and sliding, lighted and dark, Elias Zetland read French poems.”

  Zetland. This must be the work-in-progress that had been excerpted in Modern Occasions. There, too, was the autodidact, immersing himself in the works of Bentham, Kant, Rousseau, de Tocqueville; reciting Keats in a rowboat on the Humboldt Park lagoon; theorizing about the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

  The Zetland = Rosenfeld equation was never in doubt: of this I’d had confirmation from Bellow himself. But the portrait had been filled out in these nearly hundred pages. The chaotic household, with its neglected children, adulterous wife, deadbeat friends babbling on about metaphysics in a cloud of cigarette smoke: it was all new (except, perhaps, for the incontinent dog, Smokey, whom I had encountered in Alfred Kazin’s memoir). And in the midst of it all, surrounded by dusty plants and Salvation Army furniture, grubbing out articles for the highbrow journals in order to support this supposedly bohemian but in reality squalid Greenwich Village ménage, was “clever young Zet, not so young, nor so clever at thirty, no longer the prodigy his father had expected.”

  Charm and Death was dark but funny. In the opening pages, Zetland is on the couch in the basement bunker of Dr. Sapir,*4 a Reichian analyst, pounding his fists and screaming at the top of his lungs in an effort to break through the crust of repression that is stifling his life. “ ‘Hit it, Zetland!’ ” the docto
r urges him: “ ‘Strike it out. Kill it.’ ”

  Sexual blockage was no small matter: it indicated a larger, more consequential impediment, a blockage of the self. For all his great intelligence, Zetland lacked a clear sense of his own identity. In the margin, Bellow had written “Nothing there.”

  I noted with surprise the fleeting appearance of a character named Von Humboldt Fleisher, a precocious poet, “the successor to T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.” Delmore!

  The conviction hit me with great force: I would write Bellow’s biography—with or without his permission. I thought back to my epiphany at the Yale Library on that Christmas Eve in 1974 when I had my first glimpse of Delmore’s papers in their bulky cardboard boxes. Randall Jarrell once described a poet as someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. For a biographer, that’s a big number: I had now been struck twice and considered myself lucky.

  —

  Not long after my life-changing discovery, I got a call from a man who identified himself as George Sarant. This, I knew, was Isaac Rosenfeld’s son. I had been trying to track him down for my New York Review of Books piece, but had no luck until learning—from Bellow—that he had changed his name to a shorter version of his mother’s maiden name: Sarantakis.*5

  I invited my caller to lunch, and we agreed to meet at a coffee shop around the corner from my apartment. I recognized him at once, I’m not sure why—perhaps it was simply that a limited number of people who might have been Isaac Rosenfeld’s son were in the coffee shop at that moment. He was in his early forties, I guessed, plump and soft like an over-aged baby, with thick glasses.

  We talked for a long time. George was shy and sweet-natured and clearly still obsessed with his father. He had grown up in a state of domestic anarchy: his parents, Isaac and Vasiliki, a sensuous Greek beauty, had an “open” marriage, and there were many tumultuous confrontations in their pet- and intellectual-filled apartment on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village. “My mother used to sleep on the couch.” They got divorced when George was six.

  Much of what George told me about his father I already knew from Alfred Kazin’s memoir and Bellow’s Zetland novel. His description of the orgone box, a device the size of a telephone booth, made of tin and wood, that Wilhelm Reich had invented to “accumulate” the universal life force known as orgone, belonged to Rosenfeld lore: so why should I have been surprised to learn that his father would sit naked in such a box right in the middle of their living room? This confluence of fiction and reality fascinated me: Bellow made up some things, it turned out, but not that many.

  George remembered his father’s death: “We flew into Chicago for the funeral and went to Sam’s house.” Sam was Rosenfeld’s father. “Isaac’s family wanted the kids to go. My mother’s family didn’t.”*6 He related minor details that tell you everything and nothing at once—the kind that biographers file away but never get to use because they serve no purpose in bringing the story forward, such as the fact that when Rosenfeld’s aunts “kissed you hello, they’d suck your cheek.” (This is what Jewish aunts in Chicago, and probably elsewhere, do.)

  I told George about the Zetland manuscript. He listened with keen attention, gripping his coffee cup in a stranglehold. It was all there, I told him: the apartment on Barrow Street, the poets and intellectuals and children and pets swirling through the cluttered parlor; the screaming sessions with the Reichian therapist; the high-minded babble about Kant and Rimbaud and the philosopher Morris Cohen, who taught at City College. This was George’s childhood I was describing—the novel as life. And no one on the planet cared about it as much as I did, except for George himself.

  A week later the doorman handed me a package. It was big and messily wrapped in brown paper. It bore George’s name and a return address in Queens.

  I hurried upstairs and unwrapped it on the dining room table. Out spilled a jumble of worn black leather notebooks, yellow legal pads, typed manuscripts, letters, and other literary miscellania—the archive, such as it was, of Isaac Rosenfeld. For days I immersed myself in this new treasure, leafing through time-faded typescripts and reading articles he’d written for Commentary, The New Leader, Partisan Review—those touchstones of the intellectual vocation in the 1940s. But I couldn’t keep all these precious documents on the dining room table indefinitely: they had to go somewhere. And that’s how it came about that Isaac Rosenfeld’s private papers ended up in my hall closet.

  From time to time, when I tired of exploring my ever-enlarging trove of Belloviana, I would go over to the closet and paw through Rosenfeld’s papers, lodged amid a jumble of tennis rackets, hockey sticks, ice skates, soccer balls, and baseball gloves. Always I found something new. Once it was a poem scrawled in a child’s script on the back of an envelope:

  Grandfather sits in his armchair

  Long is his beard

  white are his hair

  He is reading a book

  with much interest

  Please, don’t disturb him

  He is taking a rest

  There was a letter to Rosenfeld’s aunt Rae complaining about the meagerness of his literary output—three poems a week, all of them “vile.” Later on, when he had moved to New York and joined the staff of The New Republic, there were letters to his aunt typed on the magazine’s stationery; in one, he expressed—a touching immigrant locution applied to the literary life instead of the garment business—“hopes of making good.” And on June 15, 1944, when he was twenty-six, he dispatched a telegram to his aunts on Wabansia Avenue: SOLD MY NOVEL DETAILS TO FOLLOW LOVE AND KISSES ISAAC.

  The novel was well received: the sociologist Daniel Bell*7 called it “a parable of alienation”—high praise in the terminology of that era, when alienation was seen as a positive trait. But Rosenfeld soon ran into trouble—as I put the story together from his journals—struggling to support his family on the income of a freelance critic while negotiating the Greenwich Village bohemia of the postwar era.

  After the modest triumph of Passage from Home, Rosenfeld made little headway with fiction, laboring over a novel called The Enemy that went nowhere. “The Enemy bores me,” he admitted to himself. “How I’ve ruined it with this nonsense. I want in Pathfinder a person, not a case-history. A character, by God!” He filled his journals with notes on mystical gurus, characters with names like Jarman and Bramallah Gudoy, but he acknowledged that he would do better to find material in the daily dramas of his own life:

  I look at something I have published—say, most recently, the Three Parables. I understand that there is an external Isaac Rosenfeld, who exists in the reader’s mind, a person and a character deduced from the writing, and which, even at the time of writing, I have helped to create. I see the great distance between myself as I am in publication, and myself as I actually am. When will I be able to write so truthfully that only I, as I actually am, will appear on the page?

  In his journals, Rosenfeld wrote as who he was.*8 They were full of malicious gossip, catty observations about friends, and details of his marriage and the “libertinism” that he indulged in with such deep ambivalence. How could he reconcile the “bourgeois” pleasures of domesticity with the equally seductive pleasures of la vie bohème as he found it in the Village? “This is what generates the conflict,” he noted: “the desire to keep the marriage intact and the desire for strong sensations.” He had lots of girlfriends for hot sex (“strong orgasm with full bodily convulsions”), but only Vasiliki seemed to elicit feelings of genuine tenderness and love. In one entry, he recorded the “resurgence of family feeling” that accompanied their lovemaking in a cabin at Black Mountain College, the children in bed, a fire blazing. “And gradually, slowly, to sleep, as the fire burns out, the first blissful night in a long time.”

  Then there was this whole Reich business: Rosenfeld was much more caught up in it than Bellow, who saw Reichianism as a comic (or anyway, tragicomic) fad. Rosenfeld believed that if he could only pierce
his own defenses—his “character armor,” as Reich called it—and fight through to some more authentic self, his writing would somehow open up. But the more he got involved with Reich, the less he wrote. “You had so many ideas on literature,” Vasiliki chided him: “Why don’t you ever write about that? Why not Dostoyevsky’s life, for instance?”

  She was right. Rosenfeld was a first-rate literary critic, but he never could overcome the obstacles he put in his own way, and by the 1950s, his early promise had turned to ashes. In his journal, he wondered: “Maybe I have learned something? That I have been wrong for the last seven to nine years. One does not, must not live by or for passions alone: that life of such a kind is destructive?”

  Bellow, meanwhile, was “making it.” The Adventures of Augie March appeared in 1953 to nearly universal praise. Delmore, writing in Partisan Review, ranked it above The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Rosenfeld found Bellow’s success hard to take:

  Ordinarily, I’m fairly modest. I try to be humble, to keep my tremendous ego under cover. When someone praises something I’ve written, I shrug it off. My greatest pleasure, when young kids talk about writers, is to pretend I’m no writer. “Oh, I’ve written a few things,” I say. Or about Saul’s book, I’ll say, “I like this about it. I don’t like that.” While all along, what I really have in mind is: “That? Why my book’s a million times better!” I’m terribly competitive.

  Guilt was another big theme. What provoked Raskolnikov to murder, Rosenfeld theorized, was the need to “have a great guilt to expiate.” Killing off the pawnbroker and her sister was a substitute for killing off “Mom and Sis,” an act of revenge against his family. It was the same with Kafka’s Joseph K, who longs for the court to execute him in the hope of provoking God’s intervention: “Yet he feels it is precisely his effort to provoke God that deepens and reaffirms his guilt.”