The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  Early in 1956 Rosenfeld dreamed that he would soon be dead: “It is dreadful to look two weeks ahead and know one’s life will be over.” Thoughts of suicide alternated with memories of his Chicago childhood and summer days in Humboldt Park. Listening to Toscanini and the NBC orchestra perform the Beethoven Choral Symphony one afternoon, he was seized with nostalgia for his old Tuley gang. Why hadn’t he written about them? “It is my task to know my own story, to recover my shame. What do I know? I have access to myself—but not the courage to go into it.”

  He had moved back to Chicago by then and was living in the cheerless apartment on East Huron Street*9 that Bellow had described in his preface to An Age of Enormity. The last entry in his journal read:

  This is what I have forgotten about the creative process, & and am only now beginning to remember—that time spent is time fixed. One creates a work to outlive one—only art does this—& the source of creativity is the desire to reach over one’s own death. Maybe now, if I want to create again, I want once more to live; & before I wanted, I suppose, to die.

  Two weeks later he was dead. It was Freda, my friend Josh’s mom, who found him slumped over his desk.

  George had gone to see Bellow at the Lotos Club in New York in the spring of 1987, and they’d had a long talk that left them both in tears. “There was a bond between us and a closeness,” he wrote me some months later. “I really felt for him and was so deeply moved and touched. I felt how much he really did love my parents and also felt how terribly lonely he is.”

  *1 I feel a little rueful typing out this quotation from my edition of Humboldt’s Gift, an old Avon paperback, its pages parchment-colored and brittle with age: will there be a next generation of readers patient enough to make their way through a book of this length (471 pages in small type) and density, the prose packed with literary references incomprehensible to all but graduate students writing dissertations on “American Intellectuals and Partisan Review in the Postwar Era”? (Exam question: of these five writers referenced in a Citrine monologue—Schapiro, Hook, Rahv, Huggins, and Gumbein—which two are invented, and who do they represent?)

  *2 Or nearly so; and when there was an adjective, it was one syllable (blue, high), so that the effect was to make the sentence gallop along at a terrific clop, imitating the motion of the horses.

  *3 Not “and my mind”: these associations were predictable and involuntary.

  *4 Edward Sapir was a distinguished anthropologist at the University of Chicago whose work Bellow would have known. He was in the habit of appropriating the names of real people in his life and attaching them to his characters.

  *5 A psychiatrist affiliated with Einstein Medical School, he practiced in the Bronx and was, like his father, a Reichian.

  *6 Steven Zipperstein, in his biography of Rosenfeld, offers a poignant account of that sorrowful day that doesn’t quite resolve the matter: “Vasiliki forbade the children to attend the funeral, but those in the procession related that as they drove through Chicago on the way to bury him, they happened to pass Eleni and George standing outside, staring at the cars; some in the procession called out their names.”

  *7 Bell was a Harvard professor and author of The End of Ideology. He was also—though I’m not sure why this is relevant, I feel instinctively that it is—married to Alfred Kazin’s sister Pearl.

  *8 Or who he thought he was.

  *9 Or not so cheerless. See footnote on this page.

  XVIII

  The moment had come. It was the early summer of 1989. My piece on Rosenfeld had been published in The New York Review of Books; I seemed to be in Bellow’s good graces (to borrow Adam’s phrase), and had gotten a book contract.

  I wrote to Bellow and made it clear that I wasn’t looking for authorization. I also called up Adam to share the news. He was cordial; he said his father would not “hinder” me but would never authorize a biography. Bellow wasn’t wild about the prospect of a biography now: Adam thought it would be “the nail in his coffin.” At the same time, he acknowledged, his father believed he was “the greatest writer of the 20th century” and would be “very unhappy” if he thought no one was going to write his biography. But the story wasn’t over yet: “There will be a few twists and turns.”

  I was too idolatrous, he warned me. Bellow was adept at “concealing the warts.” He cautioned me about the family: “He’s the focus for a lot of passionate feelings. Many resentments still flourish.” That said, he was pleased that I was doing the book, and he would help in any way he could.

  Three months after my piece appeared in the New York Review, a letter from Bellow arrived. The piece was generous, he wrote, and he was “touched” by it. What a relief! It had never even occurred to me that I might hear from him. A few months later I wrote to ask if I could come and see him, but heard nothing back. I decided to go to Chicago anyway—I was eager to have another look at the papers, and there was a chance he would see me if I called.

  I arrived on a Saturday night and checked in at the Quadrangle Club on East 57th Street, a gloomy place with stained-glass windows and gothic arches and faux-medieval stone floors. The room had a monkish simplicity—no TV set, no phone, just a bed and a dresser.

  The Homestead Credit 18

  The next morning I called Bellow, who seemed neither happy nor unhappy to hear from me. He suggested I come over at two o’clock.

  He greeted me rather stiffly; he was dressed in khakis and a sports shirt open at the neck. He seemed wary—it wasn’t the greeting of someone I had met on several occasions and had profiled for a magazine. We chatted for a few minutes, but we were both ill at ease. I couldn’t figure out if we were having the first of many interviews—was I there in my official capacity as the biographer?—or a preliminary, “exploratory” session, in which I was being sized up and my suitability as his biographer weighed.

  I decided to get on with it.

  “May I ask you a few questions?” I said.

  Bellow looked away, gazing out the big picture window at Lake Michigan. “I’d like to discuss with you how I feel about this project,” he said, an edge in his voice. “I was burned by Ruth Miller.”*1

  Her book on him was about to come out, and Bellow was very unhappy with it; he had thought she was writing a study of his books. “I’ve known her for fifty years. She said she was interested in my work, and I gave her access to the papers in the Regenstein. She couldn’t resist the gossip. I’ve lived a life like any other, and she made much of it. I haven’t been a good caretaker of other people’s letters. I’m concerned for them.” He paused. “I’m not ready to be memorialized. I don’t have all the answers. I’m still trying to figure things out.”

  He would see me from time to time, he said, but he didn’t want to become too involved. I worked up my nerve by counting to seventeen*2 and asked about access to his papers. He had no objection to my reading manuscripts, but at least for the moment, letters were off-limits. “Maybe I’ll simmer down.”

  He mentioned that Isaac Rosenfeld had destroyed their correspondence. I hesitated, then told him that George had turned his father’s papers over to me when I was working on my piece about Rosenfeld for The New York Review of Books. (I didn’t say they were in my closet.) A mistake. It was clear that Bellow still had Rosenfeld on his mind. After all, he had written a whole novel about him—Charm and Death, the one I found in the Regenstein archives. Now he wanted to know what Isaac had said about him in the journal he kept. I promised to send him the relevant entries.*3

  A young woman came into the room, and Bellow introduced me. It was his new wife, Janis—his fifth. They had met when she was a student in his modern literature class, writing her thesis on Dostoyevsky. She was twenty-nine, maybe thirty, I calculated, and very pretty, with ringlets of curly black hair. Her dark eyes shone. She smiled and put out her hand. Her gentle face invited trust.

  I was hoping she would join us, but it was time to go—a “girl” was arriving to “take letters.” As I was putting away my
notebook, Bellow asked if I had a hat—it was starting to rain—and opened up a closet by the front door. It was full of hats—shelves and shelves of fedoras lined up in rows. “My dead brothers’ hats are in here, too,” he said. I reminded him of the time, several years earlier, when he had loaned me a hat. I had come to interview him for Vanity Fair, and it had also been raining then, I recalled. “It was three sizes too big.” I declined the offer. My head is small to begin with; a too-big hat makes it seem even smaller. And did I really want to adopt Bellow’s haberdashic idiosyncrasies? Also, how would I return it? Best to steer clear of the whole business.

  We stood awkwardly by the door. I descended in the metal elevator with a pounding heart and sat in the car for a long time. Then I drove off and parked a few blocks away, afraid that Bellow would come out and see me writing in my notebook.

  —

  I had been twenty-four when I embarked on Delmore; I was forty when I began Bellow. The young biographer had been thrilled to interview the distinguished Partisan Review intellectuals Irving Howe and Clement Greenberg. But on my second tour of interviewing the distinguished Partisan Review intellectuals Irving Howe and Clement Greenberg, I felt a little sheepish. Not him again, they must have thought. The slight, eager youth with his oblong reporter’s notebook had metamorphosed into a weary middle-aged writer. Not them again.

  Some were dead and thus no longer available for interrogation. Harold Rosenberg, with his eagle eyebrows and brushy mustache, had died not long after my book came out. I had interviewed him about Delmore at his apartment in Hyde Park, where he was on the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought. Rosenberg was fiercely intellectual, more European than American. Gimp-legged, he clutched his cane, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers.

  It was odd to think of him in gritty Chicago; he belonged at the Café de Flore, seated at a marble-topped table with an espresso by his elbow. He would have been fascinating on Bellow. Death: the biographer’s worst enemy.

  Others were living in improved circumstances. Irving Howe had published World of Our Fathers, his best seller about the immigration of Eastern European Jews, in 1976, and could now afford to make his own migration, from the West Side to a spacious white-brick building on the East Side—not as strenuous, perhaps, as the first journey, but still hard to achieve. I remember leaving his apartment, where I had gone to interview him about Delmore, and emerging into the late afternoon light of Broadway still unable to believe that I had interviewed Irving Howe, long a hero of mine; I had read Politics and the Novel in high school, entranced by the idea that politics could even be associated with the novel. (Wasn’t the novel all about art?) By this visit, however, our relationship had darkened: I had given Howe’s memoir, A Margin of Hope, a disrespectful review in The New York Times Book Review. Oh reason not the why (though I have a few ideas). I was lucky to get an interview.

  Clement Greenberg had deteriorated. In 1975, when I interviewed him about Delmore at an elegant townhouse on Beacon Hill where he was staying with some Mayflower art collector, he had announced upon my arrival that he had been up late the night before and was “hung over.” For some reason, even forty years later I can hear the romantic association I had with that phrase at twenty-six. I was certainly no stranger to alcohol, but it connoted a decadence and sophistication that reminded me of those Peter Arno cartoons of starry-eyed drunks in The New Yorker. We met in a bright sunroom filled with large plants. Greenberg was crisply dressed in a blazer, a white-collared shirt, and a dazzling azure-blue tie.

  Twenty years later I was back to gather his testimony about Bellow. He lived in a nondescript but clearly expensive apartment in a modern building on Central Park West. I can’t recall what art was on the walls, but neither could Mark Stevens, de Kooning’s biographer, who said of his interview with Greenberg: “I think I don’t remember much about the walls because he was so disturbingly vivid. He padded over to let me in wearing a sort of robe and in bare gnarly feet.”

  His work was done now. The name Clement Greenberg, once so powerful in literary and art circles, had faded like an old copy of Partisan Review. He would have talked all afternoon. He had agreed to see Stevens only on condition that the biographer match him drink for drink. I was allowed a more moderate ratio of one brimming glass of vodka to Greenberg’s three. Even so, when I stumbled out into the summer street three hours later, I had to sit down on the curb until my head cleared.

  —

  In early 1991, I went to Chicago to interview Bellow. I had decided to be his biographer, and this is what biographers of the living did: they conducted interviews with their subjects, going over the same ground again and again in an effort to get the story straight. I had taken Bellow’s not no—or was it maybe—for yes and gone unchallenged. That was good enough for me.

  I called him from the Quadrangle Club and explained that I was in town. He told me to come the next day from one-thirty to three p.m. He called me Jim.

  I arrived promptly at one-thirty—I had learned that Bellow valued punctuality—took out my notebook, and began to go through my questions. After a while he said, “Why do you want to know all this?” I’m not a census taker, I felt like saying. I’m your biographer.

  When I told him I had interviewed Ezra Davis, who lived in the Bellows’ house on the Northwest Side of Chicago in 1926, he looked stunned and demanded to know where I dug him up. “You know more about me than I know about myself,” he said. I told him the story: I had gone to Montreal to interview friends and relatives from Bellow’s early childhood, and a writer, Ann Weinstein, a devoted Bellow maven, had taken me to a senior citizens’ center, where I found Ezra Davis in the sun parlor. Bellow took me in with that keen, appraising look of his: Who is this guy? It was beginning to dawn on him: I was going to write his biography.

  I had an alarming fantasy that he was going to rise up out of his chair and order me from his door, like the father in Kafka’s story “The Judgment,” who commands his son to jump off a bridge. But he wasn’t in that kind of mood. He wanted to reminisce. He showed me his mother’s passport: épouse du bourgeois. It was yellowed, with an ornate seal from the governor of St. Petersburg, just like the one described in Herzog. His father, Abraham, had traveled under a separate name. “I’m sure they were the best papers he could buy,” Bellow said.

  One of his mother’s brothers had owned a restaurant in St. Petersburg; another had gone off to South Africa in search of diamonds and come back “with piles of money.”*4 Growing up in Chicago, Bellow lived first at 2629 West Augusta Boulevard, then at two addresses on the 2200 block of Cortez, and finally at 3340 LeMoyne.*5 His chemistry teacher at Tuley, Mr. Olson, “held court down in the ancient part of the school, in the faculty toilet; he’d sit on the toilet with his pipe and his pants down around his knees and talk to the boys.” Lovely. I scribbled Bellow’s words in my notebook, hoping I had gotten them right. Should I ask him how to spell Olson? What if it was Olsen? Someone would write in to correct me.*6

  That was the whole problem. What if Bellow had misremembered, and the teacher who’d held court on the can wasn’t Mr. Olsen/Olson at all, but some other teacher? Or what if he had taught math instead of chemistry? What difference would it make? We yearn for things to be true: if they’re true, the world will make sense. But this isn’t how the novelist operates. Bellow’s job, he maintained, was “to learn how long clover flowers could hold their color in the dusk.” And to that there was no answer.

  At three o’clock, I got up to leave. That was our agreement. But it was clear I could have stayed longer. I asked Bellow about a rumor I’d heard that he was moving to Boston. “It’s too far from here to Vermont,” he said. “But a move at my time of life, even though I’m in fairly good shape…” He couldn’t decide what to do. But it felt wrong to advise him: I was writing Bellow’s life, not telling him how to live it.

  He helped me on with my coat. “I can do this for you.” Then: “It was nice to see you.”

  “I find this moving
,” I said.

  “Next time I’ll show you the family photographs.”

  —

  A few months later, back in Chicago, I called Bellow from the Quadrangle Club. Today we were going on a field trip. A few weeks earlier, I had written him asking for permission to obtain his high school transcripts, and he’d replied with the offer of a “personal tour of the city.” Why rummage through grammar school records from which I’d learn nothing*7 when we could drive around his old neighborhoods together? “What does your day look like?” he said.

  “It’s pretty clear. I’ve saved it for you—along with a lot of other days.”

  “Point taken,” he said.

  I had been on this tour before, when I profiled Bellow for Vanity Fair, but I was eager to go again. I had an expanded mandate now: I was writing a book, not just some ephemeral magazine article. Future biographers would depend on it. If they wanted to know what Bellow—the actual man—felt when he stood in front of the house where he’d lived when his family came to Chicago in 1924, they would have to go to my book. They could bury it in a footnote or omit attribution altogether. But I would be the one who had been with him—the only one. I was the biographer. I was there.

  I was also hoping our tour might allow me to slip in a few questions about his psychiatric history, a touchy subject. Bellow saw four psychiatrists during his lifetime: Dr. Chester Raphael, a Reichian who practiced in Queens and who was the model for Dr. Sapir in his unfinished novel about Rosenfeld; Paul Meehl, a psychologist in Minneapolis he had consulted during the disintegration of his second marriage, when he was teaching at the University of Minnesota; Albert Ellis, the famous “sexologist” whom Bellow saw for what he once described as “pool room work,” or sexual technique; and Heinz Kohut. It was the last of this quartet of shrinks, I suspected, who held the key to my subject’s psyche—insofar as there was such a thing as a “key” to anyone.*8