The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  Incredible.

  Bellow started telling me about his mother’s death when he was seventeen. I knew all about that catastrophic event from Herzog, but he was deep in his memories. I had already become aware that what I learned from our formal interviews was both random and rehearsed: the stories Bellow told me were the same ones he had told over and over to other interviewers. His talk was an anthology; he returned to its contents again and again because they moved him.

  But I had to press on with my efforts to collect the correspondence: this was my job. I asked him whether I could see the letters. After all, I’d been working on the project for three years. “I don’t want my last tatters exposed,” Bellow answered. “My poor porous fig leaf.”

  He sat silent in the gathering dusk. Finally he said, with feeling: “I don’t give a damn. It’s really for Janis’s sake. It hurts her to read about all this. She doesn’t think I should do it.”

  More silence. “What is it you want to see?”

  I explained that I’d like to see as much as I could, in order to write a thorough account. “You’re in a tough spot,” I acknowledged. “I have no wish to violate your privacy, and I’m not going to press you. We can think about it later.” I pointed out that he had known me for some time and that I had no more proof to offer of my good intentions. I simply wanted to write a book that was accurate and true. “I need to know everything.”

  “Everything?” he said doubtfully.

  Dave Peltz, a Tuley classmate and one of Bellow’s closest friends, had encouraged me to ask Bellow about “the women,” perhaps as a way of reassuring him that he’d led a vigorous and varied life in that department. “He wants to talk about them.” He did and he didn’t. Or rather he did, but on his own terms. And I wanted to talk about them on my terms. This was the hazard of being biographed: you got all this attention devoted to your life, but you had no control over how it was depicted. Maybe it was better not to be famous.

  Sometimes I wondered why Bellow was letting me write this book at all. Why was it my business—much less the world’s—to peer behind his fig leaf? What was in it for him? After all, he had told the whole story himself—or enough of it to give his readers a pretty clear sense of his life from his Montreal childhood (Herzog) to the most recent episodes of marital discord (Humboldt’s Gift) and social crisis (The Dean’s December). Was he curious, hoping he would learn things he didn’t know? Did he entangle himself in complicated situations from which he couldn’t escape in order to gratify a need for victimhood?

  Or was it for the attention? He seemed lonely, isolated by his fame. Peltz had said to me, “He doesn’t feel he can just pick up the phone and call someone to say, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ ”

  As I prepared to leave, Bellow said, “I’ve really enjoyed this today. I don’t always, but these were things I hadn’t thought about for a long time. You’ll probably learn as much from me as from the letters. I don’t mind at all talking to you. I don’t want to get too involved, but from time to time…”

  We stood at the door, and he said, “At least I’m still here.” While I was waiting for the elevator, he told me he was going to Italy and Israel. (“Without O’Hare / Sheer despair,” says Charlie Citrine.) I said I hoped to see him in the spring, and he replied, “I’ll be back in January,” as if inviting me to return sooner. I left feeling that a deep connection had been established.

  —

  Early in their relationship—they had known each other less than a year—Dr. Johnson saw Boswell off as he embarked on his Holland sojourn:

  My revered friend walked down with me to the beach, where we embraced and parted with tenderness, and engaged to correspond by letters. I said, “I hope, sir, you will not forget me in my absence.” JOHNSON: “Nay, Sir, it is more likely you should forget me, than that I should forget you.” As the vessel put out to sea, I kept my eyes on him for a considerable time, while he remained rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner; and at last I perceived him walk back into the town, and he disappeared.

  We embraced and parted with tenderness.

  Yes, that’s how it would be with Bellow and me.

  *1 Miller had been a friend—perhaps girlfriend—of Bellow’s for half a century and had been given permission to quote liberally from his correspondence. But he grew apprehensive about the book’s contents as publication day neared and put a lawyer on the case. In the end, Miller had to paraphrase and barely averted a lawsuit.

  *2 The talismanic number I counted to when I needed to gird myself for a difficult task, like jumping into the chilly Walloomsac River behind our house. I have no idea why I chose that number instead of, say, sixteen or eighteen.

  *3 Why did I make this ill-considered offer? To show Bellow that I had the goods? To please him by sharing information that I knew would be meaningful, even if it was upsetting? I never brought it up again, and to my relief, neither did he.

  *4 Just like Willy Loman’s brother, Ben.

  *5 Biographers love addresses for their facticity. You can pull up in front of an apartment building and see the numbers above the door. Yes, here it is (glancing at my notebook): the same number that’s on the letter. So he lived here. The very building I’m standing in front of now. The absence of an exact address is frustrating. “We don’t know the precise location of the Old World Drug Store and Ice Creamery that Yacov Rothkowitz managed in the last years of his life,” writes Annie Cohen-Solal of Mark Rothko’s father, describing the immigrant family’s life in Portland, Oregon. How can you wring the obligatory geographic atmosphere out of a vacant lot? Urban renewal is a disaster for biography.

  *6 Paratore’s, not Perratoni’s; Eda Lou Walton, not Edna…

  *7 Any biographer would vigorously disagree with this assertion, knowing that grammar school records can yield nuggets of gold. Was the subject good at math? Was he often absent? Did he excel at phys ed? Report cards had a runic quality, as if the biographer were deciphering Mycenaean Greek on a scrap of papyrus. Linear Bellow.

  *8 “If I had as many mouths as Siva has arms and kept them going all the time I still would not do myself justice,” says Bellow’s Dangling Man.

  *9 I don’t see how this exchange could fit here, even though it shows up in my notes of that day. Why would Bellow be talking about his girlfriends in the presence of Janis? He had many strange attitudes toward women, but he wasn’t a cad. False memory? True memory? No memory? That’s more like it.

  *10 When I read Bellow on Evanston—he had gone to Northwestern and had lived in the Orrington Hotel just a few blocks from my house while he was writing Henderson—it was with an ecstasy of recognition.

  *11 It occurs to me now that I, too, had access to a basement apartment for makeout sessions and took the El to the North Side for mandolin lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music, but these things had always seemed too ordinary to write about. Bellow could make any world seem exotic because he was Bellow.

  *12 I suppose it wouldn’t matter if I did so now, but a promise is a promise. Let his next biographer tell the world where Saul Bellow lived.

  *13 The 484-page collection of letters edited by Benjamin Taylor is one of Bellow’s best books. Laced with comic flourishes, rhetorical bombast, malice, tenderness, rage, self-justification, and a thousand other voices and postures and operatic notes, it belongs on the shelf of correspondence in the history of American literature with the letters of Emerson and Henry James.

  Boswell and Johnson Credit 19

  XIX

  I have on my wall a lithograph of Boswell and Johnson, obtained from the Princeton University Library after an online search that involved clicking on “Boswell and Johnson” and tapping the Images icon. Numerous drawings and paintings instantly came up, including a cartoon of the two writers in space suits on the moon; a photograph of a stocky white-bearded man in a skullcap purportedly reading a volume of Johnson’s poetry; and the one I purchased, which depicts Bozzy (as Johnson called him) and the Great Cham (as Johnson wa
s called) skipping arm in arm down the street.*1

  What appealed to me most about this drawing was its companionate rendering of subject and biographer. Johnson, the taller of the two (or is it his tricorn hat?), seems to be thumbing his nose at Boswell, but in a genial way. Or maybe he’s caressing his own cheek with his thumb? Unclear. What’s evident is that they’re having a good time. They have on the vestments of their day (obviously): the frock coats, the buckle shoes, the wigs. Johnson grips his walking stick.

  Johnson had been a preoccupation of Boswell’s since his schoolboy days, when he encountered some books by Johnson in his father’s library; he read them*2 “with delight and instruction,” he wrote in his journal, “and had the highest reverence for their author, which had grown up in my fancy into a kind of mysterious veneration.”

  Boswell’s determination to lead what we now might call “a big life” was manifest from early on. He had grown up at Auchinleck, his family’s estate in northern Scotland, and studied law in Edinburgh at the insistence of his father, a strict and humorless judge. But it was London, with its vibrant bustle, its busy literary life, and its easy women (“I fell into a heartless commerce with girls who belonged to any man who had money”) that inexorably called him away from the boredom of Scotland. “When we came upon Highgate hill and had a view of London, I was all life and joy, and my soul bounded forth to a certain prospect of happy futurity,” he wrote in his journal on November 18, 1762, the day of his arrival in a city that would bring him intellectual stimulation, riotous nights in the pit at Covent Garden, adventures with whores, vast quantities of alcohol, and close proximity over a period of twenty-one years to the man whose name would be yoked to his for all eternity.

  Their first meeting was still six months off. On occasion, Boswell staked out the bookshop of Tom Davies on Russell Street, having been tipped off that Dr. Johnson was a frequent visitor. No luck. Then around seven o’clock on the evening of May 16, 1763, he happened to be in the parlor at the back of the store when the shadow of a large man darkened the glass door. Davies quoted Horatio’s line to Hamlet as his father’s ghost appears on the scene: “Look, my Lord, it comes.”

  It was an auspicious encounter. They talked for three hours, until Boswell had to go off to “Dr. Pringle’s.” A few days later, the future biographer paid a call on his future subject at Johnson’s lodgings in the Inner Temple, tracking down “the Giant in his den.” Three weeks later he was back again. “Come to me as often as you can,” said Johnson, warmly taking him by the hand: “I shall be glad to see you.”

  They were an odd couple. Johnson was “scrofulous,” Boswell “scorbutic”—eighteenth-century afflictions that manifested themselves in symptoms of a visually unpleasant nature: bleeding gums, loose teeth, welts on the neck. Neither was known for sophistication in sartorial matters. Boswell, according to Frederick Pottle, author of the definitive two-volume life, was “a tireless, if somewhat grubby, man of pleasure.” Johnson, in the testimony of Joshua Reynolds’s sister Frances, “literally dressed like a beggar.”

  In temperament, too, they were much alike. Both were severe depressives who suffered from what was then called “melancholy.” One of Johnson’s biographers describes him as beset by “foul beasts who watched him from the shadows.” Another biographer, Christopher Hibbert, quotes a Dr. Adams who dropped in to find “the Great Man”—as his friends referred to Johnson—“in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself…He looked miserable.” He claimed that he would be willing to have one of his limbs amputated if it would relieve his mood.

  Boswell was also subject to depression, but he was manic, too: when not sunk in gloom, he was seized by “grand ebullitions and bright sparkles.” His journals over a lifetime are an exhausting record of mood swings: “Exceedingly high spirits”; “Your nerves were unhinged and your spirit very low”; “cheerful mind”; “I rose very disconsolate.” Boswell had a name for his condition: changefulness. Today we would call him bipolar.

  Among the characteristics of this disease are impulsivity,*3 alcoholism, and sexual excess—sometimes displayed all at once. He would start out the day determined to be calm and disciplined—retenue, restrained—to work on his biography or “brush up” on Greek, and finish it off “singing ballads with two women in red coats, probably prostitutes, in St. Paul’s Churchyard,” or “tupping” a compliant girl referred to him by a “harlot” named Nanny Cooms: “I sent for her and enjoyed her, and—a kind of licence I never had.”*4

  He also had a thing for “safe and elegant intrigues with fine women,” most notably the wealthy novelist and beauty Belle de Zuylen, a Dutchwoman Boswell courted during a year he spent in Holland as a young man.*5 And he seduced Rousseau’s mistress, Thérèse Le Vasseur, in a carriage on the way to London, claiming to have done it thirteen times.*6 But what he preferred, according to John Wain, was “frank and episodic grossness without responsibility.”*7 He was obsessed with his fellow Scotsman David Hume, who faced the prospect of mortality with a calm that baffled Boswell. Four days before Hume’s death, Boswell showed up at his door in Edinburgh “elevated with liquor” and was turned away. Slaking his disappointment in typical fashion, he “ranged awhile in the Old Town after strumpets.” Six months later, as if in defiance of Hume’s equanimity, he screwed a whore in a shed behind the late philosopher’s house.

  Fascinated by his own case, Boswell diagnosed himself as what he called a “Hypochondriack”—someone afflicted with feelings of emptiness and chronic discontent. John Wain, in his introduction to the Journals, offers a shrewd description of his subject’s mind:

  In his bleaker moods of introspection, when he confronted his own shortcomings and wondered what failings of his own had stood in the way of the worldly success he so much wanted, Boswell could sometimes be appalled at the blankness of his own nature, how it was like a sheet of white paper ready to be written on by some decisive hand, and reverting to perfect emptiness when that hand had moved on: almost as if there were no Boswellus ipsissimus under the perpetually willing receptiveness. It was as if he couldn’t establish a stable identity without the validation of another. On his own, he was nothing, a person without a self, an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

  In other words, a biographer.

  —

  A sticker affixed to the back of my Johnson and Boswell print places them in Edinburgh, which would mean they were at the beginning of the famous journey memorialized in their dual (and dueling?) travelogues: Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.*8 The year would have been 1773, when Boswell was thirty-two and Johnson exactly twice his age.

  By this time their unacknowledged biographical collaboration was a decade old. Boswell confessed in his journal that he was having a hard time working up the nerve to let Johnson know that he intended—or aspired—to write his biography. “I have not told him yet, nor do I know if I should tell him. I said that if it was not troublesome and presuming too much, I would beg of him to tell me all the little circumstances of his life, what schools he attended, when he came to Oxford, when he came to London, etc. etc.” Johnson was game: “He did not disapprove of my curiosity.” But he first needed to assure himself that his potential biographer had done his homework: “I hope you shall know a great deal more of me before you write my life.”

  The trip was intended to be a trial run. Scotland was a lab in which to test out the younger man’s suitability for the job and determine whether subject and biographer were compatible. Boswell was excited at the prospect of spending such a protracted interval in the proximity of Johnson; he felt, said one of his friends, “like a dog who has run away with a large piece of meat.” But Johnson was compliant and claimed that he had “long desired to visit the Hebrides.”

  Boswell had a powerful need for discipleship. It wasn’t enough for him to read the work of his literary heroes; he had to know them. On the trail of Voltaire and Roussea
u, precursors to Johnson, he had longed for their approval and ingratiated himself to get it. “Enlightened mentor!” he addressed Rousseau, besieging him with importunate letters: could he just drop in at Neuchâtel for a visit? Incredibly, considering that Boswell was a young man of no reputation or credentials, Rousseau consented, if he would “make it short.” Voltaire, too, found time for the obscure Scotsman, who refused to be shooed off by Voltaire’s footmen and finally wangled an hour-and-a-half interview with the philosopher (who, claiming illness, showed up in a blue nightgown).

  What quality was it that made Boswell able to command the attention of great men? A chameleon gift for adapting himself to their needs, he theorized in his journal—put less kindly, a genius for becoming someone else: “I can tune myself so to the tone of any bearable man I am with that he is as at freedom as with another self, and, till I am gone, cannot imagine me a stranger.” It was this capacity for self-erasure—what his friend Edmund Malone called “ductility”—that defined Boswell’s genius as a biographer.

  Yet on the page, the personality of the biographer will inevitably reassert itself. We are all shadowy presences in our own books. We’re there and not there, visible and invisible; our fingers leave faint but indelible prints. Our temperament, our character, our sensibility all become part of the story we’re telling. We strive for objectivity, aware that it can’t be achieved. “I profess to write, not his panegyric, but his Life,” Boswell wrote of Johnson; “which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect….There should be shade as well as light.”