The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  Boswell would have none of it. As far as he was concerned, Hawkins was out to get Johnson. “There is throughout the whole of it a dark uncharitable cast, by which the most unfavourable construction is put upon almost every circumstance in the character and conduct of my illustrious friend,” he claimed in the preface to his own Life. Besides, Hawkins didn’t really know Johnson, according to Boswell: “I never saw [Hawkins] in his company, I think, but once, and I am sure not above twice.”*18 He even accused his rival of purloining a volume of Johnson’s journal—though Boswell himself had copied out passages from the journals he found lying around Johnson’s home when his subject wasn’t there.

  Read today, Hawkins’s life of Johnson seems innocuous. Adam Sisman observes: “Many of the descriptions in Hawkins’s book that dismayed readers—for example, of Johnson’s disgusting eating habits or his slovenly style of dress—would find their equivalents in Boswell’s biography. But by then their sting had been drawn.” What had once been perceived as insult was now seen as candor.

  Boswell found writing the book a torture. It had taken him six years just to organize his papers in preparation for the massive task that lay before him: “sorted till I was stupified,” he noted in his journal.

  Holed up in a half-furnished, rat-infested house in Great Queen Street, “struggling to stay sober by a regimen of bread and milk,” he wrote to the accompaniment of his wife, Margaret, coughing in the next room; she was dying of consumption. Here begins a summary of Boswell’s dire situation by Michael F. Suarez*19 that I came across in the TLS:

  Hopes of political preferment from Lord Lonsdale were dashed; his wife died in 1789, while Boswell was away on business for his unreliable patron. Beleaguered with seemingly insurmountable debts and suffering bouts of depression, he drank heavily,*20 contracted a venereal disease, was haunted by guilt, and struggled against the anarchy of his private life.

  Had it not been for his close friend Edmund Malone, Boswell might never have gotten the book done at all. A bookish bachelor with a trust fund, Malone was the greatest authority on Shakespeare of his day. Night after night the two men sat side by side revising, editing, collating, deleting, improving, questioning, scribbling in the margins; sometimes Malone wrote entire passages himself.

  The most valuable service he performed was to mitigate Johnson’s intemperate tone, which flared up unpredictably, as when he referred to the Reverend Kenneth Macaulay as “the most ignorant booby and grossest bastard.” Malone persuaded Boswell to soften it to “a coarse man.” It was all about tone. (It always is.) Frank Brady, author of the definitive two-volume biography of Boswell, called theirs “one of the most productive collaborations in literary history.”

  Not even Malone could stave off Boswell’s dark moods. He worried that the book was too long, yet he kept discovering new letters that had to be included; desperate for money, he bought a lottery ticket; he was arrested for calling out the hour late at night in comic imitation of a watchman; he burst into tears on the street. He was, according to his journals of that time, “sadly ill,” “dejected and miserable,” “sore and fretful.”

  But he also knew that he had produced a classic. In its day, the Life was celebrated if not universally praised; its value as high entertainment was beyond dispute. “I have been amused at it,” wrote one correspondent, “but should be very sorry either to have been the author or the hero of it.” Boswell was banned from clubs out of fear that he would record private conversations in his notebook.

  Publication proved anticlimactic. The labor that had consumed Boswell’s days for over twenty years was done, and he had little to occupy himself; he was such a notoriously inept lawyer that few cases came his way, and he was reduced to practicing what he knew best, besides the art of biography: drinking and whoring. Finally, Frank Brady intones in The Later Years, “Death came to the rescue.” In Boswell’s case, the precipitating cause was a “swelling of the bladder,”*21 apparently exacerbated by alcohol. He was fifty-eight, even in those days a young age. Toward the end of his labors, he wrote: “I had now resolved the Life into my own feelings.” He had written a book that, aspiring to immortalize its subject, would immortalize its author.

  *1 For a long time, I thought this nickname had something to do with “champion,” but it’s actually an Anglicization of khan, someone who rules over a domain—in this case, literature.

  *2 Which books? According to C. E. Vulliamy, an early biographer, “little is known”—that dolorous confession of ignorance that biographers should do everything to avoid—of Boswell’s early life. Boswell is guilty of such lapses himself: “In 1761 Johnson appears to have done little.” Or was Boswell just not there to record it?

  *3 Hugh M. Milne, editor of Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals, remarked on his “fondness for publishing ill-advised newspaper articles, pamphlets and letters which cannot but have been injurious to his reputation”—a common manifestation of this trait.

  *4 I wish some literary Alan Turing would come along to break the code of squiggles and dots in his journal that indicated the various sexual “experiments” (Boswell’s word) in which he engaged.

  *5 She herself was the subject of a classic biography, The Portrait of Zélide, by Geoffrey Scott.

  *6 Frederick Pottle, Boswell’s most reliable biographer, questions this number but notes that “an eleven-day blackout imposed by family censorship” of his journal has made it impossible to pin down the facts. Whatever the case, he didn’t get high marks for performance: Pottle characterizes the biographer’s technique as “hasty, self-absorbed, and clumsy.”

  *7 If you want to hear more about it, get hold of Wain’s edition of the Journals and go to the index, where you’ll find such blunt entries as: “sex in the Park, 293; drunk, and sex with Jenny Taylor, 294; sex with Nanny Smith, 294; at Charing Cross bagnio, 295; sex at Duck Lane, 295-96.”

  *8 Note that Boswell included Johnson’s name in his title, while Johnson’s gave no indication that he’d had company along the way. As far as he was concerned, he was the main subject; his biographer was his amanuensis.

  *9 Boswell likened biography to portraiture: “I draw him in the style of a Flemish painter…I must be exact as to every hair, or even every spot on his countenance.”

  *10 According to Merriam-Webster, “a small piece or slice especially of meat.”

  *11 There were times when, weary of Johnson’s orotund proclamations, I thought of him as the Great Sham.

  *12 I note with satisfaction that the Yale edition of Johnson’s Complete Works has been terminated for lack of funds, while Boswell’s continue to emerge from the press, “so that we can count on being regaled indefinitely with the details of Boswell’s claps and hangovers,” as Donald Greene bitterly observed in the TLS.

  *13 Rich material for a “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay.

  *14 Imperfect or not, one must be grateful for the few instances of transcribed speech that have come down to us; however stilted—even fabricated—they sound, the occasional note of authenticity comes through. Coleridge’s Table Talk, recorded by his son, is strange and electrifying. “Throughout a long-drawn summer’s day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear and musical, tones,” wrote his son Hartley in his introduction, “pouring withall such floods of light upon the mind, that you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of conversion.” (What he doesn’t say is that his father was stoned out of his gourd on laudanum most of the time.) Coleridge wasn’t as lively as Boswell, Hartley admitted, and he didn’t have “the precise gladiatorial power” of Johnson, but he got off some good lines now and then: “Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.” Or this rumination on July 10, 1834: “I am dying, dying,” followed by an account of scenes from his early life that had stolen into his mind “like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope—those twin realities of this phantom world!” One feels that Coleridge would
have spoken this way. And that, for the eighteenth-century biographer, was enough.

  *15 Writers seem to be especially good at mimicry. In his biography of T. S. Eliot, Peter Ackroyd notes Eliot’s “extraordinary ability to mimic Pound’s verbal mannerisms, as if he were willingly immersing himself in his personality.”

  *16 Two.

  *17 Today it would be an ebook, followed by a print-on-demand edition.

  *18 But he did; they were often together at the Literary Club, once the “unclubbable” Hawkins had elbowed his way into becoming a member. In fact, Hawkins knew Johnson for twenty-four years longer than Boswell did.

  *19 Identified as the author of The Mock-Biblical: A Study in Satire from the Popish Plot to the Pretender Crisis.

  *20 He tried to limit himself to four glasses of wine at dinner, followed by a pint of ale afterward, but with only intermittent success.

  *21 Until the modern era, biographers were at a loss as to the exact cause of their subjects’ deaths, which, given the limitations of medical knowledge in those days, they ascribed to various strange and often invented maladies, such as aigue or neurasthenia.

  XX

  I enjoyed being in Bellow’s company, but I also enjoyed not being in Bellow’s company. He could be “snappish,” as he saw himself in Mark Harris’s deeply ambivalent portrait, or so lost in his memories that he seemed to forget I was there (which was not such a terrible thing, as it allowed me to scribble notes without having to make conversation). I never felt that he was sick of me, though I’m sure he often was. I honored him by commemorating his life, but I also reminded him of its approaching end. On a good day, I would catch him in a playful mood, telling jokes and laughing at them, making fun of academics, pulverizing the many people he hated and satirizing his best friends for a worshipful audience of one. On a bad day, I was the robed prophet in The New Yorker cartoon, carrying aloft a banner that read: “The end is nigh.” More to the point, Bellow’s end was nigh. What else can having a biography written about you portend?

  To me, Bellow was always a celebrity—always “Saul Bellow”—no matter how many times I interviewed him. Even after a decade, I experienced a nervous vibration whenever I was around him—a feeling that I suspect he would have understood. He had his own great men. These included the British philosopher Owen Barfield, whose work had made a great impression on him, and—for a time, until they quarreled—the distinguished sociologist Edward Shils. But even disciples can get tired of their role.

  Affiliated with both Cambridge University and the University of Chicago, where he was a colleague of Bellow’s in the Committee on Social Thought, Shils was perhaps best known as the eponymous hero of Bellow’s controversial novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Artur Sammler was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who had managed to make his way, after the war, to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Having witnessed horror, he felt nothing but contempt for the student revolutionaries of the 1960s. He was imperious, intolerant, and—if you wished to read it that way—racist; he derided the rampant promiscuity of that era as “sexual niggerhood for everyone.”

  Saul Bellow and Janis Freedman Bellow Credit 20

  One afternoon I visited Shils in his apartment across from the Museum of Science and Industry. The building stood alone between vacant lots; it could have been Dresden in 1945. He reminded me of Richard Durnwald, a Shilsian figure in Humboldt’s Gift described as “elderly but powerful, thickset and bald, a bachelor of cranky habits but kind.” A Jewish boy from Philadelphia, Shils had turned himself into a Chicago Englishman. He carried a walking stick, said “shall” instead of “will,” and offered me tea with elaborate ritual. His dark undertaker’s suits looked as if they had been made on Savile Row. (They probably had.) But this was all for show. He was a formidable scholar who seemed to have read everything. His twelve-foot floor-to-ceiling bookcases were on the scale of a European intellectual’s library: new hardcovers, old leather-bound books, complete sets of the great historians, and white-spined paperbacks in French. On the top shelf was a long row of the Journal of American Sociology.

  Unlike Durnwald, Shils was not kind. He brutally disparaged his colleagues, both friends and enemies, as “idiots” and “worthless fellows.” He had a sour view of life, thought human beings were corrupt, and showed contempt for the living and the dead alike. All the same, I enjoyed his company. He had one of the most penetrating minds I’d ever encountered, and there were times when I suspected his negativity was a pose. Intellectual challenges stimulated him; he was a natural pedagogue. As it turned out, I, too, would become a disciple of Shils.

  —

  Eventually I sat down to write. I had the biographer’s tools ready to hand: the notecards, the manuscripts, the letters, the interviews, the books—what the awl and plane, the hammer and nails, the saw, the wrench, and the measuring tape are to the carpenter.

  What I didn’t have was a blueprint. Bellow’s archive dwarfed Delmore’s. He was a public figure, and he had written more books and letters, saved more press clips and articles, accumulated more manuscripts and drafts of lectures, legal documents and interviews—thank god there were no journals, or none that I knew of—than I could absorb as I sat at my desk in New York, shutting out the cacophony of sirens and yipping dogs below my window with Flent’s Ear Stopples.

  Biography is a lonely trade. It requires a capacity for sitting by yourself all day for years, sometimes decades, shuffling through yellowing manuscripts and letters. The Germans have a word for this: Sitzfleisch (literally “sitting down flesh,” or the ability to keep your ass in a chair). It requires an ability to be egoless, to subjugate yourself to another. And it requires a curiosity about human nature, a need to find out why people are the way they are. But there is a deeper impulse, one born out of emotional hunger. It could be summed up in Forster’s “only connect”—be empathic, establish enduring relationships, and try to understand others at the deepest level. This was the biographer’s mandate, and every biographer I knew took it seriously. We were always preoccupied with our subjects in one way or another—sometimes to the exclusion of the life going on around us.*1

  When I wasn’t writing, I was reading. This is one of the main things biographers do: they read their subject’s books over and over, for all different kinds of reasons: sometimes they’re hunting down a quote, sometimes they’re reminding themselves about a plot, sometimes they’re trying to fit the book at hand into the canon. Is it a masterpiece? An average book? A dog? Does it have great moments, even though it fails to cohere?

  Rereading Bellow in my forties, I found that my opinion of his work had changed. Dangling Man and The Victim (Bellow called them his M.A. and his Ph.D.) now left me cold. But I was eager to return to his “breakthrough” novel, The Adventures of Augie March, five hundred pages of hectic goings-on that critics had hailed as a dramatic departure—an escape, really—from the stiff and dutiful apprentice works. Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow’s “Delmore” novel, increasingly seemed a heavy-handed caricature of Delmore’s craziness. And I was put off anew by his characters’ self-regard. Harry Trellman, in The Actual, is “a world-class noticer.” Charlie Citrine is besieged by women: “You some ladies’ man,” says Roland, the doorman of his Chicago apartment building, who talks like Rochester on The Jack Benny Show. “Literature can do with any amount of egotism,” wrote John Updike, reviewing The Dean’s December, “but the merest pinch of narcissism spoils the broth.” This would become a problem for me. Only Herzog and Seize the Day survived scrutiny without being demoted. They were Bellow’s Great Books.

  As I got older, I found my feelings about his oeuvre beginning to change yet again. I had grown weary of Augie March (maybe because other critics were always raving about it) and took pleasure once more in the early novels, with their brooding European atmosphere. The melancholic air that I had once found mannered now seemed haunting; Joseph, who dangles on the South Side of Chicago, and Leventhal, who dolefully wanders the hot summer streets of Manhattan, were figures o
ut of my own unconscious, never at home in the world, always on edge, untrusting. My view of life had grown darker. You can never read the same book twice.

  —

  It was August 1992, and I was back on twisty, mountainous Route 9—the road to Bellow. I was eager to ask him about a number of matters that had plagued me over the last Bellowless months.

  Much as I cherished my freedom, I had missed him. He intensified my sense of life. And there was something about being in his presence that excited me. Ecce homo. In the years I knew him, he was still startlingly handsome, with silken white hair, a finely chiseled nose, and beautiful brown eyes. It was strange to think that he would soon be dead for all eternity, and not long after that inconceivable event, a few decades at most, no one who had ever known him would be alive. Mine would be one of the last records of what he had looked like in the flesh as he moved through the world.

  When I arrived at the general store—I still couldn’t find my way to the house on my own—he was standing by the meat counter. He was wearing a blue cap, a multipocketed denim jacket, khakis, and black leather lace-up shoes with—this I didn’t get at all—pink tassels. His face was lined with age, and I noticed that he was a little hard of hearing.

  Every time I saw him, Bellow was older; how could it be otherwise? It never occurred to me that I was growing older as well, and that my whitening hair and veinous hands would register with him as evidence of the obsession at the heart of his work: mortality. As Herzog says, noticing the crinkled neck of an old girlfriend, now in her forties: “Death, the artist, very slow, putting in his first touches.”