The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  When we got to the house, we sat down at the kitchen table over a cup of tea. Eager to bring him up to date, I asked if he had seen a famous critic’s rave review of The Bellarosa Connection. No, he’d missed it: “My eyes are on eternity.” I thought of Sammler’s description of how he sees the world with “earth-departure objectivity” (though he was only fifty-seven).

  The problem with biography is that the biographer’s age inevitably affects the way he sees his subject. As that vantage changes, so does his viewpoint. A biography written by a forty-year-old will be more unforgiving, less sensitive to his subject’s pain, than a biography written by a sixty-year-old. I’d been at work on my book for three years, and I was a different person from the person I’d been when I started, though still callow and arrogance-prone at times. Bellow was different, too, but I wasn’t sure how. Maybe he was just sadder.

  On this night we were going out for dinner. Bellow had made a reservation at Le Petit Chef, a French restaurant on Route 100, about a half hour away. We climbed into the Range Rover. Bellow wanted “company,” he said. He didn’t see why we should go in separate cars.

  We talked in a desultory way as Bellow drove. I asked him if he’d had a good writing day. “I woke up at six because I was worried about Therese”—the housekeeper—“and had breakfast at eight. Then I started a fire. It was too damp to work in the house.” The phone rang a lot, he complained. One caller was the writer Stanley Crouch, who spent a half hour filling him in on the latest news from literary New York. Then Allan Bloom called to tell him about a piece by Daniel Bell that had appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times a few days earlier, mourning the end of his generation. Literature was no longer “central,” Bellow said, a note of rancor in his voice. The novel wasn’t important. Yeah, yeah, I thought to myself: the problem is your novels aren’t central. Delillo, Pynchon, Gaddis had lots of readers (even if I wasn’t one of them).

  Bellow was a man for whom the world was becoming unfamiliar and confusing, overrun by a youth culture with beliefs and customs of its own—a man, in short, who was growing old. But his contention troubled me all the same: was it possible that even Saul Bellow’s work would fade from the collective memory, that Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King (the “three H’s,” he liked to call them) would one day molder on the shelf beside the works of Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck, their spines creased, the yellow pages crumbling; then recede even further back in time, like Stephen Crane and George Gissing, their hard-to-find volumes available only from AbeBooks; then become footnotes in some grad student’s dissertation on twentieth-century American literature; and finally be forgotten altogether? Bellow’s work had spoken powerfully to his generation and mine, but it was entirely possible—indeed, likely—that it wouldn’t speak to the generation after that. Would I want to live in such a world?

  Seated at an outdoor patio, Bellow ordered a bottle of wine. I was too wound up to notice the label and anyway was no oenophile; wine was wine. But I was struck by the fact that it was a whole bottle instead of “by the glass.” Bellow wasn’t a big drinker; it wasn’t that. But didn’t ordering a bottle of wine mean that our dinner was a social occasion? Was I allowed to ask questions—to “interview” him and use the answers in my book?

  When the waitress poured the wine, we hesitated, about to toast—but what? My book? His book? Was he even writing one? Finally he said: “To your book.”

  He seemed more relaxed now that we were dining en plein air. He derided his contemporaries with such vigor and palpable enjoyment that it didn’t even seem malicious. He was having fun. A famous writer who had never got over the “Trotsky worship” of the 1930s he dismissed as “a grade-school radical.” A well-known Oxford academic was “a twit.” Of a literary critic who had made a career out of the Transcendentalists: “He thinks mystique is a perfume.”

  I marveled at this unguardedness, at once so calculated and so naïve. Bellow never said, “Don’t quote me” or “This is off the record.” But then, did Johnson ever turn to Boswell and say, “Sir, this is a private conversation, not to be put in your book”? Boswell came and went as he pleased, was given the run of his subject’s life and even of his mind; he was often known to set up situations to “incite”—Boswell’s word—Johnson to speech.

  The subject of Isaac Rosenfeld came up, and Bellow remarked that perhaps Rosenfeld had been jealous because Bellow got a Guggenheim first. But he didn’t. He got his Guggenheim a year after Rosenfeld. I had copies of their exchanges with the foundation. What was I supposed to do? Correct him? No, you’re mistaken, Mr. Bellow. In fact, your lifelong rival beat you to it.

  I maintained my usual psychiatric silence.

  We were each on our second glass of wine by now, and its uninhibiting vapors incited me to introduce the name of Nadine Nimier, a girlfriend of Bellow’s from his Paris days. I had interviewed her that spring, and she sent her meuilleurs sentiments. He lit up and began questioning me intently: how she looked (stunning), what she was up to (formerly the wife of a well-known French novelist, she had remarried), and what she had said about him (I couldn’t recall). I didn’t have the nerve to ask if it was true that he had proposed they run off to Africa together, though in retrospect I probably should have if I was going to put it in the book. What if Nimier had made it up?*2

  Since we were on the subject of women, I brought up another old flame—a woman Bellow had met on a Paris-bound ship in 1948. He looked shocked; he hadn’t heard from her in over fifty years. He had taken up with her after his marriage was over, he said. Alas, a lie. He didn’t get divorced until 1952, four years after his shipboard romance. Maybe he didn’t remember? “That can’t be,” I murmured, disgusted with myself. What am I, Saul Bellow’s keeper, that I have to catch him out in his adulteries?

  Yet his willingness to discuss these delicate and highly private issues—Peltz was right; he did want to talk about the women—had emboldened me. I asked about his first wife, Anita. It had been a difficult marriage and a difficult divorce. This I knew, or sensed, from his account of Tommy Wilhelm’s acrimonious divorce from Margaret in Seize the Day, which, like all of Bellow’s books, could be counted on to provide the basic facts about his life.*3

  “What happened there?” I asked.

  Bellow looked away. “I don’t want to get into that,” he said. “I have a son….”*4 He trailed off.

  I was getting really nervous now. This was private territory—even for me. Leave the man alone. I shifted the subject, insisting that I wasn’t interested in gossip but in the manners and morals of the period, life among the intellectuals in postwar America. But of course I was interested in the gossip. For the first time, it occurred to me that Bellow wouldn’t just sit there and tell me everything I needed to know. We were engaged in what Janet Malcolm would describe as a “transaction,” as all interviews necessarily are. He would tell me what he wanted me to know, and I would have to figure out the rest on my own. All he could do was straighten me out about the facts, quite a few of which I’d gotten wrong—or, as I would discover, he had gotten wrong.

  As we drove back to Bellow’s house at the end of the evening, I sensed again his loneliness. He had Janis now; she had saved him from, as he once put it to me, “falling down in the street.” He had friends, and the busy existence that renown brings. But there was a penumbra of isolation around him that nothing could dispel. We’re born alone, we survive the pain of life alone; we die alone: no one knew this better than the author of More Die of Heartbreak, a novel about a geniusy botanist named Benn Crader who feels estranged from the human race. One of Crader’s favorite books is Admiral Byrd’s Alone.

  On an impulse (was I breaking our pretense of objectivity by inviting him to a social event?), I suggested we get together with my friends Robert and Patricia Towers, who had a place in Cambridge, New York, not far from our Vermont farmhouse. Bob was an English professor at Queens College and a critic whose work often appeared in The New York Review of Books;
Pat was a veteran magazine editor I had known since my days at the Times. They were lively people, and I thought Bellow would enjoy their company. He liked the idea.

  When we pulled up to the house, Bellow seemed in no hurry to go. We sat in his car, and he said in a heartfelt way that he’d had a very good time. He asked what to call me: Jim or James? The answer depended on how I felt about myself at any given moment. If I could live with who I was (the best-case scenario) and felt comfortable in my own skin, I was Jim—informal, unpretentious, a regular guy. If I was feeling shaky, I reverted to James—literary, pompous, stiff, assuming a British, butler-like identity. Things had gone well that night: I was Jim.

  “There’s always business to conduct,” I said, handing him a letter I’d drawn up giving me permission to consult the files of Marshall Holleb, one of Bellow’s lawyers in Chicago. He handed the letter back unsigned: “It’s just legal stuff.”

  Driving back home over the mountains, I was weirdly elated. He’d said no—hardly a triumph. Yet here I was shouting to myself “It’s fun! It’s fun!” I didn’t feel rejected: It was “just legal stuff.” Besides, I was already conversant with the details of his divorces, the alimony fights, the near-jailing for perjury when he’d lied about his income. I didn’t need Bellow’s permission: the creative part, the original part, was my interpretation. That’s what biography is, I consoled myself. It was a game, an exalted game. Though sometimes a dangerous one. Neither party could control the outcome. I would write what I wanted, my own “issues” barely under control, my unconscious free to roam unfettered by my superego; my subject would “resist,” hiding or forgetting inconvenient facts. I could write an uncomprehending book; Bellow, ill-served by his passivity, could let me write a book that revealed more than he wished it to reveal. So yes, it was a game; but in most games, there’s a winner. Here both could lose.

  —

  That same summer my agent forwarded an invitation from Bill Buford, the editor of Granta. Did I have anything for a special issue they were doing on biography? I was excited. Granta was a greatly admired journal in literary circles, and Buford was a legend: an American long resident in England, he had founded the magazine when he was a student at Cambridge, resurrecting an obscure college literary journal and turning it into an institution. It was Anglo-American, chic, and trendsetting: its “Twenty Under Forty” issue, featuring the best work by young writers, had burnished the reputations of Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan.

  But it was August, and I was up in Vermont. The Bellow manuscript was in a cupboard back home in New York. The issue was on a tight deadline. Annie had to pack up my chaotic work-in-progress and deliver it into the hands of a young woman from the magazine’s New York office who stayed up half the night faxing it—all four hundred pages—to Buford in London.

  He got back to me a day later. He liked the book and could easily find an excerpt. “But those pages of your journal…that’s the real stuff.”

  My journal? What could he be talking about? Then it dawned on me. Somehow the notes that I had rapidly typed out after my meetings with Bellow had got mixed in with the manuscript. How embarrassing!

  Within a few days, Buford had carved out a seamless ten-thousand-word narrative, beginning with Bellow’s early childhood in Montreal and taking him through the publication of his first book, Dangling Man, in 1944. The Times had assigned me on short notice a profile of A. N. Wilson, and Buford asked me to meet him at the Groucho, a pseudo-seedy Soho club right out of an Anthony Powell novel. Its name was inspired by the famous dictum of Groucho Marx that he wouldn’t want to join any club that would admit him, but every writer in London aspired to belong to the Groucho, and its bar was always crowded with famous London novelists and journalists.

  Buford was a brilliant editor, the Cyril Connolly of my generation. He was also impressively dissolute, a dedicated smoker (Marlboros) and drinker who could put in a long bibulous night without showing any ill effects.*5 As we sat going over the proofs (another anachronism) of my piece, he put away four Scotches—not a great deal, given the English measurement of drinks in drams (half the amount of an American shot), but it was followed by two bottles of wine; the second he examined with the squint-eyed concentration of a jeweler assessing an antique watch, in an effort to determine whether draining it to the dregs*6 would impair our next day’s editorial work. He decided that it wouldn’t.

  —

  Back in the city that fall, I had lunch with Adam. He looked prosperous in an expensive suit; he was obviously rising up the ranks in publishing.

  I chided him about a remark he had made to the writer Daphne Merkin that I “wouldn’t get [his father] right.” He was mildly aghast and explained that he had meant only to suggest that I might be too close to my subject, might idealize him, only to be disappointed later. He stressed that the side of his father he was afraid might be neglected was “the spiritual side”—that no critics had really managed to grasp the significance of this issue in his later work or in his life.

  Bellow had been writing a big, ambitious novel called The Case for Love but had put it aside. “It’s too hard for him to write a big book now,” Adam said. “The rigging can’t weather the storm.”

  He made clear that he was in favor of the biography—“I’ll learn things about my father that I never knew”—and had told members of the family that I should be the one to write the book. He also reported that Bellow and Janis had had a good time when we all went to see Bob and Pat Towers.

  I hadn’t taken notes,*7 and all I can remember now of that afternoon is that Bellow got into an argument with a writer named Marcelle Clements over something to do with feminism and that he asked Janis to fetch his cap in a way that Annie found condescending. I wouldn’t even mention this incident except that it says something, I’m not sure what, about Bellow’s relationship with Janis. That she was subservient? That he was exploitative? Or was it just that he wanted his cap—we were sitting in the sun—and was a man in his late seventies who didn’t feel like getting up? If I live that long, I’ll want someone to fetch my cap, too.

  —

  I was sitting in the kitchen reading the Times on a Sunday afternoon in January when the phone rang. It was Bellow.

  It took me a moment to collect myself. He had never called me at home before. I didn’t even know he had my number.

  “I’ve had a bad conscience about your letter,” he said. Which letter was that? I wrote to him all the time. It no longer bothered me when he didn’t answer. He got a huge amount of correspondence. “That’s okay,” I muttered. “No hurry.” There was a long awkward pause. “About the letters…” Ah! The letters. He had once again closed the archive, and I had written protesting his decision and explaining my case. (Looking back, I sometimes wonder if I had a case. They were his letters, after all.) “My feeling is that it’s fine, as long as you let me see what you’re quoting. I don’t want to look silly.”*8 Perfectly reasonable, I assured him. He’d been a good sport. I suggested we follow the policy we’d adopted for the Granta excerpt: send him the excerpts from his letters that I wanted to quote for his approval. I did wonder about the word silly—it struck me as somehow frivolous, lacking gravity; the greatest writer in the English language had many defects, but being silly wasn’t one of them.

  “I liked what you wrote in Granta very much,” Bellow said. A thrill of joy shot through me. “I thought it was very well written. I have just one small correction, since we’re talking about it: and that is, you should be careful about what other people say who may have their own peculiar view of matters.”

  I waited in silence.

  “That quote from Vicki Lidov,” he continued.

  There were women; there were always women. During the winter of 1947, while Anita was off in Chicago with her brother, Bellow had shared a farmhouse in the country with Vicki and her husband, Arthur, a well-known painter.

  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s a woman who couldn’t have chi
ldren of her own. She’s had a bad life.” The vindictiveness in Bellow’s voice was palpable. He explained that he would go into the city by train and come back the same night, getting his car at the station. “I was trying to finish The Victim then. There were no women.”*9

  Maybe there weren’t and Vicki Lidov was full of it. It was her word against his.

  I had lost an opportunity to find out. Two years earlier I had made arrangements to drive up to the small town in upstate New York where Arthur Lidov lived. (Vicki had been jettisoned somewhere along the line.) I was eager to meet him: he and Bellow had a lot of history together.

  A date for my visit is set. I rent an Avis car. Lidov has sent me a hand-drawn map: James Atlas: This for Monday Jan. 7, 2:30 at my place. Three days before my visit, his daughter telephones me: her father is dead, the victim of a heart attack. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I tell the daughter, who has lost her father. But I’m just as sorry for my loss. Lidov would have been a great source.

  It happened all the time. After a protracted negotiation, I had been on the verge of getting Bellow’s third wife, Susan, to talk to me. Reluctant at first—their marriage, pitilessly chronicled in Humboldt’s Gift, had been characterized by extreme ill will on both sides—she had come around once I was able to prove that I was in earnest. She lived a few blocks away from me: it would be easy to meet. Then her son Dan called: she had died suddenly, also of a heart attack. She was sixty-two.

  But for every person “subtracted” (a Bellow word) from my narrative, another was added, often under the most peculiar circumstances. One day my mother called and told me she had just come from Teddy the hairdresser’s, where she had started up a conversation with the woman in the chair next to her, who turned out to be from Chicago. They were talking about their children, and when the woman learned that I was writing a biography of Bellow, she made a face and announced that she had known Frank Glassman and his wife, parents of the now-dead Susan. She informed my mother that the Glassmans had disapproved of Bellow, thought him a penniless, unreliable ne’er-do-well. That would make a good detail: what Susan Glassman’s parents thought of Bellow. But how would the footnote read? “The woman next to my mother at a beauty salon in La Jolla”?