The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  Others I got to in time but still too late. Catherine Carver, Bellow’s longtime editor at Viking, agreed by mail to be interviewed, but when I arrived at the address she’d given me in London, it turned out to be a nursing home. She’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak. I sat at her bedside for an hour and silently communed. It wouldn’t be true to say that I came away having learned nothing. I learned that biography is about death.

  —

  A few weeks later I made another trip out to Chicago to see Bellow. Janis had reminded him that it was Valentine’s Day, “but that won’t be a problem for us,” he had written me.

  I found him alone. He looked well, though he’d gained a little weight; his natty purple striped shirt was open at the bottom button. You could see why he had been—and apparently still was—so irresistible to women, with those saucer eyes and fine-boned face. (More than one called him “stunning.”) He offered to make tea, and we sat down. There was always a certain constraint between us—Bellow had poor eye contact, and I tried to maintain mine. Obviously, he knew that I knew a lot about him, which made me feel guilty; but wasn’t that my job?

  We talked about Dwight, whose biographer, Michael Wreszin, had just been to see him. Bellow asked me if I knew Dwight, and I babbled on about how he had edited my Delmore book and how important he had been to me. But Bellow didn’t want to hear about it, any more than he wanted to hear that I’d been snowed in at LaGuardia, or that I’d run into his daughter-in-law with his granddaughter in a candy store. As a novelist, he was interested in his account of the world, in all its strangeness and mystery. His job was to study life and interpret it for the rest of us. If Victor Wulpy, the intellectual in that fine story “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” wants to tell us about how he got stranded at LaGuardia in a snowstorm, why, go ahead: thousands are waiting to hear. If I wanted to tell someone about what it felt like to be stuck at LaGuardia, I could pick up the phone and call Annie.

  Most of the time I didn’t mind our unequal stature and talents: Go, you be the genius. But sometimes I felt: What about my life? Doesn’t it count, too? There comes, inevitably, a moment of rebellion, when the inequality begins to chafe. Biographers are people, too, even if we’re condemned to huddle in the shadow of our subjects’ monumentality. All the same, self-abnegation has its limits. A thousand pages along, a decade in, the biographer cries out: What am I? Chopped liver?

  Yes. That’s what you signed on to be, and that’s what you are.

  Deal with it.*10

  At the end of the afternoon, as the room was growing dark, Bellow fetched his family album from an antique desk and showed me his mother’s passport again. There were also photos of Bellow’s ancient grandparents, the grandmother sad-faced, the grandfather dying. Their garments were torn. “See how poor they were,” said Bellow. Not all the photographs were old: here was one of Bellow and Winston Moore, the head of the Chicago Housing Authority, standing in front of a monolithic housing project. “Writing your life is like writing the rise and fall of civilization,” I said.

  It had been a mistake to refer to writing his life, which we both continued to pretend I wasn’t doing. Our secret, however mysterious, had its uses. It seemed to make Bellow less inhibited, and he could encourage his friends to talk to me without explicitly giving them permission to talk to me. But I was impatient to see the letters, and therefore had no choice but to bring the fact that I was his biographer out into the open.

  I made my case confidently and without hesitation: that this was going to be the definitive book and that while he must feel uneasy after the Ruth Miller debacle, and though I had no claim, since he never asked that the book be written, he had also “tacitly assented” to it over the years and allowed me to interview him. I felt “impeded” by his restricting the archive. He listened, then broke in that he was concerned about the Ludwig episode: “I look so stupid.” (So it wasn’t a matter of protecting other people at all; it was about how he would look.)

  Jack Ludwig was a third-rate professor whose itinerary for several years had closely followed the novelist’s—right into his marital bed. The irony of Bellow’s reticence was that he had already put this notorious episode into a best-selling novel—which was why it would be of considerable interest to his biographer: it was part of the work and the life. Ludwig is—not “modeled after,” is—Valentine Gersbach in Herzog, where Bellow described in painful and riotous detail his cuckoldry at the hands of Sasha (Madeleine in the novel) and her crude lover, even as the unsuspecting Herzog is getting him teaching jobs. So why would Bellow care what I wrote about Ludwig? He had already written it for all the world to read.

  Finally he told me that after much deliberation, he had signed the request I had sent him to look at specific items (it turned out that he had sent it over to the library on Friday, the last possible day before my arrival) and agreed that if he were provided with an itemized list of correspondents, he would most likely sign all but a few; then, very conciliatory: “Is that all right? I try to make these sessions humanly palatable.”

  They were far more than that, I assured him.

  —

  In the spring of 1993, Bellow moved to Boston, as he’d been threatening to do for years; Boston University had offered him a tempting position, and he would be closer to Vermont.

  One July day the following summer, as I was preparing for my annual visit to Bellow’s dacha, he called and said that he had a doctor’s appointment and could we meet next week? We set a date, but for some reason he seemed to be hanging on the line. At last he said—rather shyly, I thought—“Do you have a moment? There’s a matter I wish to discuss.*11 It has to do with the reviews of Allan’s book.”

  “Allan” was Allan Bloom, who had died the year before at the age of sixty-two under circumstances that would furnish one of Bellow’s last crises. Bloom’s book was the posthumous Love and Friendship, a collection of essays on the subject of sex and eros in Shakespeare, Rousseau, Stendhal, and other classic writers in his beloved Western canon. It was a deeply moving if controversial book, much of it dictated from his deathbed. But it hadn’t been reviewed anywhere, Bellow complained: “Even Wieselpiss”—Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic—“ignored it.”

  As it happened, it was being reviewed, in The New York Times Book Review, which I knew because I knew the reviewer: it was Katha Pollitt, one of my closest friends from college and a well-known feminist who wrote a fiery column for The Nation and had published several books espousing her progressive politics. I hesitated. No one likes (no one “wishes”) to be the bearer of bad news, but it seemed cowardly not to say something. Since I was this deep in, I felt obliged to warn Bellow that a review was scheduled and that it wouldn’t be positive. Katha had told me so herself. From her perspective, Bloom had been a reactionary determined to challenge the values of the feminist movement. And knowing Katha as well as I did, I was certain she was going to lay all this out in the most emphatic terms.*12

  Bellow was annoyed. He launched into a tirade about “affirmative suction”—he had a weakness for bad puns—and said the editor of the Book Review had invited him to write a piece about Bloom, but he was reluctant: he didn’t say why. I urged him to reconsider. “This is one of the matters I wish to discuss,” he said darkly.

  Five minutes later the phone rang again. It was Bellow. He and Janis were coming to Bennington. They had errands—he needed yellow legal paper—and it was hot in Brattleboro. For some reason, he seemed to feel it would be cooler in Bennington. Also, he wanted to go to the Army-Navy store for pants “with lots of pockets” so he wouldn’t have to wear a jacket whenever he went into town.

  I was excited, but I wondered why he wanted to drive all the way to Bennington, forty-five minutes over the Green Mountains on a steep curvy road, just to buy a pad of paper and a pair of pants. Because he wanted to talk about Bloom? That must have been it. How did I know? I was his biographer.

  We met in front of the Army-Navy store on Main Street.
I had just bought a beat-up paperback copy of Seize the Day for $1.04 at Now & Then Used Books next door. Bellow was wearing a blue-and-white-striped railroad cap identical to mine. Just at that moment, Janis came out of the store. “I wish I had a camera,” she said.

  We went to the Brasserie, a modest French restaurant a few blocks away, and sat down at a marble-topped table on the terrace. We ordered iced tea, and the conversation turned to the collection of essays Bellow was planning to publish. I listed the titles of essays I considered essential—most of which, it turned out, he had failed to include. Janis was concerned that no one had overseen the project. I nearly volunteered but was afraid that to be involved with Bellow’s work in an editorial capacity would compromise my “objectivity.”

  I still believed in the concept of biographical impartiality—as if I were a juror charged with weighing the evidence instead of a younger man entangled with an older man in a relationship of infinite complexity, one that could never be sorted out but only lived through as it metamorphosed over time, now warm, now cold, now angry, now loving, now master/disciple, now punitive father/rebellious son. The biographer was as real as his subject; he existed in the world and took up space. He learned to listen but reacted to what he was told—and wasn’t told.

  It was mid-afternoon, and the Brasserie was empty. The waitress, a young woman with curly black hair,*13 came over to see if we wanted anything else. I had an impulse to say to her: Do you know who this is? But what if I did and the name meant nothing to her?*14

  I sensed that Bellow was having a good time. He never looked exactly happy, but his large movie-star eyes were less mournful than usual. He told a joke or, more likely, reported a witticism he had made. The previous Rosh Hashannah he had been in a Chicago synagogue when the rabbi began praising an essay by the literary critic Leslie Fiedler—a source of irritation to Bellow because of Fiedler’s insistence on classifying him as a Jewish writer. Fiedler had come late in life to an appreciation of his Jewish roots and was lamenting in the essay that no one in his secular family would know how to say Kaddish when he died. Bellow claimed that he had spoken up, with heads turning, “I’ll say Kaddish for him if he’s willing to die now.”

  Janis and I laughed and laughed. Bellow’s archive of jokes was deep. He knew many, virtually all of them of the Jewish variety, and he told them well, throwing back his head and chortling with pleasure. Some were not very good, but so what? He hadn’t won the Nobel Prize for jokes.

  “You should write a book about writing this book,” Bellow said. It had occurred to me that maybe I should write a book about writing this book instead of writing this book. Here was where the real work got done, the work of trying to understand who this man was—not in the library but in the lab of life. Seeing how Bellow drank from his glass, grasping it in his long elegant fingers and fastidiously patting his lips with a paper napkin, revealed as much about him as all the interviews in the world.

  While I was walking them to their car, Janis told me that she had reviewed Roth’s new novel, Operation Shylock, and I promised to look it up. But I forgot the name of the magazine she’d written it for, and even in the Age of Google I haven’t been able to track it down, though I did find her review of Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre in Partisan Review. It was a spirited defense of the novel, which had caused a commotion, and it gave me a sense of Janis as not just “the young wife” but as a sophisticated reader who could hold her own in the fast literary company in which she traveled.

  Did Bellow want the woman who brought him his cap to be conversant with contemporary American literature? Or did he just want his cap?*15

  —

  Toward the end of August 1993, I drove over the mountains to the Bellow homestead for the signing of permissions. It had been a hard fight. We had been skirmishing for several years now as, worn down by my dogged requests, he yielded up one territory after another—manuscripts, some letters, more letters, like a general who sees the futility of resistance but resists until the battle is lost and he must sign a treaty—in this instance literally. The agreement I’d finally gotten was a good one and guaranteed my freedom: I would show Bellow the quotes from his letters and papers that I wanted to use, and he would initial his permission: SB.

  I had told Bellow I would arrive at two-thirty, but I was fifteen minutes late. Even after several visits, I still had trouble finding the house. Bellow and Janis were loitering by the front door when I pulled up. He looked at his watch and said, “You’re always so punctual.”

  “Forgive me. I got lost.” As always, I took a quick inventory of my motives: Was my tardiness hostile? Was I acting out? No, I reassured myself: I had told him that I would be coming “around two-thirty,” “after lunch.” Yet somehow this had become, in both of our minds, two-thirty. I was always looking for some reason to feel guilty, even when there was none.

  “If the Pope can forgive, I can forgive,” Bellow said. And why shouldn’t he? I was his worshipful subject—except when I was an apostate. (There must have been some middle ground, but I never managed to find it.)

  He was wearing a kind of soft canvas pith helmet, tied around his neck like a bonnet, the many-pocketed khakis he’d got in Bennington, a jacket, nice loafers, and black socks with black ribbons. He looked well, his face now quite wrinkled and lined, but still the handsome Bellow face.

  Janis offered me a cold drink, and we took chairs out to sit on the lawn. We talked for a while in a desultory way, but I was eager to get on with the business at hand. I was about halfway through the book, I estimated, having accumulated four hundred pages of typescript and gotten my subject to Herzog. I made him sign each page. He said he felt like Jean Valjean pursued by Inspector Javert through the sewers of Paris.

  After two hours, he had initialed each page, except for those from chapter two, which were somehow put last. He came to a bad poem from his high school days that I had found among his papers and said, “I’m not going to sign this.”

  I was stunned. “You’re kidding,” I said. What could it possibly mean to him at this point?

  But he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to sign.

  “It is pretty bad,” I blurted out, instantly alarmed by my own response: I never talked back. “But it’s better than Sydney J. Harris’s poem,” I said, ingratiating myself in the hope that it would erase my involuntary verdict on his own poem. Harris was an old friend of Bellow’s from his Tuley days and, like everyone else in that crowd, a once-aspiring writer. He had ended up writing a column for the Chicago Sun-Times called “Strictly Personal” that I read every morning at the breakfast table when I was growing up and that my father found “platitudinous.” “You’re a ‘contrast gainer,’ ” I said, employing the comic Bellovian term in the hope that it would please him. See how well I know your work?

  Bellow recited Harris’s poem, and Janis chimed in at the end: she knew the poem by heart, too.

  By the time I left, I was way over my limit of Bellow exposure—the amount of time I could spend around him before I got Bellow burnout. So much concentration, combined with the suppression of self, was exhausting.

  When I came to the main road, I pulled into the parking lot of a Dairy Queen, retrieved my notebook from the glove compartment, and wrote down as much as I could remember.

  It wasn’t a lot. Months or years after one of these encounters, I would pull my notebook scrawlings from my files only to discover that they were disappointingly spare—Zen koans without the wisdom. What to make, for instance, of this laconic jotting, from what must have been a more detailed account of Bellow’s time in Paris in the early 1950s: “I was very depressed”? What if, instead of “B knew Weldon Kees and Nigel Dennis, book reviewers at Time,” you were to record your subject’s life as it really happened, so many days forgettably the same?

  Dr. Johnson breakfasted on a bowl of oats, then descended to the privy and took a shit while reading an old Gentlemen’s Magazine. By ten he was at his desk in the attic atelier at 17 Gough Square, laboring over h
is Dictionary; at one he had a lunch of cold mutton, followed by a nap.

  At least it would have been true.

  —

  Late one night in the autumn of 1993, I flew into O’Hare and got my car from the Avis lot. I loved this part of the job: tossing my suitcase into the back, hanging up my jacket on the plastic hook, and driving off in a bright-colored Chevrolet Impala, fiddling with the dial until I found WFMT, “Chicago’s classical music” station, 98.7 on the dial. I’d been listening to it since I was a child and could still remember the names of the announcers from thirty years ago, Ray Norstrand and Norman Pellegrini, their quiet civilized voices murmuring through the teakwood speakers in our living room as they announced that we would next be hearing Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, conducted by George Solti with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Once again I was in “Chicagoland,” soothed by the civilized murmur of “cultural programming”—advertisements for ethnic restaurants that offered “continental dining,” wine and cheese shops, hi-fi shops, Toad Hall Books & Records.

  As I stepped on the gas and nosed onto the Edens Expressway, I remembered Herzog in his rental car, “the teal-blue Falcon storming,” on his way to confront his wife’s duplicitous lover, Valentine Gersbach: “From the last slope of Congress Street the distortions of dusk raised up the lake like a mild wall crossed by bands, amethyst, murky blue, irregular silver, and a slate color at the horizon, boats hanging rocking inside the breakwater, and helicopters and small aircraft teetered overhead.” Gorgeous.

  It wasn’t the fastest way, but I liked speeding along the lakefront at night, past the immense Greek-columned Museum of Science and Industry, past Soldier Field, turning off at 55th Street into Hyde Park, its tree-lined streets empty at this hour, and parking in front of the dowdy University Club, happy to be in that haven of higher learning, surrounded by the ghetto pressing in from the south and west, its wide bleak trash-strewn streets lined with metal-gated liquor stores.