The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  I was pleased to see Bellow fighting back against the bullying strictures of political correctness. And maybe he really didn’t remember that I’d interviewed him. It was quite reasonable to suppose that an encounter that had been so momentous to me—interviewing Saul Bellow for The New York Times—was, to Bellow, just another interruption in his day. But one thing puzzled me: Why was he writing about this contretemps now? My piece had come out seven years earlier. There had been no “peg,” no flaring up of the issue. No one had called him to account about his “Papuans” (Polynesians!) remark of late. What had goaded him to this entertaining but unprovoked diatribe?

  My favorite passage in the op-ed was the opening, where Bellow gazes out the window of his apartment at a wintry Chicago scene: “Snowbound, I watched the blizzard impounding parked cars at midnight. The veering of the snowflakes under the streetlamps made me think how nice it would be if they were totally covered by white drifts.” This was what Bellow was best at: observing a moment in time and capturing it in an image. A word—impounding—made to represent a car trapped by snow instead of locked up by the police. The writer writing. And if he wanted, for his own reasons, to make things up, or remember them one way when they had happened another way—why, that was his prerogative, I guess. That’s what novelists do.*3

  —

  A week after Bellow’s piece came out, there arrived in the mail a four-page, single-spaced letter from Edward Shils, accompanied by notes written on the manuscript in a green felt-tip pen. Now, where had I seen that color before? It was the same color that was scribbled over the typescript of Mr. Sammler’s Planet on display in the New York Public Library. Shils! Now he was editing my book. If he could edit Bellow—his own portrait yet—he could edit me.

  Like Dwight, Shils had a vested interest in helping me get it right. Both men had had complicated relationships with my subjects and an intimate knowledge of their worlds (which were in many cases the same). Also, they had exacting minds and were offended by errors and imprecision, which they hunted down with a vigilante zeal. In his memo, Shils explained to me every facet of Bellow’s life: his friends and enemies, the streets he had walked and the books he had read; the historical events he had witnessed; his attitude toward women; even what went on in his head. Biographers tend to forget that the world they’re writing about was real to their subjects, not a construct of their research. Shils made Bellow real to me.

  He was more encouraging than I had expected him to be. “I think that you have done a good job in presenting the origins of a complicated personality in a coherent and intelligible way,” he wrote. The pages I had sent him were “vivid” and “compellingly readable.”

  By the time the “nots” began to pile up, I was armored and ready for criticism. “You do not pay enough attention…” “You do not attend sufficiently…” I had done a huge amount of research; what I hadn’t delivered was a sense of what it was like to inhabit Bellow’s world, to be Bellow. I had been taken in by the romantic image of the writer as “a sensitive, isolated person, spurned by society while keeping aloof from society. I think this is entirely central in Bellow’s life.” Shils urged me “to place him in the wider setting of European romanticism which had seeped into the United States.”

  A second memo followed two weeks later. He had now read the entire manuscript, but his secretary was having trouble understanding his dictation, and he was “rather ill at present” (I still didn’t know how ill); he didn’t have the energy to proofread his memo. As I leafed through it, I quailed: Shils had written his own mini-biography of Bellow, longer than some of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. By comparison Dwight’s letters and annotations seemed mild.

  Shils and Bellow had fallen out by then, for a variety of reasons: Shils resented Bellow’s maneuvers to install a girlfriend in the Committee on Social Thought (“pushing a screwee,” he called it), and Bellow resented what he took to be Shils’s intellectual condescension. The two men barely spoke.

  At best grudging in his approbation—of anyone—Shils was eager to dilate on his former friend’s flawed character:

  “Bellow had no sense of obligation to any other human being or to any Institution.”

  “If he has a heart, he wears it on his sleeve 24 hours a day.”

  “Saul Bellow was certainly not a person who had great sympathy with the great sufferings of humanity.”

  These brutal observations were typical of Shils, and I would hesitate to call them objective. But he didn’t allow his detestation of Bellow to snuff out every last spark of generosity—he was too devoted to the scholarly discipline of fairness—and he bestowed praise, however grudgingly, where he thought it was deserved. He was impressed by Bellow’s “extraordinary empathy with the dregs of society,” and he admired the novelist’s heroic dedication to his art.

  Shils was adamant on one point: my book needed to be cut. He had read half, which was already four hundred pages in typescript; at this rate, it would be “far too thick for comfortable reading and far too long for the importance of its subject.” The summaries of Bellow’s novels were too detailed, and there was too much tracing of the characters to their real-life sources. In addition, the structure was disorganized: Shils recommended “a stricter application of a chronological principle in your exposition.” Biographers take note.

  There is no such thing as Biography School, but if there were, Shils could have been its dean. Among the lessons he taught me: you had to place your subject in a historical context (you couldn’t just say someone was a Trotskyite, you had to explain what Trotskyism was); you had to make people sound authentic (Alexander Goldenweiser, whom I had described as “a distinguished anthropologist,” was, according to Shils, “an inveterate philanderer and he was dismissed from his post at Columbia and his name was obliterated from the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences”); you had to listen to what people said and be skeptical about pronouncements that sounded smart but upon closer scrutiny meant nothing (“How should a good man live?”); you had to write well and abjure clichés like “the dark realities of his own time.” And you had to think independently: “Your book suffers somewhat from the fact that you accept the self-diagnosis of a small group of Jewish intellectuals in New York and an even smaller group in Chicago as the expression of an ‘area’ or of a ‘generation.’ ” Above all, you had to get your facts straight, however trivial they seemed (“There is no streetcar on 51st Street”), because if you got a fact wrong, even if no one noticed, it would set off a vibration of wrongness that made everything around it, all the facts and quotes and speculations, feel somehow off.

  I found Shils’s memo exhausting to read. Would I ever be finished? Finally, on the last page, he threw me a bone. “My congratulations to you on having got so far.”

  Ten months later he was dead.

  *1 Yet Nabokov himself wrote a biography of Gogol, and Auden, while complaining that biographies of writers were “in bad taste,” was annoyed that J. R. Ackerley, in his memoir My Father and Myself, was “never quite explicit about what he really preferred to do in bed.”

  *2 “One Cheer for Literary Biography,” New York Review of Books, February 4, 1999.

  *3 It’s not what biographers do. One day Bellow said to me: “If my characters were as well-rounded as yours are going to be, I might have accomplished something.”

  “Yes, but you make it up. I’m in the realm of fact.”

  “You make some of it up, too,” he replied.

  Brent Staples Credit 22

  XXII

  On August 3, 1994, war broke out on the Vermont front.

  I arrived ten minutes late, again getting lost.

  Janis showed me around the house: the spacious new library, now filled with books on floor-to-ceiling shelves, the antique desk from Chicago, her big study and computer. She was friendly and offered me iced coffee, remembering that it was my drink of choice in the summer. Then Bellow came in, looking crabby.

  He was unhappy about a recent mention of A
dam in the Times that referred to his appointment as editorial director of the Free Press. Why did the paper always have to identify the books he published as “conservative”? Why did they have to give everyone an ideological label? Then he got on the subject of an article by Brent Staples, a writer on the Times’s editorial board who had written a memoir, Parallel Time, about growing up poor and black in the slums of Philadelphia and winning a fellowship to the University of Chicago. An excerpt had appeared in the magazine over the summer.

  Staples loved Bellow’s work, but he was wounded by the derisive remarks about blacks in the novels, where they are variously referred to as “crazy buffaloes” and “porkchops,” and where the black pickpocket exposes his “large tan-and-purple uncircumsized thing” to Sammler in the lobby of his building. “I wanted to be near him,” Staples had written, “but not too near.”

  In an attempt to resolve this deep ambivalence, he had begun stalking Bellow, hoping to encounter his obsession/nemesis on the streets of Hyde Park. I’m not sure Staples knew what Bellow represented to him. A potential mentor? An enemy? Both? (These things often go together.) Nor did he seem to have a plan for what he would do if he ever did manage to confront Bellow. “I wanted to trophy his fear,” he wrote, verbifying a noun, to frighten Bellow and make that experience the emblem of their relationship—the only one he felt was available to him.

  Brent was a big guy—I knew him from the Times—and it was a point of honor for him to dress in scruffy clothes, as if to say this is who I am.

  Bellow was appalled at the idea that Brent had been lurking in the shadows of Dorchester Avenue. It was “barbarous,” he said—a word right out of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. I defended Brent and described his devotion to Bellow’s work: he could recite whole passages from the novels by heart. Bellow didn’t want to hear about it. Why didn’t Brent just come see him, instead of tailing him like a mugger?

  I turned to Janis and asked, “What do you think?”

  “No comment,” she said.

  Here was a tangled web. As it happened, I had edited Brent’s piece in the Times Magazine…no, not as it happened. I had plucked the excerpt from the galley myself. It was beautifully written; it was about Bellow; it was news. A black journalist stalking a white Nobel Prize–winning novelist known for his controversial views on race through the streets of Chicago…what a story! But there must have been other factors involved in creating the awkward situation in which I now found myself. Could I have been making Brent’s aggression a stand-in for my own? Then there was the most obvious motive of all: it would be good for my book.

  I confessed to Bellow my role in the publication of Brent’s piece. There may have been a tangled web, but at least there was no deceit, just the usual murk of mixed motives—unconscious acting out, ambivalence, good intentions, bad faith, enthusiasm, opportunism, and a thousand other impulses, all of them imperfectly understood.

  I followed him into his study and began to tell him about the brilliant essays on John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and James T. Farrell that had turned up among his papers in the WPA archive at the Illinois State Historical Library—a real find. He wasn’t interested. He rebuked me sharply for putting my iced coffee on a book, then went over to his desk and got out his mother’s old passport. “Have you seen this?”

  I thought he wanted to tell me the story about his family’s arrival in the New World again, but no: he wanted to make a point. “Why did you say my name is Bellows?”

  Suddenly I remembered—it was the article I had written the previous winter in defense of biography, the one in which I noted that Bellow had changed his name from Solomon to Saul. Now what had I done? A favorite saying of Bellow’s flew into my head: A fool throws a stone in a pond, and ten sages knock themselves out trying to find it.

  “I made a mistake,” I said. “Maybe I wanted my independence. I can’t come running to you every time.” I was scared, but I defended myself as best I could. “Besides, I wasn’t entirely wrong. There was some issue about your name.” He had talked about it before, I reminded him—to Terry Gross on National Public Radio.*1

  Bellow didn’t reply, instead launching into a tirade on the critic Hilton Kramer, who had attacked him in Commentary.

  He was surprised there hadn’t been more letters in the magazine protesting Kramer’s piece. He felt persecuted by the editor of The New York Times Book Review. He had offered a piece to her, but she wanted him to cut three pages—including one in which he referred to “a fat woman.” He disparaged Peter Prescott’s review of his collection of essays, It All Adds Up: “They were out to get me.” They? Was this another instance of Bellow’s tendency to pluralize his enemies, robbing them of their identities as individuals? I had never seen him so angry before.

  Not that anger in Bellowworld was anything new. Sometimes I thought anger was his nature, the emotion that dominated his life. There were many others: irony, spiritual feeling, a sense of fun, deep insight, generosity—especially toward his relatives and, fitfully, old friends. But then he would refer to a woman writer who annoyed him as a “cunt” or make a joke about “Afro-American Jim.” I was always amazed that Bellow would say these things in front of me: Didn’t he realize they were on the record? Or was that the whole idea? He would say whatever he liked, and I would publish the words I chose to publish, and somehow the fact that they were being channeled through his biographer would soften their effect. This arrangement suited me.

  The day wasn’t over yet. We had a long wrangle about the papers. Bellow wouldn’t give me permission for the latest batch of excerpts I’d brought him for initialing unless I explained how the passages were being used. Finally he relented a little: “I’ll give you all the stuff that makes me look good,” he said with a laugh.

  But he was still “sore.” He glanced at his watch, something he’d never done before. He wanted me to leave. They were going out to supper.

  Janis was in the garden. “We had a fight,” I told her.

  “Bring your swimsuit next time,” she said cheerfully. “It will be more fun.”

  —

  It blew over, as our quarrels always did. What choice did we have? There was no going back now.

  Three weeks later, having sent Bellow thirteen pages of “context” notes, supplying the sentence before and after each quote, I called to find out whether they were adequate. Janis answered and told me he was sleeping.

  I still didn’t know how to address him. I was James or Jim, like a handyman; he was always Mr. Bellow. This time I settled on “the great man.” We agreed that I would call back at five, which I did, letting the phone ring awhile. (They didn’t have an answering machine.) No one picked up.

  I went outside, and a few minutes later Annie called me. Bellow was on the phone.

  He had been in the garden, he explained when I picked up. “I wasn’t going to break my ass answering the phone.” But his tone wasn’t confrontational. The letters seemed harmless, he said. We set a date for “the signing”—as I had come to refer to our initialing ritual.

  When I drove up a few days later, right on time, he said: “You’re like the Illinois Central.”

  We sat down under the tree in the yard, our own Vermont Yalta, and he said, giving me a forthright look, that he had never meant to interfere in my project; I had misunderstood him. He just wanted to know what I was quoting. He was concerned about what “certain people” were saying about him. How would I know to be fair?

  It was my job, I answered. I knew how to judge character.

  “But you’re not the catcher in the rye,” Bellow retorted.

  “It’s true,” I replied. “I can’t save you every time.” We both laughed.

  We went into the house and sat down at the kitchen table. Bellow was businesslike and went through the papers page by page, initialing each as if it were a legal document (which, in a sense, it was). It took us two hours to get through the papers. “What can I do about all this crap?” he said with a sigh as we neared the end
. Then: “This is tiring.”

  When we were done, he got up from the table. He didn’t want me to stay.

  As I drove off, he stood on the porch and waved. I waved back. He seemed so alone.

  When I got home, I hunted down a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and leafed quickly through it until I found the scene I was looking for. Sitting on the bed, Holden describes to his sister, Phoebe, the one job he’d like to have:

  Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.

  I sat on the couch and wept. My job was even harder than Holden’s. It wasn’t some little kids I was supposed to protect, but the greatest novelist in America. And I…well, I was Holden. But I was also the cliff.

  *1 In fact, I’d made no mistake, except of judgment. I’d never claimed that Bellow had called himself Bellows. It was his brothers who had changed their names, as I noted in my Times piece.

  James Anthony Froude Credit 23

  XXIII

  Among the pronouncements on biography I had filed away was this one from Johnson’s column in The Rambler: “If a life be delayed til interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.”