The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  I would also like to thank Nora Atlas, Patricia Bosworth, Anne Heller, Richard Cohen, Julia Markus, Daphne Merkin, Karen Pritzker, and Stacy Schiff, who read portions of the book at various stages in its development; my famously sharp-witted agent Binky Urban (I listened to the words of encouragement she left on my answering machine for years); the stalwarts of the Gotham Book Group; my dear children; and my brother Steve. I have managed to get almost to the end of a long writing career without mentioning him in print—his editorial acumen is evident on every page. Steve has an uncanny, virtually ventriloquistic ability to make me sound like myself and, when that’s probably a bad idea, like someone I would like to be.

  Notes

  Readers are naturally curious to know where the writer came up with his sources, especially the more outlandish ones (for instance, my mother in conversation with a woman from Chicago at a beauty salon in La Jolla, California), and deserve to be spared the common experience of turning to the expected endnotes only to find what Mallarmé called le vide papier que la blancheur défend. (I quote this line of Mallarmé’s, the only one I know, in order to annoy my brother, who read the manuscript with bristling attention to possible instances of pretension and argued me out of several other quotations in languages I barely know or don’t know at all.) But I didn’t want to weigh down my book with the scholarly apparatus of page-by-page notes. I have settled on a solution I came across in Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, where he provides citations for each chapter in the form of paragraphs listing his main sources. Edel explains: “A great deal of my documentation has come from unpublished diaries and letters; it is always difficult to source such materials minutely, but I have indicated where it is to be found.” This has been my practice, too, adding the oral element of conversations conducted in parking lots, on beaches, in smoke-dense bars, and in the notable but unique instance mentioned above, a beauty salon. This is not a systematic bibliography. I have in general not made note of books referred to in the text that are readily available or still in print. Entire chapters go noteless, especially toward the end, when the autobiographical I elbows its way more aggressively into the text. I have also relied on my own sporadic but generally reliable journals. The only source I’ve omitted is the main one: memory. “Yet why not say what happened?” Robert Lowell asked in a late poem. Because you can’t: you can only say what you think happened. I hope that has been enough. If you trust the writer’s voice, you’ll trust the writer’s facts.

  I

  The Delmore Schwartz Papers repose in the Beinecke Library at Yale and contain twenty-nine boxes (23.3 linear feet), up from the six boxes I had to work with when I embarked on my biography of Delmore. These include, according to the library’s catalog, drafts of poems, stories, “personal papers and effects, drawings, clippings, and printed material.” The addition of Dwight’s papers, those of Delmore’s brother Kenneth, and the consolidation of documents housed at the Syracuse University Library largely account for this dramatic expansion of material; in 1981 I donated my own papers, collected from a wide variety of sources, to the Beinecke’s linear footage of (a new coinage) Delmoreiana. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Delmore’s work can be found in the Delmore Schwartz Papers.

  Delmore’s own work has been sporadically in print, beginning with his collection of short stories, The World Is a Wedding, re-issued by New Directions in 1977 with a foreword by Irving Howe and an introduction by the present author. Since then collections of Delmore’s poems and stories in various permutations have appeared with gratifying frequency, including Letters of Delmore Schwartz, selected and edited by Robert Phillips, with a foreword by Karl Shapiro (Ontario Review Press, 1984); Successful Love and Other Stories (Corinth Books, 1985); Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker, with an appreciation by Dwight Macdonald (University of Chicago Press, 1985); Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz, edited and introduced by Elizabeth Pollet (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986); The Ego Is Always at the Wheel (New Directions, 1987), an assemblage of “bagatelles” from the Yale collection, and Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz (1989), both edited by Delmore’s executor, Robert Phillips; Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (W. W. Norton, 1993); and Screeno: Stories and Poems, with an introduction by Cynthia Ozick (New Directions, 2004), featuring an unpublished story I found among Delmore’s papers. On my table now (2016) is the latest, Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz, a newly minted anthology drawn from Delmore’s criticism, essays, poems, stories, and letters, edited by Craig Owen Teicher with an introduction by John Ashbery (New Directions).

  Not in print, alas, are A Season in Hell, his translation of Rimbaud’s En Saison en Enfer, unconscionably inaccurate but not without a certain charm; Genesis: Book One (there would be no Book Two); and Shenandoah, the play that appeared in the short-lived Poet of the Month series (New Directions, 1941).

  For those who wish to know more, my biography of Delmore has appeared in four editions: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1977); Avon (1978); Harvest (1985); and Welcome Rain (2000).

  II

  Richard Ellmann’s monumental James Joyce—no subtitle required—is available in numerous editions; I doubt it will be out of print as long as there is print. (I own the Oxford University Press paperback published in 1972.) But I served my biographical apprenticeship under the spell of all of Ellmann’s books; I single out here Ulysses on the Liffey (Faber & Faber, 1972), with its foldout facsimile of Joyce’s outline of the novel, and his two superb books on Yeats: The Identity of Yeats (Faber, 1954); and Yeats: The Man and the Masks, first published in 1948, when the biographer was only thirty. Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (Oxford University Press, 1973) is a lively compilation of essays on George Eliot, Wilde, Joyce, and others in the pantheon of Modernism, supplemented by his thoughts on the genre he elevated into a literary art.

  For a more intimate perspective on Ellmann’s life at Oxford, see London Lovers by Barbara Hardy (Peter Owen, 1996).

  III

  Dwight was not a prolific writer, and the one book of his that still has a pulse is Against the American Grain (Vintage, 1962), the collection of miscellaneous essays that showcased the erudition, humor, wit, sixth sense for the phony, and occasional innocent malice that made him one of the significant intellectuals of his day. “My greatest vice is my easily aroused indignation,” he once wrote: “also, I suppose, one of my great strengths.” As the fictional Macdougal Macdermott in Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis and Orlando Hutchins in Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, he came across as a stammering excitable figure; it’s not until you read, or revisit, his essays that you get a sense of his range. Macdonald could write with equal ease about Hemingway and Frost, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in his classic “Masscult & Midcult,” the leveling tendencies of American culture. For more about the man—there were no masks—turn to Michael Wreszin’s excellent biography, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (Basic Books, 1993); and A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (Ivan R. Dee, 2001), which contains a generous sample of the letters to me quoted in Chapter XV.

  Lucasta Miller’s quote comes from The Brontë Myth (Knopf, 2003).

  IV

  Leon Edel was Henry James’s official keeper of the flame, and his five-volume biography, published over a period of twenty years by J. B. Lippincott, is not only the definitive life of James but one of the definitive “Lives” of the twentieth century. He also presided over the four volumes of James’s letters, published in the decade from 1974 to 1984 by Belknap/Harvard. (His letter on the failure of his play Guy Domville is in volume three.) Like Ellmann, Edel was a shrewd commentator on his profession. In Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (W. W. Norton, 1987), he advanced his theory of the New Biography, making the case that biographers need to be vigilant about their own role in the narratives they create and that transference is a fundamental dynamic. Literary Biography (Indiana Uni
versity Press, 1973) is a primer on how to write biography. See also Lyall H. Powers, “Leon Edel: The Life of a Biographer,” American Scholar (Autumn 1997). His interview, “The Art of Biography,” appeared in the winter 1985 issue of The Paris Review.

  V

  Larkin’s ambivalence toward his executors, whom he advised to preserve or destroy his papers, depending on his mood, is described in Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, by his authorized biographer, Andrew Motion. Further dilations on the subject can be found in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985, edited by Anthony Thwaite (Faber & Faber, 1992). The story of how Larkin’s letters nearly disappeared is told in Andrew Motion’s contribution to Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, edited by Mark Bostridge (Continuum, 2004).

  Virginia Woolf’s letters are contained in the six volumes of Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975–80). My quotations are mostly from the last of these. I don’t know where I got the quotation from Freud’s taunting letter to his biographers. That Kafka directed his executor, Max Brod, to destroy his papers has been recounted by several traumatized biographers; the fullest instance is in the third volume of Reiner Stach’s exhaustive and exhausting biography, Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton University Press, 2013). The best account of Thomas Hardy’s determination to destroy his letters while preserving his legacy is in Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Penguin, 2006). Hardy wrote his own biography under the name of his wife, Florence—an ingenious solution to the problem of how to control your image before posterity.

  VI

  Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes, is the triumphal biography of the post-Ellmann, -Edel, -Holroyd generation. I have the 1974 Penguin edition, festooned with urgent annotations (“incredible scene,” “great writing”). I also recommend (too weak a word? want to press upon the reader) his two volumes of biographical memoir, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (HarperCollins 2000), and Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (Vintage, 1985). Footsteps emanates the feverish ardor of an obsessive for whom biography is “a haunting,” “a pursuit,” a quest for the “pre-biographical” element of self-identification. The other required book on Shelley (if you can find it) is by his friend Thomas Hogg, first published in 1854. It got poor reviews—Hogg was accused of being too hard on Shelley—and was abandoned after two volumes had appeared. A pity, as it really brings him alive.

  Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 1, 1904–1939 (Penguin Books, 1989; two more would follow). See the Preface for Sherry’s account of his doppelgänger feats. Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (Harper, 2015). James E. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (University of Chicago Press, 1993). Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence (North Point Press/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997).

  VII

  My portrait of Philip Rahv is supplemented by Literature and the Sixth Sense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), a collection of his essays on James, Eliot, Freud, and others (Houghton Mifflin, 1969); and Philip Rahv: Essays on Literature and Politics 1932–1972, edited by Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), which contains Mary McCarthy’s touching essay on her former lover.

  Gilchrist’s biography of Blake is one of the six volumes that appeared in Richard Holmes’s Classic Biographies series before it was mysteriously abandoned (HarperPerennial paperbacks, available only in England). The others were Johnson on Savage, Southey on Nelson, Godwin on Wollstonecraft, Scott on Zelide, and Defoe on Sheppard and Wilde.

  I obtained Carlyle’s biography of the poet John Sterling from a curious reprint house named Kessinger Publishing, which has no address or other identifying data; it’s a facsimile of the edition published by Peter Fenelon Collier in 1897.

  IX

  Isaac Rosenfeld, An Age of Enormity: Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties (World, 1962), was edited by Theodore Solotaroff and contains a preface by Bellow; his novel, Passage from Home (Meridian, 1961), was reprinted by Markus Weiner in 1988, with an introduction by Mark Shechner, who also edited a necessary volume, Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (Wayne State University Press, 1988). Shechner’s anthology collects, in addition to the best of Rosenfeld’s essays, three stories originally written in Yiddish and a selection from his journals. See Steven J. Zipperstein’s excellent Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (Yale University Press, 2009). I must also acknowledge, with great reluctance, the retrieval of a few paragraphs about Rosenfeld from my primitive novel The Great Pretender (1986); readers curious to know more about this haunting figure—and others depicted in the book—should look elsewhere.

  X

  Plutarch’s Lives, with an introduction by James Atlas (Modern Library Classics, two volumes, 2001); there’s a handy one-volume edition in the Penguin Classics. See also Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 1 (Loeb Classics, 2001); Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars (Oxford World’s Classics, 2000); Einhard and Notker the Stammerer: Two Lives of Charlemagne (Penguin Classics, 1969). Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante, foreword by A. N. Wilson (Hesperus Press, 2002); Boccaccio, Famous Women (I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2001); Vasari, The Lives of the Artists (Oxford Classics, 1998). Aubrey’s Brief Lives, edited by Oliver Lawson Dick (David R. Godine, 1999), includes Edmund Wilson’s authoritative essay on Aubrey. Izaac Walton, The Lives of John Donne and George Herbert (Harvard Classics, 1909) is one of the volumes on their Five-Foot Shelf. As for the massive, multivolume biographies of the Victorian Age, I have only “looked into” them (as Mayor Daley told a reporter who asked if he had read Herzog); A.O.J. Cockshut’s Truth to Life: The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century is a fine scholarly crib.

  There is much Johnsoniana (where does this -iana suffix come from? the papers of Johnson’s close friend Hester Thrale are referred to as “Thraliana”) in this chapter, but I thought it best to put Dr. Johnson and his biographer together, entwined as they were in life. Books about this literature-linked pair are in the notes to Chapter XIX.

  XI

  Strachey’s Eminent Victorians remains in print (Penguin Classics), as does a one-volume edition of Michael Holroyd’s masterly biography of Strachey (Penguin, 1971). “None ever wished it longer,” Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost. This is not true of Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey; even the fat two-volume edition published by William Heinemann in 1967 and 1968 left me hungry for more.

  XII

  Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann (Viking, 1975). The erotic letters (“Fuck me naked with your hat and stockings on only flat on the floor with a crimson flower in your hole behind”) are on pages 180-95, for those eager to go straight to the dirty bits.

  For Johnson’s purported struggles with S/M, I have relied heavily on Adam Gopnik, “Man of Fetters, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale,” New Yorker, December 8, 2008. Gopnik cites Katherine C. Balderston, “Johnson’s Vile Melancholy,” in The Age of Johnson, edited by Frederick Whiley Hilles (Yale University Press, 1949); Balderston was a pioneer in this narrow but important field.

  XV

  There are two biographies of Edmund Wilson: Jeffrey Meyers’s Edmund Wilson: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 1995); and, a decade later, Lewis Dabney’s authorized Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, begun after I declined the assignment and completed twenty years later. Both are adequate. I doubt there will be a third.

  Apart from the biographies of Bellow by Mark Harris, Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (University of Georgia Press, 1980), and Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (St. Martin’s Press, 1991), there is now a third: Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune (Knopf, 2015). A second volume is to follow. There are also two odd but revelatory memoirs, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir, by Greg Bellow (Bloomsbury, 2014); and Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (Fromm International, 1997), by his agent Harriet Wasserman.

  XVII
I

  Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). Kohut is the key to understanding Bellow: the work cited here, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders, was first published by the University of Chicago Press (1971) and has been reprinted in several editions.

  XIX

  The best introduction to Boswell is The Heart of Boswell: Highlights from the Journals of James Boswell, edited by Mark Harris (McGraw-Hill, 1981); Harris was the author of Drumlin Woodchuck, a winningly idiosyncratic biography of Bellow. Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, edited by Frederick A. Pottle (McGraw-Hill, 1950); Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals 1767–1786, edited by Hugh M. Milne (Mercat Press, Edinburgh, 2001); Boswell in Holland 1763–1764, edited by Frederick A. Pottle (McGraw-Hill, 1952). Frank Brady’s two-volume biography, sensibly divided up into The Earlier Years 1740–1769 and The Later Years 1769–1795 (McGraw-Hill, 1976 and 1984); Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999); D. B. Wyndham Lewis, James Boswell: a short life (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1946). Note that this is not Wyndham Lewis the painter but some other person, identified by Wikipedia as “a British journalist, author and biographer, known for his humorous newspaper articles.” Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, by Adam Sisman, is a chronicle of how the greatest biography in English got written despite its author’s virtually limitless capacity for self-destructive behavior (Hamish Hamilton, 2000). Another biography worth noting if not reading is Johnson and Boswell: The Story of Their Lives, by Hesketh Pearson (Harper and Brothers, 1958). Perhaps the oddest book about Boswell is by C. E. Vulliamy, who seems to have detested his subject—he described Boswell’s journals as “a garbage-pie of the most extraordinary dimensions”—but it’s about Boswell, so of course I read it anyway (Geoffrey Bles, 1932). Unless otherwise indicated, anecdotes about Boswell are from my eye-challenging unabridged edition of the Life, published in a single volume (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1933).