The Shadow in the Garden
Page 42
My edition of Macaulay’s Life of Samuel Johnson (Atheneum, 1896) is, at 121 pages, a model of the short form. John Hawkins, Knt., The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., edited, abridged, and with an introduction by Bertram H. Davis (Macmillan, 1961); English Men of Letters, edited by John Morley (Harper & Brothers, no date given); The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir, by Michael Bundock (Yale University Press, 2015); Christopher Hibbert, The Personal History of Samuel Johnson (Penguin, 1984); Lives of the English Poets, introduction by John Wain (Everyman Library, 1975). See also Richard Holmes’s Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage, a poignant and highly entertaining portrait of Johnson’s friendship with the poet/murderer Richard Savage, with whom he used to perambulate about St. James’s Square at all hours of the night. John Wain, the critic I mutely stood beside at a urinal in an Oxford pub, also wrote a fine biography of Johnson (Macmillan, 1974).
XXI
I thought of giving the reader a hand with the fragmented quotes that cluster around themes—biography is good, biography is bad—but decided against it when I remembered the unfathomable capacity of Google to identify a source from just two or three words, a feat as mysterious to me as the existence of black holes (or telephones, for that matter). Most of them were lodged in my memory and had never been written down; others, thanks to Google, I located through secondary sources. Joyce’s coinage, “biografiends,” which occurs on page 55 of Finnegans Wake, can be found in Ellmann’s Joyce—and it’s a good thing, since I never got that far. And when I looked up my tutor’s felicitous phrase about “the wrought jar,” Google informed me, “You’ve visited this page many times.” I invite the reader to go there, too.
XXIII
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, introduction by John Wain (Penguin Classics, 1975). There is also a later edition, with an introduction by Elisabeth Jay, who wrote a biography of Mrs. Oliphant and, according to the author’s note, “lives in Oxford with her two children.” (But that was in 1997; they’re probably grown by now.) Juliet Barker, The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (St. Martin’s Press, 1995), is a mammoth enterprise that comes in at 1003 pages, and I haven’t read all of them, or even half; but it’s one of the most detailed biographies ever written. Less demanding but equally informative is Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius, by Winifred Gérin (Oxford University Press, 1967).
Froude’s Life of Carlyle was abridged and edited by John Clubbe (Ohio State University Press, 1979); or you could just read Julia Markus’s J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian, which is both admirably lucid and of rational length (Scribner, 2005). This story is so strange that some readers may want to go back to the original sources, especially Alexander Carlyle’s hotheaded defense of his uncle, The Nemesis of Froude: A Rejoinder to James Anthony Froude’s “My Relations with Carlyle” (Bodley Head, 1903); and Froude’s agonizing self-defense, My Relations with Carlyle (Longmans, Green, 1903).
The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with a note by Coventry Patmore (Oxford University Press, 1917), like a number of old books in my possession, bears the disheartening mark of de-accession: in this instance, by Sacramento Junior College. I also have a book on Latin biography stamped East Lake Community Library, Palm Harbor, Florida, and another that I can’t seem to lay my hands on from some college in Texas. It makes me sad that these libraries didn’t consider such interesting books worth keeping on their shelves, but at least they have found a safe haven on mine. The two best biographies on Frost are Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) and Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (Holt, 1999). It was from Parini’s afterword, a consideration of Frost and his biographers, that I learned of the essay by Donald G. Sheehy, “The Poet as Neurotic: The Official Biography of Robert Frost,” in American Literature (October 1986).
Andrew Field, VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Crown, 1977). Brian Boyd’s biography of Nabokov was published in two volumes: The Russian Years and The American Years (Princeton University Press, 1990 and 1993). Boyd’s Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays, despite its menacing title, is an affectionate homage to his subject, whom he subjects to rather steely critical scrutiny but in a tone of unwavering admiration. Nabokov’s complaint to Field is cited in Boyd’s The American Years, p. 610.
Without wishing to prolong this informal bibliography, I can’t resist mentioning Aspects of Biography, by Andre Maurois (D. Appleton, 1929); The Craft of Literary Biography, edited by Jeffrey Meyers (Schocken, 1985); and Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, edited by Marc Pachter, with contributions from Justin Kaplan, Leon Edel, and Alfred Kazin, among others (New Republic Books, 1979).
Also, there’s a lot of stuff I never got around to talking about, like Julian Hawthorne’s uncanny biography of his father, Nathaniel, written in the first person, which makes you feel as if you’re standing beside him (in Rome, he evokes “the murmurous plash” of the Trevi Fountain); and Leslie Stephen’s two-volume Studies of a Biographer, with its leisurely, old-fashioned essays on Wordsworth and Gibbon, Jowett and Pascal. Now I never will, but I hope another biografiend will take up my flickering torch someday and rediscover them.
Permissions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint unpublished and previously published material:
Susan E. Barrett: Excerpt of undated letter from William Christopher Barrett to James Atlas. Reprinted by permission of Susan E. Barrett.
Carcanet Press Limited: Excerpt from “To Bring the Dead to Life” from Complete Poems in One Volume by Robert Graves, edited by Patrick Quinn. Published in Great Britain by Carcanet Press Limited, London, in 2000. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.
Trina Doerfler: Excerpt from undated letters from Trina Doerfler to James Atlas. Reprinted by permission of Trina Doerfler.
Joseph Epstein, Literary Executor of Edward Shils: Excerpts from memos written by Edward Shils to James Atlas. Reprinted by permission of Joseph Epstein, Literary Executor of Edward Shils.
The Estate of Alfred Kazin: Excerpts of an undated letter and postcard from Alfred Kazin to James Atlas. Reprinted by permission of The Estate of Alfred Kazin.
The Estate of Isaac Rosenfeld: Excerpts from the Journal of Isaac Rosenfeld and an unpublished poem, “Grandfather sits in his armchair,” by Isaac Rosenfeld. Reprinted by permission of The Estate of Isaac Rosenfeld.
Hoover Institution Archives: Excerpt of undated letter from Albert Glotzer to James Atlas. Copyright © Stanford University. Reprinted by permission of Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University.
New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpts of “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day,” “During December’s Death,” “In The Naked Bed, In Plato’s Cave,” and “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me” from Selected Poems by Delmore Schwartz. Copyright © 1959 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Nick Macdonald: Excerpt from writings of Dwight Macdonald to James Atlas. Reprinted by permission of Nick Macdonald.
The Random House Group Limited: Excerpt from Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd, published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Robert Phillips, Literary Executor for The Estate of Delmore Schwartz: Excerpt of letter from Delmore Schwartz to Robert McCauley, dated October 7, 1961; excerpt of undated letter from Delmore Schwartz to Julian Sawyer; and letter from Delmore Schwartz to James Laughlin, dated 1951. Excerpts from journals and verse notebooks of Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of Robert Phillips, Literary Executor for The Estate of Delmore Schwartz.
University of Virginia Library: Excerpt from “Notes from Conversations with Robert Frost” by Lawrance Thompson. Reprinted by permission of the Manuscripts Department of the University of Virginia Library.
Illustration Credits
1 Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rar
e Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
2 Courtesy of Lucy Ellmann
3 Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
4 Getty/New York Post Archives
5 Richard Levine/Alamy Stock Photo
6 Copyright © Stuart Clarke
7 Courtesy of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
8 Courtesy of The Estate of Alfred Kazin and The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
9 Copyright © Jeff Lowenthal
10 Wikimedia Commons
11 Getty/Photograph by Dora Carrington
12 The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
13 Courtesy of Nick Macdonald. Photograph by Mariette Pathy Allen.
14 The Estate of Delmore Schwartz
15 Copyright © Edmund Wilson, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
16 AP Photo
17 Courtesy of George Sarant
18 Courtesy of The Homestead
19 Courtesy of the author
20 Getty/Photograph by Arnold Newman
21 Courtesy of Joseph Epstein, for The Estate of Edward Shils
22 Illustration by Tina Berning/KOKO Art Agency, Inc.
23 Wikimedia Commons
24 Mark Ulriksen
25 Courtesy of the author
26 Getty/Photograph by Dominique Nabokov
27 Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by Phil King.
28 Courtesy of Nathan Tarcov
29 Courtesy of Alexander Markels
30 Copyright © Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation. Courtesy of Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Atlas is the author of Bellow: A Biography; Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the memoir My Life in the Middle Ages. The creator of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives series and a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The New York Times for many years. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and many other journals. He lives with his wife in New York City.
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