by James Atlas
ALSO BY JAMES ATLAS
Nonfiction
My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale
Bellow: A Biography
Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet
Fiction
The Great Pretender
Copyright © 2017 by James Atlas
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Portions of this work have originally appeared, some in different form, in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic.
Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material can be found following the index.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Atlas, James, author.
Title: The shadow in the garden : a biographer’s tale / James Atlas.
Description: New York : Pantheon, 2017. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016057846 (print). LCCN 2017005217 (ebook). ISBN 9781101871690 (hardcover). ISBN 9781101871706 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Atlas, James. Biographers—United States—Biography. Biography as a literary form.
BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Personal Memoirs. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Literary. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Editors, Journalists, Publishers.
Classification: LCC CT34.U6 A85 2017 (print). LCC CT34.U6 (ebook). DDC 920.073—dc23.
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2016057846
Ebook ISBN 9781101871706
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover illustration by Julia Breckenreid
Cover design by Kelly Blair
v4.1
a
for Anna
Contents
Cover
Also by James Atlas
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Acknowledgments
Notes
Permissions Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
About the Author
Delmore Schwartz, from Vogue Credit 1
I
It’s late afternoon on Christmas Eve 1974 and growing dark. I sit alone at a long wooden table in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of the Beinecke Library at Yale. On the table are six large cardboard storage boxes. I take the top off of one and peer inside: chaos. Manuscripts, letters, loose papers, and manila envelopes, all jumbled together as if they’d been tossed in the box by movers in a hurry—which, as it happens, they had.
The boxes contain the accumulated detritus of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who died of a heart attack at the Columbia Hotel in Times Square on the night of July 11th, 1966, while taking out the garbage. His body lay unclaimed in the morgue at Bellevue for two days, until a reporter noticed his name on a list of the dead. The next morning a lengthy obituary, accompanied by a photograph of a tormented-looking Schwartz, appeared in The New York Times. He was fifty-two.
It was his friend Dwight Macdonald, one of the great critics of that era, who salvaged the papers strewn about Schwartz’s hotel room at the time of his death. They would have vanished forever if it hadn’t been for a chance encounter in a bar between Macdonald’s son Michael and the owner of a moving company in Greenwich Village called the Covered Wagon. Macdonald lost track of them and would write me later: “I find in my files a note on ‘Delmore, re. White Horse days’ w. places the C.W. as being over Bradley’s restaurant, University Place at 11 st.” Schwartz’s papers were at the Covered Wagon.
Macdonald took on the role of Schwartz’s literary executor—no one else had volunteered—and for years afterward the papers were stored at Hofstra University on Long Island, where Macdonald was teaching at the time. But three months before my visit, in the fall of 1974, he arranged for them to be transferred to his own alma mater, Yale. I would be the first person to examine what Macdonald had rescued—barely—from oblivion.*1
It was nearly five now, and the library would soon be closing for the holidays. There wouldn’t be time for more than a brief look at Schwartz’s papers, but I was eager to see them. I was twenty-five and had signed a contract with the distinguished publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, committing me to write a biography of Schwartz without having any idea whether, in fact, there was enough material to do so.*2 What was in these boxes—they could have been the junk of a college student moving out of his dorm—would determine the course of my life.
I pulled out a letter from the top of the pile. It was typed on the stationery of Faber & Faber, the English publisher of T. S. Eliot, who had also worked for many years as the firm’s poetry editor.
The letter was from Eliot himself. It was brief but significant. Acknowledging receipt of an article by Schwartz in the Kenyon Review on Eliot’s journal, Criterion, the great man had written: “You are certainly a critic, but I want to see more poetry from you.” The letter was dated October 26th, 1939. Schwartz would have been twenty-five, the exact age I was at this moment.
As I stared at Eliot’s signature, I felt like Keats in his poem about discovering Chapman’s translation of Homer, “some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” I was there with the young poet, tearing open the envelope with eager hands, tipped off to the identity of its author by the return address, scanning it quickly, breathing hard as he came to the sentence about his poems, then setting the letter down gently on his desk and smoothing it out to read again and—or so I imagined—again and again and again. T. S. Eliot!
I rummaged through a sheaf of discarded drafts and notes for poems until a letter in a schoolboy’s neat blue script caught my eye. It was six pages long and addressed “Dear Delmore Schwartz”—the stiff salutation of someone who didn’t know him very well. I flipped to the last page. The letter was signed “Wystan”—W. H. Auden.*3 I raced through its contents with the nervous fervor of an heir reading a will. Which in a sense I was. Only my inheritance would turn out to be, instead of worldly goods, the custodianship of an obscure poet whose unlikely name would resonate through my life like a mournful bell.
The letter’s subject was a two-hundred-page poem by Schwartz entitled Genesis. Written in biblical-sounding prose alternating with long passages in blank verse, it told the story of Hershey Green, a “New York boy” born to Jewish-immigrant parents, and his efforts to find his way in the bewildering New World of America:
O land
Whence come chiefly the poor hurt peoples
Who for a reason good or bad cannot endure
Or be endured by the old Vaterland.
Published in an edition o
f three thousand in 1943, when Schwartz was thirty years old, it was a hugely ambitious effort, and he hadn’t quite pulled it off, in Auden’s view—at times the tension between “high” language and pedestrian detail was forced, and the epic conceit grew tiresome. Still, it had a kind of crazy energy, spilling forth in a hypnotic rhythm unlike anything ever seen in American poetry.
Not wanting to pour cold water on such a heroic effort, Auden concluded on a solicitous note: “This is a muddled and priggish letter I fear, but I really am both hopeful and anxious about your future development, as you have been given great gifts which, like all of us, you are turning against yourself.”
The brass lights on the table flicked on and off. I put the folder back in the box and shrugged on my puffy winter coat. As I headed out across the dark campus, snowflakes swirling around the lamps’ white orbs, I knew that I would soon be back in that hushed room, spending long days in the company of someone I had never met but would come to know better than anyone else in the world.
—
Schwartz’s story had lingered in my mind since I was in high school. I recall the exact date when I first encountered this exotic name: October 9th, 1966. My father, a book-mad physician who subscribed to Encounter and The Saturday Review, liked to pick up the New York newspapers’ Sunday editions from the out-of-town newsstand a few blocks from our home in Evanston, Illinois. (He found the book reviews in the local papers “primitive.”) On that particular Sunday, leafing through the New York World Journal Tribune Book Week*4 in the breakfast nook of our kitchen, I had come across a front-page article about a poet who had died that summer at the age of fifty-two, his once-promising career cut short by drugs and alcohol.
The article was by Alfred Kazin, the author of a memoir, A Walker in the City, about growing up the child of Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn during the great Diaspora; I had read this book in high school, excited by its passionate voice. Kazin was lavish in his praise of Schwartz, describing him as a figure of “immense intellectual devotion” whose poems “astonished everyone by being impeccably, formally right in the prevailing Eliot tradition—emotional ingenuity tuned to perfect pitch by gravity of manner.” But his long descent into madness had begun early. By the time he was thirty, he was exhibiting signs of erratic behavior, and his last years were a tale of squalor: he drifted from the Twin Elms Hospital, a sanitarium near the campus of Syracuse University, where he had been on the English faculty, to a desolate apartment in Manhattan, and finally to the seedy Times Square fleabag where he died.
The photograph on the cover of Book Week showed the poet on a park bench in Washington Square in a dark suit, his cigarette held outward between thumb and finger, Russian style. (I recognized this grip from my uncle Grisha, one of the old Russians who used to gather in my immigrant grandparents’ living room on Saturday nights for pinochle.) His eyes were wild. His gaze was averted from the camera. A scrap of the Daily News with the bold headline HEIRESS KEEPS HER MILLIONS lay beneath his feet. Over a quarter of a century, Schwartz had gone from a literary Adonis to a derelict stumbling in the street.
It was a haunting story, and after my Sunday morning encounter with this strangely named poet, I began to encounter references to Schwartz from time to time, experiencing that jolt of recognition one gets when registering the existence in the world of a person one hadn’t been aware of before. Oscar Williams had included him in Immortal Poems of the English Language, his face staring out from one of the oval portraits of contributors on its cover. Hair brushed back, eyes gazing off-camera in a sensuous stare, he looked like a movie star. But it wasn’t until I came across the story that had made Schwartz famous in his day that I understood Kazin’s preoccupation with this curious, self-doomed figure. It was called “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”
I first read this beautiful, deeply unnerving story during my sophomore year in college, while taking a course on American literature in the 1930s. I was deep in the stacks, reading back issues of Partisan Review to get a sense of what our professor liked to call the “intellectual currents” of the period, when I noticed Schwartz’s name in the table of contents of the autumn 1937 issue. His story was the first piece. “I think it is the year 1909,” it began. The narrator is sitting in a darkened movie theater, watching a newsreel of his parents as they stroll on the boardwalk at Coney Island, four years before his own birth. As the film unfolds, Schwartz listens to his father boast of how much money he has made, “exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated,” and starts to weep, overcome by his father’s suspicion that “actualities somehow fall short, no matter how fine they are.” The son, transfixed by the tragedy unfolding before his eyes—his parents’ unhappy marriage, his father’s lost fortune in real estate, his mother’s lonely widowhood—leaps up from his seat in the darkened theater at the very moment his father is about to propose to his mother and shouts, “Don’t do it! It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.” When I got to the end, I had the experience described by the critic Irving Howe upon encountering the story for the first time: “I felt my blood rise.”
In his masterwork, World of Our Fathers, Howe would note with tolerant irony “the sing-song, slightly pompous intonations of Jewish immigrants educated in night schools, the self-conscious, affectionate mockery of that speech by American-born sons, [and] its abstraction into the jargon of city intellectuals.” I was deeply familiar with that world, one in which the Jewish elders, ashamed of their provincial homeland, boasted of belonging to “the right class of people” and enjoying “the finer things in life.” As for the bookish characters I had encountered in Schwartz’s stories, “suspicious, rejected, ambitious to win more than most human beings desired”—I recognized them, too.
There were five titles listed in the library’s card catalog: Schwartz’s first collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, which contained, apart from the title story, a series entitled “Poems of Experiment and Imitation,” and a strange play, “Coriolanus”; The World Is a Wedding, a collection of stories; Shenandoah, a pamphlet-size play whose eponymous protagonist, Shenandoah Fish, possesses one of those supposedly haughty “American” first names combined with an ordinary Jewish surname that were a Schwartz trademark (note Bertholde Cannon and Belmont Weiss); Genesis, the two-hundred-page poem in “biblical verse” that Auden had written him about; and Vaudeville for a Princess, a collection of poems and eccentric prose pieces that provided evidence of the rapid decline Alfred Kazin had charted in his eulogy to Schwartz.
It was a modest but impressive body of work by my estimate: three stories—“The World Is a Wedding,” “New Year’s Eve,” and “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”—and five or six lyric poems that routinely show up in anthologies of American poetry, along with Whitman and Frost, Longfellow and Poe. The titles were often the first lines: “I am to my own heart merely a serf”; “Tired and unhappy, you think of houses”; and “In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave,” where the insomniac poet gazes out the window at “the stony street,” awaiting dawn as he listens to a bird’s first call:
So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of beginning
Again and again
While History is unforgiven.
When I first read this poem, I was too young to understand what it was about: the depredations of time, the innate will to survive, the way life crushes us in its inexorable march toward oblivion. But there was another poem I did understand, or thought I did, even at the age of seventeen. It was a poem so piercing in its insight into the human condition that it made me want to learn more about the author. How could he have known what he knew so early? It was called “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me,” and Schwartz was twenty-four when he wrote it—the same age at which he wrote “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”:
Breathing at my side, that
heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.
The sexual imagery—“his quivering meat…bulging his pants”—was hard to miss, and to describe orgasm as a “wince” was genius. But there was something else—vulnerable, guarded, inaccessible even to himself—that made the poem memorable. It was the presence of the poet’s double, the self from which he could never escape. The poem bespoke a loneliness of unfathomable depth. You could never get away from who you were.
*1 The second actually, the first having been a “graduate student at Hofstra” to whom Macdonald had given access to the papers. I never learned the identity of this precursor, destined to remain forever unknown, like the anonymous “person from Porlock” who interrupted Coleridge while he was writing Kubla Khan.
*2 And if so, whether I could do it; but that is a whole other story—in fact, the story.
*3 When I was seventeen, I had gone to hear Auden read at a local college. Hunched over the podium, he muttered incomprehensibly, his face cracked with deep wrinkles like the mud floor of a dried-up lake. Poetry makes nothing happen, he had famously declared. As far as I was concerned in those days, poetry made everything happen.
*4 The elongated name was the result of an ill-considered merger that lasted less than a year.
Richard Ellmann Credit 2
II
I can trace my obsession with biography back to the fall of 1971, when, armed with a B.A. in English literature that offered few prospects of future employment, I headed off to Oxford on a fellowship for study abroad. The turmoil of the sixties hadn’t reached England’s shores. In America, protests against the war in Vietnam were shutting down college campuses all across the country; every time you went to a comp lit seminar, you felt as if you were crossing a picket line. But Oxford was still defiantly archaic. Students who elected English literature had to begin at the beginning—the summer before my departure, I was sent a handbook of Anglo-Saxon grammar.*1
