The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  I was affiliated with New College (“new” when it was founded in 1379 with a grant from Richard II), but rather than live on campus, as most students from America did, I found “lodgings” in a Victorian redbrick house on Boars Hill, miles from the center of town. My days were a dreary expanse of dead time. There were no requirements, few lectures, no seminars—or none discoverable by the uninitiated. One’s only hope of establishing some formal connection with the university was through a tutor. I had been assigned J. O. Bayley, the husband of the novelist Iris Murdoch—and in later life, under the de-initialed name of John Bayley, a memoirist who pitilessly recorded his illustrious wife’s descent into Alzheimer’s.

  Bayley, alas, had no interest in teaching, or at least in teaching me. A distinguished critic, he was preoccupied with his “pieces” for this journal and that—and would dismiss me with a wave of the hand on the few occasions when I wandered into his office in search of an assignment or, at the very least, human contact. “Go read George Eliot, my boy. And not just Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The whole lot. That ought to keep you busy.”

  I did as I was told, spending my afternoons loitering in Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street, where—to the detriment of my stipend—I was allowed to purchase books simply by signing my name in a ledger. In this manner I also got through Stendhal, ten or twelve Balzacs (The Black Sheep, Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions), Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, and Manzoni’s The Betrothed; the major Russians; most of Dickens; and the entire works of Hardy, Forster, and Henry James, all in Penguin paperback editions. Their spines were color-coded according to period and nationality—black for nineteenth-century European literature, orange for the English Victorians, gray for the twentieth-century Moderns—and that was how I shelved them in my perpetually cold “bedsit,” where the only heat was from an electric coil in the sealed-up fireplace.

  Four decades later it troubles me that I spent hundreds—thousands!—of hours absorbed in books that now spark not a single memory neuron, but I’ve grown comfortable with this recollective nullity. Somehow the experience of reading as a priestly task—a calling—has stayed with me. Whenever I pass through the dining room of my New York apartment and see these old companions on the shelves, I feel a certain pride: I may have nothing to show for all my efforts, but I didn’t waste my time. It was from books that I learned the imagination is real: I knew Julien Sorel and Lucien de Rubempré and Frédéric Moreau better than I knew my own friends.

  —

  At the beginning of my second year at Oxford, my luck changed. Richard Ellmann, the renowned biographer of James Joyce, was in residence at New College as the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English, and he had agreed to supervise me, though with the gracious deferment of ego that I would later come to recognize as an element of his character. In answer to the importuning letter I’d written him upon learning he was there, Ellmann replied, “You may well prefer to have an Englishman rather than an American so as to savour*2 Oxford more completely.” I didn’t. Steven Dedalus had stumbled upon his Leopold Bloom.

  I spent my days and nights that year working my way through Joyce’s allusion-stuffed behemoth with the help of Ellmann’s own book, Ulysses on the Liffey, a genial guide that I referred to constantly, like a disoriented tourist navigating the streets of a foreign city, Fodor’s in hand. I was often lost, but I plunged ahead anyway, reassured by the analogue of The Odyssey that trotted alongside it, chapter by chapter, and by Ellmann’s erudite yet amiable crib. I grew to love Ulysses. I was defeated, though, by the hermetic stream-of-consciousness of Finnegans Wake, a book to which Joyce expected his readers to devote their entire lives. I didn’t have that kind of time.

  For Ellmann, the book was as clear as Trollope. Sometimes, while he read aloud from that mellifluous and daunting text—“Untie the gemman’s fistiknots, Qvic and Nuancee…Tez thelon langlo, walking weary! Such a loon waybash—wards to row!”—I would study the row of pale-green Dublin phone books*3 on the shelf behind his desk and wonder what had drawn him to his subject.

  Outwardly Joyce and his eminent biographer could hardly have been more different. Joyce was, in his own words, “a man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism.” Ellmann was a man of large virtue (though for many years he had a mistress in London) and a moderate drinker, if he drank at all; I remember only the odd glass of sherry. Joyce had a trim mustache, bottle-thick glasses, and in his later years, an eye patch; he was going blind. Ellmann had a receding hairline and a flat midwestern accent that years of dining at High Table with snobbish dons had failed to soften. Maybe it was his seemingly effortless fidelity to his own nature that made him such a shrewd interpreter of others. Ellmann treated his subjects with a benign, avuncular tolerance. He remarked upon, and forgave, their failings.*4 He was fascinated by genius, yet was himself in outward aspect an ordinary man. I often wondered if, like Leopold Bloom, he feasted on the inner organs of fowl.

  Many years later I came across a memoir of Ellmann by a former student, Henry Hart, in Sewanee Review; the title, “Richard Ellmann’s Oxford Blues,” gives a sense of its mournful tone. Hart, who arrived in Oxford just three years after I left, floundered there, too; having been turned away by other prospective tutors, he was taken in by Ellmann and spent seven years writing his Ph.D. thesis (known at Oxford as a D.Phil.) on the British poet Geoffrey Hill. His recollection of Ellmann—“a plump, slightly balding man wearing black-rimmed glasses, baggy pants, and running shoes”—corroborated mine, except for the shoes. Hart reminded me of details about Ellmann’s life at Oxford that I had forgotten, such as the ancient narrow house on St. Giles, near the center of town, where he lived with his wife, Mary, the author of a lively book of essays called Thinking About Women. (She was confined to a wheelchair, the result of a stroke.) But he also told me a great deal I hadn’t known: that Ellmann had started out as a poet, publishing his work in “little magazines” like the Hudson and Kenyon reviews until he decided to follow “the gods of biography”; that his London mistress had written an autobiographical novel about him; and that, like Bloom, he “brooded on his sins.” I also learned the extent to which Ellmann felt like “a loner” at Oxford, excluded even from his own college’s social life because he was an American Jew who specialized in “Modern” (that is, twentieth-century) writers: a deadly triad that could spike your chances of happiness in that city of dreaming spires. No wonder I was drawn to him.

  There was another connection, too. Like Ellmann, I had once aspired to be a poet and had published my work in various little magazines; I had even “placed” a poem in The New Yorker when I was nineteen.*5 But poetry didn’t consume me—a requirement for anyone determined to follow that forbidding path. I was beginning to sense that the lives of poets interested me even more than the poetry. I could recite Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” in its entirety (“I myself am hell; / nobody’s here”), but I was also curious about the car crash that nearly killed his first wife, Jean Stafford, while he was driving. I thrilled to the onomatopoetic mutterings of Eliot reading “The Waste Land” on the Caedmon album*6 I owned, but I still wanted to know why he had locked away his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, in a mental institution. Art and life didn’t just coexist: they enriched each other.

  Like a promising pianist who discovers that he’s not good enough to get to the top, I gave up my dream of becoming a poet without much regret (not having learned yet that life is about giving up dreams). In a poem dedicated to Schwartz, Lowell had quoted Wordsworth’s lines:

  We poets our youths begin in gladness;

  But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.

  It wasn’t just a matter of talent: I didn’t have the mental stamina. Why chance it?

  Besides, poetry wasn’t the only path to immortality. How many books of any kind could rival Ellmann’s biography of Joyce? To say that it was “magisterial,” as so many have, didn’t begin to explain its power. You could admire its stolidity, the eight hundred pages of closely pa
cked type, the dense columns of footnotes. But lots of biographers had produced books that were just as big. It was the way Ellmann told the story that enthralled me. Despite its length, his Joyce (as far as I was concerned, Ellmann’s Joyce was Joyce) managed to avoid the tedious march of facts and data that made these brick-weight biographies such a chore to read. He sought to bring us close to the man. He made his intent clear from the first sentence, assuring us that he would be our companion on the journey through his subject’s life, not an intimidating authority but an intimate guide. “We are all learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries,” he wrote.

  In order to understand Joyce, we had to inhabit the world he had known. June 16th, 1904—the day that Joyceans refer to as Bloomsday—was the day before Joyce’s landlords, the McKernans, “encouraged him to leave until he could pay his rent” (note the verb choice of “encouraged,” a sly ironic touch that lends character to the otherwise unobtrusive narrator). It was also the day that, walking down Nassau Street, Joyce “caught sight of a tall young woman, auburn-haired, walking with a proud stride”—Nora Barnacle, soon to become Nora Joyce. We even learn the weather: “June 16 was a fine, breezy day, with four hours of sunshine, and a clear night.”*7

  The product of this factual density was a book that recorded its subject’s life as if the biographer were living it alongside him. Recounting Joyce’s efforts to find a flat in Trieste, Ellmann reports that his subject moved into “squalid” quarters at 1 via Santa Catarina, where he and Nora were joined by Joyce’s brother Stanislaus: “To reach their own room James*8 and Nora had to go through Stanislaus’s.” Eventually he found a more suitable flat, at 8 via Scussa, for 600 crowns: “($120, £25).” Ellmann helpfully converts the sum; for a diligent biographer, no job is too small. “One pupil, Ettore Schmitz, was willing to put up 200, but no more, and Nicolas Santos, a Greek fruit merchant with a buxom wife, also would have helped.”*9 How did Ellmann discover that the wife of a Greek fruit merchant who in the end loaned Joyce no money was “buxom”? (The source was Stanislaus’s diary.) And why did it matter? Because, we learn a hundred pages later, the wife’s ample bosom would become a synecdochic feature of Molly Bloom.

  Ellmann’s Joyce didn’t read like a biography: it read like a work of art. It had the authority of great fiction; it was scholarly but not academic; and behind its facade of objectivity you could detect, if you listened closely enough, the biographer’s own voice. This was the kind of book I aspired to write. Ellmann—though I didn’t know it then—had made me want to be a biographer.

  —

  One afternoon I was hurrying through the narrow streets of Oxford, the old cobblestones slick with rain—did it ever not rain in this beautiful but perpetually cloud-shrouded town?—when a sharp pang of homesickness shot through me. I had been in Oxford for two years and had never acclimated myself to its strange ways: the closing of pubs from three to six (“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”); the odd Oxford vocabulary (vivas and swots); and the weird food (spotted dick, bubble-and-squeak, toad-in-the-hole). I had bought a used Wolseley Hornet, so dank and old that the carpet had rotted away; after a while I mastered driving on the left, but I could never distinguish between dual carriageways and pelican crossings or bonnets and boots. I might as well have been in Finland.

  As I stood on the drizzle-darkened sidewalk in front of Blackwell’s, stirred by the new books in the window—there were always new books—I realized that I would never be at home here. Perhaps I would never be at home anywhere. Life seemed to me indecipherable, except in books, where you could make of it what you would. “Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on.” Only where was my Dublin? Who my Joyce?

  I headed over to the Bodleian Library, that hushed, high-ceilinged cathedral of books, and sat down at one of the long tables, hoping to make some progress in Finnegans Wake (I was still only fifty pages in) when, on a sudden impulse, I got up and hurried over to the “card catalog”—in reality, a counter of atlas-size leather-bound black volumes containing age-buckled pages of entries written out in spidery longhand on strips of paper and pasted in with glue. I looked up Delmore Schwartz. The library had all his books. I filled out the slips and waited patiently for the librarian to bring them over to my table; books at the Bodleian had to be retrieved from some ancient cellar and hoisted up to the front desk by a pulley-operated device like a dumbwaiter. I had learned to wear gloves in the library. It was so cold I could see my breath.

  All afternoon I sat beneath the centuries-old portraits of Oxford great men, faint light filling the tall windows, and immersed myself in Schwartz’s books—the stories, with their troubled young protagonists; the sad, eloquent poems; the hyperrhetorical Genesis—marveling at the way he had managed to transform the idiom of immigrant Jews into the formal, echoic language of the English literary tradition. His poetry resonated with a primal depth; it shook literature awake for me in a way that made it seem like something I could actually produce, could do. I wanted to return to my own language and my own people, to hear a voice that spoke to me.

  I left Oxford near the end of my second year—I had neither the temperament nor the patience for academic life. I couldn’t even satisfy the demands of the tolerant Ellmann, who was always willing to cut me some slack: at the top of a twenty-page paper on Joyce’s use of the Renaissance philosopher Giambattista Vico’s theory of historical cycles in Ulysses, he had penciled a “good start.”

  *1 Half a century later my Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, modest even then, has dwindled to a single word: sweord-jiefu, “sword-giving.” It’s not a word that often comes in handy, but once in a while it still pops into my head, as it did one night when I happened to catch a rerun of Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf. (Anthony Hopkins was terrific as Hrothgar, but I don’t believe he made any mention of swords.)

  *2 Note the English spelling, the only Anglicism I ever detected in anything Ellmann wrote or said.

  *3 Their color reminded me of Joyce’s evocation in Ulysses of “the snot-green sea.”

  *4 Even the title of his collection of biographical essays on the major Modernists, Golden Codgers—the phrase is from Yeats—reflected Ellmann’s affection for the writers whose lives he interpreted so deftly.

  *5 It was called “Lighting the Lamps,” and I got paid ninety-eight dollars, a mysterious sum that didn’t add up by either word or line count. I’ve kept the check stub to this day.

  *6 Albums were played on a “record player,” a machine with a spindle onto which you lowered the “record,” a grooved vinyl disk, which in turn dropped down onto a spinning wheel, causing the arm of the needle to position itself over the record and lower itself onto its outermost groove. You can still find these in antique shops.

  *7 Biographers take justifiable pride in pinning down the exact weather on a significant day in their subjects’ lives. One obvious motive for this ostentatious display of archival labor is to show that the biographer has rummaged through almanacs, old newspapers, and nautical records with impressive, even irrational assiduity; but the case can also be made that these feats of meteorological research really do provide an atmospheric sense of what a particular moment in time felt like. Brian Boyd, in the first volume of his massive and entertaining biography of Vladimir Nabokov, isn’t satisfied to give us the date of his subject’s birth; he must furnish us with the climate conditions: “St. Petersburg. Dawn, April 23, 1899. A day ago the ice began breaking up on the Neva, but at this early hour—already the sun rises at 4:30—the air temperature has dropped again well below freezing.” The information doesn’t seem superfluous; it sets the scene for the opening act of the novelist’s life with the kind of precision Nabokov himself made a fetish of. Or this, from volume one of George Painter’s Proust: “The sky above Paris had never seemed so blue or crystalline—for the factories were closed, and their chimneys had ceased to smoke—as on the Sunday of Mobilisation Day, 3 August 1914, when Proust saw his brother, Robert, off to Verdun at the Gare de l�
��Est.” The cloudless sky at once foreshadows and obscures the terrible event about to occur.

  *8 Why did Ellmann resort to the familiar James here? My guess is that it was out of deference to the first-name basis he was on with Nora. Ellmann was a courtly man.

  *9 Why the conditional? Perhaps the Greek fruit merchant’s help was proffered but declined—or more likely, turned out for one reason or another to be unnecessary. A biographer can’t explain everything: the story would never get told.

  III

  Back in the States, I found a room in a rambling old house in Cambridge, not far from Harvard Square, and settled in to an aspiring writer’s life, pounding out essays, collecting rejection slips from various magazines, and chipping away at the modest trust fund I’d inherited from my immigrant grandfather, who had arrived penniless from Russia, sold postcards door to door, and eventually parlayed a job as an itinerant wool salesman into a thriving business. Once in a while I got a break: the literary editor of The Nation let me write book reviews for thirty-five dollars, but other journals paid even less. The fee at the local “alternative” newspaper, The Boston Phoenix, was, I recall, twenty-five dollars; and I once received a check for ten—payment for a painfully convoluted essay on Beckett in The Minnesota Review that ran to some seven thousand words and must have taken weeks to write.*1

  I had wangled an assignment from Stephen Berg, the kindly editor of the tabloid American Poetry Review, who gave me a shot when I proposed—an unknown writing about a no-longer-known—a biographical essay on Schwartz. It appeared, studded with errors (he died at the age of fifty-two, not fifty-three; it was his aunt, not his uncle, who attended his funeral; etc.), in the January–February 1974 issue. Whatever its flaws, it would serve me well.