by James Atlas
*5 Do I need to identify this once-famous novelist? There was a time when Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow constituted—so Bellow joked—the Hart, Shaffner, and Marx of American literature. (It occurs to me now that I should probably explain that allusion, too: a Jewish clothing company.) At least we no longer need refer to him as a “Jewish-American” writer, a term as obsolete as calling Ralph Ellison a “Negro” writer.
*6 No pens are allowed in these sanctums, lest some malevolent scholar end up defacing a manuscript.
*7 Notice, first of all, the consonance of d [drank] and d [darkness]; and (even if unintentional) the ambiguity of the line: Did he drink from his bottle of gin in the dark; or did he “drink in” as a figure of speech, the way one “drinks in” a beautiful landscape? Also, the colloquial way of putting it would have been to write “I drank in the dark”—not “darkness.” It was as if Delmore couldn’t not write poetry.
*8 An intriguing line item: Bellow and Delmore had gotten a contract from Viking for a textbook on “What the Great Novelists Say About the Novel.” It came to nothing.
*9 Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare’s home—a fresh substitute for that now-threadbare metonym, “The Bard.”
*10 Flemington, New Jersey, the rural town where Delmore lived in the early 1950s, when he was teaching at Princeton.
*11 It’s instructive to compare this attitude toward mental illness with David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, his account of accompanying David Foster Wallace on a book tour around the country. In his introduction, Lipsky offers a detailed chronicle of Wallace’s history with various antidepressants; his suicide is treated purely (though nonreductively) as a psychopharmacological problem. It’s a given that Wallace was a genius, but how contributory that genius was to his illness isn’t raised as an issue and is either beside the point or hasn’t even occurred to the author, who belongs to a generation—and I say this with envy, not disparagement—for whom literary talent was a gift, not a curse.
Leon Edel Credit 4
IV
Not long after my return to Cambridge, I had looked up a girl I used to “court”—probably not the right word to describe my habit of periodically showing up stoned at her dorm in the middle of the night, eager to babble on about Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. I was drawn by her sharp intelligence, her reserved manner, and her elegant features. She seemed even more striking now that we were in our mid-twenties and our lives were beginning in earnest. Annie was in medical school; I was a writer, or trying to become one. We got married in 1975, when I was a year into my book, and moved into an old wooden three-flat in Cambridgeport.
Annie quickly became what I called a biographer’s widow, the spouse of someone who is not strictly speaking dead but not entirely present either. I spent much of my time in the company of another—my subject, who demanded vast amounts of my time, my energy, and my mental attention, and with whom I also had an actual relationship, even though Delmore really was dead. I loved Annie’s company, but Delmore was always there.
It was strange to be living in the city where Delmore had lived. Everywhere I went, I could sense his shade—“the heavy bear”—by my side. He had spent three years in the 1940s teaching at Harvard; loitering in the Grolier Bookshop, a quaint establishment that stocked only poetry; dining in the Hayes-Bickford cafeteria in Harvard Square (“the Bick”), long since replaced by a Chinese restaurant; and staring morosely out the window of his apartment on Ellery Street. I have a photograph of him in front of the building, a standard three-decker, leaning against a telephone pole in a winter coat, behind him piles of snow—the same frigid tableau I encountered as I trudged past his door (number 47) on my way to the Out of Town newsstand in the Square to flip through Kenyon Review after a long day of clacking away on my Olympic electric typewriter.
When we visited Annie’s family house in Vermont, I discovered that Delmore had beaten me to North Bennington as well. I would drive past the Overlea Inn, where he and his first wife, Gertrude Buckman, swam in the goosebump-inducing waters of Lake Paran, where we swam in the years I was writing my book, and where, a decade later, our children would swim.
The Overlea Inn was on a dirt road that has since been paved; now a private home, it belonged to “Mrs. Stanwood,” whose name for some reason doesn’t appear in the index. What I really wanted to write about here was the heat: the boiling summer days when the air shimmered on the asphalt in front of Powers Market and the sun beat down with a furnace intensity. Delmore must have experienced this heat—he was in Vermont all summer—but I would need a Farmers’ Almanac to prove it.
Nothing, however, prevented me from identifying with Delmore’s conduct on the college tennis courts, where, he confessed in his journals, one day he would lose his temper and the next behave like “a tennis Christian” who gives his wife a chance: “After playing long and well, he tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, he plays pat-pat lightly with her and not only does she enjoy it but he enjoys it also.” I behaved the same way with Annie, whacking forehands cross-court; it wasn’t until she pointed out my bad manners that I recalled Delmore’s conversion and let up.
As I pored over Delmore’s journals, I was haunted by the familiarity of his voice, which I seemed almost to hear as a ghostly emanation from the page. I was dimly aware, as of a voice from one’s past heard over the phone after many years (a high school friend, an old lover), that I knew him, knew his torment, his sense of squandered possibilities, in some deep and fundamental way. Writing a biography was like being a psychiatrist with a single patient, and though Delmore had “terminated” long before I “took him on,” the thousands of hours I spent trying to understand him gave me the kind of insight into his character that often eluded me in my relationships with the living.
—
Biographers are invariably drawn to the writing of a biography out of some deep personal motive,” noted Leon Edel, the great biographer of Henry James. For many, this affinity with their subjects is overt. They’re from the same place (Theodore Roethke and Allen Seager both grew up in rural Michigan); they write in the same genre (the poet Andrew Motion on the poet Philip Larkin); they’ve embarked on the same religious quest (A. N. Wilson, a writer preoccupied with the sturdiness of his Christian faith, and C. S. Lewis, its tortured questioner)*1; or they belong to the same profession (Charles Strozier, a psychoanalyst, and Heinz Kohut, the founder of self-psychology): what binds them is their life experience.
E. M. Forster’s tribute to his beloved professor Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson was a model of overt biography (whether acknowledged or not). Published when Forster was fifty-five, it was, to employ a psychoanalytic term, “experience-near.” Reflecting on Dickinson’s first impressions of Cambridge, Forster wrote: “He had no idea of what Cambridge meant—and I remember having the same lack of comprehension about the place myself, when my own turn came to go up there. It seems too good to be real.” His description of King’s College, Forster’s own, is permeated with a bone-deep familiarity:
Nearly everyone knows what King’s College, Cambridge, looks like; it has been depicted and described since curiosity began. But as we return, as we recross the bridge, as we ascend the gentle slope of the lawn, note how the buildings of Gibbs dominate, how they set their seal upon the composite beauty of the scene.
Goldsworthy’s world is Forster’s, so much so that by the time the biographer himself enters the picture, a hundred pages in (“From his classes and essay-talks we slide onwards into social intercourse and familiarity, and this is the moment when I want to introduce myself”), it’s as if we have been expecting him all along.
There was another significant parallel. Dickinson, like Forster, was “worried by sex”—a euphemism for gay (in the parlance of the time, an “invert”); it was the primary conflict of Forster’s own life. His intimation that Dickinson suffered from a kind of general unrequited love (“He had for many years been offering affection where it was not needed”) is
given authority by Forster’s own romantic solitude (assuaged, finally, by a policeman who became his lover). What better way to deal with his own sexual conflicts than by exploring someone else’s?
At other times, however, the biographer’s motive is covert:*2 he develops an emotional bond with his subject or attaches his own character traits and preoccupations to a figure whose outward circumstances could hardly have been more divergent from his own.
It was this covert form of identification, barely (if at all) conscious, I suspect, that Walter Jackson Bate brought to his life of Samuel Johnson. Bate’s biography is a supreme effort of sustained empathy, yet it’s based on no perceptible resemblances between biographer and subject. The two men belonged to different historical periods and nations; they diverged in sexual orientation—Bate was homosexual, Johnson heterosexual; they had no religion or geography or family circumstances to bind them. But as I watched Bate climb the steps of Widener Library on a chilly winter morning, huddled against the cold in a Gogolian overcoat, I thought of a passage from his biography: “the dark bewildered prison house of the isolated subjective self.”
Leon Edel was another covert biographer. A child of Jewish immigrants who grew up in the remote Canadian province of Saskatchewan, where his father owned a general store, he seemed to have little in common with Henry James, the urbane, fastidious, and worldly novelist to whom he devoted his life. James was at ease in European aristocratic circles, whether he was visiting Edith Wharton’s estate, the Pavillon Colombe, or dining with the popular novelist Horace Walpole at the Reform Club. And yet after years of living in close proximity, many biographers tend to identify with their subjects even as they’re turning their subjects into versions of themselves. Edel, initially a stranger to James’s world, soon made himself at home in it; he studied literature at NYU and the University of Paris, traveled widely abroad, and would become adept at the kind of mild snobbery for which his subject was famous.*3
In my Cambridgeport apartment I made my way through Edel’s two-thousand-page epic. I loved the book but eventually tired of his adulatory, even slavish tone. In Switzerland, he wrote, James “seized the romance and the ruin of Europe, the contradictions of old and new, the symbols human and material of the old feudal order.” And all by the age of twelve! A volume later, the biographer compared the novelist to Marcus Aurelius: “He would offer the world the countenance of a conqueror who was, as Arnold said, tender and blameless—tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore.”*4 That Henry James was a figure of great stature, that he moved through the world with inordinate gravitas, no one doubts, but he was a novelist, not a Roman emperor.
Still, if at times he elevated James to an unnatural height, Edel possessed uncanny insight into his subject’s life and mind. One of the most devastating episodes in his biography concerns the reception of James’s play Guy Domville, a work that James had hoped would bring him money and fame but instead brought him public humiliation. In a letter to his friend Morton Fullerton, James reported that he had been driven off the stage by “a howling mob”; Edel saw the “brutish rumpus” as one of the precipitating causes of the nervous breakdown James suffered near the end of his life.
Edel’s chapter on the “black times” brought on by the debacle of Guy Domville and the disappointing sales of the New York edition of his novels is one of the most eloquent in his massive book. Remorselessly he quotes James on “the black devils of nervousness, direst damndest demons,” “the sick inanition and weakness and depression,” the “beastly solitudinous life” he leads at Lamb House. The novelist sobs in his bedroom, frets over his dwindling checkbook, and submits to “electrocutions.” (Today we would call it ECT.) Edel reports all this with such empathic acuity that it’s as if he’s in the room with James, having his own nervous breakdown.
Were my intimations of a deep subliminal connection between Edel and James plausible, or were they mere speculations based on the thinnest of evidence—or on no evidence at all? Only many years later did I come across a long interview in The Paris Review in which Edel confessed that before embarking on his James project, he had gone into analysis out of “confusion and despair.”
My connection with Delmore was overt—so much so that I sometimes wondered if I was writing my autobiography. The circumstantial similarities between us were pronounced: he was born in 1913, the same year as my father; his parents had come over from Russia in the great wave of Jewish immigration that crested around the turn of the last century and brought my own grandparents to these shores; we were both poetry-besotted adolescents, drunk on Eliot, intoxicated by the strangeness of Wallace Stevens, and groping our way through the opacities of Ezra Pound.
As dramatic (and sometimes creepy) as these parallels were, they were incidental. The real ones ran much deeper. Delmore’s attachment to the innocence of early childhood, his unrealizable expectations, his piercing loneliness, his book hunger, his literary ambition, his dread of failure, his sense of the sadness of life…these were traits and longings we shared.
There’s a saying in the psychiatric profession: the specialty you choose is your own disease. If so, I had chosen my subject wisely.
*1 Also—is this insane?—they share two-initial names.
*2 Covert or overt: I like the rhyme of this dyad, the second term an orthological truncation of the first. It reminds me of Auden’s sly observation that the word cosmic is separated by only a single letter from comic.
*3 I once interviewed Edel at the Century Association, a venerable arts club that has been around in New York since the mid-nineteenth century. It was Memorial Day weekend, and the place had a deserted feel. Over coffee, he explained that Saskatchewan wasn’t as provincial as it appeared. “In that town, all Europe seemed to be gathered,” he said. “It may have been a frontier, but it was cosmopolitan, steeped in a nostalgia for culture.” He showed me the club’s portrait of Henry James—also a member of the Century. Superficially, there was little resemblance between the two men. And yet despite the biographer’s pencil-thin mustache, his slight frame and American accent, I had the unsettling sense that Edel had become the novelist he was writing about. So thorough, so total was his identification with his subject that he had virtually erased himself. The biographer Janet Adam Smith, in her obituary of Edel in The Guardian, confirmed this impression: “I really believe that Leon—wearing a ring that had once belonged to the Master!—felt that by immersing himself so deeply in James’s life and thought something of their essence had been transmitted to him.”
*4 My seventh-grade Latin has evaporated, so I don’t know what this means.
V
Journals are the log of the inner life; letters are the life presented to the world, the face prepared to meet the faces that you meet. I traveled across the country on a dogged recovery mission, tracking down Delmore’s correspondents and ransacking library archives—I marveled that so many letters had survived the ruthless onslaught of time, which in the end disperses all. Why these and not others? Like the torn scrolls of Greek and Latin poetry that survive the depredations of history, from which we struggle to reconstruct a vanished civilization in its barest outlines, the letters painstakingly collected by the biographer reflect only a shadow of his subject’s life as it was actually lived.
The record, I discovered, is inevitably partial.*1 There are always more letters: they show up after the biography is written, discovered in some overlooked archive or library; tucked away in a drawer and forgotten; withheld for whatever reason by the recipient. If only I’d had in my possession the letter that turned up at an auction three years after I finished my book, the whole story would have become clear!
Why this feverish quest? Letters are the foundation of biography. Uncensored and unscripted, they often reveal a great deal about their author that the author may not have wanted known—or didn’t know he was revealing. A letter may contain evidence of a secret assignation or identify a lover unlisted on the roster of the author’s known inamorata;*2 it may dispar
age a friend or engage in “the mere twaddle of graciousness,” as Henry James called the genre of the tossed-off, jocular, sometimes inane missive one writes to thank a host for dinner or wriggle out of a date. They’re not intended for the Collected Letters—though they may end up there if the recipient decides to sell them to a private collection or a library. If you don’t want your letters to be read, don’t send them.
Gotham Book Mart sign Credit 5
Or don’t write them at all. Letters are vessels that bottle up the fluidity of the self; they capsize your expectations and turn your subject into someone else, one of the infinite selves contained within us. Delmore’s letters recounted the same events to different correspondents in different voices, changing their tone, their intent, even the facts when it suited his purpose.
I loved Virginia Woolf’s letters; I owned two volumes and would eventually own all six. “Letter writing is one of the gifts which was kept back when fairies stood at my cradle and gave me an affectionate heart,” she wrote the novelist Hugh Walpole. Hardly. She was a master of the vivid image, the wry detail, and could depict a scene with fine satirical verve. “Oh I’m so furious!” she complained to her sister Vanessa: “Just as we’d cleared off our weekend visits, the telephone rings, and there comes to lunch late, hungry yet eating with the deliberation and mastication of a Toad, Mr. Gillies of the Labour Party. It’s 5:30. He’s still there, masticating.”
Her bipolarity is on vivid display; moods fluctuate with an almost dangerous versatility. Toward importuners—young novelists, pushy acquaintances, literary editors—she is polite but firm; toward the Bloomsbury circle, she vacillates between subtle shades of intimacy; toward her aristocratic friends, she’s engaging, flattering, and disarmingly attractive but never unctuous. Welcoming a visit from Lady Sibyl Colefax, she warns: “(1) View is ruined (2) No room for chauffeur in house (3) the smallest possible doghole for you (4) Village char is cook.” Returning from a visit to Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst, one of England’s great houses, she writes her friend Ethel Smyth: “The whole place was a magnificent proof of our old English aristocratic tradition. When I got back here I was positively ashamed of my middle class origin. It was a wet night and the kitchen was damp and my room all strewn with old clothes.”
