by James Atlas
Delmore is clearly playing to the gallery here, keeping an eye on the future. He’s self-conscious, sacrificing for the sake of literary effect the candid impulsivity of a letter meant to be read at the time it was written. (“Never send an angry letter at night, only in the morning,” Delmore once instructed himself in his journal—a sensible injunction that he violated often and with predictable results.) At the same time, his confidence that posterity will take an interest in him is at war with his insecurities and self-doubt. He’s trying to figure himself out, using the occasion of a letter to engage in self-therapy.
In a way, Delmore’s barrage of questions got me off the hook: if he couldn’t answer them, why should his biographer be expected to? But I also found the fact that my subject was, in a sense, acknowledging my presence unsettling. I felt used—a mere secretary, a go-between, an archivist working to preserve Delmore’s correspondence for generations to come. Not that there weren’t letters meant to be read the moment they were written. “I don’t see why you need to bring a ham to Cambridge,” he writes on January 20th, 1946, to the novelist Jean Stafford, who shared an apartment with him and her then-husband Robert Lowell. It’s not a sentence I’ll quote in my biography: who cares about the ham? It plays no role in any story. But it brings him before me with startling vivacity. Delmore isn’t thinking about poetry or his career or sex at this moment; he’s thinking about a ham.
“Call me at CH 2-3615*9 if you can when in N.Y.,” he writes to Robie Macauley, then the editor of Kenyon Review, on October 7th, 1961. I’m tempted, in a fit of madness, to dial the number in the hope that Delmore himself will answer, enabling me to ask the million questions that force their way into my consciousness as I sit at my desk day after day, writing his life. (“Life-writing,” biography is sometimes called—a compound that conveys both the stolid former corporeality of the subject and the biographer’s act of imaginative re-creation.) What made you decide to become a poet? Who were your literary influences?
It could have been the Paris Review interview that Delmore never had, since by the time of the magazine’s founding in 1953, he was incapable of giving a straight answer about anything—certainly not the “craft” questions posed by George Plimpton, the inventor of this famous literary institution. Do you use a typewriter or a pen? I also had questions of a more intimate nature—questions he wouldn’t have answered and I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask, even if he had picked up the phone. Questions about his parents’ marriage; his relationship with his brother; his divorce from his first wife, Gertrude Buckman…Holden Caulfield said there were times when you liked a book so much you wanted to call up the author. I guess he didn’t mean dead authors.
*1 Philip Larkin’s letters to his girlfriend Monica Jones provide a vivid example of how precarious the whole letter-collecting enterprise can be. Jones had bought a house in Northumberland but spent most of her time with Larkin at his home in Hull, where she stayed on after Larkin’s death. Eventually, following years of amicable negotiation, she granted Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion access to the letters, but by that time she was too ill to accompany him to the Northumberland house. Motion drove up alone, only to discover that it had been ransacked by burglars. The furniture was broken; cans of food oozed their contents on the steps; and—what nervous joy this must have brought the biographer—there were letters from Larkin strewn about everywhere, in boxes, cupboards, and closets, stuck in books. Motion gathered them up, locked the house, and drove off, “exhilarated and ashamed” by the cache he’d salvaged. A week later thieves again broke in and took everything left: “If the letters had been there, they would have gone too.”
*2 See Flaubert’s letter to a friend in which the novelist, apparently fresh from a tumble with the governess, signs off, “Votre géant qui f…comme un âne.” A noncommittal footnote in the Pléiade edition suggests, “Perhaps an allusion to Juliet Herbert.” The tactful perhaps hints that an omission in Flaubert’s sexual history has been rectified, though at a cost to one of the parties concerned. “It is hard not to wonder what the Herbert family would have made of this,” Julian Barnes notes wryly in a review of the Correspondance. I suspect Flaubert would have been pleased by the revelation of his sexual prowess.
*3 Even the biographer has to admit that some facts are of little value—interesting, perhaps, but not necessarily illuminating. Does it matter who Geoffrey Aspern is “based on,” if anyone? I didn’t think so until I came across a person in Richard Holmes’s Shelley named George Silsbee, described as “a young Harvard graduate” who had made his way to Florence in search of Shelley’s love letters. “He tried ineffectually to charm them from the dark-eyed lady”—Claire Clairmont, Byron’s lover and the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Allegra—“by parading his youthful zeal and enthusiastic knowledge of Shelley. His performance inspired James’s cutting story The Aspern Papers (1888), which is the final damnation of all biographers.” Suddenly Aspern has taken on flesh and blood; he’s a scoundrel with a story of his own. Why pretend these connections between characters and their real-life models make no difference? They don’t cancel out the writer’s capacity for invention; they call attention to it. The art is in what’s made up.
*4 I thought of calling this book Sundays at Kinko’s: when I was writing my biography of Saul Bellow, I had a full-time job for a period of years that meant I often had only weekends and the occasional vacation day to do my research. I had to work fast to pry letters out of his relatives and friends (and sometimes enemies); I would go to their homes in my rented car, explain why handing over Bellow’s letters was good for American literature, and then, booty in hand, hurry to Kinko’s to copy them. In Hyde Park, Evanston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, I stood before the copying machine, shielding my eyes from its atomic flash as the precious documents were duplicated for my eager scrutiny. I worried about going blind, but that didn’t slow me down: someone could always read me the letters or translate them into Braille. What mattered was that I had them in my possession.
*5 As I grow older, I have a better understanding of these once-incomprehensible lacunae of memory. Going through my own correspondence, I was startled to find letters from Anaïs Nin—a now-somewhat-faded name but not so long ago a writer who qualified for a major biography by Deirdre Bair—written in longhand on stationery bedecked with colorful drawings of flowers. (“Like my hippy paper?”) I had invited Nin to give a benefit reading for my college literary magazine, prompting a brief flurry of correspondence. I’d forgotten all about it.
*6 The book I acquired on that initial foray and that, forty years later, I now hold in my hand was Marcel Proust: An English Tribute, published in New York in 1923 by a firm called Thomas Seltzer. The dust jacket, if there ever was one, is gone; the cardboard is a pattern of faded gold fleurs-de-lis against a brown background that reminds me of the dilapidated wallpaper in a nineteenth-century hotel across the street from Paddington Station. The contributors include Arnold Bennett, Compton Mackenzie, George Saintsbury, and Arthur Symons, among once-illustrious others, remembered now only by a few dedicated students of early twentieth-century literature. But they were famous then, in the middle of it all—the Kazins, Edmund Wilsons, and Lionel Trillings of their day.
*7 I sold it to the rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, who has a great knack for extracting huge sums from research libraries for the archives of famous writers, and purchased with the proceeds my first computer, a model the size of an old Philco TV that saved data on pliable “floppy disks.”
*8 Actually, it was a gift from Annie. A generous friend, Ilyas Khan, gave me another, so I now own two, one of which is inscribed to “Aileen”—Aileen Ward, who wrote a fine biography of Keats and was Delmore’s girlfriend for a while. (Richard Ellmann also had a crush on her.) The inscription was by Saul Bellow.
*9 The exchange—“CH”—recalls, as John Cheever famously wrote, “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the B
enny Goodman quartets from the radio in the corner stationery store and when almost everybody wore a hat”—a time when you could title a novel, as John O’Hara did, BUtterfield 8.
VI
“Have you read Richard Holmes’s Shelley?” Dwight Macdonald wrote me not long after it came out. “I feel like a bee drowning in honey.” I could imagine him sitting in his gloomy apartment on East 86th Street on a steamy summer day, the air conditioner blasting, cigarette holder in hand, a glass of Scotch positioned by his side, lost in this prodigious book. It was Holmes’s first biography, an eight-hundred-page tour de force. He was only twenty-eight.
I hurried over to the Pangloss Book Shop in Harvard Square, which specialized in recondite titles—the books on display in its window tended toward members of the Frankfurt School, Structuralists, and Continental philosophers like E. M. Cioran and Roland Barthes. Mr. Hillman, the shy, slight, bespectacled proprietor, didn’t have a copy of the Shelley on hand (he had once dropped into our desultory conversations the information that he didn’t “believe in” biography); but he ordered one with an ostentatious show of reluctance, muttering to himself as he filled out the invoice, and a few days later the prize arrived.
I instantly saw what Macdonald meant. Here’s how it starts:
His bedroom looked west, toward the setting sun. There was a wide lawn, with a shallow bank to roll down, and then a cluster of enormous trees, elms with rooks in, cedars, American redwoods brought back to England by his grandfather, and further and darker, rhododendrons and fir trees. Through the trees was the lake.
Was this a biography? The intensely visualized opening, with its unnamed subject (“grandfather” didn’t have a name, either), read like a novel. And it was written—this was perhaps the most remarkable thing—from a child’s point of view. When Shelley’s nurse tells the boy tales of the Great Snake that lurked in a nearby pond, Holmes employs interior monologue (“She said it lived in St Leonard’s Forest and was at least three hundred years old”), and his simple declarative sentences, often beginning with a pronoun, have the repetitive sound of a primer. It’s no surprise to learn on the second page that “Bysshe,” as the poet was called by his family, is six years old as the book opens.
Richard Holmes Credit 6
A few pages later, however, Holmes radically disrupts the chronology, jumping forward to foreshadow the poet’s premature end (“The visions and sleepwalking recorded by Mary Shelley in the last weeks of Shelley’s life—he was then aged 29”) and placing him firmly within a historical context: “Shelley had been born in 1792. It was the year in which Tom Paine published his Rights of Man, and the year in which the French revolutionary forces declared war on Europe.” There follows a brief sketch of developments in art, science, and political philosophy, summing up in a few brusque sentences the works and deeds of the painter Joshua Reynolds and “the young Turner,” Thomas Malthus and William Pitt—the key figures of the age. It’s not until page nine that Holmes get around to the genealogy (“Shelley’s great-grandfather, Timothy Shelley, the third of five sons”) that most biographers, bored and boring, hurry through at the beginning.
Holmes had subtitled his biography The Pursuit—he was out not only to depict his subject but to find him, to conjure up an actual person who had once lived in the world and fix his image, his reality, his essence on the page. Like Ellmann’s Joyce, Holmes’s Shelley was an act of virtual resuscitation. Here was the poet rendered animate: falling asleep on the hearth rug in the Oxford rooms of his friend (and future biographer) Thomas Hogg and waking abruptly after a few hours, “rubbing his hair wildly and launching without pause into a rapid and highly involved discussion of some abstruse problem”; waiting anxiously for a chaise on a London street at four a.m. as he prepared to elope with “two girls,” Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Clairmont (“One has the impression that the air round [sic] Shelley was heavy with what can only be described as sexual static”); wandering in the Italian Apennines, where he spent long hours “gazing upwards at the changing skyscapes, and the shifting light values in the trees, and the blue-green transformations of the air in the Lima valley.”
I was struck by Holmes’s capacity to intuit his subject’s interior life. When he claimed to know how Shelley felt (“He felt his friendship with Hogg was one more example of an intimate emotional relationship that had failed him”), I believed him, though he had violated a fundamental rule of biography: You can’t know what your subject felt. But you can get close. Going deeper into his subject through the artful deployment of his materials, the biographer inhabits his subject’s life as if he had been there—as if the events he’s relating hadn’t occurred in the distant past but had just happened. So when Shelley, having relocated from London to the Lake District, goes exploring in his new neighborhood, Holmes writes: “He walked out alone over the cold and beautiful upland pastures, gazing down on the ruffled waters and brooding on mutability.” Many books and letters and other documents have been marshaled in support of this scene, but no amount of citation can prove that Shelley was “brooding on mutability”—even if Shelley himself said he was. He could have been brooding on a great many things: Was he having second thoughts about moving to Keswick? Was he worried about ruining his shoes in the wet field? Nevertheless the reader goes along with Holmes’s assumption because the biographer has internalized Shelley’s unconscious. The evidence isn’t empirical, but it’s based on a decade of investigation. Holmes had earned my trust.
“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?” asked Robert Browning. I did. In Holmes’s book.
—
Among Delmore’s papers at the Beinecke Library were typed drafts of his late poems, written in the 1950s—late in the tragic chronology of his own life. He was only in his forties then but already in deep trouble. Invited to give the prestigious Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton, he rambled on about the anti-Semitism of T. S. Eliot and was clearly unprepared. He didn’t look well; deep pools of fatigue had formed under his eyes.
The unpublished poems were depressing—just as I had remembered them from my first encounter in the Bodleian. Drafts are, in a literal sense, essays: the writer is trying out, in the privacy of his own room, a new subject, a new method, a new voice, a new style. Why not leave him alone to make his mistakes, stumble into false beginnings, get it wrong? These drafts constitute the writer’s private lab: they’re none of your business. In the end, he got it right: isn’t that what matters?
Not to the biographer. For the obsessive diggers drawn to this odd profession, everything matters. And that’s why every electric bill, every grocery list, every torn envelope must be scrutinized in case it yields the genesis of a poem. And if it doesn’t, there is still the aura of the writer’s long-vanished presence; you are holding in your hand a document, however pedestrian, once held in your subject’s hand. It emanates the reality of that lost moment when it was part of another’s life, before it became part of yours. And in that transfer of emotional energy, that current running between subject and biographer, lies the significance of the draft. Its literary errors, lapses in taste, misjudgments, and stumbles offer a clue to what the writer was thinking before he’d even formulated the thought. When all you know is the finished product, it’s illuminating to come across its origins: how did those scrawled words become this burnished work of art?
It pained me to read the early, often inchoate versions of Delmore’s poems. Encountering a disastrous (and in fairness to the author, often discarded) draft, I felt the mingling of disgust and voyeuristic thrill that a child might feel catching a glimpse of his mother in a girdle as she’s getting dressed.
Not that I had any choice. I reminded myself of a pupil sitting beside his teacher as he points out the flaws in a poem—repetitions, flawed diction, grammatical infelicities, the embarrassing catachresis, the botched metaphor, the lapse in taste—that can wreck it. Only in this instance it was Delmore’s composition that was under scrutiny, not mine, and I would be the one giving the grade.
Being in charge—deciding what to share with the reader and what to suppress—was a big responsibility. It gave you power over your subject. You wanted to show the genesis of his best work, the missteps and wrong turns, but you didn’t want to embarrass him.
—
Manuscripts and journals and letters—the written record—form only a part of the biographer’s evidence. There is also the writer’s—for lack of a better word—stuff. In his account of the death of Shelley’s dissolute friend Scrope Davies, Richard Holmes provides an inventory of the objects found in a battered leather chest Davies had left behind, locked, until 1976, when it was discovered in a vault at Barclays Bank: “white kid evening-gloves; a lock of hair from the head of the society beauty Lady Frances Webster; tailor’s bills for tennis shoes and red lounge slippers; collections of aphorisms; 20 letters from Byron; and two previously unpublished poems by Shelley.” Some of these time-faded items are poignantly valueless, the detritus of a lifetime—“everything that Scrope valued, and much that he did not,” as Holmes describes it. Davies fled England in the dead of night, having incurred a gambling debt he could never hope to repay, and ended what must have been, given his circumstances, an excruciatingly long life; he died in 1852, at the age of 69, an exile in Paris, holding court on a bench in the Tuileries. His chest survives as an artifact that brings before us the physical world he inhabited in a state of uncanny preservation—“a sort of miniature Pompeii of the late Regency period.”*1
Delmore, too, had left behind a time capsule. Housed in the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University is a cache of bank statements, canceled checks, old photographs, letters from tradesmen to whom he had owed money,*2 finds—to continue Holmes’s metaphor—as thrilling to the biographer as the sudden glimpse of a shard of clay in the sand must be to an archaeologist. There, at last, is the buried figurine.
