by James Atlas
When the library closed, I would trudge back to the Mohawk Lodge, where Delmore had once wrecked his room—perhaps the very room where I lay on my bed watching reruns of The Twilight Zone. In the Orange Bar, Delmore’s hangout on the Syracuse campus, I sat in the corner eating a grinder and mourning the shabby poet in a black raincoat who had sat there a decade before.
On occasion, though, I would come across something that had real value. One of the most fascinating objects in my possession (a gift from Macdonald) was a report card from Delmore’s three years at New York University, where he had been a student from 1932 to 1935, salvaged, along with the porn mags, canceled checks and unpaid bills, torn-up letters and other junk, from his last hotel room. I studied it often, always finding fresh details to ponder on this single yellow page. For instance, the address:
Mrs. Rose Schwartz
2157 Ocean Avenue
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Ocean Avenue? For a biographer, finding a previously unknown address is as electrifying as it must have been for an astronomer to find an uncharted star in the sky: where there had once been nothing but black inky darkness, a giant blot of uncharted universe, there now came into focus a pinpoint of light that had never been glimpsed before. Brooklyn. What was she doing there? I thought she would still have been living in Washington Heights. And so, retracing my chronological steps like a hiker lost in the woods, I had to return to familiar terrain—Eastern Parkway, Ocean Parkway, 179th Street in Washington Heights—in order to figure out where I’d gone off course. I gradually pieced together the story: money was tight with Harry gone, and Rose had been forced to move back to Brooklyn, where the rent was cheaper. Delmore’s report card was gold. And this was all before I even got to his grades.
Which were, for the most part, good. He’d received As in all the courses he cared about—History of Philosophy, 17th Century Literature, Aquinas and Dante—and struggled where I would have expected him to struggle. (His D in Algebra comforts me; I barely scraped by myself.) As always, there were enigmas: Why the C in Music? Cs and Ds in Elementary Greek? But he got an A in Metaphysical Analysis. He liked to spin out theories; philosophy entertained him because it challenged the illogic of the world. Music and Greek were too learning-intensive: you had to sit down and memorize. He could do this with poetry—he knew a great deal of it by heart—but not with information presented in unfamiliar signs. The report card was a graph chart of Delmore’s mind, a map of the way it was laid out. It gave me pleasure to think about him in this way. The grades anchored speculation to fact.
And yet, examining this document now, four decades after it came into my hands, I feel sad. Like the faded blue uniform of a Union soldier pinned to burlap in a glass case of the New-York Historical Society, it feels lifeless, empty, devoid of the person who once inhabited it and for whom it had been no museum remnant but the very clothes he wore. I remember the excitement that coursed through me when I first held it in my hand and saw the evidence of Delmore’s academic rigor, as proud as if he had been my son. All those As! And in such difficult courses, too. The report card is folded and creased; on the back, someone—Rose?—has written in pencil, with a childish script, Delmore Marks.
—
As I recount the pleasures and ordeals of archival research, it occurs to me that I might as well be describing the way a monk dips his feather into a bottle of ink as he copies a medieval manuscript. What reader under the age of fifty will ever know the experience of putting a spool of microfilm tape on a machine with a handle as archaic as the crank of a Model-T Ford, sliding it under a square of magnifying glass, and squinting through a viewer as some ancient issue of The Nation or The New Republic flashed by until you found the date you were looking for, then inserting a nickel (or was it a dime?) into a slot as if it were a jukebox and waiting for the desired page to unfurl from the tray, the black type smeared on sheets of coated paper? And you didn’t just read the article. You could handle the magazine itself, in a bound volume with the year stamped on the spine. Like a jewel set in a bracelet, its brilliance enhanced by the stones that surround it, a book review or literary essay was hedged about by advertisements for books and conferences and luxury goods—the objects that give a historical period its look and feel.
Robert Lowell, in a poem from Life Studies, invoked “the tranquilized fifties,” the Eisenhower era, the country in a stupor of self-satisfaction and repressed sexuality; in the pages of The Saturday Review, where Delmore’s film reviews sometimes appeared, you could actually see this texture. Beside the text were ads for Buicks and other long-extinct makes of automobile; Westinghouse refrigerators curved at the top beside a red-lipsticked, curl-coiffed woman in a long-sleeved blouse and a calf-length skirt; unfiltered Camels, “prescribed by nine out of ten doctors” for “nerves,” with little cartoon devils shooting arrows of anxiety into some jittery midlevel executive in a suit. Looking up an article online—again I fail in my determination not to sound a wistful note about the old days—simply isn’t the same as holding in your hand an original copy of Partisan Review and losing yourself for hours in the ancillary data that crowd its pages: the masthead, the table of contents, the letters column with its once-fiery debates grown as cold as the fireplace of a summer home after a long winter, its burned-charcoal odor still lingering in the dead air. Old magazines were museums; encountering a famous essay in the course of thumbing through back issues was like coming across an old photograph by Steichen on the wall of a deserted gallery. Here in the very lettering—Partisan Review’s square typeface, the squiggly fonts of The New Yorker, the gothic curlicues of The New York Times—was the city of an earlier time, still visible in the outlines.
I wondered what it must have been like to pick up an issue with one of these world-altering pieces in the table of contents at the local newsstand and read it the way I’d read the latest issue of Granta or…or…there is no equivalent.*3 What for me was a keystone of American literary history had once been contemporary, of the moment, news. Did you see Clem’s piece on Pollock?—“Clem” being the art critic Clement Greenberg, who had made Jackson Pollock’s reputation. Lionel Trilling’s “The Meaning of a Literary Idea,” Philip Rahv’s “American Intellectuals in the Postwar Situation”—these essays defined an era.
A friend familiar with my strange emotional involvement in Partisan Review taste gave me a copy of the spring 1949 issue that she had found in her late father’s library, and I read it through with avidity. The table of contents is itself a terse museum catalog of the period, announcing an excerpt from The Adventures of Augie March, a novel-in-progress by Saul Bellow (“who lives in Paris,” according to his contributor’s note); a book review by Robert Warshow (a brilliant critic, dead of a heart attack at thirty-seven); a contrarian reevaluation of the British novelist Elizabeth Bowen by Elizabeth Hardwick (“Her sunny reputation invites the cheerful, impressionistic remark; disinclination is rude; the air here is mild, polite, congratulatory”); and a brooding story by Albert Camus, one of the PR gang’s literary heroes.
There was a subscription card stuck in the pages of the issue:
Partisan Review
1545 Broadway
New York 19, N.Y.
I was tempted to send it in. At $5.00 a year, it would have been a bargain.
—
Reading Holmes’s Shelley—“drowning” in it, to borrow Macdonald’s aquatic image—I began to understand what motivated me to loiter in front of the townhouse at 8 West 105th Street where Delmore and Gertrude had lived after their Vermont sojourn. It was a freezing afternoon in winter, and I had forgotten gloves. I stood with my hands shoved deep in the pockets of my overcoat (like Delmore on Ellery Street, it occurs to me now), waiting for a revelation that never came. It was an ordinary Manhattan brownstone, and since I didn’t know what floor Delmore had lived on, I couldn’t imagine him peering woefully out of it, but perhaps that was the revelation—that the place contained only the husk of the subject’s life, the self it had once conta
ined scattered like the soft white stalks of a dandelion. Eluded again!
Yet one persists: Delmore lived here. On another day I took a taxi out to Brooklyn and maintained a solitary vigil in front of the nondescript apartment house on Eastern Parkway where Delmore had been born. I’m studying a photograph I took of it now—it’s by no means dreary; pillars frame the doorway, and the ground floor is limestone. But again, it gave off no vibration.*4 My prayers for insight went unanswered.*5
Illusory or not, the confrontation with the actual—the café, the motel room, the country cottage—makes the elusive figure real. Something about the standing desk in the attic of Dr. Johnson’s house at Gough Square, where he wrote his dictionary, gives off a distinct emanation of the man that is available from no book. Though only the desk is left, I recall a description in Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of the furniture—“a very large deal writing-desk, an old walnut-tree table, and five ragged chairs of four different sets”—that conveys the squalor of the tall, narrow house where Johnson lived with his unruly ménage in “three very dirty rooms.”*6
Johnson was noticeably unclean himself, according to the painter Ozias Humphrey, who described him in London Town: Past and Present as “dressed in a dirty brown coat and waistcoat, with breeches that were brown also (though they had been crimson)” and “a little old shriveled, unpowdered wig.” As I gazed out the top-floor window of his house on a visit to London, listening to the roar of buses on fume-heavy Fleet Street—still a metonym for the newspaper industry, though the papers have dispersed—the rhythmic clangor of police sirens vibrating in the grit-thick air, Johnson was both there and not there. Mostly not, so you had to make an effort to recover the part that was.
We take it as a vocational obligation to engage in what Lady Antonia Fraser, the distinguished English biographer of royalty, has described as “optical research,” a hike down “the geographical trail.” We feel compelled to absorb the physical ambience. Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes’s biographer, rented the poet’s childhood house in Aspinall Street, conveniently available as a “holiday let.” Robert Skidelsky went him one better and bought John Maynard Keynes’s house, which he lived in while he was writing his three-volume biography of Keynes. Norman Sherry, the fanatical biographer of Graham Greene—his triple-decker is both a feat of research and an act of near-madness—followed Greene’s shade to Mexico, where he “contracted dysentery in exactly the same mountain village, staying in the same boarding house as [Greene] had done.” For Sherry, getting inside Greene’s skin is not a metaphor. “I had to experience, as far as possible, what my subject experienced.”*7 It’s part of the job. “Traveling to the birthplace of their subjects is something that biographers do,” wrote James Breslin in the preface to his biography of Mark Rothko: “Going was a professional duty, to ‘soak up the atmosphere,’ even across the distance of 80 years.” Thus did Breslin journey to Daugavpils, Latvia—where Marcus Rothkovitch was born.
Surely, though, there’s a limit to the fetish of proximity. Frederick Karl didn’t don a pith helmet and light out for the Congo in search of Joseph Conrad. Dostoyevsky’s biographer, Joseph Frank, didn’t put himself in front of a firing squad. Sometimes, out on the trail, you could go too far—like the night I got lost in the wilds of rural New Jersey during a snowstorm. I was searching for the ramshackle farmhouse where Delmore and Elizabeth Pollet had lived when he was teaching at Princeton in the 1950s. At twenty-four, I was too young to rent a car and had boarded a Trailways bus, alighted in some town I’d never heard of, and persuaded a taxi driver to take me to a house that turned out not to be Delmore’s; I had a photograph of it. Meanwhile it snowed and snowed. I thought I would need a team of huskies to get home. At such moments I was overcome by the inanity of the task I had set myself. Was I really “in pursuit” of Delmore, or was I in flight from him—from the harder work of understanding who he was?
Geoff Dyer, in Out of Sheer Rage, his riotous burlesque of the “quest” genre, sets out to write a biography of D. H. Lawrence, only to find that he’s not really interested in the project at all. In search of what he calls “the Lawrence experience,” Dyer drives from London to the dreary Midlands in a rainstorm (he calls it “the Motorway Experience”) and ends up having tea in the White Peacock Café at the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum and Giftshop. “I am behaving exactly like someone who has come to visit the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum. Impossible to pass oneself off as anything else. Why else would I be drinking tea in the White Peacock café?”
For all of Dyer’s irony, the subtitle of his book, In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence, hints at the lonely ardor, at once futile and consuming, of the biographer’s quest, the determination—the will—to track down every scrap of paper, visit every place, and interview every living witness, or if there are none, read their memoirs and journals and letters and postcards dashed off from some Greek island, in the hope of catching a glimpse of one’s subject, as fleeting as a familiar face spotted and then swallowed up in a crowd, before all testimony has vanished forever and it’s too late.
For Richard Holmes, biography was more than the gathering and organizing of facts. “Somehow you had to produce the living effect,” he would write in Footsteps, his classic—the classic—account of what it means to be a biographer. You had, in essence, to live your subjects’ lives, “tracking their physical trail through the past.” Even so, they would evade us in the way that memory itself evades us, surviving as a blurred shadow of the original event. “You would never catch them,” Holmes lamented in his touchingly elegiac way: “No, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.” Biography was like “a handshake, across time, but also across cultures, across beliefs, across disciplines, across genders, and across ways of life.”
That was one way to see it. I admired Holmes’s benignity; he was always reaching out to his subjects like God extending a hand to Adam in Michelangelo’s painting. But their fingers didn’t touch, and that was how I saw it. I was a biographical pessimist who wrote biography, an apostate who believed.
—
In my possession is a manila envelope with the return address of The New Yorker in that distinctive typeface, when its offices were at 25 West 43rd Street and there were no zip codes. I stare at Delmore’s baby picture: generic for its day, it’s in black and white and shows the infant Delmore in booties and a biblike pajama top against a milky backdrop, the photographer’s name signed with a flourish in the lower right-hand corner. He’s smiling at the camera, his tiny hands clenched. It yields nothing, no hint of what is to come. But what baby photograph does? Every Jewish household in America—or is it nondenominational?—contains a pile of these in a drawer: my father’s baby picture, once on the glass-topped coffee table in the living room of my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago, beside the silver nut bowl and the felt-bottomed coasters and the heavy glass ashtray, sits on our mantel in a pewter frame. The two photos were probably taken only a few months apart.
More disturbing is a photograph of Delmore at Rondax summer camp in the Adirondacks, also generic, sepia-tinted now, the boys on the deck of their cabin in the woods, dressed in kneesocks and lace-up shoes. On the back, in pencil, is the date: Rondax 1924. But a corner is torn off, and the photo is cracked and bent, as if someone had crumpled it up in a rage.
The photographs that turned up over the course of my researches form an eerie procession from cradle to grave. Here are Delmore’s parents in Brooklyn two years before his birth. They’re a handsome couple: Harry Schwartz’s strong features and deep-set eyes will soon make their appearance in his son’s face, perpetuating the visible existence of his DNA in this world for at least another half century. Rose wears a veil and a pricey fur coat; Harry sports a fedora. I recognize them from “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”—confident, in love, unafraid of death. They’re looking forward, not back.
Three years la
ter the curly-haired son has appeared on the scene, seated on his father’s lap in a carnival motorcar with the name Rockaways on the hood. Then he’s in Lakewood, New Jersey, with his mother’s arm around him and another recent arrival, his younger brother Kenneth: am I imagining it, or does she look troubled now, her mouth turned down, her eyes alarmingly inexpressive? And where is Harry? If not gone, then on the way out. The doomed marriage is over.
We leap to Delmore in 1938, just after the publication of his first book. He is twenty-five, and Vogue has photographed him for a feature. What a gorgeous man! He gazes into a mirror, thick hair styled in a wave, and in another, his hand draped limply over a pile of books, at the torsoless head of a classic statue: the poet as Greek god. And here he is, holding hands with his pretty young wife, Gertrude; and at twenty-six, with the writer James Agee, a hunk in a short-sleeved shirt, unlit cigarette in hand, at an outdoor table in summer. You can almost hear the birdsong, the chirr of crickets, the drowsy buzz of bees in the background.
Leafing through my book, I encounter a photograph of the second wife, Elizabeth Pollet, a novelist and, in her day, a fabled blond beauty, crouching beside an equally stunning Irish setter. She looks as if she had leapt from the pages of a ladies’ fashion magazine. On the facing page is Delmore in 1949, shirt open at the neck to show off his manly chest hair, but his eyes are haunted, even doomed. He’s only thirty-six yet is already launched on his steep downward slide. The poet is urgent, scared, still hopeful that he can fulfill his promise even as he knows—knows—that it will never happen. The whole story—devastating, unbearable, too late to alter—is in this photograph.
It must have been about this time, or perhaps a few years later, that he wrote “During December’s Death,” one of the last poems included in his collection Summer Knowledge:
