The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  The afternoon turned dark early;

  The light suddenly faded;

  The dusk was black although, elsewhere, the first star in the cold sky suddenly whistled,

  And I thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys on roller skates

  Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926,

  And I thought I heard the dusk and silence raided

  By a calm voice commanding consciousness:

  Wait: wait: wait as if you had always waited

  And as if it had always been dark

  And as if the world had been from the beginning

  A lost and drunken ark in which the only light

  Was the dread and white of the terrified animals’ eyes.

  And then, turning on the light, I took a book

  That I might gaze upon another’s vision of the abyss of consciousness—

  The hope, and the pain of hope, and the patience of hope, and its torment, its astonishment, its endlessness.

  The dread and white of the terrified animals’ eyes…The photograph brought me closer than ever to Delmore—to his reality, to the fact that he had once lived. In the poem I heard him; in the photograph I saw him. But in the end, it was only an image. It didn’t bring him back.

  *1 Holmes is eloquent on the talismanic aura of such artifacts: “Anything a hand has touched is for some reason peculiarly charged with personality—Thomas Hardy’s simple steel-tipped pens, each carved with a novel’s name; Shelley’s guitar, presented to Jane Williams; Balzac’s blue china coffee-pot, with its spirit-heater, used through the long nights of Le Père Goriot and Les Illusions Perdues.…It is as if the act of repeated touching, especially in the process of daily work or creation, imparts a personal ‘virtue’ to an inanimate object, gives it a fetichistic power in the anthropological sense, which is peculiarly impervious to the passage of time.”

  *2 Why do we save old bills and bank statements, scribbled thank-you notes, and invitations to long-forgotten parties? Is it that to throw them away is to admit the transience of it all?

  *3 But of course there is: The Believer, Tin House, Salmagundi, and N + 1—to name only the “print journals,” as they’re now called, that I read on a regular basis; and yes, I know there now exist online journals—Slate, Salon, The New Inquiry, in whose pages (rather, on whose sites) one can still find references to Walter Benjamin and other esoteric icons of the intellectual Old World—as sophisticated, and as influential, as the great “little magazines” of my day, if not more so, given the number of “eyeballs” they claim. I’m not naïve: that I am approaching the end of my time in this world doesn’t mean the world is approaching its end. Forgive me for indulging in this common—no, universal—preconception: how many of us have the fortitude to see things as they really are?

  *4 “Pausing on the metal doors of a sidewalk elevator, Moses received the raised pattern of the steel through his thin shoe soles; like Braille. But he did not interpret a message.” Saul Bellow, Herzog.

  *5 I’m struck by one ancillary detail in the photograph that has nothing to do with Delmore but was rather part of my own life, the particular historical epoch in which it was taken: the cars parked in front of the house. They are cars—no surprise—from the 1960s and ’70s, and they have the dated look you see in old movies of that era: fins and boxy squarish tops and ornaments on the hood, “makes” now classified as “antique” that gather in the parking lots of upstate Dairy Queens on weekends. The cars in photographs from earlier periods in Delmore’s life are of an even older vintage—the black, round-roofed automobiles you see in gangster movies, rented from prop companies or stored in Hollywood back lots. Yet to Delmore they were just cars.

  *6 Oddly, when I look it up online to refresh my memory, a crisp photograph shows the place freshly painted, the baseboards white, the walls a smart lime green, the wideboard floors polished to a high sheen. It must have been renovated, but for whom? Johnson’s house was supposed to look the way it had looked in his day: that was the whole point.

  *7 Robert Graves describes this process, not entirely approvingly, in his poem about biographers, “To Bring the Dead to Life”:

  Limp as he limped,

  Swear by the oaths he swore;

  If he wore black, affect the same;

  If he had gouty fingers

  Be yours gouty too.

  Philip Rahv Credit 7

  VII

  Like “the heavy bear who goes with me” in Delmore’s poem, he was always “breathing at my side.” My days were of stupefying length. I rose at dawn, drove Annie to the hospital, and settled down at my desk. By nine o’clock, when my next-door neighbor was pulling out of his driveway and heading off for work, I would have written three or four pages. I did the dishes, called up my editor, dawdled over The New York Times. I stood in front of the bamboo cage in which a pair of finches I had gotten to keep me company hopped from perch to perch, and draped bits of string over the bars for them to add to the nest they were building, which grew bigger as the pages of my biography mounted up. On warm days, I took the cage out to the yard—“walking the finches,” as Annie called this practice—and removed the balsa-wood floor tray so they could forage in the grass. Did Leon Edel do this? I wondered as I sat cross-legged on the damp lawn beside the bamboo cage.

  Delmore and I were like two quarrelsome shut-ins—except that his quarrel had been with life, and mine, unrequited, was with him. Why did he publish his awful translation of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell without even consulting a French dictionary? He should have known the critics would slam it. Why did he waste so much time on that hopeless epic poem Genesis, when he should have been working on his stories? And why did he have to drink so much? I sacrifice for you, I berated him. I try to make a decent character of you, and what do I get? Bad judgment, neurotic behavior, poems that get worse and worse…As Annie and I sat over dinner at the kitchen table in our apartment, my mind would turn involuntarily to this strange figure to whom I had attached myself. Dude (as we might address him now), was it really necessary for you to read aloud the whole of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” over the vociferous protests of your high school English class? Did it ever occur to you that it was perhaps unwise to accuse your publisher of cheating you out of royalties when your books had yet to make a dime? These were the questions I wished to discuss over the Hungarian cherry soup I’d fussed with for hours. (Cooking elaborate dinners had become a way of escaping from my desk.) Annie, meanwhile, could barely keep her eyes open after a thirty-six-hour shift; what to her the tribulations of my crazy subject? She just wanted to go to bed.

  When he got too lonely in Cambridge, Delmore would flee to New York. When I got too lonely—oppressed by the monotonous chirp of the finches, the meals of gobbled Cheerios, the long days at the library—I followed in his shadow. In Grand Central Station, I headed toward the bank of phones in the waiting room. Delmore had spent most of his life in New York, and by searching through the phone book, I could generally find names I had come across in his papers. “Delmore?” said Joseph Lotterman, his counselor at the Pocono Camp Club in 1923. “He was a good boy and a lot tougher than you’d think.” There was no surprise in his voice: it was as if he had been waiting for the call. While I sat in the phone booth, sweating in my winter overcoat, he launched into a long story about a fistfight in which Delmore had decked a camper named Herman Hochberg—unlisted in the Manhattan directory, so I never got his side of it. Nor did I have much luck with Leonard Nudelman, one of Delmore’s teachers at P.S. 69. “I’m sick on account I just ate a TV dinner,” said a feeble voice that I assumed belonged to Mrs. Nudelman. “Mr. Nudelman ain’t here no more.” But I did find Julie Solomon, who remembered Delmore’s bar mitzvah, and Hannah Ehrlich, whose late husband had been Delmore’s mother’s dentist.

  My archival interest in the period encouraged candor. I seemed objective, scholarly; and besides, how often did people get to talk about themselves? They could blab unfettered by social conv
ention, ignore the annoying requirement of having to listen. My sources confided in me: “I wanted to be a writer then”; “That was when my second wife and I were living on Bedford Street”; “Delmore was going out with a girl I had been in love with when I first came to the Village.”

  These interviews often lasted for hours. For every anecdote about Delmore, I had to listen to the story of someone’s life. The information yield was low. And every name suggested another, a classmate or a neighbor summoned up out of the inexhaustible procession of the living and the dead. I jotted down new sources: “Have you spoken to Norman Jacobs? He was at NYU with Delmore.” “There was a girl named Emily Sweetser who worked in the New Directions office.” “What about Arthur Berger? He was a graduate student at Harvard when Delmore studied philosophy there in the 1930s.” “He doesn’t live anymore,” said the poet Louis Simpson when I mentioned a friend of Delmore’s—a locution that has haunted me ever since, the present tense canceling out the past.

  I usually stayed at the Earle Hotel just off Washington Square. The seedy room with its worn brown carpet, wobbly end table, and stained window shade depressed me, but it was all I could afford; and besides, Delmore used to stay there, so I could osmotically absorb his ghostly presence.*1

  I interviewed professors of Delmore’s, distinguished men like the art critic Meyer Schapiro (portrayed in “The World as a Wedding” as the famously erudite teacher Israel Brown, “who knew about everything in the world”); Upper West Side European émigrés right out of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, thick-accented and still wary of America, like the widow of Delmore’s psychiatrist, Lola Gruenthal; and his frail, ancient aunt Clara Colle, a wisp in a long white dress who lived with her retarded son in a nearly furnitureless apartment adjacent to the George Washington Bridge. But there was also a harder crowd, drinking companions from Delmore’s later—and last—days who loitered at the 55 in Sheridan Square, where, a decade after his death, I found dedicated barflies who remembered him and forced me to linger in that smoke-stinging grotto for hours in order to extract a single anecdote.

  I visited Seymour Krim in his one-room apartment on East Tenth Street, a cheerless first-floor box crammed with books and papers. Krim was a prominent character on the Village cultural scene—or had been. Shake It for the World, Smartass, a collection of his essays from The Village Voice, had come out in 1970 and created a mild sensation; he’d gone after Norman Mailer and Norman Podhoretz and other noisy commentators a rung above him on the hipster totem pole. But he was a figure of pathos now, peering at me through Trotsky spectacles with lenses as thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle. Though only in his early fifties, he was already a relic out of another time, the Village of basement jazz clubs like the Blue Note; of “reefer” and “pads” furnished with mattresses where nonmarital sex was practiced; of early Ginsberg chanting his anticapitalist litanies. Krim belonged to history. For me, a twenty-five-year-old from the Ivy League, this history was unimaginably exotic; perched on a metal chair in his smoky room, I took down Krim’s testimony.*2

  Some years later he committed suicide.

  There were others, forgotten then, more forgotten now, who had joined Delmore at the 55 or the Lion’s Den, drinking away their lives; and various Luftmenschen who seemed to have limitless amounts of time to spend with me and were always around in the middle of the afternoon. I remember a man in a well-furnished loft with a skylight, lounging in a Herman Miller chair and smoking a cigarette; he, too, was “a writer”—all of Delmore’s friends were “writers,” though there was often no evidence that they had written at all—but a writer who clearly had a trust fund. How else could he have afforded to live in such opulent digs? He had often loaned Delmore money. He seemed forlorn. I sat with my notebook open on my lap like a cub reporter at a murder scene. (Only what was the crime, and who had committed it? All I knew was that someone had died.)

  Milton Klonsky, the editor of a respected Blake anthology—his name still occasionally turns up in accounts of the period—whiled away hours in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue patiently explaining to me that I was too young to understand Delmore. And maybe I was. They meant well, these not-so-Ancient Mariners of dissolution, but I was unnerved by the stories they told. One of Delmore’s friends gave me a chilling account of running into Delmore at the Minetta Tavern*3 one afternoon not long after his collection of stories, The World Is a Wedding, had been published to great acclaim. He found Delmore alone at the bar, sobbing. Sometime later I came across a passage in his journals: “If I could accept defeat, then I might once more be able to see. If I can be patient: humility is the way and patience is the way—none other. Or will I die broken-hearted, or is this the way to failure, such as most endure who had lofty hopes?” He was thirty-four years old.

  —

  Like a scientist who focuses his microscope and discovers on the slide a whole unseen realm, I found Delmore and his friends becoming known to me in a way I could never know my own contemporaries; I could see their lives from beginning to end, discern in these gray-haired men the boys I had read about in Delmore’s stories, loitering in cafeterias, hanging around their parents’ living-room parlors, going off to Greenwich Village parties. As they talked, their faces acquired a rapt, distracted look. And when they came out of their reveries, they saw before them, in the guise of Delmore’s biographer, their vanished youth. My presence couldn’t have been more unsettling if I’d worn a hooded cloak and carried a scythe.

  This image isn’t entirely fanciful. Even then his contemporaries were beginning to drop off. Not long after I moved back to Cambridge, I learned that Philip Rahv was living there and teaching at Brandeis. At some point in the late 1960s, he had “broken with” William Phillips, the cofounder with Rahv of Partisan Review. The origins of their quarrel have long since vanished into—Thomas Carlyle’s great phrase—“the extinct cockpit” of old literary feuds; but Rahv, exiled from the red-hot center of New York, couldn’t live without the harsh polemical culture of Partisan Review, the infighting of book reviews, the solemn symposia, the turf battles over Henry James. He needed his own forum and put together enough money, probably from one of his rich wives, to launch a “little magazine” called Modern Occasions.

  Rahv had played a significant role in Delmore’s narrative.*4 He was among the first to read “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” when it came into the offices of Partisan Review as its editors were assembling its inaugural issue, and to recognize its genius. When I called up and introduced myself as Delmore’s biographer—a brazen method of contact that would be unthinkable in the age of e-mail—he invited me over to his apartment in a modern white-brick apartment building on a side street near Radcliffe. A bulky figure in a seedy, somewhat rumpled black suit, Rahv resembled a member of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. The Russian analogy is deliberate: his eyes were hooded, his features coarse; Delmore called him Philip Slav.*5

  Rahv was as eager to talk about his new project as to reminisce about Delmore, and after I put away my notebook, he began to fill me in about the magazine’s “mandate.” He had published only two issues so far, but it was clear that Partisan Review was his model. There was the same mix of essays, short stories, poems, and book reviews, and the same familiar names. The most notable was that of Saul Bellow, who had contributed to the first number of Modern Occasions a long excerpt from what was described as a work-in-progress called “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” which I discovered at the Out of Town newsstand in Harvard Square one steamy summer night. To have landed this piece was something of a coup, and it showed that Rahv still had clout in the literary world.

  A few weeks after our meeting, he called me up and asked if I would be interested in helping him find promising new “voices” he could publish in the magazine, writers who had a grasp of “the situation of the intellectual.” And that’s how I became a “consultant” to Modern Occasions.

  I could see that Rahv was lonely. I hadn’t mastered his complex marital history, but his apartment had the
bare furnishings of the newly divorced, and he must have felt marginalized in the intellectual Siberia of Cambridge—Harvard professors, however distinguished, were “academics” rather than intellectuals, a crucial and invidious distinction. In need of company, he took to calling me, with a frequency that I found flattering, to discuss some new essay that had “come in” by a writer he’d never heard of. Did I know the work of…and he would mention a byline I might have come across in The Nation or The New Republic, some young critic trying to break in by tackling tough subjects like Russian Formalism or the Frankfurt School. I couldn’t always make out the name. Rahv’s croaky, Chesterfield-coarsened voice*6 over the phone sounded as if it were traveling through the transatlantic wire from his childhood village in Byelorussia instead of a few blocks away on Craigie Street.

  As an undergraduate at Kenyon, Robert Lowell pitched a tent on Allen Tate’s lawn for a whole summer; I pitched mine in Rahv’s sparsely furnished living room, transfixed by the reality—the fact—of his existence. Yes, the author of The Sixth Sense, a collection of essays I had studied as a model of how to write literary criticism, lived and breathed and smoked and talked and, I assumed (he had been married four times), engaged in other activities that were none of my business.

  It couldn’t have been more than a few months since that first visit that I picked up The New York Times Book Review one morning, and there was a photograph of my puffy-faced mentor with his lidded eyes, alongside an obituary by Mary McCarthy. (A former lover of Rahv’s, she had famously left him for Edmund Wilson.)

  I had known Rahv only briefly and wasn’t sure what I felt. Surprise? He didn’t seem sick, or not that sick. Remorse? I owed him a phone call about a manuscript he wanted to discuss. Bafflement? So people really die. All of these, perhaps, along with an acute sense of loss that was almost physical: I would never again hear that voice, a low growl as if from some wounded animal, grousing about the idiocies of his Brandeis colleagues or recounting his latest feud with the editors of Partisan Review.