The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  *8 I have since come across another instance of Delmore suppression: the contributor’s note to a review that I wrote for The New York Times Book Review in 1975, in which I was identified as “a literary critic with a special interest in literary biography.” At that point I had been at work on my book for at least a year.

  *9 Forster, in his biography of his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, recounts a similarly futile quest: “I have hunted in the tangled churchyard of Milton for her grave but have failed to find it.” It’s heartening that Forster, too, went the distance, as eminent as he was: I can imagine him, slight, stooped, bespectacled, his brushy mustache neatly trimmed, picking his way among the tombstones.

  *10 Heaven-stricken: as fine a compound adjective as Yeats’s “gong-tormented sea.”

  *11 I wonder when, between Carlyle’s time and our own, these syllables came to be reversed.

  *12 To this day, I can quote his threat to make one of his enemies “smart and wince and squirm,” and I have written down for possible future use, should I ever need to insult such a person, his description of an offending publisher as “a broad-nosed dough-faced dwarf with thin woolly hair scattered over his big head.”

  *13 I now find myself in the position of wanting to read a biography of him. The image that comes to mind is of Russian nesting dolls, the kind that unscrew to reveal ever-smaller dolls.

  *14 I noted Symons’s early demise with mild trepidation. Biographers often seemed to die young: was there some corollary?

  Alfred Kazin Credit 8

  VIII

  “I’m so glad you are going to do a biography of Delmore, but I don’t envy you some of the interviews you are going to have,” Alfred Kazin had warned me in a postcard I kept pinned above my desk. What was he talking about? The chance to interview Schwartz’s contemporaries was one of the things that had drawn me to this unlikely project in the first place, and Kazin was at the top of my list. I wanted to be like him—to write essays and reviews and books about literature. I can’t remember what waspish, too-often-stung novelist said that no one grows up wanting to be a literary critic, but I actually did. And if Schwartz was “the genius, the writer of the old Partisan gang,” as Kazin had scrawled on his postcard, Kazin was the critic.

  He had invited me to visit him when I was in New York, and now here I was, in a wooden phone booth*1 with tin-stamped walls in a drugstore on Columbus Avenue, as nervous and damp-palmed as if I were calling up a date.

  “Where are you?” he said. Aggressive, rude, peremptory: over the years I would get used to these traits, but now they still rattled me. I was twenty-five years old. I glanced around the store, a dingy grotto with a wall of girlie magazines, and blurted: “The New York Public Library.”

  Kazin snorted. “You culture types. All you care about is books.” Still, he seemed glad to hear from me and invited me down to his office. Emerging from the subway at Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue, I was elated; it was like putting down the Goncourt brothers’ Journals and setting out to interview Sainte-Beuve.

  Only was I on the right street? I studied the numbers on the transoms of cheap clothing stores and luncheonettes. Racks of dresses and leather jackets crowded the sidewalk; men in overcoats were hawking gloves and lingerie out of cardboard boxes. Salsa blared from a loudspeaker above a record shop. The address Kazin had given me was next to a Spanish-language auto-driving school. There were no names on the mailboxes in the hall, but the door was open, and I groped my way up the steel-treaded stairs. On the first landing, I heard the faint clack of a typewriter and knocked on the metal door.

  The room I stepped into could have been Delmore’s last residence. The walls had a dark cafeteria look, and the chicken-wire windows were coated in grime. In the corner stood a tiny porcelain sink. There were books everywhere: on the floor, the couch, the wood-chipped windowsill.

  Kazin, in a dark suit and tie, seemed out of place in this office. He was professorial, as if he were about to lecture on the Transcendentalists to a hall of undergraduates. His high cheekbones and pouchy, slitted eyes bore traces of the same exotic Asian ancestry Delmore had boasted of. (He called it “Tartar blood.”) “So you’re writing about Delmore,” Kazin said. “A dear, tormented man. Who else have you seen?”

  “You’re one of the first, actually. I’ve wanted to meet you ever since I read A Walker in the City.”

  “Okay, okay.” Flattery was a waste of time. He draped a hand over his face and kneaded it like dough. “But who’s on your list?”

  I mentioned a critic who had known Delmore at Harvard. “A self-promoter,” Kazin muttered. “I don’t know how he got as far as he did.” I mentioned another name, a poet. “He hasn’t written anything in years.”

  Like any smart, competitive family, the New York intellectuals got on each other’s nerves. To me, they were published authors—names—and no matter how many issues of Partisan Review I read, I could never figure out who had insulted whom at some Greenwich Village party three decades before, whose contemptuous dismissal of whose book had gotten back to the author, whose politics had changed to accommodate what fashion. To Kazin, they were the old Partisan gang, as familiar as the kids he’d played stickball with on the streets of Brooklyn.

  Kazin was then at work on his memoir New York Jew and offered to read me some passages about Delmore. He spread a bulky notebook open on his lap, and suddenly the bristling critic gave way to the rhapsodist of A Walker in the City. Reading in a rapid, eager voice, he conjured up Delmore in his youth, “a pillar of agony” with “a stone-white, sweaty brow, knotted with intellectual indignation,” his face radiant with “the fine distraction, the obstinate love behind the familiarly Jewish-frantic manner.” And when he described their last meeting, Kazin faltered as he told of the tortured poet “accusing, erupting, plotting, demanding, suffering,” in his “squalid box of a room.”

  “Why don’t you show me some of your book?” Kazin said when he was finished. “Did you bring any of it with you?”

  I had, I admitted, flattered by his interest. Only then did I remember that the chapter I had in my briefcase included a few typical instances of Delmore’s malice—and that Kazin was among his victims. “It’s not very good,” I said, stalling. “I mean, it’s just a first draft.”

  “That’s okay,” Kazin said affably. “We all have to write first drafts.” He held out his hand. Clutching my briefcase, I said, “The thing is that Delmore…He’s very nervous in this chapter, because he’s about to publish Genesis and he’s worried about the reviews and…” He was that way with everyone, I explained (as if this were news to Kazin), and it was even worse when he had a book coming out; and besides, it was just a way of blowing off steam.

  “What did he say about me?” Kazin demanded, giving me—as my grandma Rae would have said—“such a look.”

  I blurted out the offending phrase: Delmore had called him “a serious menace to criticism”—only a few months after Kazin had praised him in On Native Grounds, his compendious survey of American literature, as one of the most promising critics of their generation. “How could he say that?” Kazin lamented, rubbing his eyes. “We never quarreled.” I could see him brooding over their various encounters in his mind. What forgotten slight could have prompted such a remark? “Believe me, it was nothing personal,” I assured him. “You should hear what he said about other people.”

  “Like what?” Kazin eyed me dubiously. I had arrived on the scene and awakened painful memories, then spoiled his elegiac mood by delivering bad news. Still, he was curious despite himself. “Look, what are you doing for dinner? There’s a nice Italian restaurant around the corner.”

  Sliding into a booth at Il Grand Ticino, a restaurant on Thompson Street once frequented by Delmore, I considered myself lucky; in ancient Greece they murdered the bearers of bad news. Kazin was in a talkative mood; after all, this was his life we were discussing, his social history. Every name evoked memories. Reminiscing about a party in Greenwich Village in the 1930s, h
e could recite the whole guest list: Max Eastman, V. F. Calverton, Josephine Herbst—

  “Who?”

  Kazin was stunned. “God, Atlas, where have you been? She was one of the greatest novelists of my generation. How can you pretend to know about the period if you’ve never heard of Josephine Herbst?”

  I stared at the candle dripping down a Chianti bottle.

  “You know what I don’t get about you?” Kazin studied me intently. “You don’t stand up for yourself. I’ve read your reviews. You say whatever you like in print, you take on this big book, and then you sit here like a schoolboy in the principal’s office.”

  “It’s hard,” I said. “You bully me.” Cowed by his intensity, I was afraid to open my mouth. My way was to creep through the underbrush, as stealthy as a Vietcong, toss a grenade—“Delmore said you were a serious menace to criticism”—then melt away before he could get off a shot.

  But Kazin liked to argue; it was a way of working off grievances, improving one’s mental circulation. For him, rudeness was to conversation what polemic was to journalism—a style, a genre, an expressive mode.

  Kazin paid for dinner—I didn’t even know enough at that age to murmur about splitting the check—and we shared a cab uptown; I was meeting a friend at the West End, a Columbia hangout once frequented by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. “Thank you very much for dinner,” I said as we pulled up to the bar. “I really enjoyed myself.”

  Kazin shook his head: when would this kid get it? “I like you, Atlas,” he said as I slammed the door, “but cut the crap.”

  —

  The stock market of American literary success can be as unpredictable as Wall Street,” William Barrett observed in an appreciation of Delmore that appeared in Commentary in the spring of 1974—itself the sign of a modest revival of interest in my subject. By then John Berryman had devoted a sequence of wrenching “Dream Songs” to his “pal” (“I imagine you heard the terrible news, / that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone”); and Philip Rahv had reviewed a collection of his essays in The New York Review of Books, accompanied by a David Levine drawing of the poet with a tormented look on his face. Given the marginal role of literature in our nation’s life, these two prominent homages seemed enough to constitute a spike in Delmore’s stock.

  Barrett’s own stock was already high, in my estimate. Irrational Man, his book on existentialism, had been a canonical text when I was a teenager, and I hadn’t read it only for show. He wrote about ideas in a cosmic, “totalizing” way that seems quaint now but that in the Cold War 1950s had an aura of genuine urgency about it. When he insisted that “the phenomena of mass society and the collectivization of man are facts so decisive for our age that all conflicts among political forms and among leaders take place upon and within this basis,” it didn’t sound like jargon. Remember, Irrational Man was written in “The Age of Anxiety,” “The Atomic Age.” We could be blown up at any minute.

  I had written Barrett after reading his article in Commentary, and he had suggested lunch at Il Grand Ticino, apparently the canteen of New York intellectuals.

  It was hardly a relaxed meal. As would emerge, Barrett’s emotional investment in Delmore was even more intense than Kazin’s: for a long period in their lives—all throughout the late 1930s and ’40s—he had been Delmore’s closest friend. (In the derangement of the poet’s last years, when he picked quarrels with everyone he cared about or who cared about him, Barrett hung on almost to the end.) They had met when they were both twenty at the “salon” of Florence Wolfson, the daughter of a wealthy doctor who allowed her to entertain her literary friends in their large apartment on the Upper West Side. Barrett was then a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia, and Delmore was at CCNY.

  From the beginning, they were—Saul Bellow’s word—“soulmates.” They read the same books, nourished the same ambitions, and had the same conception of themselves as intellectuals. To say they were friends doesn’t begin to convey the emotional intensity of their connection. And when they had a violent falling-out, Barrett described it as a “break-up,” almost as if he were talking about a love affair.

  “The ending of a personal relationship is rarely a grand exit in the style of opera,” Barrett wrote in The Truants, his memoir of those years:

  Usually it’s a squalid anticlimax disfiguring everything that may have been splendid in the friendship. This one took place under the implacable heat of a New York summer, Dostoevski unspoken but in the air, and madness lurking in ambush. Delmore’s self-destructiveness could not help being destructive of me. I remember his eyes, always so expressive, gloating now in self-recrimination for his own evil, as he called it, and sucking me into it with him. I couldn’t take it any more, and walked out. And so walked away from a relationship that had been a good part of my life.

  And now here I was, a total stranger, right in the middle of it.

  I was never prepared for the way Delmore’s friends would pour their hearts out to me. One of the stranger aspects of writing a biography is the candor it elicits. You become a confidant of your subject’s friends and enemies and lovers; they have no compunction about confiding to you the most personal matters without knowing the least thing about who you are. I couldn’t understand why my interviewees were so unguarded. Why were they willing to make these profligate confessions? The answer, I think, is that I was their one remaining bond to our mutual obsession, a medium—in the literal sense—through whom they could reach their friends or parents or lovers beyond the grave.

  Stuffing his pipe and ordering more wine, Barrett dwelled with brilliant, obsessive concentration on the smallest details of Delmore’s life: what he read in the bathroom (Boileau); what he wrote in the margins of his books; what he said to Paul Goodman in 1934 and I. A. Richards in 1937. Wine-dazed in the restaurant gloom, I listened with flagging attention. There was much relevant lore in these monologues, but also much else—meandering anecdotes about how Barrett and his friend Apostle, a young Greek translator, would sit around in their underwear on hot summer afternoons poring over Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the original; recitals of the menu at the Foltis-Fischer cafeteria; detailed descriptions of Jackson Pollock’s rudeness to bartenders at the Cedar Tavern.

  I could have slid out of the booth and stolen off through the empty restaurant: Barrett wouldn’t have noticed. His mind was on the past. In the dim restaurant, the little shaded lamp in the booth giving off a reddish glow, he reminisced with a doleful, droning ardor. When Joyce died, Delmore had summoned Barrett up to Cambridge “to keen for their dead brother”; when Delmore got married, he had invited Barrett to join the newlyweds on their honeymoon; when Delmore got back to New York, he had expected Barrett to show up for dinner every night; in the 1950s, Delmore’s psychiatrist had requested an interview with Barrett, and Delmore had paid for their session. Even a decade after his death, he still had Barrett powerfully in his grip.

  Lunch was long over. The waiters had stripped the tables and were setting places for dinner. But now I had a new question: if their friendship had been so special, why had Delmore and Barrett not been able to patch things up after their final, galvanic argument? What was the “squalid anticlimax” mentioned in his Commentary piece? I had heard enough about their splendid youth: what happened later?

  “It was nothing important,” Barrett murmured, pulling on his pipe. This was his closest friend we were talking about, and here he was, sitting across from Delmore’s biographer instead of dear Delmore himself, so promising, so beautiful, so once alive, who had died and was never coming back.

  “Why are you so obsessed with him?” I asked.

  Barrett gave me a bewildered look. “I don’t know.” He peered at me as if he were trying to remember who I was. Delmore was dead: that was the message I had unwittingly delivered. I was like that Stoic philosopher invoked in Barrett’s memoir who berates the father of a dead child, demanding, “Why do you weep? It is irrational. Your weeping will not bring him back.” “That
is why I weep,” the father answers. “Because it cannot bring him back.”

  —

  Robert Lowell and the novelist Jean Stafford, who was then his wife, had spent a few months at Delmore’s apartment on Ellery Street, but I gathered from a note in Delmore’s journal that things had ended badly; there had been a falling-out.

  I dreaded interviewing Lowell. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know about this period, which I suspected wouldn’t reflect well on either of them; also, I worried that it might seem both intrusive and somehow oddly formal to show up with my tape recorder. But I didn’t really have any excuse for avoiding him. He was living in Brookline with his third wife, the novelist and Guinness heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood, and their two-year-old son, Sheridan. When I finally worked up the nerve to call him, he was friendly. We made a date for the following week.

  I was nervous as I drove through the leafy suburban streets looking for the house: I had been in his poetry seminar at Harvard, but would he remember me? Would it matter if he did? The subject was Delmore.

  He came to the door, a stooped figure in bedroom slippers, and led me into the kitchen, where Lady Caroline sat peeling vegetables, a cigarette in a tin ashtray by her side. In her riding boots and denim shirt open at the neck, her coppery hair fanning down her back, she was both slovenly and beautiful, very much the mermaid with “bel occhi grandi” celebrated in Lowell’s Dolphin poems.

  “This is Mr. Atlas,” he said in his tentative drawl, “and this is Sheridan.” It was a dark winter’s day, and there were no lights on in the house. I could scarcely see the small boy who stood in the doorway until Lowell reached down and picked him up. “Say hello, Sheridan,” Lowell prompted, but Sheridan eyed me silently. He was named after the general—another instance of Lowell’s obsession with the Civil War.