The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  The house had an unoccupied feel to it. The rooms on the first floor were empty, and I soon realized why Lowell had chosen his upstairs bedroom for our interview: it had a chair. I pulled it up to the bed, where he sprawled out amid books and manuscripts, and opened my notebook like a doctor taking a history.

  It was an ordeal to remember Delmore. “He was grieved about Eliot, thought him anti-Semitic but wanted his approval.” “He persuaded us to boycott a faculty picnic at Kenyon because our wives hadn’t been invited, saying it was homosexual to go without them.” “He showed up drunk at a party in New York, was abusive to Hannah Arendt, and flaunted his ripped trousers.”

  Lowell smoked morosely. Hadn’t there been some disastrous argument in Cambridge? I asked. He stared out the curtainless window. “I sat on his overcoat on the train up to Bangor, and he made a lot of mad accusations, complained I’d treated Jean badly.” Lowell fixed me with a melancholy eye. “People say Delmore slept with Jean,” he murmured. “Someone said he could tell by the way he lit her cigarette.”

  I closed my notebook.

  “Have you seen Jean yet?” Lowell said as I was putting on my coat.

  I hadn’t, but the following summer I called on her in East Hampton, where she lived in a weathered old clapboard house with a view through the pines to Long Island Sound. A hand-lettered sign on the screen door warned, “Use of the word ‘hopefully’ not permitted on these premises.” She was then nearly sixty (not so old from my current over-sixty vantage), but she seemed like the girl Lowell must have had in mind when he spoke of “Jean”—the girl he married when they were both still under thirty. She had a co-ed’s bony shoulders and skinny waist, wore her straw-covered hair in a pageboy, and padded around in a red pullover and saddle shoes. Only the wrinkled skin around her eyes and her blue-veined hands betrayed her age. “I was just making some eggnog,” she said in a raspy voice. “That way I don’t have to eat.”

  She led me into the parlor, a comfortable, old-fashioned room with oval throw rugs and a fireplace, and curled up in a wing chair. I opened my notebook and glanced over my questions: When did she meet Delmore? What was he working on then? How did she and Lowell end up on Ellery Street?

  But she had questions of her own. Had I seen Cal*2 yet? Had I met his new wife? How did he seem? Was he happy? On our third eggnog, I finally brought the conversation around, feeling as rude as if I were talking about myself. “Didn’t Lowell and Delmore have a quarrel?”

  “They sure did.” She peered at me over the glass cupped in her hands. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but if I do—” She lit a cigarette. “It’s yours.”

  I said nothing. “Cal was a terrible anti-Semite. He once told me he could never have a close friend who was a Jew.”

  She waited for that revelation to sink in, studying its effect with a clinical eye. “We all had dinner at the Lowells’ one night—and Cal kept going on about this ancient relative of his who was Jewish, and how that made Cal himself one-eighth Jewish, until Delmore was just livid. When we got back to Ellery Street that night, they slugged it out, and we left the next morning for Maine.”

  She regarded me with satisfaction. I knew a little bit about her unhappy marriage to Lowell—though it wasn’t until I read Ian Hamilton’s biography that I learned he had left her for Delmore’s estranged wife, Gertrude Buckman—and I could see that she was glad to even the score. I was an emissary shuttling between old flames, a conductor of the passions that still flowed between them.

  It was dusk when I got up to leave. Jean followed me into the kitchen and kissed me on the cheek as I stood by the screen door. I left her opening a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli.

  —

  In Los Angeles to consult an archive of Delmore’s papers at UCLA, I made an appointment to see Maurice Zolotow, a friend of Delmore’s from his University of Wisconsin days who had written biographies of John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe.

  He lived in a stucco apartment building on the fringes of Hollywood. “So you’re writing a book about Delmore,” he said in a gravelly smoker’s voice. He pushed aside a pile of magazines to make room for me on the couch. “What a wonderful idea. I wrote a book about him myself, a novel called O Careless Love.”*3 Zolotow’s fluffy gray hair stood out on his head. “God, I hardly know where to begin,” he said wearily, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. “I knew him for so many years.”

  They had met at the University of Wisconsin in 1931, when a drunken Zolotow was reciting Hart Crane’s “The Wine Menagerie” and Delmore knocked on the door in his pajamas: “He knew the poem by heart.” He looked at me with the wistful eyes I would come to see so often in my interviews: How long ago that was. And now I’m old and he is dead. “We used to go to a speakeasy called Paratore’s,” he said. “The Paratores were lovely people; Papa Paratore looked a little like Vanzetti. He’d been an anarchist in Naples during his youth.” He lit a cigarette, thinking. “They had a daughter at the university. What was her name?” Zolotow tried to remember the name of the daughter of the owner of the speakeasy he and Delmore had frequented in 1931. I waited. “Angelica!”

  He could recall which magazines Delmore had read at seventeen (transition and Hound & Horn); the make of the car Delmore’s father had bought him in Chicago (a white Packard); Delmore’s professors in 1933 (James Burnham, Philip Wheelwright). Below his window, the rush-hour traffic swished past, and the sky grew purple through the sliding-glass doors, but Zolotow was in Madison forty-five years before, exulting in the time he had been arrested for singing “The Internationale” and Delmore had bailed him out.

  The later years were a different story. The farmhouse where Delmore had lived in New Jersey was littered with empty gin bottles; there were no chairs to sit on, just packing crates. A psychiatrist at Bellevue told Zolotow that Delmore’s “brain was rotting” from alcohol and amphetamines. He ground out his cigarette in a seashell and lit another. “The waste of it,” he said. “His last years were crazy, demonic, right out of Dostoyevsky.” More troubling memories emerged: Delmore boasting about how much money his father made; belittling “Hollywood journalism”; storming off in a rage at some imagined slight. “He was self-absorbed,” Zolotow said. “He took, but he never gave.” Zolotow had testified at his divorce trial; Zolotow had visited him in Bellevue; Zolotow had lent him money. “And for what? That he should tell me I was a sellout?” He buried his head in his hands, wrestling with the two Delmores, then looked up, as if startled by a new insight. “Delmore was a bad person.”

  Sometimes as I went about my work, I thought about what it would be like to be on the other side—to have someone writing your biography. So you’re the one who told a precocious writer friend how much you loved his debut novel even as you were putting it down all over campus? Who gave a collection of poems by his own creative writing teacher a bad review in Poetry? Such a person—someone I thought I knew—would be unrecognizable to me. Except it was me. So was the person who, unwitnessed by anyone, pressed a dollar into the hand of a beggar in the subway; chose not to share a piece of good news with a friend going through a hard time; consoled a bartender grieving for his dead son, killed in Vietnam, in the club car of a train out of Boston late one night. Being the subject of a biography would be like looking at yourself in a funhouse mirror, now stumpy as a dwarf, now elongated like a ghost, now quivering with fat, now thin as a Giacometti. And these revelations of character are innocent compared to the things you’ve done that no one knows about or ever will, betrayals and lies buried so deep they can never be exhumed, along with acts of goodness so instinctual, so embedded in your nature, that you’re not even aware of them. Zolotow’s contention that Delmore was “a bad person” didn’t feel fair to me. He was a bad person—a bad person who was also a good person. Like everyone.

  *1 An enclosed box the size of a large coffin with a “landline” affixed to the wall and a slot for coins. You had to fumble for change and “dial” the number. Phone booths were dramatic: you stepped in, clos
ed the accordion-folding doors, fed quarters into the slot—and presto, Clark Kent was Superman.

  *2 “Cal,” short for the ruthless Roman emperor Caligula, was Lowell’s nickname, bestowed on him at the upper-crust private school St. Mark’s by his classmates, who noticed his own ruthlessness—his willingness, in the words of one, “to take on everybody.”

  *3 When I got back to Cambridge, I checked it out of the library—the first person ever to do so. The Delmore character was named Algernon Stein, “a noisy and lecherous and brilliant fake.”

  Saul Bellow Credit 9

  IX

  In the winter of 1974, I came across an issue of Playboy with an excerpt from Saul Bellow’s new novel and discovered that it was about a character named Von Humboldt Fleisher, a “grand, erratic, handsome” poet whose first book had made him famous in the 1930s, a “Mozart of conversation” who went insane and “died in a flophouse near Times Square.” Not even the Playmate of the Month could distract my eye from the specifics: the three a.m. heart attack in the corridor of a seedy hotel, the triumph of Humboldt’s first book. “Nineteen thirty-eight was his big year,” I read. Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot praised him; the book got fabulous reviews. “Humboldt was made.” It was widely known that Bellow based his characters on real-life models. People would be curious: who was this Humboldt?

  I dashed off a letter to Bellow requesting an interview and got back a cordial reply: he would be glad to tell me what he knew about Delmore. He also confirmed a surmise of mine: “You’re right, that was Isaac in the M.O. piece.”

  “Isaac” was Isaac Rosenfeld, and “M.O.” was Modern Occasions, where I had come across “Zetland: A Character Witness” two years earlier. Written in the form of a biographical portrait, it told the story of a Jewish intellectual growing up in Chicago. Bellow described him as “a junior Immanuel Kant” familiar with the whole of Western literature and thought, from Hume to Nietzsche, Heinrich Heine to the Surrealists, Russian novels to Yiddish poets. He played the violin, could explain Lenin’s concept of “democratic centralism,” and had Plato down cold. “He was a clever kid,” wrote the unnamed narrator: “His bookishness pleased everyone.”

  Bellow’s fiction was highly autobiographical, as he himself acknowledged: Augie March was Bellow, Moses Herzog was Bellow, Dr. Sammler was Bellow. Each had his own characteristic traits but also traits one could readily identify as Bellovian: a hunger for books combined with an irrepressible need to display their erudition; a penchant for metaphysics; and a profound grasp of what it meant to be Jewish. But his other characters were closely based on people in his life.*1 Just as Humboldt was Delmore, so Zetland was Rosenfeld, Bellow’s closest friend at Tuley High School in Chicago—a tragic figure who had never fulfilled his great promise and died of a heart attack in a rented room on the city’s North Side at the age of thirty-eight.

  How did I know this? I had been obsessed with Isaac Rosenfeld ever since I was a teenager. My best friend, Josh, a slight, moody boy with jet-black curls and sensuous, mournful eyes that made him attractive to girls, had pressed on me a worn paperback copy of Passage from Home, Rosenfeld’s one published novel. It was about “someone like us,” he told me. The bookshelf in my Evanston bedroom contained the high school canon: Howl, The Naked and the Dead, Tropic of Cancer, On the Road, Naked Lunch, The Beat Generation, No Exit, Waiting for Godot, The Duino Elegies. But no one had written about the specific, actual life I led: its geography, its cast of Russian-Jewish grandparents, its histrionic family dramas. I took the book home and read it overnight.

  It wasn’t an eventful story: Bernard Miller, a book-besotted boy, “sensitive as a burn,” growing up in an emotionally stifling household on the North Side of Chicago with his father and stepmother, runs away from home and goes off to live with his progressive, free-thinking aunt and her unemployed hillbilly lover. A few weeks later, put off by their sordid bohemian ménage, Bernard returns home to a tentative reconciliation with his father.

  What made the novel resonate so deeply with me was its depiction of adolescent vulnerability and excess of feeling. Trapped in his parents’ unhappy marriage, afflicted with longings he finds it hard to articulate, Bernard at fourteen has a precocious sense of “the universal sadness of life.” He suffers from “a certain homelessness in the world.” He’s Jewish without knowing what it means. To read a book that so closely mirrored my own “predicament”—one of Rosenfeld’s favorite words—was a revelation.

  Josh’s preoccupation with the book was more than literary, it turned out. His mother, Freda, had dated Rosenfeld when they were high school students at Tuley; they had necked in Humboldt Park. And toward the end of his life, when Rosenfeld was living in his last apartment, they had taken up again; Josh had a blurred memory of Rosenfeld, puffy-faced, pasty-complexioned, overweight, in a car with Freda, driving his brother to summer camp.

  Sitting in the kitchen of their Evanston bungalow, cigarette and drink in hand, Freda seemed worn-out but exotic. As I look back now, I realize that she was only in her forties then, but to me at that age she seemed old. It was hard to imagine, as it always is, that she’d ever been a girl at all. She talked obsessively about “Isaac”—her use of Rosenfeld’s first name struck me as improperly familiar. This was a writer who had published books. To Josh’s mother, he was a dead boyfriend.

  Once she found out that I knew who Saul Bellow was, Freda latched onto me; whenever I came to the house after school, she would motion me to sit down in the kitchen and told me “Isaac stories.” Bellow was writing something about Isaac, she said. He had come to visit her—Saul Bellow, dapper in a three-piece suit and fedora.

  As if these memories weren’t sufficient proof that Rosenfeld was the model for Zetland, I had the evidence of a foreword Bellow had written to a collection of Rosenfeld’s posthumous essays and reviews entitled An Age of Enormity. “Isaac had a round face and yellowish-brown hair which he combed straight back,” Bellow’s foreword began. “He was near-sighted, his eyes pale blue, and he wore round glasses.” With a few strokes, he evoked his subject, “gesturing like a Russian-Jewish intellectual, a cigarette between two fingers”; playing the clown (“He imitated steam irons, clocks, airplanes, tugboats, big-game hunters, Russian commissars, Village poets and their girlfriends”); dwelling in Hogarthian squalor on West 76th Street during his New York years, “cockroaches springing from the toaster with the slices of bread.” The piece closed on an elegiac note stunning in its simplicity: “During the last years of his life he was solitary, and on Walton Place*2 in one of his furnished rooms, he died alone.”

  Now Bellow was writing about Rosenfeld and Delmore at the same time. My touchstones. My icons. My obsessions. It couldn’t have been chance that had brought us all together.

  —

  Emboldened by the welcoming tone of Bellow’s letter, I called up to make an appointment. Miraculously, I was put through by the switchboard of the University of Chicago just by uttering the man’s name. His secretary urged me not to come out to Chicago as Bellow was very busy, but it was too late; my bags were packed.*3

  Bellow found time for me when I phoned again from O’Hare, and I took a cab over to his office in one of those stony neo-Gothic buildings on the University of Chicago campus. His secretary showed me into a linoleum-floored room with a metal desk and a filing cabinet. A coat rack stood in the corner, bare except for a herringbone fedora—Bellow’s hat.

  I pretended to study my notes, glancing up whenever I heard footsteps in the hall. At last he came in, a small man with sad, liquid eyes and a head of silky white hair. I had read somewhere that Bellow was an elegant dresser, and I wasn’t disappointed; his raincoat had a Burberry look, and his gray-plaid three-piece suit gave off a high-thread-count sheen. He sank down into a chair by the window, shielding his brow from the overhead light as if he had a migraine. No small talk here. I opened my notebook and began.

  “I gather you’re writing a novel about Delmore.”

  He raised his hand from hi
s forehead like a visor. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Well, that story in Playboy…”

  “It’s not about Delmore,” he said, a resentful note in his voice. “It’s a composite portrait of a few poets I knew: Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore. I’m writing a novel, not a biography.” He leaned back in his chair, waiting for the next question as if it were a dentist’s drill.

  I retreated to safer territory. When had he first met Delmore? “I met him in Greenwich Village. That’s where the cultural action was in those days, and Delmore was the man to know. But it was when we were teaching at Princeton that we really got to be friends.” Bellow launched into a complicated tale about Delmore’s efforts to land a job there in the 1950s, his tireless maneuvering in the English department, his elaborate scheme for getting the Ford Foundation to underwrite a chair in poetry.

  “But then he went nuts,” Bellow said in his Augie March idiom. He threatened the art critic Hilton Kramer, who happened to be living next door to him at the Chelsea, claiming that Kramer was having an affair with Delmore’s wife, and ended up at Bellevue. Bellow collected money for his treatment, but Delmore used it to hire a private eye, who tailed Bellow and made his life hell. “This Stanzioni was making a good profit off Delmore. All the money I raised ended up in his pocket.” Stanzioni: another name to look up in the Manhattan phone book.

  Bellow looked pale in the weak winter sunlight streaming through the window. Delmore had tormented his friends with recriminations during his terrible last years and bequeathed them a legacy of unresolved emotions. The lawsuits and private eyes and phone calls in the middle of the night had taken a toll.

  “What a maniac,” I commented, eager to show where my sympathies lay. Bellow nodded. He was tired of Delmore and his biographer. But I had a message to deliver. “My mother was very grateful for your note to Evelyn Stone,” I said. Evelyn, my mother’s closest friend, was dying of Alzheimer’s. Bellow, who’d had a crush on her when they were both at Northwestern, had written her a note. “She wanted me to tell you how much it meant to Evelyn.”*4 Bellow eyed me warily. “She was a beautiful girl,” he remembered. I waited for more, but he just stared out the window, and I was overcome with that empty feeling one gets when the houselights go up at the end of a movie. The interview was over.