by James Atlas
Three decades later, in a revised one-volume edition of what had come to be regarded as a classic but prudish biography, Edel tried to overcome his pudeur in order to stay relevant. It was a halfhearted effort. “I am not trying to suggest that I have, in my revisions, gone in quest of a ‘sex life’ or even a ‘love life’ for Henry James,” he insisted: “My data remains the same.” Sometimes a celibate is just a celibate.*6
It was hard enough to look at the photographs of nude women from the cache of porn mags with anachronistic names like Whisper and Stare that I found among Delmore’s “papers” at Syracuse University. Porn was less raw in those days, just breasts and a glimpse of ass—“rotundity of buttock.”
Still, Delmore’s stash was unsettling: what bad luck for both of us that it had ended up among the belongings salvaged from his last hotel room. It was like rummaging in your father’s closet and discovering a stack of Playboys. It destroyed his authority. I wanted to know Delmore, to understand him, to find out as much as I could about his life, but only up to a point. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” wrote Eliot in Four Quartets. Neither can the biographer.
*1 It was hard to believe that, even as we talked about Joyce in Ellmann’s cold but cozy New College office until the room began to darken in the short Oxford afternoon, the tables around us piled high with books, he had been sitting on these fiery letters.
*2 He was more open about his own sexual adventures. In his journal, Boswell kept a meticulous record of every STD he contracted: “Too, too plain was Senor Gonorrhea.”
*3 Boswell does acknowledge that the (apparently) abstinent Johnson wrestled with temptation: “It was well-known, that his amorous inclinations were uncommonly strong and impetuous. He owned to many of his friends, that he used to take women of the town to taverns, and hear them relate their history.” For Johnson, sex was more of an aural than oral experience.
*4 The suspiciously prolific Jeffrey Meyers, author of nearly forty biographies, is one of the few pro-flagellants: “Despite the overwhelming evidence of Johnson’s dark secret, his modern biographers have not been able to reconcile his obsession with their exalted image of the great moralist.” But his “overwhelming evidence” is no more persuasive than the non-evidence of Bate and Martin.
*5 I once stood next to Wain at a urinal in an Oxford pub but was too shy to address him. Anyway, what would I have said? How do you explain the handcuffs, Mr. Wain?
*6 And sometimes not. In the late 1990s, an acrimonious dispute broke out in the online journal Slate prompted by the publication of Sheldon Novick’s massive two-volume biography of James; Novick alleged that, contrary to Edel’s belief that the novelist was “celibate and sexually diffident,” a “querulous old maid,” he was in fact “a passionate, engaged man” who was “actively gay.” He had extrapolated from a phrase of James’s own, at the age of twenty-two, in a journal entry describing his “initiation premiere”—a “divine, unique” encounter with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. According to Novick, “James had his sexual initiation in Cambridge and Atherton Place,” the James family’s residence in Boston. As for the physician Edel had cited, it was “a bizarre, homophobic pronouncement by a doctor who examined James once he was ill and away from home, then announced to a breathless world that the famous novelist was badly hung.”
For Edel, by then a near-nonagenarian, such terms as “badly hung” might have been pushing at the borders of acceptable idiom. But Fred Kaplan, another James biographer, ratcheted up the terms of the debate by suggesting that James might have “jacked off” Holmes. “I’d like James to have had sex (mutual masturbation? belly rub? anal intercourse? Even hot kissing—that kind of thing) with someone else, male or female, that he wanted to,” Kaplan stated with magnanimity, introducing the idea that the repressed if not virginal novelist was drawn to the polymorphous perverse. “I’m baffled as to why you [Novick] think that James would be somehow lesser, even diminished, if he hadn’t fucked or sucked or whatever with someone.” Their bad language had an adolescent swagger that annoyed me. They weren’t just biographers: they were men speaking to men. But their gross locker room talk made me nostalgic for the days when Edgar Johnson, one of Dickens’s biographers, could refer to his subject’s “nocturnal adventures” and leave it at that.
XIII
Dwight’s*1 hesitation about my project had vanished once I got it under way, and he had even agreed to edit my work-in-progress. The chapters I sent him came back marked up like freshman themes. His challenges, objurgations, rebukes—and occasional praise—defaced every page. Phrase after phrase was judged “pretentious, cliché,” “verbose.” “Oh, God!” he expostulated, denouncing a failed rhetorical flourish: “You have a great vocabulary of vague and dull terms.” “Why summarize what the letter will tell the reader in twenty-five seconds?” he exploded over some lame paraphrase. “You’re like a museum guide who talks too much.” When I glossed over a religious crisis in Delmore’s life, he noted simply: “weasel.” And when I skirted the reason for Delmore’s fistfight with Robert Lowell, he scribbled: “Can’t you explain? For once!”
If I said too little on that occasion, I generally said too much. “Leave the reader alone!” Macdonald protested; I was always “reader-nudging.” Quoting a journal entry in which Delmore confided his anxieties, I summed up: “No more succinct or thorough evaluation of Delmore’s malady is to be found in all his work”—to which Macdonald retorted: “And no more vague recapitulation of the main aspects of D’s malady that have been described a dozen times. You keep wandering back to the old boneyard like a dog that’s forgotten just where he buried that bone.” And when, only a page later, I returned to the subject yet again, he exclaimed: “MY GOD, you’re back sniffing around again for that lost bone already!?”
Dwight Macdonald Credit 13
I subsisted on crumbs of praise. “Trust you realize that I, unlike the sundial, only record the cloudy hours,” he wrote at the bottom of one heavily scored page. There was an occasional “good” or “brilliant” or “masterful” (amended to the correct “masterly”) to keep me going—and once, a terse but eloquent “Ah!” He got in the habit of annotating pages with stars “a la Mimi Sheraton,” but he doled them out even more sparingly than the famous food critic and was so scrupulous that he once crossed out “very fine” and replaced it with “fine.” The manuscript had a battle-scarred look; there were singed holes where smoldering cigarette ash had been scattered over the page, and one chapter, edited from the hospital bed where Dwight was recovering from an operation, arrived in the mail wrapped in gauze, the pages smeared with blood—visible evidence of the surgery he was performing on my sickly prose.
What prompted this editorial zeal? He continued to write the occasional essay, but he was “blocked,” according to his wife, Gloria, and generally had a glass of Cutty Sark in his hand after four in the afternoon. Then there was his loyalty to the memory of his friend, and his love of editing: he had a lot of time on his hands. But I think what drove him was mainly literary enthusiasm. He often complained that he was having trouble writing and spoke wistfully of the memoirs he couldn’t seem to get started on. My manuscript gave him the opportunity to roll up his sleeves and go to work. I was cautious in the early drafts, in the grip of a priggish restraint attributable to my youth and lack of confidence, and Dwight had little patience for this infirmity. “Can’t you spur your pegasus into a livelier gait?” he exhorted me:
At times he canters, sometimes even gallops (when you give your own personal ideas their head) but too often he ambles along at an academic jog trot. You seem to back away from or edge up to what you want to say, putting everything into indirect (and impersonal) discourse, using passive, circumlocutory syntax as if you were looking over your shoulder at a PhD committee and were afraid they’d catch you with your feelings and ideas too nakedly exposed. The nervously qualifying adverbs, the doubled adjectives (a belt AND a suspender) and the defensive—and needless—summings up of what you ha
ve established or what you are going to establish, mostly at the start or the end of a paragraph—these academic tics are part of the same stylistic disease. You’re a writer, with your own peculiar viewpoint on D, not a Congressional Investigating Committee, and you should only record what gives you pleasure. Enjoy yourself as a stylist, simplify and generalize acc. to YOUR taste & pleasure & fun, kick those Facts around, ignore them if they don’t strike you as important to YOUR view of D. In short, be a (literary) man, not a (research) mouse.
I quailed whenever I saw a letter from Dwight in the mailbox, instantly recognizable by the rubber-stamped return address in the corner, framed by a boldly drawn box in red or purple Magic Marker. But he was good cop as well as bad cop. “You’ve got the makings of a superb and definitive biography of Delmore,” concluded a harsh critique of my “clotted and verbose,” “long-winded, heavy-breathing” prose. “Only why not write in your own personal voice, addressing, directly and informally, friends, acquaintances, and in general people like you, as bright as you, not academic bonzes who have to be elaborately briefed in woolly prose because they’re so much dumber than you (or me)?”
Dwight responded to literature with Orwellian directness, undeterred from judgment by an author’s reputation, and was effortlessly well read in what now seems an old-fashioned way, as familiar with Byron and Sir Walter Scott as with the latest Updike novel. In his letters he ranged back and forth from Delmore to Shelley, Jane Austen to Evelyn Waugh, with a chattily brisk authority. “Just read your excellent wrecking job on that academic bonze-ass*2 Bruccoli’s hagiography of O’Hara,” he wrote me about a review of mine:
You make just the right points re. O’Hara (fair but strict—one negative you MIGHT have noted is his lack of love/feeling, w. is why he’s so inferior to Scott [Fitzgerald], whose snobbishness like Proust’s came from a romantic love, while O’Hara’s came from Thersites envy: his catalogues of social hierarchy are cold, boring, repulsive and Madame-Tussaud-wax-museum-like, while Scott’s—as in the Homeric catalogue of the people who came to Gatsby’s parties—were alive and moving bec. he wrote about the milieu as a guilty and so “involved” participant and not as an “objective”/ Zolaesque “social scientist” cum snarling outsider.
There was nothing labored about these flights of literary criticism; they were utterly spontaneous, dashed off to make a point. He dismissed Edith Wharton as “middlebrow,” compared Delmore to Wilde and Poe (“ALLAN, for Christ’s sake!” he scolded me when I misspelled Poe’s middle name: “Youth is no excuse—or maybe it is—in the wake of the post-fifties Zeitgeist.”) When I complained that I was bogged down in the boring details of chronology, he noted that Poe had wrestled with the same problem in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym: “He can’t manage the kitchen-work of making his fantastic tale plausible except by throwing in huge sections of undigested factual stuff from voyages and natural histories that don’t work (Defoe could do it because he wasn’t at all imaginative).”
I tried to loosen up, but my authorial voice was still hopelessly solemn. “The students would enter the classroom in Sever Hall to find him sitting behind his desk, and when they left he would remain motionless, as if to discourage conversation,” I wrote of Delmore at Harvard—prompting Macdonald to object, “Any professor in any class would be thus ‘found’ by his students unless he had a trampoline or a trapeze installed in Sever 106.” A stiff remark about the “terrible irony” of Delmore languishing in a down-at-the-heels hotel while a lead article in The New York Times Book Review celebrated him as a major poet was likewise hooted down: “You sound like a Victorian moralist on the perils of drink.” And when I offered a morose interpretation of some Delmorean quip, Macdonald circled it in red and wrote underneath, in purple block letters, “JOKE: Signed, D.M.”
He was so impatient that I often mistook for anger what was only high-spiritedness. “What?” he would cry in amazement when I insisted that Ford Madox Ford was a better novelist than Conrad; that Martin Green (long forgotten now) was a good critic; that A Farewell to Arms was Hemingway’s masterpiece. “How can you say that?” And he would embark on a vehement refutation, willing to hear me out but determined to get to the heart of the matter. “Do you really believe that Delmore didn’t write any good poetry in the 1950s?” he said once, challenging a claim I’d made in an early version of the manuscript. He took out a soiled handkerchief and mopped his brow, as if convincing me that I was wrong required physical exertion. “What about all those poems in Summer Knowledge?” He rubbed his stubbly beard. “And even if it’s true, which I doubt, why say so, for God’s sake, this early in the book?” Gesturing with his cigarette, he reasoned, “But if you don’t say so, you’re holding back from the reader, who will find out your opinion later and wonder why you didn’t say so then.”
Baffled by this dilemma, invigorated by its moral ambiguity, he got up and strode around the room. In the end, we both gave ground: I came to admire a handful of the late poems, and Dwight conceded that he was partial to Delmore’s work just because it was Delmore’s. “You make me out in my usual role of a stubborn Scotch argufier, I see,” he complained about my portrait of him in the book, but it was an image he cultivated. Once, after a long afternoon spent going over a new chapter at his house in East Hampton, he hurried me off to a cocktail party, only to arrive an hour early. We got back in the car, drove to the beach, and trudged up and down in the sand. Our subject that day was Edmund Wilson, whom I persisted in overpraising. “Wilson was a classic middlebrow,” Dwight declared, halting in his tracks to make a point. “Look at To the Finland Station,” he said, indignant at the thought of how wrong Wilson was about so many things. “Don’t tell me you liked that book!” Obscurely ashamed of myself, I admitted that I did. He looked at me as if I had just said I believed in reincarnation. Ignoring the waves that swirled about his ankles, he made me explain what I could possibly admire about such a badly written, shoddily organized, poorly researched book, a book that was written only to popularize ideas Wilson never really understood in the first place and that, furthermore, Dwight didn’t believe he was even interested in, except for the purpose of showing off how much he’d read—“which is what he always does,” Dwight argued, his voice cracking in dismay. “He doesn’t know a thing about politics; there’s hardly a word about Stalin. It’s just another subject he’s read up on.”
Back at the party, I could hear Dwight’s braying voice across the room as he explained to a surly Vassar girl why David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd wasn’t “an American classic.” But he hadn’t finished with the Edmund Wilson question, and driving me back to the train station that night, he crept along the road at five miles an hour, afraid we would arrive before he’d gotten his main points across. (I, meanwhile, was afraid I’d miss my train.)
Yet for all his sharpness in debate, Dwight could be willfully naïve, and his literary acumen deserted him at the most improbable moments. Not long after Humboldt’s Gift came out, we were gloating companionably over the various characters Bellow had made fun of: the manic Delmore, the blandly genial Carlos Baker, the bibulous R. P. Blackmur. “What did you think of Orlando Huggins?” I said—“one of those ever-youthful lightweight high-spirited American intellectuals,” as Bellow described Humboldt’s “argumentative” literary executor, a blustering, “rosy-faced” character with a “tall man’s belly,” a “neighing stammer,” and a “white billy-goat beard.” There was a stunned silence. “Was that me!?”
Vigilant about prose, he was utterly indifferent to possessions. His apartment on East 87th Street, noisily patrolled by a yapping terrier that skidded up and down the hall, ignoring Dwight’s exasperated cries, was dowdily comfortable: ceiling-high bookshelves, a plump-cushioned sofa, threadbare Persian rugs. His bungalow in East Hampton reminded me of a cottage in Devon or Cornwall—leaded windows, stucco walls, a flagstone terrace decorated with a curious assortment of relics. Terra-cotta statues of animals and saints were scattered about on the lawn. The walls of the gaze
bo that Dwight had made into a study were festooned with magazine ads of women in kilts and pullovers. Dwight had spent a good deal of his modest inheritance on politics, the magazine he published and edited during the 1940s, and he was always short of money. He and Gloria had to rent the East Hampton cottage for the lucrative summer months and sweat it out in New York. But there was no pose in his simplicity. The only thing Dwight cared about was the subject at hand—whatever it was. I once saw him get so caught up at a dinner party trying to explain to the table why Hemingway “couldn’t write” that he spilled a steady stream of bouillabaisse on the carpet, oblivious to its splattering cascade.
One afternoon I called on him at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a gloomy building on West 56th Street, beyond Ninth Avenue, where he was teaching a course on American film. His office was a bare room with a metal desk, a grimy window that looked out on an air shaft, and a flickering fluorescent light—a fitting backdrop for the cross-examination that was about to occur. Dwight wasn’t in a genial mood. Fierce, irascible, antagonistic, he paced about the room—Dostoyevsky’s Inspector Porfiry interrogating Raskolnikov. Only whom had I murdered? The memory of Delmore. “You’re turning him into a nutty paranoiac,” he complained.
Had I been unfair to Delmore? It was certainly possible. I was charmed by his letters, amused by his journals, moved by his work, but I found his self-destructiveness oppressive. There were many Delmores: shambling, disheveled, self-deprecating, ironic, endearingly funny, brooding, depressed, remorseful, bitter, nail-bitten, wistful, anxious. But the sad story of his later years—the squandered talent, the mental suffering, the chaos of his life—weighed on me, and perhaps I judged him the way we tend to judge those closest to us: harshly.
