The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  If I was impatient with Delmore, Dwight was curiously obtuse. “He always made sense to me,” he said when I described one of Delmore’s paranoid soliloquies, and when he came to the scene in my book where Delmore insulted him over the phone, then tore it from the wall, he noted mildly: “Don’t remember.” Loyal to the very end, he simply couldn’t—or wouldn’t—grasp that his old friend had gone insane.

  I left Dwight’s office that afternoon in a rebellious mood. I was tired of his objections, his lectures, his jocular editorial asides. In fact, I was sick of Delmore and his whole generation. Diatribes in restaurants, boring accounts of life in the 1930s, drab offices in neighborhoods that made my heart pound: was this what the literary life was about? It wasn’t until some months later that my thwarted pride sought redress—and then it was unconscious. In the last chapter of the manuscript, I told of a scene that had been reported to me by an editor who had accompanied Dwight to the hotel where he went to collect Delmore’s belongings after he died. “Standing amidst a sea of papers, magazines, notebooks, and clothes, Dwight tried on a jacket of Delmore’s,” I wrote. “After all, it would have been a small reward for his loyalty and generosity over a decade.” “Ye Gods, No!! What’s the matter with you?” Dwight fulminated in the margin, underscoring the words with a purple pen. “Not my feeling at all. Not a dime-store ghoul. I liked the idea of wearing a jacket to remember D by—not ‘getting a small reward.’ Minuscule indeed! If I’m to be made a burlesque ghoul, at least record that I paid D’s last hotel bill, $25—and have not yet collected.”

  Chortling over this comic outcry, I turned the page—only to find that he had just been warming up. “Really, Atlas, it’s as if you weren’t there half the time and were just wordily going through the motions,” he scrawled on the last page. “I think you should put the ms away for six months or a year and then you’ll see how dead and tedious large parts of it are.” I was stunned. He had been hard on me before, but no matter how unsparing his annotations, they had invariably been witty, specific, suffused with irrepressible enthusiasm. And for once I thought he was wrong. The book was good now; it was finished. I just knew it.

  I called him up. “I really wonder about you,” he shouted over the phone. “After all these years, and all the time I spent on your manuscript, you don’t even mention me in your acknowledgments!”

  Apparently that business about Delmore’s jacket hadn’t been revenge enough for the mockery I’d endured. I had managed to thank every minor character I interviewed, every librarian who had given me access to Delmore’s letters, every friend and relative who had put me up for a night, yet failed to include even a single reference to the man who had authorized my biography, made available to me Delmore’s archive, spent hundreds of hours poring over my work-in-progress—the man who had taught me how to write. As Dwight commented in the margin about some Delmorean misdeed: “What a guy!” Still, hadn’t I been good-natured about Macdonald’s brutal annotations? It had been a great education, but a hard one, and I was still smarting from the welts raised by his red-felt-tip birch. Guiltily, I held the phone away from my ear. “If I’d thanked you the way you deserve,” I joked (sort of), “you couldn’t have written the blurb you promised me.”

  But Dwight had been doing some calculations of his own. “What are you going to do with the manuscript when you’re done?” he said.

  “Publish it, I guess.”

  “No, I mean the one I’ve edited.”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Why don’t you deposit it at Yale, among my papers?” So that his editorial genius—and my ineptitude—would be known to posterity. How could I not? The man had changed my life.

  A week later we met in my publisher’s office—neutral turf. Dwight had just gotten out of the hospital, and he hobbled in with a cane, his lips trembling through his ivory beard. But he revived when we sat down over the manuscript, his pencil hovering like a harpoon ready to spear offending phrases. Once more we made our way through my disheveled pages, only this time I stood up for myself. I had been working on this biography for three years now and knew Delmore better than those who had known him. After all, they couldn’t see him as I did, day by day, through what he divulged in his journals, his letters, his conversation, even the margins of his books. It’s said that no one knows what goes on inside a marriage; no one knows what goes on inside a biography either.

  Dwight appeared to enjoy my new militancy. Hunched over the desk, dropping cigarette ash on his turtleneck, he beamed like a violin teacher with a blossoming pupil whenever I refuted an objection. “Our last session was vivifying for me bec. you so readily accepted my revisory suggestions when you were convinced,” he wrote me later that summer, “and so clearly explained why you rejected them when you weren’t.”

  It was vivifying for me, too, but also sad. This would be our last editorial skirmish. When we got to the end, Dwight stood up and patted me on the back—just as he had the day I first met him. Then he shuffled off down the hall. The elevator was slow to come, and when I walked by a few minutes later, he was still there, leaning on his cane.

  Back in Cambridge, I rewrote my acknowledgments page, giving a full account of Dwight’s role in the book: “His brilliant, copious annotations had a profound influence on my style and ideas.” Meanwhile he was laboring over a blurb. “Took me well over a week, off and on (mostly off, guiltily fretting) in my present dilapidated period to get down a page and a half,” he reported—and he wouldn’t have relinquished it then if my editor’s assistant hadn’t shown up at his door like the boy who fetched Dr. Johnson’s copy for The Rambler.

  It was a generous blurb, and I responded with a grateful letter. “No reason for you to be ‘overwhelmed’ by my statement,” Dwight replied—less than a month after he had urged me to put the manuscript away for a year. “Didn’t you know how good it all finally came out?”

  *1 At what point did “Macdonald” become “Dwight” for me? Perhaps about the same time that “Schwartz” became “Delmore.” I spent more hours in his company than I did anyone else’s during these years, and there must have come a moment when, even in my own mind, I began to refer to him by his first name. Certainly the days of addressing him as “Mr. Macdonald” came to an end early in our relationship: Dwight didn’t encourage formality and would probably have given one of his neighing laughs if I had addressed him this way after our first or second meeting.

  *2 I’m not quite sure what Dwight meant by this word, which recurs in his correspondence: its dictionary definition (minus the “ass”) is “spiritual person” or “Buddhist,” but Dwight gave it a perplexing negative spin. Maybe such types were anathema to his practical mind.

  XIV

  The book appeared in November 1977 to appreciative reviews and more attention than I could ever have expected. It was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, which named it one of the Ten Best Books of 1977, and my normally stingy publisher*1 paid for a full-page ad: I even got nominated for a National Book Award. I was twenty-eight years old.*2

  One of the greatest pleasures was hearing from readers. In the months that followed, I got many letters from Delmore’s friends and teachers and students and mistresses. Most were friendly; some were eager to point out errors: one correspondent informed me that the reviewer of Delmore’s verse play Shenandoah wasn’t Edna Lou Walton but Eda Lou Walton. Another scolded me for leaving the e off Montague Street in Brooklyn.

  The most chastening corrections were contained in a long letter—to be followed up a year later by an article in the Michigan Quarterly Review—from Maurice Zolotow, Delmore’s classmate at the University of Wisconsin. The letters to Julian Sawyer that I’d acquired from Andy Brown at the Gotham Book Mart were, according to Zolotow, “largely fabrications, fantasies.” Delmore had written them to impress Sawyer, “with whom”—and here he dropped his bombshell—“Delmore was deeply in love.” It wasn’t just a youthful infatuation, either: “F
or Delmore was a homosexual who never came out of the closet. That was one of the frustrations of his tragic life.”

  Delmore at the Pocono Camp Club Credit 14

  Zolotow claimed that he wasn’t alone in this supposition: “It was clear to the wives and lovers of Delmore’s male friends (including my wife, Charlotte) that there was a powerful homosexual component in the feelings we had for Delmore and of course vice versa.”

  This wasn’t entirely news to me. I had dealt extensively in my book with the possibility that Delmore had homosexual impulses, at the very least, and may have acted upon them; I had even placed in evidence a Rorschach test administered by a psychiatrist that supported this thesis. But it was still shocking to have it laid out in such raw form, as a factual statement.

  It was also true that I didn’t have to believe everything Zolotow said. Not because he’d been a failure: he had written celebrity biographies that made money and got mostly favorable reviews. But he had struggled with alcoholism, eventually vanquishing it through AA; and he hadn’t achieved what he would have wished to as a writer.*3 So maybe he was bitter. On the other hand, as he noted in his Michigan Quarterly Review article, I was an innocent, untested by the disappointments of life, its disorder and ambiguity; it had been hard for me to reconcile “these confused and wandering old men and women with the gods and goddesses of the 1930s and 1940s.” It’s only now that I can observe them from the vantage of my own sixties—the same age as Delmore’s contemporaries when I interviewed them—and see how clueless I was at the time, scribbling in my oblong reporter’s notebook.

  I also heard from people who had somehow eluded my gumshoe efforts over the years to track down anyone who had ever known my subject, however tangentially. A childhood classmate by the name of William Golub supplied one of those nuggets of gold the biographer sifts for with such irrational fervor: an address. “I had a close relationship with Delmore for a year or so when I was about seven years old,”*4 Golub informed me: “When I knew him, he lived at 575 West 172nd Street, which was at the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue. I believe this was the first place he lived in Washington Heights.” He, too, had a correction to make, though he slipped it in so casually that it hardly seemed like a rebuke: “The elementary school he went to was P.S. 169, not 69.”*5

  One of the most poignant letters I received was from Mrs. Ethel Travis, who had been the neighbor of Delmore’s mother at 34 Hillside Avenue. (Wait! When did she live there?) “She was a most attractive woman,” wrote Mrs. Travis, now resident in Panorama City, California, “a chronic complainer about her arthritis and her neglectful children.” This I already knew or at least wasn’t surprised to learn. Delmore was always going on about his annoying mother, a whiner, a nag, a collector of grievances. But that she sat outside her building, disheveled in a wheelchair, “with her blouse usually half buttoned”—now there was one of those “small details” that Boswell was always looking for as a way to show character.

  There were others. For instance, that Rose had gone out to California to visit Delmore’s brother and returned with two avocados: “I was thrilled that avocados were so easily available in California, for in New York they were a great delicacy and I could rarely afford them,” recalled Mrs. Travis. But say I had managed to track her down, and suppose she had told me about the avocados. What could I have done with this detail, how worked it into the narrative? Would I have even written it down? Brought back avocados from California…Even so, I was haunted by the image of Delmore’s mother returning home, avocados in hand, and showing them off to her neighbor: were they soft by then, after their long journey, or were they still hard and shiny, waiting to ripen?

  Irving Lowe of Mill Valley, California, also had a story about Rose:

  When Delmore returned to N.Y. after his first (and only) year at Wisconsin, I met him one day on the Coney Island Boardwalk and at his urging went home with him to meet his mother—“She’d be glad to see you,” he said. I wondered at that. Our conversation had been dry, and I was uneasy and wanted to get away. He introduced me to his mother, who seemed harried; went unceremoniously to his room and didn’t come out until a couple of hours later, when she knocked at his door to say I was leaving. She had given me some tea, and we talked and talked, and it was clear that she was troubled about her wild, tender, unkind, gifted son. Before she went to call Delmore, she whispered to me, “Be Delmore’s friend, Irving.”

  I nearly wept when I read this letter. How Delmore had needed such a friend; how hard it had been for him, given his stormy temperament, to be a friend. Irving, like so many others, had tried and failed.

  Now and then a correspondent would supply an anecdote that I could have used as counter-evidence to the somewhat glum portrait of Delmore I had drawn, such as a description of how he appeared on the tennis court from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s biographer, Arthur Mizener. They were together at a summer writing workshop at Kenyon College, and Mizener would wander over to Delmore’s house after lunch and find the poet hard at work annotating Finnegans Wake: “He almost always beat me; he had a serve that would knock the racquet right out of your hand.” Right out of your hand…Who knew? And this would have been the summer of 1950, when Delmore, then thirty-six, was already deteriorating. I had quoted the novelist George Lanning, who described Delmore that same summer as “shambling, sweaty, untidy.”*6 Where was “the happy Delmore,” Mizener wanted to know, the Delmore who was “easy, gay, and great fun”? I have no idea, professor. Why didn’t you tell me about this side of Delmore—especially the detail about his big serve—when I interviewed you?

  Sometimes it felt as if the letters I got were excuses for the writers to reminisce about their own lives: “I went to the same camp as Delmore, Pocono Camp Club”—and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s nephew was in his bunk! “I was in Gertrude’s geology class [in] Washington Square College…” Or to find out if I had come across information that might prove useful for the books they were writing. “I was intrigued by your account of his Harlem nightclub crawl with Louis MacNeice,” wrote a scholar from England at work on a book about MacNeice, a passing presence in my own. I wasn’t omniscient; I could contribute no more details about Delmore’s night out in Harlem with a British poet of whose life I knew nothing other than what I’d reported. One notecard = one sentence. And what about Delmore’s relationships with Berryman, Auden, Lowell, Paul Goodman, R. P. Blackmur? their biographers queried me. For them, Delmore was a transient figure in their subject’s life, a name in the index. As Janet Malcolm shrewdly notes in Two Lives, her biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the major characters in one book are minor characters in another; sometimes they play a walk-on part, at others a supporting role:

  The biographer is writing a life, not lives, and to keep himself on course, must cultivate a kind of narcissism on behalf of his subject that blinds him to the full humanity of everyone else. As he turns the bracing storylessness of human life into the flaccid narrativity of biography, he cannot worry about the people who never asked to be dragged into his shaky enterprise.

  We are all, to ourselves, the center of the universe: why should biography be any different? It, too, has a star—or, to stay with the celestial motif, a sun, around which the lesser planets orbit.

  Reading these letters made me miss Delmore. Termination—as I thought of it, the term implied both the end of therapy and the…end—was in this case less painful for the analysand, who was dead (and had been throughout the entire term of treatment) than for the analyst. One letter in particular, from Delmore’s dear friend William Barrett, indicated that I wasn’t alone in my bereavement. “I put off reading your book for so long because I knew it would be painful to me,” he wrote a few months after it came out. “I wanted to approach it when my mind would be clear of other things. Well, it was painful to me. My friendship with Delmore was the closest I’ve ever had, and it is still very painful to think of him in his decline.”

  It was a moving letter, drenched with loss; a decade after De
lmore’s death, Barrett was still struggling to come to terms with it: “One of the things I need to do for myself is to retrieve in my memory what was good and fine in that friendship, as well as to retrieve the image of what, with all his conflicts, was beautiful and wonderful about Delmore before he began slowly to come to pieces.” To reconcile the Delmore of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the handsome, charismatic, self-dramatizing, comic, and passionate figure who had mesmerized the best writers of his generation with the shouting, abusive, drunken and decrepit figure of his last years had been a challenge for me, too.

  Perhaps the most provocative letter was from a man named Milton Schafer who lived on Riverside Drive. It was long and carefully considered. Among the issues Mr. Schafer wrestled with was the difference between my portrait of Delmore and Bellow’s. My biography “put [him] in mind of” Humboldt’s Gift,

  which for some reason I never finished. Bellow’s Schwartz as Humboldt is merely ludicrous. I found no possible basis to feel him empathically and after reading your book it became much clearer why I felt as I did. Then it occurred to me, once being drawn into his orbit and made to feel his uncomprehending rage, power, and irreversible atrophy or decomposition with such an accompanying howling and lamentable sadness about it, that Bellow actually does him a huge disservice. Not that character distortions in the literary world are by themselves all that shocking anymore, mind you. It’s just especially in the case of Schwartz, when Bellow must have known to a large extent how much he was going through continually, it seems shamefully heartless and self-serving of him to so insensitively strip him of his humanity—and so totally.

  What struck my correspondent, who didn’t seem to have known Delmore, was the evident sympathy I had for my subject—“his demons, his quirks, his essential solitariness.” He found the intensity of my identification eerie: “In a way, it seemed at times that you were as literally obsessed with him as he was with himself.”