The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  But the biggest obstacle was Wilson himself. He was hard to like: one of his wives described him as “a cold fishy leprous person.” Could I spend years of my life with a subject who, even in the company of his wife and daughter, read at the dinner table? He was anti-Semitic; he was rude to waiters. He found no merit in Anthony Powell. It finally dawned on me: what I felt was more complex than “distaste” or “dislike”—it was a question of compatibility. Was Edmund Wilson someone through whose eyes I would come to see life in a new and different way? Did he possess qualities of temperament or character that would remain fresh throughout the many years it takes to write a major biography? In short, did he interest me?

  The voice of the unborn son in Delmore’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” rang out: “Don’t do it!”

  I returned the advance.

  —

  There would be other opportunities. Once you’ve published a biography, you’re a biographer. I would get calls from editors: Did I want to write the biography of Tennessee Williams? Dashiell Hammett? Invariably, I was excited at first. Invariably, after a few days of remembering what it was like to sit in the Syracuse library for ten hours at a stretch and then have dinner alone in the gloomy Orange Bar; to pore through old telephone books and call up nine people on the Upper West Side named Sheldon Horowitz, hoping to find the one who shared a cabin with Delmore at the Pocono Camp Club in 1924; to crawl around on the floor day after day, pawing through files and notecard boxes and disorderly piles of manuscripts…I would turn down the project. Why go through that ordeal again?

  Meanwhile I had left the Times and was supporting myself as a contract writer for magazines. But I was still obsessed with Chicago, which I had now tried twice to write about—first in a strange, abandoned novel about a circle of Chicago intellectuals that I had struggled with for most of my twenties, and then in my one published novel, The Great Pretender, the story of a boy from the North Shore of Chicago in quest of “authenticity.” I felt more attached to my own past than to the New York literary world I uneasily inhabited. “I had unfinished business in Chicago,” says Bellow’s Charlie Citrine. So did I, even if I was from the suburbs.

  Bellow had obsessed me ever since I read his first novel, Dangling Man, in a Penguin paperback edition, at the age of fourteen. I had been transfixed by the Hyde Park intellectuals lost in their deep thoughts, braving the “unmitigated wintriness” of the city to ponder “what we are and what we are for, to know our purpose, to seek grace”—the European sensibility of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge imported to the snowbound streets of Chicago. The rattling El on its dark iron girders hadn’t been depicted in literature yet, as far as I knew, though I had read James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy about Irish Chicago with excitement; the industrial wasteland, the “Christmas blaze” of garishly lighted shops on Devon Avenue over the dusk-darkening holidays, the hulking warehouses—none of this had made its way into any book I had read. It was Bellow who saw it and wrote it down.

  Chicago was more than a backdrop: it was a character in itself. “I am an American, Chicago-born,” opens The Adventures of Augie March; never mind that Bellow was born in Montreal. It is Chicago, in all its raw vigor, that forms his mental life, forms life itself: “The heat of June grew until the shady yards gave up the smell of the damp soil, of underground, and the city-Pluto kingdom of sewers and drains, and the mortar and roaring tar pots of roofers, the geraniums, lilies-of-the-valley, climbing roses, and sometimes the fiery devastation of the stockyards stink when the wind was strong.”

  My favorite of Bellow’s novels, the one I read over and over, was Herzog. Published in 1964, when he was forty-nine, it was the book that brought him wealth and fame. Written partly in the third person, partly in the form of letters from Moses Herzog, an untenured professor who teaches the history of ideas in a New York night school “to everyone under the sun,” both living and dead, it was a comic tour de force. The trope of Herzog’s one-way correspondence—with Heidegger (“Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by ‘the fall into the quotidian’ ”) and Nietzsche (“Der Herr Nietzsche, You speak of the power of the Dionysian to endure the sight of the Terrible”), with his psychiatrist and his lawyer and the department store Marshall Field, where his harrassing, haughty, cuckolding wife Madeleine has been running up bills—was liberating. It enabled Bellow to say whatever he wanted to say to anyone, unfettered by self-censorship or the demands of narrative order. He could just free-associate (an illusion, of course; this was Bellow’s most tautly controlled novel) and marvelous utterances would spill forth: “Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business.” “His duty was to live.”*11

  As with all of Bellow’s fiction, the novel is lightly plotted: Herzog has been left by his castrating wife, who, it emerges, is having an affair with his best friend; he calls upon and has sex with various girlfriends; he reminisces, in passages of great beauty, about his childhood in the slums of Montreal as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants; he retreats to the Berkshires and sets about the quixotic renovation of a dilapidated Victorian mansion with “a twenty-thousand-dollar legacy from Father Herzog.” After great labor, mostly cerebral but some of the handyman variety, he lies down on his “Recamier couch”*12 and assesses his situation, which turns out to be not so bad after all. His last letter is to himself. What does his “intensity,” his “idiot joy,” add up to? Herzog asks. (The question was often on Bellow’s mind: he titled a late book of essays It All Adds Up.) What good has it done the world? What good has it done him? What does he want? “But that’s just it—not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy.”

  And talk about experience-near. Bellow had been born in a year equidistant from the years of my parents’ births (Donald Atlas, 1913; Saul Bellow, 1915; Nora Atlas, 1917); had grown up and gone to high school in a Jewish-immigrant Northwest Side neighborhood not far from my father’s (Bellow, Tuley; Atlas, Senn); and shared a weird geographical affinity. (Herzog’s father lives on Mozart—pronounced Moh-zart in Chicago—around the corner from where my grandfather, Herman Atlas, had a drugstore.) There was even an intertwined personal history: the family of my mother’s best friend, the Teitelbaums,*13 had sold their bakery to Bellow’s uncle, Louis Dworkin.

  But it wasn’t just the convergence of biographical and autobiographical facts—the overt element—that moved me. It was the way Herzog exists in the world, immerses himself in its essence. He is a sentient being, a consciousness, and this capacity for special insight brings life itself before us in all its stunning radiance. Waiting for the ferry at Woods Hole, he stares down at the clear water and reflects: “He loved to think about the power of the sun, about life, about the ocean. The purity of the air moved him.” Soul, human, heart, and—alas—death: these were Bellow’s touchstones, the words that animated and defined his experience of being in the world. I read Herzog the way a Victorian family in its Cornwall cottage might have read the worn Psalter that had been handed down from generation to generation: for comfort, spiritual insight, moral instruction, and the most important thing—not available from anyone else—a sense of what it felt like to be alive.

  —

  In the spring of 1986, a few months after my novel came out, I was assigned to write a profile of Bellow for Vanity Fair, “pegged to” a PBS version of the novella Seize the Day, featuring Robin Williams as Tommy Wilhelm. I hadn’t seen him since our brief meeting more than a decade before, when I was writing my biography of Delmore, and I was excited, as always, by the prospect of spending time in his company. I wrote and requested an interview.

  Seize the Day was Bellow’s darkest book—the only one, apart from the penumbral Dangling Man, devoid of high-spiritedness. Augie, Henderson the Rain King, and Humboldt’s Gift all had antic heroes, large-hearted, life-loving, and loaded with verve. Even Sammler, in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a tou
gh-minded Holocaust survivor, had a resilience that defied the tragic. Only Tommy Wilhelm, the protagonist of Seize the Day, was a failure—divorced, unemployed, rejected by his own father—whose downward spiral culminates in his losing, over a single day, the last of his money through foolish speculations in the stock market. In the harrowing last scene, Tommy stumbles into a stranger’s funeral and, as he contemplates the inert figure in the coffin, begins to weep: “The source of all tears had suddenly sprung open within him, black, deep, and hot, and they were pouring out and convulsed his body, bending his stubborn head, bowing his shoulders, twisting his face, crippling the very hands with which he held his handkerchief.” The world eludes his grasp; by the end, he is a man with nothing.

  Eventually a letter from Bellow arrived in the mail. I felt a tremor of joy: the University of Chicago return address was a Pavlovian trigger. “It used to be that ‘commitment’ meant locking up a mad relative,” he wrote in his best self-satirizing manner. “Now I myself appear to be the mad relative in need of protective custody.” But he would be happy to take me on a tour of his old Chicago neighborhoods. We would have fun, he promised.

  Bellow’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a concrete high-rise in Hyde Park, surrounded by a moatlike wall. When I rang the buzzer, I noted the names of three other Nobel laureates: the economists Milton Friedman and George Stigler, and the physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, his first name shortened to “S.” so that it would fit in the slot under the doorbell.

  When I came out of the elevator, Bellow was waiting at the door. I felt underdressed: he had on a dark-brown suit with a matching vest, black loafers, and a pink shirt with a white collar. There were deep pouches under his eyes.

  His living room overlooked the Museum of Science and Industry, with its Greek pillars and rotunda. I had gone there in a yellow bus on field trips to stand in the giant replica of a human heart, listening to the swish of blood in its slow-beating chambers (lub-dub, lub-dub). The apartment was simply furnished: two leather chairs, a couch, an antique desk, and everywhere, books: The Brothers Karamazov; The Orphic Vision: Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud.

  Rain was streaming down the windows, but we decided to go out anyway. Bellow opened his closet: inside were several shelves of hats. He invited me to choose.*14 I picked out a small one, of black felt.

  His car, a Cadillac Cimmaron, was parked out front. We headed north on Lake Shore Drive and got on the Eisenhower Expressway, turning off at West Division Street, a neighborhood of ramshackle houses, vacant storefronts, and trash-strewn empty lots. Bellow had grown up here. He pointed out a dilapidated apartment building and told me that his violin teacher, “Mr. Grisha Borushek,” had once lived there: “He trained his pupils by whipping them on the buttocks with his bow when he got sore at them.”

  He slowed down before a Wendy’s. This was where the Crown Theatre had been, Bellow informed me. It was here that he had seen The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu—“Lon Chaney threw knives with his feet.” I thought of the passage in Humboldt’s Gift—it seemed as if every moment I spent in Bellow’s presence brought to mind an analogous scene in his work—where Citrine hails a taxi*15 and goes on a tour of the old neighborhood: “The sausages in the carnicería were Caribbean, purple and wrinkled. The old shop signs were gone. The new ones said HOY. MUDANZAS. IGLESIA.”

  On our way back to Hyde Park, Bellow pulled in at Burhop’s, on the corner of Chicago and LaSalle, to buy “a piece of fish.” One piece. He would be dining alone. In the fish store, he took a number and, when his turn came, asked for a half pound of sturgeon. No one recognized him. No one came up and exclaimed, Why, you’re Saul Bellow! The man behind the counter wrapped the fish in flesh-colored paper. Bellow took it to the cash register and paid. I wondered if he had a vegetable in the refrigerator at home, or at least some frozen Green Giant peas.

  Back in his apartment, I brought up the matter of the fishmonger’s cluelessness. “People aren’t aware of my presence,” Bellow said with apparently unfeigned equanimity. “What am I compared to the Cubs, the Bears?” I asked if he was lonely, and he replied firmly: “No, not a bit.”

  Not that he was so alone. “I had tea with a lady,” he announced with a trace of pride, emerging from the small kitchen with two floral-patterned cups and saucers on a tray. “She brought the fancy dishes.”

  His fourth wife, Alexandra Tulcea, a renowned mathematician and said to be a great beauty—Minna, her counterpart in The Dean’s December, is described as “handsome”—had left him only months before. “Emanations from my convulsed self were hard to take,” Bellow said when I worked up the nerve to ask him about this most recent breakup. He had been working for ten hours a day on The Dean’s December. “Nothing else mattered. I turned into a beast. I was soaring, but to Alexandra it was offensive. I couldn’t make too many concessions on this score. She wouldn’t live with a writer anymore.” Nothing else mattered. You couldn’t write a great novel without breaking up your marriage? Apparently not; for Bellow, marriage was pugilistic: “It was like fighting with one hand tied behind my back.”

  When it was time to go, Bellow put on his hat and coat and walked me to the corner of 57th and Dorchester to wait for the shuttle bus to O’Hare. As we stood on the corner in the rain, he put his hand on my shoulder. Had we brought along an umbrella? Had he given me the hat again?

  I can’t remember.

  —

  In the spring of 1987, I went to Oxford to write a profile of Iris Murdoch, whose donnish oddball husband had once declined to tutor me. When I arrived, I learned that my revered tutor Richard Ellmann had just died of ALS and that his funeral would be on one of the days I was there. I hadn’t brought along the one suit I owned, but I had an old tweed jacket, and I went into Ede & Ravenscroft on High Street (est. 1689), an intimidating establishment whose salesmen, in their fine suits, were always lurking by the door, where I found a thick wool tie.

  Seated in a pew at the back of the New College Chapel, I watched as the coffin was carried down the aisle, borne by six strapping men, one of whom I imagined must be Ellmann’s son Stephen, a lawyer in New York. I didn’t see the two girls, Maud*16 and Lucy, now young women launched on writing careers of their own; I often saw their bylines in the London papers. But there was Mary in her wheelchair, an invalid who had outlived her husband.

  Ellmann was only sixty-nine and had been nearing the end of a biography of Oscar Wilde; now it would be published posthumously. “During the last weeks of his life,” wrote Walter Goodman in a Times obit, he completed his book “with the help of small machines on which he typed out messages that were then printed on a screen or on paper.” I knew Walter Goodman (now dead, naturally), a slight, fastidious, elegant man who clearly had no idea what he was talking about when it came to technology. What the fuck were “small machines”? And how did you print on a screen? Let’s give Goodman a pass; he was trying to be complimentary, calling attention to Ellmann’s diligence, and I was moved by the thought of my tutor laboring to make his final deadline; his Wilde came in at over eight hundred pages.

  It is natural for biographers’ subjects to die, which they invariably do in the closing pages, muttering some portentous last-minute observation (Henry James, “So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing,”*17 Thomas Hardy, to his sister-in-law: “Eva, what is this?”).*18 But it is also natural for biographers to die, I thought, as I walked out into a warm spring rain. And while their passing is less important than their subjects’ passing, it still matters to a small circle of people who love them and sometimes to a wider audience; biographers who wrote a good book or two can usually count on a fairly extensive obit. We like to think we matter, too (if anyone does): we have done the necessary work of preservation.

  I had been in touch with Ellmann only once since I left Oxford—he had written me a nice note about Delmore—but I had thought of him often. He was the one who had set me on my life’s path, who had shown me that the work and the life, literature as life, were int
ertwined. When he read Joyce or Yeats, his touchstones, he saw how each illuminated the other. Yeats: The Man and the Masks he’d called one of his books—the masks were the poems that concealed the poet’s true identity, but they were also what revealed him. This was the purpose of biography.

  —

  How does the biographer choose his subject? Does the biographer choose his subject? Sooner ask how each of us became the person we are and how we spend our lives. Isn’t it just random? A matter of genes and family background and historical circumstance? Of fortuity? We come across a book, a manuscript, a letter; someone who knew the subject; the subject himself. But why this one instead of that one? It’s impossible to know. The decision to write Delmore’s biography was made after a forty-five-minute lunch at Benihana; settling on my next would take a lot longer.

  In the summer of 1987, I wrote Saul Bellow a terse letter asking if I could be his biographer. I laid out my credentials: the biography of Delmore, my Chicago background, my deep knowledge of his work. Without being pushy about it, I made a strong case: I was the one.

  I waited three weeks and then, my patience (never highly developed to begin with) at an end, called him up. He was cordial: “Oh, how are you, Mr. Atlas?”

  I was nervous, but he was friendly and seemed glad to hear from me. He switched to Jim, then, perhaps deciding that was too informal, proposed to call me James. Either was fine, I assured him: “I’m still having an identity crisis.”

  “It’s something you never get over,” he said.

  I came right to the point: “I wonder if you’ve given any thought to my letter.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to write you, but you know, it’s summer…” He trailed off and after a moment resumed: “I’ve been turning it over in my mind, and I’m very flattered that you should think me a worthy subject. I liked your book on Delmore Schwartz.”

  All the same, he put me off. He might consider this “a future project.” For the moment he intended to write a memoir of his own, and he didn’t feel he could both reminisce and write. But he “would be glad to have a talk” at some point. He was friendly and reminded me that we had “crossed paths” when he was writing Humboldt’s Gift—“about Delmore from another point of view”—and I was writing my biography.