The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  I was living both my life and Bellow’s. His friends had become my friends. I always called Dave Peltz when I was in town. Dave knew Bellow better than anyone. Together they had traveled to Africa, played squash, made dumb investments. But they were rivals, too, with Dave the inevitable loser; he was a successful contractor on the South Side but had unrealized literary ambitions and harbored, despite his decent heart, a resentment of Bellow, who had put him in the story “A Silver Dish” as Woody Selbst, a ruddy-faced contractor, “fleshy and big, like a figure for the victory of Americanism,” with a powerful appetite for life, a great reader of books who took night school courses at an adult education school in the Loop. It was a gentle, affectionate portrait that I thought really captured Dave, but Dave didn’t like it. He found it unsettling to have no control over how he was depicted—a common complaint among Bellow’s friends and former friends, who waited with nervous anticipation whenever a Bellow novel came out to see if they were in it.

  Dave was emotionally invested in my book and wanted to make sure I got things right. One Sunday morning he took me to the Russian Bath on Division Street, depicted in Humboldt’s Gift as a decrepit steam room where “Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket” while a wizened attendant scrubs them with oak leaves. It felt strange to be sitting nude on a wooden bench with Dave. It was one thing to follow in your subject’s footsteps, quite another to follow your subject’s friend into the sauna.

  On this visit, funds running low, I was staying at Zita Cogan’s apartment in a modern building overlooking the lake. Zita had been one of Bellow’s girlfriends at Tuley, and I got the sense she was still in love with him. I myself had close emotional ties with her; her mother had been a friend of my grandmother’s. The whole world, my grandmother used to say, is “one piece string.”

  She gave me a bowl of vanilla ice cream—I recognized the blue fiestaware from my childhood—and showed me her shelf of Bellow novels, all in their original dust jackets and thus highly valued by rare book dealers, especially when the frontispiece contains a fond inscription: “From second-Story Bellow,” “From your own personal Humboldt Park author.” Books inscribed by the author to a friend or family member were known in the trade as “association copies,” which made them even more valuable. But Zita wouldn’t have been interested in selling them: they were the most precious possessions she owned.

  The next morning we talked about Bellow’s letters to her. It turned out that he had come with Janis to look through his papers “and taken some away.” She was happy to let me see what was left.

  I was furious. How could she just have given them away? Now it would be ten times as hard to get them back. She gave me a box of clippings—quite a good haul, actually—and I sat on the floor going through them. She had saved everything, including handwritten scraps of five words—“S. Bellow paid a visit”—but the only letter, amazingly enough, was a brief note that made clear his position on the book. He was no more enthusiastic about having his biography written than he was about reserving a plot for himself at 26th and Harlem Avenue. He wasn’t sponsoring “Atlas,” he wrote. I was on my own.

  A wave of anger coursed through me. “There will be tears before bedtime,” the critic John Gross had predicted when he learned that I was writing a biography of Bellow. And so there would.

  That evening I went to meet Professor Shils for dinner at a bleak Chinese restaurant on Cermak Road. On impulse, I asked him if he would read my manuscript, which had already ballooned to seven hundred pages. I needed a Dwight Macdonald, someone as tough as Dwight had been on Delmore, yet also capable of giving me encouragement. Shils was dying of cancer—a fact unknown to me—but he agreed.

  The next morning I went down to the lake and sat on the beach, sifting handfuls of sand. I had been doing the book for so long that I had my own memories of Chicago over the last few years. I was struck by how fast things change: what had once been the International House of Pancakes was now the Fine Arts Building of Loyola, with a broken window covered by plywood. Howard Street, where I had gone to get my hair cut and buy smoked fish on Sunday mornings, was now a black neighborhood; there were FOR RENT signs in front of the apartment houses where Jews had once lived.

  I felt sad as I watched the children frolicking around me. I had gone through the papers in the Regenstein; I had been interviewing Bellow for five years and had my story. It was good-bye to an incredible period in my life—so I did have one after all—good-bye to the place I had inadvertently called, talking to Annie on the phone the night before, “home.”

  *1 The height of my growing manuscript was barely outpaced by the growth of my children, who measured the untidy pile of papers with wary eyes, wondering who this person was who could absorb so much of my time. About the man himself, they were largely incurious: as long as he didn’t interfere with my ferrying them to hockey and tae kwon do, cello lessons and drama workshop, playdates and Science Club (I made that up; no child in our art-saturated household would go to Science Club), they never begrudged me what I had come to think of as Bellow Time. Not that he impinged on their needs: when faced with the option of typing up my interviews with Bellow’s Tuley friends or watching my daughter play the Milkman in Our Town, it wasn’t hard to choose.

  *2 To require two sources for every story would make it virtually impossible to write a biography, at least not one that relies on interviews for anecdotes. One could always write “according to,” but it’s such a pedestrian phrase and has a journalistic feel to it. Wasn’t it sufficient to write that so-and-so “remembered” or “recalled,” verbs that clearly conveyed that a story was only that person’s version? Like so much else about the writing of biography, the more you examined the premises of quotation, the more dubious it seemed as an instrument of literal truth.

  *3 Fiction, he liked to say, was a higher autobiography.

  *4 He had three, all by different wives.

  *5 On assignment for a men’s magazine, I recruited Buford to be my guide to private London drinking clubs, and we spent a long evening in a series of smoke-choked dives where you had to knock on the door and be scrutinized through a peephole before you were allowed to enter. But that was then: in the health-conscious world of the new millennium, I once spotted him striding onto a tennis court in snowy whites.

  *6 It was a rich and viscous red that had, I seem to recall, actual dregs at the bottom. Bill made no show of it, but he was a connoisseur who would go on to write a best-selling account of working in the kitchen of a famous chef.

  *7 I was off duty—living, not working.

  *8 Bellow’s position reminded me of Beckett’s hedge to his first biographer, Deirdre Bair, that he would “neither help nor hinder” her efforts. Except that Bellow would do both.

  *9 And what if there were? “A compact with one woman puts beyond reach what others might give us to enjoy,” Bellow wrote in Dangling Man: “the soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisiacal women of our imaginations are set aside.”

  *10 Ross Miller, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, was Philip Roth’s first authorized biographer. In an article in The New York Times about biographers who take on living subjects, Miller described himself and Roth as intellectual “equals.” Miller is no longer Roth’s biographer.

  *11 I loved Bellow’s old-fashioned, somewhat mannered figures of speech: “I wish” instead of “I want to,” “shall” instead of “will.” He sounded just like Shils.

  *12 Which she did, noting—among other contradictions—that Rousseau, “the big romanticizer of bourgeois marriage and sentimental parenthood, lived with an illiterate chambermaid and consigned their five children to an orphanage.”

  *13 Bellow would have known how to describe it; he was very good on hair. In Herzog, Valentine Gersbach has “flaming copper hair that literally gushed from his head”; Anna, in The Adventures of Augie March, has “spiraling reddish hair
”; George Grebe, the census taker in the story “Looking for Mr. Green,” has a “tough curl of blond hair.”

  *14 It would be like the counterman at Burhop’s all over again. Or maybe it was a coincidence, and they were the only two people in America who hadn’t heard of Saul Bellow.

  *15 I found the answer (an answer) in an essay by Janis I came across years later. Entitled “Rosamund and Ravelstein: The Discandying of a Creator’s Confession,” it sounded a note of disenchantment with the way Bellow had depicted her in Ravelstein, the novella about Allan Bloom written in his old age. Among the minor characters is the wife of Chick, Ravelstein’s admiring intellectual sidekick, a “pretty, well-brought-up, mannerly young woman” who had been a student of Ravelstein’s—as Janis had been a student of Bloom’s.

  In her essay, Janis describes begging Bellow to remove Rosamund from the book: “What could so slight a character add to a story already teeming with vibrant human types? A specific pain attached to this request. Don’t do this to me. You misrepresent me. I’m not that woman: servile, prim, obedient. Is that the way you see me? Wounded vanity might be endured. But to be invisible to the person you love?” Bellow responded, as he always did when confronted about his real-life models, that Rosamund was a character; he was writing fiction.

  Bellow’s portrait of his young wife is in fact highly sympathetic. When Chick becomes violently ill from poisoned seafood in the Caribbean—an episode based on real events—it is Rosamund who saves his life, getting him to the hospital in Boston and camping out by his bedside for weeks. She holds him up when they swim in the sea. So why was Janis so troubled by this touching depiction? Was it that instead of registering her own turmoil, her conflicts about serving him, her human complication, Bellow had depicted her as a “wife”?

  Edward Shils Credit 21

  XXI

  We biographers have always done our work amid a loud chorus of negativity. Oscar Wilde famously observed that biography “lends to death a new terror.” Joyce feared “biografiends.” Nabokov, too, derided the biographer’s efforts: “I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of human interest.”*1 Then there was George Eliot, who asked, “Is it not odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to read his book?”

  Even members of the profession disparage it. Edmund White, the biographer of Jean Genet, called biography the revenge of the little people on the big people. And Michael Holroyd, after a lifetime of helping to elevate the form, has decided that biographers are “parasites…intent on reducing all that is imaginative, all that is creative in literature, to pedestrian autobiography.” We compete with our subjects, he contends in “Two Cheers for Biography,” writing big bulky books that overshadow their beautifully crafted masterpieces. We trade on their fame.

  To refute these sniping critics, the defensive biographer keeps at the ready a handful of counter-quotations. Emerson: “There is properly no history, only biography.” Yeats: “We may come to think that nothing exists but a stream of souls, that all knowledge is biography.” Virginia Woolf: “By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.” Sometimes we get three cheers instead of two. (John Updike, alas, awards us only one.)*2

  In A. S. Byatt’s Possession, a scholar named Mortimer Cropper delivers a lecture entitled “The Art of a Biographer” in which he offers a persuasive vindication of his craft: “Biography was just as much a spiritual hunger of modern man as sex or political activity. Look at the sales, he had urged, look at the column space in the Sundays, people need to know how other people lived, it helps them to live, it’s human.”

  I believe this. Biography provides useful information. It adds, in the critic R. P. Blackmur’s phrase, “to the stock of available reality.” But it leaves unanswered the question: What does the life have to do with the achievement? You can no more “explain” the sources of a person’s talent—what combination of temperament, cultural circumstances, parents, genes, history—than you can explain why we’re here in the first place. If talent is innate, the whole project can seem futile. Why do any of these random factors matter when you’re dealing with someone whose endowments, whatever they were, made him worthy of a biography? Bellow said he was born with a gift for words and had no idea where it came from. If that was true—which I think it was—what was there to explain? It was all in the biology. You might as well ask how Bach wrote his cello suites, how Turner painted boats in a storm, or why the stars come out at night.

  So what is the biographer’s purpose? Primarily, I would say, to show what other factors—besides genius—contributed to the making of the writer’s life, the genesis of his books, the social and literary influences that formed them. Richard Ellmann described the connection this way: “Affection for one leads to interest in the other, the two sentiments tend to join, and the results of affection and interest often illuminate both the fiery clay and the wrought jar.” The fiery clay is the life, and the wrought jar is the work that gives it form.

  —

  Toward the end of 1993, I wrote a piece for the Times Magazine about the increasingly tawdry reputation of biography. The immediate provocation was Janet Malcolm’s book The Silent Woman, an account of Sylvia Plath and her biographers. Deftly and mercilessly, she laid out her case. Biography was a spurious art; the narrative it created was an invention of the biographer; there were no such things as facts.

  “Worse, the pretense of biographical objectivity conceals a darker purpose,” I wrote, summarizing Malcolm’s argument: “The biographer’s real intent is to exact revenge.” I quoted this chilling line: “ ‘The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.’ ”

  Malcolm is a skilled anatomist of our profession, a sort of anti- or meta-biographer whose books focus as much on her subjects’ surrounding cast—scholars, relatives, friends, and enemies—as on her subjects themselves; she plays the role of biographer as deconstructionist, and I find her books enthralling. The comparison of biographers to murderers, though, seemed a bit melodramatic. Hostile or punitive, maybe; unwilling to give our subjects a break, not unheard of. But homicidal? It was hard to imagine my scholarly, mild-mannered colleagues bringing concealed weapons to the library.

  Malcolm’s contention that facts themselves are constructs, the scaffolding around an edifice that doesn’t exist, seemed to me the weakest part of her argument. There are facts, I argued, and they can be illuminating. To demonstrate my point, I used what seemed like a small but telling discovery from my own research:

  That Saul Bellow, two weeks after his 21st birthday, officially changed his name from Solomon provides a clue to the name changes of his characters. Charles Citrine, the hero of Humboldt’s Gift, was originally Tsitrine; Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day was Wilhelm Adler; Dr. Shawmut, the narrator of Bellow’s story Him With His Foot in His Mouth, came from a family named Shamus, “or, even more degrading, Untershamus.” Surely this persistent literary theme is clarified by the biographical fact. Why did Solomon become Saul? And why did his two older brothers choose to be called Bellows, adding an s? Was Bellow asserting his independence? Defying his father? The biographer can only speculate.

  Three months later I opened my New York Times to find a long editorial by Bellow about his notorious Proust and the Papuans remark, in which he claimed that “the interviewer” who spoke to him over the phone (though I had been in his office) had misconstrued it: “Nowhere in print, under my name, is there a single reference to Papuans or Zulus. The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin, the result of a misunderstanding that occurred (they always do occur) during an interview. I can’t remember who the interviewer was.”

  You can’t remember the nam
e of the journalist who went on to become your biographer? I had suffered what Annie would call a narcissistic injury. And I resented being called the “interviewer.” I was the biographer.

  This Bellow still could not bring himself to acknowledge. He habitually referred to me as “people,” as if discussing some cohort of biographers and journalists instead of the one person who followed him around in Vermont and Chicago; pored over his papers in the Regenstein Library year after year; tracked down his friends (and enemies); and read his work with fierce attention. Would the singular imply that he had authorized me?

  In his op-ed, Bellow argued that even if he had made that remark about the Papuans and the Zulus, he didn’t mean it in a condescending way. After all, he had written his senior thesis at Northwestern—I must look it up!—on “France and the African Slave Trade.” And he had read widely in African literature. As evidence he cited a Zulu novel entitled Chaka, by Thomas Mofolo, “a profoundly, unbearably tragic book about a tribal Achilles who had with his own hands cut down thousands of people, including his own pregnant wife.”

  Bellow then launched into a spirited and eloquent defense of “the autonomy of the imagination,” which continually found itself under attack by the “thought police,” enforcers of the politically correct. “We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.” The effort to pretend that all societies were alike was a form of despotism, an expression of rage. Morality had been hijacked by the Left—especially the academic Left. You couldn’t insist on a hierarchy of cultural values, or you’d never get tenure. “My critics, many of whom could not locate Papua New Guinea on the map, want to convict me of contempt for multiculturalism and defamation of the third world. I am an elderly white male—a Jew, to boot. Ideal for their purposes.”