The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  Frustrated by the “garbling” and “decomposing gossip” in Field’s book, Boyd lauds with heavy sarcasm his predecessor’s “gift for mistranscription, misreporting, mistranslation, and misconstruction.” In his own telling, Boyd is the real biographer, so dedicated that in his early days as a Nabokov scholar, he would board a Greyhound bus after the Cornell Library closed, ride all night on a cheap student’s pass to avoid spending money on a hotel, and return to Ithaca in the morning, “not very fresh or very clean,” to resume his research. The novelist is never far from his thoughts. Shaving, he thinks of a passage in Pale Fire where the poet John Shade describes the inspiration he gets from the same quotidian act: “That’s how close my Nabokov can be.”

  It’s not until the end that Boyd really loses it. In three lengthy footnotes, he lays out the evidence against his rival as if he’s conducting a criminal trial:

  Exhibit A: The effect of inflation in Berlin during the 1930s on Nabokov’s decision to stay in Berlin; “averse to chronology,” Field got the dates wrong.

  Exhibit B: “As his bibliographer and biographer, Field should have known that before Fondaminsky [Ilya, editor of a literary journal] called on him in Berlin, Nabokov had published the whole of The Defense in Sovremennye zapiski.”

  Exhibit C: In chronicling readings by Nabokov in Paris during 1936 and 1937, Field had again gotten the dates wrong and, even more grievously, conflated two occasions for Nabokov’s famous meeting with James Joyce, producing “a muddled mirage.”

  Field couldn’t even get the facts about himself right: he was mistaken about the date of his first meeting with Nabokov, according to Boyd, as well as the street his own hotel was on—not the Grand-Rue des alpes, but the Avenue des alpes.*19 Well, it’s easy to make fun of pedantry. What interests me here isn’t so much the wrong dates as the tone of Boyd’s corrections. In laying out the facts, he resorts to martial language: Field had “retaliated,” “fired his first salvo,” “seemed to be preparing an attack.” As far as Boyd is concerned, Field’s biography was an act of war.

  On a visit to Montreux, Boyd leaves a message at the front desk of the Palace Hotel, but he never does meet Nabokov—in the end, I suspect, a missed opportunity that turned out to be a piece of luck.

  *1 George Birkbeck Hill, an early biographer of Boswell, reported that he had “once tried to penetrate into Auchinleck” but had been “most rudely repulsed.”

  *2 This inevitably happens and is one of the heartbreaks of the profession.

  *3 I see that I’ve picked up this Bellow word.

  *4 I’ve always been curious about this name: who put the Jews in Jewsbury? But it turns out to be a derivative of Duesbury, from a village in Yorkshire, recorded as Deusberia in the Domesday Book.

  *5 This manuscript was found among his papers by his doting children and published in response to a volume called New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, edited by Carlyle’s nephew Alexander.

  *6 The book had a co-author, Sir James Crichton-Browne, a physician who had addressed the matter of Carlyle’s impotence in a British medical journal.

  *7 I checked out the house online, and it does look pretty nice—even discounting its mildly obscene-sounding name—with lots of rolling hills and open views. But it’s also in the middle of nowhere—the kind of place where you’d want to spend the last two weeks of August and no more.

  *8 This is one charge literary biographers working today needn’t worry about. Ours is not a lucrative trade. Don’t urge your children to go into it.

  *9 But of course it turns out there is one: John Forster: A Literary Life, by James A. Davies.

  *10 I own the first two volumes, plucked from the secondhand book bin in front of Blackwell’s for 25p (the price written in pencil on the frontispiece); they have burgundy-colored boards and a facsimile of Dickens’s signature embossed on the cover in gold leaf. What’s most notable, though, is the type size: it’s the tiniest I’ve ever seen. How can anyone have been expected to read this minuscule font? The thin paper is dotted with melanoma-like blots. The epigraphs from Boswell (“I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life”) and Carlyle are in such small type that I had to hold the page an inch away from my face to read them. Carlyle’s, which is quite long and is identified as a “Letter to the Author, 16 February 1874,” says, in part, “I incline to consider this Biography as taking rank, in essential respects, parallel to Boswell himself.” A blurb! I’d never seen one from the nineteenth century before. This must be what Darwin felt when he came across the beak of a dead finch: Here is where it all began. I hadn’t known that blurbs dated back so far in the evolution of literature.

  *11 Why do I so dislike this cliché of the biography trade? How many biographical subjects, besides the wart-flecked Cromwell—the phrase derives from his directive to a portraitist—have actually had this disfiguring trait?

  *12 “Narrative truth can be defined as the criterion we use to decide when a certain experience has been captured to our satisfaction; it depends on continuity and closure and the extent to which the fit of the pieces takes on an aesthetic finality.” Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis, by Donald P. Spence, a book every biographer should read.

  *13 What if Morrison had ignored Thompson’s advice and married her lover’s rival/subject? We would be in uncharted biographical territory indeed—the biographer not only writing a narrative but creating it. From there it’s only a step to writing the biography before the life is lived. Isn’t this the kind of autonomy biographers instinctively seek?

  *14 But was the journal accurate? “I’ve noticed that when I tell a story of something Frost told me years ago,” Thompson confessed in his journal, “I feel quite sure that I can quote him verbatim on a little phrase, because the phrase has such pertinence. But later, when I happen to be in my ‘Notes on Robert Frost,’ I frequently come across my first recording of the event—the recording made immediately after the conversation. And I find that there I quote him verbatim in a way which is quite different from my later quoting! Oh dear!” Oh dear is right. I call this the Polynesians/Papuans Conundrum.

  *15 I have circled around this phrase, deleting and restoring it several times. It feels somehow too idiomatic, and therefore inappropriate, even faintly insulting to a master of usage like Nabokov. But isn’t the goal in writing to approximate ordinary speech? And Nabokov was a control freak. Stet.

  *16 Which doesn’t mean you’ve learned anything. What did I learn from wearing Bellow’s hat?

  *17 Definitive until when? Until it’s supplanted by something better—or just later.

  *18 Field teaches in Australia, Boyd in New Zealand. What is it about that antipodean realm that produces biographers of Nabokov?

  *19 Actually, it’s the Avenue des Alpes. Boyd wasn’t infallible either. And why, for that matter, trust Nabokov himself? In Vera, her scintillating biography of Nabokov’s wife, Stacy Schiff writes: “Friends had long complained that he winked at his interlocutor on the rare occasion when he spoke the truth.”

  New Yorker illustration of the author and Saul Bellow Credit 24

  XXIV

  In the middle of my labors, Bill Buford was appointed fiction editor of The New Yorker, and I soon got a note from him asking about my “Bellow journals”—the notes Annie had sent to Granta by accident. Was there something there that might work for the magazine?

  How could I resist? Or rather, how could I resist? A more prudent biographer might have considered the possible consequences and demurred. But despite considerable evidence to the contrary, I had become accustomed to thinking of Bellow not only as a father figure but as a father, whose unconditional love—or at least forgiveness—I could count on no matter what I did.

  So it was that in the summer “reading issue” of June 26 and July 3, 1995, a selection of entries from my journals appeared, accompanied by a drawing of a skeptical-looking Bellow, his “biographer” peering around the edge
of the frame. It was titled “The Shadow in the Garden”—Bellow’s description of the biographer. Of course, that, too, turned out to be slightly off; I later discovered, in reading through my journals, that the biographer was “the shadow of the tombstone in the garden”—not as poetic but perhaps even more unsettling. The tombstone was the biography.

  And the biographer was the gravedigger. I had life-giving impulses, too—a love of Bellow’s work, a love of my craft, a wish to commemorate a great American writer by telling his story—but I seemed to be in an awful hurry to bury the person I was raising up. Had it been prudent to describe as a “difficult, prickly character” in the pages of The New Yorker someone who was no character at all, but a flesh-and-blood man who would read those words in his wicker rocking chair on the front porch and think: Oi. On the Monday it came out, I opened the magazine in a state of excitement and dread. It was a great issue, with contributions from Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Paul Theroux, among other literary heroes of mine. There is a Yiddish expression: Gottenyu. Dear God.

  That August, after a period of agonized waiting, I called up Bellow in the hope of arranging our yearly visit in the country. It had been two months since my tactical blunder, and I was hoping, absurdly, that he had once again forgiven me. Besides, calling was the only honorable course: not to call would have been a tacit acknowledgment of wrongdoing.

  Bellow answered the phone himself. His voice sounded strong.

  “Hello, Mr. Bellow,” I said, my own voice—not without reason—timid. “This is Jim [not James today] Atlas.”

  “Hello, Mr. Bellow,” he replied—a slip so complex, so nuts, that I could scarcely believe my ears. It’s one thing for the biographer to identify with his subject to the point where he feels as if he is his subject. But for the subject to confuse himself with his biographer…Now we not only wore the same railroad cap; we were the same person.

  “Well, I’m in Vermont,” I said, “and I thought I would give you a call, see how you’re doing, and whether I might come and see you.” Usually I wasn’t so nervous, but this time I could barely stammer out the words. Why didn’t I just say: So what did you think of my journals?

  “I’ve had health problems,” he said shortly. Uh-oh.

  “Yes, I know,” I broke in, eager to demonstrate my familiarity with every aspect of his life, “but people who’ve seen you at Marlboro”—the summer classical music program at Marlboro College, just a few miles from his house—“say you look well.”

  “I may look well, but it’s like a jukebox: all aglow on the outside, but full of complicated machinery on the inside. Also, I’m trying to finish a book, and I’ve had heavy teaching responsibilities at BU. So I really don’t see where I would have the time.” What did you expect, idiot?

  “As you wish,” I said in a chastened voice.

  “It’s not as I wish, it’s the way I am,” he answered sharply. And as my biographer, you should know that. After an unnervingly long pause, he continued: “I’ll tell you a story: A wise man is asked, ‘What is the difference between ignorance and indifference?’ He answers: ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’ ”

  I laugh. “I’ll write that down and think about it.”

  “You do that.”

  “I wish you well,” I said, hoping to convey an apology without apologizing. Accept the consequences of your acts.

  I hung up, shaken. This time I had really done it.

  —

  I never missed a Bellow reading at the 92nd Street Y, and my heart gladdened when I read in The New York Times that he would be appearing in October.

  I had heard that the house was sold out, and I congratulated myself on having ordered my ticket early, as was my custom. When I arrived, I spotted a friend in the lobby. He asked me if I was with anyone. “No,” I said. “I’m just a lone fan.” He, too, was alone. Going to hear Bellow wasn’t a social event: it was an act of witness.

  Rust Hills, the crusty fiction editor of Esquire, introduced Bellow. “It’s a wonder there are any awards left,” he joked. “Why doesn’t he give some back?” Then he turned earnest: “I don’t just mean that at eighty he’s still here. That’s swell. But I mean longevity. Every decade, because of him, the canon of American literature grows.”

  When Bellow emerged from behind the curtain, the applause was thunderous and sustained. He looked well. His face showed few new lines; his hair was white but still there. He wore a conservative gray suit. I was struck, once again, by how handsome he was. I could see why women—Evelyn Stone notwithstanding—fell for him.

  “This is an extremely large audience,” he said, peering out at the sea of fans. It was an older crowd, verging on the geriatric, but there were lots of younger people, too, in their thirties and forties. Bellow was read now by a new generation; he still had the goods.

  “My first thought is, ‘What if I were to close the doors of the hall and perform a Vivaldi concerto on the recorder? What a delicious torture!’ ”

  He read from The Bellarosa Connection, a book I’d never been crazy about. The narrator, an elderly Jew who lives alone in a vast, lavishly furnished house in Philadelphia (why Philadelphia?), spends his days absorbed in the past and finds himself ruminating on a distant relative, Harry Fonstein, who was saved from the Holocaust by the Broadway impresario Billy Rose. The story had always struck me as contrived, but now, as Bellow read from his novella, a “late” book written when he was in his mid-seventies, I finally heard its pathos. It was a book about memory, “which is life itself,” the unnamed narrator muses. He had put the people he most loved “in storage,” “a mental warehouse” closed off from his true feelings. He had gotten it wrong. In a terrible dream, Fonstein comes to the realization that “the best he could do was not enough.” “I was being shown—and I was aware of this in sleep—that I had made a mistake, a lifelong mistake: something wrong, false, now fully manifest.”

  After an hour of reading, his voice still strong though tinged with the hoarse octave of old age, Bellow said, “My strength is going here,” and broke off. The applause was even louder this time.

  The moment had come for the ritual of answering questions drawn from file cards that the ushers had handed out before the reading. Bellow leafed through the cards and paused at one he seemed to like: “What do you think of Mr. Atlas’s biography?”*1

  Bellow gazed out at the audience and said, after a pause: “It’s like being measured for your coffin. All kinds of shameful matters…” He trailed off.

  Other questions followed, some self-written, I presumed, others from members of the audience. Did people still interest him at eighty? “Part of your business as a writer is to discover the fascination of people. You think they’re perfectly ordinary, but they never are.” On Delmore: was he the most brilliant person Bellow had ever known? “He wasn’t the most brilliant. He was one of the most charming.” On his own early works: “I feel an urge to cut them.”

  He told a funny story about Isaac Bashevis Singer. A friend of Bellow’s had once picked up Singer at the airport for a reading, and Singer had asked him to pose a question that night about “the parallels between Singer’s work and Chagall’s.”

  Dutifully, Bellow’s friend had stood up after the reading and asked: “Are there any parallels between your work and Chagall’s?”

  Singer: “What a stupid question.”

  A great roar of laughter erupted from the audience.

  —

  The next summer I waited until almost the end of August to call. I was scared. But I didn’t want to leave our quarrel unresolved. Also, it seemed rude not to call. I looked forward to visiting Bellow each summer (“to see your bubba,” he said). As far as I could tell, he enjoyed it, too. At least sometimes.

  It was Janis who answered: “This is Mrs. Bellow.” She was friendly when I announced myself. “Hello, Jim Atlas,” she said pertly, and asked me how my summer had been. I asked if I could “have a word with Mr. Bellow.” I wouldn’t have dreamed of calling him “Sa
ul,” even at this late date. Or ever.

  “James Atlas,” Bellow said, intoning my name—as if in calling me James, he was upgrading me, giving me respect. I felt a surge of gratitude.

  I asked if I could come and see him, and though he sounded congenial, he put me off. “Janis’s parents are coming, and I have three children and four grandchildren.”

  I was silent. He had often put me off, only to relent. Sure enough: “But maybe next week. I’m not good at remembering these things. Why don’t you call me on Sunday?”

  “Great,” I murmured. “Fine.”

  Suddenly awkward, we muttered shy good-byes to each other—“like two boys making up after an argument in the locker room,” Annie said when I recounted our conversation.

  Significantly, I have no recollection of whether a subsequent meeting took place that summer, and no record of one. I was beginning to slip away from Bellow’s influence, shrugging out of its once-tight bonds. I was deep into my Bellow now, asserting my freedom—the freedom that art grants the biographer to “kick around the facts,” as Dwight had put it. Not to fabricate them, but to choose and order them in such a way that they create a likeness—a likeness that was mine. Foolishly and generously, out of kindness and vanity, innocence and egotism, Bellow had allowed me a glimpse of his many-selved character. For the better part of a decade, I had observed and made notes. The data had been collected. That work was done. Ahead lay the harder work: making sense of it.

  *1 Confirmation that Bellow wrote his own questions: no one else called me Mr. Atlas.

  Rosenfeld, Freifeld, and Glotzer Credit 25

  XXV

  I was sitting at my desk one morning, working on my book, when the phone rang. It was Alfred Kazin—“Alfred,” he said. My heart quickened. (Though now nearing fifty, I still couldn’t call Kazin by his first name.) When I was a child growing up in Chicago, my parents had taken me downtown to see the Bolshoi Ballet: there was an act where two caped wrestlers grappled with each other until the cape was thrown off to reveal that we had been watching a master contortionist and there was only one. That was my relationship with the New York (Jewish) intellectuals.