The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  History is ever regenerative. New subjects arise as the old ones disappear—including people we never heard of. Virginia Woolf asked: “Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography—the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious?” What about all the people I’ve known who didn’t leave records of their own lives? Don’t they deserve biographies, too? Sing now of Scottie A., my best friend when I was growing up in Highland Park, Illinois, who built snow forts with me in the days when there was snow, and who died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight, which maybe wasn’t such a terrible thing as he was about to be put on trial for securities fraud; of Mr. Gillespie, my seventh-grade Latin teacher at Nichols Junior High, who gazed at me with a doleful eye when I stumbled over my conjugations; of Susan M———, a blond, blue-eyed stunner who lived across the street from me and who I thought of when, years later, I encountered the much-revised sentence in Ulysses where Bloom gazes at some mannequins in the window of a department store (“Mutely he craved to adore”); and a hundred—a thousand—others. Who will write their biographies, or—the most common fate—will they remain unwritten about for all eternity? Biography, in the end, is a stay against death. Most of us don’t get one.

  One day I packed seventy-three biographies into a shopping cart and wheeled it down the street to HousingWorks, the thrift shop that donates its profits to AIDS research. I had been a judge for a biography award; books had landed with a sharp report on my doorstep several times a day for months, so many that even the closets were soon overwhelmed. It was a cold afternoon in January, the sky darkening at four o’clock, and as I trundled my cargo along the icy sidewalk like a homeless person pushing a shopping cart loaded with empty cans, I thought back to the days when I used to call up Fred Bass, the genial buyer at the Strand Bookstore, to alert him that I had a new cache of review copies. He was always glad to hear from me and would arrange a time for Dennis, his ponytailed driver, to come pick them up. The last time I’d called Fred, he had told me they were accepting only large collections. “It’s not worth the time or the gas to go up there anymore.” Gas: it seemed like such a trivial expense.

  Spare me the elegies, right? The world is ever in flux, each generation forced to undergo its own obsolescence. I try to keep up and have learned to stab at the letters on my iPhone keyboard like a chicken pecking corn. (Let others employ their simian thumbs.) I read on a Kindle, adapting to “locations” instead of numbered pages, use search buttons instead of having the maddening but pleasurable experience of leafing through a book in search of a particular passage for half an hour, then stumbling upon it and being rewarded with a pop of dopamine.

  But what about the “book”? Will it go the way of the gramophone, destined for a glass display case in the Smithsonian? And what does this looming disappearance into the dustbin of technology portend for biography? Its tools will be audio, video, and who knows what else. The questions biographers of my generation ask before embarking on a project—Are there letters? Where’s the archive?—won’t be the questions the next generation asks. The only archive will be the cloud.*8 And just as the means of depicting another person are transformed by technology, so will be our ways of interpreting the data we collect. What we see and hear will shape our portrait more than what we read.

  Biography will survive, but not biography as we’ve known it. E-mail spells the end of written correspondence; the letter is dead.*9 Future biographers will scroll through “texts.” (I never thought I’d see the day when that sacrosanct noun would become a verb.) The interview where you sit across from your subject with your notebook on your knee will be supplanted by the interview conducted on Skype. Human character will be assessed by new criteria: How does the subject perform on camera? Is he graceful? Articulate? What about the timbre of his voice? His sartorial style? And who will “write” these books? The new generation of biographers will include filmmakers, multimedia artists, and oral / visual historians—a profession that doesn’t even exist yet—who produce biographies assembled from podcasts and documentary clips. Biographers will continue to determine who gets to live awhile in the evanescent ether of posterity and who dies in obscurity, unbiographed and unknown. It’s just their tools that will be different. And I won’t have to learn how to use them.

  Phew.

  —

  I sit in my study and contemplate the stacks of biographies strewn about the room. The shelves long since full, I’ve taken to piling them up on the floor. I’ve read most (a lot?) of these books, some several times, but I like to hold them in my hand and turn the pages. Here is Harold Nicolson’s The Development of English Biography, published by the Hogarth Press, the imprint founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Bound in dark blue cloth, it’s compact, its dimensions barely larger than a postcard; copious notes fill the blank front pages: “70 first use of the word ‘biography’ ”; “**79 biography as ‘creative literature’ ”; “87 Boswell ‘invented’ actuality.” And here’s a beat-up old book published by Doubleday, Doran & Co. in a series called the Master Classics; it’s an anthology of passages from Boswell, Macaulay’s Byron, Carlyle’s Dante, and others, also heavily annotated. Macaulay’s Life of Johnson (1928) is equipped with “Study Helps and Questions” for students: “If Boswell ‘could not reason, had no wit, no humor, no eloquence,’ why is it that his writings ‘are likely to be read as long as English exists, either as a living or a dead language’?” For once I was sorry I wasn’t taking an exam: I could have nailed this one.

  Not all my books are antiquarian: I’m excited to come across a galley of volume two of Holmes’s Coleridge. Clearly unread (its spine is uncreased, and my last note, “weird unsparing exactitude,” is on page 14), it now induces in me a kind of hypnotic attention right from the first page, in which the poet watches “the lights of England recede along the Cornish coast through the brass porthole above his narrow berth” as he sets sail for Malta.*10

  In his afterword, Holmes muses on the contradictions that shadow his monumental undertaking. “Coleridge’s life continues in one’s head, and mixes with the sounds of one’s own existence, and starts up again somewhere else in other hands with a different interpretation,” he writes. “This is the peculiar music of biography, haunting and uniquely life-like for a moment, but always incomplete and unsatisfactory and sending out many echoes into the future.” Incomplete and unsatisfactory: yet Holmes devotes his life to the effort.

  When Delmore was seventeen, he wrote a strange epistemological treatise called “Having Snow”; its theme was “the attempt to know.” His intent was to explore “the existence of objects which do not preserve their identity, for even as we form an idea of what they are they are becoming something else.” Isn’t this what the biographer does? Delmore assigned his friends “grades of permanence”; some lingered in his mind longer than others. In the same way, our subjects elude the porous net of facts we cast over them; they shape-shift over time, and so do we. I had devoted my life to an art whose assumptions couldn’t be tested. Still, its rewards could be great—the challenge of reconstructing someone else’s world; the opportunity to educate yourself; the serendipitous encounters and unlikely finds. I found this invigorating. You could never hope to get it right: even Holmes said so. But if, over many years, you worked very hard and extended your hand, you could write a book that earned a high degree of permanence.

  —

  One day as I’m walking up West 79th Street, I pass the apartment building I first lived in when I came to New York in the fall of 1977—forty years ago, I calculate as I stop by the front door and peer into the lobby. What was the doorman’s name? Albert. What has happened to Albert? Where is he now? He had a weathered-looking face, as I recall, and thinning cottony hair; his skin was lacquered like an old wooden floor. Let’s say he was sixty: that would make him ninety-eight. Take off a decade, and he’s still pretty old. But what if by chance he’s still alive? Where would I find him? Not by publishing one
of those letters from biographers that appear in The New York Review of Books: I am at work on a book that features someone named Albert who was a doorman at 147 West 79th Street in the 1970s…I wonder if he’d be a good subject.

  My encounter with the ghost of Albert reminded me that my own archive wasn’t in order—a shameful situation for a biographer. The painful but fascinating adventure of life would soon draw to a close, whether in two years or twenty. (Bellow’s description of death: “The pictures stop.”) On an impulse, I decided to go through my papers in the hope of getting rid of them, or most of them, to spare my children the trouble. I’ve stored the few letters from famous writers I corresponded with over the years in a separate accordion folder. Bishop, Mailer, Malamud, Oates (a blizzard of blue postcards), Updike,*11 John Irving, Walker Percy: the wily book dealer Glenn Horowitz should be able to get a few thou for these.

  So much stuff: I sit cross-legged on the floor and leaf through the pile. Yellowing stacks of The Nation with my early reviews; letters from high school girlfriends; report cards; short stories, written when I was in college. I read the first sentences: “Herman Traps awoke to find a stranger sitting by his bedside.” “When she asked me to go with her it was late in the evening.” I lay them on the “discard” pile. But here’s an intriguing document: a manuscript typed on legal paper, defaced by brown splotches like faded sunspots, the pages yellowed to the color of parchment, held together by a rusty paper clip. At the top is an address where I lived in the mid-seventies: 111 Magazine Street, Cambridge, MA 02139. The title is typed in caps at the top of the first page: THE LETTERS OF LEON STEIN. There is a long introduction by David Blum, a friend of Stein’s. The letters, all quite long, are addressed to Leon’s father Herman,*12 to Thomas Mann, to his girlfriend, Miriam, and to himself.*13

  It’s the draft of a novel I wrote in my twenties, seventy-five pages long, and I can’t put it down—it’s brooding and strange, about a twenty-four-year-old intellectual with a depressive existential head who reads Spinoza and maintains a weak allegiance to the University of Chicago—one of those disaffiliated Jews defined by “Marxism, Angst, implacable rebellion, and a high I.Q.” Leon was familiar with the Banach-Tarski theorem and had memorized the entire works of Balzac, transcribing them on index cards in a minuscule hand. His erudition was formidable; in a footnote, Blum claims that he was conversant in Russian, Yiddish, French, German, Italian, and Polish and possessed a reading knowledge of Hebrew, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese, and “several Paleosiberian dialects.”

  To my surprise, I find that Leon Stein is vividly drawn: “He had sharp, angular features, the sort that create shadows and recesses in the face, begrimed spectacles that appeared to balance like pince-nez on his nose, and that exacerbated an impression, like smudged windows in midwinter, of unrelieved pallor.” He belongs to no institution and has no job. After the death of his father, he leaves home and rents a room above Walgreens, where he opens a shop called Eisenstein Enterprises.*14 Its motto is “We Solve All Problems,” and it’s staffed by “a group of capable Ph.D.’s” who turn out to be Leon alone. (His first and only customer is a woman seeking the definition of oneiric, which he supplies for a dollar.)

  Life is an ordeal for Leon. “What I love isn’t available in this world,” he writes Miriam: “the simple experience of living.” On the last page, he plunges into Lake Michigan with a fifty-five-volume set of Balzac’s collected works tied around his waist (or “torso,” as I have it). I’m giving the plot away, but so what? No one’s going to read it now.

  I decide to save it anyway.

  Little else survives: I throw out old journals (“reading Boswell with keen enjoyment”); manuscripts labeled “foul matter” (the weird publishing phrase for drafts); notebooks with interview fragments: “I complained that his dog relieved himself in the herb garden; he was outraged when I took a swipe at the dog with a broom.” (This must have been Bellow on Ralph Ellison when they were sharing the house in Tivoli.) Everything—or almost everything—must go.

  It’s no great loss. I’m safely in Carlyle’s land of “No-biography,” though once in a while I find my name lodged in the index of some literary chronicle between Atlantic, The and Auden, W. H. One of the consolations of achieving less than one had hoped is being spared this prospect. There’s little here of interest to anyone else.

  But wait. What’s in this small manila envelope? I’ve written on it: “Isaac Rosenfeld family—friend of Bellow. Okay to throw out.” I guess: his wife is dead, his son is dead, his daughter Eleni is a Buddhist nun who lives in a monastery in Bordeaux. I open the envelope and study the photographs: old snapshots with scalloped edges and a sepia tint. Isaac in swimming trunks; Isaac in a Hyde Park playground, cigarette in hand; his wife, Vasiliki, in a long fur coat, leaning against a tree. The prohibition against destroying photographs is atavistic. It feels like desecrating a tombstone. I put them back in the envelope and toss them on the “keep” pile.

  Three hours later I’ve filled a large green garbage bag with the detritus of a writer’s life: book reviews, manuscripts, journals, profiles of famous American novelists, and articles for travel magazines. I carry it out into the hall, set it down by the service elevator for the porter to pick up (no bonfires in Manhattan), push the button, and head back to my apartment with hurried steps before I can change my mind.

  *1 Excerpts from my journals of those years: “very sad; obsessive devastating feelings of isolation, of not-belonging, even of annihilation of self…happiness…mood dip…total melt-down…terrible tennis…great tennis…losing in tie-breaker with inept forehand…excellent day, writing, looking out the window at beautiful, fragile New York in the twilight…no friends…lots of friends…fun…fun!…strong day…paranoia…joy at the first bite of pesto risotto…sick of mind…happy on the porch as I looked out at the birds in the wet grass…I grabbed my own neck in anguish…suicidal ideation…the clarity of the city in the snow…came home tremulous, wired…” I was riding Delmore’s “roller-coaster.”

  *2 I had a high-functioning family, a spacious sun-filled apartment on the Upper West Side, and a mantel crowded with photographs of the family on ski trips. Delmore never went to Stowe.

  *3 Who?

  *4 His name shows up in the routine transactions of my daily life. My passwords include various iterations of Delmore; the name on my business credit card is Delmore Inc. (Bellow, too, has been put to this utilitarian use: bellow64, bellow65, Bellow66…you can see where this is going.)

  *5 Within is a publicity photograph of his twenty-eight-year-old biographer, a portrait of orthodontal disaster, sartorial innocence—cord suit, Trotsky glasses—and well-coiffed raven hair taken on his wedding day. Like Milton’s Adam, he’s at the beginning of his life: the world is all before him, where to choose. So he chooses to be a biographer…

  *6 This demand that one write a “big” book has caused untold misery in the lives of writers who wrote a few small books or none yet still had honorable careers.

  *7 My own bathroom reading these days isn’t old reviews of my books—I doubt they would boost my morale—but a weather-beaten copy of Boswell in Holland, its cover as warped as if it had been left out in the rain. After a decade of leafing through its mildewed pages, I’m never bored. “My Lord Marischal was most entertaining company, and the Turkish lady talked extremely well when indolence did not keep her in silence.” We won’t be hearing from her again. Yet Boswell incited her to speech.

  *8 Isn’t there something now called Snapchat where the message just fades away? Dear T. S. Eliot: It was with the greatest…

  *9 Never again the letter in the mail, the pulse-quickening experience of spotting a hand-addressed envelope among the bills and flyers.

  *10 It reminds me of the passage in Lord Jim where the young sailor on the deck of a ship bound for the East watches “the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet, with the hazy splendor of the sea in the
distance, and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.”

  *11 Biography New World: In 1973, I copied out Delmore’s letters to his publisher, James Laughlin, by hand at the dining room table of Laughlin’s white-clapboard home in Norfolk, Connecticut, while sheep trotted past the window. Four decades later Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, shows up at the door and photographs my correspondence with Updike on his iPhone. Again, forgive my archaic laments, but I remain convinced that something about writing down words in your own hand—or even typing them—imprints them on the mind and brings some new depth of understanding. This is probably nonsense.

  *12 So what’s with the Herman? That was the name of my grandfather, as noted earlier; also, with a second n, of Kafka’s father.

  *13 I must have read Herzog by then.

  *14 I was a perfervid fan of the Russian director.

  Acknowledgments

  Books are supposed to be composed in solitude—the writer in his lonely lair, struggling to get words down on paper as the window darkens and night comes on. I’ve had my share of such days, when my only companions were long dead: Boswell and Baron Corvo and Lytton Strachey and all those other strange figures out of literary history whose voices have long haunted my imagination. But I also had days when the legendary editor Alice Truax made a house call to excavate from the depths of my unconscious the buried material of this book. Alice, I have kept a bottle of your Kombucha Wonder Drink in the fridge to remind me of your enlivening presence. And after Alice came the beloved Deb Garrison, to whom I first confided my fugitive early reflections about a book to be called The Shadow in the Garden. Deb got it before there was anything to get. Twenty years later, when I finally had a manuscript to show, it was Deb I thought of first. She and her colleagues at Pantheon—Dan Frank, Sonny Mehta, and Todd Portnowitz—have produced a book that is beautiful in every way. I’m proud to share the distinguished Pantheon imprint with two other biographers whose work has been a model for mine: Richard Holmes and Geoff Dyer. I feel that I’ve come home.