The Shadow in the Garden: a Biographer’s Tale by James Atlas
The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale By James Atlas Corsair £30 Oldie price £22.79 inc p&p
In 1977, when he was 28, James Atlas published a biography of the once promising poet, Delmore Schwartz. The fascination of Delmore, as he was always called, lies in the degree to which he turned against his talents. The literary Adonis of the 1940s was to die drunk, derelict and deranged aged 52. Atlas’s biography passed muster with the critics, and he was admitted to the New York literary elite.
Saul Bellow had used Delmore as a model for Von Humboldt Fleisher, the ‘grand, erratic, handsome poet’ in his novel Humboldt’s Gift. Twenty-three years later, Atlas published his second, and last, biography – a life of Bellow. This was less well received, and Atlas quotes the worst of his reviews. The consensus was that he had focused on Bellow’s sex life at the expense of his genius. Rather than defend the book he spent eleven years writing (a ‘long journey’, as one reviewer put it, ‘into knowing too much’), Atlas began to doubt himself. Had he been unfair on Bellow? He went through the biography (now a ‘malign’ presence) line by line, putting a yellow Post-it note on any page that contained a ‘snippy’ remark, such as ‘Bellow wasn’t a nurturing person’. He ends up with twelve Post-it notes which, as the years go by, he reduces to six.
The Shadow in the Garden is, broadly speaking, a reflection on these two biographies, but it is also an act of atonement, a form of self-harm and an argument between the older Atlas and his younger self. Reading his anxious prose is like listening to a man muttering into his glass as he gets progressively drunker and eventually falls into the gutter. Atlas hides nothing. He even reveals the comments made by Dwight Mcdonald on his early draft of the Delmore biography: ‘You have a great vocabulary of vague and dull terms’; ‘Can’t you spur your Pegasus into a livelier gait?’; ‘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.’
Delmore was dead when Atlas began rifling through his letters, but Bellow was alive. Atlas’s Delmore is a dark double, a version of the biographer himself: ‘his unrealisable expectations, his piercing loneliness, his book hunger, his literary ambition, his dread of failure, his sense of the sadness of life… These were the traits and longings we shared.’
But Atlas has nothing, save his Jewishness, in common with Bellow. By the time the biography appears, the biographer’s idolatry has become deep disappointment. Even ten years after completing the book, he doesn’t know what to call Bellow: Saul, Bellow, Saul Bellow, Mr Bellow? He says nothing about his own name, but being called Atlas must be a burden on a man pursuing greatness.
His failing, Atlas feels, is that he lost empathy for his subject. He cannot forgive himself for this: ‘Hadn’t it been my job? To imagine another’s pain?’ But nor can he forgive Bellow his own lack of empathy; for putting his genius into his work and allowing his family to ‘fall under a bus’. Were his novels worth the human cost? The loused-up friends, the screwed-up sons, the marriages (all five of them)? And what about Atlas’s biography of Bellow: was that worth the human cost?
Writers, Atlas learns, are less than human. ‘I could never understand Bellow’s almost boastful confession that he had “turned into a beast” when he was writing The Dean’s December. It’s not even that good.’ But Atlas’s sentences are all this good, and we have no idea where any of them are going to lead.
Atlas ends by piling ‘the detritus’ of his own writing life – the manuscripts, letters, articles – into a large, green bin-bag. There will be, he now knows, no biography of James Atlas. This is the ‘consolation’ of ‘achieving less than one had hoped’. But it is in the act of giving himself up and throwing himself away that his generosity as a writer lies. There are many books about the art of biography, but none more honest, abject or soul-skinning than this. The Shadow in the Garden is both a mental breakdown and a literary masterpiece.