James Atlas’s The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (Pantheon Books) is the writer’s effort to come to terms with his calling as a literary biographer. Atlas has written two noteworthy biographies, the first of which, on Delmore Schwartz, helped to reignite interest in this fascinating figure. The more recent of the biographies is a life of Saul Bellow.
In his new book. Atlas provides many anecdotes, much gossip, concerning justly famous writers (and their biographers. He spills beans, shares the tricks of his trade. He gives a blow-by-blow account of his dealings with dapper, irascible Bellow. He introduces the reader to superb biographies and their authors. These are all virtues. There is also considerable discussion of the biographer’s lot, the “expanse of dead time” spent in research libraries, the trips to Kinko’s on Sundays to photocopy documents on loan from individuals and institutions. Atlas has earned his living as a journalist and editor, and now as a publisher, but he has always aimed higher; in his heart he is a literary biographer, a field populated by the likes of Richard Ellmann, Walter Jackson Bate, Leon Edel, and Richard Holmes.
The Shadow in the Garden is an edifying and very enjoyable read if you value, as I do, knowing that, for example, the art critic Clement Greenberg smoked unfiltered Camels while his rival Harold Rosenberg favored Pall Malls or that Jean Stafford told Atlas that "Cal" (Robert Lowell, her ex-husband) was "a terrible anti-Semite." Atlas tends to be highly judgmental, sparing no one, least of all himself. Charitable he is not. Some grievances fail to elicit sympathy; for the sake of a single useful fact, the poor biographer has to listen to hours of reminiscences from aged interviewees. Yes, we know the feeling, but it is ungracious to air the gripe. Of Richard Ellmann, his Oxford don, whom he liked and respected, Atlas writes "Ellmann was a man of large virtue (though for many years he had a mistress in London)." The writer would have been well-advised to drop that parenthesis.
There are a great many footnotes -- not to acknowledge a source but to amplify a statement in the text, as though perhaps the author, reading through a late draft, found himself commenting on it. While most of the notes are gratuitous, some are amusing, as when for future generations Atlas explains how a record-player works and what a telephone booth is.
Reviewers are expected to point to errors. It is Stephen, not Steven Dedalus, in Ulysses. Wordsworth wrote: “We poets in our youth begin in gladness, / but thereof come in the end despondency and madness” -- not “We poets our youths begin. . .” These are mistakes that a fact-checker could have caught.
More curious is a spectacular miscue that I cite not to excoriate the author, but because it is, in its way, as revealing about the biographer’s line of work as are such fascinating facts as that Robert Skidelsky bought John Maynard Keynes's house and wrote his three-volume biography of Keynes while living there.
If there is one indispensable fictional treatment of the plight of the biographer in a celebrity-obsessed age, it is Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. In the novel a literary scholar, in ruthless pursuit of the papers of a famous poet based on Shelley, tosses scruples to the wind. The deceased poet is named Jeffrey Aspern. The scholar desperate to get his hands on the papers is a scoundrel.
Atlas devotes one paragraph to James’s novella. What astonished me was that in his telling, it is not the famous poet but the importunate researcher who is named Aspern, and not Jeffrey but Geoffrey, the British spelling. And the literary scholar is described as a journalist.
There is a simple explanation. At Oxford as a graduate student Atlas tells us he read the entire works of Henry James. Alas, he confides, the hours he spent with these and other books “spark not a single memory neuron.” Many years have passed since then, and it quite possible that an unreliable memory transferred the name of the great poet to his putative Boswell.
The unconscious works in magically mysterious ways, and my theory is that the error is a clue to the scary thought that must invade the consciousness of any ambitious literary biographer – which is that the really interesting and important person is himself, and not the famous poet; not Shelley but a mere journalist.
The biographer is susceptible to a sequence of feelings commencing from a close identification with his or her subject but terminating in resentment and even antagonism. There is also bound to be a certain amount of self-contempt. That is why, as Atlas writes, The Aspern Papers is “reflexively invoked by masochistic biographers as a damning critique of their profession.”
The new movie, by the way, is a dud. -- DL
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