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The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale

James Atlas

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Aug 20, 2017
Category: Biography

James Atlas and I were at Harvard at the same time and surely took courses together and sat at the same table in the special library for graduate students and excellent undergrads, but the similarities stop there. He was a Rhodes Scholar, studied obscure texts; he took the higher road, toward literature.

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, published when Atlas was 28, was praised on the front page of the Times Book Review, which named it one of the Ten Best Books of 1977; it was nominated for a National Book Award. He went on to write his big book: 700 pages on Saul Bellow.

It’s not likely that you’ve read either of his biographies. Or that, in “The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale,” you’ll recognize the names of most of the scholars and critics he writes about. Or care about his insights on biography, or the inside baseball anecdotes about interviewing famously thorny literary figures. No matter. “The Shadow in the Garden” is a book that has value even for those who move their lips as they read. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

It starts like a thriller:

The boxes contained the accumulated detritus of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who died, of a heart attack, at the Columbia Hotel, in Times Square, on the night of July 11, 1966, while taking out the garbage. His body lay unclaimed in the morgue at Bellevue for two days until a reporter noticed his name on a list of the dead. The next morning, a lengthy obituary, accompanied by a photograph of a tormented-looking Schwartz, appeared in the Times. He was fifty-two.

It was his old friend Dwight Macdonald, one of the great critics of that era, who salvaged the papers that had been strewn about Schwartz’s hotel room at the time of his death. They would have vanished forever if it hadn’t been for a chance encounter in a bar between Macdonald’s son Michael and the owner of a moving company in Greenwich Village.

Macdonald took on the role of Schwartz’s literary executor — no one else had volunteered — and for years afterward the papers were stored at Hofstra University, on Long Island, where Macdonald was teaching at the time. But three months before my visit, in the fall of 1974, he arranged for them to be transferred to his own alma mater, Yale. I would be the first person to examine what Macdonald had rescued — barely — from oblivion.

It was nearly five now, and the library would soon be closing for the holidays. There wouldn’t be time for more than a brief look at Schwartz’s papers, but I was eager to see them. I was twenty-five and had signed a contract with the distinguished publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, committing me to write a biography of Schwartz without having any idea whether, in fact, there was enough material to do so. What was in these boxes — they could have been the junk of a college student moving out of his dorm — would determine the course of my life.

The first letter he finds is from T.S. Eliot. A few minutes later, he’s holding one from W.H. Auden. That double shock produced “the moment of contact, when you travel in a startling instant from the present to the past, your subject suddenly alive before you on the page.” [To read an excerpt from “The Shadow in the Garden,” click here.]

If you read selectively, this is the dishiest book ever written about serious literature. Among the anecdotes: the critic who made Atlas match him drink for drink during their interview. (Atlas cheated.) Schwartz popping 20 Dexedrine a day. Atlas telling critics what Schwartz wrote about them in his diary, and getting righteous blowback. Literary titans lecturing Atlas: “You say whatever you like in print, you take on this big book, and then you sit here like a schoolboy in the principal’s office.” Saul Bellow, premature ejaculator. The rookie biographer, standing in a Grand Central phone booth, looking up numbers of minor characters he wants to call. The smut James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle. Jean Stafford: “I was just making some eggnog. That way I don’t have to eat.”

And there are the perceptions, worth marking. Like this wise phrase, delivered as a throwaway: “‘the first wife’ — the one who lived through the early stages of a writer’s career and set up a bourgeois household that eventually became suffocating and ended in divorce.” Or this: “Journals are the log of the inner life. Letters are the life presented to the world, the face prepared to meet the faces that you meet.” Or this: The biographer’s dream is “to find the pattern in a life, even if it isn’t there.”

English majors who become writers are, in their way, as ambitious as hedge fund managers. Certainly, from the beginning, James Atlas was: “I wanted to write a biography that some young writer would come across a hundred years from now in a second-hand bookstore, if such a thing still existed — or at least track down on Abebooks and have delivered by drone. Delmore Schwartz? What a strange name? Who was he?”

The currency of literary ambition and achievement is perception. There’s a lot of wisdom lightly shared in these pages, but what stands out is the perception that sums up a life’s work: “The key to writing biography is the capacity to be empathetic.” Too modest, I think. Isn’t empathy the key to every kind of writing? Isn’t it one of life’s largest lessons?

“The Shadow in the Garden” is a master class in empathy: stumbling on it, learning to use it, applying it to your own life. It’s ironic. In the end, the best book James Atlas has written is the one about himself.