The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale
James Atlas
Corsair, £30
Review by Alan Taylor
LIKE the bounty hunters of yore, biographers stalk their subjects with studied mercilessness. It is no surprise, therefore, to learn that when they knock on a door the welcome they receive is often less than effusive.
In the summer of 1987, when James Atlas first asked Saul Bellow if he might be his biographer, Bellow proved as evasive as Lord Lucan and as slippery as a salmon.
Who could blame him? The celebrated author of The Adventures of Augie March had already been badly burnt, having allowed two people previously to dig into his past with alarming results. Two years and a charm offensive later, however, Bellow succumbed to Atlas’s overtures.
There followed a decade and more of research, including countless interviews with Bellow, his family, friends and enemies. Apart from anything else, a biographer needs stamina.
Atlas’s 800-page brick was finally published in 2000; he was in his forties when he embarked on it and in his fifties when it appeared.
By and large, the notices were mixed but the author was more harsh on himself than any critic. In The Shadow of the Garden, he remembers only the bad reviews (“flames of rage engulfed my book”) and he recalls rereading his work and inserting Post-its where he felt he got the tone wrong.
These he called the “Twelve Errors”, places where he deemed he had been ungenerous, “snotty” or – “the worst sin of all” – judgmental. “How I longed to edit these sentences,” Atlas writes. “Like the pockmarks from a medieval ague, they would disfigure me forever, unsalved by the ointment of
self-knowledge.”
He shouldn’t be so hard on himself. For what it’s worth, I thought he did Bellow proud. Having said that, as anyone who has ever attempted to write about another person knows, writing a biography is a thankless task.
Every line you write is surcharged with doubt and the possibility of inaccuracy. Facts are fine; they can be verified. It is in the murky area of feeling where things can go awry.
Who knows who felt what at a certain point in a life? Since we barely know ourselves, how on earth can we know others? For a biographer to suggest he does is presumptuous, arrogant.
By way of illustrating his point, Atlas mentions Richard Holmes’s superb biography of Shelley, The Pursuit. “I was struck by Holmes’s capacity to intuit his subject’s interior life,” Atlas notes. “When he claimed to know how Shelley felt ... I believed him, though he had violated a fundamental rule of biography: You can’t know what your subject felt. But you can get close.”
Biography is the subject of Atlas’s new book, in which he combines accounts of his own career of this much maligned art and that of his illustrious predecessors.
The footsteps in which he follows are those of the truly great, none greater than Boswell, the Laird of Auchinleck – “that drunken, depressive, philandering, whoring, obsequious, comic, effusive and compulsively indiscreet genius”– whose life of Samuel Johnson remains the gold standard.
Even Boswell, besotted as he was by the Sage of Lichfield, felt occasionally like giving up, so trauchled was he was by the effort of organising his material into a coherent whole.
Not only was he Johnson’s boon companion and the butt of his many jokes, he was a daily witness to the manner in which he conducted himself and the recorder of his prize aphorisms.
Doubtless on occasion Boswell tidied up Johnson’s less polished bon mots and he was not averse occasionally to making things up.
“Be Johnson” was his self-invented instruction, which is a cri de coeur that biographers – Atlas included – down the ages have struggled to follow. Writing a biography requires a level of self-denial which is not normal among creative artists.
Few writers aim to be a biographer. Atlas most certainly did not. His “obsession”, he confesses at the outset, dates to his arrival at Oxford from America in 1971 when he fell under the spell of Richard Ellmann, the fabled biographer of Joyce, Yeats and Oscar Wilde.
Such was the impact Ellmann made on his young disciple that Atlas describes it thus: “Steven Dedalus had stumbled upon his Leopold Bloom”. “Steven”, of course, should be spelled “Stephen”. One shares Atlas’s pain. Thanks to Ellmann, he immersed himself in all things Joycean, though he admits to being defeated by Finnegans Wake. He is in good company.
Like his mentor, Atlas had dreamed of becoming a poet; he had a poem published in The New Yorker when he was 19. But while he enjoyed reading poetry, and perhaps writing it, he was more interested in the lives of the poets than the poems they wrote. Thus, realising that “poetry wasn’t the only path to immortality”, he became a biographer.
What particularly appealed to him about Ellmann’s biographies was the style in which they were written. They read like novels, full of colour, anecdotes, indelible characters, gossip, drama. “Ellmann’s Joyce didn’t read like a biography: it read like a work of art. It had the authority of great fiction...”
Atlas’s first biography was of the American poet Delmore Schwartz, whose name, one fears, may be unfamiliar to readers on this side of the pond. Schwartz, a contemporary of Dylan Thomas with whom he has much in common, including his drinking and womanising, was celebrated by his peers but died nevertheless in penury. Like Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, Schwartz expired in an elevator while taking out the garbage. It was the most ignominious
of ends to a life full of Sturm und
Drang.
From Atlas’s point of view, writing Schwartz’s life gained him access to the inner sanctum of American letters in the latter half of the 20th century.
More names, even more unfamiliar perhaps to readers hereabouts, pepper the pages: Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Isaac Rosenfeld and Dwight Macdonald, who edited his manuscript with the glee of a hangman whistling as he went about his work. Others, such as Edmund Wilson, Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell are better known.
Atlas is good on the drudgery of the biographer, the niggardly advances, the long hours spent in libraries, the wearisomeness of interviewing people whose real interest is not in the subject of study but themselves.
But he is likewise fascinating on the thrill of the chase, of finding the address of a hitherto uncontactable source, of being shown a cache of papers he had not known existed, of the pre-internet era when there was unfettered access to people and sources. “What reader under the age of 50 will ever know the experience of putting a spool of microfilm tape on a machine with a handle as archaic as the crank of a Model-T Ford...?”
Such digressions – and the copious footnotes to which Atlas is addicted – help make The Shadow in the Garden a book every rookie biographer should read before devoting a chunk of their lives to commemorating someone else’s.
Whether a subject’s caught dead or alive, there is a sense of achievement
and failure; achievement at having recorded a life in all its ramifications, failure at having not quite described it as it was.
The impossibility of “getting it right” is what must haunt every biographer. The best you can hope for, as Atlas concedes, is that if over many years “you worked very hard and extended your hand, you could write a book that earned a high degree of permanence”.
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