* As one grows older and reaches one’s sixties and seventies, the world grows smaller and the air seems to thin, reminding one that mortality hovers. Although all of us sustain losses—of loved ones, friends and acquaintances—at some point in our lives, it is around this time that they begin to accrete, and at an accelerating rate. To be sure, all losses leave holes in the fabric of life, but there are some that suggest, more than others, the passing of an entire realm of discourse, a frame of reference that no longer holds. The one uppermost in my mind today is the end of a distinct period in American letters, when literary culture held sway in the surrounding society, commanding respect and bestowing prestige. It was a world peopled by impressive and varied figures such as Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, and, in its impassioned involvement with the life of the mind, made my contemporaries dream of gaining admission to it. That sense of an ending comes with a melancholic recognition that everything, including what once seemed to be a vibrant and entrenched style of intellectual engagement, is fleeting.
* There was a prickly, no-nonsense aspect of Jim [James Atlas] that alienated some people but which I enjoyed. For someone as passionate about literature as he was he had an endearing way of keeping its gratifications in perspective. About a year ago he joined a reading group that I was in and regularly sounded off about finding Henry James unreadable or some other revered novel too long. I still remember a conversation the group engaged in about an elegant, rather morose novel I loved called The Widow’s Children, by Paula Fox, in which Jim suddenly exclaimed about the characters we were so painstakingly trying to analyze: “They’re such losers! Who wants to be with such losers? I don’t.” His was the sort of unfiltered personality that allowed others to feel free to express their prejudices, however silly or catty they might sound, and his anti-bien pensant spirit countered any tendency one or the other of us might have had to become moralizing or righteous.
* The “life of significant contention,” as Diana Trilling once called the life of the mind, may always have been more aspirational than actual. Trilling herself once told me, apropos of her writing, that there was no “echo” anymore (a sentiment she shared with Virginia Woolf, who wrote in her journal shortly before she committed suicide in 1941, “It struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing ‘I’ has vanished. No audience. No echo…”). Nostalgia, as we know, tends to wear rose-colored glasses and the world of the New York intellectuals was always as full of pettiness as profundity, with the troika of Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick and Sontag taking jabs at other members of the group like high-school mean girls. (Not to overlook a brawler like Mailer, who stabbed his wife at a party celebrating his mayoral candidacy.) But it was also a world marked by a commitment to ideas, an appreciation of great writing, a passionate interest in the visual arts, and, perhaps most of all, a belief that these things mattered. Both Barbara and Jim believed in its necessity and value, and helped keep that world aloft even as it was indisputably going into eclipse.
In a valedictory issue of Horizon, the magazine that Cyril Connolly, the British literary critic and memoirist founded, Connolly wrote: “It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.” That was in 1949 and the pronouncement was a bit hyperbolic, but not by much. The idea that one is living on borrowed time is not an easy one to recognize, much less accept, but these days the garden that once bustled with stimulating literary presences seems inhabited mostly by formidable ghosts. And the shadows that they cast seem ever longer.
