{"id":138611,"date":"2021-04-21T09:17:06","date_gmt":"2021-04-21T17:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138611"},"modified":"2021-04-22T09:17:09","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T17:17:09","slug":"the-shadow-in-the-garden-a-biographers-tale-by-james-atlas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138611","title":{"rendered":"The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale by James Atlas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2017 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* Janet Malcolm: “The biographer is writing a life, not lives, and to keep himself on course, must cultivate a kind of narcissism on behalf of his subject that blinds him to the full humanity of everyone else. As he turns the bracing storylessness of human life into the flaccid narrativity of biography, he cannot worry about the people who never asked to be dragged into his shaky enterprise.”<\/p>\n

* He [Edmund Wilson] had his weaknesses. He could be na\u00efve; the timing of To the Finland Station , an excitable defense of the Russia Revolution, happened to coincide with Stalin\u2019s consolidation of power, preparing the way for the Terror. He had a tin ear for poetry, tending to overpraise mediocrities like Phelps Putnam, and opportunistic enthusiasms; he crassly praised the work of Ana\u00efs Nin in order to get her into bed. And he had blind spots: \u201cMust we really, as his admirers pretend, accept the plight of Kafka\u2019s abject heroes as parables of the human condition?\u201d<\/p>\n

* It wasn\u2019t only the number of women Wilson \u201cbedded\u201d that got on my nerves. It was his insistence on recording the mechanics\u2014what Richard Ellmann called \u201cthe precise anatomical convolutions\u201d\u2014at great and annoying length in his journals. Wilson\u2019s cold clinical accounts of sex made Kinsey seem like Henry Miller. I was startled not only by his profligacy but by his potency: at the age of seventy-four, he seduced the bibulous New Yorker film critic Penelope Gilliatt on a couch at the Princeton Club and also managed to work in a hot affair with his dentist\u2019s wife. He seemed to have no taboos, even dabbling in bondage and discipline. (He briefly owned a whip). He was a prodigious engine; women marveled at what one described as his \u201cbull-like physical stamina.\u201d He was so insatiable that I sometimes wondered how he could have slept with so many women while reading as many books as he did. And it didn\u2019t even sound like fun. Cyril Connolly, reviewing Memoirs of Hecate County , complained of the \u201cinsect monotony\u201d of its couplings. It\u2019s not enough to say that Wilson was clinical; he could be downright creepy. He described his penis as \u201cmeaty\u201d and compared his mistress\u2019s feet to \u201cmoist little cream cheeses.\u201d * 10
\n But the biggest obstacle was Wilson himself. He was hard to like: one of his wives described him as \u201ca cold fishy leprous person.\u201d Could I spend years of my life with a subject who, even in the company of his wife and daughter, read at the dinner table? He was anti-Semitic; he was rude to waiters. He found no merit in Anthony Powell. It finally dawned on me: what I felt was more complex than \u201cdistaste\u201d or \u201cdislike\u201d\u2014it was a question of compatibility. Was Edmund Wilson someone through whose eyes I would come to see life in a new and different way? Did he possess qualities of temperament or character that would remain fresh throughout the many years it takes to write a major biography? In short, did he interest me?<\/p>\n

* When he [Mark Harris] calls the novelist\u2019s home, Bellow\u2019s three-year-old son picks up the phone and, mistaking Harris for his often absent father\u2014Bellow is in the midst of one of his divorces\u2014announces that he loves him: \u201cI could not but tell him that I loved him, in turn, and I think that I fooled him with my voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

* You can never read the same book twice.<\/p>\n

* The problem with biography is that the biographer\u2019s age inevitably affects the way he sees his subject. As that vantage changes, so does his viewpoint. A biography written by a forty-year-old will be more unforgiving, less sensitive to his subject\u2019s pain, than a biography written by a sixty-year-old. I\u2019d been at work on my book for three years, and I was a different person from the person I\u2019d been when I started…<\/p>\n

* Bellow was a man for whom the world was becoming unfamiliar and confusing, overrun by a youth culture with beliefs and customs of its own\u2014a man, in short, who was growing old. But his contention troubled me all the same: was it possible that even Saul Bellow\u2019s work would fade from the collective memory, that Herzog and Humboldt\u2019s Gift and Henderson the Rain King (the \u201cthree H\u2019s,\u201d he liked to call them) would one day molder on the shelf beside the works of Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck?<\/p>\n

* Most of the time I didn\u2019t mind our unequal stature and talents: Go, you be the genius. But sometimes I felt: What about my life? Doesn\u2019t it count, too? There comes, inevitably, a moment of rebellion, when the inequality begins to chafe. Biographers are people, too, even if we\u2019re condemned to huddle in the shadow of our subjects\u2019 monumentality. All the same, self-abnegation has its limits. A thousand pages along, a decade in, the biographer cries out: What am I? Chopped liver?<\/p>\n

* By the time I left, I was way over my limit of Bellow exposure\u2014the amount of time I could spend around him before I got Bellow burnout. So much concentration, combined with the suppression of self, was exhausting.<\/p>\n

* \u201cThere will be tears before bedtime,\u201d the critic John Gross had predicted when he learned that I was writing a biography of Bellow. And so there would.<\/p>\n

* Edmund White, the biographer of Jean Genet, called biography the revenge of the little people on the big people.<\/p>\n

* In A. S. Byatt\u2019s Possession , a scholar named Mortimer Cropper delivers a lecture entitled \u201cThe Art of a Biographer\u201d in which he offers a persuasive vindication of his craft: \u201cBiography was just as much a spiritual hunger of modern man as sex or political activity. Look at the sales, he had urged, look at the column space in the Sundays, people need to know how other people lived, it helps them to live, it\u2019s human.\u201d<\/p>\n

* So what is the biographer\u2019s purpose? Primarily, I would say, to show what other factors\u2014besides genius\u2014contributed to the making of the writer\u2019s life, the genesis of his books, the social and literary influences that formed them. Richard Ellmann described the connection this way: \u201cAffection for one leads to interest in the other, the two sentiments tend to join, and the results of affection and interest often illuminate both the fiery clay and the wrought jar.\u201d The fiery clay is the life, and the wrought jar is the work that gives it form.<\/p>\n

* A nother way the biographer\/subject relationship can go wrong: you start out a friend of your subject and end up hating him, as Lawrance Thompson did in his notorious biography of Robert Frost. Every biographer is familiar with this train wreck; Jay Parini, Frost\u2019s most sympathetic biographer, called it \u201ca three-volume assault on Frost\u2019s character in the shape of a literary biography.\u201d Thompson died before he could complete the third volume, to the relief of all concerned, and it was finished by his student R. H. Winnick, but the damage was done. His biography stands as a monument to the danger of writing about someone you know.
\n It began as a promising match. Thompson wasn\u2019t just Frost\u2019s biographer; he was the authorized biographer, appointed by Frost after he read an admiring book Thompson had written on his poetry. The admiration was apparently provisional, since it didn\u2019t prevent Thompson from giving a hostile review to a play of Frost\u2019s in the Times Book Review or, stranger still, having an affair with Frost\u2019s mistress, Kay Morrison, the wife of Theodore Morrison, a poet and professor of English at Harvard. Now that\u2019s access. Is it enough to call this a conflict of interest, or is it transgressive?
\n \u201cThompson\u2019s intimacy with Kay allowed him to participate in and even change the course of the life he was writing,\u201d wrote Jeffrey Meyers, one of Frost\u2019s many biographers. He urged Morrison to reject Frost\u2019s proposals of marriage and be \u201ctough\u201d with him, even though Thompson knew\u2014it was his job to know\u2014every detail of their affair. * 13 I can\u2019t help wondering what their pillow talk was like.<\/p>\n

* I was deep into my Bellow now, asserting my freedom\u2014the freedom that art grants the biographer to \u201ckick around the facts,\u201d as Dwight had put it. Not to fabricate them, but to choose and order them in such a way that they create a likeness\u2014a likeness that was mine. Foolishly and generously, out of kindness and vanity, innocence and egotism, Bellow had allowed me a glimpse of his many-selved character. For the better part of a decade, I had observed and made notes. The data had been collected. That work was done. Ahead lay the harder work: making sense of it.<\/p>\n

* “No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways, he has to elbow his way through the world, giving and receiving offence.”<\/p>\n

* Bellow had three sons: Greg, Adam, and Dan.
\n He also had three disciples: James Wood, Leon Wieseltier, and Martin Amis. These three were\u2014I won\u2019t say pseudo-sons, because their affection for Bellow was so deep as to be almost filial\u2014but surrogate- or substitute- or perhaps alter-sons, whose love was uncomplicated by anger and the unruly demands of hereditary sons. Easier to choose your sons than to deal with the ones you have.<\/p>\n

* \u201cHow, really, could the drama of paternity have competed with the drama of creativity?\u201d asked Wood. For Bellow, \u201cThe writing was the living.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Maybe it could have been fixed if I\u2019d written the book now, toward the end of my life, and known more about its capacity to wound. Maybe it could never have been fixed. The key to writing biography is the capacity to be empathic; Holmes\u2019s image of the biographer extending \u201ca handshake\u201d toward his subject stayed with me. At some point, without realizing it, I had withdrawn my hand. <\/p>\n

* Anyway, it\u2019s not as if he got away with it. There was a lot of wear and tear. He was battered by alimony fights and operatic love affairs. As a father, he was a disaster. Even Janis, whose love for Bellow was unconditional, acknowledged in an interview after his death that \u201che failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around.\u201d<\/p>\n

* I had never been able to convince myself that it was justifiable for Bellow to diminish his friends and family members by making them \u201cmaterial.\u201d When Dave Peltz reprimanded him for putting a story Peltz had told him in Humboldt\u2019s Gift , Bellow lectured him about the sanctity of the artist: \u201cI should think it would touch you that I was moved to put a hand on your shoulder and wanted to remember you as I took off for the moon.\u201d
\n I remain unpersuaded by the casuistical argument put forward by James Wood: \u201cThe number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than could be counted on two hands, yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.\u201d Was I missing something in this creepy moral calculus? Was Wood suggesting that it was okay to hurt your own wives and friends and children in the service of literature? \u201cDoes the reader care that Dave Peltz was a little wounded?\u201d I did. Dave was my friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2017 book: * Janet Malcolm: “The biographer is writing a life, not lives, and to keep himself on course, must cultivate a kind of narcissism on behalf of his subject that blinds him to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42891],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138611"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138663,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138611\/revisions\/138663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}