An Atlas of the Difficult World

Richard Holmes stands out among the literary biographers James Atlas summons in his compulsively readable book, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale. He values Holmes both for his biography of Shelley and his subsequent Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. In a decade-long pursuit of the poet, Holmes traveled everywhere Shelley had gone, retracing the very paths he once trod.

This "tracking a physical trail through the past" represents part of what it means to be a biographer, Atlas comments. "You had, in essence, to live your subjects' life." Except, as Holmes concluded, "you would never quite catch them" as they faded into fleeting figures, or—in Saul Bellow's terminology—shadows in the garden. It was Holmes, too, who gave Atlas a description of what he aimed for in crafting his own biographies: "Nonfiction story-telling: that's what I was after."

The stories Atlas has told are those of Delmore Schwartz, an immensely talented and too-young dead poet, and Bellow, a great novelist who lived into his 90^th year and won all the important prizes, including the Nobel.

A Rhodes scholar from Harvard, Atlas came under the guidance of Richard Ellmann, the eminent biographer of James Joyce, then in residence at Oxford's New College. On the strength of some youthful publications, Atlas harbored aspirations toward becoming a poet, but Ellmann's useful example (the British called another Rhodes scholar, Bill Bradley from Princeton, a "useful" addition to Oxford's basketball team) directed him toward telling life stories instead.

Ellmann, a Jew from the American Midwest, had little in common with his chosen subject, an Irishman "of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism." But he was fascinated by genius, and treated Joyce and the modernist writers chronicled in his Golden Codgers with an avuncular tolerance that "remarked upon, and forgave, their failings." For his own conferences with Ellmann, Atlas managed to make sense of Joyce's Ulysses, but was "defeated"—a refreshing concession—by the nearly impenetrable Finnegan's Wake.

Working on Delmore

Deciding that the academic life was not for him, Atlas came back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he wrote literary reviews for peanuts to establish his bona fides and began research toward a biography of Schwartz, then a little-remembered figure. Schwartz's body lay unclaimed in the New York morgue for two days following his death on July 11^th, 1966, and his disorganized papers turned up unexpectedly at the Covered Wagon, a Greenwich Village moving company. The writer and critic Dwight Macdonald, volunteering to serve as Schwartz's literary executor, salvaged those documents and saw to it that they were housed at Yale's Beinecke Library.

Atlas starts his book there, on Christmas Eve, 1974, where he sat at a long table and opened the first of six cardboard storage boxes to discover "manuscripts, letters, loose papers, and manila envelopes, all jumbled together" as they'd been tossed inside by the movers. It was almost time for the Beinecke to close for the day and the holidays, but during that brief span Atlas read a letter to Schwartz from T. S. Eliot, acknowledging an article he'd written about Criterion, and asking to see more of his poetry. And another letter to Schwartz from "Wystan": W. H. Auden.

This was heady stuff, and Atlas was hooked. Three years later, he published his biography of "Delmore"—the name he invariably used for the poet (and the same one that John and Mary Cheever, up in Westchester, assigned to their particularly troublesome cat). Delmore was best known among the literati for his erratic and sometimes alcoholic behavior and gained a wider notoriety when Bellow portrayed him as a principal player in his 1977 novel, Humboldt's Gift.

By some legerdemain, Atlas's Biographer's Tale manages to convey his own excitement as he encountered one discovery after another through digging into written archives. And he does a splendid job of bringing his interviewees to life, among them, in Delmore's case, several members of the Partisan Review circle who were the intellectual heroes of...