Literary biographers—writers who devote their lives to other writers’ lives—are a confraternity of old soldiers who like to trade battle stories. In this theatre, a seven-year war is not uncommon. Whatever its outcome, no one emerges from the conflict—between one’s self and one’s subject—unhumbled.
James Atlas, who died last week, of chronic lung disease, at seventy, was a valorous combatant who knew both glory and defeat. His peers were grateful for his comradeship. On their long marches through hostile territory, he generously shared vital intelligence. Given the hardships of his métier—the sheer slog of it—he envied the output of certain contemporaries, the English in particular. “They finish a thousand-page manuscript at breakfast and start another one after lunch,” he once marvelled.
Atlas published two biographies—of the poet Delmore Schwartz and the novelist Saul Bellow—both of which harrowed unbroken ground. (The life of Schwartz was a finalist for the National Book Award, in 1978, when Atlas was twenty-nine.) But perhaps Atlas was too demanding of himself to be prolific. He excelled at shorter forms of life writing, and one of his fortes was the personal history that chronicled the angst of living by one’s pen. (Many of those essays were published in this magazine during his time as a staff writer.) That angst was partly financial. When he bogged down in the Bellow book, he co-founded and edited the Penguin Lives series, a venture that was inspired, in part, by his own battle fatigue, but also by his experience of a “divorce”: a biography of Edmund Wilson that Atlas abandoned on grounds of incompatibility. The Penguin Lives, by contrast, were conceived as love matches. Writers were paired off with subjects whom they found alluring, and that chemistry also excited readers. The books were short, as romances tend to be. Atlas proved himself a canny matchmaker.
Atlas and I grew up and got old together as biographers. I was starting my life of Isak Dinesen when he was finishing his work on Delmore Schwartz; we both often felt like indentured servants, and he would later put our predicament eloquently: “I was pouring my own life into the resurrection of his.” We met in the early seventies, in the offices of the Carcanet Press, a small Oxford-based publisher of poetry. I was working as a cook in London, and Jim had just graduated from Harvard, where he had studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. This young littérateur, I thought, dramatized his seriousness by affecting a donnish aura. Yet Jim’s tweedy jackets and bow ties contrasted with a bawdy wit and a brashness that served him well in the scrimmages of his working life.
Jim was at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, studying under the great Richard Ellmann. Master and protégé had a natural affinity as Jewish Midwesterners in a citadel of high English culture, Ellmann from Michigan, Atlas a Chicagoan. In 1959, Ellmann had published his life of James Joyce, a masterpiece that redefined literary biography for a new generation. Its message was that in telling the story of a life with scrupulous fidelity to the facts, an erudite reading of the texts, and a novelist’s feeling for the narrative, a writer could aspire to create a work of literature in its own right.
That ideal fired Jim’s ambitions at twenty-two, and it is embodied in the book he published in 2017, at sixty-eight, “The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale.” Into this singular memoir, whose buoyancy belies its depth, Atlas distilled everything he had learned the hard way about our vocation. He surveyed the canon, meditated on the craft, and blithely gave away trade secrets. But he remained unsparing toward his own shortcomings. A Danish biographer once astutely defined our dogged business as “tracking the process of individuation to the point at which it fails,” and there is no finer, more authentic, illustration of the dictum than “The Shadow in the Garden.” Its real subject, however, is the nature of intimacy. How can a person come to know someone else? It is possible, Atlas concludes, only once you know yourself. ♦
