James Atlas
JAMES ATLAS is the The founder of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives series, Atlas was for many years an editor at The New York Times, first at the book review and later at the magazine. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and other journals. He lives in New York City. He is the author of DELMORE SCHWARTZ: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award, BELLOW and his new memoir THE SHADOW IN THE GARDEN.
Raised in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, he proudly claims the prickly independence of his fellow Chicagoans.
Who was Delmore Schwartz and why did you choose him as the subject of your first biography?
It was October 9, 1966. Although living in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, my father liked to pick up the Sunday editions of the New York newspapers since he felt that the local papers were too “provincial.” In the New York World Tribune Book Week I found an article by Alfred Kazin about a poet who had died that summer at the age fifty-two, a once promising career cut short by drugs and alcohol. Kazin described him as a figure of “immense intellectual devotion” whose poems “astonished everyone by being impeccably, formally right in the prevailing Eliot tradition–emotional ingenuity tuned to perfect pitch by gravity of manner.”
I later read Saul Bellow’s novel, HUMBOLDT’S GIFT, a fictional, spot-on portrait of Schwartz, and the seed was planted.
Your book is filled with references to some of the great names of 20th century literature and criticism, including Richard Ellman, Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson and, of course, Alfred Kazin. Talk about those writers and how they influenced your work and your decision to become a biographer.
Ellmann was my professor at Oxford and wrote a great biography of James Joyce. “It didn’t read like a biography: it read like a work of art.. It had the authority of great fiction; it was scholarly but not academic; and behind it’s facade of objectivity you could detect, if you listened close enough, the biographers own voice. This was the kind of book I aspired to write. Ellmann–though I didn’t know it then–had me want to be a biographer.”
But, Dwight MacDonald taught me how to write. The great critic was suffering from a bout of writer’s block and having been a good friend of Delmore Schwartz took it upon himself to “edit” my manuscript, filling the margins with red-penciled annotations and
observations. “His brilliant copious annotations had a profound influence on my style and ideas.”
It took you eleven years to research and write BELLOW. Discuss its origins, the writing process and the man.
I remember being fourteen and reading THE DANGLING MAN. It’s voice spoke to me, to my origins, like nothing else before it. We had many meetings in Chicago, Vermont and although I learned much about him, he took no interest in me whatsoever. “You live on the same block as Phillip Roth” was the closest he ever came to showing any interest in me.
He was a very flawed person, divorced four times, a negligent father, emotionally distant, filled with grievance and resentment over the fact that his older brothers had been so much more successful early in their adult lives.
At the end of the day and all the time you spent together, did you like Bellow?
As a biographer, I don’t think it is necessary to like your subject but you must find him interesting. That being said, “I never walked away from an encounter with Bellow that did not leave me intellectually buzzing.”
Bellow was one third of the post war Jewish literary mafia that included Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud, and we might add the Canadian cousin Mordechai Richler. As first generation American and Canadian born Jews their work reflected the American work ethic overlaid with assimilation and tragedy of the Shoah. Are they being widely read today and will we be reading them 50 years from now?
Sadly, I don’t think they are even being read today.
