THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 19
1
POSTSCRIPT
JAMESATLAS
L
iterary 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 uncom-
mon. 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 hard-
ships of his métier—the sheer slog of
it—he envied the output of certain con-
temporaries, the English in particular.
“They finish a thousand-page manu-
script 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 Na-
tional 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 mag-
azine 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 incompati-
bility. The Penguin Lives, by contrast,
were conceived as love matches. Writ-
ers 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 to-
gether 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 ser-
vants, and he would later put our pre-
dicament 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 littéra-
teur, I thought, dramatized his serious-
ness by affecting a donnish aura. Yet
Jim’s tweedy jackets and bow ties con-
trasted with a bawdy wit and a brash-
ness that served him well in the scrim-
mages of his working life.
Jim was at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar,
studying under the great Richard Ell-
mann. Master and protégé had a natu-
ral affinity as Jewish Midwesterners in
a citadel of high English culture, Ell-
mann from Michigan, Atlas a Chica-
goan. 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 tell-
ing 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 cre-
ate 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 Biog-
rapher’s Tale.” Into this singular mem-
oir, 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 se-
crets. But he remained unsparing toward
his own shortcomings. A Danish biog-
rapher once astutely defined our dogged
business as “tracking the process of in-
dividuation 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.
—Judith Thurmanthe stripe and snap the line!” she sang.
But, twenty years later, a nor’easter
blew the cabaña into the bay. The fam-
ily retreated to the Remsenburg prop-
erty, and when Cherry drove by she rec-
ognized the grape arbors she’d planted
almost eighty years ago. A grandson of
the playwright Guy Bolton (no SS)
pushed her off the high dive at the beach
club; when she shoved him off the edge
of the pool, he broke his front teeth. “You
know what? He started it, and I finished
it,” she said.
Back in Moriches Bay, the Small
Sloops labored on like resolute wooden
ducklings. The race finished. No. 120 beat
out Nos. 152, 153, 137, 135, 13, and 125. At
two-forty-five, the Small Sloop associ-
ation convened its annual meeting under
a tent. It is a small band of enthusiasts
whose estimable goal is to keep the boats
sailing generation after generation.
(About forty craft are still in sailing con-
dition.) Cherry, carrying a walking staff
topped with a bellic carved eagle, intro-
duced herself. The association’s secretary
showed her a booklet with the lineage
of every SS. She pointed happily to the
Rices (No. 5), the Drivers (No. 47), and
the Kiddes (No. 115). “I dated Kyle Kidde,”
Cherry told the group. “I danced with
him on a Saturday night, and by Mon-
day he was in an iron lung.”
The commodore interrupted to say,
“The wind has changed. The boats are
in danger.” The crowd suddenly had
to go.
Cherry’s husband died in 2008. He
would have known their boat number,
and so would her brother—he captained;
she crewed—but he died last year. His
wife had letters, maybe even scanned,
but... long story. Cherry had only her
memories. The number 33, imprinted on
a cloth mainsail, kept flashing in her
brain, but, when she looked up that sloop
in the booklet, she saw that its last listed
owner was eighty years ago. The boat
had likely been turned into a planter or
split in half to make a bar or sucked out
to sea long ago. Cherry told other sto-
ries from that time: affairs, gruesome
deaths, hearts sundered by grief. Some
kids had robbed the local movie house
with a fake gun. She’d fallen off her Iver
Johnson and got a concussion. It was
four o’clock. Traffic was building. She
should really get going.
—D. T. Max