The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale

by James Atlas Narrated by George Newbern

Overview

The biographer-so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts-comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers'*lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas's professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas's first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the “tall pines,” as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the “merciless pruning of mortality”) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, “a metaphysician of the ordinary.”

Atlas revisits the lives and works of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called “lives,” Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them-“as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.”

(With black-and-white illustrations throughout)

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2017 - AudioFile

Expertly read by George Newbern, Atlas's history/memoir on the art of writing biography is a listener's treat. Atlas, the biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, surveys the history of biography with an insider’s eye and recounts his own career in what amounts to a fifty-year history of American literary life. Rich in anecdote, insight, and wit, this is one of those rare literary gems that exceed their dimensions. Newbern perfectly captures the fine balance between reverence and irony of an author who is part greenhorn, part cognoscente. Names like Irving Howe, Dwight MacDonald, and Leon Edel are mostly forgotten today. Here is a voice to rekindle their unique spirits, and those bygone decades they defined. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

07/03/2017
Atlas (My Life in the Middle Ages), a biographer and longtime contributor to the New Yorker, illuminates the art of writing a biography in this witty, conscientious, and perceptive work. Atlas grapples with what makes a good biographer (total empathy with one’s subject, among other traits), why biographies matter, and why he persists in writing them. He reveals his struggles dealing with subjects both famous (Saul Bellow, who agreed to interviews but remained wary and unenthusiastic about Atlas’s project) and obscure (Delmore Schwartz—“no one outside the literary world had ever heard of him”). Atlas also provides a rich literary history of biographers that includes the ancient Greeks and Romans, who decided to write “lives” rather than histories, the Renaissance writers who dealt with the dawning of “self-consciousness,” James Boswell’s masterful work on Dr. Samuel Johnson, and the flowering of the form in the Victorian era. Given top billing are the writers who inspired him: his Oxford professor Richard Ellmann, whose biography of James Joyce motivated Atlas to become a biographer; Michael Holroyd, whose work on Lytton Strachey made Atlas fall in love with “the scaffolding... that surrounds the main text”; and Dwight Macdonald, who edited his work in progress on Schwartz (“His challenges, objurgations, rebukes—and occasional praise—defaced every page”). Part literary history and part memoir, this is a lively and elegant biography of biography itself. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

There are times when you like a book so much that you want to call up the author. For me, this is one of those rare times.” —John Tytell, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Entertaining . . . A goody bag of quotable incidents and a useful guide to the biographer’s tradecraft.” —James Wolcott, The London Review of Books

“Absorbing . . . The Shadow in The Garden will, I predict, have a long life precisely because its author, a man for whom biography-writing proved a release into literary expressiveness, has endowed it with so much genuine thought and feeling.” —Vivian Gornick, Boston Review

“A work of both depth and radiance . . . Expert, provocative, and enlightening . . . Atlas relays all with wry hilarity, bighearted candor, and effervescent passion for the art of literary biography.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“In recounting a life largely subsumed by the lives of others, James Atlas reveals, with sincerity, humor, and incisiveness, the value and the difficulty of looking outside oneself for meaning. The Shadow in the Garden is a brutally honest look at the ways in which our lives are shaped—both with and without our knowledge—by the lives of others.” —Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

[Praise for the audiobook edition] “A listener's treat . . . Expertly read by George Newbern . . . One of those rare literary gems that exceed their dimensions.” —David A. Walton, Audiofile

“Illuminating . . . A brutally honest examination of the biographical craft and a good companion piece to Richard Holmes’s This Long Pursuit.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A unique, behind-the-scenes look  . . . Readers of literary biographies (or any type of biography) rarely get such an insight into the process itself.” —Lee Polevoi, Highbrow Magazine

“Witty, conscientious, and perceptive . . . Part literary history and part memoir, this is a lively and elegant biography of biography itself.” —Publishers Weekly

“An arresting book, at once personal and broad in its purview.” —Robert Weibezahl, BookPage

“The dishiest book ever written about serious literature . . . A master class in empathy: stumbling on it, learning to use it, applying it to your own life.” —Jesse Kornbluth, Head Butler

“Atlas, with incredible knowledge of all things literary, and with self-deprecating (almost self-lacerating at times) wit and wisdom, gives us the history of the biography form itself.” —Michelle Willens, The Huffington Post

“The Shadow in the Garden is written on behalf of all the biographers whose honesty about their subjects was interpreted as gossip, or whose readability was maligned as salaciousness. Such are the pitfalls of the genre. But is biography writing worth it? Atlas thinks it is.” —Robert Minto, The New Republic

“Biographers and their subjects engage in a prolonged dance of mutual seduction and betrayal and nobody elucidates this maddening psychodrama better than James Atlas. With candor, subtle insight, and almost heartbreaking humility, he narrates his pursuit of the deceased Delmore Schwartz and the often forbiddingly alive Saul Bellow, laying bare both the pitfalls and rewards of biography. Best of all his memoir is enriched by an encyclopedic knowledge of literary biography that enables the reader to measure his unending quest against the high standard set by James Boswell and Samuel Johnson and many other illustrious predecessors. Anyone even remotely interested in the art of biography will be captivated.” —Ron Chernow, author of Alexander Hamilton
 
“I loved this book and was sorry to see it end—not simply because I happen to be one of the ‘obsessive diggers drawn to this odd profession,’ as Atlas puts it, but because it’s a funny, amazingly candid, beautifully written, and, yes, profound meditation on the maddening (and ultimately impossible) business of understanding another human being.” —Blake Bailey, author of Cheever: A Life
 
“How can a book be both modest and magisterial? James Atlas, in his confidences about his own methods as a biographer and in his thrilling presentation of the great biographers of the past (from Plutarch to Leon Edel), tells us everything we need to know, but lightly, sincerely—and definitively.” —Edmund White, author of Rimbaud: The Double-Life of a Rebel
 
“The biographer slips into another’s skin; he is meant to assume someone else’s unconscious. By definition, he erases himself in the process. Writing of and around his books, Atlas triumphantly returns that fugitive figure—part sleuth, part scholar, part analyst, part medium, an emissary between worlds—to the page. The result is a lyrical, tender, and unexpectedly suspenseful take on a life in literature. ‘There is no such thing as Biography School,’ Atlas laments at one juncture. There is now.” —Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life
 
“Oh God, Atlas has given it all away: all the trade secrets, anxieties, ploys, scruples, and obsessions of the literary biographer, the noble and ignoble inner workings of the craft, along with an enthralling history of it, and of its greatest practitioners. This excellent memoir may make you think twice about writing a life—i.e., subsuming your own to it—but it will inspire you to rush out to read one.” —Judith Thurman, author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

Library Journal

03/15/2017
Atlas is a publishing-world fixture, e.g., he founded "Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives" series and has been a staff writer, contributor, or editor for publications such as Time and The New Yorker. But he's likely best known to general readers as the author of the monumental Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, a National Book Award nominee. Here he looks at the biographer's art, from the Renaissance writers of various "Lives" to James Bowell and Richard Ellmann to his own work.

OCTOBER 2017 - AudioFile

Expertly read by George Newbern, Atlas's history/memoir on the art of writing biography is a listener's treat. Atlas, the biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, surveys the history of biography with an insider’s eye and recounts his own career in what amounts to a fifty-year history of American literary life. Rich in anecdote, insight, and wit, this is one of those rare literary gems that exceed their dimensions. Newbern perfectly captures the fine balance between reverence and irony of an author who is part greenhorn, part cognoscente. Names like Irving Howe, Dwight MacDonald, and Leon Edel are mostly forgotten today. Here is a voice to rekindle their unique spirits, and those bygone decades they defined. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2017-05-31
An illuminating account of a career as a biographer.A literary critic, magazine editor, memoirist, novelist, and founder of the Lippert/Viking Penguin Lives series of biographies, Atlas (My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale, 2005, etc.), who has penned acclaimed biographies of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, digs deep into his own psyche to explain why he became attracted to the craft of biography. He also delves into why he chose Schwartz and Bellow as his subjects—Schwartz after the poet's death and Bellow, an ambivalent subject, while still living. Beset with doubts about his ability to complete either biography satisfactorily and despite some moments of unwise hubris, Atlas could never divorce himself from the occupation of peering into the lives of others. He repeatedly impresses upon readers the sacred responsibility of rendering someone else's life so that it is not only factually correct, but also emotionally accurate. Along the way, Atlas offers insights into dealing with sources who innocently remember events that never occurred, who knowingly exaggerate or lie, or who want to cooperate but die before the frantic biographer can schedule interviews. Because the author specializes in biographies of writers—as opposed to, say, celebrities, politicians, athletes, or business tycoons—he must interpret their published pages. That can cause difficulties when the second reading of a novel yields a reaction divergent from the original reading. For example, Atlas realized years after becoming Bellow's biographer that most of the novels that seemed nearly perfect at first were actually less compelling upon close examination. The author is especially insightful about the pitfalls and occasional advantages of choosing a living person as the subject of the biography. His relationship with Bellow became so complicated at times that he found it difficult to sort out his own feelings. A brutally honest examination of the biographical craft and a good companion piece to Richard Holmes' This Long Pursuit(2017).

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172167805
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/29/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

I read biographies with the absorption of a car mechanic, repair manual in hand, peering under the hood at a steaming engine: What’s gone wrong here? And how do I fix it? In order to write a biography, I had to know how the thing was done.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Shadow in the Garden"
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Copyright © 2018 James Atlas.
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