The Shadow in the Garden by James Atlas

Author:James Atlas [Atlas, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

*3 The fictional town in Sholem Aleichem’s stories.

*4 Unpublished books, typed on white paper, were circulated in this way before the advent of “attachments.”

Isaac Rosenfeld Credit 17

XVII

Like a birder spotting a rare painted bunting in Central Park, I grew flushed with excitement when I saw in the 92nd Street Y catalog that Bellow would be giving a reading that fall. I sent in for tickets so early that the ones I received in the mail were numbered three and four. (I wondered what zealot got there first. And was it a zealot who had invited along a friend, lover, relative? Or were there two separate zealots?) I had invited my friend Judith Thurman, the biographer of Isak Dinesen and another literature-mad soul, to go with me. We met in the lobby just before eight to find the place jammed. A thousand people must have shown up. An usher led us out onto the stage, where folding chairs had been set up to accommodate the overflow. Those, too, were filling up fast, but I told an usher that Judith was five months pregnant—not the kind of thing you can make up—and he gave us two seats in the front row. My chair was two feet from the edge of the stage, in full view of the audience.

My new friend Lola Szladits gave the introduction.

Then Bellow walked onstage. The applause was loud and seemed to last for five minutes. He was wearing a gray suit and looked older than a year ago, when I’d seen him in Chicago. He was frail and white-haired but elegant as always. “A greeting like this makes me wonder why I didn’t run for president,” he said wryly.

He read a passage from Humboldt’s Gift, the one in which Humboldt is living in the rural wilds of New Jersey and his friend Charlie Citrine goes to spend the night—and read it beautifully. In his voice was all the pathos and humor of manic, eloquent, amphetamine-fueled Delmore rattling off references to

jewboys, goyboys, chorus girls, prostitution, and religion, old money, new money, gentlemen’s clubs, Back Bay, Newport, Washington Square, Henry Adams, Henry James, Henry Ford, Saint John of the Cross, Dante, Ezra Pound, Dostoevski, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Gertrude Stein and Alice, Freud and Ferenczi.*1

Then he read the closing of Henderson the Rain King—less good, flawed as it is by his penchant for jokiness (riding a roller coaster with a bear named Smolak?), but full of energy all the same, as when Henderson is bunking in a stable in Ontario: “There the rats jumped back and forth over my legs at night, and fed on oats, and the watering of the horses began at daybreak, in the blue light that occurs at the end of darkness in the high latitudes.” It was thrilling to hear that long, run-on, rhythmic sentence, the ands piling up, the adjectiveless nouns,*2 read in its author’s dry voice with such precise enunciation.

He read for about an hour, followed by a question-and-answer period. The Y’s

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