James Atlas

BIO

James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and many other journals. He is the author of DELMORE SCHWARTZ: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

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PAST INTERVIEW

December 15, 2000

BELLOW is James Atlas's comprehensive and critically acclaimed biography of the Prize-winning author Saul Bellow. Bookreporter.com's new reviewer, Joel Wells, debuts his interviewing skills with Atlas. Find out how many years it took for Atlas to research and pen BELLOW, his favorite Bellow novel, the book where he makes a cameo appearance, and what his next project is about (hint: no more biographies).

BRC: With the publication of BELLOW, you have now completed two biographies, spending 10 years on this last one. You are also the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. What do you think is the purpose of literary biography? Why do you think readers are so interested in them?

JA: Literary biography is popular now, I suspect, because we live in a confusing time, an era of tremendous and rapid social transformation. It requires elucidation --- facts, data, reality. We want to know how people lived, we want instruction in what critics used to call "manners and morals." Biography is our school, our church, our family, our community. It does the work the novel used to do: it educates us.

BRC: For those readers who are approaching Bellow's work for the first time, what work do you suggest they read first --- and should they perhaps read the biography before the fiction?

JA: Read Bellow's work first. The two "apprentice" novels, DANGLING MAN and THE VICTIM; SEIZE THE DAY; HENDERSON THE RAIN KING; HERZOG; SAMMLER'S PLANET; RAVELSTEIN.

BRC: In a recent interview you made a comment about the "temporal sense" of the biographer. Ten years seems like a long time, how did you know when you were finished?

JA: I knew I was done when I had made the book as good as I could make it --- and when I had said all I had to say.

BRC: Can your interest in Bellow be traced to your work on Delmore Schwartz or was there something else that initially attracted you to him?

JA: My interest in Delmore, certainly, but also the fact that I'm from Chicago, that my parents are from the same world of Chicago Northwest Jews and the same generation as Bellow. I was studying my own tribe.

BRC: Is there a novel or character of Bellow's with which you are particularly close?

JA: HERZOG is my novel, and my guy --- not the biographical details, but the state of inner yearning for clarity.

BRC: You comment early on that Bellow took positions at universities to pay the bills, i.e., his heart was not really into the job. It could be suggested that his attitude toward the profession changed, especially with his time at U of C --- where he seemed to embrace the position. Is there something in particular that triggered this change?

JA: I think he liked being at the place where his love of books had first been inculcated in him. The University of Chicago was his intellectual home.

BRC: Louise Menand's recent review of RAVELSTEIN in the NYRB stated, "It is hard, reading the book, not to feel that every fictional x is intended to be set equal to some real life y." Do you think this is true? Do you ever think that you might show up in the next novel?

JA: Menand has it right, as usual. I see that I was generous not to note the cruel depiction of Edward Shils, for example. I could show up, it's crossed my mind. I already have a cameo role in the opening pages of HUMBOLDT, the eager young biographer "fabricating cultural textile rainbows."

BRC: How do you react to the critics? After having read Richard Poirier's comments in the London Review of Books was there empathy for Bellow and his feelings about critics and reviews?

JA: I do empathize with Bellow. Critics, it turns out, are just giving their opinions. They have no authority, no special purchase on the truth.

BRC: Considering there are subtle charges of racism in the biography, why wasn't a relationship such as the very close one Bellow claims to have had with Ralph Ellison explored more closely?

JA: I tried to show that Bellow's "racism" was a response to his own sense of vulnerability. He wasn't a racist --- his friendship with Ellison was based on their love of books. I wish I had written more about Ellison, but I still wouldn't have said, "Hey, by the way, Bellow liked him even though he was black." Bellow liked him because he liked him.

BRC: If you were asked for an epitaph on this work or for Bellow's career in general, what would it be?

JA: He enlivened our experience of the world, and did the best he could --- a far more heroic feat than it may sound.

BRC: Who's next?

JA: No more biographies for me! Unless, when I'm an old man puttering around, I do a short book on Boswell. I'm writing a sort of generational memoir based on pieces I did for The New Yorker, called MY LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. It's under contract to HarperCollins.

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