THE GARDEN IN THE SHADOW [F, 11-13-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE GARDEN IN THE SHADOW  [F, 11-13-20]

 When daughter Katie Kennedy, the author and college prof, was doing graduate work at UIL, she was the teaching assistant for Geoffrey Parker, the world’s preeminent Western Europe and military history scholar. One of many awards, he was knighted in the UK, so Katie calls him “Sir Geoffrey.” Because of her intellectual depth, sideways humor, and charming personality, Katie was always a favorite student of any professor, so she and Sir Geoffrey have stayed in touch.

Recently he suggested to her that her father might enjoy a book by James Atlas called The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale. Atlas wrote the biographies of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow. Shadow is the story of how he did those, and an explanation, in general, of how biographers work. So she sent me a copy.

It is a delightful book. Atlas writes with insight and sparkle and omniscient scholarship. I’m sort of a biographer, sometimes writing about my friends in these little columns, so I appreciated the book for the craft insights. But “enjoy” is not quite the right word for my reaction to the book, for it is a reminder that I will never catch up.

Atlas grew up Jewish in Evanston/Chicago, the child of professional people. I grew up Methodist in southern Indiana, the child of primitive farmers. [No water or heat in the house. No car or tractor, just a horse.] He notes on p. 96 that in high school, he had read the high school canon. Howl. The Naked & the Dead. Tropic of Cancer. On the Road. Naked Lunch. The Beat Generation. No Exit. Waiting for Godot. The Duino Elegies.

High school? Really? I didn’t read any of these until I was through college and seminary. I still haven’t read most of them.

Where I grew up, philosophers were Will Rogers and Abe Martin [1], not Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Authors were Robert Louis Stevenson [2] and Howard Pease [3] not J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac. Musicians were Hank Williams and Kitty Wells, not J.S. Bach and Leonard Bernstein. Poets were James Whitcomb Riley [4] and Gelett Burgess [5], not Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Certainly not Delmore Schwartz.

I had heard the name of Delmore Schwartz along the way, and remembered it, because it’s different, but I had not read any of his poems. [I have now.] And even though I have read almost all of Saul Bellow, I had no idea that Schwartz was a character for Bellow, whose works of “fiction” are almost all veiled biography. [I learned that from James Atlas.] [6]

On every page of this book, Atlas reminds me how far behind I am. Every page contains the names of authors of whom I haven’t even heard, let alone read. The unread canon just keeps getting longer.

Of course, Atlas and I are from almost different generations [He was born 12 years after I was.] and very different cultures. If I wrote The Garden in the Shadow: A Storyteller’s Tale, about how I composed story-sermons, naming theologians famous and forgotten, like Reinhold Niebuhr and Leslie Weatherhead, and preachers like Fred Craddock and Harry Emerson Fosdick, and hymn writers like Natalie Sleeth and Fred Pratt Green, Atlas might feel like he was a long way behind.

Leslie Stahl interviewed me the other night. I think it may have been in a dream, but these days, who knows? She seems to be willing to interview almost anybody. She asked me what is the most important thing for an old person to do. I said, “Don’t just accept irrelevance; embrace it.”

James Atlas died last year, when he was only 70. I’m already way beyond that age. It’s going to be really hard to catch up. So, about the literary canon, I think I’m just going to embrace my irrelevance.

John Robert McFarland

1] A comic strip featuring a home-spun Hoosier raconteur.

2] Often the Classic Comics version of standards like Treasure Island.

3] Books about teen boys who stow away, etc., with titles like High Road to Adventure.

4] “Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay…”

5] “I never saw a purple cow…”. Actually, I read more Ogden Nash, but “Purple Cow” is important to show my literary level.

6] When I pastored in Charleston, IL, I occasionally had genial arguments with a young English prof at EILU about who was the most important novelist of the previous 50 years. He claimed Bellow, I claimed John Updike. Our cultures were obvious—he an urban Jew, and I a hillbilly Protestant.