April 27, 2005
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Marc Royce/Random House
James Atlas
April 24, 2005
‘My Life in the Middle Ages’: Making It
By JAMES CAMPBELL
MY LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
A Survivor’s Tale.
By James Atlas.
220 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.
Giving up drinking doesn’t make you live longer, the old joke goes; it only feels like it. Since he entered his 50′s, James Atlas has renounced a variety of pleasures. ”Not only do we not drink or smoke,” he writes of a reunion with two old friends; ”we don’t eat either.” At dinner, it’s salad and decaf all around. Atlas has even cut down on reading. ”The hurried pace of life erodes our capacity to read,” he complains, and ”makes a tough job even tougher.” Shadowed by guilt, he enjoys listening to Pepys’s diary on tape while driving his car, but the printed page fatigues him, even when it contains the words of George Eliot or Dostoyevsky. ”Much as I savor the experience of immersion in a good book, the way it takes over your life, becomes your life, my Samsung gleams at my side, speed-dial at the ready.”
A quarter of a century ago, authors principally associated with fiction or the literary essay turned to travel writing for a spot of recreation. Nowadays, the urgent voyage is into the heart of oneself. If you can confront a little darkness along the way — drug or alcohol addiction, sex abuse, racism; all overcome, naturally — so much the better. The literary motto of our age is that everyone has a memoir in them.
”My Life in the Middle Ages” is an occasionally amusing, frenetic, prolix exercise in the genre. Atlas sets out to show how an energetic, all-purpose literary man — he is the author of biographies of Saul Bellow and the poet Delmore Schwartz, and of a novel, ”The Great Pretender”- is worn down by the battery of worries and disappointments that are commonly the reward for having survived a half-century. Atlas has discovered that middle age is a hell of disintegration that his younger self had assumed was reserved for other people. To judge by the details, it is a well-appointed hell: a car, a house in the country and an apartment in Manhattan, an adored family, loving parents who cultivated the taste for books that gave him a decent career. But Atlas can’t see the trees for the wood. Middle age means not only the loss of youth, but a newfound intimacy with death. ”Like a man on a subway platform awaiting a train whose vibration on the rails prefigures its arrival, I feel its approach.” He is worried about money (or the lack of it), success (ditto), his physical condition, his mental health. In a chapter called ”Failure,” he writes, ”I’m so obsessed with this theme that I actually keep a ‘failure file.’ ” The file includes consoling words by other writers, such as Paul Auster’s remark that ”I went through a period of years when everything I touched turned to failure.” To be reminded of this bucks up Atlas so much that he adds, ”Ah!”
In an airy prose that seems not sufficiently upholstered to bear the weight of his concerns (other chapters are titled ”Time,” ”God,” ”Death”), Atlas suggests that the main difference between him and Auster is that his ”period of years” extends to the present. Most of the writing in ”My Life in the Middle Ages” is anecdotal, and many of the anecdotes involve ”a friend of mine,” or more typically ”a friend, a successful doctor,” or ”a distinguished friend,” or ”a well-organized friend.” The device is used to cast our author as an unsuccessful, undistinguished, ill-organized persona, but one who might earn our empathy through candor. ”I . . . curled up . . . and wept,” he writes (one of many weeping sessions), recalling the rejection of a first novel. When he finally broke into print, things scarcely improved. A reviewer of ”The Great Pretender” admitted he’d ”laughed out loud” when reading the novel, ”but he wasn’t sure ‘who the joke was on.’ ” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s ”painful” review in The New York Times left Atlas lying ”rigid in bed, listening to the angry horns of taxis down in the street.”
Candor can be good for the soul, which is presumably how this veteran of the therapist’s couch intends us to take it. On the other hand, it is unedifying to confess too much to people you do not know. Atlas’s confessions often conceal as much as they reveal. ”I left a succession of jobs with impulsive haste and ended up at a newsweekly.” What jobs? Which newsweekly? When? In a section called ”Shrinks,” Atlas, whose problems up to this point have been focused on the fact that his country house is less grand than those of other people (”You should have a box for envy,” he tells one therapist who is having him fill out a form), springs the news that he suffers from depression. ”It comes out of nowhere, seizes you in its grip, and drives out all happy memories. When you’re in this condition you look back on your life and remember only the bad parts.” Once again, though, the section seems underwritten (”Depression is like an illness — it is an illness”) and the baring of the soul ultimately reserved. ”You’re secretive,” says a therapist when Atlas ”clammed up rather than confessing my latest misdeed.”
”My Life in the Middle Ages” is a chatty book, and the chat is frequently engaging, even if the reader feels the urge to move down the bar from the guy who’s had one Perrier and lime too many. To have worked for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review and The Times Magazine, in addition to the mystery newsweekly, to have punctuated those jobs with the writing of well-received biographies, and then to write a book bleating about a lack of fulfillment seems like self-pity, and people who are self-pitying are boring, as a friend of mine, ”a successful poet,” used to say. When Atlas remembers that there are people in the world worse off than he, his ironic self-deprecation turns to Sunday sermonizing: ”If we contemplate our own lives, not the phantom life on the other side, we might find things in them to envy -a family that’s intact; a job we like; good health (the thing we take for granted and on which all happiness depends).”
In the discussion of his loss of literary appetite, Atlas recalls reading ”Anna Karenina” on the London tube, ”holding the fat paperback open with one hand and gripping the strap with the other.” As Levin waits in an anteroom while his wife gives birth, fearing she must be dying, only to be presented with a healthy baby, Atlas held on to his strap and ”wept alongside Levin in a fit of rhapsodic grief.” For once the reader is not impelled to snap, ”Pull yourself together.” The author has presented himself in the throes of a complex emotional experience, in one of the simplest and most satisfying actions available to literate folk: reading a novel on a train. It has nothing to do with other people’s houses, other people’s stock-market bounty, other people’s more successful books or a gleaming Samsung, whatever that is.
James Campbell’s latest book is ”This Is the Beat Generation.” He works at The Times Literary Supplement in London.
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