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.

I have been given many instructions about how to proceed here
&endash; many prohibitions and rules - so I must proceed in a
gingerly fashion. The first edict was not to refer to my daughter in
my remarks, for that would embarrass her; also not to refer to the
fact that I wasn't referring to her. All that I was prepared to do.
As Molly once put it in her customary way, when I asked if I could
quote something she had said in an article I was writing, "No, Dad,
that's off the record. In fact, my whole life is off the record." So,
I was prepared to protect my sources, as we say in the journalism
business. But when I learned that she was going to be introducing me,
it all became much more complicated. Should I ignore the fact that
I'm being introduced by my own daughter? That would be awkward, so
let me acknowledge her, without making a big deal about it, and thank
her not only for introducing me but also for being the person she is.
Much as I would like to take the entire credit for this person, I
think it's only fair - and anyway, it will give me great pleasure -
to acknowledge the role that Nightingale has played in this process.
I don't know if you realize how amazing this place is. The level of
academic excellence at Nightingale, especially to a graduate of a
public school, is stunning: the teachers I've gotten to know - Mr.
Loughery, Mr Bikk, Ms Sand, Ms Sheerin, Dr. Murphy, Ms Schutt - are
more sophisticated, more passionate about their work, probably more
erudite than the teachers I had in college. The school's atmosphere,
as you walk the halls, hums with scholarly intensity. The class of
2002 surpassed my level of knowledge about world history, I would
estimate, by the time you were sophomores. Those in advanced Latin
seem to find translating Ovid as untaxing an exercise as going to
"abs and glutes." The reading list of the senior English class -
Seamus Deane, Jim Crace, Elizabeth Hardwick - would prepare a child
for a slot as a daily reviewer for The New York Times. But it's not a
knowledge confined only to books that you imbibe at this school. It's
an exposure to the world. The visit of the Tibetan monks, who came to
Nightingale for a week last winter to share their culture with the
students; the panel discussion on Islam after September 11th; the
recent NBS Authors Night, at which you could buy books from star
writers like Anna Quindlen and Ken Auletta: you may take these things
for granted, but the only writer who ever came to my high school -
and Evanston Township High School was once ranked as the best public
high school in the nation - was a local furrier, Leonard Karas, who
wrote a polemical column for The Evanstonian that he paid for as an
advertisement, called "Let the Fur Fly."

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Nightingale is the sense
of community it fosters. When your child attends this school, in a
sense you attend this school. The lectures and coffees for parents,
the family social events, the year-end ceremonies bring us all into
the fold. We live in a highly atomized society, one in which the
institutions that used to provide coherence - church, family,
neighborhood - have lost much of their authority; a school like
Nightingale works actively to compensate for that loss. And, not to
be too solemn about it, there is Fathers Who Cook, a chance for the
fathers to contribute to the school's coffers. One year, I recall -
though it's a little hazy, given that the owner of Patroon,
Nightingale father Ken Aretsky, was supplying the wine - after some
of the fathers began raucously heckling the entertainment, the
normally measured and restrained Ms Hutcheson, perhaps fearing the
outbreak of a food-fight, could be heard shouting over the
microphone, "Now there are a lot of drunken fathers out there..."

Well, let me not dwell any longer on the splendors of this
institution and get to the advice part. Flaubert, when he was a young
man, complained about "the tedious crowd of grey-haired, burnt-out
over-forties who constantly patronized him with the words, 'Vous
changerez, vous changerez.' 'You'll change, you'll change.'" I don't
want to be a member of that tedious crowd (and over-forty is
generous; in my case it's way over-forty), wagging my finger and
saying, "You'll see what it's like out there." But the fact is that,
however exemplary this school has been in teaching you the
fundamentals of world culture, the values necessary to lead a good
life, the manners and morals you'll need to make your way in the
world, it has perhaps been a benign environment, too warm, too
nurturing, to prepare you for the challenges and inevitable setbacks
that lie ahead. (In other words, you'll see what it's like out
there.) As much as you have learned here, my guess is that you'll
discover, as you make your way through life, how unprepared you were
for it. Not in terms of your ability to identify the underlying
causes of the Reformation or the structure of a molecule or other
useful data of that sort - all of which you'll forget anyway - but,
on a basic level, how to get a job, plan your wedding, furnish a
home, assemble a crib; how to buy a car or find an investment
counselor; how to dress; how to use an oyster fork. Sometimes I think
of writing a book employing the title of this talk: Life: An
Amateur's Guide. But then I think I still don't know enough to write
it. The challenges you'll face negotiating the details of daily life,
as daunting as they are, pale beside the tougher, more baffling
challenges you'll face as you get older: how to deal with
disappointment, failure, loss, financial crises, aging, death and,
hovering in the background of all these personal and private dramas,
the intrusions of history, which disrupt the best-laid plans -
witness the events of 9/11, events beyond the capacity of human
beings to imagine. Life - if I may hazard a generality - is like
those medieval maps that inscribed in the unknown corners, "Here be
dragons." You just don't know what lies beyond the borders of your
own familiar world.

One of the most curious features of American life is the way it
requires everyone to start from scratch, to assemble a career the way
we assemble our first apartments, find a spouse and start a family:
that is to say, without the benefit of guidance. No one takes us
aside to offer friendly advice - No Uncle Morty put his arm around me
at the country club and walked me out to a shady elm beside the first
tee to murmur the suggestion that I might want to call to his
business partner, who's looking to hire a young associate... I'm not
sure where I got this idyllic image, maybe from my grandpa Sam, who
brought his cousins and his nephews and his in-laws into his wool
business whether they were qualified or not, which most of them
weren't. But for most people - or most people of my generation,
anyway - getting a job was a mysterious and random process, as
unfathomable as the weather. I never visited the Office of Graduate
and Career Planning at my college, nor do I know anyone who ever did;
but that's because we knew intuitively that it wouldn't help us.
There were no books on the subject, no useful family lore. You're on
your own: the mantra of American life.

I was slow to grasp this fact. It wasn't until I was a few years
out of college that it occurred to me - a revelation prompted by my
dwindling bank account - that it was time to get a job. Also, I had
the disconcerting example of the cum laude speaker two years ago, my
dear friend Jonathan Galassi, father of Isabel, class of 2000, and
Beatrice, class of 2004, who precedes me in every important life
decision. Jon bought a briefcase and a suit, arranged interviews with
publishers in New York, and became a book editor. How did he learn to
do this? I wondered. Where did he get the knowledge? Was there a
handbook he'd consulted? A book with some basic title like How to Get
a Job? I asked him about this some years later, and he professed to
be as bewildered as I was. Eventually, from hanging around with him,
I realized that what he was doing all the time was noticing: if we
were in a friend's garden, he would ask about each plant and flower;
if you were cooking dinner, he would look over your shoulder and ask
about each ingredient; if you went on a trip to Italy, he had to know
exactly which churches you visited, and what frescos you saw. The
world was his textbook.

Jon knew he wanted to go into the book business. I had no idea
what I wanted to do, except that I wanted to be a writer. But it was
hard to make a living as a writer on your own, so I got a job at Time
magazine; on the masthead it listed what were called "staff writers,"
and that was good enough for me. When I arrived at the magazine and
was assigned an office, though, no one came and explained my job.
There was no "orientation." I sat at my desk for weeks, and might
still be sitting there now if I hadn't finally gone and stood in the
doorway of the adjacent cubicle, where a young woman sat hunched over
a typewriter - we used typewriters in those days, which must sound as
remote to most of you as if I'd said, "We cooked our meals over an
open fire." She explained to me how the system worked. (Her name, by
the way, was Michiko Kakutani, and she would go on to become a famous
critic at the New York Times.) Early each week, staff writers, known
as "floaters," were assigned a section of the magazine - Science,
Culture, Nation - and a story topic. Our job was to write a story
based on the files we got from reporters in the field; at TIME, you
didn't have to know anything about a subject in order to produce a
story. I wrote on Japanese lingerie tycoons and Italian judicial
scandals; I wrote an article about the Nambikwara, a tribe that had
just been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest. The fact that I
didn't know how to write a news story was no obstacle: when my copy
was returned to me by a top-editor late on the night before "close,"
it had been entirely rewritten. There were no by-lines at TIME in
those days, so it didn't matter; but it was hard to impress my
parents. "Hey, Mom and Dad," I'd say excitedly over the phone. "Turn
to page 36 of this week's issue. That story about the proliferation
of kangaroos in Australia? I wrote it."

I had even less experience for my next job, as an editor at The
New York Times Book Review. I had never edited a line. Long after
everyone had gone home at night, I would sit in front of my computer
in the now-darkened office, the screen of my terminal casting an
eerie green light out over the room, pruning and arranging sentences
and inserting style changes; by my side was The New York Times Guide
to Style, the book I'd been handed on my first day of work. That was
the extent of my "job training."

My other vocation, as a biographer, also came about by accident. I
had gone to Oxford after college on a fellowship and had wandered
around those beautiful old buildings for a year trying to find a
tutor. You didn't enroll in classes over there; you studied under the
supervision of a tutor, and I had been assigned John Bayley, later to
achieve fame as the husband of Iris Murdoch. (You might know him as
Jim Broadbent, the Hollywood version, who won an Oscar for his
performance in Iris.) Bayley had no interest in teaching, however,
and would hide behind a literal wall of books whenever I ventured
into his office. "You're doing fine, my boy," he would cry, his
quavery voice emanating from somewhere behind that intimidating
fortress of erudition. "I'll just sign your letter" - the one
confirming that I had completed a term's work and was thus entitled
to my stipend.

Fortunately, my second year I wandered into the office of an
English professor who was from the Midwest like me, and was also
perhaps the greatest literary biographer of his age: Richard Ellmann,
author of a biography of James Joyce that I had read and admired.
Under his tutelage, I came to understand that biography, in the right
hands, could be an art form like any other, capable of telling a
story, evoking a life, illuminating history - a genre as vivid and
compelling as the novel. When I returned to this country - without a
degree and without any idea of what to do with my life - a college
friend who had gone into publishing suggested I write a biography of
Delmore Schwartz, a poet who had died under tragic circumstances a
few years earlier. I had always loved Delmore's work - or the handful
of his poems I'd read in anthologies. I was curious about his life,
or the little I knew about it - how he had squandered his early
promise and died alone in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. It sounded
like a good idea. My friend Tom got me a contract and said, "Now go
write a book."

In order to get access to Delmore's papers, I had to deal with
Dwight Macdonald, who was perhaps the foremost critic of his day and
the person in charge of the poet's estate. I have a vivid memory of
the first time we met: Dwight had an office at The New Yorker, and he
was wearing a Caribbean-blue tropical shirt. "What makes you think
you could write his biography?"

"Well, no one else has done it," I said. Dwight laughed. I was
twenty-four: I had never written a book, needless to say - and
certainly not a biography. What did make me think I could do it?
There was no biography school, no certified biographer's license you
could apply for, no Biography for Dummies handbook. So I decided to
teach myself: over the next three years, I read just about every
major biography ever written, from the 18th century onwards, studying
the structure, the organization, the style. I also got help; I found
someone to teach me how to write: in other words, a mentor. Dwight,
at that point, was near the end of his writing career: he was
supposed to be writing his memoirs, which would have been a great
book, but he had writer's block and he drank too much and he was
lazy. So instead, he became obsessed with my book, and ended up
editing the whole manuscript, page-by-page and line-by-line. The
chapters I sent him came back marked up like freshman themes. His
criticism - and occasional praise - defaced every page. "Why
summarize what the letter will tell the reader in twenty-five
seconds?" he exploded over some lame paraphrase. "You're like a
museum guide who talks too much." When I glossed over a religious
crisis in Delmore's life, he noted simply: "weasel." (I knew what he
meant.)

He was comically sarcastic. Quoting a journal entry in which
Delmore confided his anxieties, I summed up: "No more succinct or
thorough evaluation of Delmore's malady is to be found in all his
work" - to which Macdonald retorted: "And no more vague
recapitulation of the main aspects of D's malady that have been
described a dozen times. You keep wandering back to the old bone yard
like a dog that's forgotten just where he buried that bone." And
when, only a page later, I returned to the subject yet again, he
exclaimed: "MY GOD, you're back sniffing around again for that lost
bone already!?"

I subsisted on crumbs of praise. "Trust you realize that I, unlike
the sundial, only record the cloudy hours," he marked at the bottom
of one heavily scored page. There was an occasional "good" or
"brilliant" or "masterful" (amended to the correct "masterly") to
keep me going - and, once, a terse but eloquent "Ah!" The manuscript
had a battle-scarred look; there were singed holes where smoldering
cigarette ash had been scattered over the page, and one chapter,
edited from the hospital bed where Macdonald was recovering from an
operation, arrived in the mail wrapped in gauze, the pages smeared
with blood.

"Be a (literary) man, not a (research) mouse," he exhorted me. In
other words, write in your own voice. But the other crucial thing I
learned from Dwight was: enlist others to help you find your way.
It's something I still do: when I was writing my biography of the
novelist Saul Bellow, a book on which I spent ten years, I was having
dinner one night in a Chinese restaurant in Chicago with a professor
at the University who was famous for his vicious opinions. He and
Bellow had had a feud. The professor was raging on in his usual
sneering manner, insulting this one and that one; and I was halfway
through my pork fried rice when it occurred to me: this is the guy to
read my manuscript. I asked him, and he agreed. The result was a
16,000-word memo with exactly one sentence of praise - "an
interesting start, Mr. Atlas" - followed by thirty pages of brutal
criticism. It was worth it: get your criticism early or you'll get it
when it's too late.

My first biography was easier to write than my second, and I have
an idea why. When you don't know what you're doing, you're more free.
You don't worry so much about your mistakes, because you haven't made
any yet. But there was another reason why I found the second book
hard to write: Bellow was a big success. He won the Nobel Prize and
every other prize; he gorged on praise and attention. Delmore, by
contrast, died alone and broke. I doubt that will happen to me -
after all, I'm done paying Nightingale tuition - but I could identify
with it. "Success," declared Winston Churchill, "is the ability to go
from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." By that
definition, I qualify as a success. Is this habit of dwelling on
reversals just a function of my morbid temperament, or does it
resonate with everyone? I wrote a piece in The New Yorker a few years
ago called "The Art of Failing," in which I described some of my own
most traumatic failures - an early novel that was rejected, a later
novel that was published and panned - and even quoted from my
despairing journals. It got a larger response than anything I've ever
written, and some of the people I heard from were hardly what you
would consider failures. I must name-drop to make my point: I heard
from Norman Mailer, from the playwright James Lapine, from Tom
Brokaw. The Nightingale father Peter Jennings called me on the phone.
(I kept waiting to hear from Dan Rather.)

Why did these people, who had achieved so much worldly success,
respond to a meditation on failure? My guess is that it described,
not any actual experience of failure - though all of us fail on
occasion - but how they felt. The missteps, the wrong turns, the
stumbles - "those terrible gaffes," in the words of the writer Martin
Amis, "those flops that make our hands fly to our faces, that make us
stop dead on the street and babble to drown out the memory." What
Amis is describing is the private sense of inadequacy that we carry
within us, the sense of forever falling short. Is that a good thing
to feel, or a destructive thing? To my mind, exercised in moderation,
it's a good thing; it provides a corrective to our exceptionalism,
our sense of being special. I'm not saying we shouldn't appreciate
ourselves; a little self-appreciation is healthy. But mindfulness - a
wonderful word central to Buddhist philosophy - mindfulness of the
fragility and transience of all things, including our most cherished
achievements, serves to keep us humble. I have, in my approaching
late middle age, taken to reading up on religion. This creates
certain tensions at home. My free-thinking daughter, on her housing
questionnaire for college, expressed concern that roommates who were
conservatives or religious fanatics would find her annoying. She's
afraid I'll buy a tatami mat, shave my head - an easy job for a
barber at this point - and turn our living room into a meditation
center. But I can't resist quoting from a book called Ordinary Mind
that I've been reading under the covers with a flashlight late at
night. "Each moment, life as it is - the only teacher. Practice is
nothing more than an ongoing awareness of this identity of ourselves
and life. Life, if we can bear to listen, reminds us of this simple
truth moment after moment. And it has an endless supply of voices at
its disposal when it wishes to call out to us. Do you have an equal
number with which to respond?"