Author Atlas Finds New York Literary World Disillusioning

After 10 years in the real world of New York's glamorous literary scene, author James Atlas '71 returned last night to the scene of his first best-selling novel, "The Great Pretender."

After giving a speech at the Winthrop House Junior Common Room, Atlas reflected on how far he has come in the past 15 years. Atlas, who worked for The Advocate and The Crimson while at Harvard, set his novel--which has won kudos from the literary world--in Harvard of the late 1960s. Atlas's book details the frustration and confusion of youth in the 1960s. The semiautobiographical tale is told through the eyes of a budding author, whose life is shadowed by his Jewish-Chicago past.

Garbed in a newly-acquired suit, Atlas last night bridged the world of the literary elite and Harvard. Atlas, who after graduation went to Oxford for two years on a Rhodes scholarship, has recently accepted an editorial position with the New York Times Magazine and says that the litertary life is nothing like what he expected as an undergraduate.

"The hardest thing about the literary life I think is that it turns out to be less literally than you thought it would be," he said.

"I formed such peculiar ideas about literary life in New York. All of them were derived from books, about living in cold-water flats with no money and basically being very romantic about deprivation and suffering," he continued. "But now there are very few people who live hand-to-mouth. It's out of style, you can't do it."

In 1977, the Chicago native published his first book, "Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet," a biography of the 1920s New York poet. With the money he received from the book, Atlas moved to New York with the expectation of joining the Bohemian scene where he thought he would find that omnipresent genius was either inbred or quickly acquired.

But Atlas found that the world of Schwartz and the other literati of that era, such as Saul Bellow, was long gone.

"There was no world like the one I'd read about and written about, no world like New York of the 40s. I discovered a very stratified scene and a new professionalism," Atlas said. "You can't live the Bohemian life, you have to have a job....And now it's very complicated business. All these young writers talk about their agents and their hard-soft deals and they're being marketed."

As a result, Atlas said the city is no longer the literary Mecca that it once was. Atlas said, "New York is no longer the center of the literary world. It's the center of the publishing and the media world, but [for literature] there is no center."

Atlas, who has worked with Time Magazine and Atlantic Monthly as well as The New York Times, said he has had to adjust to the dissolution of his fantasies. "The job I thought I'd have doesn't exist," he said. "I've had a lot of interesting quasi-literary jobs, which is good, and I've written a lot of things I never thought I would. I think reporting and writing about literary criticism is the only solution for me."

Currently Atlas is researching a piece on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago for the New York Times Magazine and has just completed a story about Italian author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi.

"It was the most interesting assignment I've ever had," Atlas said.

Big Literary Chill

Even the college world has changed in Atlas's eyes. He said that students today are radically different from students 15 years ago.

"Sociological factors have changed. When I was in college, nobody I knew even talked about making money. It just wasn't a consideration. You didn't need money to live," he said. "Both after the [World War I] and in the 60s, there was tremendous political pressure to do what you thought was right. There was the sense that being a poet was its own validation, regardless of money."

Although Atlas has grappled with his Harvard experience in print, he has never attempted to capture his hometown with words. He said, "One subject I want to deal with but that I haven't found the medium for is Chicago."

But he added, "For a profession in writing, New York is the only place I can think of to go."