James Atlas's The Great Pretender is a first novel. But Atlas has some prior fame as the author of a powerful biography of Delmore Schwartz, America's poète maudit who died tragically unfulfilled in 1966, having lived out the truth of one of his best essays: 'The Isolation of the Modern Poet'. The Great Pretender tells the story of a tyro versifier, who comes to artistic consciousness around 1966 in Chicago and who hilariously fails to attain any subsequent artistic fulfilment. Not to force connections, both Atlas's sombre biography and his current comic novel address the complex issue of the modern poetic career. It is, as it happens, a hot topic among literary critics at the moment, particularly the so-called 'new historicists'. Lawrence Lipking's The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981), for instance, elegantly demonstrates how 'the idea of the poet' framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson's Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance.

LRB 2 April 1987 | PDF Download