Tarn had conceived of an experimental project aimed at an overabundance of jargon. It involved looking for a “new” language in which to write certain kinds of cultural anthropology, a language that would not depart from scientific exactitude and rigor but would not, either, abdicate one jot of its literary potential. —Atlantis, An Autoanthropology

A lifetime of activity—of travel, of study, of loving, of writing—lay behind Nathaniel Tarn when he set out to compile Atlantis, An Autoanthropology; a lifetime of accumulating particulars: places visited or lived in, books read, museums inhabited, people met and interacted with, books and articles written (published or unpublished) or projected. An enormous midden of particulars, a memory-archive of staggering proportions—even though he decided to assemble the book without systematically consulting the journals he’d kept from a very early age. Indeed, he might well comment on the “deathly fear of incompletion at the heart of this project,” for the project of writing one’s “life and contacts” is always potentially infinite, even if one’s life is nowhere near as long and abundant as Tarn’s has been.

“The temptation to see, know, and do everything—while kept at bay in poetry—is rarely overcome in prose,” Tarn writes early on. Is that a warning to the reader? But of course the author has overcome that temptation. Atlantis is not a brief book—its three hundred pages are closely printed, packed tightly with names, details, and events—but neither is it an undifferentiated, unsorted archive, a morass of recounted anecdote. We have every right to expect the memoir of a pop culture celebrity or political figure to be a sty of shapeless detail; Tarn however is first and foremost a poet. Or perhaps he is first and foremost an anthropologist. Take your pick, or consider him both: in either case, he’s a writer, and his highest value is precisely style, in its broadest and most specific senses.

Buffon’s shopworn phrase—“Le style c’est l’homme même”—is a truism precisely because of its truth. We’re inclined to see prose style as revelatory of a writer’s self most clearly in the semi-literate pronouncements of cretinous politicians, in the flippant and cynical tweets of billionaires—or in the guileless birthday cards of young children. But even a highly unusual style, an extraordinary deviation from conventional manners of expression, is itself the revelation of the writer’s self, if perhaps in a more roundabout manner: that Nabokov determined to narrate his early years in St. Petersburg in a shimmering, lyrical prose in Speak, Memory tells us much about Nabokov the artist; that Henry Adams casts his Education in a wry, compassionately judgmental third person reveals more about Adams in the early years of the twentieth century than it does about his subject, the young Adams of mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts.

I don’t bring up Adams’s Education randomly, for Tarn in Atlantis also deploys, as one of his styles, a third person narrative voice. It is the voice, one is tempted to say, of the anthropologist, the external observer. He looks at the events of Tarn’s life—from a privileged position, needless to say—and recounts, as from outside, the places visited, the people known, the books read. The memoirist as “autoanthropologist” produces “a thematic study of a structure provisionally baptized Nathaniel Tarn.” This is the “Tarn” who studies at various universities, who lives among his anthropological informants for extended periods, who participates in sybaritic meals, epic drinking bouts, and exotic spiritual initiations, who rubs shoulders with a long index-worth’s catalogue of famous scholars and writers. (“Readers will discover that I have met many people. I list as many as I possibly can.” Alas for the lack of an index!) This is Tarn as anthropologist, but also Tarn as collector (or perhaps Tarn as sheer accumulator).

The ”Nathaniel Tarn” of this third person narration indeed at times seems more a “structure” than actor. The events of his life wash over him in waves and catalogues, the pervasive passive verbs seeming to empty him of active agency. Poets and anthropologists are met; spectacular corners of the globe are visited and marveled at; textiles, objets d’arts, and books, books, books are purchased and shipped home. But accumulation must be forged into active collecting, or the subject’s environment becomes a midden, rather than a dwelling-place. The principle applies no less to “Nathaniel Tarn”’s experiences and observations than it does to his books and tchotchkes. There must be a reflective structure to make sense of the data: “Grounding this,” Tarn writes, “this matter of order made in spite of ever-threatening disorder, the constant reiteration of an order, the rage against the irruption of disorder (loss, misplacement, memory blocks, etc.) into an ordered cosmos—all of this requires a guiding concept.” The particular conceptual structure he has gravitated to is heraldry, “theoretically unlimited variations or transformations of content within a standard, relatively simple form.” “Delight in transformation, then, within some kind of format.”

The thirty-three chapters, or “Throws,” of Atlantis roughly alternate between the “anthropological” third person style and a more straightforward, familiar commentarial first person—what we might be tempted to call the “poet’s” style. (I say “roughly”—some of the Throws contain both third and first person narration, and there seems no hard and fast structure to which the poet-anthropologist-memoirist has decided to adhere.) “There comes a point,” Tarn quotes Gary Snyder, “when the anthropologist gets tired of asking questions and wants to become an informant. It is here, no doubt, that the anthropologist becomes the poet.” There are, as Tarn informs us at the very outset, two identities under inspection here: “One name is Nathaniel Tarn. Another is Edward Michael Mendelson,” the name under which his birth was registered. (And there are variations: he was known first as “Teddy,” then “Michael” at Cambridge, would publish anthropological works under the name “E. Michael Mendelson,” and was known as “Michel” in French circles; various early noms de plume are passed over.)

A poet with two mother tongues (French and English), at least two names, and two distinguished international careers (in anthropology and literature)—it’s not surprising that Tarn wields at least two distinct styles in sorting out the narrative of his lives and careers. Nor that towards the end of Atlantis, in the first-person mode in which the reader has become accustomed to receiving Tarn’s more theoretical and ruminative passages, that he breaks into an astonishing—and hilarious—profession of his own divinity, and that the god with whom he identifies himself is precisely the two-featured Janus, Roman god of thresholds, of endings and beginnings: “it must be clear to you by now that here is something, to coin a phrase (and was I not the inventor of coinage?), duplicitous about my nature.”

Like Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Nathaniel Tarn contains multitudes: the Bunker Libraries of Fort Tarn outside of Santa Fe, where a lifetime’s reading and collecting are meticulously stored and arranged, are an image of his identity, as much as the shelves of books he has himself written. At first leaf-through, Atlantis, An Autoanthropology may strike the reader as a similarly comprehensive library within two covers; by book’s end, however, it is apparent with what cunning and skill the poet-anthropologist has structured his volume around duality: E. Michael Mendelson and Nathaniel Tarn; the poet and the anthropologist; the third person and the first. Two sides of a single coin, two faces of a single threshold figure. Tarn stands at the threshold of two eras—the Gutenberg Age and the Age of the Internet—and casts his gaze back to the pre-literate and forward to some Atlantis of the future beyond his and our imaginings.

Mark Scroggins has written and edited numerous books of poetry, criticism, and biography. He looks forward to the imminent publication of the poetry collections Zion Offramp 1-50 and Damage: Poems 1988-2022, the chapbook Pest: Zion Offramp 65-70, and the nonfiction collection Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts.