Part 1 (1/2)

Hiding man : a biography of Donald Barthelme.

by Tracy Daugherty.

INTRODUCTION.

THE LOST TEACHER.

The a.s.signment was simple: Find a copy of John Ashbery's Three Poems Three Poems, read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, don't sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.

A dutiful student, I walked to the Brazos Bookstore, a few blocks from my apartment, and purchased a paperback edition of the book (n.o.body walks in Houston, so this was more dutiful than it sounds). Next I made my way to Weingarten's to pick up a bottle of red. I didn't drink much, and didn't know one wine from another. Then I went home.

I lived in an efficiency apartment in a slightly fixed-up, but not fixed up enough, old building near a freeway underpa.s.s southwest of downtown. Always, when I unlocked my door, I was greeted by loud scurrying. The bugs were so big, I felt sure I'd return someday to find them pulling books from my shelves, rearranging the s.p.a.ce more to their liking. The apartment was close to where my teacher lived when he was a young man, writing and publis.h.i.+ng his first short stories. I didn't know this then, and if I had, it would have made me more self-conscious than I already was about my work.

Thus the a.s.signment. I was in my first year of a Ph.D. program, but really I was just stalling for time while trying to write a novel. My fellow students, talented and confident, intimidated me. Determined to meet their standards and to perform perfectly, I wasn't performing at all. I edited in my head long before my hands scooched near a keyboard. My pages remained pristinely, sadly blank.

My teacher's solution: Ashbery, sleeplessness, and alcohol. He didn't tell me I needed to loosen up, but we both knew that this was the case. I fed the stray cats in the weeds behind my building so they wouldn't mew all night, then settled at the card table where I ate and tried to write each evening. I switched on my Smith Corona electric typewriter. This was in the days before Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. The only mouse in my place had four legs and a tail. I opened the book: At this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of listening, as though to the feeling of the wind before it starts....

What the h.e.l.l was this? I rubbed my neck and tried again: From the outset it was apparent that someone had played a colossal trick on something.

A colossal trick. Right. Well, my task was not to a.n.a.lyze or understand Three Poems Three Poems, but to respond to its rhythms, take its music into my body, and come up with a similar score. I finished reading, only half-concentrating. My front window was busted, and mosquitoes invited themselves in and out of the room. I had tried covering the window with a sheet, but the sheet flapped raggedly in a breeze. The night before, my upstairs neighbor, another student, had shattered the pane by trying to climb the wall. He had come home drunk around midnight and discovered that he'd lost his key, so he s.h.i.+mmied up the rainspout to reach his window. He slipped. His foot crashed through my gla.s.s, startling me awake.

I fiddled with the sheet. Through the window I glimpsed a streetwalker standing beside a light pole on the corner. She wore a long blue dress and flicked a Bic lighter off and on. The vice squad had chased hookers from one end of my neighborhood to another. Soon, the women would be driven from my street, too, but for now their presence charged the block with an undercurrent of danger and morbid t.i.tillation.

This was my life in Houston, in the grad-student boondocks of the area known as Montrose. I had come here because I wanted to be a writer.

And now, because I wanted to be a writer, I was stuck with Ashbery. I started to open the wine and realized I didn't own a corkscrew. Another walk to the store, keeping my head down as I pa.s.sed the hooker. ”Evening, sugar,” she said. I nodded and sped up. Back in my apartment, I poured a little wine into a Dixie cup. I sat down and started to type.

By one o'clock, my flesh had served as an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord for the mosquitoes. I was bleary, yawning, and tipsy. A third of the bottle remained. My s.h.i.+rtsleeves sagged with sweat. I had filled four pages with abstract nonsense. I poured more wine and hit the keyboard again. ”All fall, my father held a trouble light beneath the car,” I wrote. ”My family was not on the move.”

Two more hours pa.s.sed. Just after 3:00 A.M. A.M., the phone rang. I jumped, tipping the cup. Someone's dead, I thought. A car crash, a stroke. I picked up.

”How's it coming?” said Donald Barthelme.

”Fine,” I croaked. ”I think.”

”Good. Twelve pages, on my desk. In five hours.” He clicked off.

Fast-forward twenty years, to the early winter of 2001. I'm attending the ”Andy Warhol: Photography” exhibit at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. The show displays many of Warhol's photo-booth portraits of writers, artists, and celebrities from the 1960s, including a picture ent.i.tled Man with Newspaper: He Is a She, ca. 1963 Man with Newspaper: He Is a She, ca. 1963, featuring a shorthaired man in black gla.s.ses reading a tabloid. The tabloid's front-page headline, all about a s.e.x-change operation, says HE IS A SHE HE IS A SHE! The photograph's interest lies in the contrast between the cheesy newspaper and the man's impeccable appearance. He's well groomed and cleanly shaved, in a dark suit and fas.h.i.+onably thin tie. He peruses the paper with raised eyebrows and a tight mouth, just this side of shocked, just this close to lasciviousness-campy, funny, an a.s.sured performance. The picture is rare in the Warhol collection in that its subject is not identified by name.

I recognize the man as the late Donald Barthelme, whose short stories, appearing regularly in The New Yorker The New Yorker and in ten books between 1964 and 1987, along with his four novels, substantially expanded the range of American fiction for those who were paying attention. In the 1960s, the whole culture, it seemed, paid heed-absurdities and social disruptions appeared to leap off his pages, weekly, and into the streets of our cities. His and in ten books between 1964 and 1987, along with his four novels, substantially expanded the range of American fiction for those who were paying attention. In the 1960s, the whole culture, it seemed, paid heed-absurdities and social disruptions appeared to leap off his pages, weekly, and into the streets of our cities. His New Yorker New Yorker pieces read like dispatches from the front lines. He had ”managed to place himself in the center of modern consciousness,” William Ga.s.s wrote. Barthelme knockoffs glutted the lit mags, and he even had to disown a few stories, penned by a canny imposter, that popped up in various publications. He wasn't just influencing other writers; apparently, his mischievous spirit inhabited some of them. pieces read like dispatches from the front lines. He had ”managed to place himself in the center of modern consciousness,” William Ga.s.s wrote. Barthelme knockoffs glutted the lit mags, and he even had to disown a few stories, penned by a canny imposter, that popped up in various publications. He wasn't just influencing other writers; apparently, his mischievous spirit inhabited some of them.

In the late 1970s, his influence waned. The nation's psychedelic fiesta wound down and the culture sobered up (or so goes the official line). Straightforward narrative storytelling rea.s.serted its grip on American literature, b.u.t.tressed by the reverence surrounding Raymond Carver and other new ”realists.” Following Don's death from throat cancer in 1989, his books, with few exceptions, drifted out of print and out of reach-a situation that has only recently begun to change as Dave Eggers, Donald Antrim, George Saunders, and other prominent young writers now claim Don as an influence on their work. For a while, Amazon's Web site noted the ”unfortunate discontinuance” of many of Don's t.i.tles.

Asked, once, about critics' responses to his work, he replied, ”Oh, I think they want me to go away and stop doing what I'm doing.”

”Neglect is useful,” he mused in 1960, before fully launching his literary career. One of our ”traditional obligations in our role as the public [is] the obligation to neglect artists, writers, creators of every kind.” In this way, he said, a ”Starving Opposition is created, and the possibility of criticism of our culture is provided for.” As far as he could see, at that time, neglect was ”proceeding at appropriate levels.”

Since the 1960s, neglect has become a growth industry, merging with historical revisionism to wipe out the compet.i.tion-that is, anything that doesn't hew to the official line. For the past three decades, most of the quality fiction published in the United States has been doggedly representational, respectful of a narrow literary and cultural tradition, as though all Americans agree on what's valuable, what's true; as though the social upheavals of the fifties, sixties, and seventies-Vietnam, the s.e.xual revolution, the civil rights and women's movements, the proliferation of nuclear arms-never happened; as though certain imaginative responses to these events-in abstract art and Pop Art, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the 1967 attempt to ”exorcise” the Pentagon, the protests of May 1968 in Paris, and fiction that questioned all authority, including that of language-never happened.

They happened. Straightforward narrative storytelling is only one way to measure the results of these seismic s.h.i.+fts, but you wouldn't know that, poking through most bookstores.

Neglect is useful if we are mindful of why and how it occurs-thus the possibility for a cultural critique. In part, Don's ”unfortunate discontinuance” was a result of officialdom's widespread desire to bury the troubled 1960s. Also, with the exception of a few, he has suffered at the hands of younger writers, many of whom see him as dated as ”groovy,” ”make love not war,” and the rest of hippie lingo. Others dismiss him as a writer who wrote only about writing, a troublemaker like Marcel Duchamp scribbling a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa Mona Lisa-a perpetual adolescent gleefully tras.h.i.+ng cla.s.sical art.

In fact, Don stressed that he didn't like fiction about fiction. And though the specific events that chiseled his sensibility have pa.s.sed, he was right, I think, to insist that the ”problems” they pointed to-among them, the need to refresh language continually, to keep it free of ”political and social contamination,” safe from co-optation by commercial interests-are ”durable ones.”

One of authority's tools in creating a Book of Neglect is to suggest that opposition to dominant cultural currents occurs only in moments of extreme crisis, when society is strained-world wars, the Great Depression, the 1960s. A signal value in reconsidering the life and work of Donald Barthelme now is seeing that opposition is built into built into the dominant culture: It has always carried the seeds of its own unraveling. Like a plant that blooms only every few decades, oppositional art erupts into the open now and then, as it did in the 1960s; while its flowering may seem an isolated event, if we trace its roots, we realize its perennial nature. the dominant culture: It has always carried the seeds of its own unraveling. Like a plant that blooms only every few decades, oppositional art erupts into the open now and then, as it did in the 1960s; while its flowering may seem an isolated event, if we trace its roots, we realize its perennial nature.

In 1990, Lois Zamora, one of Don's Houston colleagues, wrote that the relations.h.i.+p of his fiction ”to political writing needs critical repositioning. As time pa.s.ses, and 'postmodernism' and other current ideologies come increasingly into focus, we will identify and appreciate ambiguities in his work that have as yet been barely noticed or discussed by the critics.” The time has come for this ”critical repositioning.”

Just before his fatal illness, Don said he believed that the latest generation of American writers held ”lowered expectations in terms of life. My generation, perhaps foolishly, expected, even demanded, that life be wonderful and magical and then tried to make it so by writing in a rather complex way. It seems now quite an eccentric demand.”

In the mid-1980s, he would sit in his Houston duplex, across the street from the Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School, and tell me he had ”done his little thing” in fiction. His moment had pa.s.sed. The ”postmodern” writing with which he'd been linked had been forced to retreat into a small arrondiss.e.m.e.nt in the American literary landscape, surrounded by General Carver and his troops. In writing cla.s.ses, Don quoted his old philosophy teacher, Maurice Natanson: ”It is a mistake to regard literature as a graveyard of dead systems.” Privately, he didn't sound so sure.

Years have pa.s.sed, now, since I listened to his rueful talk, and gradually I've come to see it's wrong to think of Don as a victim victim of neglect. He was, rather, a of neglect. He was, rather, a connoisseur connoisseur of it. Often, his stories are built on obscure foundations. Just as often, they celebrate the long lost, the hopeless, the never was. Like the lonely clowns beating their drums on empty streets in the late lithographs of Daumier (one of Don's heroes) or Baudelaire's ”pitiful” acrobats ”illumined” in the shadows of alleys ”by burned-down candles, dripping and smoking,” Don's characters proceed by marginal means. of it. Often, his stories are built on obscure foundations. Just as often, they celebrate the long lost, the hopeless, the never was. Like the lonely clowns beating their drums on empty streets in the late lithographs of Daumier (one of Don's heroes) or Baudelaire's ”pitiful” acrobats ”illumined” in the shadows of alleys ”by burned-down candles, dripping and smoking,” Don's characters proceed by marginal means.

In other words, I believe he designed designed his stories-and his teaching-to fall into dormancy, only to bloom again unexpectedly. His personal anguish b.u.mped up against his awareness that he was chasing the impossible, and his choice to pursue an aesthetics of uncertainty-what he called ”needful obscurity.” ”Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult,” he said, ”but because it wishes to be art.” his stories-and his teaching-to fall into dormancy, only to bloom again unexpectedly. His personal anguish b.u.mped up against his awareness that he was chasing the impossible, and his choice to pursue an aesthetics of uncertainty-what he called ”needful obscurity.” ”Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult,” he said, ”but because it wishes to be art.”

One of Don's men in the shadows laments, ”The point of my career is perhaps how little I achieved. We speak of someone as having had a 'long career' and that's usually taken to be admiring, but what if it's thirty-five years of persistence in error? I don't know what value to place on what I've done, perhaps none at all is right.” This melancholy was not new in Don's work. From the beginning, failure failure is a primary theme of his fiction. ”[W]hat an artist does is fail,” he writes. ”The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition...there is no such thing as a 'successful artist.' ” is a primary theme of his fiction. ”[W]hat an artist does is fail,” he writes. ”The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition...there is no such thing as a 'successful artist.' ”

By the late eighties, this concern seemed intensely personal in Don's writing-as it did in Daumier's last efforts-and burdened even his lightest sentences. His gestures carried the weight of all this, too. His walk was a shamble. His shoulders drooped. Frequently, he blotted sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve.

One afternoon, I arrived at his university office for an appointment. He sat at his desk with a copy of his latest collection, Overnight to Many Distant Cities Overnight to Many Distant Cities, which had just been published. He picked up the book and balanced it on the tips of his fingers. ”Looks a little slender, don't you think?” he asked me. Then he shrugged, the profoundest, weariest shrug I had ever seen. It seemed to take about a minute.

On the morning I was to turn in my Ashbery a.s.signment, I was dragging from exhaustion and a hangover. He looked as bad as I felt. I decided to drop the a.s.signment on his desk and leave him alone, but he told me to sit down. He skimmed my first few pages, chuckled the way I'd heard him laugh over a jazz riff whenever he'd put on a record in his home. He grinned at me. ”Congratulations,” he said. ”Now you can get some rest.”

”It's junk,” I said.

”It's an imitation. It's supposed supposed to be junk.” to be junk.”

”But what's the point? I can't do anything with it.”

”What do you think you've achieved?”

”I don't know. That's what I mean,” I said. ”I didn't understand a word of the Ashbery. I don't understand a word of what I've I've written.” written.”

”In that case,” he said, ”you've just composed your first important draft.”

It took me weeks, months to understand that Don didn't mean writing should make no sense. He meant it shouldn't be so overdetermined, it falls dead on the page. The process requires a pinch of uncertainty so the energy of discovery can be built into the work.