Part 3 (1/2)

5.

THE NEW MUSIC.

”I do believe this was my idea,” Don said of becoming a writer. ”I can't blame anybody else for it.”

In his senior year at Mirabeau B. Lamar High School, away for the first time from the sisters and priests who had been his teachers, he tested his idea. In the 1949 issue of Sequoyha Sequoyha, the high school's literary magazine, he published a parody of Pilgrim's Progress Pilgrim's Progress. It was called ”Rover Boys' Retrogression.” His choice of targets, and the changes he worked on the original, revealed his state of mind and-remarkably-set the pattern for much of his future work. Not only did parody remain a central impulse throughout his career but, more important, he was already developing strategies for transforming personal material into allegory, fantasy, or absurd imagery.

His father's influence appears, in this earliest locatable work, in two ways: Form is the foremost concern, not for its own sake, but for the way it embodies, economically, the ideas behind it; and an intensity of feeling is conveyed without revealing its sources. The story's core remains safe from ridicule. These are weighty matters for a comic piece by a seventeen-year-old.

John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress Pilgrim's Progress, ”an Allegory...[about] the way to Glory,” in 1678. It traces the soul's journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, detailing along the way the pitfalls of the Slough of Despond and the Valley of Humiliation. The New Yorker The New Yorker's breezy style was in Don's mind, as was ”Hemingway as parodist,” when he decided to lampoon Bunyan. Whereas the magazine's wits tackled news items, and Hemingway, in Torrents of Spring Torrents of Spring, aimed his arrows at the American naturalists, Don chose-in his first year away from Catholic teaching-a sacred text. Reportedly, Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress Pilgrim's Progress in jail, while being punished for conducting religious services that did not conform to the dictates of the Church of England. In rebellion against conformity and spiritual discipline, Don built his first published work around a pointed literary source. in jail, while being punished for conducting religious services that did not conform to the dictates of the Church of England. In rebellion against conformity and spiritual discipline, Don built his first published work around a pointed literary source.

”Rover Boys' Retrogression” follows two characters, Half-Asleep and Not-Quite-Awake, as they journey to the River of Respect Due. There, they fail to wors.h.i.+p properly an ”impressive array of state barges carrying great quant.i.ties of Personages, Dignitaries, Golden Calves, Sacred Cows, Cabbages, Kings, and Members of the School Board.” Eventually, they reach Expulsion.

A preface accompanies the piece, in which Don explained: a parody, to be completely effective as a parody as a parody, must be a complete reversal of att.i.tude, set in the form of the work being parodied. As ”Pilgrim's Progress” is highly moral, the ensuing ”Rover Boys' Retrogression” is not. It has been written as the ant.i.thesis of Bunyan's book, not because the writer feels any perverse delight in caricaturing things as they are, but purely from an altruistic effort to respect the integrity of the parody form, as he sees it.

”Disingenuous though it is, the disclaimer allowed the story to escape whatever censors.h.i.+p existed,” says Robert Murray Davis, the first scholar to track Don's juvenilia. Don's trouble with the St. Thomas Eagle Eagle gave him a tactic for smuggling heresy into print. The preface is noteworthy for another reason. Like his father, Don sought to educate his audience, to mount a crusade for his art. Many of Don's later fictions are also, implicitly, forms of literary criticism. gave him a tactic for smuggling heresy into print. The preface is noteworthy for another reason. Like his father, Don sought to educate his audience, to mount a crusade for his art. Many of Don's later fictions are also, implicitly, forms of literary criticism.

In fleeing the ”School Board,” and heading for Expulsion, Half-Asleep and Not-Quite-Awake parallel Don and Pat Goeters on their flight to Mexico. Nearly thirty years would pa.s.s before Don wrote plainly of the incident, in ”Departures,” and even then he mixed the material into a collage, instead of constructing a narrative or a memoir from it. From the beginning, stories and characterizations based on the conventions of literary realism failed to engage him; he was energized by the fusion of parody and myth, the high and the low, and by the alchemy of turning experience into a stylized essence.

He satirized the sacred, but gently-Bunyan was an iconoclast, one whom Don must have admired on some level. Don razzed the authorities and praised freedom-nothing surprising for an adolescent, except for the sophistication of its style. What is is surprising is the complex layering already evident in Don's work. Aside from the surprising is the complex layering already evident in Don's work. Aside from the Pilgrim's Pilgrim's parody and the buried personal references, a second literary source comes in for scrutiny: The Rover Boys Series for Young Americans. parody and the buried personal references, a second literary source comes in for scrutiny: The Rover Boys Series for Young Americans.

Edward Stratemeyer, writing under the pseudonym Arthur M. Winfield, published the first Rover Boys book, The Rover Boys at School, or The Cadets at Putnam Hall, The Rover Boys at School, or The Cadets at Putnam Hall, in 1899. Whitman Publishers reprinted this volume in a handsome edition in the 1930s. The Rover Boys, d.i.c.k, Tom, and Sam, are among the most obnoxious heroes in children's literature, haughty, cruel, violent. The series kicks off with a disingenuous preface. Stratemeyer wrote, ”'The Rover Boys at School' has been written that those of you who have never been at an American military academy for boys may gain some insight into the workings of such an inst.i.tution.” The story is longer on high jinks than on insight. Stratemeyer referred to his characters as those ”lively, wideawake”-as opposed to Half-Asleep or Not-Quite-Awake-”fun-loving Rover brothers.” in 1899. Whitman Publishers reprinted this volume in a handsome edition in the 1930s. The Rover Boys, d.i.c.k, Tom, and Sam, are among the most obnoxious heroes in children's literature, haughty, cruel, violent. The series kicks off with a disingenuous preface. Stratemeyer wrote, ”'The Rover Boys at School' has been written that those of you who have never been at an American military academy for boys may gain some insight into the workings of such an inst.i.tution.” The story is longer on high jinks than on insight. Stratemeyer referred to his characters as those ”lively, wideawake”-as opposed to Half-Asleep or Not-Quite-Awake-”fun-loving Rover brothers.”

”Rover Boys' Retrogression” is not just a rebellious parody of a cla.s.sic text; it is an homage to a book about about rebellion, and a disguised travelogue of Don's escape from home. He took a theme-refusal of authority-and fas.h.i.+oned a collage around it. In so doing, he emphasized the piece's structural principles. Significantly, he also found a way to get it into print, refusing to stay at a school where his work was not appreciated. rebellion, and a disguised travelogue of Don's escape from home. He took a theme-refusal of authority-and fas.h.i.+oned a collage around it. In so doing, he emphasized the piece's structural principles. Significantly, he also found a way to get it into print, refusing to stay at a school where his work was not appreciated.

”Rover Boys' Retrogression” signals one other uprising: Here, Don followed his father in embracing an art form and approaching it with serious playfulness, but it was his mother's art (or the art she sacrificed for the family) that he chose to pursue. It was her dream that he would animate, and to succeed at it, he would do whatever he had to, whether his father liked it or not.

Don and Goeters were buddies now, after their Mexico adventure, and they did their best to stir excitement at home. They competed for girls, a friendly rivalry that Goeters usually won. He was tall, blond, and handsome. Don was a little gawky, with big horn-rimmed gla.s.ses. He, Goeters, and Carter Roch.e.l.le practiced journalism together. ”In the fall of 1948, Don and I drew up a detailed plan for an entire page especially for teenagers to run every Sat.u.r.day in our local morning daily, the Houston Post, Houston Post,” Roch.e.l.le recalls. ”That September we borrowed his dad's 1948 Studebaker and drove over to the newspaper's headquarters, went into the city room and asked to see the editor. Amazingly, we were granted an audience. We presented our idea. The city editor, Harry Johnston, said he thought it was a great idea-which is why they had just started [a teen page]. Even so, he let us unfold our plan in detail, and it turned out that he liked our thinking better than what they were doing. We got to meet the managing editor, who also listened to our proposal and promised to consider it. A week later, the city editor offered me a job as a cub reporter. Don wasn't hired, presumably because he was still seventeen while I was eighteen going on nineteen. When I initiated the teen page, I brought Don in as its record critic. Each week he'd review all the new LP records (LPs had just come in, the previous year).” Don filed pieces on Stan Kenton's band-leading skills, and the odd syncopations in the music of Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. His work stood out among traditional articles on school activities and sports events. His reviewing lasted ”about six months, until he and I had a couple of disagreements over editing and he gave it up,” Roch.e.l.le says.

Often, Pat Goeters would take his mother's car after school, and he and Don would go joyriding. Once again, late in his career, Don felt comfortable enough-personally and professionally-to write straightforwardly about his youth. In an autobiographical piece called ”Chablis,” he recounted: I remember the time, thirty years ago, when I put Herman's mother's Buick into a cornfield, on the Beaumont highway. There was another car in my lane, and I didn't hit it, and it didn't hit me. I remember veering to the right and down into the ditch and up through the fence and coming to rest in the cornfield and then getting out to wake Herman and the two of us going to see what the happy drunks in the other car had come to, in the ditch on the other side of the road.

Goeters says this pa.s.sage ”refers to the time Don got me to take him to Galveston so he could drive past the house of a girlfriend who had recently dumped him. He wanted to drive by without stopping in order to ignore her. He told me that would serve her right. Then he insisted on driving on the return trip and drunkenly missed a turn, went off the road and bounced us across a field, tearing up the bottom of the car.”

Don's youngest brother recalled that when he was a teenager, he wasn't allowed to drive his father's car because ”my older brothers had raced and wrecked the three earlier Corvettes my father owned until he had gotten fed up.” In ”Chablis,” Don wrote, ”There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep for a while while he was in his DWI period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep because she was a girl.”

In ”Grandmother's House,” a late dialogue piece, two of Don's speakers reflect:

-Seventeen is a wild age.

-Seventeen is anarchy.

-I was atrocious when I was seventeen. Absolutely atrocious.

-Likewise.

-Drunk driving was the least of it.

-When you think about it now you turn pale.

As the Barthelme children grew, the dynamic s.h.i.+fted on North Wynden Drive. ”Though we felt a fierce tribal loyalty with Don and Joan, an engagement with their exploits and opinions, they were young adults,” Rick and Steve wrote in Double Down. Double Down. To some extent, Peter, too, felt stuck in the second Barthelme family-the ur-family being Mom and Dad, Don, and Joan. By the time Peter, Rick, and Steve were adolescents, their father had ”for the most part excused himself from the child-rearing business to spend his energies on buildings he was designing and clients who needed endless care and persuasion.” To some extent, Peter, too, felt stuck in the second Barthelme family-the ur-family being Mom and Dad, Don, and Joan. By the time Peter, Rick, and Steve were adolescents, their father had ”for the most part excused himself from the child-rearing business to spend his energies on buildings he was designing and clients who needed endless care and persuasion.”

In his late teens, Don was headstrong and stubborn like his father, emotionally guarded, furiously protective of the things that mattered to him-his mother, his writing, his friends. He looked ”very much like his mother,” his cousin, Elise, recalls. ”Their mouth and jaws cupped into mischevious grins, conveying a bond between them that was innate and made stronger by mutual love and respect.” The ”Barthelme characteristics” included ”expressive eyes and lithe body movements.” Don had his mother's ”wry humor” and ”kept his own counsel.”

His father's busy schedule gave Don more time, more room, to break away, race the car, drink and smoke, read, listen to music, and hone his writing, for which he received more and more attention. In the spring of 1949, his story ”Integrity Cycle” (now lost) tied for fourth place in a Scholastic Magazine Scholastic Magazine contest, and he won the Texas Poet Laureate Award for a poem ent.i.tled ”Inertia.” The high school newspaper, the contest, and he won the Texas Poet Laureate Award for a poem ent.i.tled ”Inertia.” The high school newspaper, the Lamar Lancer, Lamar Lancer, said the poem addressed the ”subject of world cooperation.” said the poem addressed the ”subject of world cooperation.”

It would have been small consolation for the elder Barthelme to know that his son still carried the Basilian Order's reverence for social diversity wherever he went, or that Don pursued even his leisure activities with the pa.s.sion of someone searching for meaningful principles. During his late adolescence, this pa.s.sion led Don into Houston's jazz clubs. Nietzsche's a.s.sertion that ”without music the world would be a mistake” became his new spiritual dogma.

Don's interest in jazz had developed early. In his upstairs bedroom, his father's former study, he played the drums day and night, until the family could take no more. He moved his trap set outside, into the s.p.a.ce his father had once intended as a garage. The neighbors began to complain. Don arranged with them that he would play whenever they were gone. A picture, taken by his father sometime in the mid-forties, shows Don dressed in white s.h.i.+rt and pants, looking very serious behind a huge ba.s.s drum and a snare. A hi-hat, a crash, and a ride cymbal round out the set. Don's hair is slicked back and his thick gla.s.ses s.h.i.+ne. He props his hands on his drumsticks, which are propped on his right thigh. His fingers are graceful and long, nimble, an extension of the sticks. When he played, he'd keep time with his right hand on the ride cymbal while his left roamed over the snare, the bell of the crash, the hi-hat, diddling, filling, breaking, catching the beat off guard, switching tempos: steady rhythm, startling tangents. Sometimes he wrote musical scores, none of which survive, and he may have fiddled with horns, but the drums were the only instrument he learned to play well.

Pat Goeters recalls visiting Don ”in his aerie” and listening to ”New Orleans jazz on the radio (WWL in New Orleans-'Moonglow with Martin'). As it got late, Papa Barthelme would come to the bottom of the stairs and yell, 'What'sa matter, ain't Goeters got a home?' ”

Don's senior year in high school, he, Goeters, Carter Roch.e.l.le, and other friends went to ”black clubs,” Don said, ”to hear people like Erskine Hawkins who were touring-us poor little pale little white boys were offered a generous sufferance, tucked away in a small s.p.a.ce behind the bandstand with an enormous black cop posted at the door. In other places you could hear the pianist Peck Kelly, a truly legendary figure, or Lionel Hampton, or once in a great while Louis Armstrong or Woody Herman. I was sort of drenched in all this.” Houston was generally more relaxed about racial matters than most American cities. In few other metropolitan areas in the South in the 1940s would he and his ”pale little” pals have enjoyed the freedom to enter such clubs.

From jazz, Don learned ”something about making a statement,” he said, ”about placing emphases within a statement or introducing variations...[taking] a tired old tune...[and] literally [making] it new. The interest and the drama were in the formal manipulation of the rather slight material. And [the musicians] were heroic figures, you know, very romantic.”

The local jazz was heavily inflected with Texas swing and rhythm and blues, called ”race music” in those days. It was guitar-heavy, drum-heavy, with a four-beat, twelve-bar base. Don listened to the two black radio stations in town, KCOH and KYOK, both now defunct, whose DJs gave themselves monikers like ”Mister El Toro” and ”Daddy Deepthroat.” The largest clubs, all southeast of downtown, were the Eldorado, at the corner of Elgin and Dowling streets (”it was strictly an African-American establishment,” Roch.e.l.le recalls, ”and we were underage as well, but they let us sneak in the back because we knew some of the people there”); the Club Ebony, at Rosewood and Dowling; the Club Savoy on Wheeler; and Shady's Playhouse, at Elgin and Ennis.

In addition to jazz greats, Houston's clubs featured talents like Lightnin' Hopkins, Albert ”Ice Man” Collins, Johnny Ace, Bobby ”Blue” Bland, and T-Bone Walker, whose R & B electric guitar stylings helped define what was later called ”West Coast jazz.” In 1949, Don Robey, a Houston businessman and reputed gambler, founded Peac.o.c.k Records to promote Clarence ”Gatemouth” Brown, a regular in Robey's Bronze Peac.o.c.k Club. The record label thrived, putting Houston on the jazz map, along with Oklahoma City and Kansas City. It was a thrilling scene in which to be immersed.

In the various jazz styles that developed during this period, drummers were major innovators. The slightest variation in rhythm could violate or purify the music (depending on how one heard it). For example, Jo Jones, who got his start in the thirties playing with the Blue Devils in Oklahoma City (a band revered by the young Ralph Ellison), would often abandon the beat to play rhythmic variations on his band mates' solos, using the hi-hat as the focal point. This untethered the tune, gave it flight. Known for his delicate brushwork, he also s.h.i.+fted the beat away from the ba.s.s drum and tom-toms and moved it to the cymbals-in effect, lifting the rhythm from the bottom to the top, lightening the sound. Jones was part of a generation of musicians that included Chick Webb, Gene Krupa, Baby Dodds, Buddy Rich, and Sid Catlett. They streamlined jazz drumming, dropping the bells, whistles, and rattles that had characterized big-band percussion in the tens and twenties. They introduced subtle polyrhythmic playing and syncopation to expand swing and encourage improvisation. Webb was one of the first drummers to tune his drums melodically-he keyed his ba.s.s drum to the stand-up ba.s.s's G string. ”Some say drums have no part of the melody,” Catlett once said. ”They just provide the rhythm. I look at it like this: swing is my idea of how a melody should go. Now I ask you, what is swing without the drums?” Using swishes, crashes, strokes, thunderous rim shots to choke off a phrase, or accenting a piano's ba.s.s line with snare taps to drive it into the forefront of a tune, these stickmen redefined jazz in their time, and Don paid close attention.

In the Paris Review Paris Review interview with J. D. O'Hara, Don lists as one of his strongest influences ”Big Sid Catlett.” Versatility distinguished Big Sid-his ability to move from big bands to small combos, from swing to bebop. He was Louis Armstrong's favorite drummer; Satchmo used him from 1938 to 1942, and again from 1947 to 1949. In between, Catlett hooked up with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker for some of the earliest bop recordings. Don admired him for his capacity, and his willingness, to be a transitional figure, to carry the old into the new, to play the new interview with J. D. O'Hara, Don lists as one of his strongest influences ”Big Sid Catlett.” Versatility distinguished Big Sid-his ability to move from big bands to small combos, from swing to bebop. He was Louis Armstrong's favorite drummer; Satchmo used him from 1938 to 1942, and again from 1947 to 1949. In between, Catlett hooked up with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker for some of the earliest bop recordings. Don admired him for his capacity, and his willingness, to be a transitional figure, to carry the old into the new, to play the new against against the old in ways that enriched the traditions the old in ways that enriched the traditions and and the innovations he pioneered. The depth of this achievement-and the fierce resistance to it, intially-is reflected in a Buddy Rich interview from 1956, in which Rich expressed his suspicions of change, praising the old big-band styles and excoriating bebop. ”Whereas in the days when it was necessary to swing a band, when a drummer had to be a powerhouse, today more or less the 'cool school' has taken over,” Rich said, ”and I don't believe there's such a thing as a 'cool drummer.' You either swing a band or you don't swing a band and that's what's lacking today. There aren't any guys who get back there and play with any kind of guts. And I like a heavyweight.” the innovations he pioneered. The depth of this achievement-and the fierce resistance to it, intially-is reflected in a Buddy Rich interview from 1956, in which Rich expressed his suspicions of change, praising the old big-band styles and excoriating bebop. ”Whereas in the days when it was necessary to swing a band, when a drummer had to be a powerhouse, today more or less the 'cool school' has taken over,” Rich said, ”and I don't believe there's such a thing as a 'cool drummer.' You either swing a band or you don't swing a band and that's what's lacking today. There aren't any guys who get back there and play with any kind of guts. And I like a heavyweight.”

Catlett made no such distinctions. He was a team player, serving the music. With the Teddy Wilson Quartet, in the 1940s, he could be completely selfeffacing, showcasing his band mates. With Benny Goodman's orchestra, he could rein in the large group and drive them relentlessly toward a single destination. With Armstrong's All-Stars, he could provide individual rhythms for each soloist, leading them to the grooves that best suited their particular strengths. He could make swing bop, and bop swing. He was playful and serious, high and low. He was Perelman and Hemingway.

After graduating from Lamar High School in the spring of 1949, Don wanted to hit the road with a small band. His father did not approve, and they argued. Eventually, Don defied his dad, packed up his drums, and did a series of engagements in southeast Texas. It's impossible to know where he played, but in those days the Last Concert Cafe, a Mexican restaurant and dance hall on Nance Street in Houston, regularly hosted amateur jazz bands, as did the Tin Hall Dancehall and Saloon in Cypress, Texas, the oldest roadhouse in Harris County, and the Starlight Barber Shop and Pool Hall in Crockett. These were likely venues for a local group, catering to mostly middle-cla.s.s, and some mixed-race, crowds. The tour seems to have soured quickly. By September, Don had enrolled at the University of Houston, once again frustrating his father, who had hoped he would go to an Ivy League school.