Part 7 (1/2)

A few years later, in ”For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You” (1964), Don took a swipe at Maggie. In mock-Joycean brogue, a husband and wife banter: ”Ah Martha coom now to bed there's a darlin' gul. Hump off blatherer I've no yet read me Mallarme for this evenin'. Ooo Martha dear canna we noo let the dear lad rest this night? When th' telly's already shut doon an' th' man o' the hoose 'as a 'ard on? Don't be comin' round wit yer lewd proposals on a Tuesday night when ye know better. But Martha dear where is yer love for me...”

”I've never been a good drinker,” Maggie says, looking back on her marriage to Don. ”It's not about principles. I just can't digest alcohol very well.” At the parties Don took her to, ”which I have to say weren't very wild, I was the only sober person left after the first two hours, which isn't very fun. It was difficult.”

”She wasn't relaxed or natural,” Gollob says of Maggie. ”We couldn't have been couldn't have been more more relaxed. I will say, she was sultry-looking, had a great body and great mind....” relaxed. I will say, she was sultry-looking, had a great body and great mind....”

As for alcohol: ”We were all drinking,” Gollob says. ”Partly it was a Texas thing. Don was a bitter drinker. He drank when he was sad and it added to his gloom. When he was drunk, he could be a cold motherf.u.c.ker. You did not approach him frivolously. He'd freeze you out quickly.”

Gollob began dating a Rice undergraduate who happened to be one of Maggie's students. One night, in Stubby's Lounge, he admitted to the girl that he thought Maggie was a ”sn.o.bbish b.i.t.c.h” and that it must be awful to have her for a teacher. A few days later, Gollob dropped by Don's office at UH to take him to lunch at their favorite barbecue place. ”I understand you think my wife is a sn.o.bbish b.i.t.c.h,” Don said. ”My date had ratted on me, possibly because I'd had the poor taste to take her to Stubby's, not one of Houston's chic watering spots,” Gollob says. Fearing a freeze-out from Don, he decided it was best to confess. ”Yes, I do think she's a sn.o.bbish b.i.t.c.h,” he replied. ”Rising, [Don] patted me on the arm and said, 'So do I. In fact, I'm getting a divorce. I'll have to look for an apartment right away. Why don't we share one?' ”

Despite Don's flippancy with Gollob, the decision to split from Maggie wasn't easy or made without regret. Later, he told Helen Moore he had gone to her office seeking work a few months back hoping a day job would save his marriage. He told her it was Maggie who ”no longer wanted to be married.”

”By the time Don came back from Korea, it was evident that our paths had diverged seriously, and we never got it back together again,” Maggie explains. ”I was very much into my schoolwork and the thesis.

”I think Donald always wanted two things that were incompatible, and he spent a lot of time and effort trying to reconcile the two,” she says. ”He wanted a bourgeois family life, like the one he'd grown up with, and at the same time he wanted a swinging bohemian life. That's one of the reasons I knew the marriage wasn't going to work. I didn't want either of those things. I wanted to go out and see the world. You know, in the fifties, most people just wanted to settle in the suburbs with two kids. In 1956, I went to France, to the University of Paris, and got a doctoral degree. I left Donald my car. In 1959, I saw him in Houston, to get the car back.” She laughs as she recalls the quirky charm that drew her to Don in the first place. ”He told me the car had needed two things: It needed to be painted and it needed new brakes. He couldn't afford both. So he'd gotten it repainted.”

Gollob was eager to move out of his parents' place, so he and Don, along with Henry Buckley and Maurice Sumner, both graduates of the UH architecture school, rented a dilapidated Victorian-style house on Burlington near Hawthorne, just west of Main Street downtown. It was a ”gothic dwelling to gladden the heart of Charles Addams,” Gollob says. The guys were ”too scared to unboard” the door to the attic, and ”fantasized all these horrible things that were up [there].” Finally, they ”made a pact that no one could leave anybody else in the house alone. It was terrifying.” In retrospect, it was also like the ”ultimate Barthelme story...funny, but dark and unknown too.” Later, when city planners ran the Southwest Freeway through midtown, the house came down.

Gollob remembers Don working on a novel in the gloomy old rooms. Don told him he had already tossed two complete drafts of the project, so this was likely an evolution of the ”unlove” ma.n.u.script. Gollob a.s.sumed it was ”autobiographical and rich in Maggie-inspired angst.” He suggested that Don had been too ”extreme” in rejecting the earlier drafts. ”Maybe you're too harsh a critic of your own work,” he said. ”Maybe you could have benefited from someone else's perspective.”

”[Don] hit me with the kind of look that Hamlet must have given Claudius [when Claudius] advised him to stop mourning because it was unmanly,” Gollob recalls. Don said, ”Thanks so much. I'll remember that when I'm throwing this third draft into the toilet. I can see that it's full of the same self-pitying s.h.i.+t that smelled up the others.”

From Korea, Don had written to Joe Maranto that he would probably take the novel into a third draft; that he wanted to finish it even though it wasn't likely he'd publish it. He stuck to his plan. He was teaching himself discipline, self-editing.

Otherwise, goofiness prevailed. Don entertained his housemates by acting out movies. The Man with the Golden Arm The Man with the Golden Arm was one of his favorites, Gollob says-an indication, along with Don's review of was one of his favorites, Gollob says-an indication, along with Don's review of The Flies The Flies, that he was developing an interest in existentialist fiction. Based on a Nelson Algren novel, Otto Preminger's film starred Frank Sinatra as Frankie Machine, a former card dealer and heroin addict struggling to reintegrate into society and find a new livelihood-subjects of interest to Don after his service in the army. Though he cracked up his housemates with parodies of Sinatra's anguish, it was the restraint of Sinatra's performance that impressed Don. Kim Novak's role in the movie also intrigued him: a sympathetic female, woman as savior.

Within a few months, Gollob moved out of the Burlington Street house and went to California to enroll in a fine arts program at the Pasadena Playhouse. ”Don always loved Houston,” Gollob says. ”I never did-couldn't wait to get out of the G.o.dd.a.m.ned place.”

Don, with whom he stayed in touch, was ”as close to a Hamlet figure as anyone I've ever known,” Gollob recalls. ”Hamlet's soliloquies and speeches could have sprung directly from [Don's] soul, not just the pain, the bitterness, the scorn of 'I have of late...lost all my mirth'...but the antic wit and humor of Hamlet the punster, the jiber-he had among his other talents a prodigious gift for laughter and a love of plays and players.”

”[You] go to college, and if you run through one or two or three very good teachers, you're extremely lucky,” Don said. He had been disappointed in the faculty at the University of Houston; he continued to take cla.s.ses because he was unable to imagine anything else. Finally, in Maurice Natanson, a philosophy professor, Don found a sympathetic soul and an engaging mentor. Natanson's enthusiasms were Kierkegaard, Sartre, Husserl, and phenomenology in modern literature. He was a ”wonderful guy, an excellent teacher, and I took everything,” Don said. ”[Because of Natanson,] what I mostly did, at school, was study philosophy.”

Natanson's long career included teaching stints at the universities of Nebraska, Houston, North Carolina, and California-Santa Cruz, as well as at Yale (he died in 1996). Eileen Pollock, a young novelist who studied with him many years after Don did, says that Natanson's knowledge of Kafka, Beckett, and Thomas Mann made him the perfect philosophy teacher for budding writers. ”He was a lovely man,” she recalls. In addition to sharing his love of literature, ”he had a nicely old-fas.h.i.+oned way of making a soph.o.m.ore or junior feel as if studying philosophy actually had something to do with figuring out how to live one's life”-a powerful appeal for Don after his sojourn in the army. ”He had a warm, charismatic presence,” Pollock says, ”very rabbinical, with a full white beard, crinkly, lively eyes, and an impish smile. He spoke in this hypnotically odd cadence, drawing out some syllables, accenting others, while stroking his beard. He had a wry sense of the absurd. He took his subject seriously-and yet he didn't, perhaps because the subject itself seemed to indicate that nothing had a solid foundation beneath it.”

Don was already familiar with existentialism, but Natanson excited him about it. Kierkegaard became a guiding spirit for Don. In the course of his career, he would make half a dozen direct or indirect references to Kierkegaard in his work, as well as numerous echoes of phrases, images, and ideas from Kierkegaard's writings. ”Purity of heart is to will one thing,” says a character in Don's story ”The Leap.” ”No,” his companion replies. ”Here I differ with Kierkegaard. Purity of heart is, rather, to will several things, and not know which is the better, truer thing, and to worry about this, forever.” Timidly, the first speaker asks, ”Is it permitted permitted to differ with Kierkegaard?” His companion replies, ”Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.” to differ with Kierkegaard?” His companion replies, ”Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.”

14.

THE OBJECT.

Despite her writing, editing, and teaching experience at the University of Houston, Helen Moore was earning, when she left the inst.i.tution, less than Farris Block offered Don as a new hire with little PR experience. When she told the school's president, A. D. Bruce, that she planned to take a job with the Boone and c.u.mmings advertising firm, he made a tepid counteroffer in an attempt to keep her. She informed him that his figures fell far short of her new salary-nearly twice what she'd made at UH. ”But that's more than some of our male male faculty members earn!” he said. faculty members earn!” he said.

She had tried to get a job with the newspapers, but for most women in the 1950s, journalism was a closed shop. The city's dailies, and the smaller papers, were boys' clubs. Helen's husband, Peter Gilpin, a staffer at the Chronicle Chronicle, took long lunches with his comrades once they'd met the hectic morning deadlines. Alcohol oiled their talk of wives and kids. Women were rarely allowed at the table. Over at the Post Post, Don, George Christian, and an all-male crew had always worked at night, getting home at dawn, a routine Don was grateful to leave behind.

Television newsrooms were as unfriendly to women as the papers. In 1953, Helen had helped the university launch the nation's first educational TV station, KUHT. She had written much of its PR material. But the school's radio and television department was all male, as were the station's news writers and on-air personalities.

Because of television, advertising was booming. The big firms needed talent, so their doors were open to women, and the salaries were compet.i.tive. Helen joined Boone and c.u.mmings. Shortly thereafter, she moved into an apartment with one if its executives, Betty Jane Mitch.e.l.l. Helen's marriage to Gilpin had foundered because of his drinking. ”I felt quite alone in my marriage,” Helen says. The new job and her friends.h.i.+p with Mitch.e.l.l were gifts.

Meanwhile, Don had taken charge of the faculty newsletter she had edited at the university. In her memoir, Helen claims that she started the newsletter. Lee Pryor, a UH English professor, says he he founded it. In any case, the publication did not become significant until Don took the reins. Right away, he set out to broaden the newsletter's range and widen its readers.h.i.+p. On February 27, 1956, he sent a memo to Douglas McClaury in University Development, arguing that founded it. In any case, the publication did not become significant until Don took the reins. Right away, he set out to broaden the newsletter's range and widen its readers.h.i.+p. On February 27, 1956, he sent a memo to Douglas McClaury in University Development, arguing that Acta Diurna Acta Diurna's format should be revised so it was not just an ”internal news organ,” but, rather, was a ”p. r. medium for outside distribution.” He wanted to change the layout and make it standard magazine size. The cost of the new Acta Acta would be about $77.50 per week, as opposed to the old budget of $47.50, because of better paper, an increased press run, and more mailings. The administration was slow to respond. Don kept pus.h.i.+ng. A month later, he wrote to Pat Nicholson in the Office of Development: ”As to material used [in the proposed new would be about $77.50 per week, as opposed to the old budget of $47.50, because of better paper, an increased press run, and more mailings. The administration was slow to respond. Don kept pus.h.i.+ng. A month later, he wrote to Pat Nicholson in the Office of Development: ”As to material used [in the proposed new Acta Acta], articles written by members of the faculty on subjects of wide general interest could supplement regular news and feature stories. Publication in this format might be an especially valuable method of presenting our faculty to the community and to their colleagues.”

While Acta Acta had been a small newsletter about staff activities on campus, Don envisioned his editors.h.i.+p as an opportunity to become Harold Ross. He hoped to learn from the pieces he edited, to advance his education, and to make contacts in publis.h.i.+ng, academia, and other fields. Within a few months, his tenacity had convinced the university to take a chance on a multidisciplinary journal. In a PR statement, he announced that in September 1956, the University of Houston planned to publish ”as part of our public relations program the first issue of a monthly magazine which will run from 16 to 24 pages.” He solicited articles on and off campus. He convinced Maurice Natanson to contribute a piece on selfunderstanding, and he wrote Dr. Richard A. Younger, of the Harris County Historical a.s.sociation, requesting permission to publish Younger's talk ”The Grand Jury on the Frontier,” which he had delivered in Houston. ”The level of readers.h.i.+p we are aiming at will be roughly that of had been a small newsletter about staff activities on campus, Don envisioned his editors.h.i.+p as an opportunity to become Harold Ross. He hoped to learn from the pieces he edited, to advance his education, and to make contacts in publis.h.i.+ng, academia, and other fields. Within a few months, his tenacity had convinced the university to take a chance on a multidisciplinary journal. In a PR statement, he announced that in September 1956, the University of Houston planned to publish ”as part of our public relations program the first issue of a monthly magazine which will run from 16 to 24 pages.” He solicited articles on and off campus. He convinced Maurice Natanson to contribute a piece on selfunderstanding, and he wrote Dr. Richard A. Younger, of the Harris County Historical a.s.sociation, requesting permission to publish Younger's talk ”The Grand Jury on the Frontier,” which he had delivered in Houston. ”The level of readers.h.i.+p we are aiming at will be roughly that of Harper's Harper's or the or the Atlantic Atlantic,” Don said.

”Kierkegaard is Hegel's punishment,” Natanson might say to start a cla.s.s. Or: ”Philosophy, for Husserl, is the search for radical cert.i.tude.” As Natanson presented them, philosophers were romantic figures, just like the jazzmen Don heard on Dowling Street. ”[After] Sartre...there are few philosophers alive today who qualify for a magisterial role. The elders are not being replaced,” Natanson said. ”Instead, there is a profusion of professors. Whatever esteem philosophy may have had in earlier times has been eclipsed by the demands of immediacy: the realms of politics, economics, and history....”

Natanson's wistfulness-his longing for philosophy on a grand scale-appealed to Don; it matched his feeling that previous generations had chewed up the landscape, leaving sc.r.a.ps for their followers to harvest. Something vital had leaked from the world. Papa's wars had been spectacular; in their wake, only minor skirmishes remained. ”Although it has always been known that philosophy bakes no bread, it was a.s.sumed that it could occasionally supply a little yeast,” Natanson said, adding that philosophy was virtually invisible now in Western Europe and America.

Stubbornly, Don attached himself to the discipline's marginal status, the way he'd embraced Baudelaire, Mallarme, and a literary tradition with limited public appeal. Like Kierkegaard, he disdained the ”untruths” of crowds. At the same time, a sweet optimism-a pinch of his father's crusading spirit-encouraged him to believe that intellectually rigorous art could improve everyone's everyone's lives. Natanson kindled this fire in him. lives. Natanson kindled this fire in him.

Prior to Kierkegaard, the ”story of...philosophy is the story of the loss of individuality,” Natanson taught. By contrast, Kierkegaard's ”burden” is the ”exploration of the Self.” He went on to explain: ”By the Self Kierkegaard means the 'inwardness' of the individual, that unique aspect of each of us [that balances] freedom and necessity.” (English translations of Kierkegaard's works were still fresh in the fifties; Walter Lowrie had begun issuing his versions in the late 1930s.) ”Paradox is the b.o.o.by-trap into which we plunge [with Kierkegaard], just as Alice went down the rabbit hole,” said Natanson. Kierkegaard's writings contain ”odd inner ironies” and fantastic ”humor” that celebrates the Self's contradictions: ”One does not know for sure at any point whose side the laugh is on.”

In Kafka, ”Kierkegaard found his novelist.” Kafka gave narrative shape to the horror of feeling ”condemned” in a G.o.dless world. Prior to Kafka, Dostoevsky had located life's meaninglessness in consciousness. ”I was conscious every moment of so many elements in myself,” says the unnamed narrator of Notes from Underground. Notes from Underground. ”I felt them simply swarming in me.” Worse, every thought he has, every phrase he utters, he has stolen from some other source; the ubiquity of language, its overuse, leaves him skeptical of ideas. Urgencies (the world is never still), endless possibilities, and the Self's confusions necessitate action ”I felt them simply swarming in me.” Worse, every thought he has, every phrase he utters, he has stolen from some other source; the ubiquity of language, its overuse, leaves him skeptical of ideas. Urgencies (the world is never still), endless possibilities, and the Self's confusions necessitate action in the moment in the moment, though what to do remains a mystery.

For Natanson, it was Edmund Husserl, born in 1859 in what is now the Czech Republic, who best expressed the weight of the moment. At every instant, Husserl said, consciousness remakes the world. Consider a chair. A chair can be a place to sit, or a surface on which to stack books, or it can be torn apart, rearranged, and turned into a sculpture. Or it can be made into a sculpture by virtue of our agreeing to call it one. Depending on our intention intention, the chair has several possibilities, and its actualization here, now, in one shape, serving one particular function, is merely one choice among many. When we turn to an object, we're aware of our awareness of it. Whatever we make of a thing, our choice reveals our intentionality. By studying objects, consciousness discovers its form form. It haunts the world as the spirit of what the world might be, or what it might still become.

In cla.s.s, Natanson pointed out that fiction fiction is an object in the world, made of words. What is an object in the world, made of words. What is is fiction, he said, but an invitation to consider the real by way of the unreal, to examine possibility for a clearer grasp of the actual. This is fiction's strategy. ”What if fiction, he said, but an invitation to consider the real by way of the unreal, to examine possibility for a clearer grasp of the actual. This is fiction's strategy. ”What if this this happened?” it asks. ”Or happened?” it asks. ”Or that that?”

Just as we can seize a chair and remake it, fiction seizes us. us. The object of The object of fiction's fiction's intentionality is human nature, human experience. intentionality is human nature, human experience.

Following Husserl's example, Sartre used fiction to trace consciousness: In Sartre's work, the ”chain of thought [that was] stated with agonizing force by Kierkegaard,” and was echoed in Dostoevsky and Kafka, ”comes to artistic fruition,” Natanson said.

What did he mean by this? In his biography of Sartre, Ronald Hayman reported that Sartre sought a ”means of blending philosophical reflection with the direct transcription...of personal experience,” a literary form that would bypa.s.s the ”familiar opposition between realism and idealism, affirming both the supremacy of reason and the reality of the visible world.” Sartre wanted to be able to sit in a sidewalk cafe, contemplate a chair or the drink in front of him, and call it ”philosophy.” Husserl's phenomenological method was a revelation to him. So was Hemingway's prose. Papa made ”insignificant-seeming details significant” without relying on subjectivity, Hayman wrote. ”Objects in his narratives were conspicuously solid, though he offered no more than would have been apparent to the character he was presenting.”

For example, in ”A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Hemingway's lack of metaphors and similes forces the story's objects to emerge as themselves, in and of themselves, in all their raw thingness thingness: ”...the leaves of the tree made [shadows] against the electric light” and ”The waiter poured on into the gla.s.s so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer on the pile.”

A phenomenological impulse lies behind Hemingway's celebrated prose style-an obsessive focus on objects, stripped of mental baggage-and Hemingway elevated it to a literary aesthetic.

Sartre extended Hemingway's method. In Nausea Nausea (1938), his narrator, Roquentin, says of a chestnut tree, its presence ”pressed itself against my eyes.” Usually, ”existence hides itself,” but now ”existence had unveiled itself” to him. ”It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this [tree] root was kneaded into existence.” (1938), his narrator, Roquentin, says of a chestnut tree, its presence ”pressed itself against my eyes.” Usually, ”existence hides itself,” but now ”existence had unveiled itself” to him. ”It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this [tree] root was kneaded into existence.”