Part 8 (1/2)

16.

FORUM.

Don wasn't writing much, but his discovery of Beckett and his philosophical studies were guiding him away from vague attempts at an ”unlove” story. He was forming a firmer aesthetic. He grounded his magazine editing in philosophy, too, especially in existentialism as it evolved under Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre's influence in America is hard to measure. In the forties and fifties, Time Time and and Harper's Bazaar Harper's Bazaar ran pieces on existentialism. The word ”today refers to faddism,” Maurice Natanson complained. But when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited New York City in the 1940s, the intellectuals there, led by Hannah Arendt, gave them a cool reception. Sartre had declared himself an atheist, but Arendt and her circle traced his ideas to Kierkegaard's apolitical Christianity. In addition, Arendt saw Sartre as an apologist for the Soviet Union. ran pieces on existentialism. The word ”today refers to faddism,” Maurice Natanson complained. But when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited New York City in the 1940s, the intellectuals there, led by Hannah Arendt, gave them a cool reception. Sartre had declared himself an atheist, but Arendt and her circle traced his ideas to Kierkegaard's apolitical Christianity. In addition, Arendt saw Sartre as an apologist for the Soviet Union.

In Manhattan, Sartre sought the nitty-gritty of American culture: the vitality of jazz, Harlem, popular movies, novels by James M. Cain, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright-raw, pa.s.sionate writers, to whom the New York intellectuals felt vastly superior. What Sartre interpreted as bold American energy, the Old Left regarded as lowbrow, and they questioned his taste.

If existentialism didn't take with Arendt's crowd, or with most American academics, it had a stronger and longer-lasting effect on American fiction. Among others, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison were intrigued by Sartre's thinking. So was Harold Rosenberg, though he never used the word existential existential in any of his art criticism. Rosenberg would exert a strong personal influence on Don. But already, in the mid-1950s, Don was mapping a steady route. in any of his art criticism. Rosenberg would exert a strong personal influence on Don. But already, in the mid-1950s, Don was mapping a steady route.

The first issue of the new Acta Diurna Acta Diurna-renamed Forum Forum-appeared in September 1956 ”in spite of every imaginable obstacle-a scarcity of money, faculty indifference, and very little editorial talent other than [Don's] own,” Helen says. Don's desire to make the journal interdisciplinary ruffled the university's bureaucrats. Even more outrageously, he wanted to solicit articles from nonacademic writers.

The debut-made up mostly of contributions from UH faculty-fell short of Don's hopes. Natanson's piece, ”Defining the Two Worlds of Man,” on the relations.h.i.+p of philosophy to science (accompanied by a Ben Shahn sketch of a man holding his head in his hands), was exemplary, but on the whole, the articles were disappointing. Still, they covered a remarkably wide range of subjects-photography, television, engineering, music, art, and history.

As he laid out the issue, Don wrestled with the fear that his wife would not grant a divorce in time for him to marry Helen when he'd planned. Maggie had received a Fulbright Fellows.h.i.+p. She suggested postponing the divorce until after she returned from France. Finally, though, after much back-andforth, she agreed to move ahead. Helen's divorce from Peter Gilpin was finalized on October 5. ”Don was concerned that his mother should understand that we both had grounds for divorce, reasons acceptable to her, although not to the Catholic church,” Helen said later. More than anything, ”Don seemed to want...to live as if neither of us had been previously married.” He insisted that she drop the name Gilpin and restore her surname to Moore. ”I had no doubt that he was trying to change the past.”

On October 12, at the First Unitarian Church, Don and Helen were married. The timing, so soon after their divorces, convinced them to downplay the event. George Christian and Helen's youngest sister, Odell Pauline Moore, were the attendants. Otherwise, only family filled the seats.

That night, the couple stayed in Don's apartment on Hawthorne Street, listening to jazz and drinking champagne. Helen recalled: Don had filled the entire apartment with flowers. There were huge bouquets wherever I looked, on the tables, on the floor, upstairs as well as downstairs. On the previous weekend, Don had painted some of the rooms, and then on the day of our wedding he spent hours cleaning the house and making other preparations. Later, I found [his] list of things to do that day.The next morning...we drove to New Orleans for our honeymoon. Before we left, Don gathered up all the flowers and took them next door to our neighbor, an attractive young woman and the mother of two small children.

In the French Quarter, the couple listened to jazz at Pete Fountain's, and to the Preservation Band (though Preservation Hall had not yet been opened as a venue for musicians). They drank hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's, ate lunch at the Court of Two Sisters, had dinner at Antoine's, and beignets at the French Market. They sat in Jackson Square, watching people and pigeons flock around St. Louis Cathedral. Even in the 1950s, these pastimes were standard tourist fare, and they were the kinds of things Don tended to mock. Many years later, he disparaged New Orleans jazz as the worst sort of treacle.

Within a few days, Don and Helen returned to Houston, and Don was back on the job. He insisted they live off his university salary, and asked Helen not to look for work. When, after several months at home, she became restless, he urged her to develop a newspaper column that might be syndicated, something that would muster her ”authority” and ”clear...distinct ideas.” For three months, she tried, halfheartedly, to compile material for a column, but she decided she was ”not interested in writing anything that [would] appeal to a broad newspaper audience.”

Meanwhile, ”Don's writing consisted almost solely of the work that he was doing for the university,” she said. ”Although he usually had some kind of ma.n.u.script in progress, he had very little time for writing fiction and seldom worked on it. He kept this ma.n.u.script and anything else creative...in a single letter-size file folder that he sometimes carried back and forth to the office.”

Bored, Helen enrolled in philosophy and art cla.s.ses at UH. She fantasized with Don about attending an Ivy League school where he could concentrate on philosophy and she could earn a doctorate in literature, but neither of them looked into the possibility. Between cla.s.ses, she shopped and tried to become a gourmet cook. Don designed their living s.p.a.ce. He painted the apartment white, with the exception of one wall, which he covered in redwood paneling. He bought a chest of drawers for the bedroom and finished it with walnut stain; for the living room, he purchased a Danish walnut couch and chair. He built redwood bookshelves. ”Don had no desire to own possessions for the sake of possessions,” Helen wrote. Unlike his father, ”he was not compelled to add or change anything” once a place was furnished. ”[In] creating a comfortable, handsome...s.p.a.ce, Don thought only of the present. If we did not have enough room or there was some other reason to give up unnecessary furnis.h.i.+ngs...he would give up whatever seemed appropriate, even recordings and books [including Helen's Steinbeck collection.]” Helen said he ”did so with little sense of loss.”

Helen wished for more furniture, ”even a little clutter,” but Don had a ”clearly defined notion of what a room or house should look like.” She deferred to his austerity. At his suggestion, she took up sewing, though the idea was foreign to her; she discovered it was easy to make bedspreads and curtains.

Most of all, Don was adamant that she jettison items she had shared with Peter Gilpin.

During the week, they ate at home, where Helen cooked the meals. Don cleaned up afterward and generally straightened the apartment. After dinner, they'd listen to Maria Callas or bebop on their hi-fi, lying on a rug near the speakers. Don would tell Helen who played the instruments on every jazz recording. On the weekends, they went for lunch at Alfred's Delicatessen on Rice Boulevard or the El Patio Mexican Restaurant on Kirby Drive. They went to movies, plays, concerts. Sat.u.r.day afternoons were for browsing the bookshops-Guy's, Brown's, Rita Cobler's. On Sundays, they'd eat a late breakfast, listen to Bach, especially the Concertos for Two Harpsichords, or Gregorian chants. In the early afternoon, they drove to Don's parents' house. ”At first, I found these visits uncomfortable,” Helen admitted later, ”chiefly because of harsh arguments between Don and his father.” Usually, the get-togethers began pleasantly enough, ”with Don laughing at his father's adventures”-battles with university administrators or clients, including Bud Adams, later the owner of the Houston Oilers (Barthelme designed Adams's Petroleum Center). Don would talk about Forum. Forum. Helen said that although ”these conversations were largely between Don and his father...I was struck by the repartee...among the entire family, including Peter, who was in his last year at St. Thomas High School in 1956 and planning to enter Cornell University the following year.” In describing the family, Helen wrote, ”Rick [was] a handsome youth whose rebellious years were just beginning. Joan's wit, like Don's, was sharp and sometimes biting when directed at her father. Don's mother...an especially attractive woman...was articulate and witty but always kind.” Steve was nine in 1956, and treated with ”special affection” by the family. Helen said that although ”these conversations were largely between Don and his father...I was struck by the repartee...among the entire family, including Peter, who was in his last year at St. Thomas High School in 1956 and planning to enter Cornell University the following year.” In describing the family, Helen wrote, ”Rick [was] a handsome youth whose rebellious years were just beginning. Joan's wit, like Don's, was sharp and sometimes biting when directed at her father. Don's mother...an especially attractive woman...was articulate and witty but always kind.” Steve was nine in 1956, and treated with ”special affection” by the family.

Always at some point just before dinner, during a brief ”c.o.c.ktail hour,” as a soft symphony unfolded on the record player, Don and his dad ”began to disagree about something.” They argued over ”ideas or writers”; his father ”disapproved of Don's interest in the 'new' literature, and was not interested in reading the avant-garde work with which Don could identify.” They also differed on ”how to rear the younger sons. Don felt his father was too rigid in the rules he set for Pete and Frederick. [He] believed that his father's continual disapproval [was] harmful.”

Despite her discomfort, Helen saw that the ”brilliant, witty afternoons and evenings” at the Barthelme home ”gave Don's life a dimension that he could not find anywhere else.” His disagreements with his father ”emerged from the forthrightness of their relations.h.i.+p.” From his father, he had inherited an ”inflexible will and [the] ability to challenge anyone at all.”

On the couple's first Thanksgiving together, Helen baked a turkey and they invited Henry Buckley, one of Don's old roommates, to eat with them. Right after Christmas, they threw their first party. Over a hundred people-from the university, the Post Post, the advertising world-jammed their apartment. They were ready ”to boast” of their marriage.

Their friends included the Marantos, George and Mary Christian, Pat Goeters and his wife, Georgia, who had their first son by now, Helen's sister Margo and her husband, Roy, and new acquaintances they'd made in the local art world: Jim Love, a sculptor working with found materials, Robert Morris and Guy Johnson, painters who mixed straightforward landscapes with irrealism. Johnson taught art cla.s.ses at Lee College in Baytown, an oilrefining center on the Gulf Coast. Often, Don and Helen drove down to dinner with Johnson and his wife, Nancy. ”It was at their home that we first heard a recording of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” Helen recalled. They bought two of Johnson's paintings, their first art purchases together. One featured a solitary guitar player sitting on a desolate coastal sh.o.r.eline.

At the heart of these friends.h.i.+ps was a yearning for cultural excitement. Houston wasn't New York, but it wasn't a backwater, either. It was brash and fast, and there was plenty of money in Houston. Sometimes at work, Don and his friends suffered isolation (Beckett? Brecht? What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?), but they had each other, and they felt a powerful sense of possibility.

Don was especially happy that Helen got along so well with his dad, who amused her. She wasn't intimidated by him. One of his favorite pastimes, during family visits, was showing his slides. One Sunday afternoon, he slipped in a picture of Don's first wife. Helen didn't blink. By staying calm, she seems to have pa.s.sed a test, and he moved on without comment. Later, at her request, he designed, free of charge, a building for her friend Betty Jane Mitch.e.l.l's ad agency. Don was flabbergasted. The old man never worked without a commission. ”He likes you,” Don concluded.

Don wrote to small businesses, larger companies, and arts organizations, soliciting ads for Forum. Forum. In the spring of 1957, he claimed that In the spring of 1957, he claimed that Forum Forum had ”at present a circulation of 3,000.” had ”at present a circulation of 3,000.”

On March 13, he contacted Dr. William J. Handy at the University of Texas, seeking an article. The letter served as a template for his requests.

”The magazine is, in a sense, experimental in character, in that the audience for which it is published differs somewhat from that of most university quarterlies,” he said. ”The people we are trying to reach are, largely, graduates of colleges, in responsible positions, who have allowed their intellectual ties with the universities to lapse or become crusted over, but at the same time are eager for the kind of special knowledge and insight to be found in the scholarly community. This group, numerically large, represents an audience and a need that the scholarly community cannot easily ignore.” He added, ”Unfortunately, we cannot compete with other journals in terms of compensation.”

Pat Goeters and Henry Buckley, now working as architects, designed covers for the first two issues. Most of the contents still came from University of Houston professors: a piece on ”alienation” in the novels of William Faulkner, a study of rattlesnake venom, a discussion of ”social motivation a.n.a.lysis.” Don contributed an essay called a ”A Note on Elia Kazan,” in which he argued that the unfettered emotions in Kazan's films were a response to the ”crucial problem posed for imaginative literature...by the widespread public acceptance of the 'new sciences' of sociology and psychology.” He quipped that ”sound [psychological] motivation is now required even for song cues in musical comedy.” While noting that Method acting and Marlon Brando were somehow ”right...for this time,” he stated that ”Method actors do not fare well...in high comedy or expressionistic drama, where manner is valued above psychological realism.”

While generally lauding Kazan's craft, Don concluded that the ”wordlessness and frustration” in his actors' performances ”seem overwhelmingly images of helplessness, a universal lostness in the face of an existence that is complex and unforgiving.”

Steeped in existentialism-and moving far beyond film reviewing-Don established terms here that would define his fiction: the recognition that form is not a given, that it is buffeted by social developments, that it is timedependent and that it can lose its power. He believed that style and manner are more central to art's effects than content.

He read widely in popular and academic journals, seeking writers and subjects for Forum. Forum. He had always prided himself on being a quick study; when he started at the He had always prided himself on being a quick study; when he started at the Post Post, he and George Christian had joked that ”given forty-five minutes, they could master anything.”

He wrote to Leslie Fiedler, then teaching at the University of Montana, to solicit an article on J. D. Salinger. And he noticed the work of a young writer named Walker Percy. On March 12, 1957, he wrote to Percy, ”Your recent articles in Partisan Review Partisan Review and and Commonweal Commonweal...especially 'The Man on the Train,' represent the kind of thing in which we are particularly interested.” ”The Man on the Train” explored existentialist themes in American landscapes. Along with his letter, Don sent Percy copies of the first two issues of Forum. Forum. Percy responded on March 26: ” Percy responded on March 26: ”Forum is most attractive-and original (Rattle snakes and existentialism!). Liked articles on Kazan and consumer behavior. Would like to see more-to get a better feel of what you're trying to do.” is most attractive-and original (Rattle snakes and existentialism!). Liked articles on Kazan and consumer behavior. Would like to see more-to get a better feel of what you're trying to do.”

Don felt an immediate link with Percy: Both men had been raised as Catholics, both were immersed in Kierkegaard, and both looked to popular culture for signs of the nation's health. But many weeks would pa.s.s before Don got back to Percy. Helen had discovered she was pregnant.

One day in March, she was home alone and began to hemorrhage. She tried to phone her doctor, but without success. She reached Don at the university; he called one of their neighbors and asked her to look after Helen until he could get home. By now, Helen was dangerously weak. She later recalled that ”in Houston, a city ordinance prohibited ambulances from carrying a pregnant woman to the hospital. A pregnancy or miscarriage did not qualify as an emergency.”

Don phoned his father, whose architectural offices on Brazos Street were near the apartment. He got to Helen right away. Her neighbor had a friend who pulled some strings and managed to lure an ambulance. Don arrived in time to help the attendants carry his wife down the apartment steps on a stretcher. On the way to St. Joseph's Hospital, she began to lose consciousness. Don pleaded with the driver to go faster, but he refused to break city rules and turn on the siren. Dutifully, he stopped at all the traffic lights. Helen arrived at St. Joseph's with a frighteningly low pulse, but she recovered quickly under the doctors' care. Don implored her not to worry about the miscarriage, saying they would have plenty of chances to have children.

17.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ANGELS.

Soon after Helen's miscarriage, Don moved her into a new apartment inside an old house remodeled to accommodate several flats. It was on Richmond Avenue, near Montrose, a rapidly developing area of town. Oaks, cicada-riddled willows, and imported palm trees shaded the neighborhood. Don threw himself into erasing the couple's loss. Despite Helen's claim that he'd fix a place up and leave it alone, the open-ended environments he'd known at home and at school had given him a spatial restlessness. He bought a black table for the new living room and spent several days lacquering it. Dissatisfied, he took the table to a professional finisher. Don filled the apartment with houseplants and flowers. On weekends, he and Helen haunted junk shops and cut-rate antique stores. They bought a walnut breakfast table. At a place called Trash 'n Treasure on Westheimer Road, they found a nineteenth-century oak table for their dining room. The owner thought it an ”old piece of junk,” but Don refinished it and it made a handsome addition to their home. He bought an Alvar Aalto lounge chair, a Bertoia set, and a set of Prague side chairs. From the Museum of Fine Arts he bought a Chagall poster for the living room wall. He enjoyed working with his hands, arranging and rearranging things.

Meanwhile, Don continued his correspondence with Walker Percy. On May 20, 1957, he told Percy he would like to have a five-thousand word essay for the summer issue of Forum. Forum. In July, he nudged Percy again, saying the ”issue would be closed out by the end of the month and appear sometime in August.” Percy responded with an article that he hoped would ”interest both the scientifically minded and the literarily minded.” He added, ”[D]on't hesitate to send it back.” In July, he nudged Percy again, saying the ”issue would be closed out by the end of the month and appear sometime in August.” Percy responded with an article that he hoped would ”interest both the scientifically minded and the literarily minded.” He added, ”[D]on't hesitate to send it back.”