Part 8 (2/2)

Originally ent.i.tled ”Symbol and Sign,” the essay ran in Forum Forum's summer issue under the t.i.tle ”The Act of Naming.” In it, Percy argued that, because of language, man is ”that being in the world whose calling it is to find a name for Being, to give testimony to it, and to provide for it a clearing.”

On October 2, Percy wrote to say he'd received his copy of the issue. A ”very good-looking job,” he said, ”striking format. I, for one, am proud to be part of it. Thanks also for your skillful editing which helped my piece not a little.” He praised Don's choice of contributors, including James Collins, a ”first-cla.s.s philosopher...[and] writer” who had recently published a book called The Mind of Kierkegaard. The Mind of Kierkegaard.

In the fall of 1957, Maurice Natanson left Houston for a job at the University of North Carolina. Don felt ”academically stranded.” He and Helen talked again about moving east, perhaps to Brandeis or the New School in Manhattan, but once more they failed to follow up on it. Helen had gone back to work (her way of coping with the miscarriage). Her friend Betty Jane Mitch.e.l.l was faring better now with her ad agency, after handling the account of the popular patent medicine Hadacol. Helen served as as an account executive for the firm. way of coping with the miscarriage). Her friend Betty Jane Mitch.e.l.l was faring better now with her ad agency, after handling the account of the popular patent medicine Hadacol. Helen served as as an account executive for the firm.

With Natanson gone, ”Don was more isolated than ever,” Helen recalled. He stayed in touch with Natanson, seeking topics for Forum Forum, and he kept the books he'd bought for Natanson's courses, including a copy of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

At the ad agency, Betty Jane Mitch.e.l.l a.s.signed Helen to represent Dominican College, a four-year Catholic school for girls in Houston. She met the school's dean, who invited her to teach a few courses in journalism and literature. She had missed teaching, and happily accepted the offer. Occasionally, she asked Don to give a guest lecture. He looked forward to these sessions, reading aloud from a poem or novel, and kidding the ”sweet nuns.”

One day, he soothed a young woman dismayed by the portrayal of the alcoholic priest in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. The Power and the Glory. Don explained that the church's hierarchy was humane and effective, with young priests standing ready to correct their elders' missteps. Don explained that the church's hierarchy was humane and effective, with young priests standing ready to correct their elders' missteps.

These cla.s.sroom visits gave Don his second taste of teaching (after the tutoring in Korea). He was conscientious and thorough in his lectures. His tone was polite, even when discussing religious themes. He revealed, Helen said later, ”nothing of his own withdrawal from the church.”

Early in the summer of 1957, Helen learned that she was pregnant again. In spite of her recent miscarriage, and the loss of a premature child with Peter Gilpin, she did not want to cut her hours at the ad agency or change her daily routines.

She and Don continued to walk in the evenings, and to go to movies and plays. On the weekends, they made their regular trek to the Barthelme house. Steve showed them snakes and frogs he'd found in the woods or in the bayou. Don's mom bragged about Steve's school a.s.signments.

At the end of October, Helen lost the child: a boy weighing less than two pounds. She never saw him. When she awoke from the anesthesia, Don asked her how she'd feel about donating the baby's body to the hospital for medical research. ”He thought this was the best thing for us to do and I agreed at once. The child I lost in my first marriage was buried in our family cemetery plot in Houston, and I did not want to face that experience again.”

She returned to work and stayed active so as not to dwell on the loss. In quick succession, she and Don attended events at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Joan Crystal's Louisiana Gallery, and the New Arts Gallery. One evening at a reception in the Museum of Fine Arts, she noticed how often people introduced Don as the ”son of the architect.” Over and over, he affirmed that he was ”indeed the son of the great man”; then he ”withdrew into a kind of aloofness.” For the first time, she realized how difficult these evenings were for Don.

On another occasion, at a surrealism exhibit, Don saw a ”small eggshaped object covered in fur, the inspiration for what became [his] favorite line in his fiction,” Helen recalled. Most likely, she was thinking of Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered teacup (1936), one of surrealism's icons. In ”Florence Green Is 81,” Don's narrator claims that the ”aim of literature...is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”

Every night, Don brought home proofs from the magazine. Sometimes, Helen helped him read them. She found the time spent on type fonts, ill.u.s.trations, and the placement of page numbers tedious. He'd spread everything on a rug and spend ”hours moving type around.” For him, ”every element was part of the design.” He was ”never entirely satisfied.”

In the mornings, ”he would walk over to the university's press to help with headlines and other display type that was set by hand.” He wrote constantly to designers and typographers, requesting special fonts. ”He kept a file of clippings of miscellaneous art,” Helen wrote, ”mostly out-of-copyright art, that he could use as ill.u.s.trations, a practice he had begun as a reporter at the Post. Post.”

His whimsical eye is apparent in Forum Forum's Fall 1957 issue. To accompany Maurice Natanson's article on the tension between ”Philosophy and the Social Sciences,” Don chose drawings of Tweedledee and Tweedledum sidling up to each other. Loose caps cover their eyes.

He never lost the ”guilty pleasure” of playing with clip art, and ill.u.s.trated many of his early stories. A number of his letters to Roger Angell, and to book editors, concern the appearance of his stories on the page once they had gone to the printer.

On October 17, 1957, Don wrote to Natanson that he had ”evolved a new type dress and a very Bauhaus layout scheme.” He had a strong sense of what he wanted visually. In an exchange with New York photographer Gene Gaines, he asked for a portfolio of the Dancers of India, a troupe traveling in the United States under the auspices of the Indian government. ”Our idea...[is to]...catch the dancers at the height of their various movements, silhouette these shots and superimpose them on shots of the ancient Indian statues from which they are supposed to derive their inspiration,” he said.

That fall, the famed sociologist David Riesman wrote to Don. In 1950, Riesman had published The Lonely Crowd The Lonely Crowd, a study of the insular American character. He was tinkering now with fiction. On November 8, Don replied that Forum Forum didn't publish fiction: The editorial board wouldn't allow it. ”It is difficult to know where to publish short stories that are not formula or run-of-the mill,” Don said. He suggested didn't publish fiction: The editorial board wouldn't allow it. ”It is difficult to know where to publish short stories that are not formula or run-of-the mill,” Don said. He suggested Southwest Review Southwest Review at Southern Methodist University. They have ”run a good deal of distinguished fiction.” at Southern Methodist University. They have ”run a good deal of distinguished fiction.”

Scarce funding continued to plague him. The board pressured him to cut costs. On April 17, 1958, he wrote Wayne Taylor of the UH Printing Department, ”[W]e would...like to pay not more than $16.00 per page for [the next] issue, which will run forty pages.” He proposed that ”margins will be, for this issue, restrained to more conventional proportions,” that ”there will be no full-page, four-way bleed cuts,” that the ”amount of handset type will be drastically reduced,” and that ”no changes will be made (except for typos) in pages that are already made up.” This is confession confession more than more than plan plan, revealing Don's previous layout practices. He concluded, ”The undersigned will stay out of your way as much as possible.”

His agony is even more palpable in his letters to writers. Percy had asked him, ”[H]ow come a U. of Houston publication isn't paying about a dollar a word?” After all, Houston was an oil town; the university was famous for the generous endowment it had gotten from Hugh Roy Cullen. But the Cullen money had been used for capital expenditures, not for daily operations or faculty salaries. The Cullen myth kept other potential donors away. The university would soon become part of the state system, but at that time it was still a private inst.i.tution.

Don explained all this to Percy, who never again mentioned money. Other writers were not as understanding. In the summer of 1957, Don had written to Thomas A. Bledsoe, director of Beacon Press in Boston, hoping to excerpt chapters from some of Beacon's books in Forum. Forum. Initially, Don was interested in Lewis A. Coser and Irving Howe's Initially, Don was interested in Lewis A. Coser and Irving Howe's The American Communist Party: A Critical History. The American Communist Party: A Critical History. Coser and Howe were amenable, but Bledsoe wrote what Don considered a ”very nasty letter,” insisting that oil-soaked Houston ought to be able to pay reprint fees. Coser and Howe were amenable, but Bledsoe wrote what Don considered a ”very nasty letter,” insisting that oil-soaked Houston ought to be able to pay reprint fees.

Alfred Kazin, whom Don hoped would move the magazine's literary studies beyond ”pale new critic[ism],” wrote to say that he appreciated Don's interest in his work, but couldn't understand why Forum Forum didn't pay. Perhaps feeling he had nothing to lose, Don responded: didn't pay. Perhaps feeling he had nothing to lose, Don responded: You are absolutely right but if I sent you...money I would have to cut exactly 16 pages out of the magazine. If I sent $300 each to three more contributors there would be no magazine. This perhaps would be no great loss but I must believe otherwise. The magazine is produced at absolute minimum cost. The University has an annual deficit of close to $600,000 a year. All of Cullen's money went into grandiose buildings with nothing left to keep the radiators burning. The magazine is printed in our own makes.h.i.+ft campus printing plant where the question of whether or not we should spend $15 for a new roller is gravely debated. The printers, about half of whom are students, are suitably underpaid. I set a good deal of the display type myself and do a number of other things which you probably wouldn't believe to save money. We bought the good paper in quant.i.ty at a distress sale. The handsome typefaces were begged by me from the manufacturers. If I send a telegram I have to pay for it out of my own pocket (I'm not a professor either, by the way). The faculty feels that it's too esoteric: what is all this Dada business anyhow? Because the magazine is produced here, all hands are pretty sure that it can't be much good.All of this is irrelevant. The answer to your question is that the printer shouldn't shouldn't be paid when the writer is not. But the printer is invariably adamant whereas the writer is sometimes willing to be victimized. This difference between printers and writers is what makes possible marginal journals like our own, which have no real (economic) right to exist. Whether all this effort on the part of writers, printers, and editors is worthwhile-whether the magazine itself is a good magazine, or is meaningful in any way-is another question. We are, of course, visited from time to time by the thought that we are merely deluding ourselves about the worth of the whole project....But this is my problem, not yours. be paid when the writer is not. But the printer is invariably adamant whereas the writer is sometimes willing to be victimized. This difference between printers and writers is what makes possible marginal journals like our own, which have no real (economic) right to exist. Whether all this effort on the part of writers, printers, and editors is worthwhile-whether the magazine itself is a good magazine, or is meaningful in any way-is another question. We are, of course, visited from time to time by the thought that we are merely deluding ourselves about the worth of the whole project....But this is my problem, not yours.

Don was all alone in endeavoring to create a first-cla.s.s publication. The writers he rejected didn't always respond with grace. A journalist named James Boyer May submitted an article ent.i.tled ”I'm an Old Anti-Sartrean.” Don turned it down, citing his affinities with Sartre. May wrote back, ”As to your sympathy with the 'existential-phenomenological movement' (to me no more definable than the non-existent 'beat movement' I've...wasted time in a.n.a.lyzing for CBS)-every editor is undoubtedly ent.i.tled to promote his views [but this one is] narrow...self-defeating...”

Clearly, Don considered himself an editorial artist. artist. Early in his marriage to Helen, he told her that the two of them ”should be committed to becoming part of the intellectual and artistic elite rather than the wealthy elite.” He ”believed his mother was disheartened over having a less affluent lifestyle than any of her friends, the kind of life that one could have expected from an architect as famous as his father,” Helen recalled. ”Several of their early friends were now quite wealthy, but it was not a world that Don envied.” Early in his marriage to Helen, he told her that the two of them ”should be committed to becoming part of the intellectual and artistic elite rather than the wealthy elite.” He ”believed his mother was disheartened over having a less affluent lifestyle than any of her friends, the kind of life that one could have expected from an architect as famous as his father,” Helen recalled. ”Several of their early friends were now quite wealthy, but it was not a world that Don envied.”

Still, he did not want to be part of the ”carriage trade.” Growing up, Don had never had to worry about money. He told Helen they ”should buy whatever [they] needed and then find the money to cover [their] expenses.” She wrote, ”This was a new approach to budgeting for me.” She oversaw their joint bank account. Don never kept track of his spending. Each month, despite Helen's efforts, several checks came back marked ”insufficient funds.” Don simply wrote new checks to replace the returns.

In the spring of 1958, Helen suggested they move in order to economize. They took a tiny flat on Emerson Street. Shortly after settling, they invited Don's dad to dinner-he was alone for a few days while the rest of the family visited Don's aunt in Pennsylvania. Helen asked her father-in-law what he thought of the apartment. He looked around. It's ”ingratiating,” he said dryly.

Soon, Helen became pregnant again. Though she and Don had lived in the apartment less than six months, they began to look for a larger s.p.a.ce. They wound up moving across the street, to a 1920s house owned by Linn and Celestine Linnstaedter. Linn was a colleague of Don's dad in the UH architecture department; Celestine practiced psychiatry in Houston's VA Hospital.

Don was not happy with the new place. He part.i.tioned the big central room with a j.a.panese rice-paper screen, which he built to hang from the ceiling. He converted one of the bedrooms to a living room. Despite his dissatisfaction, he enjoyed the Linnstaedters, who lived next door.

He asked Helen if she would still love him after the baby was born. She a.s.sured him she would. She worked as hard as ever at the advertising agency. In the early fall, she lost the child, another boy. Again, she and Don donated the body to the hospital for research, but Helen wrote that she regretted this later and was always haunted by ”images” of the ”two infants.” She remained convinced that Don had felt the same way. In her book, she cited a pa.s.sage from his 1973 story ”One Hundred Ten West Sixty-First Street”: Paul and Eugenie went to a film. Their baby had just died and they were trying not to think about it. The film left them slightly depressed. The child's body had been given to the hospital for medical experimentation. ”But what about life after death?” Eugenie's mother had asked. ”There isn't any,” Eugenie said. ”Are you positive?” her mother asked. ”No,” Eugenie said. ”How can I be positive? But that's my opinion.”

”I have no doubt that Eugenie was speaking for Don,” Helen wrote. ”Don knew that the Catholic church would not have approved of what we did, and he later told me that his mother talked to him about it. Giving the bodies to the medical school...was, I believe, an attempt to leave the experience in the past. The presence of two tiny graves would not let us do this. And as always, he was driven by an implacable will to make decisions independent of all authority, in this instance both the church and his mother.”

Fighting Forum Forum's editorial board was like ”working in a vacuum,” Don said, but still he plowed ahead. He secured articles from Leslie Fiedler (”The Secret Life of James Fenimore Cooper”), Walter Kaufmann (from his forthcoming book From Shakespeare to Existentialism From Shakespeare to Existentialism), Hugh Kenner (discussions of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett), James Collins (”Art and the Philosopher”), Richard Evans (interviews with Carl Jung and Freud biographer Ernest Jones), Peter Yates (on West Coast music), Parker Tyler, the editor of Art-News Art-News (on contemporary American film), William Carlos Williams (from (on contemporary American film), William Carlos Williams (from I Wanted to Write a Poem I Wanted to Write a Poem), and Norman Mailer (an excerpt from Advertis.e.m.e.nts for Myself Advertis.e.m.e.nts for Myself). Walker Percy submitted a new piece, ”The Loss of the Creature,” which dealt with the gaps between perceptions and reality.

Though they were not paid, these writers were eager to be part of a journal composed with the care, seriousness, and range of curiosity Don brought to his work. In the spring of 1958, he published a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay ”Algeria,” which a.n.a.lyzed the torture techniques of French soldiers. Sartre noted it was a bitter irony that Frenchmen had become torturers in Africa so soon after the French had suffered at the hands of German troops.

The piece had first appeared in Europe (it was banned in France); Malcolm McCorquodale, a Houstonian who worked for the arts patron Dominique de Menil, saw the essay while traveling and brought it to Don's attention.

Without hesitating-and without university approval-Don phoned Sartre in Paris to ask his permission to print McCorquodale's translation of the piece. Sartre eagerly agreed. Several follow-up calls were needed to finalize arrangements. When Don's boss, Farris Block, saw the phone bill, he exploded. The magazine did not have the budget to cover such expenses. Don replied, ”I'll pay for it.” Block knew Don didn't have the cash, and he dropped the argument. Helen recalled that the couple's home phone bill was a nightmare of magazine-related charges.

Don kept pressing his luck with Block and the editorial board. At his own discretion, he solicited work from writers all over the country and beyond: Randall Jarrell, E. B. White, Erwin Panofsky, Ronnie Dugger, Kenneth Tynan, Cyril Connolly, the editors of Dissent Dissent, Diana Trilling (”I've been reading and enjoying your Partisan Partisan pieces for some time...”). One of his favorite contributors to pieces for some time...”). One of his favorite contributors to Forum Forum was Joseph Lyons, a research psychologist with the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. In the Summer 1958 issue, Lyons's essay ”The Psychology of Angels” appeared. Parts of the piece resurfaced in Don's 1969 story ”On Angels.” was Joseph Lyons, a research psychologist with the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. In the Summer 1958 issue, Lyons's essay ”The Psychology of Angels” appeared. Parts of the piece resurfaced in Don's 1969 story ”On Angels.”

By July 1958, in a general fund-raising letter, Don could accurately boast, ”The response from our readers has far exceeded our expectations; and some of the nation's most distinguished scholars have informed us that Forum Forum has filled a major gap in the field of scholarly publis.h.i.+ng.” has filled a major gap in the field of scholarly publis.h.i.+ng.”

Then the bad news: ”We are now...at a point where certain difficulties must be resolved if the magazine is to make the fullest use of its opportunities. The University of Houston, as you may know, is suffering heavily from lack of funds....”

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