Part 9 (1/2)

Once more, Helen became pregnant, and once again she lost the baby. ”I a.s.sumed that with Don's Catholic background, we would eventually have children,” she later said, ”[but] I now had ambivalent feelings about [it].” Just before the latest pregnancy, her gynecologist, Dr. Charles Bancroft, had recommended medical testing; nothing suggested that either she or Don had any reproductive problems. ”It was apparent that Don detested having to undergo...tests and seemed to feel that somehow it tainted the idea of having a child. I was struck by the depth of his need for 'mystery' and spontaneity. It was becoming clear that Don's sensibilities made it difficult for him to confront the realities of being a father.” Helen wrote that in the 1950s, ”pregnancy was an event that women faced pretty much alone,” and she admitted that after the latest miscarriage, ”I...had no desire whatsoever to become pregnant again.”

Typically, Don wanted to move on and put the past behind him. He told Helen he was always seeking a spot where ”everything is different.” He found a two-story apartment that he liked on Kipling Street, and placed a deposit on it. Designed by Burdette Keeland, a colleague of his father, it had white brick exteriors, redbrick interior floors, and a gla.s.s wall overlooking a garden out back. Don added texture to the living room by covering one wall with natural burlap.

Linn and Celestine Linnstaedter had been very kind to the couple, both as friends and landlords; Don dreaded telling them that he and Helen had found a new place to live. He informed them one evening in their yard. Before they could respond, Don, apparently self-conscious about Celestine's psychiatric training, told her in a ”sharp, accusatory tone that he knew what she was thinking about the psychological implications” of his frequent desire to move. ”Celestine was visibly stunned,” Helen recalled. Don seems to have mounted an attack to ward off criticism-or to deflect the guilt he was feeling.

18.

THE MECHANICAL BRIDE.

In 1959, without alerting his editorial board, Don decided Forum Forum would publish fiction. He was preparing to take his own fiction from the back burner; fitfully, he had been working on a story he'd eventually call ”Hiding Man.” would publish fiction. He was preparing to take his own fiction from the back burner; fitfully, he had been working on a story he'd eventually call ”Hiding Man.”

On September 25, he wrote to Martha Foley, a Columbia University professor and editor of the annual Best American Short Stories Best American Short Stories anthology. He asked her if she could ”recommend some young fiction writers...who might be interested in contributing fiction or poetry to our quarterly. We have only recently decided to add fiction and poetry to the magazine, and this letter is an exploratory gesture.” There is no record of a reply. No doubt, Don was exploring the possibility of advancing his own efforts while expanding anthology. He asked her if she could ”recommend some young fiction writers...who might be interested in contributing fiction or poetry to our quarterly. We have only recently decided to add fiction and poetry to the magazine, and this letter is an exploratory gesture.” There is no record of a reply. No doubt, Don was exploring the possibility of advancing his own efforts while expanding Forum Forum's scope.

In a letter signed ”Earl Long,” Walker Percy told Don he had been ”wra.s.sling with a piece of fiction and not doing too well.” Don phoned him and asked to see what he was up to. Percy hesitated; he was not yet comfortable enough to show Don the ”curious adventures of my ingenious young moviegoer.”

To encourage him, Don phoned his old friend Herman Gollob, now working as an acquisitions editor for Little, Brown in Boston. He mentioned Percy's novel. Gollob made some calls and discovered that Knopf had already bought it. Don contacted Percy, who admitted, ”Yes, Knopf did option my book, paid me a small sum, then shot it back with the suggestion that I rewrite it. Since then I've been sitting here...of no mind to do anything...[but] soon...[I'll] give you any part you might want.”

True to his word, Percy mailed the book's second chapter to Don, who wasted no time setting it into type. To shape it as a stand-alone story, Don deleted most of the last twelve pages of the ma.n.u.script. Percy didn't mind. ”Glad you wish to use as much as you do. You are welcome to it. Your reaction to the last section will probably be of great value to me. There's my weakness...Platonizing...and it may be fatal.”

The excerpt, ent.i.tled ”Carnival in Gentilly,” appeared in the Summer 1960 issue, a year before Percy published the novel.

Don fought hard to land another story in Forum Forum, by a young author named Bruce Brooks. John Allred, chair of Forum Forum's editorial board, objected to the story's h.o.m.os.e.xual theme and nixed it without submitting it to the other board members. Furious, Don wrote to him, ”[N]ot publis.h.i.+ng this story (or the next one) is a certain way to kill Forum. Forum. The magazine is dead just as soon as we are governed by other people's antic.i.p.ated reactions to what we print. We have killed it ourselves.” He went on to say ”Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Stein etc. etc. were all greeted with exactly this kind of outraged alarm when they first appeared. They were redeemed by time. Ought we to content ourselves with 'safe' writers or writers for whom other people have already taken the risks? To argue that ours is a special situation is no argument. Our situation is precisely what we make of it.” The magazine is dead just as soon as we are governed by other people's antic.i.p.ated reactions to what we print. We have killed it ourselves.” He went on to say ”Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Stein etc. etc. were all greeted with exactly this kind of outraged alarm when they first appeared. They were redeemed by time. Ought we to content ourselves with 'safe' writers or writers for whom other people have already taken the risks? To argue that ours is a special situation is no argument. Our situation is precisely what we make of it.”

Don's relations.h.i.+p with the board, uneasy from the start, began to crumble. He initiated another editorial brawl when he accepted an essay by William Ga.s.s, a relatively unpublished young professor then teaching at Purdue. ”The Case of the Obliging Stranger” opens with an elaborate description of a man bound and trussed and baked in an electric oven. Ga.s.s wrote: Any ethics that does not roundly condemn [baking the man] is vicious....This is really all I have to say, but I shall not stop on that account. Indeed, I shall begin again.

Several paragraphs follow, in which Ga.s.s argues that the task of ethics is to ”elicit distinctions from a recalcitrant language.” Meanwhile, the man ”is overbaked. I wonder whether this is bad or not....”

Forum's board did not know what to make of Ga.s.s's playfulness and erudition-early hallmarks of his later, much-celebrated essays. On October 30, 1959, board member Howard F. McGraw sent Don a formal letter: ”I...undoubtedly...have [a] different audience in mind for Forum. Forum. I myself conjure up, as the typical reader, a busy layman of better-than-average curiosity and intelligence....[M]y guess is that at least nine out of ten readers would give up [on Ga.s.s's essay] after a page or two.” I myself conjure up, as the typical reader, a busy layman of better-than-average curiosity and intelligence....[M]y guess is that at least nine out of ten readers would give up [on Ga.s.s's essay] after a page or two.”

At the bottom, in different typescript, McGraw added informally: Don,If, at this point, you'd be embarra.s.sed to reject the piece, go ahead and run it...but I do feel strongly about this matter. I think you...a.s.sume too much interest, background, and mental acuteness on the part of Forum Forum's readers.

Don published Ga.s.s's essay in the spring of 1960.

Maggie Marrs returned to Houston to retrieve the car she'd left with Don when she flew to France. She noticed a new gravity in him. ”I wouldn't say it was sadness,” she says. ”We were young. Sadness is something you learn later. I learned sadness over time, on subsequent trips to Paris because it's so old, with the ancient stones on the bridges....Don probably learned sadness in New York.” But he had visibly matured since she'd seen him last.

Around this time, Maurice Natanson made a brief return to Houston, for a guest lecture sponsored by the Contemporary Arts a.s.sociation. Don was pleased to see him, but the visit reminded him how dry his intellectual environment had become since his former teacher's departure. Ever the existentialist, Natanson urged Don to act to dispel his gloom about Forum Forum's future, but Don's actions had been thwarted at every turn. He had proposed a ”Conference of Editors of American Literary and Intellectual Journals” to be held in Houston, but the university refused to fund it. He submitted a grant application to the Ford Foundation, but it was rejected.

Don also felt isolated in his personal life. The Marantos had moved to Dallas; Joe had joined the PR wing of the Mobil Oil Corporation. Pat Goeters was busy establis.h.i.+ng his architectural practice and producing doc.u.mentaries for Houston's public television station. Don and Helen had made many friends among those active in the local art scene, but few of them could discuss writing and philosophy. Helen was only peripherally part of Don's intellectual world. She worked full-time in advertising, a field Don disdained, no matter how supportive he wished to be of his wife. After a series of medical tests and miscarriages, the marriage no longer held the mystery, romance, and spontaneity Don thought he could sustain with Helen. As with the magazine, his idealism had vanished. It was an increasing burden to maintain creativity at home and at work, and to keep a high level of interest. And he wasn't writing much.

”I could see and feel an abating of his exuberance for life,” Helen recalled. A few months after her most recent miscarriage, Don read William s.h.i.+rer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. s.h.i.+rer's accounts of n.a.z.i atrocities so wrenched him, Helen ”became apprehensive that he might commit suicide.” He seemed now to ”live with an intense consciousness of the world as evil.” s.h.i.+rer's accounts of n.a.z.i atrocities so wrenched him, Helen ”became apprehensive that he might commit suicide.” He seemed now to ”live with an intense consciousness of the world as evil.”

If there had been hints of a persistent melancholy in Don-in his clashes with his father, his lip twitch, his defensive irony, his fear that something might be ”permanently gone” after the army-this period, in 1959 and 1960, just before his breakthrough into important literary work, provides the first glimpse of a depression that would hound him all his life.

He retained enough Catholicism and stoic pride to rule out killing himself. Even in the pit of his misery, he told Helen he believed that a person ”had a responsibility to live out his life, whatever the circ.u.mstances.” In later years, he liked to paraphrase Nietzsche: The thought of suicide had often consoled him, Don said, and gotten him through many a bad night.

Natanson's visit unnerved him. He worried that isolation had changed his personality. One night, half-jokingly, Natanson ”alluded to Don's penchant for fast cars, a reference to his Austin-Healey,” Helen wrote. After that, Don ”seemed to feel guilty that we were indulging ourselves.” Though he ”insisted on a beautiful place in which to live and work,” he had a horror of seeming phony. He bristled when a friend kidded him about his fancy Bertoia chairs, and when another acquaintance told him he and Helen made a ”chic” couple. He talked disparagingly of ”driving a Jaguar,” his shorthand for wealthy elitism. In years to come, many of his critics dismissed him as chic-in part, Don believed, because his stories appeared in The New Yorker The New Yorker next to glittering ads for watches, jewelry, fas.h.i.+on, and Jaguars. next to glittering ads for watches, jewelry, fas.h.i.+on, and Jaguars.

Following Natanson's visit, Helen and Don talked again of Don leaving the university in order to write. ”Don saw it as the need to confront the choice between a career with money and the lifestyle it could provide...or a wholehearted commitment to writing,” Helen said later. At the end of 1959, she had started her own ad agency. She continued to teach at Dominican College. Despite her earnings, the couple remained in debt because of Don's reckless spending. He wasn't ”indulging” himself so much as failing to keep track of finances in any organized way.

Helen feared he'd want to move again to ease his restiveness. She was happy on Kipling Street, and tired of constant change. Sure enough, one day Don complained to her-after they had lived on Kipling little more than a year-that the apartment was ”inappropriate for a serious writing career.”

That Don stayed with Forum Forum as long as he did, despite his frustrations, suggests he knew what he had accomplished, even if few others did. Simply put, for a brief time he edited one of the nation's most serious and innovative intellectual journals-and at an out-of-the-way place with little funding and a conservative editorial board. The ”strange and beautiful” pieces he published pleased him immensely, as evidenced by their echoes in his fiction. as long as he did, despite his frustrations, suggests he knew what he had accomplished, even if few others did. Simply put, for a brief time he edited one of the nation's most serious and innovative intellectual journals-and at an out-of-the-way place with little funding and a conservative editorial board. The ”strange and beautiful” pieces he published pleased him immensely, as evidenced by their echoes in his fiction.

The American College Public Relations a.s.sociation gave Forum Forum its highest award, in recognition of its distinction, in 1958. In a testimonial for the journal, Norman Mailer noted, ”It looks as if I might receive better than full value for my subscription.” Tirelessly, Don explored funding schemes. He sent a copy of the magazine to Ima Hogg, the wealthy daughter of Texas's former governor, with a note saying, ”[We] thought you might be interested.” When Mc-Neil Lowry of the Ford Foundation came to Houston to talk to the directors of the Alley Theatre, Don notified the UH Development Office that they ought to pitch the magazine to him. The ”drudge work” and his ”numerous petty tasks” must have been ”more deadening for him than anyone knew,” Helen wrote. its highest award, in recognition of its distinction, in 1958. In a testimonial for the journal, Norman Mailer noted, ”It looks as if I might receive better than full value for my subscription.” Tirelessly, Don explored funding schemes. He sent a copy of the magazine to Ima Hogg, the wealthy daughter of Texas's former governor, with a note saying, ”[We] thought you might be interested.” When Mc-Neil Lowry of the Ford Foundation came to Houston to talk to the directors of the Alley Theatre, Don notified the UH Development Office that they ought to pitch the magazine to him. The ”drudge work” and his ”numerous petty tasks” must have been ”more deadening for him than anyone knew,” Helen wrote.

At the same time, he delighted in the journal's growing body of work: a ma.s.sive collage. In January 1959, he wrote Patrick J. Nicholson of the university's Development Office: ”Because Forum Forum has now published a total of ten issues, and because its future is now being debated” (in light of budget constraints), ”it seems appropriate to offer at this time some facts about it which may serve to enrich the discussion.” He composed an eclectic list, a precursor of the playful catalogs that would appear in his fiction. With great exuberance, he noted the wide range of subjects represented in the pieces that has now published a total of ten issues, and because its future is now being debated” (in light of budget constraints), ”it seems appropriate to offer at this time some facts about it which may serve to enrich the discussion.” He composed an eclectic list, a precursor of the playful catalogs that would appear in his fiction. With great exuberance, he noted the wide range of subjects represented in the pieces that Forum Forum had published: had published: Educational television, engineering education, sea animals, H. H. Bancroft's histories, opera, Faulkner, the new Germany, the director Elia Kazan, consumer research, anthropology, radiation in venom tests, the natural numbers in mathematics, home design, the French playwright Jean Giraudoux, the ”new critics,” pottery, Niccolo Machiavelli, the idea of progress, semantics, the Suez crisis, the separation of church and state, Ernest Jones, freedom as an idea, Coleridge, the relation between philosophy and the social sciences, Stalinism, contemporary music, the Algerian question, logical positivism, angels, academic freedom, psychology and ancient religions, scientism, movies and art, C. G. Jung, architectural literature, recognition of China, the fantastic, the Organization Man, nihilism, disarmament, magic, Eliot's verse plays, the Welfare State, destiny, the Affluent Society, the new French fiction, modern composers, Freud, dictators, the contemporary theatre, the suburbs, the neo-Dada movement, Fortune Fortune magazine, and James Fenimore Cooper. magazine, and James Fenimore Cooper.

Don thrilled at this woolly mix, at the fur that flew when worlds collided. He continued to attract top talent: Robbe-Grillet, Gregory Bateson, Roger Caillois, and Marshall McLuhan. Pat Goeters had studied with Mc-Luhan in Toronto; he had talked with Don about Mc-Luhan's vision of a new kind of writing for the electronic age.

Don solicited a piece from McLuhan. For Forum Forum's Summer 1960 issue, McLuhan submitted a copy of a speech he had written, ent.i.tled ”The Medium Is the Message.” Soon, this phrase would ring throughout the ”global village.”

McLuhan a.n.a.lyzed the way power structures-government, media-”get inside the...collective mind” through propaganda, advertising, and electronic imagery to ensure a ”condition of public helplessness.” Individuals exist in a storm of information and stimuli, he said, and the way to survive it is to ride the waves, just like Edgar Allan Poe's main character in the story ”A Descent into the Maelstrom.” ”Poe's sailor saved himself by studying the action of the whirlpool and by cooperating with it,” McLuhan wrote in a book ent.i.tled The Mechanical Bride The Mechanical Bride, first published in 1951.

McLuhan's version of riding the maelstrom was to forget what we think think we know-about newspapers, laundry detergents, magazine ads, movies, clothing-and study objects as they really are (a phenomenological approach); so, for example, the front page of we know-about newspapers, laundry detergents, magazine ads, movies, clothing-and study objects as they really are (a phenomenological approach); so, for example, the front page of The New York Times The New York Times is not just a summary of the news but also a series of discontinuous columns of pictures and print, collaged together in a frenzied fas.h.i.+on that recalls Cubist paintings, Joyce's novels, and modern theories of physics. is not just a summary of the news but also a series of discontinuous columns of pictures and print, collaged together in a frenzied fas.h.i.+on that recalls Cubist paintings, Joyce's novels, and modern theories of physics. Something Something about the present conjures chaos, and it is changing the way we process thought, the way we act and consort with one another. about the present conjures chaos, and it is changing the way we process thought, the way we act and consort with one another.

Trivia, cultural products, and social behavior are signs, McLuhan said. These signs don't always match the meaning of a thing (a Cadillac and a clunker both ”mean” transportation, but they signal different values: wealth and cla.s.s versus versus tastelessness and poverty). Power creates and repeats certain signs (Cadillac equals cla.s.s) to control ma.s.s behavior. tastelessness and poverty). Power creates and repeats certain signs (Cadillac equals cla.s.s) to control ma.s.s behavior.

Poe's sailor, locked in the whirlpool, dodging debris, says, ”I must have been delirious, for I even sought amus.e.m.e.nt amus.e.m.e.nt in speculating” upon the objects sinking and flying around. For McLuhan, the sailor's surrender to chaos, and his playfulness, provided a guide to the future. in speculating” upon the objects sinking and flying around. For McLuhan, the sailor's surrender to chaos, and his playfulness, provided a guide to the future.

Notably, in France, Roland Barthes was writing essays similar to McLuhan's for the left-wing magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles Les Lettres Nouvelles. Eventually, Barthes's pieces were gathered in a collection called Mythologies: Mythologies: discourses on Greta Garbo's face, food photos in magazines, laundry detergents, popular wrestling, tabloid profiles of s.p.a.ce aliens. Like McLuhan, Barthes argued that the trivia of everyday life was packed with meanings that were often at odds with their functions. We inhabit a world of signs; they claim to be ”natural,” but, in fact, they mask power's real motives. discourses on Greta Garbo's face, food photos in magazines, laundry detergents, popular wrestling, tabloid profiles of s.p.a.ce aliens. Like McLuhan, Barthes argued that the trivia of everyday life was packed with meanings that were often at odds with their functions. We inhabit a world of signs; they claim to be ”natural,” but, in fact, they mask power's real motives.

Don adopted this outlook in writing his first successful short story, ”Me and Miss Mandible,” in October 1960. ”We read signs as promises,” his narrator says. ”I believed that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love....