Part 10 (1/2)

”This is your big chance. The Lord has sent me here only to introduce you to the literary world. Dash off a few brilliant short stories and I'll try to peddle them for you.” Herman Gollob had made this offer to Don in January 1958, shortly after joining the William Morris Agency in New York. After leaving Houston, Gollob studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. Then he went to work for MCA Artists, a talent agency for actors. Finally, he landed at William Morris.

Throughout his final months as editor of Forum Forum, Don had worked on a story called ”Hiding Man,” set in a nearly empty movie theater devoted to horror films. Here, a disguised priest tracks down a young man, a lapsed Catholic, and hopes to s.n.a.t.c.h him back to the fold. Hovering between fantasy and realism, the story is indebted to Kafka. Gollob didn't know what to do with it. It wasn't the kind of thing he thought he could sell. In December 1959, he sent an apologetic letter to Don, who set the story aside.

In early October, after resigning from Forum Forum, Don established a rigorous writing routine. By and large, he stuck to the schedule for the rest of his life. He rose at dawn, dressed neatly in corduroy or khaki slacks, and settled at his Remington typewriter on the screened-in back porch. By 8:30 or 9:00 A.M. A.M., Helen prepared a breakfast of bacon or ham with fruit juice and toast. She'd take it to him and then retire to the dining room to work on her ad accounts or lectures for her cla.s.ses at Dominican College.

The clacking of Don's typewriter shot through the porch screens and startled early morning pa.s.sersby on the sidewalks. He revised each sentence several times, often tearing the paper from the roller and tossing it into the trash. He'd lean back in his chair, light a cigarette, and read his words aloud. Sometimes he'd call to Helen, ”asking her how spell” a certain word? Or he'd say, ”How does this phrase strike you?”

On his way to the kitchen for a second cup of coffee, he'd stop to give her a kiss. Or he'd quote Eliot: ”I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Or to make her laugh, he'd balance a pencil on the tip of his nose.

Occasionally, he'd read a pa.s.sage to her and seek her reaction, or he'd pace the house, repeating his sentences aloud. Flaubert, he said, used to walk into the woods and shout his words to the tops of the trees.

If a paragraph proved especially troublesome, Don strolled around the neighborhood, past the art galleries, the artists' studios, and the historic houses of the Montrose area, many of which were being renovated to serve as apartments or offices for architects and lawyers. After a half hour or so, he'd return to his Remington.

By noon or one o'clock, he'd knock off for the day. The wastebasket bulged with paper, thirty or forty sheets at a time. Most of them contained just a sentence or two. What he kept, after a morning session, ranged from nothing at all to maybe two pages. Very carefully, he carried his ashtray to the kitchen, and emptied it into the trash. ”[D]uring these first years of writing, he was irresistibly happy,” Helen recalled.

Shortly before Don quit his job to write full-time, the Houston Post Houston Post printed an interview with his father ent.i.tled ”Construction and Conformity.” Portions of it gave Don fertile material for his first successful short story. printed an interview with his father ent.i.tled ”Construction and Conformity.” Portions of it gave Don fertile material for his first successful short story.

By now, Donald Barthelme, Sr., was a veteran of Houston's architectural scene, and a teacher at the University of Houston as well as at the Rice Inst.i.tute. In the interview, he comes across as brash and uncompromising. The years had not softened him. ”The customer is never right in architecture,” he claimed. ”He operates from a very limited background.”

He applauded iconoclasts: ”We depend upon...people who refuse to conform to move us into new paths, to find for us new aspects of things which add new enlightenment.” But then, perhaps inadvertently revealing worry over his eldest son, a budding nonconformist, Barthelme qualified his thought: ”On the other hand, it's practically impossible for those people to exist unless they are provided with private sources of income and are armored against all sorts of pressures from their friends and other[s]. The penalty of non-conformance is so great as to even endanger your life, if nothing else by the slow process of starvation.”

School design, one of Barthelme's favorite topics, dominated the conversation. ”Did you ever notice the similarity between school...and canning tomatoes?” Barthelme asked the reporter. ”You put things in both can and child, test both, label both.” Then he railed against traditional learning arrangements: People don't come in grades. As a matter of fact, you go into any elementary school, you'll find that there are three sizes of chairs in that room...because there are three sizes of children, and they can't all use the same chairs.... no two people are alike. Their rates of learning are not alike. There's nothing at all about them that is alike. Yet we must cram them into some sort of grades....

In the months following his father's interview, Don drafted a story about a thirty-five-year-old man named Joseph who has been, through clerical error, ”officially” declared ”a child” and sent back to Horace Greeley Elementary School. ”I...sit in this too-small seat with the desktop cramping my thighs...in the no-nonsense ugliness of this steel and gla.s.s building,” he says. Like Don's father, Joseph discovers that age is not an accurate predictor of development. ”The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel,” Joseph says. ”There are only individual egos, crazy for love.”

Eventually, it dawns on him that he has not been forced here by accident, after all. ”A ruined marriage, a ruined...career, a grim interlude in the Army when I was almost not a person. This is the sum of my existence to date, a dismal total,” he says. ”Small wonder that re-education seemed my only hope. It is clear even to me that I need reworking in some fundamental way. How efficient is the society that provides thus for the salvage of its clinkers!” He will sit in the wrong-size desk, reliving his early schooling, until he learns to conform.

Like ”Pages from the Annual Report” and the aborted drafts of ”Hiding Man,” ”The Darling Duckling at School” proceeds from a Kafka-like vision-an all-knowing and secretive system controls everyone's lives-but the story succeeds, where the others did not, because it is animated by more than its premise. Personal anguish (a ”ruined marriage,” a ”ruined career”) and Don's wry admiration for his father's views lift the piece beyond its clever conception and into pathos.

Joseph has ”misread” society's signs. In his ”former existence” as an insurance-claims adjustor, he ”read the company motto ('Here to Help in Time of Need') as a description of the duty of the adjustor, drastically mislocating the company's deepest concerns,” which are to earn a hefty profit and please its investors. This failure to heed cultural ”clues”-a concern raised by Walker Percy and Marshall McLuhan in their Forum Forum pieces-spirals Joseph into a Nietzschean repet.i.tion. The teacher's name, Mandible (a fear-some, man-eating creature?), suggests another reason for Joseph's regression. pieces-spirals Joseph into a Nietzschean repet.i.tion. The teacher's name, Mandible (a fear-some, man-eating creature?), suggests another reason for Joseph's regression.

Yet in Don's hands, the situation is not a nightmare. Joseph wonders at the life around him, enjoying the ”furnace of love, love, love” in the sixth-grade cla.s.sroom. In his former job, he had been compelled to spend time ”amid the debris of our civilization: rumpled fenders, roofless sheds, gutted warehouses, smashed arms and legs.” He admits, ”After ten years of this one has a tendency to see the world as a vast junkyard, looking at a man and seeing only his (potentially) mangled arms, entering a house only to trace the path of the inevitable fire.” Still, Joseph marvels at the world, combing through its trash with the interest of an artist, plucking castoffs to make a collage. A sweet optimism fills the story, despite Joseph's disastrous fate. He fulfills the teacher s.e.xually (”She knows now that everything she has been told about life, about America, is true”) and they get caught.

When Don had finished a satisfactory draft of the story, he walked into the dining room and said to Helen, ”Well, Babe, are you ready for this?” Helen later wrote, ”I turned...and saw Don standing there holding a typescript. [He] spoke in a serious, challenging tone, but underlying it was a kind of gaiety that characterized his mood as he worked. We moved into the living room, and I sat on the sofa while he stood facing me and read....His voice was rich and deep, every word precisely enunciated. I was astonished-I had heard nothing like it before, yet in it I could hear the Don that I knew and loved, his incisive wit and his satirical humor, the matter-of-fact tone and the ironies it created.”

Don sent the story to an ambitious new West Coast journal called Contact Contact. Each morning, he eagerly antic.i.p.ated the postman's arrival, leaving his desk and waiting on the front porch to take the mail. Within weeks, Contact Contact responded positively. responded positively.

The magazine's history is worth reviewing, since Don believed his work belonged in its pages. One of its editors was Evan S. Connell, who would write the brilliant novels Mrs. Bridge Mrs. Bridge and and Mr. Bridge Mr. Bridge, and several other distinguished books. Contact had enjoyed two previous incarnations before it was revived in 1958. In 1920, William Carlos Williams cofounded the journal, with the aim of presenting writing that was ”stark” and ”fearlessly obscene,” literature that would ”speak to the present.” He chose the name because he believed, erroneously, airplane pilots said ”Contact” when they touched ground after a flight. The word suggested earthiness as well as the ability to soar, and it had a modern ring.

From 1920 to 1923, Contact Contact published Ezra Pound, Kenneth Burke, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, among others. After that, the magazine suspended publication, as Williams busied himself with his own writing. In 1931, the year of Don's birth, Williams was ready to try the journal again, and he chose as his coeditor Nathanael West. published Ezra Pound, Kenneth Burke, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, among others. After that, the magazine suspended publication, as Williams busied himself with his own writing. In 1931, the year of Don's birth, Williams was ready to try the journal again, and he chose as his coeditor Nathanael West.

At the time, West was flirting with Surrealism. On the dust jacket of his novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he described himself as ”much like Guillaume Apollinaire, Jarry, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Raymond Roussel, and certain of the surrealists” in his ”use of the violently disa.s.sociated, the dehumanized marvelous.” West's sensibility seemed ant.i.thetical to Williams's longing for a spare, natively American realism. But in 1931, when Surrealism made its American debut at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, in a show that featured Pica.s.so, Max Ernst, and De Chirico, curators translated the word Surrealism Surrealism as ”Super-Realism.” Like Surrealist painters, the writers West admired were not content to define Surrealism as dream imagery and unconscious impulses. The unconscious, they said, was filled with cliches, trivia, and debris from popular culture-hence, Duchamp's ready-mades, cultural objects, like his urinal, that become art because we as ”Super-Realism.” Like Surrealist painters, the writers West admired were not content to define Surrealism as dream imagery and unconscious impulses. The unconscious, they said, was filled with cliches, trivia, and debris from popular culture-hence, Duchamp's ready-mades, cultural objects, like his urinal, that become art because we call call them art, and see them with fresh vision. Williams's famous ”red wheel-barrow” is just such an object. them art, and see them with fresh vision. Williams's famous ”red wheel-barrow” is just such an object.

Here was the point of contact between Williams and West, between Surrealism and Super-Realism. The men were united in their desire to translate Surrealism to an American landscape. Among the writers they sought to publish were Hemingway, Faulkner, Edward Dahlberg, Hart Crane, and Harold Rosenberg.

In a decade when naturalism dominated American literature (Studs Lonigan, The Grapes of Wrath), Contact Contact chose the path of nonconformance. West, who explored the malevolence of American jingoism through his character Lemuel Pitkin, was writing almost entirely in cliches-deliberately so, as he understood the power of ba.n.a.lity to shape public experience. His dead-pan delivery, use of worn-out phrases, and the dumbing down of therapeutic approaches-eventually, Don would seize and refine each of these stylistic strategies. Given chose the path of nonconformance. West, who explored the malevolence of American jingoism through his character Lemuel Pitkin, was writing almost entirely in cliches-deliberately so, as he understood the power of ba.n.a.lity to shape public experience. His dead-pan delivery, use of worn-out phrases, and the dumbing down of therapeutic approaches-eventually, Don would seize and refine each of these stylistic strategies. Given Contact Contact's colorful past, it's not surprising he chose the journal as the first place to send his work.

On the cover of the issue in which Don's story appeared (February 1961), a street worker, gripping his hard hat, leans against a wheelbarrow-an homage to Williams's poem. Williams is listed as a contributing editor, along with Nelson Algren, Wallace Stegner, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and S. I. Hayakawa. In payment for his story, Don received ”12 Shares of Cla.s.s A Capital Stock of Angel Island Publications, Inc.”

”Don observed that he felt a bit like he was starting a new life, that he felt a little strange,” Helen recalled. After a morning of writing, he would sometimes help Helen compose ad copy or design a print ad. ”[He] did not enjoy writing such material, especially anything in which humor was inappropriate,” she said. ”For print media advertising, he was much more interested in art and design than in copy. I worked with several commercial artists, but Don designed most of the ads during the first year of my agency.”

In the afternoons, he helped Helen organize her lectures for Dominican College. For a course she was teaching on the short story, he wrote the following notes: ”In a work of literature form and content are so beautifully welded together that it is difficult to separate them....Form may be said to be the arrangement of parts so that a preconceived effect is successfully achieved. In a successful work of literature, Form Form is used to state or establish is used to state or establish Meaning Meaning...[the] task of the writer in general is to give form to the raw material of experience-to say what it means.”

He once told Helen he thought formal experimentation could lead him to other dimensions of experience besides that of time-bound realism, to a place where ”everything is different.” The world as it is disappointed him, as it had disappointed his father. Accepted wisdom and the accepted forms forms of things had gone stale. He insisted, ”What I write has to be in the present. I cannot understand how anyone can be interested in the past.” of things had gone stale. He insisted, ”What I write has to be in the present. I cannot understand how anyone can be interested in the past.”

He returned to ”Hiding Man.”

Helen wrote that the story's theme may ”have been suggested by an article that had appeared in Time Time magazine in which Marcel Camus is quoted as saying, 'The cinema has replaced the church, and people seek truth at movies instead of the Ma.s.s.'” At the time, Camus was a relatively unknown French film director who had just completed his first feature, magazine in which Marcel Camus is quoted as saying, 'The cinema has replaced the church, and people seek truth at movies instead of the Ma.s.s.'” At the time, Camus was a relatively unknown French film director who had just completed his first feature, Black Orpheus Black Orpheus, a translation of the Orpheus myth to the barrios and hills of contemporary Brazil.

In its issue of November 16, 1959, Time Time ran an article on ran an article on Black Orpheus Black Orpheus and the French New Wave. Camus, quoted extensively, did not mention film in connection with the church, but an unnamed critic said movie directors now ”speak of cinema as of a religion.” and the French New Wave. Camus, quoted extensively, did not mention film in connection with the church, but an unnamed critic said movie directors now ”speak of cinema as of a religion.”

Whether or not Don was thinking of this article, he clearly had in mind Walker Percy's The Moviegoer The Moviegoer as he began reworking ”The Hiding Man.” Don's story is less about movies than about popular entertainment and church rituals as sign systems. It is a McLuhan-like exercise in reading American culture for clues to concealed realities. as he began reworking ”The Hiding Man.” Don's story is less about movies than about popular entertainment and church rituals as sign systems. It is a McLuhan-like exercise in reading American culture for clues to concealed realities.

In the story the theater's movies-Attack of the Puppet People, She G.o.ds of Shark Reef, Night of the Blood Beast-recall movies Don reviewed for the Houston Post Houston Post. ”People think these things are jokes,” the narrator, Burlingame, says of the films. ”[B]ut they are wrong, it is dangerous to ignore a vision....”

Like Ralph Ellison's protagonist in Invisible Man Invisible Man, Burlingame has freed himself from the received ideas of society and church. He has learned to interpret the culture, and he has gone underground. ”Most people don't have the wit to be afraid,” he says. ”[M]ost view television, smoke cigars, fondle wives, have children, vote...never confront Screaming Skull, Teenage Werewolf, Beast with a Thousand Eyes Screaming Skull, Teenage Werewolf, Beast with a Thousand Eyes, no conception of what lies beneath the surface, no faith in any manifestation not certified by hierarchy.”

Just two years after Don published ”Hiding Man” in the Spring-Summer 1961 issue of First Person First Person, America was stunned by a man who tried to hide in a nearly empty movie theater. When Lee Harvey Oswald ducked into the Texas Theatre in Dallas shortly after President Kennedy was shot, two genre movies were playing, War Is h.e.l.l War Is h.e.l.l and and Cry of Battle Cry of Battle. As Burligame says, ”it is dangerous to ignore a vision,” especially a nation's violent image of itself, neatly packaged in its popular entertainments. ”People think these things are jokes, but they are wrong.”

In her memoir, Helen said: As Don wrote his first stories, trying to do something that no other writer had yet attempted, I did not find his work strange. Nor was it puzzling....The idea of creating fantasies or incongruous situations, of combining the real with the unreal, was emerging as a new way of interpreting the world....In the literature of the postWorld War II period, and with the continuing dominance of New Criticism, the story as an object mattered; it was a work of art that the writer created. And the most powerful influence of all continued to be what the Modernists, especially Pound and Eliot, had given us: the necessity of creating something ”new.”A reader did not ask what a story or poem meant....What you talked about was ”form and content.” This phrase seems hackneyed today, out-of-date and overworked. But it was real then, and what is more important, it was at the heart of Don's creativity.

Maggie Maranto offers a slightly different perspective: Though Don was an essentially post-Word War II product, he was really just about the last of a long line of wonderfully inventive, trenchant, but lighthearted humorists who filled the pages of newspapers, magazines, and books dating back to the late 1800s. A number of popular magazines were being published in the early years of the twentieth century, leading to a proliferation of fiction writers, since they could actually make a living from their contributions. There was, for example, Jerome K. Jerome, P. G. Wodehouse, Booth Tarkington, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, and S. J. Perelman. All of them catalyzed Don's thinking and his view of life, and inspired him to put his own special, unique wit to paper.

These summaries, insightful as they are, suggest a more uniform literary setting than existed in America. Don's struggles with Forum Forum show how limited taste could be, even in (maybe show how limited taste could be, even in (maybe especially especially in) an academic environment. As Don began to write in earnest, Nabokov's in) an academic environment. As Don began to write in earnest, Nabokov's Lolita Lolita still faced bookstore bans, nearly five years after it had first been published in the United States. still faced bookstore bans, nearly five years after it had first been published in the United States. Time Time magazine wrote of Samuel Beckett, ”[his] vision is too ghastly to be borne in the long run...[he] has conjured it up about as many times as most readers will be able to stand” (ten years later, he won the n.o.bel Prize). magazine wrote of Samuel Beckett, ”[his] vision is too ghastly to be borne in the long run...[he] has conjured it up about as many times as most readers will be able to stand” (ten years later, he won the n.o.bel Prize).

Yet news weeklies discussed complex writers such as Albert Camus and Max Frisch. In October 1960, as Don started writing every morning, Time Time reviewed a translation of Heinrich von Kleist's reviewed a translation of Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O The Marquise of O, which became one of Don's favorite books. In spite of moral, legal, and financial challenges, in spite of the stubbornness of old-fas.h.i.+oned tastes, literary possibilities seemed to be expanding, and finding popular acceptance.

Nathanael West's darkness, in Miss Lonelyhearts Miss Lonelyhearts and and A Cool Million A Cool Million, flowered in the black humor of the 1950s and early 1960s. Some observers felt nihilism and absurd laughter were inevitable reactions to the war in Korea or McCarthyism. Unsparing novels by ex-soldiers such as James Jones and Norman Mailer posit the shock of World War II as the center of a cynical worldview that offered laughter as the best response to nuclear threats and n.a.z.i atrocities.

If we take a still longer view, we see West extending a tradition of grotesque humor traceable to Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Twain. But in the 1950s and 1960s, many American writers-among them, Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Terry Southern-used wicked comedy in a particularly self-conscious manner. Joseph h.e.l.ler's Catch-22 Catch-22 holds pride of place on the period's Shelf of Alienated Laughter. In 1969, Bruce Jay Friedman edited a widely reviewed anthology called holds pride of place on the period's Shelf of Alienated Laughter. In 1969, Bruce Jay Friedman edited a widely reviewed anthology called Black Humor Black Humor. By 1969, black humor had begun to fade as a publis.h.i.+ng trend; Friedman admitted that very little bound the writers he had picked for the book. Yet he insisted that ”if you are alive today, and stick your head out of doors now and then, you know that there is a nervousness, a tempo, a near hysterical new beat in the air, a punis.h.i.+ng isolation and loneliness of a strange, frenzied new kind. It is in the music and the talk and the films and the theater and it is in the prose style” of American writers.