Part 14 (1/2)

”We were glad to see each other, and [Don] was so...happy...that I was not angry at first,” Helen claimed. ”In fact, we hugged, laughed, and talked for several minutes. About the girl, Don said simply that 'she was not anyone who mattered.' ” He had leapt eagerly into the sophisticated mess of the art world (whose s.e.xual att.i.tudes were considerably loosened by the growing use of birth-control pills).

Once more, Helen was swept into the whirl of art-world parties-most of them held in Elaine de Kooning's studio. One evening, Helen remarked dryly that there were an awful lot of parties in art circles, and Don replied, ”[N]o one else works as hard as we did [in Houston].”

”Before long, [Don] became as pa.s.sionate as ever,” Helen recalled. But after finding him with another woman, ”it was impossible for me to respond to his gestures of love. I was affectionate but...felt nothing more.”

Almost immediately, Don insisted that they live in different places. He offered to let her stay in the Fifteenth Street apartment while he looked for another spot. Discouraged, Helen ”decided there was nothing for [her] to do.” She returned to Houston and moved in with her mother.

Don's affair with Lynn Nesbit hastened the end of things. ”Helen would have hung on forever,” Herman Gollob says.

She resumed her work at the ad agency and began teaching again at Dominican College. ”[W]ithin a short time,” she said, ”I started a new social life without Don.” She was soaring above the mess.

Don felt restless on Fifteenth Street now-he a.s.sociated the apartment with Helen-and he hoped to find a less expensive place. An acquaintance told him about an empty rent-controlled flat on West Eleventh Street, near Sixth Avenue. Don checked it out, and in the spring of 1963, he moved into what would become his permanent home in Manhattan.

West Eleventh Street is in the heart of the West Village, famous for its bohemian past, when rents were low and rooms were widely available, before Sixth and Seventh avenues cut through the small, winding streets. Among those who have called the Village home are John Reed, Max Eastman, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan...”these nuts that call[ed] themselves artists,” as one old-timer put it, ”not even bothering to close [their] blinds.”

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp climbed the arch in Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park and declared the ”Independent Republic of Greenwich Village.” When Eastman helped found The Ma.s.ses The Ma.s.ses in 1910, he meant to harness the neighborhood's literary talent to publish ”what is too naked or true for a money-making press,” a tradition carried on by in 1910, he meant to harness the neighborhood's literary talent to publish ”what is too naked or true for a money-making press,” a tradition carried on by The Partisan Review The Partisan Review and and The Village Voice The Village Voice. Don had landed in a literary haven (though, in the 1960s, bohemianism s.h.i.+fted somewhat to the East Village). The ghosts of some of America's greatest writers whispered on the street corners here. The Village, with its angled, curving lanes, was intoxicated with itself. Don felt right at home. (In one sense, Houston had prepared him for life here: the Bayou City's lack of zoning led to long stretches resembling the mixed-use neighborhoods Don found so appealing in the Village.) His apartment was one block west of the building where James Thurber had lived in the 1920s, and across the street from a brownstone once occupied by S. J. Perelman. Grace Paley lived with her husband, Jess, and their two children across the street in the Unadilla Apartments, a few doors from the Greenwich Village School. Grace would become one of Don's closest friends.

In 1963, Don paid around $125 a month for his railroad apartment on the building's second floor. Three central windows, the middle one given over to a small air conditioner, faced south, toward the school across the street. The apartment's walls were old and painted yellow. The kitchen was placed toward the back, overlooking a tiny yard below. Just off the living room, Don set up his desk and typewriter.

The rest of the s.p.a.ce remained empty for a while-Helen had asked Don to send their furniture back to Houston. ”What about when you return to New York?” Don asked her. ”I was puzzled and frustrated,” Helen recalled, ”but when I asked if he were ready for me to come back, his answer was 'not yet.' And so within a few days, the moving truck arrived [in Houston] and I established my own home once again.”

On West Eleventh, Don wrote most of the stories that made him famous. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published a year before Don arrived in the Village, Jane Jacobs cited the neighborhoods around West Eleventh as models of good city life-short, lively streets that promoted ”frequent contact with a wide circle of people” and provided opportunities for ”humble” self-government by concerned neighbors. Don would celebrate these qualities in such stories as ”The Balloon,” ”City Life,” ”The Gla.s.s Mountain,” and in the novel Paradise Paradise. And as Grace Paley once pointed out, living across the street from a school meant that Don was one of the few American men writing in the mid-twentieth century who paid vivid attention to children.

”[O]nce in a while when I was low on cash I'd write something for certain strange magazines-the names I don't even remember. Names like Dasher Dasher and and Thug Thug,” Don once told an interviewer. ”I do remember picking up five hundred bucks or something per piece. I did that a few times. Kind of gory, or even Gorey, fiction” that will never resurface. One such story was ”The Ontological Basis of Two,” published in the June 1963 issue of Cavalier Cavalier (a cutrate (a cutrate Playboy Playboy) under the pseudonym Michael Houston. Don carried a copy of the magazine with him to Texas when he returned for two weeks right before Christmas.

A fanciful seduction tale, and a parody of B. F. Skinner's behavioral theories, the story is most notable for what it reveals of Don's preoccupations at the time. One character wears a ”Ford Foundation overcoat”; another burns with a ”Guggenheim-applicant feeling.”

When Don saw Helen, he handed her the copy of the magazine. He told her that Playboy Playboy had turned the story down, killing his ”hopes of a warm winter.” had turned the story down, killing his ”hopes of a warm winter.”

He ”wanted to avoid the places that had been part of our weekly ritual since 1956,” Helen recalled. ”I could see that he was cautious and unwilling to risk anything that might threaten his self-control.” He told her he still wanted to live alone but that he ”had not given up on a later reconciliation.” She didn't respond; she simply told him about her new life and adventures. He asked her if the pilots who gave her flying lessons ”were tall and blond and wore long white scarves.” She invited him to the airfield-the Collier Airport in northwest Houston-but the thought of the place terrified him.

”[F]or me, the worst was past,” Helen wrote in her memoir. ”I had grieved for an entire year and could no longer feel...sorrow. My pride and my own expectations [made it] impossible for me to propose any kind of compromise.” The night before Don returned to New York, he reiterated that for now he needed to be alone, to pursue his career. ”As we walked to his car, I looked up at him and saw that tears were streaming down his face,” Helen said. ”It was the first and only time that I ever saw him cry.”

26.

FOR I'M THE BOY

The first issue of Location Location-with a circulation of about five thousand copies-arrived in the nation's literary bookstores in May 1963. In addition to the Bellow, Koch, and McLuhan pieces, it featured photographs of Robert Rauschenberg's studio taken by Rudy Burckhardt, excerpts from an interview with Willem de Kooning by David Sylvester, a series of Saul Steinberg drawings, an excerpt of a Larry Rivers memoir, an essay on modern music by Peter Yates, and photographs of sculptures by Reuben Nakian, Mark di Suvero, David Smith, and Barnett Newman.

Don was not happy with the issue. Individual pieces pleased him, but he felt that the magazine lacked a coherent theme and that it wasn't sufficiently critical of the current state of the arts. In introductory notes, Rosenberg and Hess tried to explain the focus of the magazine-it would explore ”certain aspects of [an] artist's work that will reflect something of the logic and direction of his enterprise,” Hess said. It would concentrate one at a time on ”single [art] objects” to indicate ”something” of the object's ”variety.” Rosenberg suggested that the journal's aim was to overcome specialization in the arts, which had become fields of academic study in order to find niches in a culture that didn't care for them-” 'At last there is a place for the Artist in America,' sighed the poet as he was sworn in.”

Rosenberg railed against the sorry state of American literature: ”For twenty years poetry and fiction have had their goals set by a traditionalist imagination in harmony with the formal conservatism of the ma.s.s media. The result has been an incredible naivete in regard to the process of composition....The conditions of psychic self-enslavement and joylessness under which most current literary works are produced makes reading difficult for anyone but a s.a.d.i.s.t.” Literary innovation depends ”on criticism,” Rosenberg said. Every writer must react ”against the insufficiency of what he admires most.”

It should be noted that Rosenberg's literary sensibility, and his hopes for Location Location, had been shaped by an earlier magazine, the Partisan Review Partisan Review, founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv in a Greenwich Village loft in 1934. Its first issues coincided with the rise of the John Reed Club. Phillips, the child of Jewish immigrants in East Harlem, and Rahv, a Russian transplant, were pressured by the club to express Soviet ideology in the magazine, in the style of socialist realism. Phillips and Rahv were Marxists, but they were modernists in their literary tastes, and eventually they broke with the club. This political/literary push-pull, with multiple contradictions and a strong polemical edge, continued to define Rosenberg's judgments about art and his editorial style.

Visually, Location Location celebrated collage-not only in the photographs of sculptures, paintings, and drawings but also in the variety of layouts and typefaces (courtesy of Don). celebrated collage-not only in the photographs of sculptures, paintings, and drawings but also in the variety of layouts and typefaces (courtesy of Don).

Edges, placement, shapes: These formal concerns are echoed in each of the texts. In the magazine's attention to ”objects” and ”acts,” an existential outlook is apparent. In its interest in ”Random Order,” a desire to wrest freshness from tradition and spark a cultural revolution is just as plain.

Despite his dissatisfaction with the issue, Don felt proud of certain things. In preparing the Rauschenberg article, he had accompanied Rudy Burckhardt to Rauschenberg's studio and ”noticed that the windows overlooking Broadway were dark gray with...good New York grime. Rauschenberg was then working on some of the earliest of his black-and-white silkscreen paintings, and the tonality of the paintings was very much that of the windows. We ran a shot of the windows alongside photographs of the paintings...instant art history.”

Writers, editors, and publishers pressured Location Location to respond to the era's tumultuous events. In July 1963, Rosenberg received a note from Barney Rosset of Grove Press asking him to use the magazine to rally support for Henry Miller: ”[The] New York State Court of Appeals has just banned to respond to the era's tumultuous events. In July 1963, Rosenberg received a note from Barney Rosset of Grove Press asking him to use the magazine to rally support for Henry Miller: ”[The] New York State Court of Appeals has just banned Tropic of Cancer Tropic of Cancer in the entire state of New York.” in the entire state of New York.”

A few months later, the editorial staff of Basic Books solicited the magazine's help in rounding up tributes to John F. Kennedy. ”The New York Times New York Times...received an unprecedented number of poems” about the a.s.sa.s.sination, the letter said. ”Most of them were expressions of profound grief. A young President had been murdered, and with him, it seemed, died a new hope that he had generated for the world. But for the most part these poems were notable for their sincerity rather than for their poetry.” Basic Books wanted to publish an anthology of worthy responses, and it felt the magazine was in a position to a.s.sist.

Rosenberg, Hess, and Don resisted the temptation to be topical, and they tried harder for thematic cohesiveness in the second issue, which appeared in the summer of 1964. They continued to champion formal experimentation: The issue featured a story by William Ga.s.s, poems by John Ashbery, photos of Ray Johnson's letter collages and of a retrospective of William Baziotes's work, and reproductions of new paintings by Willem de Kooning. The issue's most striking images were of de Kooning's studio: coffee cups half-filled with paint atop a paint-encrusted table resembling a coastal landscape; newspaper clippings, gloves, pamphlets pinned to a wall.

In a lead editorial piece ent.i.tled ”Form and Despair,” Rosenberg blasted literature's concern with ”social and historical happenings” and urged writing to ”examine its own practices,” the way recent painting had done. The failure of American writers to consider form amounted to a ”lack of seriousness,” he said.

On the pages immediately following, Saul Bellow reb.u.t.ted these remarks. ”A literature which is exclusively about itself?” he cried. ”Intolerable!” There was good reason, he said, why the ”modern novel is predominantly realistic,” and that was because ”realism is based upon our common life.” Therefore, content-the ”social” and the ”historical”-was far more crucial than form, in his view.

Don weighed in on this debate, contributing an essay ent.i.tled ”After Joyce”-his first formal statement of literary values (and only one of two essays on writing he would ever publish). He noted that a ”mysterious s.h.i.+ft...takes place as soon as one says that art is not about something but is is something”-that is, when a literary text ”becomes an object in the world rather than a commentary upon the world.” He went on to say: ”Interrogating older [literary] works, the question is: what do they say about the world and being in the world? But the literary object is itself 'world' and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world directly.” something”-that is, when a literary text ”becomes an object in the world rather than a commentary upon the world.” He went on to say: ”Interrogating older [literary] works, the question is: what do they say about the world and being in the world? But the literary object is itself 'world' and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world directly.”

Instead of ”listening to an authoritative account of the world delivered by an expert (Faulkner on Mississippi, Hemingway on the corrida),” the reader b.u.mps into ”something that is there there, like a rock or a refrigerator.” Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake remains ”always remains ”always there there, like the landscape surrounding the reader's home or the buildings bounding the reader's apartment. The book remains problematic, unexhausted.”

Twice in ”After Joyce,” Don harkened back to the first fiction he had ever published, in his high school literary magazine. Pilgrim's Progress Pilgrim's Progress, which he had parodied in ”Rover Boys' Retrogression,” is an ”object,” just as Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake is an object, but John Bunyan did not is an object, but John Bunyan did not intend intend this ”special placement” for his work, so he failed to reap any metaphysical benefits. Don pointed to Kenneth Koch's this ”special placement” for his work, so he failed to reap any metaphysical benefits. Don pointed to Kenneth Koch's The Red Robins The Red Robins as an intentional literary object. ”Koch's strategy is to re-enter the history of the novel and fix upon a particular kind of American sub-literature, that of the Rover Boys [and] Tom Swift....These books, sentimental, ingenuous, and trivial, furnish a ground of positions, att.i.tudes and allusions against which” Koch enacts his ”search for poetry.” as an intentional literary object. ”Koch's strategy is to re-enter the history of the novel and fix upon a particular kind of American sub-literature, that of the Rover Boys [and] Tom Swift....These books, sentimental, ingenuous, and trivial, furnish a ground of positions, att.i.tudes and allusions against which” Koch enacts his ”search for poetry.”

Don insisted that art can change the world: ”I do not think it fanciful...to say that Governor Rockefeller, standing among his Miros and de Koonings, is worked upon by them, and if they do not make a Democrat or a Socialist of him they at least alter the character of his Republicanism.” At a minimum, a literary object forces a reader to consider: ”What do you think of a society in which these things are seen as art?”

Don admitted he was promoting cultural terrorism, smuggling ”Hostile Object[s]” into readers' hands with the aim of reviving ”outmoded forms” and ”celebrating life.” The traditional novel, he said, was a ”doomed tower.”

Location did not make it to a third number. The magazine cost nearly thirty thousand dollars per issue to produce, and it didn't sell well in stores. Subscriptions were slow to acc.u.mulate. More to the point, tensions grew between Don and did not make it to a third number. The magazine cost nearly thirty thousand dollars per issue to produce, and it didn't sell well in stores. Subscriptions were slow to acc.u.mulate. More to the point, tensions grew between Don and Location' Location's founders, Hess and Rosenberg. They remained friends, but friends.h.i.+p was easier if they didn't work together. Like Don's father, Rosenberg and Hess were formidable intellectual figures. Don needed distance from them.

”[H]e was a talker, he had had to talk...[a]s he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous,” Saul Bellow once said of Rosenberg in a thinly disguised fictional portrait. ”Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people torn to bits.” He ”lived for ideas,” and he could carry his listeners into ”utterly foreign spheres of speculation.” Don thrilled at all of this, but he had his own ideas, and felt, as he had felt in his father's house, that his thoughts couldn't grow in the shadow of the great man. to talk...[a]s he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous,” Saul Bellow once said of Rosenberg in a thinly disguised fictional portrait. ”Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people torn to bits.” He ”lived for ideas,” and he could carry his listeners into ”utterly foreign spheres of speculation.” Don thrilled at all of this, but he had his own ideas, and felt, as he had felt in his father's house, that his thoughts couldn't grow in the shadow of the great man.

If Don disagreed with Rosenberg, he was made to feel he had missed something, and never allowed to forget it.

In an undated ”Memorandum on Location Location Prospectus and Prospects,” apparently addressed to Rosenberg and Hess between the first and second issues, Don said, ”Let me confess now that my own idea for the magazine hasn't worked out.” The memorandum is worth quoting at length because it reads like an aesthetic manifesto-even more so than ”After Joyce.” Prospectus and Prospects,” apparently addressed to Rosenberg and Hess between the first and second issues, Don said, ”Let me confess now that my own idea for the magazine hasn't worked out.” The memorandum is worth quoting at length because it reads like an aesthetic manifesto-even more so than ”After Joyce.”

Don said he was embarra.s.sed at ”being inside the establishment,” forced to praise rather than critique great figures such as Willem de Kooning and Reuben Nakian. In his view, the establishment position had ”fatal consequences”: We are heavily committed to the leading figures of an achieved revolution. Most literary-art magazines come into being as the organs of revolutionary parties and see their missions in terms of promulgation of a radical doctrine, destruction of the existing order, and establishment of a new regime. Location Location enters as an apologist for an existing order. We are not defending a stockade but guarding a bank. enters as an apologist for an existing order. We are not defending a stockade but guarding a bank.

Speaking of American literature, he expressed the opinion that ”we all seem radically bored” with it. ”This is probably literature's fault rather than our own, but we have not found a way to make this radical boredom a principle which operates to the advantage of the magazine.”