Part 15 (1/2)

He was also in tune with existentialist fas.h.i.+on (or the part of existentialism that wallowed in grim cupidity).

Happily for Don, the explosion of foreign movies in Manhattan coincided with a growing American film underground led by Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol. In 1963, at the Factory on Forty-seventh Street, Warhol produced his first film, Sleep Sleep, a six-hour tour of a slumbering man's body. This was followed a year later by Empire Empire, an eight-hour still-camera view of the Empire State Building. ”The themes of [Warhol's] films were unspeakably ba.n.a.l,” wrote film historian Klaus Honnef. Yet the movies' ”clumsiness” made them ”strikingly immediate and fresh”: If the cinemagoer really concentrated and became involved in these films, they had an incredibly forceful effect. Offering utterly meaningless trivia, they took an attentive audience out of the real world of purpose and constraint and induced a mood bordering on the ecstatic....[Warhol's] films would be unthinkable without the traditional film to hold them up against; they are shaped by their deliberate contrast to the Hollywood approach....

If Honnef's a.s.sessment sounds strained now, it's a sign of Warhol's success at exposing Hollywood formulas. It's also a sign that the pa.s.sions of New York's 1960s film culture are long gone, as are many of the theaters in which that culture thrived. The 8th Street Playhouse, where Don used to walk from his apartment, has closed. The Bleecker Street Cinema fell into financial ruin, ended its days as a p.o.r.no house, and was gutted for retail s.p.a.ce. The Thalia was boarded up in 1987, and in the spring of 2005 the Beekman, which made an appearance in Annie Hall Annie Hall, Woody Allen's Oscarwinning paean to the city, shut its doors.

Since the 1920s, contributors to The New Yorker The New Yorker had written for urban romantics, the type of people who would frequent sophisticated films and popular culture. Fittingly, the magazine's offices, at 25 West 43rd Street, in a Beaux-Arts building beloved of E. B. White, were near Aeolian Hall, where Gershwin debuted had written for urban romantics, the type of people who would frequent sophisticated films and popular culture. Fittingly, the magazine's offices, at 25 West 43rd Street, in a Beaux-Arts building beloved of E. B. White, were near Aeolian Hall, where Gershwin debuted Rhapsody in Blue Rhapsody in Blue in February 1924. No matter the era, the ”old” New York was always vanis.h.i.+ng, always a.s.suming a brittle, nostalgic glow-a wonderful elegance. The magazine's awareness of this was part of its appeal; at times, it was a measure of its stodginess. in February 1924. No matter the era, the ”old” New York was always vanis.h.i.+ng, always a.s.suming a brittle, nostalgic glow-a wonderful elegance. The magazine's awareness of this was part of its appeal; at times, it was a measure of its stodginess.

Harold Ross, born in Colorado and raised there and in Utah, had come to the city, as Don would, with a western swagger and a lot of newspaper experience. He knew what he wanted when he founded the magazine: a mixture of humor, sophistication, and romance. Within a year of its first appearance on newsstands, ”the look, the editorial and graphic components, and the feel of the magazine would be more or less in place,” wrote Ben YaG.o.da. After that, ”virtually any alteration or innovation would be made within within those constraints,” he added. those constraints,” he added.

And yet nothing was ever good enough for Ross. Robert Coates, an early ”Talk of the Town” writer, has noted that in the magazine's early days, ”not only part.i.tions” in the office ”but editors and just about everything else came and went or were s.h.i.+fted about almost constantly. We used to joke about it at the time [as evidence] of Ross's restlessness, but as I see it now, something deeper was involved....Ross's sudden changes of plan and direction were like the chargings-about of a man in a canebrake, trying blindly to get through to the clearer ground he is certain must lie beyond.”

This desperate desire for clarity stamped itself on the magazine's prose style-take, for example, the strict rules about serial commas. E. B. White once quipped that ”commas in the New Yorker New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” (In 1984, Don would tell George Plimpton that he had waged a ”twenty year” war with Ross's successor, William Shawn, who always ”stippled” Don's stories with commas, interfering with the ”freer style of punctuation” Don preferred.) fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” (In 1984, Don would tell George Plimpton that he had waged a ”twenty year” war with Ross's successor, William Shawn, who always ”stippled” Don's stories with commas, interfering with the ”freer style of punctuation” Don preferred.) Shawn, the Chicago-born son of a cutlery-shop owner, had come to New York in 1932, hoping to be a composer. He went to work as a fact-checker at The New Yorker The New Yorker. He appealed to Ross because he ”fully comprehended...the magazine's commitment to a rhetoric and even a poetry of facts,” YaG.o.da wrote. When Ross died of throat cancer in 1951, Shawn took charge of the magazine. He seemed even more frantic than his predecessor to find clear verbal ground. Over time, the magazine's articles grew longer, qualifierladen, as though the sentences could never find their cores. Shawn's editorial style was indirect; he would let his writers know he was dissatisfied, and he would stand firm, but he would rarely come out and say what he wanted. Harold Brodkey said that Shawn ”combined the best qualities of Napoleon and St. Francis of a.s.sisi.” His manner left many of his writers confused and paralyzed, locked in endless bouts of rewrites that often led nowhere. In the early 1960s, John Cheever, one of The New Yorker The New Yorker's most celebrated fiction writers, complained that Shawn, and by extension the whole magazine, was ”hobbled” and ”capricious.”

Joseph Mitch.e.l.l had gone silent, as had J. D. Salinger. Renata Adler, who joined the staff of the magazine in 1963 as a ma.n.u.script screener, said that Shawn's ”inhibition[s]” led to an ”ethic of silence”: There began to be a feeling [at the magazine] that it was vulgar, perhaps morally wrong to write. Turning in a piece, of course, put Mr. Shawn in the predicament of having to decide whether to publish it. If he rejected it, there had to be one kind of painful conversation. If he accepted it, he was put under the pressure of publis.h.i.+ng it....This hesitation was not only explicit in his conversation. The aversion to personal publicity for editors and writers, the increasing respect for the privacy of subjects were turning into a reluctance to publish at all....

The ”physical structure of the office” appeared to ”externalize writer's block,” Adler added. ”Wherever there was s.p.a.ce sufficiently wide for people to gather in a corridor for a chat, whole rooms would be built...in such a way as to take up what had been the entire gathering s.p.a.ce....”

Ved Mehta, another New Yorker New Yorker staffer, concurred. ”The staffer, concurred. ”The New Yorker New Yorker had an air of complete privacy,” he said: had an air of complete privacy,” he said: The offices of editors, writers, artists, and other people connected with it were all mixed together and there was no way of telling who was to be found where. None of the offices had names on them. Most were little more than cubicles, each with an individual window and outfitted with a desk, a chair, a typewriter, and, in some cases, a divan bed, which would always be piled high with books, ma.n.u.scripts, and old newspapers. The monoton[ous]...dusty hallways and dingy walls gave the place a bleak atmosphere, as though the New Yorker New Yorker were making a conscious statement that writers and artists should be above worrying about their surroundings. were making a conscious statement that writers and artists should be above worrying about their surroundings.

Certain staff writers, ”under the pressureless pressures of being left alone to do whatever they liked...fell apart,” Mehta recalled. They ”had nervous breakdowns, or developed writer's block, which sometimes lasted for years.”

”I've always felt that there was a connection between The New Yorker The New Yorker and depression. Depression as an aesthetic,” Phillip Lopate says. ”There's the recessive quality of the first-person p.r.o.noun in much and depression. Depression as an aesthetic,” Phillip Lopate says. ”There's the recessive quality of the first-person p.r.o.noun in much New Yorker New Yorker writing. It's genteel, not in your face. Reserved. Taking in the world and being reflective without getting too excited, too parvenu. It's a depressive stance, and it's a mark of a certain social status. You know, it's not a working-cla.s.s disease.” writing. It's genteel, not in your face. Reserved. Taking in the world and being reflective without getting too excited, too parvenu. It's a depressive stance, and it's a mark of a certain social status. You know, it's not a working-cla.s.s disease.”

Often, the magazine's short stories reflected this tamped-down mood. By the early sixties, staleness had crusted over much New Yorker New Yorker fiction. Always, the stylistic precision was high, but for years the magazine had published the quiet suburban sketches of Cheever, John O'Hara, and John Updike, while rejecting more forceful work such as Philip Roth's novella fiction. Always, the stylistic precision was high, but for years the magazine had published the quiet suburban sketches of Cheever, John O'Hara, and John Updike, while rejecting more forceful work such as Philip Roth's novella Goodbye, Columbus Goodbye, Columbus.

In January 1963, amid the roughly 250 fiction submissions a week-most of them, according to Adler, ”amazingly bad,” and some of them ”obscene and extremely violent,” some with photographs-an unusual piece surfaced, making its way around the office part.i.tions, past the piled-up newspapers on the ugly gray shelves of the eighteenth floor, past the drone of rock music from behind a closed door, cigarette smoke in the hallways, and the faint witch-hazel scent of William Shawn's aftershave, which lingered in corridors. The story landed on the desk of Roger Angell, a fiction editor. A parody of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, it was called ”L'Lapse.” The writer was Donald Barthelme.

”At the time I didn't have an agent,” Don told George Plimpton in 1984. ”We sent [the story] agented only by a stamp.” He was misremembering. Lynn Nesbit had submitted the story to Angell, who returned it with praise and an offer to consider it again if Don revised it. On January 25, Angell contacted Nesbit: ”Donald Barthelme has rewritten 'L'Lapse' ” and the magazine will ”buy it,” he said. ”I have already told him the good news.”

”L'Lapse” is less a story than what Roger Angell would refer to as a ”casual,” a straight humor piece, capturing the excitement and silliness of the Antonioni craze. The timing was terrific. La Notte La Notte, Antonioni's follow-up to L'Avventura L'Avventura had opened in New York the previous year. A long, slow study of ennui, it featured Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, and Monica Vitti. The camera constantly pulled away from the actors, and the script avoided any engagement among the characters. ”Eroticism is the disease of the age,” Antonioni had p.r.o.nounced to a newspaper reporter. Long lines of movie buffs had waited to see had opened in New York the previous year. A long, slow study of ennui, it featured Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, and Monica Vitti. The camera constantly pulled away from the actors, and the script avoided any engagement among the characters. ”Eroticism is the disease of the age,” Antonioni had p.r.o.nounced to a newspaper reporter. Long lines of movie buffs had waited to see La Notte La Notte, and rumors now spread that L'Avventura L'Avventura might be scheduled to play at the Film Festival in September. might be scheduled to play at the Film Festival in September.

In ”L'Lapse,” composed as a script, a ”wealthy film critic” named Marcello tries to instruct his lover and protegee, Anna, in the art of film reviewing. Anna is a ”lengthy, elegant beauty, blond, whose extreme nervousness is exteriorized in thumb-sucking.” The couple sits in ”the plaza in front of the Plaza” while ”shabby-looking pigeons wheel about meaningfully but in slow motion.” Anna's reviews suffer from forced enthusiasm. She depends on phrases such as ”penetratingly different.” Marcello (”wealthy, bored”) complains, ”If I'm going to teach you the business, cara cara, you gotta learn not to make adverbs out of words like 'penetrating.' ” Anna's heart is not in her work: ANNA (removes thumb): But, Marcello, I didn't like like the picture. I was bored. the picture. I was bored.MARCELLO: Look, sweets, it doesn't matter you were bored. The point is, you were bored in a certain way in a certain way. Like brilliantly.

The script indicates the camera is to pull away from them as they talk: ”Shot of nail kegs at construction site. Camera peers into keg, counts nails. Shot of bus disappearing around corner. Shot of I.R.T. breaking down.”

Frustrated, Anna spits at Marcello, ”Critic!”-a lift from Waiting for G.o.dot Waiting for G.o.dot. Then she says, timidly, ”Last night when we were talking about pure cinema, and I called for a transvaluation of all values, and you said that light was the absence of light-we weren't communicating then, were we? It was just jargon, wasn't it? Just noise?”

Marcello, ”facing the truth,” says, ”No, Anna, I'm afraid we were were communicating. On a rather low level.” Anna (” communicating. On a rather low level.” Anna (”frenzied, all thumbs”) cries that she wants her life to be ”really meaningless,” filled with ”febrile elegance!” Marcello admits, ”Meaninglessness like that is not for everybody. Not for you and me, meaningless,” filled with ”febrile elegance!” Marcello admits, ”Meaninglessness like that is not for everybody. Not for you and me, cara cara.” The camera pans to a man on a nearby bench, who stares back at the camera inquiringly. ”Shot of cement bags. Shot of leaf floating in gutter; leaf floats down drain. Camera waits four minutes to see if leaf will reappear. It does not reappear. Shot of traffic light; it is stuck.”

Don's piece appeared in the March 2, 1963, issue of The New Yorker The New Yorker, just before a long Cheever story and an excerpt from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem Eichmann in Jerusalem. If it didn't quite signal a sea change in New Yorker New Yorker fiction, it distinguished itself by its energy. As in the best of Perelman, its parody was so deadpan and earnest, the reader felt disoriented. Anna's movie reviews (”penetratingly different”) were similar to the magazine's capsule reviews. For example, in ”Goings on About Town” for March 2, the magazine called the film version of fiction, it distinguished itself by its energy. As in the best of Perelman, its parody was so deadpan and earnest, the reader felt disoriented. Anna's movie reviews (”penetratingly different”) were similar to the magazine's capsule reviews. For example, in ”Goings on About Town” for March 2, the magazine called the film version of West Side Story West Side Story ”inhumanly overproduced.” ”inhumanly overproduced.” Cara! Cara!

Ever since his teens, Don had longed to see his name printed in The New Yorker The New Yorker's famous Caslon typeface. Now he had succeeded.

On March 5, Angell wrote to Don, addressing him as ”Mr. Barthelme”: [The novelist] Niccolo Tucci asked me to convey my congratulations to you. He told me that he had been asked by Mr. Antonioni, who is a friend of his, to write a screenplay. Tucci didn't want to, but he didn't know how to say this to Antonioni. So when he read your casual, he translated it into Italian and sent it off to Antonioni, saying it had expressed his own feelings exactly.And now, when are you going to send us another casual?Roger Angell was forty-two years old at the time. Later that year, he would be divorced from his first wife, by whom he had two daughters, and would marry Carol Rogge, who had worked as a secretary in The New Yorker The New Yorker's fiction department. Angell was the son of Katharine Angell, who had joined the magazine in 1925 as a ma.n.u.script reader and become indispensable to Harold Ross. When she married E. B. White in 1929, she was the magazine's chief literary editor.

It is not surprising, then, that from an early age Roger's pursuits were literary. In 1938, when he was eighteen, he asked his stepfather to give him a book of A. E. Housman poems, a bottle of Amontillado, and a top hat for Christmas. ”I can only a.s.sume that he is going to sit around in the hat, drinking the sherry, reading the poems, and dreaming the long long dreams of youth,” White wrote a friend.

While in the service in the early forties, Angell was stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii. There, he became the editor of TIG Brief TIG Brief, an Air Force magazine. In 1943, White recommended his stepson to Harold Ross for editorial work at The New Yorker The New Yorker. ”Although he is a member of the family I have little hesitancy in recommending him,” White said. ”He lacks practical experience but he has the goods.” He told Ross, ”When my wife was editing the New Yorker Short Story Book New Yorker Short Story Book, Roger turned out to have a pretty sound knowledge of that kind of stuff and helped her with opinions and recommendations, practically all of which made a good deal of sense.”

Eventually, Angell moved into his mother's old office, and according to Renata Adler, he ”established an overt, superficially jocular state of war with the rest of the magazine.” As Adler explained the situation: ”The fiction editors themselves wrote fiction, a conflict of interest which did not exist in other departments.”

William Shawn recognized the politics of the fiction department, but he did nothing to ease tensions or restructure practices. Staffers a.s.sumed that Angell aspired to the general editors.h.i.+p, but Ved Mehta thought of him as ”cold and irascible,” lacking the nurturing qualities that were ”a sine qua non sine qua non for the job of the for the job of the New Yorker New Yorker's editor.”

If Shawn was a remote father figure to Don, Angell would become a big brother, a man with business authority, but someone who also (according to Mehta) lacked confidence: Angell was drawn to Don's swagger. The men shared military experience, editing, and the trauma of divorce. In time, Angell said, Don became ”my lifeline to the literary world and I became his lifeline to an everyday life.”

But first Don had to prove he was capable of negotiating The New Yorker The New Yorker's quirks. He attempted a parody of a Playboy Playboy interview, but the satire seemed ”vague and obscure” to Angell, and he warned Don away from the Q & A format, so reminiscent of Frank Sullivan's ”Mr. Arbuthnot” pieces. interview, but the satire seemed ”vague and obscure” to Angell, and he warned Don away from the Q & A format, so reminiscent of Frank Sullivan's ”Mr. Arbuthnot” pieces.

Don suggested several ideas for parodies, including a Broadway treatment of William Burroughs (”Lunchtime!”); Angell encouraged him, but none of the pieces went anywhere. In early April, Lynn Nesbit submitted Don's story ”Carl” (an early draft of ”Margins”). Angell replied, ”This strikes us as being highly artificial and entirely unconvincing....I'm certain he can do something better than this little sermon.”

On May 6, in a letter rejecting another parody, Angell told Don, ”I do hope that you will not be discouraged by these setbacks. Your eye and ear for parody are unblemished, and I think you should have full confidence in them....I am quite sure, also, that you need not confine yourself exclusively to parody. We will continue to look forward anxiously to anything you send us.”

Angell was impressed by Don's tenacity-and also by his humor and brevity, two of the magazine's mainstays, at least in fiction. Though nothing had succeeded since ”L'Lapse,” Angell was certain that Don had the goods.

Meanwhile, Herman Gollob, noting that his old pal had now published six short stories (in March and April alone, he had placed pieces in The New Yorker The New Yorker and and Harper's Bazaar Harper's Bazaar), felt ready to take a chance with Don at Little, Brown. ”I showed the stories to my boss, Ned Bradford, the shrewd, dapper, silver-haired editor in chief,” Gollob wrote later. ”For the next hour or so I could hear him roaring with laughter in his office....Emerging at last, he said, 'This b.a.s.t.a.r.d is either crazy or a genius. Probably both.' ”

Short story collections didn't ”fly off the shelves,” Bradford said, and Don was so ”esoteric,” no one would know what to do with him. Still, Bradford felt he ”might turn out to be an American Kafka or Joyce” and said that they couldn't ”pa.s.s up a chance to publish someone” like that. ”[O]ne of these days he might write a novel that more than ten people want to read,” he told Gollob. ”Sign him up,” Bradford said.

”I told Don the amazing news, and it instantly galvanized him into action,” Gollob recalled. ”He wrote two stories in three days-'Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight' and 'A Shower of Gold.' ”

Don had drafted a version of ”A Shower of Gold” in Houston, but he changed it substantially once he moved to New York. He completed it at the Gollobs' house on Martha's Vineyard, in a room overlooking the ocean.

To seal the book deal with Little, Brown's editorial board (once he'd got the go-ahead from Bradford), Gollob showed up at the sales conference in a pair of dark gla.s.ses and recited a monologue from ”A Shower of Gold.” ”That did the trick,” Gollob says. ”They upped the print run from one to eight copies.” It wasn't the ”Joycean s.h.i.+t” that impressed the board. It was the fact that Don's work was ”screamingly funny.”

In midsummer, Don submitted to Roger Angell a new draft of ”The Piano Player” (later, a reviewer tagged the story ”John Cheever in a fun-house mirror”). Angell was so taken with the piece, he not only bought it but also offered to pay Don an additional fee for any new work of his the magazine purchased, on the condition he be shown it first. On July 22, Angell wrote to Nesbit: ”[Mr. Barthelme] seemed most interested in the offer...in return for a first look at all of Mr. Barthelme's work that falls in the category of fiction, humor, reminiscence, we will pay an additional 25% to the basic price for any works we purchase from him. There are secondary benefits as well.”

What this amounted to in hard figures was never very clear. The New Yorker The New Yorker's financial agreements with writers were variable and murky-sometimes, it seems, even to the accountants. But Don and Nesbit saw nothing to lose. The offer was extraordinary, given that Angell had accepted only two pieces so far. Don's writing was ”breathtaking,” Angell thought, even in the stories that didn't work. Here was a special and singular talent. So Angell took a chance-perhaps seizing an opportunity to intensify his little ”war” with the rest of the magazine.

Soon after ”The Piano Player” appeared in the August 31 issue, William Maxwell, another fiction editor, a fine writer, and a man of genteel tastes, told Angell the piece had ”baffled” many staffers. Other editors-Rachel MacKenzie, Robert Henderson-groused about Don's work. Angell was delighted.

Curiously enough, the ever-hesitant William Shawn ”was on to Barthelme before anyone else,” Angell recalled. ”[H]e told me that the key to Barthelme wasn't to read him like fiction, but like poetry.