Part 18 (1/2)

Don had not been honest with Helen about his work. He wanted as much of her sympathy as he could get. He was well along now on Snow White Snow White. For a while, after turning from ”A Shower of Gold,” he had toyed with the idea of expanding ”The Indian Uprising.” He told Angell, ”I am tired of tiny stories however beautiful....Some day I will write a great long story like other writers write, many-paged, full of words, resplendent.”

”The Indian Uprising” resisted changes-it was as tight as a box-but soon Don had ideas for Snow White Snow White.

Meanwhile, Herman Gollob had left Little, Brown and was now an editor at Atheneum. He advised Don not to divorce Helen. ”I told him to get rid of the kid, get an abortion, and come home. Always felt a little guilty about that, later, every time I saw that wonderful kid. He had to do the honorable thing, you know.”

By now, Don had confessed his troubles to Angell. ”We are now in a three-way snit over a) divorce papers, b) getting married, c) visa,” he wrote. ”Everything is under control, as far as I can see, but the timing is tight. We hope to be home the first part of October but can't count on it.”

Angell didn't try to tell him what to do. He said, simply, ”I am going to be 45 [soon]-an age when one likes to have one's friends nearby.”

Despite the ”snit” he was in, Don was writing plenty-new stories as well as Snow White Snow White. Over the summer, Angell bought ”Snap Snap”-a parody of Time Time's and Newsweek Newsweek's breathless journalistic styles.

”You are writing so much and so well that I haven't got time to do any writing myself,” Angell told Don. ”I just spend all my time sneaking commas into your ma.n.u.scripts and sending you money. Actually, I am delighted by all of this fecundity and brilliance.”

In August, Angell went on vacation, leaving the final editorial details on ”Snap Snap” to William Maxwell. Maxwell's letters to Don were blunt, all business. Don's approach to revision unnerved him. ”If you don't like the laparotomy,” Don told him at one point, referring to a line in the story, ”you may choose some other operation ending in 'omy.' ” Maxwell didn't reply.

The moment Angell returned, he sent Lynn Nesbit $750 for Don ”against future work,” as if to rea.s.sure Don that, Maxwell aside, The New Yorker The New Yorker still loved him. Angell told Nesbit, ”[Don's] indebtedness here now stands at $1750.” still loved him. Angell told Nesbit, ”[Don's] indebtedness here now stands at $1750.”

Birgit was sick now almost every morning, and she rarely felt like making love. Don bought her antinausea pills at the drugstore. He tried to make her laugh (she didn't understand his culturally specific jokes). Occasionally, an American movie played in Copenhagen and Don would coax Birgit out of the flat to see it. Some nights, he drank too much; when he did, his homesickness emerged in the form of discussions about movie trivia. He argued with her over actors and film t.i.tles. Sometimes he got heated over practically nothing. At such moments, his verbal abusiveness could equal that of his father's, but he was never physically violent. In later years, Helen learned from friends that Birgit's ”manner was like that of a child” and ”Don treated her like one.” He would tell his his friends that, at any given moment, Birgit ”may suddenly step into the street to cross in front of a bus.” She exhausted him. friends that, at any given moment, Birgit ”may suddenly step into the street to cross in front of a bus.” She exhausted him.

Don once told Helen that before he met Birgit, ” 'something' happened to her in Denmark.” ”He was vague, referring to an incident that affected her life.” In ”Edward and Pia,” Pia tells Edward that a man ”raptured” her: ”Edward walked out of the room. Pia looked after him placidly. Edward reentered the room. 'How would you like to have some Southern fried chicken?' he asked. 'It's the most marvelous-tasting thing in the world. Tomorrow I'll make some. Don't say ”rapture.” In English it's ”rape.” What did you do about it?' 'Nothing,' Pia said.”

Don always wondered if Birgit would begin to suffer someday from Huntington's (she would be diagnosed with the disease in 1975). It was hereditary and its symptoms-ranging from clumsiness and involuntary movements to slurred speech, depression, apathy, severe irritability, and memory lapses-usually appeared before the age of forty. Birgit's inability to grasp simple actions (following directions, opening a bottle of pills), and her helplessness, frightened Don.

”You don't look happy,” Birgit would say to him. ”You don't look happy, either,” he'd reply.

Things were rotten in Denmark. But on some days an air mail envelope would slip through the mail slot with a check from Roger Angell. Sometimes Birgit would would laugh at Don's jokes. laugh at Don's jokes.

Don asked his father for extra money so he could take Birgit back to the States. His mother objected to his ”cavalier” att.i.tude toward the circ.u.mstances. He responded by mail, saying, ”I am sorry that I did not treat the announcement of new domestic arrangements seriously enough, or that I somehow did it in the wrong way, or that I am somehow wrong, wrong, wrong, probably fundamentally. You have to remember that for me levity is a mode of seriousness, my only mode of seriousness.”

Don said he was ”thinking of coming home to Texas where [the baby] can be had in a WARM, CHEERFUL, LOVING atmosphere...rather than a cold New York atmosphere.” He asked his father to design a house in Houston for his ”cuties.” However in a follow-up letter, he said a ”house is out of the question, really.” He had no money. Jack Kroll planned to take an extended leave from magazine work, and he offered Don Newsweek Newsweek's book-reviewing spot, but the pay was ”low, low,” Don wrote his dad. ”I think I could do better sitting at home staring at the typewriter.”

To Lynn Nesbit, he wrote: I feel [happy] about nothing. No confident expectation. I have a hope, which is that I can raise the baby without ruining it. The relations between Birgit and myself are peculiar. There is love but no confidence, apparently not on either side. She is a remarkable girl but we are all remarkable and that is no guarantee of anything. I suspect that I will be able to make her happy for a time, probably happier than she will make me. But what can make me happy? My little ego is so const.i.tuted that the most enormous outpourings of love and attention are not, apparently, enough for it.

As regards his personal relations.h.i.+p with Nesbit-and responding to her rueful a.n.a.lysis of what had happened between them-he said, ”I don't think you played wife when you should have played lover. I think that you played lover in a way congenial to you and me, which involved the laundromat as an additional but not crucial dimension. You are wonderful, sweet Lynn; it's me who is in difficulties, who am the difficulty.”

In late October, just before leaving Denmark, Don renewed the lease at 113 West 11th Street. Birgit was almost nine months pregnant. Don booked a flight for the two of them-the three three of them-on Icelandic Airlines, now more nervous than ever about flying. of them-on Icelandic Airlines, now more nervous than ever about flying.

As soon as they landed, Don drove Birgit to the house of his old friend Robert Morris in Connecticut (as per the sublet arrangement, Tom Wolfe still had a few days left in Don's apartment). Don phoned Helen and thanked her again for granting the divorce. He wanted to explain why he had been so rushed and why he might have seemed callous. He said he wanted the baby to have his name when it was born. ”Otherwise I will have to adopt it later and it would always be an adopted child,” he said. ”Nor did I want to have to go to Mexico for a divorce.”

Helen didn't want to talk about these things. The topic of children was intensely painful for her. Instead, she spoke about Don's Houston friends, and of recent shows at the Contemporary Arts Museum. ”We both were reluctant to end our conversation,” she says. ”[W]hen we at last said goodbye, I felt very sad, for Don as well as for myself.”

Don phoned Herman Gollob about the novel he was drafting. ”You'll see that it's not Indian Uprising Indian Uprising,” he said. ”But I don't think you'll hate it.”

Gollob helped him arrange a hasty private wedding in Montpelier, New Jersey. ”Birgit was about to pop,” Gollob recalled. Right before the ceremony, she had to see a doctor, ”this eighty-year-old guy who lectured Don and Birgit about s.e.x.” Gollob and his wife, Barbara, were the only witnesses at the wedding. At first, the priest, a ”strict Italian-American,” misunderstood: He a.s.sumed Gollob and his wife were the bride and groom. When he realized the truth, he was ”devastated” and balked at performing the ceremony for a pregnant woman. Don talked him into going ahead. Still, the priest confused Barbara's and Birgit's names: ”Do you, Barbara, take this-”

”I gave him the honorarium in an envelope-all fifty dollars of it,” Gollob said. ”Next day it came back to me in the mail. He didn't want that money.”

The Manhattan to which Don returned was more vibrant and edgy than ever. By late 1965, antiwar rallies had grown larger and more frequent. On October 15, four hundred demonstrators showed up outside an army induction center at 39 Whitehall Street. Pa.s.sersby jeered at the protestors. One young man burned his draft card in front of federal agents. Events might have ended there despite incitements by the SDS, the Socialist Workers party, and other groups-except that the New York Supreme Court refused to overrule the Parks Commission's denial of a demonstration permit to the ACLU. In defiance of the court, six hundred City College students and faculty members held a four-hour silent vigil in Central Park, followed by a two-hour rally. The next day, a crowd of between ten and twenty thousand people, many of them middle-aged and middle-cla.s.s, marched down Fifth Avenue from Ninety-fourth Street to Sixty-ninth.

Roger Angell and his wife, Carol, watched the march from the window of their apartment on Ninety-fourth between Fifth and Madison. His ”quiet block” became ”one of the forming-up side streets for marchers heading down Fifth,” he wrote. ”Somewhere a band was playing 'I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die-Rag,' the Country Joe and the Fish cla.s.sic.” He described the scene: ”The gigantic skulls and caricatures of the Bread and Puppet Theatre tottered and swayed at the top of the block, and we waited while the various group banners-S.D.S and others-went slowly past, until our own bunch, Veterans for Peace (I was a veteran), came along and we went downstairs and out into the suns.h.i.+ne and marched away, too.”

Two weeks later, demonstrators in support of the war-”cops and firemen and union guys, all waving American flags”-followed the same path up Fifth. With a felt-tip pen, Angell scrawled ”Stop the Bombing!” on an old s.h.i.+rt cardboard and stuck it in his window. Someone threw a beer can at it; the can pinged off the gla.s.s. It was followed by more cans and a few eggs. Angell's landlady rang his bell and demanded to know what he'd done. ”Whatever it is, stop.” Angell removed the sign and shot a finger at the crowd. ”My face was a mirror of theirs by now: the American look,” he said. ”The war had come home.”

On the brighter side of the ledger, the city had erected several stunning new buildings while Don was gone: Eero Saarinen's ”Black Rock”-the thirty-eight-story CBS Building on Sixth Avenue at Fifty-second; Edward Durell Stone's Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art, a contemporary palazzo at Columbus Circle; and the International Style building at 277 Park Avenue, between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth streets, designed by Emery Roth and Sons (whom Don had singled out in ”The Indian Uprising” as purveyors of a lifestyle now under siege).

Andy Warhol was everywhere. His Campbell's Tomato Soup Can Campbell's Tomato Soup Can and and '65 Liz '65 Liz were reproduced in magazines and on posters and billboards. With the help of Billy Kluver, a former Bell Labs engineer, he was preparing a new exhibit for the Leo Castelli Gallery. The exhibit would feature silver Mylar balloons filled with helium-just enough so they'd float in midair. Metal weights placed inside the balloons would incline them to careen haphazardly as gallerygoers walked among them and nudged, pushed, or b.u.mped them around the room. were reproduced in magazines and on posters and billboards. With the help of Billy Kluver, a former Bell Labs engineer, he was preparing a new exhibit for the Leo Castelli Gallery. The exhibit would feature silver Mylar balloons filled with helium-just enough so they'd float in midair. Metal weights placed inside the balloons would incline them to careen haphazardly as gallerygoers walked among them and nudged, pushed, or b.u.mped them around the room.

How to explain such a wondrous world to a child? Just before his daughter arrived, Don wrote ”See the Moon?” ”When a child is born, the locus of one's hopes...s.h.i.+fts, slightly,” the narrator says. ”Not altogether, not all at once. But you feel it, this displacement. You speak up, strike att.i.tudes....Drunk with possibility once more.”

The story is a sort of traveler's report, ”pieced together from the reports of [other] travellers.” Only from such ”fragments” can we know the world. ”Look at my wall, it's all there,” the narrator tells his unborn child. He points to sc.r.a.ps, newspaper clippings, and other souvenirs he has gathered for study. ”That's a leaf...stuck up with Scotch tape,” he explains to the baby. ”No no, the Scotch tape is the s.h.i.+ny transparent stuff, the leaf the veined irregularly shaped...”

He wonders what he can do for his child: ”I can get him into A. A., I have influence. And make sure no harsh moonlight falls on his soft new head.” The moon-the bringer of lunacy, light-mindedness, fits, spells, and occasionally dark enlightenment-”hates” humans. It itches to afflict us. Nevertheless, drunk with ”possibility,” the father-to-be says to his kid, ”We hope you'll be very happy here.”

Angell thought this a ”lovely” story and offered Don few editorial suggestions. The rough drafts indicate that Don wrote it quickly and made only minor changes to it later. At one point, the narrator studies a Catholic cardinal to grasp his serenity. This section gave Don the most trouble. Its relative length suggests that spiritual yearning is the heart of the story. The narrator says, ”[M]aybe I was trying on the [cardinal's] role,” in antic.i.p.ation of becoming a father.

He treats his wife gingerly. ”Dear Ann...I'm going to keep her ghostly. Just the odd bit of dialogue...” As in Paradiso Paradiso, where Dante leaves mostly ”unsaid” his experience of Beatrice (for speech would only sully her), Don's narrator admits the woman's greater power, and his own lack of promise.

Anne Barthelme was born on November 4, 1965, at St. Vincent's Hospital, just down the block from Don's apartment. A few days later, the city's lights went out. The two events linked up in his mind.

Later, Marshall McLuhan said that if the blackout had lasted six months longer, ”there would be no doubt how electric technology shapes, works over, alters-ma.s.sages-every instant of our lives.” Billy Kluver said the power failure ”could have been an artist's idea-to make us aware of something.” Failure is a special skill of artists, exposing cracks in the status quo, he said.

Eventually, Don wrote ”City Life,” in which a woman is impregnated by the ”fused glance” of her community's ”desirous eye”: ”The pupil enlarged to admit more light: more me,” she says. In light and darkness, the city's inhabitants are locked together-a village, a tribe-in an ”exquisite mysterious muck”: What a happy time that was, when all the electricity went away [the woman thinks]. If only we could recreate that paradise! By, for instance, all forgetting to pay our electric bills at the same time. All nine million of us...The same thought drifts across the furrowed surface of nine million minds. We wink at each other, through the walls.

She gives birth to her child: an unexpected development that may open, for her, the gates of paradise. In any case, she thinks of the birth as a communal ”invitation” she had no choice but to accept.

A father-at last-Don felt a visceral attachment to his community. But as the street marches indicated, New York was a particularly messy messy paradise. ”The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity [there will be],” McLuhan said. paradise. ”The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity [there will be],” McLuhan said.

At the same time, Robert Lowell predicted that, in retrospect, this period would seem a ”golden time of freedom” just before a ”reign of piety and iron.”

On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, Don invited Roger Angell and his wife to 113 West 11th Street to meet Birgit and Anne. ”You have a lovely baby,” Angell told Don. The couples shared good food and drink. They swapped the blackout stories they'd heard (people stuck on subways, in elevators-already folks were predicting that nine months hence Manhattan would see a baby boom). Anne slept quietly through dinner.