Part 19 (1/2)

As a result, every social category-cla.s.s, gender, neighborhood-fell under increasingly centralized national control. But the process was messy. According to T. J. Clark, Manet saw the new city as a ”greasy press of people,” with ”ladies in crinolines having to come into contact with legless beggarboys on trolleys.”

Le Ballon shows a mixed-cla.s.s crowd gazing in awe at a hot-air balloon, the kind of public spectacle that could not have occurred in Paris until Haussmann's reordering of the city, when the old social categories broke down. These are people whose routines have dissolved, who have encountered a strange new presence-modernity-in their midst. Manet's balloon vividly embodies that moment. shows a mixed-cla.s.s crowd gazing in awe at a hot-air balloon, the kind of public spectacle that could not have occurred in Paris until Haussmann's reordering of the city, when the old social categories broke down. These are people whose routines have dissolved, who have encountered a strange new presence-modernity-in their midst. Manet's balloon vividly embodies that moment.

His model was a hot-air balloon that belonged to the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Felix Tournachon). Nadar used the balloon to photograph Paris from unique new angles, the city as never before seen.

As a publicity stunt, and to make room for his camera equipment, Nadar built his balloon six times the normal size. As he floated in it, he felt like a ”traveler who [had] arrived yesterday in a strange city,” a city in which ”they have destroyed everything, down to the last souvenir souvenir.” Nadar's photographs flatten s.p.a.ce and collapse the horizon. They reduce the landscape to a sea of signs-cathedrals become merely steeples; homes, chimneys; factories, smokestacks.

The invention of photography was a turning point in modern art, not only by supplying supplying new images but by forcing artists to paint images beyond the camera's reach. Similarly, movies would later challenge novelists' authority (Balzac complained that cameras stole his thunder, conjuring more vivid pictures than he could muster in prose). new images but by forcing artists to paint images beyond the camera's reach. Similarly, movies would later challenge novelists' authority (Balzac complained that cameras stole his thunder, conjuring more vivid pictures than he could muster in prose).

Manet's paintings mark the historical moment when these revolutionary changes first occurred. But this was just the beginning beginning of modernity. Three years after of modernity. Three years after Le Ballon Le Ballon (when (when Le Ballon Le Ballon was still very much in the public eye), Manet showed was still very much in the public eye), Manet showed Olympia Olympia at the Paris Salon, inciting a violent scandal and signaling another turning point in art. T. J. Clark wrote, ”The crush of spectators was variously described as terrified, shocked, disgusted, moved to a kind of pity” by the painter's portrait of a nude prost.i.tute, the onlookers ”subject to epidemics of mad laughter, 'pressing up to the picture as if to a hanged man.' ” at the Paris Salon, inciting a violent scandal and signaling another turning point in art. T. J. Clark wrote, ”The crush of spectators was variously described as terrified, shocked, disgusted, moved to a kind of pity” by the painter's portrait of a nude prost.i.tute, the onlookers ”subject to epidemics of mad laughter, 'pressing up to the picture as if to a hanged man.' ”

Olympia presented Paris with another image of the modern, the commodification of s.e.x and cla.s.s, the unadorned power of desire-once more forcing spectators to move beyond their accustomed paths of perception. The 1865 Salon scandal, coming as it did in the midst of the city's physical and social upheaval, is one of the seminal moments of modernism. presented Paris with another image of the modern, the commodification of s.e.x and cla.s.s, the unadorned power of desire-once more forcing spectators to move beyond their accustomed paths of perception. The 1865 Salon scandal, coming as it did in the midst of the city's physical and social upheaval, is one of the seminal moments of modernism.

”Observations” about the painting ”are made out loud,” reported the paper La France La France. ”Some people are delighted...others observe the thing seriously and show their neighbor [how it is] improper.”

”There were reactions” to the balloon, says the narrator of Don's story. ”Critical opinion was divided.” Some engaged in ”remarkably detailed fantasies” of delight; others were perturbed, thinking words like ”sullied.”

Manet's detractors noted the ”irregularities” of his work, and its ”unfinished” qualities.

Don's narrator speaks of the balloon's ”deliberate lack of finish” and of ”irregular” areas on its surface.

Le Grand Journal reported that reported that Olympia Olympia's body seemed made of ”rubber,” and Les Tablettes de Pierrot Les Tablettes de Pierrot described her as shapeless, shape-s.h.i.+fting, ”some form or other, blown up like a grotesque in...rubber.” described her as shapeless, shape-s.h.i.+fting, ”some form or other, blown up like a grotesque in...rubber.”

Don's balloon is a ”vari-shaped” rubberlike ma.s.s with a surface ”pneumaticity,” in contrast to the ”city's flat, hard skin.”

As many readers have observed, Don's story considers public responses to art. But besides this general theme, he had in mind a specific set of reactions, in a crucial time.

In invoking Manet's balloon and the Olympia Olympia scandal, Don encoded in his story an early chapter of the art that nourished him throughout his career; an art inseparable from social change, resistant to strict ordering, and opposed to the narrowing of perceptions required by commodification. scandal, Don encoded in his story an early chapter of the art that nourished him throughout his career; an art inseparable from social change, resistant to strict ordering, and opposed to the narrowing of perceptions required by commodification.

”The Balloon” resonates with one more modernist touchstone, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway Mrs. Dalloway. As the novel opens, Mrs. Dalloway is walking the streets of an increasingly ”new” London, a city torn by the conflicts of social cla.s.s, when she sees a crowd gaping up at an object ”coming over the trees”-an ”aeroplane...making letters in the sky!” The shapes move and melt; the crowd disagrees as to the plane's purpose. What are the letters trying to say? The message turns out to be a toffee ad, but its true meaning, people feel, ”would never be revealed,” for the spectacle continues to s.h.i.+ft, the figures now beautiful, now terrible. One observer is moved to consider how ”solitary” everyone is.

A common thread ties Baron Haussmann's Paris in the 1860s, Virginia Woolf's London of the 1920s, and Don's mid-1960s Manhattan: ma.s.sive social transition, just before capitalism tightened its grip another notch. In these chaotic intervals, while the signs were still elusive, people remained free to interpret, create, and act in unpredictable (unspeakable, unnatural) ways. Far from ignoring history, tras.h.i.+ng literary tradition, or practicing randomness-as some critics later claimed of him-Don chose a particular battle, and helped to man the barricades.

With the publication of three stories three months in a row, Don erased his debt to The New Yorker The New Yorker-”which is good news for all hands,” Angell wrote him. Belatedly, the magazine sent Don an extra $82.90 for the ”battles.h.i.+p” addition to ”See the Moon?”

The flush period didn't last long. With a restless wife and a hungry baby, Don requested, and was granted, a one-thousand-dollar advance against future work. In June, he renewed his agreement with the magazine, allowing it the right of first refusal. Birgit was homesick. She pressed Don for a trip to Denmark. He figured the only way they could travel was if he received a Guggenheim Fellows.h.i.+p. He had been denied one the previous year-Lynn Nesbit and Herman Gollob had written him letters of support. This time, he asked Angell for a recommendation.

Angell told the Foundation: I believe that Mr. Barthelme is far and away the most intelligent and the most original young writer of fiction in the United States today. As his editor at the New Yorker, New Yorker, I am in close contact with his work and his writing methods, and I can say with a.s.surance that he is an entirely dedicated artist, capable of the most severe and admirable selfdiscipline...[he is] ”courageous” because financial hards.h.i.+p has not tempted him to take a job and thus become a part-time writer, nor has it forced him to alter his style in the interest of popularity and a.s.sured sales I am in close contact with his work and his writing methods, and I can say with a.s.surance that he is an entirely dedicated artist, capable of the most severe and admirable selfdiscipline...[he is] ”courageous” because financial hards.h.i.+p has not tempted him to take a job and thus become a part-time writer, nor has it forced him to alter his style in the interest of popularity and a.s.sured sales....[his stories'] meanings are both poetic and cerebral [and] cannot be escaped or forgotten...what most distinguishes his apparently avantgarde style is its lack of self-consciousness, its absolute inevitability.Barthelme writes as he does because no other method could begin to convey his echoey multiple meanings....He must be given a chance to complete a longer, more significant work of fiction. He has no other means of support than his writing, and his need for money-money that will buy him time to write-is greater than ever, for he now has a wife and a young baby.

Angell's support at this time was crucial. Letters kept coming to the magazine, complaining about Don's work. More crus.h.i.+ngly, S. J. Perelman said he didn't care for Don's fiction (though, more happily, John Updike admitted he felt challenged by pieces like ”The Balloon” to try more daring formal experiments).

As Don waited for news of the Guggenheim, he shopped for Anne-and decided that the seven little men who lived with Snow White in his novel would manufacture baby food (with a comical Chinese twist): ”BABY BOW YEE (chopped pork and Chinese vegetables)...BABY DOW SHEW (bean curd stuffed with ground pike)...BABY JAR HAR (shrimp in batter)...BABY JING SHAR SHEW BOW (sweet roast pork and apples)...”

Because of Anne, he could no longer hang around jazz clubs till the early morning hours. Some evenings, while Anne slept, he slipped away to the Eighth Street Bookshop, which was open late. It was owned by Eli Wilentz, whose son Sean would become a well-known historian. The elder Wilentz looked like ”an older Bob Dylan” and could be seen with a ”cigarillo stuck between his lips or burning between his fingertips,” wrote M. G. Stephens, a former clerk in the store. The place offered four floors of books, and customers often stood in the aisles discussing poetry or European novels. Don opened a charge account at the store. Other regular customers included Edward Albee, Anais Nin, Albert Murray, Djuna Barnes, and a Mafia don-one of the Gallos-who one night told Stephens, ”I read a lot of Albert Camus.”

Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation Against Interpretation was the most exciting book Don discovered that year. In her celebration and blurring of high and low culture, Don found a kindred spirit. ”Perhaps there are certain ages”-like the present-”which do not need truth so much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality,” Sontag wrote. ”An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth.” In a section of was the most exciting book Don discovered that year. In her celebration and blurring of high and low culture, Don found a kindred spirit. ”Perhaps there are certain ages”-like the present-”which do not need truth so much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality,” Sontag wrote. ”An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth.” In a section of Snow White Snow White, in typically playful, aphoristic fas.h.i.+on, Don echoed Sontag: ”In the midst of so much that is true, it is refres.h.i.+ng to shamble across something that is not true.”

At times, Don felt as if he were living in Haussmann's Paris: The cost of living in the United States rose more dramatically in the winter of 1966 than it had at any time since 1958, people were protesting in the streets against the federal government, and a construction boom was changing the face of the city. The grand old Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station had been demolished the previous year to make way for a twenty-nine-story building. In August 1966, groundbreaking would begin for the World Trade Center.

In the latter part of the year, Don retreated indoors. He hunkered down with his family, his friends, his novel. He composed a scene in which Snow White writes a four-page poem: ”The thought of this immense work...”-a joke on him, to keep him on task.

Angell was curious to see this immense new work. Don put him off. He'd write, walk, shop, write some more, sit with Grace Paley on a neighborhood stoop, then go home to soothe the baby and listen to music.

He urged Grace to write more stories. She said she was too busy trying to stop the war. She apologized to Don for her inactivity during the Korean conflict. ”We were so unconscious, so unaware of that war,” she said. ”The whole country was unconscious....[We] just didn't want to pay attention.”

Finally, in early October, Don showed Angell the nearly completed ma.n.u.script. Angell snapped it up, and convinced his fellow editors that the magazine should publish all of it in a single issue. On October 26, he sent Don a ”first” payment for Snow White Snow White. ”This was an exciting day around here,” he said. ”I am delighted.” Earlier, Don had gotten word that he had received a Guggenheim Fellows.h.i.+p. He was happy. His editor was happy. Birgit was happy. Even the baby seemed happy.

”Here's that check....Sending this out makes me feel like G.o.d. Or maybe Joseph E. Levine,” Angell wrote Don on December 8, 1966. The check raised Don's total payment for Snow White Snow White to $25,000. to $25,000.

He was busy writing last-minute additions and making cuts, rearranging sections of the novel to ”correct poornesses in the storyline.” In his version of the tale, Snow White is a modern young woman living in New York with seven little men. The men have communal s.e.x with her in the shower, though she has grown tired of the arrangement (as has Bill, the men's ”leader”). The men, born of different mothers but the same father (”a man about whom nothing is known”) were reared in national parks. They clean buildings, make baby food, and manufacture plastic buffalo humps (”Heigh-ho”). Snow White is torn: She wants to hear ”some words in the world that [are] not the words” she always hears; she is dissatisfied with her education, and with the domestic duties she's forced to perform. She understands that the world is too complex to be contained in romantic myths. Yet the myths' power draws her still. She waits, however skeptically, for a prince. She lowers her hair from an upper window, an erotic invitation, but there is not a man in sight with the gumption to grab it. Modern consumer culture has emasculated them all. ”It has made me terribly nervous, that hair,” thinks Paul, the book's Hamlet-like prince figure. He knows he is supposed supposed to respond to the hair; what stops him is the realization that beyond the hair's s.e.xual symbolism lies daily life, the eventual dullness of habit, practical considerations (”Teeth...piano lessons...”). Stripped of their ideals, but still yearning for them, men and women circle one another in a wary, frustrating dance. America's ”daughters are burning with torpor and a sense of immense wasted potential,” Snow White thinks, ”like one of those pipes you see in the oil fields, burning off the natural gas that it isn't economically rational to s.h.i.+p somewhere!” to respond to the hair; what stops him is the realization that beyond the hair's s.e.xual symbolism lies daily life, the eventual dullness of habit, practical considerations (”Teeth...piano lessons...”). Stripped of their ideals, but still yearning for them, men and women circle one another in a wary, frustrating dance. America's ”daughters are burning with torpor and a sense of immense wasted potential,” Snow White thinks, ”like one of those pipes you see in the oil fields, burning off the natural gas that it isn't economically rational to s.h.i.+p somewhere!”

Helen Moore Barthelme has said Don explored ”his own love life” in Snow White Snow White-not that he ever shared one woman, except his mother, with several other men. What she meant was that Don took parts of himself-his romantic expectations and his experiences-and gave them to each of the characters: the little men, the prince figure, the ”vile” Hogo de Bergerac, who defiles women, even Snow White herself. This way, Don ”could both examine his own feelings and imagine the reactions of the girl,” Helen explained.

Helen and others recognized Don's personal history in the book. ”During our courts.h.i.+p, Don [had] told me of a group of male graduate students who were part of his first wife's circle of friends at Rice University,” Helen wrote. ”Years later, one of these friends wrote a note to me in which he said it was possible to identify which 'dwarf' portrayed each of them.” Certainly, shards of Don's trajectory-from the Alamo Chile House to New York to Denmark-are traceable in the novel's fragments.

Atheneum published Snow White Snow White a month after it had appeared, in its entirety, in a month after it had appeared, in its entirety, in The New Yorker The New Yorker, and it became one of the most talked-about novels of the year-a year in which Susan Sontag said ”the beauty of...a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc G.o.dard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible” and equally valuable. The ”feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes.” In 1967, the high and the low, the sublime and the ridiculous, danced cheek to jowl.

That year, at the beginning of what Time Time and other newsweeklies called the ”Summer of Love,” the Beatles released and other newsweeklies called the ”Summer of Love,” the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The group was hailed as more than just rock stars: they were artists. The New Yorker The New Yorker quoted a cla.s.sical music enthusiast, who said of this newest release, ”This alb.u.m is a whole world. It's a musical comedy. It's a film. Only, it's a record.” quoted a cla.s.sical music enthusiast, who said of this newest release, ”This alb.u.m is a whole world. It's a musical comedy. It's a film. Only, it's a record.”

Here was art as ”sensation,” a ”feeling” not limited to its format.

In Against Interpretation Against Interpretation, Sontag argued that the blurring of ”high” and ”low,” ”popular” and ”serious” did not signal the demise of art, but a ”transformation of [its] function”: Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility...artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians, continually challenging their means, their materials and methods....Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.

In such an atmosphere, a ”literary” novel based on a Walt Disney cartoon (and an old fairy tale), containing numerous typefaces and page layouts, wasn't out of place. It was the extremity of Don's imagination, and his metaphysical grounding, that made an old fairy tale), containing numerous typefaces and page layouts, wasn't out of place. It was the extremity of Don's imagination, and his metaphysical grounding, that made Snow White Snow White seem so radical. seem so radical.

”It's not my favorite book,” Don later told an interviewer. In another interview, he said, ”The thing is loaded with cultural baggage, probably too much so.”

Here, Don touched on one of the riskiest aspects of his writing: his use of time-sensitive materials. If a sculptor places a metal pipe in the center of his piece and then it tarnishes over time, darkening, flaking, the new hue and texture will alter the entire structure, and will change the viewer's response. The trick is to choose materials that will change in interesting ways, but this is difficult to predict. (Remember Don's dad wrapping his home in copper sheeting, hoping it would taint attractively, only to be disappointed in its rough discoloration.) ”Cultural baggage”-and language-has similar organic properties, which is susceptible to the seasons.

In trying to extend his literary methods to novel length, Don faced other dilemmas. ”Writing a novel consists of failing, for me, for a long time...” he said. ”The problem...is that I'm interested in pus.h.i.+ng the form, if not forward then at least in some direction.”

More than short stories, novels tend toward formula...or, at the very least, toward habitual habitual structures, steady rhythm, and foreshadowing to keep the reader engaged till the end. The trouble is, habit lacks magic. It cheapens the values of images and words. It's the sudden eruption, the improvised melody or phrase, that tickles our imaginations, and adds wonder to the world. structures, steady rhythm, and foreshadowing to keep the reader engaged till the end. The trouble is, habit lacks magic. It cheapens the values of images and words. It's the sudden eruption, the improvised melody or phrase, that tickles our imaginations, and adds wonder to the world.