Part 20 (1/2)

On August 30, Angell notified Lynn Nesbit, ”I am afraid we are turning [this story] down. The objection here is not with the writing, which is up to his best, but rather with the form. It just isn't possible for us to run a fictional work about a real person, for a number of complicated reasons.... I certainly hate to lose this.”

Don was deeply hurt by this particular rejection, and frustrated with The New Yorker The New Yorker's timidity. Nesbit wasted no time in sending the piece to Ted Solotaroff, the young founder and editor of The New American Review. The New American Review.”Barthelme's reputation was just getting under way,” Solotaroff recalled. ”I'd read a few of his things in the New Yorker New Yorker and thought of him as a literary dandy...kind of Frenchified...surrealism as cultural fun and games, out of step with the strenuous late sixties. Despite this prejudice, I was bowled over and then haunted by his impressionistic portrait of Kennedy.” He said: and thought of him as a literary dandy...kind of Frenchified...surrealism as cultural fun and games, out of step with the strenuous late sixties. Despite this prejudice, I was bowled over and then haunted by his impressionistic portrait of Kennedy.” He said: ”Bobby” was on everyone's mind just then-an exciting, distrusted figure.[H]e had emerged from the shadow of his brother's death as a prospective leader of the opposition to the war. Shorn of his kid-brother brashness he seemed half-ruthless opportunist, half liberal crusader, Joe McCarthy in his background and Eugene McCarthy in his foreground.In Barthelme's hands he was transformed from the ba.n.a.l chameleon Bobby to the bemusing, enigmatic ”K.”...he became both more abstract and more intriguing: a pure politician in the contemporary American mode: an overt and subliminal image-maker.

Solotaroff conceded that he didn't fully grasp the story, but an ”editor doesn't have to understand everything, you just have to trust the feeling of seeing freshly and also being teased out of thought, as Keats said of Shakespeare.” Don's story ”made my mind feel like it had been awakened and was rubbing its eyes,” he said.

The New American Review published the piece in April 1968, two months before Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles. ”I cannot account for [the] impulse of the I-character to 'save' [Kennedy] other than by reference to John Kennedy's death,” Don told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ”[S]till, a second a.s.sa.s.sination was unthinkable at that time.” published the piece in April 1968, two months before Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles. ”I cannot account for [the] impulse of the I-character to 'save' [Kennedy] other than by reference to John Kennedy's death,” Don told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ”[S]till, a second a.s.sa.s.sination was unthinkable at that time.”

In late April, Jack Newfield of The Village Voice The Village Voice showed the story to Kennedy. Kennedy asked him, ”Well, is he for me or against me?” Don was amused by the anecdote-and later haunted by the fact that no one was actually able to save Kennedy. showed the story to Kennedy. Kennedy asked him, ”Well, is he for me or against me?” Don was amused by the anecdote-and later haunted by the fact that no one was actually able to save Kennedy.

In another spooky trick of timing, Martin Luther King, Jr., was a.s.sa.s.sinated just as Don's story appeared in bookstores. King's a.s.sociates demanded to know if the FBI was responsible for the murder. d.i.c.k Gregory went public with the fact that the FBI had hara.s.sed King. The agency's code name for him was ”Zorro.” Don had dressed RFK in a Zorro costume, in the story's final scene, to mock Kennedy's heroic image. The coincidence unnerved him.

In the summer of 1967, Don wrote to Walker Percy, pleased that Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Percy's publisher, was now his publisher, as well. Lynn Nesbit had brokered a deal. Percy was happy for Don but also wary about sharing his editor, Henry Robbins. At the time, Percy was struggling with a draft of his novel Love in the Ruins. Love in the Ruins. He wanted Robbins's full attention, and he told Don, only partly in jest, to stand in line. He wanted Robbins's full attention, and he told Don, only partly in jest, to stand in line.

Roger Straus had founded his publis.h.i.+ng house along with John Farrar in 1945. Straus's mother was Gladys Guggenheim; his father, Roger W. Straus, was chair of the American Smelting and Refining Company. His family also owned Macy's. Farrar, Straus and Company's first t.i.tle was Yank, the G. I. Story of War, Yank, the G. I. Story of War, selections from the army's weekly publication, selections from the army's weekly publication, Yank. Yank. s.h.i.+rley Jackson's s.h.i.+rley Jackson's The Lottery, The Lottery, published in 1949, was among the company's first literary t.i.tles. Financially anemic until the 1950s, the firm got its first big boost when Edmund Wilson left Doubleday in a legal dispute and cast his lot with Roger Straus. Wilson remained on the company's list for the rest of his career. In 1955, Robert Giroux, a young editor who had earned his chops at Columbia University's published in 1949, was among the company's first literary t.i.tles. Financially anemic until the 1950s, the firm got its first big boost when Edmund Wilson left Doubleday in a legal dispute and cast his lot with Roger Straus. Wilson remained on the company's list for the rest of his career. In 1955, Robert Giroux, a young editor who had earned his chops at Columbia University's Columbia Review, Columbia Review, joined the firm, bringing with him from Harcourt, Brace seventeen new authors, including Flannery O' Connor, T. S. Eliot, Bernard Malamud, and John Berryman. This move established the company's reputation for publis.h.i.+ng fine literature. (By the mid-eighties, FSG could boast of fifteen National Book Awards and six Pulitzer Prizes; a decade later, it had added ten n.o.bel laureates to its list, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, and Seamus Heaney. Each winter, Straus would give a mock groan and say, ”Oh my G.o.d, I have to go to Stockholm again.”) Eventually, Giroux became a managing partner in the firm. Robert Lowell's joined the firm, bringing with him from Harcourt, Brace seventeen new authors, including Flannery O' Connor, T. S. Eliot, Bernard Malamud, and John Berryman. This move established the company's reputation for publis.h.i.+ng fine literature. (By the mid-eighties, FSG could boast of fifteen National Book Awards and six Pulitzer Prizes; a decade later, it had added ten n.o.bel laureates to its list, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, and Seamus Heaney. Each winter, Straus would give a mock groan and say, ”Oh my G.o.d, I have to go to Stockholm again.”) Eventually, Giroux became a managing partner in the firm. Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead For the Union Dead was the first t.i.tle under the imprint Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in 1964. was the first t.i.tle under the imprint Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in 1964.

Theatrical, flamboyant, gossipy, gracious but salty, usually clad in an ascot, a double-breasted pinstripe suit, and lilac-colored socks, Straus was the tireless company crusader and its iconic image-the picture of the ”gentleman publisher” (when he'd gone into business in the forties, the New York publis.h.i.+ng world consisted of about a dozen small houses run by families-for example Knopf, Scribner's; Harcourt, Brace; and Farrar and Rinehart). Straus railed against ”huge corporate bulls.h.i.+t” and refused to become a ”spaghetti salesman”-his term for bottom-line publis.h.i.+ng-or to let FSG become a ”division of Kleenex, or whatever.”

By the late 1960s, FSG was known for its cheapness as much as for its literary prestige. Straus's favorite boast was that he'd published a ”h.e.l.l of a book” and paid next to nothing for it. Most of his authors didn't mind this arrangement-or the fact that there was no hot water in the bathrooms in FSG's offices at Union Square-because low advances allowed Straus to keep books in print for a long time. His personal loyalty to his writers was charming, flattering, intense.

Henry Robbins, a Harvard graduate two years older than Don, was relatively new to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. For some time, he had kept an eye on Don. After Herman Gollob's outburst at Lynn Nesbit, she courted Robbins and he responded favorably.

”Robbins was a man who took himself and his literature seriously (he was inclined to confuse them),” wrote editor Michael Korda. ”[P]ugnacious, arrogant, opinionated, and self-righteous...Robbins [was] a cla.s.sic type A personality...he enjoyed a good fight for its own sake...[h]e did not compromise. Reasoning with him, as Churchill complained about de Gaulle, was like trying to reason with Joan of Arc.”

One imagines the old editorial board of Forum Forum speaking of Don this way. Small wonder Don became attached to the man. ”Henry was hot-headed,” Lynn Nesbit agrees. ”But he was hot-headed about the right things.” speaking of Don this way. Small wonder Don became attached to the man. ”Henry was hot-headed,” Lynn Nesbit agrees. ”But he was hot-headed about the right things.”

Joan Didion, another of Robbins's authors, has stressed his loyalty to writers: ”I remember his actual hurt and outrage when any of us, his orphan sisters or brothers, got a bad review or a slighting word or even a letter he imagined capable of marring our most inconsequential moment.”

Though Don would rarely pa.s.s up a professional opportunity, he also prized loyalty in friends.h.i.+p. When opportunity and friends.h.i.+p clashed, he was anguished. Shortly after signing with FSG, he called Herman Gollob from Europe-at 3:00 A.M. A.M. Gollob's time. ”I'm not mad at you for not giving me the f.u.c.king money,” Don said. ”Why are you p.i.s.sed off because I asked for it?” Gollob's time. ”I'm not mad at you for not giving me the f.u.c.king money,” Don said. ”Why are you p.i.s.sed off because I asked for it?”

Gollob, groggy, was disarmed. ”End of quarrel,” he said later, looking back on the incident.

By now, Don had made up with Helen, too. One night, when he and Birgit were in New York, Helen phoned him. She was returning to Houston from a trip to Boston, and an airline strike had temporarily stranded her in Manhattan. ”Don was startled to hear my voice, but after a moment he recovered his equanimity and we talked for a long time,” Helen recalled. ”I asked about his work, but he was more interested in telling me of his role as 'father of the child.'

” 'I do everything for my daughter-bathe and dress her, feed her, everything,' he said.... He was learning to cook as well. And then after the first few minutes, he began to tell me of Birgit's emotional condition and how it had manifested itself in both Copenhagen and now in New York.”

Helen remembered that she and Don were ”warm and kind to each other.” ”In fact,” she said, ”I later realized that I had talked to him with the same endearing language I had used during our marriage. We finally said goodbye, and this was the last time that we talked for several years.”

In February 1968, as the number of U.S. Navy and Air Force reservists on active duty in Vietnam topped fifteen thousand; as Americans flocked to Planet of the Apes, Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston battled simians who ruled an America in ruins; and as Richard Nixon announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency by telling voters that ”peace and freedom in the world” depended on his election, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published 6,500 copies of Don's latest short story collection, in which Charlton Heston battled simians who ruled an America in ruins; and as Richard Nixon announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency by telling voters that ”peace and freedom in the world” depended on his election, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published 6,500 copies of Don's latest short story collection, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts.

The t.i.tle comes from Hamlet Hamlet-the quintessential drama about corrupted power, intergenerational conflicts, and dysfunctional families. Near the end of the play, Horatio says: ”...And let me speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about: so shall you hear / Of carnal, b.l.o.o.d.y and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put by cunning and forced cause, / And, in this upshot, purposes mistook / Fall'n on the inventors' heads: all this can I / Truly deliver.”

Don dedicated the book to Herman Gollob-”an unspeakable and unnatural thing for you to do,” Gollob told Don on the phone.

”You mean it made you feel guilty? Good!” Don said. ”That means you still retain a spark of Hebraism.”

”The Indian Uprising,” with its images of complete social breakdown, led off the collection; the book ended with ”See the Moon?” in which the narrator, with a new ”locus of...hopes” awaits the birth of his first child. In between, mysterious objects appear in the city (”The Balloon”), couples drift (”Edward and Pia”), the U.S. military perfects the efficiency of killing (”Report”), while politicians remain aloof (”Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” and ”The President”).

Even more than Snow White, Snow White, Don's latest book took readers into a world at once recognizable and unfamiliar. The portrait of Robert Kennedy was spot-on accurate, and yet the story was also a surrealist word machine. RFK dreams of ”strange aircraft which resemble kitchen implements, bread boards, cookie sheets, colanders. The s.h.i.+ny aluminum instruments are on their way to complete the bombing of Sidi-Madani.” Don's latest book took readers into a world at once recognizable and unfamiliar. The portrait of Robert Kennedy was spot-on accurate, and yet the story was also a surrealist word machine. RFK dreams of ”strange aircraft which resemble kitchen implements, bread boards, cookie sheets, colanders. The s.h.i.+ny aluminum instruments are on their way to complete the bombing of Sidi-Madani.”

”Kafka might well be not turning over but grinning in his grave at Donald Barthelme, for here at last is a worthy successor,” said Anatole Broyard in the New York Times Book Review. New York Times Book Review.

In an extended piece in The New York Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, William Ga.s.s quoted a line from ”The Indian Uprising” and said, ”It is impossible to overpraise such a sentence, and it is characteristic” of William Ga.s.s quoted a line from ”The Indian Uprising” and said, ”It is impossible to overpraise such a sentence, and it is characteristic” of Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts.

Hilary Corke, who had perceptively reviewed Don's first collection, detected a ”coa.r.s.ening and souring” of Don's att.i.tude toward life: ”[S]ex...which once seemed to Barthelme the one possible real act remaining to us in our conurbations of unreality, is...seemingly becoming for him yet another thing to be flicked through, switched on or off, a spectator sport even for its partic.i.p.ants.” Still, the new book was, she said, ”richer in ideas, and in laughs of all colors for that matter, than the combined collections of a dozen ordinary writers.”

It was apparent to most reviewers that Don's stories were more powerful than his novel. In a culture that prized the flamboyant over the small and complex, this would become an increasing problem for Don. Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts was published just as Norman Mailer released was published just as Norman Mailer released The Armies of the Night, The Armies of the Night, his ”non-fiction novel” about the march on the Pentagon in October 1967. A ”big” book in every way, combining memoir, history, fiction, the personal and the political, Mailer's achievement was rightly praised (by Alan Trachtenberg in his ”non-fiction novel” about the march on the Pentagon in October 1967. A ”big” book in every way, combining memoir, history, fiction, the personal and the political, Mailer's achievement was rightly praised (by Alan Trachtenberg in The Nation The Nation) as a ”permanent contribution to our literature.” This remark was followed in the magazine by Calvin Bedient's claim that ”Donald Barthelme [is] relentlessly and entertainingly unmeaningful” in his ”brief, bright, breezy stories.”

In contrast to this view, Earl Shorris noted a few years later in Harper's, Harper's, ”Donald Barthelme has accomplished the work that the New Journalists are not competent to do. In a single story he is able to include more of the taste of the times than there is in the collected works of Wolfe, Breslin, Talese & Co. The difference lies in Barthelme's ability to compress, almost to transistorize the world, and then make his miniatures real again by virtue of his talent for language.” ”Donald Barthelme has accomplished the work that the New Journalists are not competent to do. In a single story he is able to include more of the taste of the times than there is in the collected works of Wolfe, Breslin, Talese & Co. The difference lies in Barthelme's ability to compress, almost to transistorize the world, and then make his miniatures real again by virtue of his talent for language.”

Writing in Newsweek, Newsweek, Jack Kroll, who knew how hard Don worked, and what he faced day to day, said simply, ”Here is a writer one wishes good health, no tax problems, not too much phony success-this voice must not be allowed to crack.” Jack Kroll, who knew how hard Don worked, and what he faced day to day, said simply, ”Here is a writer one wishes good health, no tax problems, not too much phony success-this voice must not be allowed to crack.”

34.

THE POLITICS OF EXHAUSTION.

On May 3, 1968, the Sorbonne's rector called the Paris police to clear the university courtyard of a ”disputatious student meeting,” igniting protests in the city. Students held hands and marched through the Latin Quarter, as well as the old neighborhoods linked by legend to Manet, Courbet, and Baudelaire. Student rioting had already occurred in Nanterre, a poor Parisian suburb. Beginning May 13, Paris would host the peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam, but in the next few weeks, the May rebellion would swamp all other news from the city. Students and workers, striking together, marching in tandem, erecting barricades, would stun Europe and nearly cripple the French government.

In the Latin Quarter, and on the walls of schools, slogans appeared: ”Let's open the gates of nurseries, universities, and other prisons”; ”Be a realist, demand the impossible”; ”I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of my desires.” As with the 1871 Commune, this was an erotic, creative, and playful revolution-and all the more serious for being so. It was a refusal of all authority, ”an ever-growing bubble,” one observer wrote, ”sucking in all that is young against all that is black.”

The New Yorker ran regular updates of the events in Paris that May. Several ”Letters from Paris” appeared from Janet Flanner (writing under the pseudonym Genet), and over the course of two issues in September 1968, Mavis Gallant published ”Reflections, the Events in May: A Paris Notebook.” She talked about tear gas wafting through the windows of fifth-floor apartments, damaged trees, the ”extremely moving” faces of boys and girls linking arms in the streets, the middle-aged urban professionals ”who must know they are hated now.” ran regular updates of the events in Paris that May. Several ”Letters from Paris” appeared from Janet Flanner (writing under the pseudonym Genet), and over the course of two issues in September 1968, Mavis Gallant published ”Reflections, the Events in May: A Paris Notebook.” She talked about tear gas wafting through the windows of fifth-floor apartments, damaged trees, the ”extremely moving” faces of boys and girls linking arms in the streets, the middle-aged urban professionals ”who must know they are hated now.”

During the time between Flanner's reports and Gallant's two-part article, Don slipped two stories into the pages of the magazine. The first, ”The Policemen's Ball,” ran beside Flanner's a.s.sertion, dated June 2, that this ”has been the decisive week since France's crisis began.”

In Don's story, Horace, a policeman with the ”crack of authority” in his voice, takes his girlfriend Margot to a policemen's ball, hoping she will surrender to his force-the ”force of the force.” At the ball, she is drawn to a fireman named Vercingetorix. Finally, though, she returns home with Horace and gives him what he wants-”his heroism deserves it.” All the while, the ”horrors” lurk outside Horace's apartment. ”Not even policemen and their ladies are safe,” the horrors think. ”No one is safe. Safety does not exist. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

The story's smirk at authority is clear. The names Horace and Vercingetorix come to us from Roman history. Vercingetorix was a Gallic rebel noted for building barricades to thwart Roman soldiers. Shortly after vanquis.h.i.+ng Vercingetorix, Caesar was a.s.sa.s.sinated. Horace, an irreverent poet and satirist, fell under Brutus's sway, and joined him in a hopeless attempt to establish a republic.

The historical referents-to a decadent empire and rebellions against it-make Don's story, in the context of the May Days, an extended utopian slogan, as playful, sly, and funny as much of the graffiti in the Latin Quarter.