Part 26 (1/2)

Pynchon notified the NBA that he was not inclined to accept a literary prize, but he did not wish to offend Isaac Bashevis Singer. Fittingly, the award ceremony at Lincoln Center devolved into chaos. A streaker ran across the stage, and Pynchon's publisher sent the comedian Irwin Corey to accept the prize on his behalf. A somewhat befuddled Ralph Ellison introduced Corey, who spouted nonsense for several minutes.

Don's ability to secure recognition for Pynchon was not the only evidence, that year, of his political ac.u.men. Benjamin DeMott, a reader in the Philosophy and Religion category, said the winning entry, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, had been brought to the committee's attention by Donald Barthelme, who had arranged to have lunch with another judge, Francine du Plessix Gray, to talk about it. The author of the Husserl book was Don's old mentor and friend, Maurice Natanson, who learned that he had won the prize just as his publisher was going out of business.

On September 11, 1974, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Guilty Pleasures Guilty Pleasures, Don's first ”nonfiction” book, a collection of Nixon satires, graphic collages, and social critiques.

The book's appearance was a victory for FSG: Don's continued alliance with them had been in doubt. In late December 1973, The New York Times The New York Times published a short article announcing that Simon & Schuster had ”lured” Henry Robbins away from FSG. This was news to Robbins's authors, including Don. ”No announcement has yet been made as to which of the authors Mr. Robbins has already been editing...may follow him,” the paper said. ”The group includes Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion, Marjorie Kellogg, Grace Paley, Walker Percy, Wilfrid Sheed, and Tom Wolfe.” published a short article announcing that Simon & Schuster had ”lured” Henry Robbins away from FSG. This was news to Robbins's authors, including Don. ”No announcement has yet been made as to which of the authors Mr. Robbins has already been editing...may follow him,” the paper said. ”The group includes Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion, Marjorie Kellogg, Grace Paley, Walker Percy, Wilfrid Sheed, and Tom Wolfe.”

Don found exceedingly depressing the paper's implication that ”authors are large striped or spotted animals to be trundled bound and gagged...from one game preserve to the next. Editors are not big-game hunters,” he wrote in a letter to the Times Times, ”they are more like farmers...an editor attends to the spring and fall planting, looks at the sky hoping for rain, and pays some slight attention to the compost heap, that is to say, the media.”

Quietly, he asked Lynn Nesbit to get him out of his contract with FSG so he could accompany Robbins to Simon & Schuster. Straus, fearing a ma.s.s exodus of his best authors, refused to discuss terms. On January 9, 1974, Don wrote Straus, praising the ”exemplary fas.h.i.+on” in which FSG had published his books, and thanking the publisher for his extraordinary ”patience in the matter of my as-yet unfinished [second] novel.”

However, he added, ”my a.s.sociation with Henry has been and is extremely close, both professionally and personally, and I would be deeply upset to have it cut off”: There is the question of a boy's functioning and peace of mind. I have not written this d.a.m.ned book [the long-promised novel] out of malice or (I hope) self-destructiveness, but because I hadn't figured out how to do it; and now, when the thing is on the verge of getting itself written, all of this changing-about-of-editors comes up. I would have much preferred that Henry had stayed with you, but what's done is done. In sum, I would be deeply grateful, and much eased in the mind, if you could see your way clear to letting me go, on such terms as might seem to you appropriate.

Straus replied that Robbins had made ”damaging” allegations, implying ”to a number of literary agents that we would welcome the return of advances because of our alleged financial condition.” Robbins's behavior, Straus stated, ”leaves us no recourse except that of counteracting it with a blanket decision” to refuse all authors' requests to renegotiate their contracts. Straus reminded Don that FSG had optioned a novel from him in 1967, and in 1972 had contracted for another children's book and a book of stories. He thanked Don for the ”generous tone and spirit” of his letter of January 9 and a.s.sured him that in the long run he would be ”glad” he had stayed with FSG.

Once more, Don asked him to reconsider: ”What remains is an author-editor relations.h.i.+p of years' standing which has been and is very important to me. I am sure that you of all people understand the significance of this.”

Straus stood firm. He replied, curtly, that the ”more I've thought about our decision and the more I've reconsidered it, the more certain I am that it is right.”

Nesbit advised Don that it was best not to contest his contract. Eight months later, Guilty Pleasures Guilty Pleasures appeared. FSG paid him a five-thousand-dollar advance for the book. Don's editor was now Pat Strachan, a lively, intelligent woman, with whom Don worked well. appeared. FSG paid him a five-thousand-dollar advance for the book. Don's editor was now Pat Strachan, a lively, intelligent woman, with whom Don worked well.

He remained the darling of Time Time and and Newsweek Newsweek, whose reviewers praised the new book's charms. They, and other writers, argued that Guilty Pleasures Guilty Pleasures lacked the complexity of Don's best fiction but that for this reason it was Don's most accessible book. Some of its humor was ”pretty low,” one critic remarked, and another said Don risked ephemerality by ”draping his motley over perishable structures” like the Nixon scandals. But everyone agreed that Don skewered what needed to be skewered. lacked the complexity of Don's best fiction but that for this reason it was Don's most accessible book. Some of its humor was ”pretty low,” one critic remarked, and another said Don risked ephemerality by ”draping his motley over perishable structures” like the Nixon scandals. But everyone agreed that Don skewered what needed to be skewered.

In the wake of this cheerful reception, FSG offered Don a contract for another nonfiction book. He devised a tentative t.i.tle: Women. Women. Perhaps he imagined, as the book's center, an expansion of the remarks he had written for an exhibition catalog at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in 1970 for a show called ”She,” about women in art. (” 'The looking at a woman sometimes makes for l.u.s.t,' says Thomas Aquinas, in one of the great understatements of the 13th century,” Don wrote. ”Women now demand a presuppositionless regard...[but] the disembawdiment of the eye will not be easily achieved.”) Perhaps he imagined, as the book's center, an expansion of the remarks he had written for an exhibition catalog at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in 1970 for a show called ”She,” about women in art. (” 'The looking at a woman sometimes makes for l.u.s.t,' says Thomas Aquinas, in one of the great understatements of the 13th century,” Don wrote. ”Women now demand a presuppositionless regard...[but] the disembawdiment of the eye will not be easily achieved.”) In August 1975, FSG advanced him ten thousand dollars on signing for the book, plus another five thousand in December, and one thousand a month for the first six months of 1976. Don would be paid an additional five thousand dollars ”on delivery of an acceptable ma.n.u.script.” Straus worked hard to keep Don happy; besides looking ahead, Don was working to finish the novel he'd owed Straus since 1967.

44.

PEANUT b.u.t.tER.

Don's second novel, The Dead Father The Dead Father, published in 1975, roughly in the middle of Don's career, is ”our representative American minimalist work, an audacious cultural doc.u.ment as well as a dynamic and original fiction,” wrote the critic Frederick Karl. In The Dead Father The Dead Father, Don constructs a narrative not around a single tale as in Snow White Snow White, but around all tales-the story is the journey of the hero, the primary subject of myth. Structurally tighter than Snow White Snow White, the novel does not move by cause and effect so much as by a ”process of accretion.” Ideas and images cling, barnaclelike, to the book's central action (the Dead Father's trip to his grave), until the center is nearly obscured. At one point, the Dead Father's journey is interrupted by ”A Manual for Sons”-a separate text altogether, tucked boldly into the book (it later appeared as a short story in Sixty Stories Sixty Stories)-which, though charming, arguably has only minor relevance to the novel's core.

The novel is ”minimalist” in its effort to ”expose” truths by taking as its point of reference ”not the line [developed], but the beyond”-what is only hinted at, said Karl. Don had learned this strategy from two of his his dead fathers: Kafka and Hemingway. dead fathers: Kafka and Hemingway.

At the end of the book, the Dead Father, who has come to represent traditional literature and Western cultural history as well as the weight of paternity, is buried by bulldozers-but clearly not forever. Like Tim Finnegan, the hero of the Irish vaudeville song around whom Joyce built Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake, the Dead Father may reappear at any time, an irrepressible giant.

The Dead Father introduces the extended-dialogue form that largely characterizes Don's remaining novels and several of his late stories. He admitted that these conversations couldn't have been written without the example of Beckett. In introduces the extended-dialogue form that largely characterizes Don's remaining novels and several of his late stories. He admitted that these conversations couldn't have been written without the example of Beckett. In The Dead Father The Dead Father, the dialogues serve as counterpoints to the main narrative and startle the reader with a flurry of non sequiturs. Here, two women, Julie and Emma, are speaking: Hoping this will reach you at a favorable moment.Wake up one dark night with a thumb in your eye.Women together changing that which can and ought to be changed. Dangled his twiddle-diddles in my face.More than I can bear.No it's not.Will it hurt?I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.He's not bad-looking.Haven't made up my mind.Groups surrounding us needing direction.

As opposed to traditional male ”parley,” the women's language is adventurous, pus.h.i.+ng the limits of discourse, like Gertrude Stein's ”Ladies' Voices,” ”telling of b.a.l.l.s.” (Jerome Charyn says that at one point in the early 1970s, Don ”was beginning a novel about Gertrude Stein. It was brilliant but he didn't finish it because The New Yorker The New Yorker turned part of it down.” Julie and Emma's dialogues appear to be salvage from this project.) The women, in spite of their compet.i.tiveness with each other, are out to ”change” the world and give it ”needed direction.” They hope the present is a ”favorable” historical ”moment” for female visions. turned part of it down.” Julie and Emma's dialogues appear to be salvage from this project.) The women, in spite of their compet.i.tiveness with each other, are out to ”change” the world and give it ”needed direction.” They hope the present is a ”favorable” historical ”moment” for female visions.

In contrast, the men in the book reinforce old, flawed ideas (violence, humiliation of one's enemies and children, war). Early on, the Dead Father and his entourage come upon a man tending bar in an open field. The bartender tells Julie he can't serve unaccompanied women. Exhausted language lies at the heart of his boorishness. ”I can talk to you. We understand each other,” the bartender says to the Dead Father, the very embodiment of weary tradition. These men use the same vocabulary-the lexicon of fathers, of patriarchy, which perpetuates injustice. Julie and Emma may not always make sense, but they are linguistic explorers, shattering old forms and their cognitive restraints. They are cousins of Sylvia Plath's anguished daughter in the poem ”Daddy”: ”Daddy, Daddy, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I'm through!”

Earlier, Don's Snow White had longed for ”words in the world that [are] not the words [we] always hear,” but like the woman in Plath's poem, she had no partner to help create a liberated ”grammar.” Julie and Emma have each other; though their alliance is often uneasy-and not yet successful-together they have advanced further than the princess. In these pa.s.sages, The Dead Father The Dead Father movingly extends movingly extends Snow White Snow White's themes.

As for the Dead Father's words, they form the rituals behind order and authority. In Totem and Taboo Totem and Taboo (1912), Freud said that at some point in the history of human development, rebellious sons banded together to kill and eat the father, who had been chasing the boys away so as to keep the females to himself. Freud suggested that the guilt for this deed has haunted every subsequent generation, and to atone for it men have created and wors.h.i.+pped totems for the father: animals, symbols, cultural forms-theology, law, aesthetics. The language of these forms has become the words in the world we always hear. They trap us in authority's grip. (1912), Freud said that at some point in the history of human development, rebellious sons banded together to kill and eat the father, who had been chasing the boys away so as to keep the females to himself. Freud suggested that the guilt for this deed has haunted every subsequent generation, and to atone for it men have created and wors.h.i.+pped totems for the father: animals, symbols, cultural forms-theology, law, aesthetics. The language of these forms has become the words in the world we always hear. They trap us in authority's grip.

Kafka's ”Letter to His Father” is a poignant statement of the problem (and an important literary touchstone for Don): ”[M]y writing was all about you,” Kafka imagines confessing to his father. He speculates that if he had been able to forge a lasting bond with a woman, he could have been a ”free, grateful, guiltless, upright son,” but then everything that had ever happened between father and son ”would have to be undone” and he (Kafka) would be left without a self. When he tried to picture a new self, he could only hear his father's words speaking back at him: ”You are unfit for life....You have only proved to me that all my reproaches were justified.” There is no escape. The structure of language is the shape of the father's body (corpse equals body; corpus equals the body of literature).

Those who try to escape, like Paul, the prince figure, and Bill, the leader of men in Snow White Snow White, suffer debilitating neuroses. The psychoa.n.a.lyst Jane Gallop puts it this way: ”If one tries to think at one and the same time about the desire for the father's death and the desire to be in the father's place, one risks facing the desire for one's own death.” In Snow White Snow White, Bill exhibits the cla.s.sic features of schizophrenia, withdrawing from human relations.h.i.+ps-he can't bear to be touched-and Paul flails in his attempts to avoid social conformity (the very glue of fatherly authority).

Thomas, the Dead Father's son, is also caught; he has worn the foolscap forced on him by his father. By the novel's end, it is unclear whether he will step into the father's role and perpetuate patriarchy, or whether he will break his chains-but he seems a step ahead of Paul and Bill, perhaps because of his union with Julie. At least, in conversation with her, he recognizes the challenges he faces.

By the mid-1970s, Michel Foucault had argued that ”power has its principle not so much in a person as in...an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.” Jacques Derrida had insisted that ”speech” is the ”father” while ”logos” (writing) is the ”son.” ”The son,” he said, ”would be destroyed in his very presence presence without the without the attendance attendance of his father.” That is, of his father.” That is, the act of writing the act of writing was a sign of filial devotion. was a sign of filial devotion.

Don's Dead Father, a purely verbal creation, an abstract, s.h.i.+fting being, half-human, half-mechanical (with a movie house and a confessional lodged in his leg), the progenitor of the ”poker chip, the cash register, the juice extractor, the kazoo, the rubber pretzel, the cuckoo clock, the key chain, the dime bank, the pantograph, the bubble pipe, the punching bag both light and heavy, the inkblot, the nose drop, the midget Bible, the slot-machine slug, and many other useful and humane artifacts” is the perfect (non-)image for the grammars of power obsessing Foucault, Derrida, and others. He is Plath's ”b.a.s.t.a.r.d,” Kafka's faceless bureaucrat, and Alfred Jarry's Pere Ubu Pere Ubu rolled into one. He is Freud's totem filtered through Jacques Lacan (”It is through the rolled into one. He is Freud's totem filtered through Jacques Lacan (”It is through the name of the father name of the father that we must recognize the...symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified...the figure of the law,” Lacan said). that we must recognize the...symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified...the figure of the law,” Lacan said).

And for all the symbolic weight the Dead Father carries, he is movingly, even sympathetically, human.

At one point, one of the women, Julie or Emma, asks the other, ”What is your totem?” Elsewhere, the characters speculate about eating the Dead Father-all of which indicates Don's familiarity with Totem and Taboo. Totem and Taboo. Does he offer expiation for primal guilt? Does he offer expiation for primal guilt?

Perhaps the playfulness of Julie's and Emma's talk-the playfulness of the novel as a whole-suggests a direction. As the critic Peter Schwenger says, play is a release of tensions both conscious and unconscious, a loosening of the patterns and internal mechanisms by which the father governs our every thought. ”Patricide is a bad idea,” Don wrote. ”[I]t proves, beyond a doubt, that the father's every fluted accusation against you was correct: you are a thoroughly bad individual....And it is not necessary. It is not necessary to slay your father, time will slay him, that is a virtual certainty.” No, rebellion is not the way. Play, play, and by means of play, ”Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least 'turned down' in this generation.”

Centrally placed, The Dead Father The Dead Father refines what has been and antic.i.p.ates what's to come in Don's writing. It is an enlargement of Oedipal meditations such as ”Views of My Father Weeping” and ”The Sandman.” It is also a deepening of a dialectic that has been present in his work from the start. ”For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You” is perhaps the clearest example of this thread in his fiction-a clash between male and female language, realms of experience, and related other differences (public versus private, aesthetic detachment versus involvement in daily life). refines what has been and antic.i.p.ates what's to come in Don's writing. It is an enlargement of Oedipal meditations such as ”Views of My Father Weeping” and ”The Sandman.” It is also a deepening of a dialectic that has been present in his work from the start. ”For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You” is perhaps the clearest example of this thread in his fiction-a clash between male and female language, realms of experience, and related other differences (public versus private, aesthetic detachment versus involvement in daily life).

In ”For I'm the Boy,” Bloomsbury's friends.h.i.+p with Huber and Whittle is rendered in formal terms. It is unsatisfactory: The men know only the merest facts about each other. They long for emotional connection-Huber and Whittle are even willing to pay Bloomsbury ”a hundred dollars” for a ”feeling”-but this is denied them in the highly postured male sphere.

On the other hand, the language linked to women is free-flowing and playful. The men are enclosed in a car; women fly into the sky. Bloomsbury's friends have no access to his inner life, his private (feminine) language, and in the end can only connect with him by beating him. In Don's work, male encounters often end in violence (”For I'm the Boy,” Snow White Snow White, ”Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”).

In The Dead Father The Dead Father, the language tied to Thomas is terse and concerned with logistics. If there is any hope for him, it lies with Julie-though without the aid of the father's deep grammar, she, too, will have trouble equating the ”kind of life” she has ”imagined” with ”what [she] is actually doing.”

The only character in the novel free of all all constraints is a drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d named Edmund (an echo of Shakespeare's constraints is a drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d named Edmund (an echo of Shakespeare's Lear Lear?).

The Dead Father prompted one of the most blistering attacks ever launched against Don, courtesy of Hilton Kramer in prompted one of the most blistering attacks ever launched against Don, courtesy of Hilton Kramer in Commentary. Commentary. A conservative cultural critic, he accused Don of holding ”life itself in contempt, and seek[ing] a redress of...grievances in the kind of literary artifice that shuts out all reference to the normal course of human feeling.” Don, he said, ”adopts an att.i.tude of irony and condescension” toward ”nature” and ”innocence.” A conservative cultural critic, he accused Don of holding ”life itself in contempt, and seek[ing] a redress of...grievances in the kind of literary artifice that shuts out all reference to the normal course of human feeling.” Don, he said, ”adopts an att.i.tude of irony and condescension” toward ”nature” and ”innocence.”

After railing for several paragraphs against Don's ”aestheticism,” Kramer revealed his true concern-and his political agenda: He said Don's work expressed ”that hatred of the family that was a hallmark of the ideology of the counterculture of the 60s.” Let the culture wars begin. his political agenda: He said Don's work expressed ”that hatred of the family that was a hallmark of the ideology of the counterculture of the 60s.” Let the culture wars begin.

It's hardly worth noting that there never really existed, in this country, a coherent ”counterculture”-and that, if one had existed, Don would not have partic.i.p.ated in it. Perhaps Kramer had something like the Beats in mind, whose dominant political ideology was, if anything, more antiwar than antifamily.

Nevertheless, Don's fiction challenged the complacent ”truths” of our culture in all its variety. It challenged easy, prevailing notions of literature, politics, and social relations. ”His [writing]...is the most sophisticated” weapon in the war against traditional cultural values, Kramer said, ”because [it] is the most calculated and refined.”

Kramer's anger about the decline of American culture might have been aimed more accurately against the greed of commercial publishers. This was the topic of a conference held at the Library of Congress in October 1975, at which Don was invited to speak. The nation's poet laureate at the time, Stanley Kunitz, noted the ”state of crisis” in publis.h.i.+ng-the fact that major houses were abandoning their poetry lists and quality fiction because literature was not economically viable. ”Perhaps much of contemporary literature will go underground and be published in mimeograph for a handful of friends,” Kunitz fretted. He convened a group of editors and writers, including Don, Peter Davison, James Laughlin, Grace Schulman, Kathleen Fraser, Larry McMurtry, Ted Solotaroff, Daniel Halpern, and Jonathan Baumbach to discuss this ”sad state of affairs.” Most of the writers agreed with Baumbach that ”we're really a country” of ”quasi-literacy” and that the vast quant.i.ty of ”schlock” that gets published each year ”drives out serious fiction.”

The editors tried to defend their practices, but most admitted that the business had changed ”unimaginably” in recent years. It used to proceed with ”considerably more pride and generosity,” but now the financial bottom line drove publis.h.i.+ng, rather than intellectual rigor or high literary standards.

Don grasped the situation this way: The main difficulty with the book business is that a book is two kinds of objects. You have, on the one hand, a thing that a reasonable and prudent man might decide is a book. You have on the other hand an object which looks very much like a book, feels very much like a book, but is in actuality a bucket of peanut b.u.t.ter covered with a thin layer of chocolate sauce. These things are sold in the same way. The latter seems to sell better, for some mysterious reason, than the former. A good example of this that I ran into recently is a book called The First Time The First Time, which apparently has to do with accounts of initial s.e.xual experiences of either eminent or reasonably well-known people. This, I would say, is a bucket of peanut b.u.t.ter. Actually, they missed. They should have done a book called The Last Time The Last Time, which would not only be funnier but more poignant. The idea is copyrighted, by the way. Take notes.