Part 27 (1/2)

45.

DOWNTOWN.

In April 1975, television screens filled with the spectacle of a U.S. military helicopter lifting off the roof of the American emba.s.sy in Saigon as several South Vietnamese citizens tried to latch on to the flying machine and be carried away from the chaos on the ground. U.S. Marines were seen wielding rifles against desperate Vietnamese who tried to block the Americans' escape routes. Furious ARVN soldiers, formerly Western allies, fired on departing U.S. personnel for what they saw as a craven betrayal. America's longest, and most ignominious, war had reached an end.

”The greatest dissonance of my adult lifetime was the Vietnam war,” Don said. It was the ”late twentieth century music.” Its strains had shaken American literature. Don had directly addressed the war in only a handful of stories-among them ”Report” and ”The Indian Uprising”-but his dissonant style was partly an outgrowth of the conflict's effects on every aspect of American life. To some extent, Don's phrase ”Fragments are the only forms I trust” was a witty refinement of Hemingway's mistrust of honor, glory honor, glory, and other ”patriotic” words, just as Vietnam marked a refinement in military technology since World War I. The twentieth century had become more efficient at killing, and language had become more complicit in covert crimes. Hence the embrace of fragments-little glimpses of authenticity-rather than wholehearted acceptance of grand visions.

Don's prose style, shaped by his dance with philosophy and modernism, may have been outre, but it was not different in spirit from more mainstream writing touched by the war, which stretched the possibilities of American ”realism.” (Remember Don's comment that the ”function of the advance guard...is to protect the main body, which translates as the status quo.”) ”Vietnam has sp.a.w.ned a jargon of such delicate locutions that it's often impossible to know even remotely the thing being described,” Michael Herr said in his dispatches from the war. Long ago, George Orwell had warned readers that when words are used to obfuscate, rather than communicate, narrative breaks down. Meaning is lost. Vietnam was the perfect example. ”We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote in an essay dealing with the late 1960s. But, she admitted, it was a time ”when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.”

She was not alone. As Don's narrator says in ”See the Moon?” his ”irregular methods”-as well as those of Tim O'Brien, Michael Herr, Robert Stone, Joan Didion, and others-were a ”Distant Early Warning System,” signaling troubles ahead...at heart, a conservative and deeply sentimental impulse: to warn, to caution, to protect the middle.

In 1976, America's bicentennial year, Don went to the airport to meet his daughter. Anne had flown in from Denmark for her annual summer visit. ”I put the United States on a pedestal, because that's where my dad was,” Anne says.

”As soon as she stepped off the plane, people began slapping red-white-and-blue Bicentennial stickers on her and she came under fire from three different platoons of Light Infantry, all in authentic period uniforms,” Don wrote, only slightly tongue in cheek, in a ”Talk of the Town” piece. In it, he related a conversation he had had with Anne about the bicentennial: ”The Bicentennial means that we have been a nation for two hundred years.””The Americans got loose from the evil English king,” she said.”Well, he wasn't so evil. Just not too bright. The point was that we got the feeling that the country should belong to the people who lived in it.””What about the Indians?””You're right. I'm just telling you what happened.””Tell me what's good about the Americans,” she said.”Well, we tried to design a government that would be better for the people than the old governments of Europe.””Is it?””In some ways. There's still a lot wrong with it.””Like what?””It doesn't take good enough care of the poor people, and it takes excessively good care of the rich people.””Why is that?””It's mostly run by the rich people....”... ”What's a s.e.x scandal?” She'd been watching television.

Their bicentennial conversation continued throughout the summer as Don took Anne shopping around the West Village. She kept pressing him, asking, ”What else? What else is good good about Americans?” about Americans?”

”We're sensible,” Don told her one day. ”We're sensible as an old shoe.”

New York City was broke that summer, and the federal government refused to come to its aid. The New York Daily News New York Daily News ran a headline summing up President Ford's response: ford to city: drop dead. Crime was commonplace; garbage piled up on the streets. Two years earlier, so many people were living in once-deserted buildings in Lower Manhattan, the city council pa.s.sed a new law, the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, to regulate illegal occupancy. For a ”sensible” father, an old-shoe sort of dad, it was frightening to take his daughter around the streets that summer. ran a headline summing up President Ford's response: ford to city: drop dead. Crime was commonplace; garbage piled up on the streets. Two years earlier, so many people were living in once-deserted buildings in Lower Manhattan, the city council pa.s.sed a new law, the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, to regulate illegal occupancy. For a ”sensible” father, an old-shoe sort of dad, it was frightening to take his daughter around the streets that summer.

In SoHo, on the Lower East Side, over on Avenue D, and along the old West Side piers, painters, musicians, and performance artists gathered in large numbers-in part because of the abandoned building s.p.a.ce-and responded to the city's crisis. ”New York in the 1970s was a dark and dangerous place,” writes Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. ”The hippie euphoria of the 1960s, with its optimism, free love, and paeans to personal fulfillment, had evaporated. Hippie culture had never really found New York to be fertile ground anyway....If acid had been the mind-expanding substance of the West Coast sixties, heroin was the drug of preference in Gotham.” Leaders.h.i.+p could not be counted on...Watergate, Vietnam, bankruptcy, corruption...

One result, in what the press came to call New York's ”Downtown” scene, was loud and nihilistic art, with large doses of didacticism and rage. Punk rock led the way in clubs such as CBGB on the Bowery. Television and similar bands dragged glam and glitter through the garbage dump and staged performances that were indistinguishable from a.s.saults on the audience. ”[E]veryone was in a band,” Taylor says, even those who were really painters and writers. ”Downtown works undermined the traditions of art, music, performance, and writing at the most basic structural levels. Artists were also writers, writers developed performance pieces, performers incorporated videos into their work.” Influences included the ”Symbolists, Beats, New York School, Situationists, Dada, Pop Art, Hippies, Marxists, and Anarchists.”

Keith Haring would soon turn graffiti into an art form. Jenny Holzer was already doing the same for billboards. Philip Gla.s.s made minimalism the new musical currency. Laurie Anderson brought William Burroughs back into vogue. And by the next decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat would become the new Andy Warhol, famous for being famous.

Downtown writing-much of it self-published or appearing in ephemeral literary tabloids sold in the St. Marks and Spring Street bookshops-was an attack on the ”nicey-nicey-clean-ice-cream-TV society,” Kathy Acker said. In her work, and the work of other Downtown writers such as Lynne Tillman, Constance DeJong, and Dennis Cooper, the reader finds ”language divided against itself,” said Robert Siegle, a culture critic. The fiction produced was clearly ”related to the generation that preceded it, writers who emerged in the sixties and balanced commercial and critical success with remarkable skill, including...Donald Barthelme (whose witty appropriations must have encouraged the more politically engaged forms [of Downtown writing]).”

Yet Don was ambivalent about this Downtown stew. In a story called ”Visitors,” he would write, ”Barking art caged in the high white galleries, don't go inside or it'll get you, leap into your lap and cover your face with kisses. Some goes to the other extreme, snarls and shows its brilliant teeth. O art I won't hurt you if you don't hurt me.” Later in the same piece, two characters talk: ”Actually, I can't stand artists....””Like who in particular?””Like that woman who puts chewing gum on her stomach-””She doesn't do that anymore. And the chewing gum was not poorly placed.””And that other one who cuts parts off himself, whittles whittles on himself, that fries my a.s.s.” on himself, that fries my a.s.s.””It's supposed to.”

For Don, the problem with the new ”barking” art was its lack of subtlety and wit. The battles it waged had been tackled already, and in finer fas.h.i.+on. While Don's generation of American writers-among them, Barth, Pynchon, Paley, Hawkes, and Ga.s.s-had attempted to expand modernism's discoveries, to develop from from and and against against it naturally, this new wave seemed merely repet.i.tive, less cognizant of its roots and deepest aims. Whereas Downtown writing seemed content with polemics, Don had always yearned for transcendence. At the Was.h.i.+ngton and Lee symposium, he had made a remarkable statement that placed him at a distance from many of the writers who now claimed him as a father. ”I would suggest...that there is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists...[and] which is true,” he said. ”This is something spoken of as the ineffable. If there is any word I detest in the language, this would be it, but the fact that it exists, the word ineffable...suggests that there might be something that is ineffable. And I believe that's the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it...an area somewhere probably between mathematics and religion, in which what may fairly be called truth exists.” it naturally, this new wave seemed merely repet.i.tive, less cognizant of its roots and deepest aims. Whereas Downtown writing seemed content with polemics, Don had always yearned for transcendence. At the Was.h.i.+ngton and Lee symposium, he had made a remarkable statement that placed him at a distance from many of the writers who now claimed him as a father. ”I would suggest...that there is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists...[and] which is true,” he said. ”This is something spoken of as the ineffable. If there is any word I detest in the language, this would be it, but the fact that it exists, the word ineffable...suggests that there might be something that is ineffable. And I believe that's the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it...an area somewhere probably between mathematics and religion, in which what may fairly be called truth exists.”

When it came to contemporaries, Don's affinities lay with Europeans-and increasingly with Latin Americans, whose ”magic realism” was booming.

Since the early sixties, he had kept his eye on the Paris-based journal Tel Quel Tel Quel, edited by Philippe Sollers. Tel Quel Tel Quel's literary ideology was founded on the notion that textual structures could be studied ”scientifically,” and that a systematic approach to reading and writing would dispel literature's mystique mystique. Implicit in this project was an attempt to erase humanism, to downplay subjectivity (there was much talk about the ”death of the subject,” ”the death of the author”) and to focus on literary production as a politically, historically, and mechanically determined process.

Don was intrigued by Tel Quel Tel Quel's theories, the way one is amused by the rules of a board game. But he was not fully convinced by the program. In the work of Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, and others, the effort, Don said, is ”to get rid of psychologizing the novel, and...the effort is considerable. In doing this, it seems to me, [these authors] miss much else, they pay far too little attention to language, although many of them write beautifully.”

At an extreme, the Tel Quel Tel Quel group (admittedly, the group was inconstant) implied that literature was hermetically sealed, a world unto itself. On the other hand, the Vietnam books appearing then in America suggested that literature was group (admittedly, the group was inconstant) implied that literature was hermetically sealed, a world unto itself. On the other hand, the Vietnam books appearing then in America suggested that literature was highly highly sensitive to the world. Meanwhile, New York's Downtown writers viewed literature as a blunt political tool. sensitive to the world. Meanwhile, New York's Downtown writers viewed literature as a blunt political tool.

Like Edgar Allan Poe's intrepid sailor, Don rode the whirlpool of these competing forces, and rejected all attempts to restrict his art.

In 1976, Don's ninth book, Amateurs Amateurs, was published. It was his fourth book in four years and it was a remarkably a.s.sured collection-if not Don's most ambitious outing, perhaps his most purely entertaining. It's as though, with The Dead Father The Dead Father, he had fulfilled the need to prove himself, to carve a niche in the rock of modernism. As with his last two collections, he chose a simple, noncombative t.i.tle that suggested a cheerful acceptance of humanity's frailties. In ”postmodern” terms, The Dead Father The Dead Father followed by followed by Amateurs Amateurs may imply weakness in the shadow of giants, but the t.i.tle is less narrow than that, noting, instead, human essentials: our dabbling, doodling natures...and that other essential, amour. ”[O]ne should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever,” Don wrote in ”Rebecca.” may imply weakness in the shadow of giants, but the t.i.tle is less narrow than that, noting, instead, human essentials: our dabbling, doodling natures...and that other essential, amour. ”[O]ne should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever,” Don wrote in ”Rebecca.”

The book opens and closes with stories about the mechanical flavor of our age. It is temporal, our age, soon to be washed away. In the meantime, we have love, work, and play. ”Our Work and Why We Do It” accepts the Tel Quel Tel Quel argument that texts are received ideas spit out by machines. But rather than wallow in systematic dullness, Don celebrated human ingenuity. ”[A]dmirable volume after admirable volume tumbled from the sweating presses...” he began. Then he cataloged machinery's ”precious” products: ”carefully justified black prose,” ”Alice Cooper T-s.h.i.+rts,” atlases and maps, matchbook covers, the ” argument that texts are received ideas spit out by machines. But rather than wallow in systematic dullness, Don celebrated human ingenuity. ”[A]dmirable volume after admirable volume tumbled from the sweating presses...” he began. Then he cataloged machinery's ”precious” products: ”carefully justified black prose,” ”Alice Cooper T-s.h.i.+rts,” atlases and maps, matchbook covers, the ”Oxford Book of American Grub.” The narrator boasts, ”Our destiny is to accomplish 1.5 million impressions [of print] per day.” A meaningless spewing of trash in a self-justifying economic system (the ”postmodern condition”)? Or an example, to be cherished, of energy and creativity? The work itself is a joy, a purpose for our lives, and the matchbook covers are charming.

”I saw the figure 5 writ in gold,” the narrator says, reminding us that mechanization also a.s.sists poetry and art. The line was inspired by William Carlos Williams's ”The Great Figure,” in which the poet described a fire truck moving ”tense” and ”unheeded” through the ”dark city,” with the number 5 emblazoned on its side. In an homage to Williams, Charles Demuth painted the figure 5 on a large canvas. Now Don pulled the poem and and the painting into the mechanics of the painting into the mechanics of his his work. work.

The story ends with an affectionate nod to Joyce: ”Our reputation for excellence is unexcelled, in every part of the world. And will be maintained until the destruction of our art by some other art which is just as good but which, I am happy to say, has not yet been invented.” As an epigraph to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce had chosen a line from Ovid: ”And he turned his mind to unknown arts.” Stephen Dedalus sets out to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race; Don's man aspires only to maintain the nuts and bolts of daily ”impressions.” A falling off from previous generations? Perhaps. An amateur effort. But that is the nature of our age, and, in truth, of all all ages, as one era sweeps aside another. ages, as one era sweeps aside another.

The volume's concluding story, ”At the End of the Mechanical Age,” owes its t.i.tle, in part, to Walter Benjamin's famous essay ”The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin refined Valery's concern that just as ”water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” With endless reproduction, the ”aura” of art-its authenticity-will ”wither.”

In this story, Don concurs, but he insists that at least for a while ”standby generators” will ensure the continued ”flow of grace to all of G.o.d's creatures at the end of the mechanical age.” The artists of our time may not be the great visionaries the world has formerly known-and possibly we ”will not enjoy the age to come quite so much”-but in the meantime we can ”huddle and cling” in the light from our backup systems.

The story's characters sing songs of ”great expectations.” And here Don is firm in his belief that, if there is a slide in the quality of our period's art, the fault lies in the world's brute facts. ”The end of the mechanical age is in my judgment an actuality straining to become a metaphor,” says one of the characters-a rejection of the Aristotelian view that language precedes and shapes facts. Rather, Don insists that the actualities come first. Objects and particularities resist the mechanics of language, as does the ”ineffable.” But the mechanics are means for scratching away at the things we cannot reach.

And the mechanics are delightful. Several stories in Amateurs Amateurs (”What to Do Next,” ”The Agreement,” ”And Then”) demonstrate the joy of sentence generation. A simple simile, a faint connotation, makes possible multiple ”impressions.” Each of these stories is an outgrowth of ”Sentence” in (”What to Do Next,” ”The Agreement,” ”And Then”) demonstrate the joy of sentence generation. A simple simile, a faint connotation, makes possible multiple ”impressions.” Each of these stories is an outgrowth of ”Sentence” in Sadness Sadness, but they are more relaxed, more confident, glorying in their music rather than scoring theoretical points about the nature of language.

Overall, there are fewer fragments in this book, a lightening of the collage effect: Habitual systems do do have their dangers. Don's story ”The Sergeant” points out the problems of mechanized politics. The ”militaryindustrial complex,” seeking to perpetuate its enormous profit-making capacity, leads to endless wars and mistakes in war. ”Works is what counts, boy, forget about anything else and look to your works, your works tell the story,” a chaplain tells the sergeant. The n.o.ble aims have their dangers. Don's story ”The Sergeant” points out the problems of mechanized politics. The ”militaryindustrial complex,” seeking to perpetuate its enormous profit-making capacity, leads to endless wars and mistakes in war. ”Works is what counts, boy, forget about anything else and look to your works, your works tell the story,” a chaplain tells the sergeant. The n.o.ble aims behind behind the ”works” have been lost in the midst of a flatulent bureaucracy. the ”works” have been lost in the midst of a flatulent bureaucracy.

Huddle and cling: ”it will pall, of course, everything palls, in time,” says one of Don's characters, but Amateurs Amateurs affirms that the ”fear of pall [is] not yet triumphant.” affirms that the ”fear of pall [is] not yet triumphant.”

Most reviewers received the book with enthusiasm; the praise, and Don's remarkable productivity, cemented his reputation as a major writer. ”The public wants rea.s.surance, and Barthelme, true to his vision, gives it to them,” Linda Kuehl wrote in The Sat.u.r.day Review The Sat.u.r.day Review. ”He offers gestalts on behalf of the mult.i.tude he champions, on behalf of mechanized, betrayed Everyman....He counters grim, audacious reality with a wry wit, warm heart, and sympathetic-if surreal-eye.”

Even those who felt that Amateurs Amateurs was a lesser effort than was a lesser effort than Sadness Sadness and and City Life City Life inadvertently confirmed Don as an important literary presence. Richard Locke, writing in the inadvertently confirmed Don as an important literary presence. Richard Locke, writing in the New York Times Book Review New York Times Book Review, complained that Don's style had become a ”mannerism, self-duplicating, an automatic reflex not an act of local intelligence.” What this charge ignores is the miracle that Don developed styles at all using literary and cultural detritus, and the further astonishment that these styles could be refined into a ”mannerism.” In other words, Amateurs Amateurs solidifies a unique American voice. solidifies a unique American voice.

Locke's review was accompanied by a series of photographs of Don's head, tumbling down the page (it is an age of mechanical reproduction). He is smiling wryly, eyebrows raised.

He was everywhere now.

Specifically, in the summer of 1976, as America buried its war sorrows in bicentennial bl.u.s.ter, he was on the streets of New York with his daughter. There was nothing mechanical in his approach to the role of father-or citizen. ”The great task is to make the word 'American' mean what it meant in the beginning-new hope,” he told Anne.

”That's going to be a b.i.t.c.h,” Anne said.

”I don't know where she gets such language,” Don wrote, ”but I didn't disagree.”

46.