Part 28 (1/2)

One day Birgit phoned Don from Denmark to talk about Kierkegaard, and he found himself, once more, in a mentors.h.i.+p role with his ex-wife. In a piece Birgit eventually published in a journal called Kierkegaardiana Kierkegaardiana, her musings on irony are identical to Don's summary of it in ”Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel.”

The ironist, Birgit later wrote-possibly thinking of her ex-husband-is a man who ”sees everything as possibility and nothing mundane is allowed to drag him down.”

To his neighbors, Don was now a familiar presence, his daily appearances on the street another aspect of his sagacious demeanor. The novelist David Markson says, ”I lived over near Sixth, and so I'd frequently walk up West Eleventh and we'd run into each other. He was a famous writer, and I had no reputation at all, so I was always kind of quiet around him. He was the the Donald Barthelme. Once, I was walking with my daughter, who was about sixteen at the time, and we b.u.mped into him. Afterward, she asked me who he was and I told her, and she said, 'Dad! You didn't even introduce me! My friends and I love his work!' Donald Barthelme. Once, I was walking with my daughter, who was about sixteen at the time, and we b.u.mped into him. Afterward, she asked me who he was and I told her, and she said, 'Dad! You didn't even introduce me! My friends and I love his work!'

”One time, Faith Sale pa.s.sed this message on to my wife; she said, 'Donald Barthelme wants you to please tell David Markson that he's not always always coming out of that liquor store where you frequently see him”-probably Lamanna's, on Sixth. ”It was very funny,” Markson says. ”I, of course, went to a coming out of that liquor store where you frequently see him”-probably Lamanna's, on Sixth. ”It was very funny,” Markson says. ”I, of course, went to a different different liquor store, and was probably there more often than Don was in his!” liquor store, and was probably there more often than Don was in his!”

Ann Beattie was now a regular, if infrequent, guest in Don's apartment, or he and Marion would go over to her place for dinner. One night, while Beattie cooked for them, she felt ”exorcized,” she said, because she'd ”just finished [reading] Poets in Their Youth Poets in Their Youth.”

Poets in Their Youth is Eileen Simpson's memoir of John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, and others. The book details the heavy drinking and nervous breakdowns that anguished these poets. At the end, Simpson pictures the poets' idea of heaven. They would all be together and they would ”recite one another's poems and talk for hours on end, free at last of worldly concerns about where the next advance, the next drink, the next girl or even the next inspiration would come from-free at last to be obsessed with poetry.” is Eileen Simpson's memoir of John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, and others. The book details the heavy drinking and nervous breakdowns that anguished these poets. At the end, Simpson pictures the poets' idea of heaven. They would all be together and they would ”recite one another's poems and talk for hours on end, free at last of worldly concerns about where the next advance, the next drink, the next girl or even the next inspiration would come from-free at last to be obsessed with poetry.”

”I thought the ending must be meant ironically,” Beattie says. Don shot her a pained look. ”He despaired of me,” she admits.

47.

THE END OF AN AGE.

In August 1977, Roger Angell returned a story of Don's called ”Tenebrae.” Pa.s.sing on this ”was a hard decision,” he said. The story contained material that would resurface in ”Great Days” and ”The Farewell Party.” It was pure dialogue, without exposition or identifiable characters. Angell recognized that ”Tenebrae” was ”a serious work” and that it was a ”new form” for Don. It also had ”some long and lovely pa.s.sages and some short and funny ones that [I] admire extravagantly.” But after several readings, the story remained ”private and largely abstract” to Angell, and he felt ”let down or simply bored by pa.s.sages that meant very little and that sometimes almost appeared to go on just because it was easier for [Don] to continue them than to cut them off.”

Angell knew the rejection would be a blow to Don because, as he wrote him, ”you told me that this is the direction that your work is taking now and may be taking for some time to come. Well, maybe we'll learn to read you. It won't be the first time that that happened.” happened.”

This news came on the heels of some very public attacks on Don's work. Josephine Hendlin, writing in Harper's Harper's, said that Don felt ”such disdain for life he aestheticizes even his depression.” In Matters of Fact and Fiction Matters of Fact and Fiction, Gore Vidal claimed that Don ”writes only about the writing he is writing...[and] I [am] put off by the pictures.”

Don's new dialogue stories would only embolden his critics. The stories edged toward complete abstraction. Conversations in medias res, they risked, even flirted with, randomness.

In 1978, John Gardner published On Moral Fiction On Moral Fiction. Don described it as a St. Valentine's Day Ma.s.sacre: ”John took all his contemporaries into a garage and machine-gunned us all-with full moral intent, I'm sure.” Gardner dismissed his peers on the grounds that their writing stank of moral rot. The ironic laughter in Don's stories was ”enfeebled,” he said: ”He knows what is wrong [with the world] but he has no clear image of, or interest in, how things ought to be.”

The Barthelme backlash of the late 1970s occurred for several reasons, obvious in retrospect. First, praise and then scorn is a natural journalistic cycle: switching the poles of a story in order to keep the story ”new” (a worm in the apple of celebrity). As a former newspaper man, Don knew the rhythm well.

Second, some writers clear paths for their work by slaying whatever moves (Don had once taken shots at Graham Greene and John Kenneth Galbraith). At the time of On Moral Fiction On Moral Fiction, Gardner was a frustrated novelist who believed his work hadn't received its due; he had published a book on Chaucer whose originality had been questioned by academics. He demanded respectability. Third, the excitement of the linguistic daring that had distinguished Vonnegut, Barth, Pynchon, Don, and others had worn off. Each of these writers was now settling into the style or styles he had forged for himself-an intensely interesting movement, but no longer novel.

Perhaps more than anything else, constriction-of a political nature-had seized the culture. Willie Morris (fired by Harper's Harper's for publis.h.i.+ng ”provocative” essays) put it this way: America's ”[idealistic] party was pretty much over” and the nation was suffering a hangover. for publis.h.i.+ng ”provocative” essays) put it this way: America's ”[idealistic] party was pretty much over” and the nation was suffering a hangover.

All along the political scale, the suspicion spread that America had gone too far. We had overindulged in the sixties and early seventies, and now we'd have to pay (there was, the media claimed, a very real ”energy crisis”). It is remarkable how often Don's critics worried about his ”morals” instead of his literary ability.

Don felt a winding down. ”[E]verything in New York City is getting shabbier and rattier and rattier,” he said. ”My eyes are getting worse. Everything's Everything's getting worse. My back hurts. getting worse. My back hurts. Everybody's Everybody's back hurts. back hurts.

”Aside from that, the physical surround is deteriorating. And beyond that, I feel a deterioration of the world's mental life. I think it's a shared perception; it's brought up in Christopher Lasch's book The Culture of Narcissism The Culture of Narcissism. Everybody seems to agree that everything is getting worse. Of course the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Elizabethans also complained that things were falling apart. But I think here everything is is getting worse.” getting worse.”

Thus the dialogues. They were not a turning away from the world but a turning toward turning toward something, a purer search for transcendence, which had always occupied Don, whatever else he had been up to. something, a purer search for transcendence, which had always occupied Don, whatever else he had been up to.

In the past, ”I have” often been ”a realist, a Dreiserian chronicler of historical time,” Don insisted, and as evidence he could point to all the details in his work: student rebellions, the ”new music,” urbanism....

With the dialogues, Don was seeking ”something...beyond [emphasis added] which I haven't figured out yet....I know it's there and I can't quite get there....” He was drawn to the ”poetic” possibilities of dialogue that had opened to him in composing the ladies' voices in [emphasis added] which I haven't figured out yet....I know it's there and I can't quite get there....” He was drawn to the ”poetic” possibilities of dialogue that had opened to him in composing the ladies' voices in The Dead Father The Dead Father.

While Marion was still working for Time Time, the magazine began pressuring her to ”live and work in other cities/bureaus like other correspondents,” she says. She needed to make plans.

She asked Don what he wanted to do. New York City was getting ”rattier,” but Don didn't want to leave it.

What about marriage? He had written in ”Rebecca” that love is ”an incredibly dangerous and delicate business” and he had once said that ”The Rise of Capitalism” was about ”incredibly beautiful and good women who are moving toward a rather terrible destiny and a kind of disenchantment.”

If these remarks betrayed hard-earned doubts about marriage, the enthusiast in him felt otherwise: ”Show me a man who has not married a hundred times, and I'll show you a wretch who does not deserve G.o.d's good world.”

Occasionally now, Helen Moore Barthelme spoke to Don on the phone. He told her about Marion. ”Although reluctant to marry again, he was considering it,” Helen recalled. ”He said that Marion wanted marriage and he thought it was the 'right' thing to do.”

One day, in June 1978, Steve Barthelme called Helen to tell her that Don was planning to marry. Steve worked for Helen's ad agency now, and he ”thought [she] should know” about Don. ”A few days later, I called to wish Don well,” Helen said. ”He was pleased and then laughed because the marriage was to take place that very evening. In fact, he was delighted that his mother and father were in town for the ceremony. He was at that moment 'scrubbing the john' as part of cleaning the apartment for the occasion. He was clearly pleased with his decision.”

For the wedding, Elizabeth Fonseca, ex-wife of the sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca, opened her home, just down the street from Don and Marion's place. A judge performed the ceremony, and a jazz band graced the reception.

Herman Gollob recalls standing around, listening to the music, and joking with his wife, Barbara: ”Since you and I have been married, we've been to three weddings. And they've all been Don's!”

Harrison Starr felt Marion's family came to the wedding worrying about ”their darling daughter marrying this writer, this bohemian.”

Starr's wife, Sandra, says that ”one of [Marion's] relatives came up to me at the reception and asked, 'Well, what happened to his other wives?' By this time I'd had a couple of gla.s.ses of champagne and I said, 'Oh, he buried them in the back garden on Eleventh Street!' ”

Don and Marion went to Barcelona for their honeymoon. ”Some part of 'Overnight to Many Distant Cities' came from that trip, when the lights went out in the city,” Marion says.

In the story, Don writes, ”In Barcelona the lights went out. At dinner. Candles were produced and the s.h.i.+ny langoustines placed before us. Why do I love Barcelona above most other cities? Because Barcelona and I share a pa.s.sion for walking? I was happy there? You were with me? We were celebrating my hundredth marriage? I'll stand on that.”

As he moved toward remarriage, Don had remained in touch with each of his exes. Birgit phoned him regularly to talk about Anne or Kierkegaard or some difficulty she couldn't solve. Marilyn says, ”Don got back in contact with me. Gallimard had published some French translations of his work, and he suspected that the translations were not good at all. He wrote to ask if I'd take a look and give him my opinion. He was entirely correct. There were enormous bloopers, so bad they obscured the meaning of the stories. He asked me if I'd be willing to vet any new translation, and I said sure.”

In the late 1970s, Gallimard agreed to translate City Life City Life and and Sadness Sadness.With his advance, Don wanted to pay Marilyn to scour the French texts. The publisher and their their translator were not happy with the arrangement. ”If it's any consolation to the author, though Gallimard's sales are pretty awful, I do find French publishers and writers talking about Barthelme with admiration,” a foreign rights agent wrote to Maggie Curran, a young agent who worked with Lynn Nesbit on Don's behalf. Don was translator were not happy with the arrangement. ”If it's any consolation to the author, though Gallimard's sales are pretty awful, I do find French publishers and writers talking about Barthelme with admiration,” a foreign rights agent wrote to Maggie Curran, a young agent who worked with Lynn Nesbit on Don's behalf. Don was not not consoled, but the publisher was so offended by his insistence that his ”friend” vet the ma.n.u.scripts, Maggie Curran backed off, and Marilyn never saw the drafts. consoled, but the publisher was so offended by his insistence that his ”friend” vet the ma.n.u.scripts, Maggie Curran backed off, and Marilyn never saw the drafts.

”I did see Don again, in France-I can't put an exact date on it,” Marilyn says. ”I was in Paris and he'd been to Denmark to see his daughter. We had a very nice lunch in Paris. We talked about this and that, nothing important.