Part 33 (1/2)

The completed piece, 42787 feet, is fas.h.i.+oned of steel, wood, canvas, and magnesium. A flat, wilted chess rook, caged behind bars, leans toward a female torso made of steel (as if it were armor); a string of wire and double-headed nails, suggesting a barbed-wire fence, separates the torso from a rumpled man's s.h.i.+rt with a hole in the heart. The right sleeve reaches toward the woman's body but is blocked by the wire. Above and below this sleeve, words are etched into brightly reflective rectangular panels.

The top panel reads: Everything reflects well on our cityOur audiences are amazingly perceptiveThe string section has a broken heartWe cheer it because it is outstandingGulls smash into the great gla.s.s windowsI have never been more optimistic, more sanguine.

The bottom panel is more somber: She is riding naked on the catafalqueWe'll to the woods no more my darlingI am boned, crack-skinned, malaproposA chorus of dromedaries humming triumphantlyRevolves the stage machineryAway from me, away from me.

Like the best of Don's fiction, The Rook's Progress The Rook's Progress is both playful and melancholy: the giddiness of the words near the top (and their apparent indifference to the figures around them); the elegiac tone of the bottom words; the visual pun of the word is both playful and melancholy: the giddiness of the words near the top (and their apparent indifference to the figures around them); the elegiac tone of the bottom words; the visual pun of the word reflects reflects s.h.i.+ning from a smooth, reflective surface, and the verbal pun of the s.h.i.+ning from a smooth, reflective surface, and the verbal pun of the Rook Rook in the t.i.tle, implying fool as well as chess piece; the reference to Hogarth's in the t.i.tle, implying fool as well as chess piece; the reference to Hogarth's The Rake's Progress The Rake's Progress (1734), which Hogarth conceived as a novel in paintings; the sad, impossible reach of the empty s.h.i.+rt. (1734), which Hogarth conceived as a novel in paintings; the sad, impossible reach of the empty s.h.i.+rt.

The viewer's eye goes immediately to the heavily s.h.i.+elded female figure: This torso is not to be trifled with. The rook's resemblance to a softening p.e.n.i.s is unmistakable, and the flattened, damaged s.h.i.+rt, like wrinkled skin, lies forever unrequited-a balloon popped on the wire or on the sharp, virile curves of the womanly form. The s.h.i.+rt's shape recalls Matisse's Icarus Icarus from his from his Jazz Jazz series-the right arm straining to grasp what's always out of reach, the void in the heart. Away from me, away from me... series-the right arm straining to grasp what's always out of reach, the void in the heart. Away from me, away from me...

One of Don's final collages, The Rook's Progress The Rook's Progress fully marries his visual and verbal skills. fully marries his visual and verbal skills.

In November 1987, Don joined several other writers, including Grace Paley, William Gaddis, Walter Abish, Robert Coover, Rita Dove, Lisa Alther, and Marilyn French at a festival of American writing in Berlin, billed as ”The American Chapter.” Heidi Ziegler, a young literary scholar, and Lutz Engelke, then the director of international cultural events for the deputy mayor of West Berlin, arranged the event. Don and Marion flew sixteen hours from Houston and arrived exhausted on a cold and dismal evening. They were whisked to a reception at the American consulate in West Berlin. Don retired into a corner with a drink while Marion served as his ”social bridge to the world,” Engelke recalled.

The following day, Don and Marion walked around the Reichstag, visited the Bauhaus Museum, and saw the ”spy bridge” near the Schloss Glienicke. At the Wall, in the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum, Don became intrigued by a flight simulator that took him through aerial images of war-torn Berlin. ”He kept looking into those city scars as if he needed to find an explanation for it,” Engelke said later.

From the start, Walter Abish had clashed with the conference organizers. For some reason, the arrangements were not to his liking. He threatened to boycott a panel he was slated to chair; in response, the organizers threatened not to pay him. ”Fine,” he said. Don tried to mediate the dispute. He called Abish early one morning and said, ”I know you're upset, but you don't want to let our side down.” Abish exploded, saying, ”What side? America? American literature? f.u.c.k our side.” On the other hand, Don and Grace Paley treated each other civilly, if coolly-sadly, silently mourning their damaged friends.h.i.+p.

Late in the week, a semiclandestine meeting was planned between the Americans and a group of East German writers. ”[A]lthough it was clear that the STASI had somehow heard about the meeting, the level of fear was low enough so that it could take place. All the same, it took place under circ.u.mstances of conspiracy,” Engelke said. ”The group met in an old pottery workshop” on the east side, within walking distance of the Brandenburg Gate, ”and because it was unofficial-that is, not reported-we had to use all sorts of little tricks to come together. For instance, everybody from the West had to memorize the address, so that no one's name would be written on a piece of paper, and we had to arrive at intervals. Because of this, Robert Coover didn't get the message right and got there too late! The press had not been informed, although the meeting was of political and cultural significance. For the Westerners, a certain romantic flavor was evident. It was a little like planning, playing, and editing your own black-and-white movie,” Engelke wrote.

Don and Paley read stories, translations of which had been provided to the group; then some of the East German writers-among them, Jan Faktor, Helga Konigsdorf, and Edmond Hesse-read. In that ”brownish, dark East Berlin atmosphere,” Don's stories ”were all of a sudden more than merely Postmodern,” Engelke said. To Western ears, accustomed to too much language too much language-a surfeit of meaning-Don's stories sounded merely playful. But to the East Berliners, who in their daily lives scoured ”every detail for sense and meaning, although the official metaphors for sense had been reduced to stupid rituals of repet.i.tion,” Don's absurdities exploded like ”Molotov c.o.c.ktail[s].” Quietly, he had smuggled across the Wall radical devices to scramble and reshape semantics.

Still, he refused to let his fiction be reduced to Cold War polemics. ”Politics is something of which literature has to have a disappointed position,” he declared to the group. Asked about Texas, he said that Houston and East Berlin were ”two poles of the same world.”

Don returned to the States. Marion and Grace Paley stayed for a couple of days at Marianne Frisch's apartment in Berlin. A few months later, Robert Coover reprised Don's Postmodern Dinner. The event, ”Unspeakable Practices: A Three-Day Celebration of Iconoclastic American Fiction,” honored John Hawkes upon his retirement from Brown University. Held in Providence, Rhode Island, the festival could not have been more different from the edgy, romantic gathering in East Germany.

On a panel whose subject was ”Traditional Values and Iconoclastic Fiction,” the critic Leslie Fiedler called ”postmodern” writers ”iconoclasts with tenure.” He asked his fellow panelists-Don, William Ga.s.s, William Gaddis, Stanley Elkin-rote questions: Why do you write? Who is your audience? Irritated by Fiedler's superficiality, Gaddis grumbled, ”I write to avoid boredom, which is probably why I came up here today.” After that, he slumped into a torpid silence.

Don said, ”I know exactly who I'm writing for. They are extremely intelligent and physically attractive.”

Fiedler closed the discussion with this remark: ”None of us will be remembered as long or revered as deeply as our contemporary, Stephen King.”

The writers filed out of the hall, quietly furious.

On the festival's final night, Coover took everyone to a Portuguese restaurant in East Providence for roast pig and fried calamari. A singer named Manny, dressed in a maroon jacket, told moronic jokes and sang loungelizard tunes, occasionally shouting to Gaddis or Hawkes, ”You're lookin' good!” Coover loved the camp, and clapped along; he insisted on keeping the group there through three full sets of the show. Most of the others, including Don, felt ill at ease.

This was the last full gathering of the leading figures of what had come to be known as American postmodernism.

Following all these travels, Don seemed, for a while, more at home in Houston. He was the king there, the ”one who ironically, gracefully, and profoundly bore the burdens and shouldered the responsibilities,” letting out, now and then, a ”lovely sigh-weighty, humorous, world-weary,” according to Ed Hirsch. Don told him, ”All writers are really black sheep,” and a ”writing community is a whole flock of them.” The ”black sheep have to stick together and help each other out.”

Briefly, he experienced renewed relish at the creative-writing lunches. ”Let's stir up the troops!” he'd goad his colleagues. Or: ”Let's have a Dada happening!” Among the faculty, there were ”rivalries for Don's affection,” Hirsch recalled. ”I once asked him about his theory of committee meetings. 'Be the last one to speak,' he said. He preferred not to speak at all, to just let things unfold. But if the meeting took a dark turn, and there was a risk he wouldn't get what he wanted, he'd intervene. His reserve gave him tremendous authority. Incidentally, I think that was also his theory of fatherhood-and of teaching.”

In the cla.s.sroom, he challenged a new group of students to rethink narrative. On one occasion, he took a pair of scissors and cut a student's story into several sections. ”There's something wrong with this piece. Let's rearrange it,” he said. After collaborating with the cla.s.s to redo the story, he admitted, ”No, this doesn't make it any better, does it?”

”The first time I met [Don], I recognized that he was the most intelligent person I'd ever met-not just in terms of knowledge, but also in terms of his perceptions about people,” recalled Vikram Chandra, a New Delhi native who had come to Houston via Johns Hopkins. At the time, Chandra was writing his novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The other students hated his work. ”It was 1987 when all the minimalist stuff was in vogue, and suddenly here I am with these Indian G.o.ds making p.r.o.nouncements,” Chandra said. ”They'd say, 'This is melodramatic!'-and I'd answer, 'I know, but I like melodrama. We Indians do melodrama.' ” The other students hated his work. ”It was 1987 when all the minimalist stuff was in vogue, and suddenly here I am with these Indian G.o.ds making p.r.o.nouncements,” Chandra said. ”They'd say, 'This is melodramatic!'-and I'd answer, 'I know, but I like melodrama. We Indians do melodrama.' ”

Another student, Eric Miles Williamson, says, ”One day, after we read a piece by Vikram-I thought it was tedious, but Don loved it-Don said, 'I think Mr. Chandra's work deserves a round of applause.' And he made us clap for this guy. Half of us didn't want to, but Don made us.”

In 1995, Red Earth and Pouring Rain Red Earth and Pouring Rain was published to worldwide acclaim. was published to worldwide acclaim.

Outside of cla.s.s, Don continued to extend to his students extraordinary generosity. When George Williams and his wife, both enrolled in the program, learned they were going to have a baby, Don called them. ”I understand there is a pregnant woman on the premises,” he said.

”How did you find out?” Williams asked.

”Jungle drums, jungle drums. Will a thousand do?”

It took Williams a moment to realize Don was offering them money.

”Often, students would end up at Don's house late at night after a reception for some visiting writer,” Williams says. ”I got the impression we'd go till two or three in the morning if Marion hadn't kicked us out. She was very protective of Don. We were all in our twenties and could stay up all night. Marion knew Don couldn't take it physically. But he wouldn't be the one to throw us out.”

One late spring night in a Thai restaurant, Don joined several students to celebrate the end of the school year. A waiter approached the table and asked the group if they wanted something to drink. ”A thousand gla.s.ses of wine,” Don said.

”By the end of the evening [his] guests were out on the sidewalk, flush with the success of the evening, due entirely to [Don's] presence,” Williams recalls, ”talking and shaking hands and hugging and b.u.mping into one another and promising phone calls and dinners and tennis games and fis.h.i.+ng trips that never materialized, while Don tried to break up a party that refused to, by reminding us he didn't enjoy playing father to us. 'Home now,' he said. 'Home now.' ”

During the spring semester of 1988, Phillip Lopate noticed that Don's reserve seemed to be growing. At public gatherings, he acted more remote than ever. ”I kept having the feeling that Don was becoming cooler toward me,” Lopate says. ”Interactions that used to take up thirty-five seconds were now clipped to twelve....Had I done something to offend him? I raised the question to Ed Hirsch, who was closer to Donald than I was, and Eddie told me that he had detected the same curtness of late.”

At lunches, Helen Moore Barthelme also encountered a more closed-down companion. He looked like an old man, she thought. But he loved being father to Katharine. One day, he admitted to Helen he had been writing one morning, when he realized that Katharine, whom he was supposed to be watching, had disappeared. He scrambled downstairs and found her toddling halfway down the block.

”After we left the restaurant, I drove [us] through two of our old neighborhoods off Montrose Boulevard,” Helen said. ”The apartment building in which we had lived on Richmond Avenue was still standing, an ugly, imposing interior. Don and I commented on the strangeness of seeing it....We were extremely happy when we had lived there....

”When we returned to his home...he looked especially unhappy...his demeanor as he walked away was somber and dispirited.”

In mid-April, Don's friends and colleagues learned that he had been hospitalized for throat cancer. For a while before that, Marion says, ”despite Don's smoking, his doctor hadn't suspected that his long-term sore throat and some weight loss might be cancer, and put him through three rounds of antibiotics.” Houston's M. D. Anderson Cancer Center housed one of the world's premier cancer-research facilities, but Don refused to go there. ”He had a lot of Houston biases-you know, he liked to eat at that terrible Mexican place, Felix-and maybe the biases extended to hospitals,” says Ed Hirsch.

”He was so sure that MDA had nothing over Memorial and Park Plaza,” Marion says. ”I would have preferred him to go to MDA, and in hindsight I think real follow-up care might have saved his life, but I trusted and respected his choice, especially when he told me he had discussed it with his doctor, who felt Park Plaza could do the job.”

Don asked his friends not to visit him in the hospital because he didn't want people to see him looking frail. Eerily, at around the same time, his brother Pete was diagnosed with throat cancer. He was recovering from a similar operation.

The doctors told Don he had squamous cell carcinoma of the pharynx. It had metastasized to the lymph glands in the right side of his neck.

He remained in the hospital for nearly two weeks. A few days after he'd returned home, Phillip Lopate paid him a visit, bringing five jazz alb.u.ms as a get-well gift. ”With his newly shaven chin, Donald looked harshly exposed,” Lopate wrote. ”His eyes were dazed. He had a tube running from his nose to his mouth like an elephant's proboscis; its purpose was to feed him liquids, as his throat was still too sore to take in solids.”

Don set the alb.u.ms on his lap and patted their covers without looking at them. ”I'm tired of sounding like Elmer Fudd,” he told Lopate in a pinched, weak voice. But ”Demerol is great stuff.”