Hiding Man_ A Biography Of Donald Barthelme Part 10

"This is your big chance. The Lord has sent me here only to introduce you to the literary world. Dash off a few brilliant short stories and I'll try to peddle them for you." Herman Gollob had made this offer to Don in January 1958, shortly after joining the William Morris Agency in New York. After leaving Houston, Gollob studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. Then he went to work for MCA Artists, a talent agency for actors. Finally, he landed at William Morris.

Throughout his final months as editor of Forum Forum, Don had worked on a story called "Hiding Man," set in a nearly empty movie theater devoted to horror films. Here, a disguised priest tracks down a young man, a lapsed Catholic, and hopes to s.n.a.t.c.h him back to the fold. Hovering between fantasy and realism, the story is indebted to Kafka. Gollob didn't know what to do with it. It wasn't the kind of thing he thought he could sell. In December 1959, he sent an apologetic letter to Don, who set the story aside.

In early October, after resigning from Forum Forum, Don established a rigorous writing routine. By and large, he stuck to the schedule for the rest of his life. He rose at dawn, dressed neatly in corduroy or khaki slacks, and settled at his Remington typewriter on the screened-in back porch. By 8:30 or 9:00 A.M. A.M., Helen prepared a breakfast of bacon or ham with fruit juice and toast. She'd take it to him and then retire to the dining room to work on her ad accounts or lectures for her cla.s.ses at Dominican College.

The clacking of Don's typewriter shot through the porch screens and startled early morning pa.s.sersby on the sidewalks. He revised each sentence several times, often tearing the paper from the roller and tossing it into the trash. He'd lean back in his chair, light a cigarette, and read his words aloud. Sometimes he'd call to Helen, "asking her how spell" a certain word? Or he'd say, "How does this phrase strike you?"

On his way to the kitchen for a second cup of coffee, he'd stop to give her a kiss. Or he'd quote Eliot: "I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." Or to make her laugh, he'd balance a pencil on the tip of his nose.

Occasionally, he'd read a pa.s.sage to her and seek her reaction, or he'd pace the house, repeating his sentences aloud. Flaubert, he said, used to walk into the woods and shout his words to the tops of the trees.

If a paragraph proved especially troublesome, Don strolled around the neighborhood, past the art galleries, the artists' studios, and the historic houses of the Montrose area, many of which were being renovated to serve as apartments or offices for architects and lawyers. After a half hour or so, he'd return to his Remington.

By noon or one o'clock, he'd knock off for the day. The wastebasket bulged with paper, thirty or forty sheets at a time. Most of them contained just a sentence or two. What he kept, after a morning session, ranged from nothing at all to maybe two pages. Very carefully, he carried his ashtray to the kitchen, and emptied it into the trash. "[D]uring these first years of writing, he was irresistibly happy," Helen recalled.

Shortly before Don quit his job to write full-time, the Houston Post Houston Post printed an interview with his father ent.i.tled "Construction and Conformity." Portions of it gave Don fertile material for his first successful short story. printed an interview with his father ent.i.tled "Construction and Conformity." Portions of it gave Don fertile material for his first successful short story.

By now, Donald Barthelme, Sr., was a veteran of Houston's architectural scene, and a teacher at the University of Houston as well as at the Rice Inst.i.tute. In the interview, he comes across as brash and uncompromising. The years had not softened him. "The customer is never right in architecture," he claimed. "He operates from a very limited background."

He applauded iconoclasts: "We depend upon...people who refuse to conform to move us into new paths, to find for us new aspects of things which add new enlightenment." But then, perhaps inadvertently revealing worry over his eldest son, a budding nonconformist, Barthelme qualified his thought: "On the other hand, it's practically impossible for those people to exist unless they are provided with private sources of income and are armored against all sorts of pressures from their friends and other[s]. The penalty of non-conformance is so great as to even endanger your life, if nothing else by the slow process of starvation."

School design, one of Barthelme's favorite topics, dominated the conversation. "Did you ever notice the similarity between school...and canning tomatoes?" Barthelme asked the reporter. "You put things in both can and child, test both, label both." Then he railed against traditional learning arrangements: People don't come in grades. As a matter of fact, you go into any elementary school, you'll find that there are three sizes of chairs in that room...because there are three sizes of children, and they can't all use the same chairs.... no two people are alike. Their rates of learning are not alike. There's nothing at all about them that is alike. Yet we must cram them into some sort of grades....

In the months following his father's interview, Don drafted a story about a thirty-five-year-old man named Joseph who has been, through clerical error, "officially" declared "a child" and sent back to Horace Greeley Elementary School. "I...sit in this too-small seat with the desktop cramping my thighs...in the no-nonsense ugliness of this steel and gla.s.s building," he says. Like Don's father, Joseph discovers that age is not an accurate predictor of development. "The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel," Joseph says. "There are only individual egos, crazy for love."

Eventually, it dawns on him that he has not been forced here by accident, after all. "A ruined marriage, a ruined...career, a grim interlude in the Army when I was almost not a person. This is the sum of my existence to date, a dismal total," he says. "Small wonder that re-education seemed my only hope. It is clear even to me that I need reworking in some fundamental way. How efficient is the society that provides thus for the salvage of its clinkers!" He will sit in the wrong-size desk, reliving his early schooling, until he learns to conform.

Like "Pages from the Annual Report" and the aborted drafts of "Hiding Man," "The Darling Duckling at School" proceeds from a Kafka-like vision-an all-knowing and secretive system controls everyone's lives-but the story succeeds, where the others did not, because it is animated by more than its premise. Personal anguish (a "ruined marriage," a "ruined career") and Don's wry admiration for his father's views lift the piece beyond its clever conception and into pathos.

Joseph has "misread" society's signs. In his "former existence" as an insurance-claims adjustor, he "read the company motto ('Here to Help in Time of Need') as a description of the duty of the adjustor, drastically mislocating the company's deepest concerns," which are to earn a hefty profit and please its investors. This failure to heed cultural "clues"-a concern raised by Walker Percy and Marshall McLuhan in their Forum Forum pieces-spirals Joseph into a Nietzschean repet.i.tion. The teacher's name, Mandible (a fear-some, man-eating creature?), suggests another reason for Joseph's regression. pieces-spirals Joseph into a Nietzschean repet.i.tion. The teacher's name, Mandible (a fear-some, man-eating creature?), suggests another reason for Joseph's regression.

Yet in Don's hands, the situation is not a nightmare. Joseph wonders at the life around him, enjoying the "furnace of love, love, love" in the sixth-grade cla.s.sroom. In his former job, he had been compelled to spend time "amid the debris of our civilization: rumpled fenders, roofless sheds, gutted warehouses, smashed arms and legs." He admits, "After ten years of this one has a tendency to see the world as a vast junkyard, looking at a man and seeing only his (potentially) mangled arms, entering a house only to trace the path of the inevitable fire." Still, Joseph marvels at the world, combing through its trash with the interest of an artist, plucking castoffs to make a collage. A sweet optimism fills the story, despite Joseph's disastrous fate. He fulfills the teacher s.e.xually ("She knows now that everything she has been told about life, about America, is true") and they get caught.

When Don had finished a satisfactory draft of the story, he walked into the dining room and said to Helen, "Well, Babe, are you ready for this?" Helen later wrote, "I turned...and saw Don standing there holding a typescript. [He] spoke in a serious, challenging tone, but underlying it was a kind of gaiety that characterized his mood as he worked. We moved into the living room, and I sat on the sofa while he stood facing me and read....His voice was rich and deep, every word precisely enunciated. I was astonished-I had heard nothing like it before, yet in it I could hear the Don that I knew and loved, his incisive wit and his satirical humor, the matter-of-fact tone and the ironies it created."

Don sent the story to an ambitious new West Coast journal called Contact Contact. Each morning, he eagerly antic.i.p.ated the postman's arrival, leaving his desk and waiting on the front porch to take the mail. Within weeks, Contact Contact responded positively. responded positively.

The magazine's history is worth reviewing, since Don believed his work belonged in its pages. One of its editors was Evan S. Connell, who would write the brilliant novels Mrs. Bridge Mrs. Bridge and and Mr. Bridge Mr. Bridge, and several other distinguished books. Contact had enjoyed two previous incarnations before it was revived in 1958. In 1920, William Carlos Williams cofounded the journal, with the aim of presenting writing that was "stark" and "fearlessly obscene," literature that would "speak to the present." He chose the name because he believed, erroneously, airplane pilots said "Contact" when they touched ground after a flight. The word suggested earthiness as well as the ability to soar, and it had a modern ring.

From 1920 to 1923, Contact Contact published Ezra Pound, Kenneth Burke, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, among others. After that, the magazine suspended publication, as Williams busied himself with his own writing. In 1931, the year of Don's birth, Williams was ready to try the journal again, and he chose as his coeditor Nathanael West. published Ezra Pound, Kenneth Burke, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, among others. After that, the magazine suspended publication, as Williams busied himself with his own writing. In 1931, the year of Don's birth, Williams was ready to try the journal again, and he chose as his coeditor Nathanael West.

At the time, West was flirting with Surrealism. On the dust jacket of his novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he described himself as "much like Guillaume Apollinaire, Jarry, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Raymond Roussel, and certain of the surrealists" in his "use of the violently disa.s.sociated, the dehumanized marvelous." West's sensibility seemed ant.i.thetical to Williams's longing for a spare, natively American realism. But in 1931, when Surrealism made its American debut at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, in a show that featured Pica.s.so, Max Ernst, and De Chirico, curators translated the word Surrealism Surrealism as "Super-Realism." Like Surrealist painters, the writers West admired were not content to define Surrealism as dream imagery and unconscious impulses. The unconscious, they said, was filled with cliches, trivia, and debris from popular culture-hence, Duchamp's ready-mades, cultural objects, like his urinal, that become art because we as "Super-Realism." Like Surrealist painters, the writers West admired were not content to define Surrealism as dream imagery and unconscious impulses. The unconscious, they said, was filled with cliches, trivia, and debris from popular culture-hence, Duchamp's ready-mades, cultural objects, like his urinal, that become art because we call call them art, and see them with fresh vision. Williams's famous "red wheel-barrow" is just such an object. them art, and see them with fresh vision. Williams's famous "red wheel-barrow" is just such an object.

Here was the point of contact between Williams and West, between Surrealism and Super-Realism. The men were united in their desire to translate Surrealism to an American landscape. Among the writers they sought to publish were Hemingway, Faulkner, Edward Dahlberg, Hart Crane, and Harold Rosenberg.

In a decade when naturalism dominated American literature (Studs Lonigan, The Grapes of Wrath), Contact Contact chose the path of nonconformance. West, who explored the malevolence of American jingoism through his character Lemuel Pitkin, was writing almost entirely in cliches-deliberately so, as he understood the power of ba.n.a.lity to shape public experience. His dead-pan delivery, use of worn-out phrases, and the dumbing down of therapeutic approaches-eventually, Don would seize and refine each of these stylistic strategies. Given chose the path of nonconformance. West, who explored the malevolence of American jingoism through his character Lemuel Pitkin, was writing almost entirely in cliches-deliberately so, as he understood the power of ba.n.a.lity to shape public experience. His dead-pan delivery, use of worn-out phrases, and the dumbing down of therapeutic approaches-eventually, Don would seize and refine each of these stylistic strategies. Given Contact Contact's colorful past, it's not surprising he chose the journal as the first place to send his work.

On the cover of the issue in which Don's story appeared (February 1961), a street worker, gripping his hard hat, leans against a wheelbarrow-an homage to Williams's poem. Williams is listed as a contributing editor, along with Nelson Algren, Wallace Stegner, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and S. I. Hayakawa. In payment for his story, Don received "12 Shares of Cla.s.s A Capital Stock of Angel Island Publications, Inc."

"Don observed that he felt a bit like he was starting a new life, that he felt a little strange," Helen recalled. After a morning of writing, he would sometimes help Helen compose ad copy or design a print ad. "[He] did not enjoy writing such material, especially anything in which humor was inappropriate," she said. "For print media advertising, he was much more interested in art and design than in copy. I worked with several commercial artists, but Don designed most of the ads during the first year of my agency."

In the afternoons, he helped Helen organize her lectures for Dominican College. For a course she was teaching on the short story, he wrote the following notes: "In a work of literature form and content are so beautifully welded together that it is difficult to separate them....Form may be said to be the arrangement of parts so that a preconceived effect is successfully achieved. In a successful work of literature, Form Form is used to state or establish is used to state or establish Meaning Meaning...[the] task of the writer in general is to give form to the raw material of experience-to say what it means."

He once told Helen he thought formal experimentation could lead him to other dimensions of experience besides that of time-bound realism, to a place where "everything is different." The world as it is disappointed him, as it had disappointed his father. Accepted wisdom and the accepted forms forms of things had gone stale. He insisted, "What I write has to be in the present. I cannot understand how anyone can be interested in the past." of things had gone stale. He insisted, "What I write has to be in the present. I cannot understand how anyone can be interested in the past."

He returned to "Hiding Man."

Helen wrote that the story's theme may "have been suggested by an article that had appeared in Time Time magazine in which Marcel Camus is quoted as saying, 'The cinema has replaced the church, and people seek truth at movies instead of the Ma.s.s.'" At the time, Camus was a relatively unknown French film director who had just completed his first feature, magazine in which Marcel Camus is quoted as saying, 'The cinema has replaced the church, and people seek truth at movies instead of the Ma.s.s.'" At the time, Camus was a relatively unknown French film director who had just completed his first feature, Black Orpheus Black Orpheus, a translation of the Orpheus myth to the barrios and hills of contemporary Brazil.

In its issue of November 16, 1959, Time Time ran an article on ran an article on Black Orpheus Black Orpheus and the French New Wave. Camus, quoted extensively, did not mention film in connection with the church, but an unnamed critic said movie directors now "speak of cinema as of a religion." and the French New Wave. Camus, quoted extensively, did not mention film in connection with the church, but an unnamed critic said movie directors now "speak of cinema as of a religion."

Whether or not Don was thinking of this article, he clearly had in mind Walker Percy's The Moviegoer The Moviegoer as he began reworking "The Hiding Man." Don's story is less about movies than about popular entertainment and church rituals as sign systems. It is a McLuhan-like exercise in reading American culture for clues to concealed realities. as he began reworking "The Hiding Man." Don's story is less about movies than about popular entertainment and church rituals as sign systems. It is a McLuhan-like exercise in reading American culture for clues to concealed realities.

In the story the theater's movies-Attack of the Puppet People, She G.o.ds of Shark Reef, Night of the Blood Beast-recall movies Don reviewed for the Houston Post Houston Post. "People think these things are jokes," the narrator, Burlingame, says of the films. "[B]ut they are wrong, it is dangerous to ignore a vision...."

Like Ralph Ellison's protagonist in Invisible Man Invisible Man, Burlingame has freed himself from the received ideas of society and church. He has learned to interpret the culture, and he has gone underground. "Most people don't have the wit to be afraid," he says. "[M]ost view television, smoke cigars, fondle wives, have children, vote...never confront Screaming Skull, Teenage Werewolf, Beast with a Thousand Eyes Screaming Skull, Teenage Werewolf, Beast with a Thousand Eyes, no conception of what lies beneath the surface, no faith in any manifestation not certified by hierarchy."

Just two years after Don published "Hiding Man" in the Spring-Summer 1961 issue of First Person First Person, America was stunned by a man who tried to hide in a nearly empty movie theater. When Lee Harvey Oswald ducked into the Texas Theatre in Dallas shortly after President Kennedy was shot, two genre movies were playing, War Is h.e.l.l War Is h.e.l.l and and Cry of Battle Cry of Battle. As Burligame says, "it is dangerous to ignore a vision," especially a nation's violent image of itself, neatly packaged in its popular entertainments. "People think these things are jokes, but they are wrong."

In her memoir, Helen said: As Don wrote his first stories, trying to do something that no other writer had yet attempted, I did not find his work strange. Nor was it puzzling....The idea of creating fantasies or incongruous situations, of combining the real with the unreal, was emerging as a new way of interpreting the world....In the literature of the postWorld War II period, and with the continuing dominance of New Criticism, the story as an object mattered; it was a work of art that the writer created. And the most powerful influence of all continued to be what the Modernists, especially Pound and Eliot, had given us: the necessity of creating something "new."A reader did not ask what a story or poem meant....What you talked about was "form and content." This phrase seems hackneyed today, out-of-date and overworked. But it was real then, and what is more important, it was at the heart of Don's creativity.

Maggie Maranto offers a slightly different perspective: Though Don was an essentially post-Word War II product, he was really just about the last of a long line of wonderfully inventive, trenchant, but lighthearted humorists who filled the pages of newspapers, magazines, and books dating back to the late 1800s. A number of popular magazines were being published in the early years of the twentieth century, leading to a proliferation of fiction writers, since they could actually make a living from their contributions. There was, for example, Jerome K. Jerome, P. G. Wodehouse, Booth Tarkington, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, and S. J. Perelman. All of them catalyzed Don's thinking and his view of life, and inspired him to put his own special, unique wit to paper.

These summaries, insightful as they are, suggest a more uniform literary setting than existed in America. Don's struggles with Forum Forum show how limited taste could be, even in (maybe show how limited taste could be, even in (maybe especially especially in) an academic environment. As Don began to write in earnest, Nabokov's in) an academic environment. As Don began to write in earnest, Nabokov's Lolita Lolita still faced bookstore bans, nearly five years after it had first been published in the United States. still faced bookstore bans, nearly five years after it had first been published in the United States. Time Time magazine wrote of Samuel Beckett, "[his] vision is too ghastly to be borne in the long run...[he] has conjured it up about as many times as most readers will be able to stand" (ten years later, he won the n.o.bel Prize). magazine wrote of Samuel Beckett, "[his] vision is too ghastly to be borne in the long run...[he] has conjured it up about as many times as most readers will be able to stand" (ten years later, he won the n.o.bel Prize).

Yet news weeklies discussed complex writers such as Albert Camus and Max Frisch. In October 1960, as Don started writing every morning, Time Time reviewed a translation of Heinrich von Kleist's reviewed a translation of Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O The Marquise of O, which became one of Don's favorite books. In spite of moral, legal, and financial challenges, in spite of the stubbornness of old-fashioned tastes, literary possibilities seemed to be expanding, and finding popular acceptance.

Nathanael West's darkness, in Miss Lonelyhearts Miss Lonelyhearts and and A Cool Million A Cool Million, flowered in the black humor of the 1950s and early 1960s. Some observers felt nihilism and absurd laughter were inevitable reactions to the war in Korea or McCarthyism. Unsparing novels by ex-soldiers such as James Jones and Norman Mailer posit the shock of World War II as the center of a cynical worldview that offered laughter as the best response to nuclear threats and n.a.z.i atrocities.

If we take a still longer view, we see West extending a tradition of grotesque humor traceable to Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Twain. But in the 1950s and 1960s, many American writers-among them, Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Terry Southern-used wicked comedy in a particularly self-conscious manner. Joseph h.e.l.ler's Catch-22 Catch-22 holds pride of place on the period's Shelf of Alienated Laughter. In 1969, Bruce Jay Friedman edited a widely reviewed anthology called holds pride of place on the period's Shelf of Alienated Laughter. In 1969, Bruce Jay Friedman edited a widely reviewed anthology called Black Humor Black Humor. By 1969, black humor had begun to fade as a publishing trend; Friedman admitted that very little bound the writers he had picked for the book. Yet he insisted that "if you are alive today, and stick your head out of doors now and then, you know that there is a nervousness, a tempo, a near hysterical new beat in the air, a punishing isolation and loneliness of a strange, frenzied new kind. It is in the music and the talk and the films and the theater and it is in the prose style" of American writers.

A vague claim, but hard to dispute at the time. A nervous frenzy invaded the homes of middle-cla.s.s Americans every evening via their television screens. Images of mushroom clouds nestled among commercials for hair spray and canned peas. Sitcom characters mocked civic values. Stand-up comedians-Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce-edged their performances toward political satire. The daily newspaper was Sahl's comic prop. The "New York Times...is the source and fountain and bible of black humor," Friedman wrote.

It was not only the content but also the style style of humor that felt quicker, harder, meaner. Spontaneity and improvisation became commonplace in stand-up comedy-a jazz influence. Several comics served as warm-up acts in nightclubs, and romanticized the musicians. "Lenny Bruce seems concerned [only] with...making the band laugh," a newspaper reviewer wrote. It was a jazzman, Philly Joe Jones, Miles Davis's drummer, who got Bruce work in the early days, and spread the word about his talent. of humor that felt quicker, harder, meaner. Spontaneity and improvisation became commonplace in stand-up comedy-a jazz influence. Several comics served as warm-up acts in nightclubs, and romanticized the musicians. "Lenny Bruce seems concerned [only] with...making the band laugh," a newspaper reviewer wrote. It was a jazzman, Philly Joe Jones, Miles Davis's drummer, who got Bruce work in the early days, and spread the word about his talent.

"Abstraction" was the "direction in which I was going," Bruce once said. "Musicians, jazz musicians especially, appreciate art forms that are extensions extensions of realism, as opposed to realism in a representational form." of realism, as opposed to realism in a representational form."

Bruce's routines, said a reviewer, are "clearly the equivalents of the brief but corny 'quotes' from another tune and the sardonic, deadpan mockery with which a jazzman can approach a very square set of chord changes."

Nathanael West worked such changes in his black-humor masterpiece, A Cool Million A Cool Million, from which Don pinched the name Pitkin for his Daily Cougar Daily Cougar columns. West "quoted" Horatio Alger again and again in a merciless parody of the American Dream. The typical Alger hero saves damsels in distress. Poor Pitkin gets beaten and the girl gets raped. West related these disasters in Alger's cheerful style, sometimes stealing whole scenes from Alger's novels and altering only a word or two. columns. West "quoted" Horatio Alger again and again in a merciless parody of the American Dream. The typical Alger hero saves damsels in distress. Poor Pitkin gets beaten and the girl gets raped. West related these disasters in Alger's cheerful style, sometimes stealing whole scenes from Alger's novels and altering only a word or two.

Most of all, literary black humor shared with the popular comedy of the 1950s and 1960s a cynicism toward the language language of the status quo. As Bruce said, as West's novels demonstrated, and as Don clearly saw, "[H]umor [lay in] distinguishing between the of the status quo. As Bruce said, as West's novels demonstrated, and as Don clearly saw, "[H]umor [lay in] distinguishing between the moral moral differences of words and their connotations." differences of words and their connotations."

20.

THE UGLY SHOW.

Composing a great or even near-great bookshop is as exacting a task as composing a novel [says Larry McMurtry]. One has to be done word by word...the other volume by volume....Booksellers who manage...to keep their shelves filled with interesting books will rarely be the most successful financially. The world, by and large, is well content to buy the conventional standards-the sort of books that make safe gifts to G.o.d-children. But the booksellers who have interesting books will always have...respect....

In Houston, in 1960, as Don started to write his first important stories, the great book store was the Brown Book Shop, on San Jacinto Street, near Buffalo Bayou, downtown. The bayou meanders through Houston, only a few feet deep in spots, and in other places filled with family discards: old shoes, busted toasters, empty picture frames. In the sixties, San Jacinto Street was a flat, nondescript business corridor. The bookshop's proprietor, Ted Brown, was highly pragmatic. He knew that Houston bobbed on a sea of oil, and he stocked his shelves with books on petroleum, geology, and drilling technology. But he was also "elegant," according to McMurtry, a bit of a dandy: His "heart, all along, was in literature, and he kept a wall...of sets, first editions, travel literature, press books."

After a morning of writing, Don drove to Brown's store to browse through the Grove paperback editions, the Evergreen books featuring European playwrights and American experimental novelists. He bought copies of the Tulane Drama Review Tulane Drama Review, which excerpted one-act plays and essays a.s.sociated with the Theatre of the Absurd. He bought plays by Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, and Arthur Kopit. He thumbed through Ionesco's The Bald Soprano The Bald Soprano, Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur The Voyeur, and Arrabal's The Automobile Graveyard The Automobile Graveyard. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up Max Frisch's novel I'm Not Stiller I'm Not Stiller. And always, he prowled around for Beckett.

Houston was blessed with several secondhand bookshops, as well as junk stores overflowing with jazz 78s and yellowed volumes of the cla.s.sics. There was Joe Petty's, downtown, and rows of antique stores along Washington Avenue. McMurtry recalled: My book hunting seldom turned up anything of much value, but it kept me in reading matter and also gave me a knowledge of the funkier reaches of Houston that has stayed with me to this day. I came to love the city, particularly its steamy, shoddy, falling-down sections. Houston as a city was a series of crumbling, half-silted-over neighborhoods. You could still come upon little drugstores that looked as if they had been free-framed by a Life Life photographer in the thirties. Once, in a district not far from the slum that's called the Bottoms, I came upon a vast wooden boat, so weedy and overgrown with vines and creepers that it was hard to even guess what period it dated from. It sat in the middle of a large, neglected lot, visited only by winos and grackles. Sam Houston could have ridden in that boat, or Cabeza de Vaca. photographer in the thirties. Once, in a district not far from the slum that's called the Bottoms, I came upon a vast wooden boat, so weedy and overgrown with vines and creepers that it was hard to even guess what period it dated from. It sat in the middle of a large, neglected lot, visited only by winos and grackles. Sam Houston could have ridden in that boat, or Cabeza de Vaca.

Don knew Houston's funky reaches, too; like McMurtry, he had discovered them while searching for books, records, live jazz, and old furniture. In "Return," Don imagined motoring along the bayou on a raft "powered by eight mighty Weed-Eaters." He wrote: I saw many strange and wonderful things. I saw an egret and then another egret and a turtle and a refrigerator without a door on it and a heron and a possum and an upside-down '52 Pontiac. And I said to myself, this blessed stream contains many strange and wonderful things. It was getting dark now, and the moon had risen, and I saw a wise old owl sitting in a tree. So I throttled back my eight powerful Weed-Eaters and spoke to the owl, saying, "How's by you, boychick?"And then I looked closely and saw that it wasn't a wise old owl at all, it was Philip Johnson, out hunting for new clients, by the light of the moon.* * *

When he wasn't lingering in Brown's, or following the bayou's trickle to some hidden treasure, Don spent his afternoons with artist friends, folks active in the city's Contemporary Arts a.s.sociation. He was close to Jack Boynton, a painter who combined abstraction with whimsical Texas imagery. Boynton's best-known painting is Amarillo Boot Amarillo Boot, a colorful cowboy boot embossed with the word ART ART.

Don lunched with Jim Love, a sculptor who worked with detritus salvaged from the bayou. He made birds out of hammers, dogs with garden spades.

Love and Boynton knew that Don was writing stories, but Don didn't discuss his fiction with them. "You sure are an illiterate b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he kidded Boynton. It was true that Boynton didn't read much. His wife, Ann, was severely depressed. She had given up painting to raise her two daughters, and she worried about money. Don and Boynton's conversations revolved around Ann's troubles, and the difficulties artists faced in the marketplace.

Among Don's other friends, only Joe Maranto expressed an interest in Don's writing, but the Marantos had moved back east. Joe was doing PR work for Mobil Oil in New York. Don stayed in touch with Herman Gollob, who had moved to Boston to work for Little, Brown, but for now, Don didn't send him any more fiction.

George Christian, Don's former colleague at the Houston Post Houston Post, was barely aware of Don's writing. Don felt Christian wouldn't appreciate the absurdist direction his fiction was taking. Pat Goeters had established his own architectural firm. Most of his discussions with Don centered on the arts. Don "worked in even greater isolation than when he edited Forum Forum," Helen recalled. "There was no other writer with whom he could talk about his work....There was simply no one at all."

Early in 1960, at the urging of Pat Goeters, Don joined the board of the Contemporary Arts a.s.sociation. The CAA had begun in 1948 as an alliance of artists, business leaders, and architects who felt that the Museum of Fine Arts' traditional programming needed to be balanced with exhibits of contemporary work. The charter established the a.s.sociation as a nonprofit organization to be staffed by volunteers and supported by membership dues. Its first exhibition, held in two gallery s.p.a.ces in the Museum of Fine Arts, opened in October 1948. It was called "This Is Contemporary Art," less a proclamation than an invitation to Houstonians: Come in. This stuff won't bite.

In 1949, the architectural firm of MacKie and Kamrath designed a museum building and erected it, for five thousand dollars, on a downtown site owned by a family named Detering (who would later open Houston's premier rare-book shop). The Contemporary Arts a.s.sociation paid a dollar a year for its museum lease. In time, the Deterings felt they could no longer afford to be so generous. In 1954, the owners of the Prudential Insurance Company lot, near the corner of Fannin and Holcombe, extended a charitable hand to the CAA.

In its new spot, the museum, a small triangular building of gla.s.s and steel, sat in the shadow of the eighteen-story Prudential Building. An azalea forecourt and an elaborate fountain, placed between the museum and the skysc.r.a.per's entrance, welcomed visitors into a pleasant open s.p.a.ce.

The CAA's success began to strain its volunteers. It needed more resources, firmer support. Accounts vary as to when Jean and Dominique de Menil got involved, though Jean was was elected to the first board of directors. In 1955, the Menils came up with the money to hire the Contemporary Arts Museum's first salaried director, Jermayne MacAgy. elected to the first board of directors. In 1955, the Menils came up with the money to hire the Contemporary Arts Museum's first salaried director, Jermayne MacAgy.

Houston's cultural life is impossible to imagine without the Menils. Even those, like Don, who tried to avoid their reach were dependent on them for the vibrancy and rapid development of Houston's arts scene. Jean de Menil came from an aristocratic French family. In World War II, he worked for the Resistance, "traveling through Europe on 'business trips,' conducting cloak-and-dagger missions for the underground," wrote Frank Welch, a Texas architect. Dominique was the daughter of Conrad Schlumberger, the man who developed the the system for discovering subsurface oil; petroleum companies adopted it worldwide. Dominique was heir to a vast fortune. She was energetic and intellectually curious, eventually studying math and science at the Sorbonne. She met Jean at a ball in Versailles. A devout Catholic, Dominique fell under the sway of a Dominican priest in Paris, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, a follower of modern art. He introduced the Menils to the Cubist paintings of Pica.s.so and Braque, and sparked in them a lifelong pa.s.sion for collecting. system for discovering subsurface oil; petroleum companies adopted it worldwide. Dominique was heir to a vast fortune. She was energetic and intellectually curious, eventually studying math and science at the Sorbonne. She met Jean at a ball in Versailles. A devout Catholic, Dominique fell under the sway of a Dominican priest in Paris, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, a follower of modern art. He introduced the Menils to the Cubist paintings of Pica.s.so and Braque, and sparked in them a lifelong pa.s.sion for collecting.

The Menils fled Paris just ahead of the n.a.z.is, and arrived in Houston in the late 1940s. Jean went to work for the Schlumberger Oil Company. He "just loved things American and Texan! Texan!" recalls an acquaintance. Dominique adapted quickly to her new home, but noted disapprovingly that "Houstonians [think] nothing about spending thousands on a prize bull but [draw] the line at buying art."

On one of their many trips to New York, the couple met Philip Johnson. They invited him to Houston to design their house-the beginning of Johnson's long relationship with the city. The local architectural establishment felt snubbed. "[Jean] and Dominique wanted to set an example" of improving the city's culture, recalled their friend, Marguerite Barnes. "Out of town" professionals had more mystique than the local boys, and Jean sought "cachet...with the New York culturati." "They really had the thought that if they brought someone like Philip Johnson to Houston and he designed a nice house, it would lead to better architecture in the city," Barnes said. They "wanted to improve the climate."

Johnson designed for them a 5,600-square-foot wood-frame house on San Felipe Road, in the River Oaks neighborhood, with a gla.s.s entry and a facade of salmon-colored brick. Completed in 1950, it was the first International Style house built in Houston.

In 1955, the Menils lured Jermayne MacAgy from San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor to direct Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum. In addition to arranging shows of individual artists, such as Mondrian and Rothko, MacAgy organized thematic exhibits that placed contemporary art in a historical context. She mounted a Surrealist retrospective and a show on art and technology; in 1959, she curated "Totems Not Taboo: An Exhibition of Primitive Art," which featured over two hundred rare pieces from across the world.

In mid-1959, the CAA board voted not to renew MacAgy's contract. Frank Welch has said there was "controversy over...MacAgy's radical ideas." The more likely explanation is that the "Menil grip" had proved too tight for the board. "I know that Don thought that Dominique was dominating and somewhat imperious," Marion Barthelme says. He "was not interested in getting trapped in her powerful web." The CAA board probably felt the same (even to her friends, Dominique was known as the "Iron b.u.t.terfly").

After MacAgy's dismissal by the CAA, Don's friend Robert Morris a.s.sumed the directorship of the Contemporary Arts Museum, and he and Don set about organizing the "Out of the Ordinary" show, which ran from November 26 to December 27, 1959.

Morris left shortly after that to take a job at the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut. The CAA board scrambled to distribute responsibilities among volunteers. Each board member agreed to arrange a show for the coming year, and to work with others to schedule special events. Given the board's varied interests, film, theater, music, and architecture became as visible as painting and sculpture.

In April 1960, the museum presented, in the new Cullinan Hall at the Museum of Fine Arts, a show ent.i.tled "Architectural Graphics." Don wrote the catalog introduction. "The city...may be seen as a texture of signs which must be correctly read if they are to yield their secrets," Don said. "Many of these [signs] are necessary: we are all familiar with the anarchy which obtains when a traffic light breaks down. Others are gratuitous, a gift from the makers of, say, Wunda Cola, and hardly essential to survival. Both kinds of messages claim s.p.a.ce in the visual landscape."

From an "oversupply of information" in the culture, "we must constantly select that which is relevant, that which is true," Don wrote. "Some messages are contradictory; others are disguised." Further, "we live in secondhand worlds...between the human consciousness and experience there is interposed a screen of communications, designs, patterns, and values which instruct us in what we are experiencing, and sometimes, have the experience for us."

Don realized that these cultural pressures posed severe challenges to artists, including writers. The "traditional alphabet is staggering under the tremendous variety of functions we are asking it to serve," he wrote.

Words are not suited to electronic computers, which utilize the language of mathematics, nor to such emerging phenomena as the post office's new letter-sorting devices, which reduce the old alphabet to cl.u.s.ters of horizontals and verticals. The inadequacy of our present system is also ill.u.s.trated by the thousands of special symbols developed to handle special problems, those of printers, map makers, electrical engineers, chemists, biologists, and so on.Thus the vocabulary of [the artist] is further strained. In this welter of competing interests, he must find a solution that is acceptable to all and is, if possible, beautiful. The problem...that our experience is structured by the very devices we use to clarify it, places a considerable responsibility on the man who is sending the message.

In the fiction he had started to write, he was probing this responsibility. Already he was pushing, playing with, and shattering physical texts on the page, using his sensual awareness of typography. As his narrator (a sort of off-kilter museum director) would say in "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace": The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders.Often we don't know where our next marvel is coming from.The supply of strange ideas is not endless.The development of new wonders is not like the production of canned goods.Some things appear to be wonders in the beginning, but when you become familiar with them, are not wonderful at all.

For his exhibition in the CAM's gallery s.p.a.ce, Don mounted "New American Artifacts: The Ugly Show." Excited by Duchamp's ready-mades, and Harold Rosenberg's "anxious object"-a constructed piece that doesn't know if it's a work of art or a pile of junk-Don collected from p.a.w.nshops, antique stores, and the banks of Buffalo Bayou "cultural artifacts of ambivalent status." Fellow board members complained that things like bra.s.s knuckles didn't belong in a museum, but that was Don's point. When stripped of its usual function, and placed in an aesthetic context, a pair of bra.s.s knuckles can be seen in an entirely new light-as an intriguingly shaped object, ugly or not. At the same time, the object does not lose its former connotations; rather, those meanings get smuggled into a new realm of experience.

Don's list of the show's "wonders" reads like the verbal collages that would spice his fiction: A baby blue styrofoam chrysanthemum. An auto hubcap, brand unrecognizable. A hideous jukebox. Paint-by-number pictures of lambs, sans paint. An unbelievably ugly plastic chair. A giant-size vaseline jar. An imitation shrunken head. A plaster "flamenco." Reader's Digest. Official Detective. Ricky Nelson Magazine Reader's Digest. Official Detective. Ricky Nelson Magazine. A TV antenna. A whiskey decanter disguised as a Greek vase. Bunny rabbit decals. Big Bonus Big Bonus stamps. A gilded baby shoe coin bank. stamps. A gilded baby shoe coin bank. Klutch Klutch denture adhesive. Plastic-bright artificial fruit. denture adhesive. Plastic-bright artificial fruit. Tiki Joe's Luau Kit Tiki Joe's Luau Kit. A plastic red rose in pseudo crystal vase. Three (bad) reproductions of Gainsborough's Blue Boy Blue Boy. An "obscene" ashtray. A large c.o.ke bottle. A box of All All. Half-ceramic, half-wood totem poles. A toy machine gun. A plastic soldier's helmet. "A roseate and gaudily commercialized" badly-printed stuffed head of Christ. A copy of the American flag printed out of register on flimsy plastic.

Right away, Prudential received a complaint from a museum visitor: How could these last two "objectionable" items be displayed on property owned by the insurance company? A few days later, Don told a newspaper reporter that the head of Christ and the plastic American flag "belong in the show and I don't agree that their removal was necessary. We took them down, however, because Prudential requested it." His pique at the company may have inclined him to mock insurance firms in "The Darling Duckling at School." The narrator's habit of seeing the world as a ma.s.sive field of litter belongs to the kind of sensibility that created "The Ugly Show." The exhibition ran from June 17 to July 19, 1960. Always, Don looked back on it with fondness and pride.

21.

DANGLING MAN.