Hiding Man_ A Biography Of Donald Barthelme Part 11

As he began to write in earnest, Don had his eye on visual art, theater, film, and music. He also thought about what it meant to be a Texan. Two of his short essays, published in the spring of 1960, decipher Texas "signs," and suggest that the Lone Star State left him hanging."Culture, Etc.," published in the Texas Observer Texas Observer on March 25, explored the "myth that every Texan is in some sense a cowboy, or capable of being one, or should possess the cowboy virtues." This myth, Don said, is "received from the media" and enforces "provincialism." It produces exquisite ironies: on March 25, explored the "myth that every Texan is in some sense a cowboy, or capable of being one, or should possess the cowboy virtues." This myth, Don said, is "received from the media" and enforces "provincialism." It produces exquisite ironies: ... we have the moneyed cowboy whose money proceeds not from cattle but from a nice little plastics plant. To complicate the picture insanely, let us say that he is also, in his rough-hewn way, a patron of the arts. Note that the drama here is generated by the delicious incongruity he presents-and savors-in his role of the cultured cowboy: "I died with my boots on in the Art Museum." When we remember that he is not a cowboy at all but a plastics engineer, the multiple level of the charade is revealed, the lostness of the leading actor established.

Frequently, Don encountered such "schizophrenics" in Houston's art circles. He felt the pressure, familiar to every Texas male, to adopt a laconic G.o.d-and-football swagger. The "ritual demands of the [cowboy] role" sever "certain important areas of thought and feeling" from anyone who tries it on, Don wrote.

One afternoon, in the Texana section of the Brown Book Shop, he discovered a curious, slender novel self-published by H. L. Hunt. It was called Alpaca Alpaca, and it took place in a "tiny, vaguely Southern American republic." Hunt was a Dallas millionaire who fit the stereotype of the Texas oil tyc.o.o.n. His novel was a radical proposal for changing the U.S. Const.i.tution, disguised as a utopian fantasy: The "establishment of a perfect state where the number of votes a man has bears some resemblance to his financial status." As Don notes, one of Hunt's characters claims, "[W]hat is good for the possessor of the greatest wealth in the Nation is good for the poorest citizen."

Don reviewed the book in the Reporter Reporter on April 14 and mocked the "modesty" of men like Hunt: "One of the disadvantages of being the richest man in the country (or the second or fourth) must be a profound sense of political frustration," he wrote. "No matter how many billions you command, you are given under the Const.i.tution only one vote. The insult is personal; in the voting booth, you are brought at a stroke to the level of the poorest citizen....H. L. Hunt of Dallas sets out to correct this gross equity." on April 14 and mocked the "modesty" of men like Hunt: "One of the disadvantages of being the richest man in the country (or the second or fourth) must be a profound sense of political frustration," he wrote. "No matter how many billions you command, you are given under the Const.i.tution only one vote. The insult is personal; in the voting booth, you are brought at a stroke to the level of the poorest citizen....H. L. Hunt of Dallas sets out to correct this gross equity."

In the fall of 1960, around the time he began drafting "The Darling Duckling at School," Don negotiated with the New York producers of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape Krapp's Last Tape and Edward Albee's and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story The Zoo Story to bring the shows to Houston, under the auspices of the Contemporary Arts a.s.sociation. An off-Broadway cast from the Cricket Theatre had performed both plays in Manhattan, and Don arranged for a double-bill performance in the University of Houston's Cullen Auditorium on January 30 and 31. to bring the shows to Houston, under the auspices of the Contemporary Arts a.s.sociation. An off-Broadway cast from the Cricket Theatre had performed both plays in Manhattan, and Don arranged for a double-bill performance in the University of Houston's Cullen Auditorium on January 30 and 31.

Shortly afterward, he persuaded a local actor, Tom Toner of the Alley Theatre, to give a staged reading from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground Notes from Underground. Mack McCormick, a Houston folklorist, wrote a musical based on the song "Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley," and Don staged it at the Contemporary Arts Museum. McCormick had recently seen the once-legendary blues singer Lightnin' Hopkins playing to small crowds in Dowling Street dance halls. With Don's help, he arranged a Hopkins concert at the museum.

Don's energy, his creativity, and his ability to get things done impressed his fellow board members. They urged him to consider filling the vacancy left by Bob Morris. Don was writing now; he did not want a full-time job. He asked if a part-time director would satisfy the board. They responded enthusiastically.

On March 12, 1961, Don submitted his formal application to the CAA. "Don relished the challenge of it," Helen recalled. Upon receiving the board's approval, he "began a schedule in which he wrote for at least four, sometimes five hours, after which he turned his attention to the museum. It was an ideal schedule for Don."

His first initiative was to arrange a lecture by Harold Rosenberg. "Every year something almost takes me to Texas but I never quite make it," Rosenberg replied to Don's query. "The minumum fee would be $250. Perhaps this is more than you had in mind, so that once again I shall have almost visited Texas. It was pleasant to hear from you again."

While Don courted Rosenberg, The New Yorker The New Yorker ran two long articles, in back-to-back issues, on "The Super-American State" of Texas. Don feared Rosenberg would see them and ran two long articles, in back-to-back issues, on "The Super-American State" of Texas. Don feared Rosenberg would see them and never never want to visit Houston. The writer, John Bainbridge, offered old chestnuts: "The life-style in Texas is marked by bravado, zest, optimism, ebullience." He was seduced by cliches: the "so called American Dream...come[s] true...in Texas. Novels and movies about Texas sometimes give the impression that the native millionaires travel in nothing but four-engine airplanes complete with bar [and] galley....As a matter of fact, some years ago [oilman] Glenn McCarthy did own a Boeing Stratocruiser...." want to visit Houston. The writer, John Bainbridge, offered old chestnuts: "The life-style in Texas is marked by bravado, zest, optimism, ebullience." He was seduced by cliches: the "so called American Dream...come[s] true...in Texas. Novels and movies about Texas sometimes give the impression that the native millionaires travel in nothing but four-engine airplanes complete with bar [and] galley....As a matter of fact, some years ago [oilman] Glenn McCarthy did own a Boeing Stratocruiser...."

Don was particularly incensed by the magzine's dismissal of Texas's cultural treasures. John Graves, one of the best writers in the state, got only a pa.s.sing nod in the piece; instead, Bainbridge lingered over purple-prosers like Mary La.s.swell and Mrs. Perry Wampler Nichols (who wrote, "Visitors stepping into this land of bluebonnets and endless skies find weaving about their hearts, like webs spun by giant spiders, the love of something friendly and great"). Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum, one of the country's most innovative inst.i.tutions of its kind, was not mentioned.

"What is the biographer going to do for a region that has so few men of distinction?" the historian Walter Prescott Webb once asked about Texas. The question, Bainbridge said, still awaited an answer.

On April 13, Don wrote Rosenberg, "It's cheering to find that you're not intimidated by all that nonsense in the New Yorker New Yorker." His citizen's pride had been hurt; worse, he knew he could have done a better job for the magazine.

He agreed to Rosenberg's fee. "I'm pleased at the idea of having you on our cultural vaudeville series," he said. As to the potential crowd size, he said, "I can only suggest that we have had audiences ranging from one to three or four hundreds for these things. Some of them will be very knowledgeable, some won't."

Rosenberg arrived in Houston on May 10, and stayed for three days. Don put him up in the Warwick, one of the city's finest hotels, near the Museum of Fine Arts and the Rice Inst.i.tute. Rosenberg drew a moderate crowd for his lecture, which was on the "subject of continuity and novelty in contemporary painting."

John Bainbridge's pat view of Texas would have collapsed if he'd learned that the director of an arts museum in Houston, who staged Beckett plays and Lightnin' Hopkins concerts, was writing short stories like "Florence Green Is 81," in which the narrator, a writer named Baskerville, "free a.s.sociat[es], brilliantly, brilliantly," to "put" the reader into the center of his consciousness.

Baskerville, an ex-Catholic and an admirer of Edmund Husserl, edits with his "left hand a small magazine, very scholarly, very brilliant, called The Journal of Tension Reduction The Journal of Tension Reduction (social-psychological studies, learned disputation, letters-to-the-editor, anxiety in rats)." The range of references in his thought stream reflects the articles he has edited: lentils, Siberia, Quemoy and Matsu, the population of Santa Ana, California, the Sea of Okhotsk. The story takes place at a dinner party in the home of Florence Green, a wealthy arts patron. Baskerville, working to secure funding for his magazine, flirts unsuccessfully with an attractive young woman across the table, drinks too much, and admires Florence Green's desire to go someplace "where (social-psychological studies, learned disputation, letters-to-the-editor, anxiety in rats)." The range of references in his thought stream reflects the articles he has edited: lentils, Siberia, Quemoy and Matsu, the population of Santa Ana, California, the Sea of Okhotsk. The story takes place at a dinner party in the home of Florence Green, a wealthy arts patron. Baskerville, working to secure funding for his magazine, flirts unsuccessfully with an attractive young woman across the table, drinks too much, and admires Florence Green's desire to go someplace "where everything is different everything is different."

Two years later, when the story appeared in Harper's Bazaar Harper's Bazaar, "several prominent Houstonians"-including Dominique de Menil-"believed the character of Florence was based on each of them," Helen recalled.

At about the time Don took charge at the museum, he was working on two other stories, "The Big Broadcast of 1938" and "The Viennese Opera Ball," both of which would appear in literary journals in 1962 ("Broadcast" in New World Writing New World Writing and the "Opera Ball" in and the "Opera Ball" in Contact Contact). "The Viennese Opera Ball" presents a rush of c.o.c.ktail-party chatter-a language collage. "The Big Broadcast of 1938" tells the story of Bloomsbury, a man recently divorced from his wife, Martha. Somehow, in exchange for giving Martha the house he had shared with her, he has acquired a radio station: "Bloomsbury could now play 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' which he had always admired immoderately, on account of its finality, as often as he liked. It meant, to him, that everything was finished. Therefore he played it daily, 60 times between 6 and 10 a.m., 120 times between 12 noon and 7 p.m., and the whole night long except when, as was sometimes the case, he was talking."

His "talking" consists of repeating a word-nevertheless, say-over and over for a quarter of an hour, during which the "word would frequently disclose new properties, [and] unsuspected qualities." Despite its absurd premise, the story is genuinely moving, as Bloomsbury, a man alone in the middle of the night, talks to his distant ex, who is probably not even listening. He broadcasts his oddly evocative words until the electric company, whose bill he hasn't paid, shuts him down.

In May of 1961, after he had directed the Contemporary Arts Museum for less than two months, Don learned of a writer's conference sponsored by Wagner College on Staten Island. Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, and Edward Albee would be the writers in residence. Sterling Lord, a powerful literary agent, was scheduled to give a lecture on publishing. Only fifteen fiction writers would be selected to have their work critiqued by Bellow. Don was interested in the opportunity; he was also excited about the possibility of seeing New York City for the first time.

He mailed off a personal bio along with "The Darling Duckling at School" and "The Big Broadcast of 1938," which he had just sold to New World Writing New World Writing. Right away, the conference organizers accepted his application.

On July 9, he and Helen flew into Newark and then took a shuttle bus to Manhattan's East Side. They knew nothing of New York except that Grand Central Terminal was conveniently located and that it was near the Mobil Oil offices, where Joe Maranto worked. "[Our] hotel and its setting were bleak," Helen recalled.

The couple spent the weekend with Joe and Maggie Maranto. They walked to Central Park, to the Museum of Modern Art, and to the Met. It was a "treat" to stop in randomly at galleries. Mostly, though, they were overwhelmed by all there was to see in so short a time.

On Monday morning, they walked through Battery Park to Manhattan's southern tip. The ferries for Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty left from there; Castle Garden (now called Clinton Castle), an old fort that had once protected the harbor, drew crowds with its fast-food stands and coinoperated binoculars offering views of the water. At one time, Castle Garden had processed immigrants. On this pleasant summer morning, Don and Helen were immigrants in a new world, and they shared the excitement of the people around them.

They walked past the waterfront's perpendicular piers (the "miserable...slipshod, shambling piers of New York," Herman Melville once said of them). At the Staten Island Ferry terminal, shabby and crowded with pizza shops, Don bought a pair of tickets.

After crossing the water, the couple caught a cab to Wagner College. The conference was scheduled for ten days and would consist of cla.s.s sessions, individual meetings with the writers in residence, readings, and lectures. Don and Helen shared a dorm room and ate in a campus dining hall. Among the other students at the conference were Susan Dworkin, only nineteen (she would become an accomplished playwright), Arno Karlen, a promising short story writer whom Don had published in Forum Forum, Buzz Farber, who would end up acting in Norman Mailer's films, and Sarah Dabney, an instructor at Smith College. "This was Don's first intimate contact with other accomplished writers and the first important critical acknowledgement he received," Helen wrote. Still, he was "uncomfortable in the role of student. Since his teen years, he had been at the center of any creative group in which he took part."

Saul Bellow was a notoriously poor teacher. His "heart wasn't in it," says his biographer, James Atlas. Bellow had come to Wagner that summer expecting "leisurely days and idle nights." Instead, he told a friend, he had wound up "sweating over papers and talking 12 hours a day til my mouth was like an ashpit." The temperature hovered at around "106 degrees, like a stokehold."

The Adventures of Augie March had made him famous. Don "saw him as the major American novelist of our time," Helen recalled. Dworkin wrote, "[T]hat summer, no one in the world mattered more than Saul Bellow." The great man was uncomfortable, carrying the weight of the world. His students' " 'ego-stricken needs' unnerved him." Dworkin said he "sat and listened to us read our work in cla.s.s. He sat with his thumb pressed to his temple, like a man rehearsing suicide. Sometimes he gazed into s.p.a.ce-and when he was forced to look at us, it was with had made him famous. Don "saw him as the major American novelist of our time," Helen recalled. Dworkin wrote, "[T]hat summer, no one in the world mattered more than Saul Bellow." The great man was uncomfortable, carrying the weight of the world. His students' " 'ego-stricken needs' unnerved him." Dworkin said he "sat and listened to us read our work in cla.s.s. He sat with his thumb pressed to his temple, like a man rehearsing suicide. Sometimes he gazed into s.p.a.ce-and when he was forced to look at us, it was with fear fear. Why this brilliant writer should be afraid of us, I could not understand. I felt sorry for him...I felt guilty in his presence, as though I personally had done whatever it was that had been done to Saul Bellow and was personally trying to destroy him."

In cla.s.s, Bellow rambled about his marriages and the alimony he paid his former wives. "For the most part, Bellow said very little about our work," Dworkin recalled. "He seemed reluctant to make judgments or give too much guidance."

Nevertheless, he was brutal to the young men in cla.s.s. Karlen submitted a chapter from a novel that read a lot like Augie March. Augie Augie March. Augie's author ignored it. Farber read a story that seemed to Bellow to romanticize poverty. "I've lived in dirt, and when you've lived in dirt, there's nothing interesting about it," Bellow said.

" 'The Big Broadcast' and Don's reading of it [in cla.s.s] clearly intrigued other students," Helen recalled, "but Bellow was much less enthusiastic about what Don was doing than the younger people were. I believe he...thought that Don's fictional world was too restricted."

"Do you really believe it's that hard for people to talk to each other?" was all Bellow said when Don had finished reading.

Don didn't respond.

After the conference, Karlen sent Bellow a letter complaining about the way he had handled the cla.s.s. Bellow replied candidly, admitting that he felt compet.i.tive with other writers, especially men. "I myself have often been indignant with older writers, and I know how you must have felt," he wrote. He said that when he looked at Karlen, "I saw my own pale face twenty years ago...and no doubt I said the wrong thing[s]."

Generally, Bellow was less harsh, though less engaged, with the work of his female students. He told Dworkin, "You'll be a good writer." "I couldn't remember ever having been so happy," she wrote. Later in the week, at a party, she overheard Bellow confess to someone that he frequently told young writers they were good. "He hadn't the heart to do otherwise. They needed encouragement so much, much more than they needed hard criticism; he was scared by the need in their faces; he remembered his own need when he was young."

"I cried and cried," Dworkin recalled. "For weeks after [that] at home, I cried. My family didn't know what to do."

One day in cla.s.s, a woman named Bette Howland (who would later publish many books) presented a story about an abortion. The heat in the room and the student pressure finally cracked Bellow's composure. He blurted that he couldn't stand women writers who "wore their ovaries on their sleeves."

In the afternoons, craft sessions brought together all the fiction-writing students. The discussions bored Don. They centered on characterization and scene setting-conventions that Don had worked past in his writing.

One day, a student criticized Bellow for writing Henderson the Rain King Henderson the Rain King when he'd never been to Africa. Don couldn't believe this was even a topic of conversation; imagination was the whole point of fiction, wasn't it? when he'd never been to Africa. Don couldn't believe this was even a topic of conversation; imagination was the whole point of fiction, wasn't it?

Edward Albee was the writer with whom "Don might have had [the most] rapport, but he was concerned only with the students in drama," Helen recalled. "Don was excited about having produced Albee's play for the Contemporary Arts a.s.sociation, [but] he appeared uncomfortable that Albee was the 'writer' and he was the 'pupil.' Albee had not read any of Don's stories and knew nothing of what Don was attempting to do. Don spoke with him just once briefly and that conversation concerned the Houston production of The Zoo Story The Zoo Story."

Generally, though, Albee was congenial-"thin, in large sweaters" was Dworkin's description of him. He hung around students in the evenings, whereas Bellow returned to Manhattan at the end of the day. Lowell seemed "filled with anguish," Helen wrote later. He had a "movingly sad look." "I commented to Don that I thought Lowell should not have been there-it appeared too difficult for him."

The students bonded-under Bellow's gaze, they shared a siege mentality-and that justified the conference to Don. One of the partic.i.p.ants "got drunk one night and ran around the dorms with a toilet seat over his head, shouting," Dworkin says. Another student, Ed McClanahan, an English instructor at Oregon State College, told stories about Bernard Malamud, who had taught at Oregon State, and whose latest novel, A New Life A New Life, based on the school, had scandalized some of the locals. Don was "[w]ry-drunk a lot," Dworkin recalled. He laughed at people from "behind his ice cubes." "He didn't care what Saul Bellow thought of his work. He had brought his wife along, and she was drinking too, and they were having a fine, quiet time at the conference."

Don was not as sanguine as Dworkin thought he was. "I saw Don as more insecure with [Bellow, Albee, and Lowell] than I thought he would be," Helen said, though she admitted his insecurity came more "from his desire to have his talent recognized than from any doubt about what he was attempting to write. He knew that he was already an accomplished writer and wanted to be taken more seriously."

One evening, Don and Helen were strolling across campus, when they ran into Bellow. Helen said that Bellow "alluded to our marriage...[he] mentioned that there were obviously good things in Don's life that he ought to include in his work, so that his writing would encompa.s.s the whole world." Don, she recalled, "was friendly, but...he did not reply to Bellow's advice; instead, he just responded by nodding pleasantly."

On another night, Sterling Lord gave a talk about the book business. "I don't believe Sterling...met Donald personally" at the conference, says Lynn Nesbit, who would soon become Don's agent. However, Helen later insisted that Arno Karlen "recommended Don to...Lord," who was Karlen's agent at the time.

In any case, Nesbit says she "had just been promoted by Sterling to be a junior agent when he went to the...conference and brought back a sheaf of stories and threw them on my desk." One of them was "The Big Broadcast of 1938." "I found [it] completely compelling and original. Sterling had told me I should contact any of the writers whose stories impressed me and ask if they were interested in representation. As I recall, the only one I wrote to was Donald."

Nesbit wasn't alone in countering Bellow's dismissal of "The Big Broadcast of 1938." Herman Gollob read it when Don and Helen came to visit him in Boston soon after the conference. "I was awed by the controlled madness...[the] exuberant quirkiness...[the] comic flair," he says. "Most of all, I think, I marveled at the unforced precision of the language, the seemingly effortless colloquial tone, traceable I felt to Don's newspaper days."

Once more, Don challenged him to "summon up the courage to publish 'the most brilliant work of our time.' "

Gollob was newly married, still green at Little, Brown. He didn't want to make mistakes or push his luck too fast. His earlier muted reaction to "The Hiding Man" was based on his perception of its limited commercial appeal. He was beginning to appreciate what Don was up to, and he felt heartened by the responses of editors at Contact, New World Writing Contact, New World Writing, and First Person First Person. Gollob encouraged Don to keep up this "radically different approach to fiction." A few more stories, a few more publications, and...well, we'll see, he said.

Don asked his friend if he knew of any magazine-editing jobs on the East Coast. Gollob promised to keep his ear to the ground.

Susan Dworkin's remark that Don was "drunk a lot" during the conference raises the issue of Don's alcoholism. In her memoir, Helen said Don's drinking did not become a problem until sometime after he moved to New York City in 1963. Dworkin's observation that Don's wife "was drinking too" may suggest that Helen was being circ.u.mspect about her own consumption. On the other hand, Dworkin said the gathering was not a staid affair. In a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell complained about the "sounds of intimacy, outrage and drinking" every night at the conference.

Some of Don's late stories ("Chablis," "Grandmother's House"), written with a personal candor new to his work at the time, make it clear that, at least on occasion, he drank heavily while in high school. Pat Goeters says that, from an early age, Don had an "alcoholic's attention span." He recalled, "In Houston, Don and I were like alcoholics-in-training. We would go out to local clubs, listen to jazz and drink beer. In those days, only beer and wine could be purchased in bars. Our 'adventures' had a distinct Catcher in the Rye Catcher in the Rye flavor-young men poking at life from the sidelines while hungry to be in on the action. We were both alcoholics by the time he left Houston for New York, but it was in New York that he began to drink every day." flavor-young men poking at life from the sidelines while hungry to be in on the action. We were both alcoholics by the time he left Houston for New York, but it was in New York that he began to drink every day."

Don's first wife, Maggie, thinks Don had alcoholic "tendencies" early on, but she believes his drinking was not "serious" until he moved to New York and "had more possibilities to do what he wanted, which made life easier for him in some ways, and more difficult in others." Herman Gollob recalled that Don, in his mid-twenties, "was addicted, as was I, to West Coast jazz and to Scotch," but it's unclear how literally he meant "addicted." Helen noted, persuasively, that while Don edited Forum Forum, he worked meticulously each night on his proofing ch.o.r.es and the magazine's layout. Later, as the museum director, he maintained a rigorous schedule, and pursued his writing and museum duties with astonishing energy. The only certainty is: If he was alcoholic at this point, he was functioning at a remarkably high level.

As they sat suspended over Texas, waiting for their plane to land, Helen and Don felt powerful emotional tugs. To nineteen-year-old Susan Dworkin, Don had seemed impudently confident, but Helen knew he had been bruised by Bellow's brush-off. The East Coast appeared to him elitist and strange. Still, he felt he had to "crack" it. Manhattan shocked Helen. She had found the city "bleak" and overwhelming. And yet she had gotten some "insight into the New York literary world...a world in which there was a genuine conviction that if you mattered as a writer, then you lived in New York." She later wrote, "I could see that [Don] had to be there for his writing." As the plane began its descent, this realization settled uneasily into her stomach.

22.

THE EMERGING FIGURE.

Before leaving for the conference, Don had composed a catalog introduction for a show called "The Emerging Figure." The show ran at the Contemporary Arts Museum from May 31 through June 21, 1961. It featured one of Willem de Kooning's Woman Woman paintings, and work by Richard Diebenkorn, Alex Katz, Lester Johnson, James Weeks, and others. Don's introduction traced the return of human figures "in the work of the children of the de Kooning generation." Against the grain of fashionable criticism led by Clement Greenberg, a supporter of pure abstraction, Don argued that figures were always implicit in Abstract Expressionism. He quoted Thomas Hess: The figure, Hess said, is one of abstraction's "lineal continuities." paintings, and work by Richard Diebenkorn, Alex Katz, Lester Johnson, James Weeks, and others. Don's introduction traced the return of human figures "in the work of the children of the de Kooning generation." Against the grain of fashionable criticism led by Clement Greenberg, a supporter of pure abstraction, Don argued that figures were always implicit in Abstract Expressionism. He quoted Thomas Hess: The figure, Hess said, is one of abstraction's "lineal continuities."

Hess was a friend of Harold Rosenberg. Together, they fought Greenberg over the meaning meaning of the avant-garde. To Greenberg, reference to the world was "literary" (that is, it belonged to the of the avant-garde. To Greenberg, reference to the world was "literary" (that is, it belonged to the verbal verbal arts) and was to be expunged from "pure" painting. To reach its highest possibilities, painting must concentrate on the materiality of paint and the flatness of the canvas. For Rosenberg and Hess, "pure" painting, devoid of social implications, was arid and inhuman. They preferred messier works of art. The "action" of painting-traces of the artist's movements in the brush strokes on the canvas-revealed the artist's emotions, social status, and cultural context, and these were more important than the medium's pedigree. Don's catalog piece placed him squarely in the Hess/Rosenberg camp. In years to come, the tensions between Greenberg and Rosenberg would grow, and the avant-garde would split even wider apart. arts) and was to be expunged from "pure" painting. To reach its highest possibilities, painting must concentrate on the materiality of paint and the flatness of the canvas. For Rosenberg and Hess, "pure" painting, devoid of social implications, was arid and inhuman. They preferred messier works of art. The "action" of painting-traces of the artist's movements in the brush strokes on the canvas-revealed the artist's emotions, social status, and cultural context, and these were more important than the medium's pedigree. Don's catalog piece placed him squarely in the Hess/Rosenberg camp. In years to come, the tensions between Greenberg and Rosenberg would grow, and the avant-garde would split even wider apart.

In his introduction, Don stressed that the "current interest in the figure" was not a turning away from abstraction; it was, rather, an "attempt to explore and consolidate the victory of the new style." In other words, there was no going back to traditional portraiture. From now on, portraiture would include gestures learned from abstraction: The visual territory has expanded. The new figurative paintings were not "about" people-they were "enriched by anonymous human presences."

Already, Don was approaching fictional characters in this manner. He believed that in painting and and in writing, the "direct, unmistakable, and unclouded recapitulation of some aspect of human experience ('LOOK MA, I'M DANCING')" was "self-defeating." "We cannot rid ourselves of the feeling that such an account has been won too easily," Don wrote. Surprise and insight were possible now only through indirection, masking-saying and seeing things "slant," as Emily d.i.c.kinson put it. in writing, the "direct, unmistakable, and unclouded recapitulation of some aspect of human experience ('LOOK MA, I'M DANCING')" was "self-defeating." "We cannot rid ourselves of the feeling that such an account has been won too easily," Don wrote. Surprise and insight were possible now only through indirection, masking-saying and seeing things "slant," as Emily d.i.c.kinson put it.

In truth, the figure had emerged in avant-garde painting almost a decade before Don's catalog comments. De Kooning displayed his paintings of women in New York's Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1953. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning's biographers, call Woman I Woman I the "barbaric yawp of American painting"-it is, they say, "personally, socially, culturally, and artistically fraught with uncertainty." the "barbaric yawp of American painting"-it is, they say, "personally, socially, culturally, and artistically fraught with uncertainty."

The frank ugliness of the figure flies in the face of the Great Master heritage, traducing one of the oldest painterly traditions, the worship of the female form. But de Kooning also violated Abstract Expressionism by reintroducing the human form within a storm of brush strokes.

In a not-so-subtle swipe at Clement Greenberg, Don wrote in his introduction, "It is just as arbitrary to insist that a painting cannot own a reference to a human form as to insist on ideological [and] theological...grounds that it contain one."

In 1953, de Kooning had thumbed his nose at everyone everyone. By 1961, the heroics of his gesture-the new territory it seized, enlarging ideas of figuration as well as abstraction-were more apparent than ever.

Don's catalog piece ends with a line that he would echo over twenty years later in "Not-Knowing": "It is not that we prize difficulty [in art] for the sake of difficulty, only that we hope to know...that the experience is genuine."

If figures were emerging in abstract painting, consumer goods were disappearing in magazine and newspaper ads. Four months after the "Emerging Figure" show, Don made his first appearance in a major national publication, with "The Case of the Vanishing Product," a commentary on advertising, in the October 1961 issue of Harper's Harper's. "A remarkable number of advertis.e.m.e.nts give not so much as a clue to what is being advertised," Don wrote-a fact he'd gleaned working with Helen on her ad accounts. Instead, many ads are filled with objects-"keys, clocks, corkscrews, kiosks, balloons, musical instruments, stones...none of [which] is being offered for sale. Instead they are the means by which we are to conceive of other things which are are being offered for sale-typically nowhere in sight. The very high level of abstraction in contemporary advertising both confers a new freedom upon designers and increases the possibility of ambiguity in its use." being offered for sale-typically nowhere in sight. The very high level of abstraction in contemporary advertising both confers a new freedom upon designers and increases the possibility of ambiguity in its use."

With one eye on the art world and the other on his wife's advertising business, Don could see the culture's growing visual awareness, and the emerging social consequences. "It is not...surprising that, living in a land of plenty within a circle of poverty and near or actual starvation, Americans should be self-conscious about their fabulous consumption, and that advertisers should be cautious in reminding us of it," he said.

As director of the Contemporary Arts Museum, he "flew by the seat of [his] pants, pulling together exhibitions, but [he] loved that kind of spontaneous, creative effort," says Marion Barthelme, recalling stories Don told her about his museum days. "He and Jim [Love] went down to Matagorda where Forest Bess had a studio, for instance, and just took everything off his walls for one show." Bess, the son of an oil worker from Bay City, painted small abstractions filled with geometric symbols reminiscent of Kandinsky or Klee. He held his first show in the lobby of a Bay City hotel in 1936, but by the midforties Meyer Shapiro and Betty Parsons backed him. Don showed his work in April 1962.

Don arranged stagings of innovative theater, such as Edward Albee's The American Dream The American Dream, Jules Feiffer's Crawling Arnold Crawling Arnold (about a businessman who reverts to childhood), and Fernando Arrabal's (about a businessman who reverts to childhood), and Fernando Arrabal's The Automobile Graveyard The Automobile Graveyard. The crowds, especially for the Arrabal production, were gratifyingly large, but Don clashed with the director, an aggressive Brooklynite named Ned Bobkoff, over the setting designs. Hubert Roussel panned the plays in the Post Post. On February 2, 1962, he wrote that Albee's drama was a "structural katzenjammer which makes its points 20 times over with lamentably amateur enthusiasm and winds up as a greatly pretentious bore."

Don knew that his short stories would provoke similar reactions from Roussel and his old newspaper buddies, so he kept the stories to himself. No one at the museum took a strong interest in his writing.

In the fall of 1961, Don arranged for the John Coltrane Quartet to perform in Houston. The day before the concert, Hurricane Carla threatened from the Gulf. The musicians exercised the cancellation clause in their contract, took the performance fee but did not show up. If they had, they would have received a mixed reaction anyway. One of Don's greatest frustrations with Houston audiences was their lack of musical sophistication. In September, he scheduled a performance of Elliott Carter's music. Carter was one of America's most original modern cla.s.sical composers. Only fifty people showed up for the concert. The newspapers didn't cover it. Don fumed.

He felt better on September 30, when a respectable crowd gathered in Jones Hall to hear Peter Yates, a musicologist, speak on experimental music and lead a performance of a computer-composed string piece by members of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. Later that week, Don arranged a modern staging by Harry Partch of Euripides' The Bacchae; The Bacchae; called called Revelation in the Courthouse Park Revelation in the Courthouse Park, Partch's work was a music-theater piece. The music was played on large gla.s.s tubes.

Don oversaw the museum's literary events, as well as short courses taught by visiting artists. In November 1961, he put together a poetry festival featuring W. D. Snodgra.s.s, Robert Bly, and Kenneth Koch. "Don had a nice bunch of friends, sort of artistic exiles in the wild wastes of Houston, and he introduced me to them," Koch recalled. "[At my reading] I got a surprising...reaction to my poem 'Lunch'...someone in the audience asked me why I didn't make up my own language and write poems in that. I think the idea was that if I was going to be so obscure I should take it all the way. Don was good-humored about and pleased by me (and my poetry) as some odd sort of event he was bringing to his native city-like its first air balloon or TV set. He was smiling almost all the time. Of course, I liked him a lot....He was very pleasant, genial, ironic. He was very funny. Irony and all, he seemed mild compared to the people I knew in New York."

Ever since the Wagner College trip, Helen had worried about Don's restlessness. He didn't obviously display his discomfort. In fact, most of his friends thought he was content in Houston. To Herman Gollob, however, he had written, "This job at the museum is sapping my will to live, never great to begin with."

Helen was most aware of Don's unhappiness when his reactions to people differed sharply from her own. A breach was growing between them. For example, during the poetry festival, she gravitated to Robert Bly. He was "serious, older, and [he] told us that he was soon to be a father," Helen recalled. His "demeanor and actions were...dignified, whereas Koch, who spent a lot of time with a young woman poet, was more lighthearted about his visit." Koch's jokey behavior embarra.s.sed her (and Bly), yet it was Koch whom Don appreciated. "[Don and I] spent a lot of time in the car," Koch says. "He explained drinking in Texas to me. The dry and wet rules were complicated and I don't remember them. But people kept a bottle in the glove compartment. Just in case. Beer was drunk during the daytime to provide a 'base' for the whiskey to be drunk later. Actually we didn't drink very much." Still, Helen fretted when Don disappeared with Koch for a couple of hours each day before dinner.

She was also more and more troubled by Don's spending. He paid out of pocket for museum meals and events. She borrowed against her ad agency's income to keep their personal finances afloat. "[We] were severely strained...in part from our trip to New York the previous summer and in part from the cost of entertaining for the museum," Helen wrote. "Don continued to write checks whether we had funds or not....I was growing increasingly alarmed about our company's debt. And even with the extra money I was borrowing from the agency, it had become difficult just to pay our personal bills."

On the first night of the festival, she and Don took their guests to La Louisiane, a French restaurant on Main Street. The group toasted Houston's "wildness" and laughed about the restaurant's wall paintings of satyrs and nymphs with flapper haircuts. At the end of the meal, Don refused the poets' money and paid the tab. Two nights later, at Ye Olde College Inn across the street from Rice, Don announced that it was the poets' poets' turn to "pick up the check." Helen was shocked. She was relieved not to sh.e.l.l out more cash, but she thought Don rude. Later, he explained to her that the CAA was "paying [the poets] enough that he thought they could share the costs." "Don and Kenneth seemed to get along so well that [Kenneth] probably regarded it with humor," Helen says. "But I doubt that Bly thought it was funny." turn to "pick up the check." Helen was shocked. She was relieved not to sh.e.l.l out more cash, but she thought Don rude. Later, he explained to her that the CAA was "paying [the poets] enough that he thought they could share the costs." "Don and Kenneth seemed to get along so well that [Kenneth] probably regarded it with humor," Helen says. "But I doubt that Bly thought it was funny."

As they said good night outside the Warwick Hotel, Bly and Koch kissed Helen's cheek. In the car on the way home, Don said, "Now you have something you can tell our grandchildren, the night when you were kissed by two famous poets."