Hiding Man_ A Biography Of Donald Barthelme Part 31

One of the interchapters, "I put a name in an envelope..." was part of a catalog introduction Don had written for a Joseph Cornell exhibit at the Castelli Gallery in 1976. Cornell's spirit touches all of Overnight: Overnight: Many of the short texts involve the construction of small-scale imaginative worlds ("Holding the ladder I watch you glue...chandeliers to...[tree] limbs...") while a number of the longer stories take place in hotels or in the midst of temporary arrangements, recalling Cornell's celebration of the ephemeral in his work (Cornell made a Many of the short texts involve the construction of small-scale imaginative worlds ("Holding the ladder I watch you glue...chandeliers to...[tree] limbs...") while a number of the longer stories take place in hotels or in the midst of temporary arrangements, recalling Cornell's celebration of the ephemeral in his work (Cornell made a Hotel Hotel series of boxes; often, he included stamps and letters in his collages-correspondence blown on the wind). series of boxes; often, he included stamps and letters in his collages-correspondence blown on the wind).

Don's reviewers missed these echoes and aims. They seemed to have lost patience with learning from a writer how to read him. Instead, they approached Overnight Overnight with a fixed idea of "story." When the book did not match their preconceptions, they dismissed it. It was one thing to say, as did Anatole Broyard, that with a fixed idea of "story." When the book did not match their preconceptions, they dismissed it. It was one thing to say, as did Anatole Broyard, that Overnight Overnight did not represent top-drawer Barthelme. It was another to call the book nonsense without taking into account the writer's intentions. One could readily believe that "minimalism" did not represent top-drawer Barthelme. It was another to call the book nonsense without taking into account the writer's intentions. One could readily believe that "minimalism" was was the new literary currency: Anything beyond six-word sentences about fast food and television now seemed beyond the capacities of many readers, even those who read for a living. the new literary currency: Anything beyond six-word sentences about fast food and television now seemed beyond the capacities of many readers, even those who read for a living.

Dispirited, Don loped down the halls of the Roy Cullen Building. Fissures had opened up among the faculty. Some of them complained that the best students flocked toward Don-not just because they prized Don's teaching but also because they hoped to use his literary connections. The lunch meetings became more awkward.

"During heated discussions" at these meetings, "Donald would often wait until everyone else had declared a position, and then weigh in with the final word, more like an arbiter than an interested party," Lopate says. "He was good at manipulating consensus through democratic discussion to get his way; and we made it easy for him, since everyone wanted his love and approval....Still, when a vote did go against him, he bowed sportingly to majority will. He often seemed to be holding back from using his full clout; he was like those professional actors who give the impression at social gatherings of saving their real energy for the real performance later."

Only once did Don give in to pleasure at one of these afternoon gatherings. The group was discussing how to update faculty bios for a new promotional poster. Rosellen Brown suggested, "Donald Barthelme-Still Famous." Don leaned back in his chair, put his napkin to his mouth, and roared.

For all his deflation, he soldiered on with a touching almost optimism. Once, he organized a dance in a local art annex, the Lawndale, for students in the creative-writing program and the UH Art Department. He felt that students' teaching and cla.s.s schedules restricted their social lives. The party s.p.a.ce was as big as a warehouse. The young painters, in green-and-red-spattered overalls, huddled on one side of the room, shy as middle school kids, while Don's proteges crowded into the opposite corner. Finally, in an attempt to merge everyone, Don stepped into the center of the floor, wearing (as usual) a striped cotton shirt, khaki pants, and cowboy boots, and asked a scared young art student to dance. No matter-the painters and writers never relaxed with one another that night, to Don's great disappointment. Still, he'd tried.

For a while, he joined a graduate-student band, Moist and the Towlettes. "I used to play the drums, you know," he told his astonished students. The group played ratchety three-chord rock at parties and book signings. Texas Monthly Texas Monthly called it the "worst band in Houston, if not the universe." Soon enough, the tedious practice sessions bored Don, but at the band's first couple of gigs, he seemed transcendently pleased. At a dance one night in a bookstore parking lot, he beamed and waved his sticks like a sprightly conductor. Midway through the show, the group's backup singers wandered off into the crowd (discipline, like harmony, was not a Towlette virtue). Don laughed, hit a mighty rim shot, and carried the band into the next wild song. called it the "worst band in Houston, if not the universe." Soon enough, the tedious practice sessions bored Don, but at the band's first couple of gigs, he seemed transcendently pleased. At a dance one night in a bookstore parking lot, he beamed and waved his sticks like a sprightly conductor. Midway through the show, the group's backup singers wandered off into the crowd (discipline, like harmony, was not a Towlette virtue). Don laughed, hit a mighty rim shot, and carried the band into the next wild song.

53.

BETWEEN COASTS.

Houston was an easier and safer place than New York to raise a child, said Don. But he kept returning to Manhattan with his family, at first for half a year, then only in the summers. Phillip Lopate, who also spent part of his time in Manhattan, said that Don was "slightly more speedy and nervous" in New York.

Around this time-in the spring of 1983-"Donald had this idea to make a dinner in SoHo," says Walter Abish. "A major dinner for a group of writers, and he planned it very, very carefully. It was a strange event. Amusing and intriguing. He invited...well, that was the thing of it. The list. I was astounded that he consulted me, but he called and said, 'Should we invite so-and-so?' Naturally, I did the only decent thing and said 'Absolutely' to everyone he mentioned. I pushed for Gaddis. Ga.s.s was there, and Coover and Hawkes, Vonnegut and his wife, Jill Krementz, who took photographs, I think. Don's agent, Lynn Nesbit, was there. She was always very friendly. Susan Sontag, the only woman writer invited."

Pynchon couldn't make it. He wrote Don to apologize. He said he was "between coasts, Arkansas or Lubbock or someplace like 'at."

"Donald had picked the restaurant," Abish says: It was very pricey, and we all had to pay our own way. About seventy-five dollars apiece, very steep back then. There was a fixed menu. It was in a loft somewhere. Very strange. Sort of monumental. The occasion made me think of Paris, you know, this group of artists. Donald was absolutely in charge of the seating. To my surprise, he seated me across from him. He was sitting with his back to the window. On his right, Coover...well, Coover selects his own place; you don't tell Coover where to sit. But he was on Don's right. Gaddis was on the other side, with Muriel Murphy nearby. And Donald barely said anything the entire meal. He did not look happy. Very, very dour. Vonnegut was to my left. To my right, Hawkes and Barth, and they were pretty jovial. In all, about twenty-one people. It seemed...since Donald had put it together, planned it for three or four weeks...it invited interpretation, and I couldn't figure it out. You couldn't take it at face value. Everyone gave a short little speech about their work and their friendship with the other people there. Hawkes was very eloquent, warm and nice. Gaddis was, as always, very quiet. Donald was both withdrawn and a dynamo. He was the center though he didn't dominate in any way. It was puzzling. I left with questions....

"Donald didn't socialize the way others do-he didn't like small talk," Ed Hirsch explains. In part, the "Postmodern Dinner" may have been Don's way of signaling to friends that his return to Houston didn't imply exile from New York or the literary world. "The thing is, Donald's New Yorkcentric friends felt he was too big a talent to go back to Texas, back to teaching," says Hirsch. "But in Houston he wrote very early in the morning. He got several hours of writing done before he talked to anyone. The place was good for him."

Naturally, his New York friends missed him terribly. "I was afraid he'd get stuck [in Texas], what with the working presence of so much family and his responsibilities at the University of Houston," Grace Paley recalled.

"We were family," says Roger Angell. He missed seeing Don "sitting and smoking in my regular armchair at my place...[trying to] keep the evening's sadness at bay. We counted on each other-a great many people felt this way about him...."

When in New York, Don proved to be a "true good neighbor" to Phillip Lopate, helping him move furniture, offering to help him paint his apartment, giving him tips on interior design. One hot summer day, Don helped Lopate carry books and chairs up a flight of stairs into Lopate's new place on Bank Street. "[I]t was ninety-four degrees...and several trips were required, and we must have looked a sight, Sancho Panza and the Don with his scraggly beard, pulling boxes roped together on a small dolly," Lopate recalls. "At one point the cart tipped over and spilled half my papers onto the sidewalk. After that, I let Donald carry the lion's share of the weight, he having a broader back and a greater liking (I told myself) for manual labor than I, as well as more steering ability. He was hilarious...joking about the indignity of being a beast of burden, and I must admit it tickled me to think of using one of America's major contemporary writers as a drayhorse. But why not take advantage when he seemed so proud of his strength, so indestructible, even in his mid-fifties?"

54.

ANNE.

Anne's mother jumped out of a window when Anne was eighteen. "In a way, her death was not a surprise, and it was kind of a relief," Anne says. "It freed me."

Don brought her to Houston. The move-in 1984-is still "kind of hazy," Anne admits. She'd known New York and Copenhagen; Houston was, she says, the "armpit of the nation. It was a serious culture shock. And the weather! I felt I'd crashed these people's lives, Marion's and my father's. I wasn't made to feel unwelcome, but I think Dad and Marion were going through a difficult time.

"Dad gave me a curfew. At eighteen! I said, 'You're joking.' I'd been my own keeper since the age of seven. But he was very protective. It was sweet, really. We all had to adjust to each other. I wanted to go out into the world. I was eighteen. I smoked. I drank. I think I just wanted to live and feel it. I saw how wonderful Dad was with Kate. He had really learned to be more demonstrative and loving. It was the stable home life I had never known."

School was a problem. "I'd been in the gymnasium in Copenhagen, so in the States I had to take the GED, the high school equivalency test. The test was very important to Dad and Marion. I barely got into the University of Houston. I was essentially a foreigner. I had no relationship to sentence composition. I was a voracious reader in English, but I hadn't learned the grammar."

While she studied at home, Don hoisted Katharine onto his shoulders and played "horsie" with her, or took her down the street for an ice-cream cone. Later, he'd try to help Anne study, but she resented the restrictions he'd forced on her. She resisted him.

Yet fairly quickly her steady schedule and the family atmosphere began to appeal to her. "There was a lot of cooking and dinner-table talk. It was exquisite," she says. "Dad and I loved to watch movies together. It was one of our favorite things to do. Especially John Wayne movies. He loved the character of John Wayne. He'd say, 'There's a Duke movie on tonight.' And Hill Street Blues. Hill Street Blues. ' 'Hill Street's on tonight,' he'd say. He thought the show was well written and the characters were well-rounded." In these moments with him, she was "made to feel I was his number-one daughter." They didn't talk about Birgit.

Eventually, Anne became comfortable enough to kid her dad. "He'd look out the window and see a woman jogging on the street in a T-shirt and shorts, and he'd say, 'That's a cute girl.' I'd go, 'Dad! You're a dirty old man.' "

On many occasions students sat with Don in his living room while he read their story ma.n.u.scripts. Anne would bounce through the house, a brunette blur, all motion and smiles. Though she was younger than her father's charges, she gazed at them wryly, as if to say, Trust me, I know. know. He'll give you what he He'll give you what he wants wants to give you, and no more. You don't have anything to do with it. "He was inspired by his students," she says now. "They kept his juices flowing. He really wanted to make everything work." to give you, and no more. You don't have anything to do with it. "He was inspired by his students," she says now. "They kept his juices flowing. He really wanted to make everything work."

At the university, Anne's composition teachers were often her father's pupils. "I remember, at one point I was flunking English," she says. "Dad tried to help me. There was a rubella outbreak on campus, and we wrote this story together about a character named Rubella (she had red hair). He He wrote most of it, and it got a wrote most of it, and it got a D. D. We really got a kick out of that. I wanted to tell this woman, the teaching a.s.sistant, that she'd flunked my dad." We really got a kick out of that. I wanted to tell this woman, the teaching a.s.sistant, that she'd flunked my dad."

Don's new family now expanded to include his daughter from a previous marriage. Occasionally, he ate lunch with his ex-wife Helen. He was building a fresh academic program, but at his old inst.i.tution. Every morning, in the hallways of the English Department, he ran into another figure from the by-gone days, Sam Southwell, his second ex-wife's former lover, who muttered under his breath about "presence" and "absence" in the literary theories of Jacques Derrida.

Presence/Absence was not just a theoretical binary for Don but also his daily paradox. Whenever he went to supper in a filthy student apartment, his students thought he was slumming, but theirs were the neighborhoods, and the types of rooms, he'd lived in when he was first on his own, playing music, writing stories. In dropping in on their lives, he revisited his early self. A myth-minded man, he appreciated the poignancies and ironies of all this: a search for lost youth, potency, reinvigoration; mirroring, doubling, symmetry. Here he witnessed a Kierkegaardian repet.i.tion, bound to fail.

So it was that Don invited the art critic Arthur Danto to campus to speak on the end of historical necessity and the new age of pluralism in the arts (a view completely adverse to Don's).

So it was that he invited Hans Magnus Enzensberger to campus to p.r.o.nounce the death of postmodernism. Don listened ruefully in the back of the auditorium.

So it was that he invited Susan Sontag to campus to defend narrative fiction, a forecast of the traditional turn her novels would take: an unspoken repudiation of the works, including Don's, which she had championed at the start of her career. She bristled when a student suggested that her stories were more cerebral than emotional. Don grinned, enjoying her discomfort and the student's.

He lived a pastiche of old and new lives, birthing the future while often feeling his own moment was over.

Though he tried to shield Anne, she sensed his melancholy: "Once, when I asked him if he was happy, he said, 'n.o.body's happy. I just want to go to sleep.' His mind took in so much stuff...politically...in every every way...it had to be tiring for him. And of course he found relationships very difficult." way...it had to be tiring for him. And of course he found relationships very difficult."

Karen Kennerly remembers calling from New York one night to discuss PEN business. "I said, 'Hi. How are you?' He gave out that Barthelme sigh, the sigh of sighs. He said, 'My wife doesn't love me anymore.' He wasn't joking, but I'm sure it wasn't true, either. I said, 'You must have done something to make her stop loving you.' He didn't deny it. He went on about the sorrows of marriage."

Yet his sadness never paralyzed him. Every few weeks, The New Yorker The New Yorker carried a new Donald Barthelme story: "Construction," in which the narrator vows to "explore the mystery" of a woman named Helen (Don's ex-wife read this as a nod to their renewed friendship); "Basil from Her Garden," in which a husband admits to adultery; and "Bluebeard," a retelling of the fairy tale. carried a new Donald Barthelme story: "Construction," in which the narrator vows to "explore the mystery" of a woman named Helen (Don's ex-wife read this as a nod to their renewed friendship); "Basil from Her Garden," in which a husband admits to adultery; and "Bluebeard," a retelling of the fairy tale.

In the cla.s.sroom, he was often bemused, especially when a student tried something unusual. One day, the patrician Southern writer Peter Taylor, visiting campus, sat in on a workshop. One of the students read an abstract piece. It involved the ringing of bells. Taylor was startled. "Care to comment?" Don asked him, smiling. Decorously, Taylor declined.

In large public gatherings, Don continued to promote the writing program with astonishing enthusiasm. Phillip Lopate recalled a difficult "let-down" after a fund-raising ball one night. "Donald and Marion, Cynthia [Macdonald] and I drove...to [Donald's] house for a nightcap," he said, recounting the evening: The event had been pretty successful, but not as large a windfall financially as we had fantasized....Instead of sitting around having a postmortem, we-began singing songs....Donald had a lovely baritone and a great memory for lyrics: Cole Porter, musical comedy, jazz ballads. Each of us alternated proposing songs, and the others joined in...Donald seemed particularly at ease. There was no need to articulate his thoughts, except in this indirect, song-choosing fashion.

This was the funny/sad atmosphere Anne encountered after nearly two decades of a long-distance courtship with her father, and after the trauma of finding her mother dead. "I was messed up, but it was was good for me in Houston," she says. "I came to see it was amazing, who my mother was, who my father was. They were extraordinary people, even if they were kind of unusual. And they're the fabric of what I am." good for me in Houston," she says. "I came to see it was amazing, who my mother was, who my father was. They were extraordinary people, even if they were kind of unusual. And they're the fabric of what I am."

In Houston, her relationship with Don "got better and better," Anne says. And he "really did did love the place, despite the ups and downs. He was a total rock star there." love the place, despite the ups and downs. He was a total rock star there."

55.

THE STATE OF THE IMAGINATION.

In 1986, Anne left for California. Life in Houston had been good for her, but she craved independence. "Dad would say, 'I'll get you your own apartment nearby.' But I wanted to be away," she says. "I had a friend attending SDSU in California, and I said, 'That's it! I'm going, too!' "

She enrolled in San Diego State and tried her hand at acting. "My father wasn't great at communicating after I left," she recalls. "I wasn't that connected to home. It was sad, because he was getting better with age, or maybe I was just becoming an adult and could understand him more. So much more could have happened with our relationship if he had lived."

Day by day, Don was enmeshed in administrative tasks at the university, while trying to stay active in the larger literary community. The year had begun with the 48th International P.E.N. Congress in Manhattan. Because of fallout from the conference, the year would end with a sad break with his old pal Grace Paley.

"Basically, Don and I put the PEN conference together," Karen Kennerly says. "Norman Mailer raised the money, and he was the most generous man in the world. Don and Richard Howard came up with the conference theme: 'The Imagination of the Writer and the Imagination of the State.' 'The Imagination of the State' is pure Don."

At fund-raising dinners, gala events, and readings (tickets cost one thousand dollars apiece for a series that featured Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Arthur Miller, William Styron, Woody Allen, and others), Mailer attracted huge amounts of cash. At one point, he persuaded Saul Steinberg and his wife, Gayfryd, to join the fund-raising efforts. In business circles, Steinberg was known as a "takeover baron"; on behalf of PEN, he opened the wallets of fellow entrepreneurs such as Ivan Boesky, Brooke Astor, Lily Auchincloss, and Leonard Stern. One night, Gayfryd hosted a reception in her thirty-four-room Park Avenue apartment. After a lavish dinner, Saul Steinberg asked Mailer to say a few words about PEN. Then Steinberg plied the guests for money. Some of them contributed up to ten thousand dollars that night. One wealthy old gentleman, an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, thought he was donating to Penn. "He probably wondered what part of the campus he'd helped improve," Kennerly says.

Some PEN members, distrustful of big business, grumbled about consorting with "richies" and their "bad money," but Mailer's joviality and ambitions for the International Congress sparked the most successful fund-raising campaign PEN had ever enjoyed.

One day, shortly before the conference began, Kennerly walked to the loft where PEN was headquartered, a spare fourth-floor s.p.a.ce on lower Broadway. "So I'm at one end of the loft," Kennerly says, "and I hear that Norman has invited George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, to address the conference. I thought, Oh no. You can't just do that without asking people if it's all right." Mailer admitted he had not consulted the PEN board before issuing the invitation.

Later, Calvin Trillin told Kennerly, "Don't worry. Shultz will be too busy invading some small country to come to our little conference."

"But one day I get a call from Shultz's secretary, saying, 'I've got good news for you,' " Kennerly says. "I thought, Oh s.h.i.t."

In an op-ed piece published in The Nation The Nation and and The New York Times, The New York Times, E. L. Doctorow spoke for many board members when he said, "America is one of the few nations in the world in which writers don't have to ask for the endors.e.m.e.nt of the government" but that now "American PEN has put itself in the position of a bunch of obedient hacks...gathering to be patted on the head by the Minister of Culture. It is astonishing to me that [PEN would] set up...fellow writers as a forum for the Reagan Administration," which, he claimed, was responsible for "killing men and women and children and mutilating their bodies" in Nicaragua, torturing black and white writers in South African prisons, and practicing "ideological exclusion" by refusing to issue an entry visa to n.o.bel Prizewinning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez-among others-because he was friendly with Castro. E. L. Doctorow spoke for many board members when he said, "America is one of the few nations in the world in which writers don't have to ask for the endors.e.m.e.nt of the government" but that now "American PEN has put itself in the position of a bunch of obedient hacks...gathering to be patted on the head by the Minister of Culture. It is astonishing to me that [PEN would] set up...fellow writers as a forum for the Reagan Administration," which, he claimed, was responsible for "killing men and women and children and mutilating their bodies" in Nicaragua, torturing black and white writers in South African prisons, and practicing "ideological exclusion" by refusing to issue an entry visa to n.o.bel Prizewinning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez-among others-because he was friendly with Castro.

Generally, Kennerly agreed with Doctorow's politics and she was miffed at Mailer for bypa.s.sing the board. Still, it rankled her that Doctorow and other PEN critics had not lifted a hand to help plan this enormous and complex conference. It was easy to do nothing and grouse from the wings.

As usual, Don stayed behind the scenes, organizing, orchestrating, setting the tone where he could. Though he felt as Kennerly did about the sniping at Shultz, he kept silent about the controversy, hoping for openings to patch things up quietly.

January 12, the night of Shultz's keynote address in the South Reading Room of the New York Public Library, was bitterly cold. Security was tight; guards at the library's Forty-second Street entrance bullied invited guests. Saul Bellow barely managed to squeeze inside. Mario Vargas Llosa was left standing in the chill wind, as was the 1985 n.o.bel Prize winner in literature, Claude Simon. One writer quipped, "This is what happens when you invite the state."

"The room was packed and there was an overflow crowd in the next room with a mike feed," Kennerly says. "I was in the overflow room. When Shultz started talking, a big group led by Grace Paley started booing him."

Paley and others had drafted a letter, signed by Susan Sontag, Nadine Gordimer, Richard Howard, Richard Gilman, Russell Banks, Ted Solotaroff, John Irving, Kenneth Koch, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and over fifty others, declaring it "inappropriate" for a man who had harmed freedom of expression and who supported governments that tortured and imprisoned writers to address PEN. During Mailer's introduction before the keynote address, Paley stood and shouted, "Norman, we would like to have our letter read. Norman, please read the letter."

Mailer refused, then apologized to Shultz for the "silly bad manners" of the "puritanical leftists" in the audience.

Shultz's speech was innocuous and vague. He told the a.s.sembled writers, "President Reagan and I are on your side." Kennerly says, "Shultz let people boo. Then he just picked up and went on." A few people walked out on the speech, but that was all. "I was standing in the overflow room with delegates from the GDR, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and they felt as if they'd died and gone to heaven. It was like angels had flown down, that this protest could happen and n.o.body got too upset about it," she recalls.

The ironies were rich: Mailer, long regarded by the press as a radical "bad boy" was suddenly an apologist for the "establishment." And even as Shultz hailed a "liberality of views," his a.s.sistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Elliot Abrams, was calling for American intervention in Nicaragua.

After Shultz's speech, Mailer defended his decision not to read the protest letter. "I didn't invite Secretary Shultz here in order to be insulted, to be, uh, p.u.s.s.ywhipped," he said. Asked by a reporter if public dissent was secondhand to her by now, Paley said no. It felt awful every time, but it had to be done, she explained.

Shultz's appearance was only the beginning of tensions at the International Congress. The conference theme guaranteed debate, as Don surely knew. In a panel discussion, Claude Simon insisted that states lacked imagination and showed a "constant preoccupation for staying the same." For the public at large, he said, "pleasure is only elicited, as with children, by the endless repet.i.tion of the same forms, so that the ma.s.ses and the states which spring from them find they are in spontaneous agreement about condemning and rejecting whatever might disturb the established order."

William Gaddis countered, dryly, that the state is the "grandest fiction to be conceived by man."

On another occasion, Susan Sontag argued that it was the writer's duty to oppose the state, while Mario Vargas Llosa insisted that writers must co-operate with official inst.i.tutions. "For communal life to exist, given the nature of man, certain rules are required," he said.

One day, Toni Morrison shocked an audience by declaring, "At no moment in my life have I ever felt as though I were an American. At no moment. The whole reason that I am invited here, and the whole reason that I am sitting here, is because some black children got their brains shot out in the streets all over this country. And had the good fortune to be televised....I am a read, as opposed to unread, writer because of those children...had I lived the life that the state planned for me from the beginning, I know that if I had the gifts of Homer I would have lived and died in someone else's kitchen on somebody else's land and never written a word. That is what the state always planned for me as a black person and as a female person."

Taking his turn on a panel, Saul Bellow tried to shift the week's focus away from politics. "Language is a spiritual house in which you live, and no one has the right to evict you," he told his fellow writers. "We should get rid of pretentious words like alienation." Americans weren't alienated, he said; they were interested in "common sense desires" like clothing, shelter, and health care. Gunter Gra.s.s accused Bellow of ignoring realities in his own country: "I would like to hear the echo of your words in the South Bronx, where people don't have shelter, don't have food, and no possibility to live the freedom you have."

Salman Rushdie asked Bellow why so many American writers abdicated the task of examining America's power in the world. "We don't have tasks," Bellow replied. "We have inspirations."

Later in the week, Gra.s.s said to a New York Times New York Times reporter, "Is capitalism better than Gulag communism? I don't think so." reporter, "Is capitalism better than Gulag communism? I don't think so."

By midweek, newspaper and magazine reporters were denouncing the conference's strident tone. They mocked well-dressed writers eating lavish meals and soaking up booze at the Metropolitan Museum, the National Arts Club, and the Cat Club in Greenwich Village while decrying poverty. A pet.i.tion condemning U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Nicaragua, made the rounds of the St. Moritz and the Ess.e.x House hotels, where most of the events had been scheduled. The Cuban writer Heberto Padilla skimmed the pet.i.tion and shook his head. "I only sign what I write," he said.

Everywhere she went, Rosario Murillo, a poet and the wife of Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega, was treated like royalty.

Cynthia Ozick tried, with little success, to stir interest in a pet.i.tion critical of the Jewish ex-chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky, for meeting with members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Pet.i.tions circulated that chastised the government of Iran for "condemning...creative intelligence to death," that of Romania for its "perpetual hara.s.sment" of "Hungarian cultures," and those of Turkey, Vietnam, and South Africa for imprisoning writers.

Exhausted, Don and his fellow organizers were near collapse. He was saddened that the conference had not transcended weary Left-Right squabbles. A panel had been a.s.sembled to discuss Utopia, but no one rose to the challenge of actually imagining such a place. Famously, Plato had pitted the Republic against poets, but no one mentioned the Greeks or other philosophers. Tired, tense, disappointed, Don drank too much. "I remember meeting Donald Barthelme, whose work I loved, but who was so drunk that I had the feeling of not really having met him," Salman Rushdie says.

Events concluded with yet another major protest, one that seriously wounded Don's friendship with Grace Paley. She and others noted that only seventeen women had been chosen to moderate panels (over ninety panels were scheduled). In response, several female PEN members called a caucus meeting, from which men were excluded. Someone invited Betty Friedan, not at that time a PEN member, to address the caucus. She told the group they should force the conference organizers to apologize "to the women writers of the world." Paley urged caution. It wouldn't help to "point fingers," she said. Cynthia Macdonald agreed. It was best, she said, to forget punishment and focus on redress.

At the final session that week, Macdonald thanked Mailer for the work he had done on behalf of the event, but she pleaded with PEN to take note of its failure to represent women adequately. "Won't we ever do enough to make this boring subject obsolete?" she asked.