Hiding man : a biography of Donald Barthelme.
by Tracy Daugherty.
INTRODUCTION.
THE LOST TEACHER.
The a.s.signment was simple: Find a copy of John Ashbery"s Three Poems Three Poems, read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, don"t sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.
A dutiful student, I walked to the Brazos Bookstore, a few blocks from my apartment, and purchased a paperback edition of the book (n.o.body walks in Houston, so this was more dutiful than it sounds). Next I made my way to Weingarten"s to pick up a bottle of red. I didn"t drink much, and didn"t know one wine from another. Then I went home.
I lived in an efficiency apartment in a slightly fixed-up, but not fixed up enough, old building near a freeway underpa.s.s southwest of downtown. Always, when I unlocked my door, I was greeted by loud scurrying. The bugs were so big, I felt sure I"d return someday to find them pulling books from my shelves, rearranging the s.p.a.ce more to their liking. The apartment was close to where my teacher lived when he was a young man, writing and publishing his first short stories. I didn"t know this then, and if I had, it would have made me more self-conscious than I already was about my work.
Thus the a.s.signment. I was in my first year of a Ph.D. program, but really I was just stalling for time while trying to write a novel. My fellow students, talented and confident, intimidated me. Determined to meet their standards and to perform perfectly, I wasn"t performing at all. I edited in my head long before my hands scooched near a keyboard. My pages remained pristinely, sadly blank.
My teacher"s solution: Ashbery, sleeplessness, and alcohol. He didn"t tell me I needed to loosen up, but we both knew that this was the case. I fed the stray cats in the weeds behind my building so they wouldn"t mew all night, then settled at the card table where I ate and tried to write each evening. I switched on my Smith Corona electric typewriter. This was in the days before Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. The only mouse in my place had four legs and a tail. I opened the book: At this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of listening, as though to the feeling of the wind before it starts....
What the h.e.l.l was this? I rubbed my neck and tried again: From the outset it was apparent that someone had played a colossal trick on something.
A colossal trick. Right. Well, my task was not to a.n.a.lyze or understand Three Poems Three Poems, but to respond to its rhythms, take its music into my body, and come up with a similar score. I finished reading, only half-concentrating. My front window was busted, and mosquitoes invited themselves in and out of the room. I had tried covering the window with a sheet, but the sheet flapped raggedly in a breeze. The night before, my upstairs neighbor, another student, had shattered the pane by trying to climb the wall. He had come home drunk around midnight and discovered that he"d lost his key, so he shimmied up the rainspout to reach his window. He slipped. His foot crashed through my gla.s.s, startling me awake.
I fiddled with the sheet. Through the window I glimpsed a streetwalker standing beside a light pole on the corner. She wore a long blue dress and flicked a Bic lighter off and on. The vice squad had chased hookers from one end of my neighborhood to another. Soon, the women would be driven from my street, too, but for now their presence charged the block with an undercurrent of danger and morbid t.i.tillation.
This was my life in Houston, in the grad-student boondocks of the area known as Montrose. I had come here because I wanted to be a writer.
And now, because I wanted to be a writer, I was stuck with Ashbery. I started to open the wine and realized I didn"t own a corkscrew. Another walk to the store, keeping my head down as I pa.s.sed the hooker. "Evening, sugar," she said. I nodded and sped up. Back in my apartment, I poured a little wine into a Dixie cup. I sat down and started to type.
By one o"clock, my flesh had served as an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord for the mosquitoes. I was bleary, yawning, and tipsy. A third of the bottle remained. My shirtsleeves sagged with sweat. I had filled four pages with abstract nonsense. I poured more wine and hit the keyboard again. "All fall, my father held a trouble light beneath the car," I wrote. "My family was not on the move."
Two more hours pa.s.sed. Just after 3:00 A.M. A.M., the phone rang. I jumped, tipping the cup. Someone"s dead, I thought. A car crash, a stroke. I picked up.
"How"s it coming?" said Donald Barthelme.
"Fine," I croaked. "I think."
"Good. Twelve pages, on my desk. In five hours." He clicked off.
Fast-forward twenty years, to the early winter of 2001. I"m attending the "Andy Warhol: Photography" exhibit at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. The show displays many of Warhol"s photo-booth portraits of writers, artists, and celebrities from the 1960s, including a picture ent.i.tled Man with Newspaper: He Is a She, ca. 1963 Man with Newspaper: He Is a She, ca. 1963, featuring a shorthaired man in black gla.s.ses reading a tabloid. The tabloid"s front-page headline, all about a s.e.x-change operation, says HE IS A SHE HE IS A SHE! The photograph"s interest lies in the contrast between the cheesy newspaper and the man"s impeccable appearance. He"s well groomed and cleanly shaved, in a dark suit and fashionably thin tie. He peruses the paper with raised eyebrows and a tight mouth, just this side of shocked, just this close to lasciviousness-campy, funny, an a.s.sured performance. The picture is rare in the Warhol collection in that its subject is not identified by name.
I recognize the man as the late Donald Barthelme, whose short stories, appearing regularly in The New Yorker The New Yorker and in ten books between 1964 and 1987, along with his four novels, substantially expanded the range of American fiction for those who were paying attention. In the 1960s, the whole culture, it seemed, paid heed-absurdities and social disruptions appeared to leap off his pages, weekly, and into the streets of our cities. His and in ten books between 1964 and 1987, along with his four novels, substantially expanded the range of American fiction for those who were paying attention. In the 1960s, the whole culture, it seemed, paid heed-absurdities and social disruptions appeared to leap off his pages, weekly, and into the streets of our cities. His New Yorker New Yorker pieces read like dispatches from the front lines. He had "managed to place himself in the center of modern consciousness," William Ga.s.s wrote. Barthelme knockoffs glutted the lit mags, and he even had to disown a few stories, penned by a canny imposter, that popped up in various publications. He wasn"t just influencing other writers; apparently, his mischievous spirit inhabited some of them. pieces read like dispatches from the front lines. He had "managed to place himself in the center of modern consciousness," William Ga.s.s wrote. Barthelme knockoffs glutted the lit mags, and he even had to disown a few stories, penned by a canny imposter, that popped up in various publications. He wasn"t just influencing other writers; apparently, his mischievous spirit inhabited some of them.
In the late 1970s, his influence waned. The nation"s psychedelic fiesta wound down and the culture sobered up (or so goes the official line). Straightforward narrative storytelling rea.s.serted its grip on American literature, b.u.t.tressed by the reverence surrounding Raymond Carver and other new "realists." Following Don"s death from throat cancer in 1989, his books, with few exceptions, drifted out of print and out of reach-a situation that has only recently begun to change as Dave Eggers, Donald Antrim, George Saunders, and other prominent young writers now claim Don as an influence on their work. For a while, Amazon"s Web site noted the "unfortunate discontinuance" of many of Don"s t.i.tles.
Asked, once, about critics" responses to his work, he replied, "Oh, I think they want me to go away and stop doing what I"m doing."
"Neglect is useful," he mused in 1960, before fully launching his literary career. One of our "traditional obligations in our role as the public [is] the obligation to neglect artists, writers, creators of every kind." In this way, he said, a "Starving Opposition is created, and the possibility of criticism of our culture is provided for." As far as he could see, at that time, neglect was "proceeding at appropriate levels."
Since the 1960s, neglect has become a growth industry, merging with historical revisionism to wipe out the compet.i.tion-that is, anything that doesn"t hew to the official line. For the past three decades, most of the quality fiction published in the United States has been doggedly representational, respectful of a narrow literary and cultural tradition, as though all Americans agree on what"s valuable, what"s true; as though the social upheavals of the fifties, sixties, and seventies-Vietnam, the s.e.xual revolution, the civil rights and women"s movements, the proliferation of nuclear arms-never happened; as though certain imaginative responses to these events-in abstract art and Pop Art, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the 1967 attempt to "exorcise" the Pentagon, the protests of May 1968 in Paris, and fiction that questioned all authority, including that of language-never happened.
They happened. Straightforward narrative storytelling is only one way to measure the results of these seismic shifts, but you wouldn"t know that, poking through most bookstores.
Neglect is useful if we are mindful of why and how it occurs-thus the possibility for a cultural critique. In part, Don"s "unfortunate discontinuance" was a result of officialdom"s widespread desire to bury the troubled 1960s. Also, with the exception of a few, he has suffered at the hands of younger writers, many of whom see him as dated as "groovy," "make love not war," and the rest of hippie lingo. Others dismiss him as a writer who wrote only about writing, a troublemaker like Marcel Duchamp scribbling a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa Mona Lisa-a perpetual adolescent gleefully trashing cla.s.sical art.
In fact, Don stressed that he didn"t like fiction about fiction. And though the specific events that chiseled his sensibility have pa.s.sed, he was right, I think, to insist that the "problems" they pointed to-among them, the need to refresh language continually, to keep it free of "political and social contamination," safe from co-optation by commercial interests-are "durable ones."
One of authority"s tools in creating a Book of Neglect is to suggest that opposition to dominant cultural currents occurs only in moments of extreme crisis, when society is strained-world wars, the Great Depression, the 1960s. A signal value in reconsidering the life and work of Donald Barthelme now is seeing that opposition is built into built into the dominant culture: It has always carried the seeds of its own unraveling. Like a plant that blooms only every few decades, oppositional art erupts into the open now and then, as it did in the 1960s; while its flowering may seem an isolated event, if we trace its roots, we realize its perennial nature. the dominant culture: It has always carried the seeds of its own unraveling. Like a plant that blooms only every few decades, oppositional art erupts into the open now and then, as it did in the 1960s; while its flowering may seem an isolated event, if we trace its roots, we realize its perennial nature.
In 1990, Lois Zamora, one of Don"s Houston colleagues, wrote that the relationship of his fiction "to political writing needs critical repositioning. As time pa.s.ses, and "postmodernism" and other current ideologies come increasingly into focus, we will identify and appreciate ambiguities in his work that have as yet been barely noticed or discussed by the critics." The time has come for this "critical repositioning."
Just before his fatal illness, Don said he believed that the latest generation of American writers held "lowered expectations in terms of life. My generation, perhaps foolishly, expected, even demanded, that life be wonderful and magical and then tried to make it so by writing in a rather complex way. It seems now quite an eccentric demand."
In the mid-1980s, he would sit in his Houston duplex, across the street from the Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School, and tell me he had "done his little thing" in fiction. His moment had pa.s.sed. The "postmodern" writing with which he"d been linked had been forced to retreat into a small arrondiss.e.m.e.nt in the American literary landscape, surrounded by General Carver and his troops. In writing cla.s.ses, Don quoted his old philosophy teacher, Maurice Natanson: "It is a mistake to regard literature as a graveyard of dead systems." Privately, he didn"t sound so sure.
Years have pa.s.sed, now, since I listened to his rueful talk, and gradually I"ve come to see it"s wrong to think of Don as a victim victim of neglect. He was, rather, a of neglect. He was, rather, a connoisseur connoisseur of it. Often, his stories are built on obscure foundations. Just as often, they celebrate the long lost, the hopeless, the never was. Like the lonely clowns beating their drums on empty streets in the late lithographs of Daumier (one of Don"s heroes) or Baudelaire"s "pitiful" acrobats "illumined" in the shadows of alleys "by burned-down candles, dripping and smoking," Don"s characters proceed by marginal means. of it. Often, his stories are built on obscure foundations. Just as often, they celebrate the long lost, the hopeless, the never was. Like the lonely clowns beating their drums on empty streets in the late lithographs of Daumier (one of Don"s heroes) or Baudelaire"s "pitiful" acrobats "illumined" in the shadows of alleys "by burned-down candles, dripping and smoking," Don"s characters proceed by marginal means.
In other words, I believe he designed designed his stories-and his teaching-to fall into dormancy, only to bloom again unexpectedly. His personal anguish b.u.mped up against his awareness that he was chasing the impossible, and his choice to pursue an aesthetics of uncertainty-what he called "needful obscurity." "Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult," he said, "but because it wishes to be art." his stories-and his teaching-to fall into dormancy, only to bloom again unexpectedly. His personal anguish b.u.mped up against his awareness that he was chasing the impossible, and his choice to pursue an aesthetics of uncertainty-what he called "needful obscurity." "Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult," he said, "but because it wishes to be art."
One of Don"s men in the shadows laments, "The point of my career is perhaps how little I achieved. We speak of someone as having had a "long career" and that"s usually taken to be admiring, but what if it"s thirty-five years of persistence in error? I don"t know what value to place on what I"ve done, perhaps none at all is right." This melancholy was not new in Don"s work. From the beginning, failure failure is a primary theme of his fiction. "[W]hat an artist does is fail," he writes. "The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition...there is no such thing as a "successful artist." " is a primary theme of his fiction. "[W]hat an artist does is fail," he writes. "The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition...there is no such thing as a "successful artist." "
By the late eighties, this concern seemed intensely personal in Don"s writing-as it did in Daumier"s last efforts-and burdened even his lightest sentences. His gestures carried the weight of all this, too. His walk was a shamble. His shoulders drooped. Frequently, he blotted sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve.
One afternoon, I arrived at his university office for an appointment. He sat at his desk with a copy of his latest collection, Overnight to Many Distant Cities Overnight to Many Distant Cities, which had just been published. He picked up the book and balanced it on the tips of his fingers. "Looks a little slender, don"t you think?" he asked me. Then he shrugged, the profoundest, weariest shrug I had ever seen. It seemed to take about a minute.
On the morning I was to turn in my Ashbery a.s.signment, I was dragging from exhaustion and a hangover. He looked as bad as I felt. I decided to drop the a.s.signment on his desk and leave him alone, but he told me to sit down. He skimmed my first few pages, chuckled the way I"d heard him laugh over a jazz riff whenever he"d put on a record in his home. He grinned at me. "Congratulations," he said. "Now you can get some rest."
"It"s junk," I said.
"It"s an imitation. It"s supposed supposed to be junk." to be junk."
"But what"s the point? I can"t do anything with it."
"What do you think you"ve achieved?"
"I don"t know. That"s what I mean," I said. "I didn"t understand a word of the Ashbery. I don"t understand a word of what I"ve I"ve written." written."
"In that case," he said, "you"ve just composed your first important draft."
It took me weeks, months to understand that Don didn"t mean writing should make no sense. He meant it shouldn"t be so overdetermined, it falls dead on the page. The process requires a pinch of uncertainty so the energy of discovery can be built into the work.
The "irruption of accident" can produce "estimable results," Don wrote. And: "What is magical [about art] is that it at once invites and resists interpretation...it remains, after interpretation, vital-no interpretation or cardiopulmonary push-pull can exhaust or empty it."
Don"s teaching had this quality. At the university, grad students used to fret about their futures, between cla.s.ses, in a musty lounge on the second floor of the English Department building. Here, Don dropped a few of his pedagogical hints, like scattering bread among the hungry and lost. The school gave him a discretionary fund to spend on the creative writing program. Often, he aided struggling students with their personal expenses. And he furnished the lounge with texts. I had the impression that, given more money, he would have hung a sign above the door-CABARET VOLTAIRE-decked the place out with French paintings, and hired starving poets to crawl around the lounge shouting "Umbah-umbah!" in healthy Dadaist fashion for our entertainment and edification.
A tossed-off remark, a question in pa.s.sing, a note in the margins of a story, a book he"d offer...we"d feel his little prods now and then, the merest touch, with no context or follow-up. But later-who knows why-they"d suddenly make enormous sense. He was planting seeds in his students that might not grow for years. In the two decades since the night I cribbed Three Poems Three Poems and the day I discovered Don in the Warhol exhibit, I"d startled dozens of times at the unexpected movement of these new/old kernels in my mind. and the day I discovered Don in the Warhol exhibit, I"d startled dozens of times at the unexpected movement of these new/old kernels in my mind.
And his stories: Silently now, as t.i.tle after t.i.tle is suspended, rescued, suspended again, they wait to be rediscovered. That they wait without much expectation is one of the most beautiful and melancholy aspects of his art.
After Don died, his colleague Phillip Lopate wrote of him, "It [is not] easy to conjure up a man who, for all his commanding presence, had something of the ghost about him even in his lifetime."
Don once dismissed the possibility that his biography would clarify his stories and novels. In a 1981 Paris Review Paris Review interview with J. D. O"Hara, he said, "There"s not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there...which illuminate...not very much." As with his stories, he rigorously edited the interview, cutting much of the biographical content so only a smidgen remains on the page. In the raw transcript of his conversations with O" Hara, he said, "I will never write an autobiography, or possibly I"ve already done so, in the stories," thereby suggesting a stronger personal strain in the fiction than he was willing to admit publicly. And though he insisted that his life story would not "sustain a person"s attention for a moment," his main objection to a literary biography was this: It would indicate "your life is over, a thing that might make a boy a shade selfconscious." I like to think he wouldn"t mind, so much, this book"s appearance now. He admitted to O"Hara that "biography is always interesting. Even the Beckett biography [by Deidre Bair], which is not very good, is fascinating." He also said that his work had "not perhaps [been] adequately" commented upon; this is the "kind of thing that comes with time." interview with J. D. O"Hara, he said, "There"s not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there...which illuminate...not very much." As with his stories, he rigorously edited the interview, cutting much of the biographical content so only a smidgen remains on the page. In the raw transcript of his conversations with O" Hara, he said, "I will never write an autobiography, or possibly I"ve already done so, in the stories," thereby suggesting a stronger personal strain in the fiction than he was willing to admit publicly. And though he insisted that his life story would not "sustain a person"s attention for a moment," his main objection to a literary biography was this: It would indicate "your life is over, a thing that might make a boy a shade selfconscious." I like to think he wouldn"t mind, so much, this book"s appearance now. He admitted to O"Hara that "biography is always interesting. Even the Beckett biography [by Deidre Bair], which is not very good, is fascinating." He also said that his work had "not perhaps [been] adequately" commented upon; this is the "kind of thing that comes with time."
On another occasion, he said, "Time works on fiction as it does on us." And time is pitiless-another reason for telling this story now. "I remember Donald well...or as well as I remember anything these days," said Roger Angell, the venerable New Yorker New Yorker editor, when he and I chatted about Don. "I"m patchy, I mean." Kirk Sale, Don"s downstairs neighbor for nearly twenty years, kept telling me his memory was lousy, but he urged me to prod him, because, he said, "I don"t mind trying" to remember Don. He even sent me a little poem: editor, when he and I chatted about Don. "I"m patchy, I mean." Kirk Sale, Don"s downstairs neighbor for nearly twenty years, kept telling me his memory was lousy, but he urged me to prod him, because, he said, "I don"t mind trying" to remember Don. He even sent me a little poem: When I reflect how many cellsRemain in what my brain"s become,I take my comfort from the thought,Cogito, ergo some some.
George Christian, with whom Don began to write as a professional journalist, would have had much to say about Don"s early career. Christian died a few years ago from Parkinson"s disease. Time has worked on Don"s fiction, and it has worked on those who knew him. It"s necessary to gather what we can while while we can. we can.
Finally, it comes down to this: I still want to know Don better so as to know better the world he he knew. Though some of the details have changed over time, the world he knew is, of course, our world. He still has lessons to teach us. knew. Though some of the details have changed over time, the world he knew is, of course, our world. He still has lessons to teach us.
PART ONE.
BAUDELAIRE.
AND BEYOND.
1.
TOOLS.
The America that Don knew as a boy and as a teenager, in the 1930s and 1940s, was a nation whose structures were beginning to be formed with messianic fervor. Or so his father believed. His father, Donald Barthelme, was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1907, the son of a lumber dealer. He learned, early, to calculate board feet, negotiate timber rights, and distinguish loblolly from other sorts of pine trees. These skills led him to a pragmatic view of building and of problem solving in general, a view his eldest son would inherit.
During the elder Barthelme"s childhood, Galveston was dominated by singular personalities who left indelible imprints on the city"s finances, inst.i.tutions, environment, and cultural life. William Lewis Moody, Jr., the son of a cotton magnate, owned controlling interest in the city"s national bank; in 1923, he purchased the Galveston News Galveston News, Texas"s oldest continuously running newspaper; in 1927, he formed the National Hotel Corporation, and subsequently built two of the city"s landmark inns; he organized what became the biggest insurance company in Texas, and bought a printing outfit and several ranches, though he had little interest in raising cattle. He used the land for duck hunting and fishing. A Gulf Coast Citizen Kane, he managed the city"s money and information, and shaped much of the public s.p.a.ce. In 1974, Don would publish a story called "I Bought a Little City" about a Moody-like man who, otherwise bored with his life, establishes an amiable but unimaginative empire in Galveston, and presides over the city"s decline.
The other major figure in town, prior to World War I, was N. J. Clayton, a supremely confident architect with a love of high Victorian style. Even today, the generous loft s.p.a.ces in many of Galveston"s commercial buildings bear his mark. He favored bold ma.s.sing and articulate composition, and was fond of Gothic detail. That one man"s sensibility, if pushed aggressively, could fashion a city"s looks was a lesson absorbed, and cherished, by Barthelme senior. It was an example of idealism, optimism, and hard work that he impressed on his children.
Always short for his age, with red hair, fair skin, and fat gla.s.ses from the time he was three, the elder Barthelme felt as a boy that if he was going to get anywhere in life, he "wasn"t going to be able to just stand there." "I had to walk into a room with a swagger, and talk loud, and tell "em I was there," he said. In their memoir, Double Down Double Down, his sons Rick and Steve said that, early on, their father adopted the att.i.tude, perhaps modeled on men like Moody, that the "world was a place that needed fixing and he was just the man to fix it."
By the time he reached high school, he was an a.s.sured and popular young man, always tweaking authority to win his friends" loyalty, practiced at the swagger he"d affected, a h.e.l.l-raiser.
As a college freshman, he enrolled in the Rice Inst.i.tute, in Houston, but was asked to leave "for some indiscretion in the school newspaper, which he edited," Rick and Steve recounted, "an indiscretion that wasn"t his, as it turned out, but some fellow student"s for whom Father was taking the fall."
The elder Barthelme"s father approached school administrators on his behalf but found them unbending. Instead of waiting twelve months to reenroll, when his suspension would expire, Barthelme transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. There, he studied architecture with Paul Philippe Cret, and he met Helen Bechtold, whom he would marry in June 1930. They were introduced on a blind date when he went with a buddy to Helen"s sorority house. As Helen and a friend approached the boys in the house"s foyer, Helen whispered that she hoped she would get the "tall, dark, and handsome one." Instead, her date was the "short, red-headed one."
"He was a fortunate man," Rick and Steve wrote in Double Down Double Down. "[Mother was] a prize that took some winning, according to the family lore, for while Mother was smart, talented, stylish, attractive, and sought after, our father was only smart and talented." Away from school, Helen lived in Philadelphia with her mother and sister. Her father had died when she was twelve, leaving his family financially secure, but Helen wanted a teaching career and even made what she once described as an "abortive attempt" at writing. She was interested in acting at the time she met Barthelme.
On April 7, 1931, Don was born (he would later write, "What else happened in 1931?...Creation of countless surrealist objects"). In December of 1932, his sister, Joan, arrived. Helen Bechtold Barthelme abandoned her teaching, writing, and acting dreams; she hunkered down to become the "beloved mother" of a family that would eventually total five children, all of whom, swayed by their mother"s love of reading and drama, excelled at writing.
After graduating from Penn, Donald Barthelme, Sr., worked as a draftsman for Cret and for the firm of Zantzinger, Borie, & Medary (where he helped design the U.S. Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C.), but he was unable to find lasting work in Philadelphia. In 1932-just before Joan was born-the family moved to Galveston, where Barthelme joined his father"s lumber business. The company was best known for building a magnificent roller coaster near the seawall at the beach. Barthelme"s father, Fred, a New York transplant, was a prominent and successful member of Galveston society.
Barthelme was restless working for the old man and living in a garage apartment behind his parents" house. He worked briefly for the Dallas architect Roscoe DeWitt, then, in 1937, moved his family to Houston, where he joined the firm of John F. Staub. In 1940, he branched out on his own.
At Penn, his course of study had stressed traditional architecture and conventional building techniques. On his own, he studied the Bauhaus movement in Europe and pored over Frank Lloyd Wright"s published plans; still, he didn"t chafe against Penn"s established pedagogy. He admitted his perplexity at the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building, designed by Howe and Lescaze-this was one of most prominent modern buildings erected in the United States in the 1930s, and Barthelme didn"t get get its austerity. its austerity.
In Philadelphia, he encountered, once more, powerful personalities. In cla.s.s one day, evaluating one of Barthelme"s designs, Cret asked, "Where did you get this idea?" "Oh," Barthelme said, "I got it out of my head, Mr. Cret." "It"s good that it is out," his teacher replied. Temporarily, Barthelme worked for Cret in a Philadelphia firm that employed Louis Kahn. At night, Kahn would go around the office and leave critiques on his coworkers" designs, including those of his bosses. People "laughed at him," Barthelme said. "But he was teaching himself."
Little by little, Barthelme taught himself modern architecture. He would pa.s.s his enthusiasm for learning on to Don. Though Don"s chosen pursuit would differ from his father"s, the idea of the modern the modern and the aesthetic principles of modern architecture form the background of Don"s writing. A broad familiarity with what was at stake in his father"s world is essential to understanding what mattered to Don in his work. and the aesthetic principles of modern architecture form the background of Don"s writing. A broad familiarity with what was at stake in his father"s world is essential to understanding what mattered to Don in his work.
Paul Philippe Cret, Barthelme"s mentor at Penn, accepted a teaching position at the university in 1903, which he held until his retirement in 1937. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, one of Europe"s oldest centers of art and architectural education, dating back in various forms to 1671. The Beaux-Arts basic design principles stressed symmetry, simple volumes, and lucid progression through a series of exterior and interior s.p.a.ces; the outside was a rational extension of the inside. Beaux-Arts urbanism relied on visual axes with clearly marked meeting points as its prime ordering device; its most celebrated examples were Georges-Eugene Haussmann"s schemes for the reorganization of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. The Beaux-Arts approach was not seriously challenged in American academia until the late 1930s, when a second wave of Europeans came to the States, who were advocates of the International Style, and a.s.sumed positions of power.
As Cret"s career progressed, he absorbed elements of the International Style and began a process of simplification, minimizing the ornamentation of his designs. He reduced the number of moldings, which served to highlight the planar and volumetric quality of his work. Many of his earlier designs, such as the one for the Indianapolis Library, used Doric colonnades. By the early thirties, when he conceived the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., he had replaced the colonnades with abstract fluted piers.
At a time when university architecture departments felt the first ripples of a change, when, more than ever, competing ideologies dominated the field, Barthelme was excited to find a man like Cret, who bridged the gap between tradition and innovation. Cret was not bullying or domineering, but he was unflappable and firm. These qualities enabled him to perform the architect"s trickiest task smoothly: appeasing p.r.i.c.kly clients and warring const.i.tuencies. He could "cut through" the politics, bad histories, "complexities and ambiguities" of a situation, wrote Elizabeth Greenwell Grossman, and "offer a design that seemed by its simplicity to reveal the immediate character of [an] inst.i.tution."
Initially, Barthelme followed this example to good effect, but calm, compromise, and diplomacy were not attributes he could sustain. Eventually, he would topple into the "excesses" of his profession, the "heroics and mockheroics" exhibited by architects in general, as Don later reflected.
What came to be called the International Style of modern architecture, in the years between the first and second world wars, valued lightweight materials, open interior s.p.a.ces, smooth machinelike surfaces, and exposed structural components, airily clad in collaged metal sheeting or gla.s.s curtain walls. It was a craft test-driven in the Bauhaus workshops in Germany in the 1920s under the direction of Walter Gropius, who championed austerity and performance in the steel windows and door frames of the houses he designed, in exposed metal radiators, exposed electric lightbulbs, and elemental furniture. He believed that materials and forms should be celebrated for their independent, asymmetrical structures, rather than for their compatibility and relative invisibility in an overall design.
In the Bauhaus vision, all the arts joined to shape a splendid future. "Together let us conceive and create the new building...which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting...and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith," said the group"s 1919 proclamation. Beneath the doc.u.ment"s socialist zeal, one can still hear the trauma of war, and an uncertainty about whether any social order can survive the erosions of time and the violence of men.
The Parisian architect Le Corbusier expanded the Bauhaus model, promoting "house machines," "healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful," he said, "in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful." Mies van der Rohe, who began his career in Berlin, expounded a skin and bones architecture in the office buildings he designed. "The maximum effect with the minimum expenditure of means," his projects proclaimed.
The schools of modern architecture were not uniform, nor were their pract.i.tioners always in agreement, but the field"s leading figures shared a belief that architecture should boldly reflect its time. Convictions about the character of the time conflicted wildly, but this did not blunt the energy with which Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies, and others set out to convert the world to their aesthetic aims. They were on a crusade. As large-scale turmoil scarred Europe more and more in the first half of the century, the tenor of the time, and appropriate responses to it, became harder to pa.r.s.e. One could argue that the only sane response to the Holocaust was emptiness and silence-not to build at all. But Europe"s upheavals had another effect: the flow of brilliant architects to the safety and relative openness of the United States, which Le Corbusier called the "country of timid people."
If U.S. inst.i.tutions were slow to accept the new architecture, young architects in the nation"s finest programs, schools, and firms were not at all timid about embracing change. A "tendency toward Oedipal overthrow" has always been "rampant in [the] profession," says the architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. To survive, one must cultivate a strong personality.
During this pivotal migration of genius, Donald Barthelme, Sr., started his practice. Since childhood, he had worked to overcome timidity, to prove himself by staking out fresh directions. Later in life, he recalled meeting, early in his career, Mies van der Rohe, and criticizing one of the master"s buildings for its lack of human scale. "Mr. Barthelme, I find that I can make things beautiful, and that is enough for me," Mies replied.
Barthelme"s first major projects straddled the battle zone between the future and the past. Zantzinger, Borie, & Medary"s design for the U.S. Department of Justice building, which Barthelme had a say in (though, as a junior member of the team, not a very large one), combined cla.s.sical style with Art Deco detailing and an unusual use of aluminum for features commonly cast in bronze, such as interior stair railings, grilles, and door trim.
After his return to Texas, Barthelme inherited a project begun by Frank Lloyd Wright, which struck an early modernist blow in Dallas. The entrepreneur Stanley Marcus had commissioned Wright to build a house on six and a half acres of north Texas prairie. Marcus recalled: We had told Mr. Wright that we could only afford to spend $25,000, which was a lot of money in the Depression year of 1934, but which he a.s.sured us was quite feasible. We invited him to come to Dallas....He arrived on January 1, with the temperature at seventy degrees. He concluded that this was typical winter weather for Dallas, and nothing we could tell him about the normal January ice storms could ever convince him that we didn"t live in a perpetually balmy climate. When his first preliminary sketches arrived, we noticed that there were no bedrooms, just cubicles in which to sleep when the weather was inclement. Otherwise, ninety percent of the time we would sleep outdoors on the deck. We protested that solution on the grounds that I was subject to colds and sinus trouble. He dismissed this objection in his typical manner, as though brushing a bit of lint from his jacket....
Additionally, Wright provided "little or no closet s.p.a.ce, commenting that closets were only useful for acc.u.mulating things you didn"t need." Frustrated, Marcus enlisted Roscoe DeWitt to serve as a local a.s.sociate for Wright, who had returned to Taliesin, and to be an on-the-ground interpreter of Wright"s plans. Marcus clashed again with the great man when he asked DeWitt to be on guard against inadequate flashing specifications-Wright"s buildings were notoriously leak-p.r.o.ne, but he deeply resented this precaution.
Bad feelings got worse, cost estimates spiraled, and, eventually, Marcus turned everything over to DeWitt and his young designer, Donald Barthelme. "I couldn"t understand [Wright"s] plans," Barthelme said. "He had a column that was in the shape of a star, and he had marked a little note that said, "stock column." So far as I knew there was no such stock column. He also had six panes of gla.s.s about six feet wide each that were slipped into adjacent tracks with no frame around the end. I can just imagine trying to slide those doors open."
Ultimately, the house, completed in 1937, bore no resemblance to Wright"s initial design. Barthelme designed a long, low-lying structure with cross-ventilation and open living and dining rooms. p.r.o.nounced overhangs sheltered the windows. The result was too conventional to be a notable piece of architecture, Marcus said later, though it was unconventional enough to be "highly controversial" in Dallas at the time. "It proved to be a home which met our living requirements better than the Wright house would have done."
That same year, for the Texas centennial celebration in Dallas"s Fair Park, Barthelme designed the Hall of State, which remains among the most monumental structures in Texas, and was then, at $1.2 million, the most expensive building per square foot ever constructed in the state. Originally, a consortium of ten Dallas firms had been hired to create the hall, but they failed to produce a plan acceptable to the State Board of Control. Barthelme synthesized their ideas and added his own. Faced with Texas limestone, with bronze doors and blue tile (the color of the bluebonnet, Texas"s state flower), the building is an inverted T-a structure in which Paul Cret"s influence is apparent.