Don had not been honest with Helen about his work. He wanted as much of her sympathy as he could get. He was well along now on Snow White Snow White. For a while, after turning from "A Shower of Gold," he had toyed with the idea of expanding "The Indian Uprising." He told Angell, "I am tired of tiny stories however beautiful....Some day I will write a great long story like other writers write, many-paged, full of words, resplendent."
"The Indian Uprising" resisted changes-it was as tight as a box-but soon Don had ideas for Snow White Snow White.
Meanwhile, Herman Gollob had left Little, Brown and was now an editor at Atheneum. He advised Don not to divorce Helen. "I told him to get rid of the kid, get an abortion, and come home. Always felt a little guilty about that, later, every time I saw that wonderful kid. He had to do the honorable thing, you know."
By now, Don had confessed his troubles to Angell. "We are now in a three-way snit over a) divorce papers, b) getting married, c) visa," he wrote. "Everything is under control, as far as I can see, but the timing is tight. We hope to be home the first part of October but can"t count on it."
Angell didn"t try to tell him what to do. He said, simply, "I am going to be 45 [soon]-an age when one likes to have one"s friends nearby."
Despite the "snit" he was in, Don was writing plenty-new stories as well as Snow White Snow White. Over the summer, Angell bought "Snap Snap"-a parody of Time Time"s and Newsweek Newsweek"s breathless journalistic styles.
"You are writing so much and so well that I haven"t got time to do any writing myself," Angell told Don. "I just spend all my time sneaking commas into your ma.n.u.scripts and sending you money. Actually, I am delighted by all of this fecundity and brilliance."
In August, Angell went on vacation, leaving the final editorial details on "Snap Snap" to William Maxwell. Maxwell"s letters to Don were blunt, all business. Don"s approach to revision unnerved him. "If you don"t like the laparotomy," Don told him at one point, referring to a line in the story, "you may choose some other operation ending in "omy." " Maxwell didn"t reply.
The moment Angell returned, he sent Lynn Nesbit $750 for Don "against future work," as if to rea.s.sure Don that, Maxwell aside, The New Yorker The New Yorker still loved him. Angell told Nesbit, "[Don"s] indebtedness here now stands at $1750." still loved him. Angell told Nesbit, "[Don"s] indebtedness here now stands at $1750."
Birgit was sick now almost every morning, and she rarely felt like making love. Don bought her antinausea pills at the drugstore. He tried to make her laugh (she didn"t understand his culturally specific jokes). Occasionally, an American movie played in Copenhagen and Don would coax Birgit out of the flat to see it. Some nights, he drank too much; when he did, his homesickness emerged in the form of discussions about movie trivia. He argued with her over actors and film t.i.tles. Sometimes he got heated over practically nothing. At such moments, his verbal abusiveness could equal that of his father"s, but he was never physically violent. In later years, Helen learned from friends that Birgit"s "manner was like that of a child" and "Don treated her like one." He would tell his his friends that, at any given moment, Birgit "may suddenly step into the street to cross in front of a bus." She exhausted him. friends that, at any given moment, Birgit "may suddenly step into the street to cross in front of a bus." She exhausted him.
Don once told Helen that before he met Birgit, " "something" happened to her in Denmark." "He was vague, referring to an incident that affected her life." In "Edward and Pia," Pia tells Edward that a man "raptured" her: "Edward walked out of the room. Pia looked after him placidly. Edward reentered the room. "How would you like to have some Southern fried chicken?" he asked. "It"s the most marvelous-tasting thing in the world. Tomorrow I"ll make some. Don"t say "rapture." In English it"s "rape." What did you do about it?" "Nothing," Pia said."
Don always wondered if Birgit would begin to suffer someday from Huntington"s (she would be diagnosed with the disease in 1975). It was hereditary and its symptoms-ranging from clumsiness and involuntary movements to slurred speech, depression, apathy, severe irritability, and memory lapses-usually appeared before the age of forty. Birgit"s inability to grasp simple actions (following directions, opening a bottle of pills), and her helplessness, frightened Don.
"You don"t look happy," Birgit would say to him. "You don"t look happy, either," he"d reply.
Things were rotten in Denmark. But on some days an air mail envelope would slip through the mail slot with a check from Roger Angell. Sometimes Birgit would would laugh at Don"s jokes. laugh at Don"s jokes.
Don asked his father for extra money so he could take Birgit back to the States. His mother objected to his "cavalier" att.i.tude toward the circ.u.mstances. He responded by mail, saying, "I am sorry that I did not treat the announcement of new domestic arrangements seriously enough, or that I somehow did it in the wrong way, or that I am somehow wrong, wrong, wrong, probably fundamentally. You have to remember that for me levity is a mode of seriousness, my only mode of seriousness."
Don said he was "thinking of coming home to Texas where [the baby] can be had in a WARM, CHEERFUL, LOVING atmosphere...rather than a cold New York atmosphere." He asked his father to design a house in Houston for his "cuties." However in a follow-up letter, he said a "house is out of the question, really." He had no money. Jack Kroll planned to take an extended leave from magazine work, and he offered Don Newsweek Newsweek"s book-reviewing spot, but the pay was "low, low," Don wrote his dad. "I think I could do better sitting at home staring at the typewriter."
To Lynn Nesbit, he wrote: I feel [happy] about nothing. No confident expectation. I have a hope, which is that I can raise the baby without ruining it. The relations between Birgit and myself are peculiar. There is love but no confidence, apparently not on either side. She is a remarkable girl but we are all remarkable and that is no guarantee of anything. I suspect that I will be able to make her happy for a time, probably happier than she will make me. But what can make me happy? My little ego is so const.i.tuted that the most enormous outpourings of love and attention are not, apparently, enough for it.
As regards his personal relationship with Nesbit-and responding to her rueful a.n.a.lysis of what had happened between them-he said, "I don"t think you played wife when you should have played lover. I think that you played lover in a way congenial to you and me, which involved the laundromat as an additional but not crucial dimension. You are wonderful, sweet Lynn; it"s me who is in difficulties, who am the difficulty."
In late October, just before leaving Denmark, Don renewed the lease at 113 West 11th Street. Birgit was almost nine months pregnant. Don booked a flight for the two of them-the three three of them-on Icelandic Airlines, now more nervous than ever about flying. of them-on Icelandic Airlines, now more nervous than ever about flying.
As soon as they landed, Don drove Birgit to the house of his old friend Robert Morris in Connecticut (as per the sublet arrangement, Tom Wolfe still had a few days left in Don"s apartment). Don phoned Helen and thanked her again for granting the divorce. He wanted to explain why he had been so rushed and why he might have seemed callous. He said he wanted the baby to have his name when it was born. "Otherwise I will have to adopt it later and it would always be an adopted child," he said. "Nor did I want to have to go to Mexico for a divorce."
Helen didn"t want to talk about these things. The topic of children was intensely painful for her. Instead, she spoke about Don"s Houston friends, and of recent shows at the Contemporary Arts Museum. "We both were reluctant to end our conversation," she says. "[W]hen we at last said goodbye, I felt very sad, for Don as well as for myself."
Don phoned Herman Gollob about the novel he was drafting. "You"ll see that it"s not Indian Uprising Indian Uprising," he said. "But I don"t think you"ll hate it."
Gollob helped him arrange a hasty private wedding in Montpelier, New Jersey. "Birgit was about to pop," Gollob recalled. Right before the ceremony, she had to see a doctor, "this eighty-year-old guy who lectured Don and Birgit about s.e.x." Gollob and his wife, Barbara, were the only witnesses at the wedding. At first, the priest, a "strict Italian-American," misunderstood: He a.s.sumed Gollob and his wife were the bride and groom. When he realized the truth, he was "devastated" and balked at performing the ceremony for a pregnant woman. Don talked him into going ahead. Still, the priest confused Barbara"s and Birgit"s names: "Do you, Barbara, take this-"
"I gave him the honorarium in an envelope-all fifty dollars of it," Gollob said. "Next day it came back to me in the mail. He didn"t want that money."
The Manhattan to which Don returned was more vibrant and edgy than ever. By late 1965, antiwar rallies had grown larger and more frequent. On October 15, four hundred demonstrators showed up outside an army induction center at 39 Whitehall Street. Pa.s.sersby jeered at the protestors. One young man burned his draft card in front of federal agents. Events might have ended there despite incitements by the SDS, the Socialist Workers party, and other groups-except that the New York Supreme Court refused to overrule the Parks Commission"s denial of a demonstration permit to the ACLU. In defiance of the court, six hundred City College students and faculty members held a four-hour silent vigil in Central Park, followed by a two-hour rally. The next day, a crowd of between ten and twenty thousand people, many of them middle-aged and middle-cla.s.s, marched down Fifth Avenue from Ninety-fourth Street to Sixty-ninth.
Roger Angell and his wife, Carol, watched the march from the window of their apartment on Ninety-fourth between Fifth and Madison. His "quiet block" became "one of the forming-up side streets for marchers heading down Fifth," he wrote. "Somewhere a band was playing "I-Feel-Like-I"m-Fixin"-to-Die-Rag," the Country Joe and the Fish cla.s.sic." He described the scene: "The gigantic skulls and caricatures of the Bread and Puppet Theatre tottered and swayed at the top of the block, and we waited while the various group banners-S.D.S and others-went slowly past, until our own bunch, Veterans for Peace (I was a veteran), came along and we went downstairs and out into the sunshine and marched away, too."
Two weeks later, demonstrators in support of the war-"cops and firemen and union guys, all waving American flags"-followed the same path up Fifth. With a felt-tip pen, Angell scrawled "Stop the Bombing!" on an old shirt cardboard and stuck it in his window. Someone threw a beer can at it; the can pinged off the gla.s.s. It was followed by more cans and a few eggs. Angell"s landlady rang his bell and demanded to know what he"d done. "Whatever it is, stop." Angell removed the sign and shot a finger at the crowd. "My face was a mirror of theirs by now: the American look," he said. "The war had come home."
On the brighter side of the ledger, the city had erected several stunning new buildings while Don was gone: Eero Saarinen"s "Black Rock"-the thirty-eight-story CBS Building on Sixth Avenue at Fifty-second; Edward Durell Stone"s Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art, a contemporary palazzo at Columbus Circle; and the International Style building at 277 Park Avenue, between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth streets, designed by Emery Roth and Sons (whom Don had singled out in "The Indian Uprising" as purveyors of a lifestyle now under siege).
Andy Warhol was everywhere. His Campbell"s Tomato Soup Can Campbell"s Tomato Soup Can and and "65 Liz "65 Liz were reproduced in magazines and on posters and billboards. With the help of Billy Kluver, a former Bell Labs engineer, he was preparing a new exhibit for the Leo Castelli Gallery. The exhibit would feature silver Mylar balloons filled with helium-just enough so they"d float in midair. Metal weights placed inside the balloons would incline them to careen haphazardly as gallerygoers walked among them and nudged, pushed, or b.u.mped them around the room. were reproduced in magazines and on posters and billboards. With the help of Billy Kluver, a former Bell Labs engineer, he was preparing a new exhibit for the Leo Castelli Gallery. The exhibit would feature silver Mylar balloons filled with helium-just enough so they"d float in midair. Metal weights placed inside the balloons would incline them to careen haphazardly as gallerygoers walked among them and nudged, pushed, or b.u.mped them around the room.
How to explain such a wondrous world to a child? Just before his daughter arrived, Don wrote "See the Moon?" "When a child is born, the locus of one"s hopes...shifts, slightly," the narrator says. "Not altogether, not all at once. But you feel it, this displacement. You speak up, strike att.i.tudes....Drunk with possibility once more."
The story is a sort of traveler"s report, "pieced together from the reports of [other] travellers." Only from such "fragments" can we know the world. "Look at my wall, it"s all there," the narrator tells his unborn child. He points to sc.r.a.ps, newspaper clippings, and other souvenirs he has gathered for study. "That"s a leaf...stuck up with Scotch tape," he explains to the baby. "No no, the Scotch tape is the shiny transparent stuff, the leaf the veined irregularly shaped..."
He wonders what he can do for his child: "I can get him into A. A., I have influence. And make sure no harsh moonlight falls on his soft new head." The moon-the bringer of lunacy, light-mindedness, fits, spells, and occasionally dark enlightenment-"hates" humans. It itches to afflict us. Nevertheless, drunk with "possibility," the father-to-be says to his kid, "We hope you"ll be very happy here."
Angell thought this a "lovely" story and offered Don few editorial suggestions. The rough drafts indicate that Don wrote it quickly and made only minor changes to it later. At one point, the narrator studies a Catholic cardinal to grasp his serenity. This section gave Don the most trouble. Its relative length suggests that spiritual yearning is the heart of the story. The narrator says, "[M]aybe I was trying on the [cardinal"s] role," in antic.i.p.ation of becoming a father.
He treats his wife gingerly. "Dear Ann...I"m going to keep her ghostly. Just the odd bit of dialogue..." As in Paradiso Paradiso, where Dante leaves mostly "unsaid" his experience of Beatrice (for speech would only sully her), Don"s narrator admits the woman"s greater power, and his own lack of promise.
Anne Barthelme was born on November 4, 1965, at St. Vincent"s Hospital, just down the block from Don"s apartment. A few days later, the city"s lights went out. The two events linked up in his mind.
Later, Marshall McLuhan said that if the blackout had lasted six months longer, "there would be no doubt how electric technology shapes, works over, alters-ma.s.sages-every instant of our lives." Billy Kluver said the power failure "could have been an artist"s idea-to make us aware of something." Failure is a special skill of artists, exposing cracks in the status quo, he said.
Eventually, Don wrote "City Life," in which a woman is impregnated by the "fused glance" of her community"s "desirous eye": "The pupil enlarged to admit more light: more me," she says. In light and darkness, the city"s inhabitants are locked together-a village, a tribe-in an "exquisite mysterious muck": What a happy time that was, when all the electricity went away [the woman thinks]. If only we could recreate that paradise! By, for instance, all forgetting to pay our electric bills at the same time. All nine million of us...The same thought drifts across the furrowed surface of nine million minds. We wink at each other, through the walls.
She gives birth to her child: an unexpected development that may open, for her, the gates of paradise. In any case, she thinks of the birth as a communal "invitation" she had no choice but to accept.
A father-at last-Don felt a visceral attachment to his community. But as the street marches indicated, New York was a particularly messy messy paradise. "The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity [there will be]," McLuhan said. paradise. "The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity [there will be]," McLuhan said.
At the same time, Robert Lowell predicted that, in retrospect, this period would seem a "golden time of freedom" just before a "reign of piety and iron."
On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, Don invited Roger Angell and his wife to 113 West 11th Street to meet Birgit and Anne. "You have a lovely baby," Angell told Don. The couples shared good food and drink. They swapped the blackout stories they"d heard (people stuck on subways, in elevators-already folks were predicting that nine months hence Manhattan would see a baby boom). Anne slept quietly through dinner.
Before the year was out, Don"s latest story, "The Balloon," would delight Angell. He bought it for the magazine and scheduled it to run early the next year. Don worked to finish his first novel.
He was thirty-four years old, with a new wife and child, a world of experience behind him, and a place now in the New York literary establishment. Warily but happily, he settled into the Village, preparing for the great days ahead.
PART FOUR.
GREAT DAYS.
32.
SNOW WHITE AND THE AND THE.
SUMMER OF LOVE.
Today"s readers will find the February 18, 1967, issue of The New Yorker The New Yorker remarkably familiar. In the ads, the clothing, the women"s hairstyles, and the car bodies appear antiquated, but the layouts are as recognizable now as they were forty years ago. "The Continental Life is never out of date," says a Lincoln Continental endors.e.m.e.nt just inside the front cover. Turn the page and there"s a Tiffany diamond ad: the look of love. remarkably familiar. In the ads, the clothing, the women"s hairstyles, and the car bodies appear antiquated, but the layouts are as recognizable now as they were forty years ago. "The Continental Life is never out of date," says a Lincoln Continental endors.e.m.e.nt just inside the front cover. Turn the page and there"s a Tiffany diamond ad: the look of love.
In the "Goings On About Town" section, the names have changed but not the forms of entertainment.
None of which suggests that time hasn"t worked its effects. Note the volume of print print-so much more in 1967 than now. Like most publications these days, The New Yorker The New Yorker attempts to resemble a television screen or a computer monitor rather than a book. attempts to resemble a television screen or a computer monitor rather than a book.
Which indicates, precisely, why the one item in the February 18, 1967, issue of The New Yorker The New Yorker that looks as odd now as it did then, as strangely out of place-and harder to read because we have become poorer readers-is Donald Barthelme"s that looks as odd now as it did then, as strangely out of place-and harder to read because we have become poorer readers-is Donald Barthelme"s Snow White: Snow White:
She is a tall dark beauty containing a great many beauty spots: one above the breast, one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the b.u.t.tock, one above the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down: ******The hair is black as ebony, the skin white as snow.
We feel vaguely at home with this material-but tonally it"s off off. Cool. Snide. This is not quite quite the Snow White we thought we knew. (And in which form do we know her?-the Grimm brothers" version, which was told to us by our parents when we were little, or the Disney animated version? Already, confusion is king). And why are we reading about her now, in contemporary language, in a sophisticated magazine? Fleetingly, our minds register the phrase "containing a great many beauty spots," as though this maiden were an artificial vessel, a suspicion reinforced by the ill.u.s.tration of her physical features: The the Snow White we thought we knew. (And in which form do we know her?-the Grimm brothers" version, which was told to us by our parents when we were little, or the Disney animated version? Already, confusion is king). And why are we reading about her now, in contemporary language, in a sophisticated magazine? Fleetingly, our minds register the phrase "containing a great many beauty spots," as though this maiden were an artificial vessel, a suspicion reinforced by the ill.u.s.tration of her physical features: The text text contains the spots. Snow White as a storm of words, marks on a page... contains the spots. Snow White as a storm of words, marks on a page...
Surely this is parody. But of what? The children"s tale? The Disney movie? Romance? As though fitted with the wrong slippers, we stumble, off-kilter, our footing unsure.
As she walked around the Village, Birgit felt as wary as she had in Copenhagen. She clung to Don wherever they went-Sutter"s Bakery for breakfast rolls; Balducci"s for groceries (sometimes uptown to Zabar"s because Don liked their colorful new shopping bags); Gene"s, just down the block, for Italian food; Lamanna"s liquor store over on Sixth. The Women"s House of Detention, near the Jefferson Market Courthouse, chilled Birgit-all the trapped, miserable women inside, some separated from their children-but she felt comforted amid the mossy stones in the Second Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. Birgit found solace with the ghosts of fellow immigrants who had settled in this peaceful, shady garden tucked between brownstones.
Whenever she met new people with Don-at the Eighth Street Bookshop; the new Cedar Tavern, which was now located on University Place; or Nikos Magazine & Smoke Shop-she stayed silent, dreamy. She doted on her baby at home. She had shed most of the weight from her pregnancy but had retained enough pounds to lose her former waifishness. In Denmark, her face had been long and pale; it was rounder now. Sleeplessness lined her eyes, a result of Anne"s late-night feedings. She first knew Manhattan in winter. She took to wearing a long black overcoat, b.u.t.toned tight around the neck.
Don flirted with a beard, liked it, hated it, shaved it off, grew it back-a full beard, a goatee, something in between. His hair had softened and thinned. It was a beautiful light red. He tried horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, perfectly round gla.s.ses, no gla.s.ses at all (when he wasn"t working). He was often cold, no matter the weather, and preferred several layers of clothing, a T-shirt, a shirt, and a pullover sweater. Together, he and Birgit and Anne (with spiky brown hair that later lightened in color) were the very picture of a chic young Village family, strolling beneath the stately plane trees of West Eleventh.
The city felt livelier than it had when Don left more than a year ago. Its handsome new mayor, John Lindsay, promised broad political reforms. He had the charisma to convince nearly everybody he was a miracle machine. Even stodgy old Governor Rockefeller seemed to be loosening up. In 1966, he would approve the first major revision of New York"s divorce law since 1787, making it easier for a couple to split.
The Marine Midland Bank would soon issue something called Master Charge, promising New Yorkers they no longer needed cash or checks to buy restaurant meals, rent hotel rooms, or purchase airline tickets. As he walked the streets, past the old wrought-iron lampposts that spoke of another era, past Oscar Wilde"s former apartment or the building where Sara and Gerald Murphy once lived, Don felt the pleasure of worlds colliding: the genteel cultural past and the pulsing present, which seemed to be pulling the future toward it.
At home, he and Birgit tried to settle. He still liked to write early in the mornings, but Anne had something to say about that. Birgit got restless sitting around the spa.r.s.ely furnished apartment, but she wouldn"t go out on her own, and she"d needle Don to please stop typing, help her on with her coat, go with her down to the store.
Sunday night was garbage night on West Eleventh; the sounds of clattering cans could be heard in the dark. And on Monday morning, trash lay piled as high as your shoulders all along the walks, emitting the smells of rotting cabbage, chicken, and fish. Buses sighed and squealed to a stop each morning at seven o"clock in front of P.S. 41 across the street, the children laughing, shouting, crying. From around the corner, sirens brayed day and night, the high, healthy notes of a prosperous hospital.
Don shopped for Anne"s clothing and toys, and always rose with Birgit in the odd hours to care for the baby. On the rare quiet evenings when Anne slept, Don and Birgit liked to read together. They"d tease out the meaning of a Kierkegaard pa.s.sage-they were particularly drawn to The Concept of Irony The Concept of Irony and to the argument that irony, in stating as true that which is not true, has the power to (conceptually) obliterate all of existence. and to the argument that irony, in stating as true that which is not true, has the power to (conceptually) obliterate all of existence.
In late 1965, a new young family moved into the apartment downstairs: Kirkpatrick Sale, his wife, Faith (nee Apfelbaum), and their young daughter, Rebekah. The couple had attended Cornell with Richard Farina and Thomas Pynchon (the latter coauth.o.r.ed a never-produced musical called Minstrel Island Minstrel Island with Sale). Sale focused most of his literary energy on polemics, history, and environmental studies. In later years, he would joke, "One reason that Don could be so spare and exact in his writing...was that he was able to get rid of all the unnecessary, c.u.mbersome, undignified, aimless words. The way it worked was this: he would let all the unwanted words fall through his typewriter... with Sale). Sale focused most of his literary energy on polemics, history, and environmental studies. In later years, he would joke, "One reason that Don could be so spare and exact in his writing...was that he was able to get rid of all the unnecessary, c.u.mbersome, undignified, aimless words. The way it worked was this: he would let all the unwanted words fall through his typewriter...downstairs, to my apartment, in fact to my typewriter-which is why I write these large bulky books and Don"s were so small and jewel-like and perfect."
For a while, the Sales frequented the folk scene at Gerde"s on Fourth Street, listening to Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Richard Farina. By 1965, they were parents, ready for nesting. Sale became more serious about his writing. Faith had worked as an editor at J. B. Lippincott and Macmillan-"using the skills I had taught her when we were on the [student] paper at Cornell," Sale says-and now she did freelance editing for publishing companies, literary agents, and authors.
It took a few months for the Sales to get to know Don and Birgit. Don "was a private person," Sale says. "Not distant but private. Nothing personal or intimate. Birgit was a strange one. Quiet, aloof even, and totally unemotional. Pleasant always, but sort of Scandinavian cold. I never once saw her drunk. She would read Kierkegaard-p.r.o.nounced, she told me, Keergor (and Copenhagen, she said, was Cohnhawn) but I don"t think she ever talked philosophically. Or politically. If I think about it, I can"t see any reason that Don married Birgit, except that her cool style attracted him-cool, calm, bright, that would be his type, like Lynn Nesbit."
Birgit made her first friendly overture toward Sale after a conversation in the hallway, in which, somehow, Schubert"s Trout Quintet came up. Sale said he didn"t know it, and Birgit went out and bought him a recording of it. He warmed to Don through their mutual concern for the building. Don "was protective of [it], making sure the super (who slept in the bas.e.m.e.nt, an old black guy that Don thought was so smart he should help him go to college, but Jimmy was in truth a lush, and that idea didn"t fly) was content and doing his job," Sale says. "[Once] the woman in the third floor rear apartment, another lush-and that does seem a recurrent theme here, doesn"t it?-fell asleep while smoking and set her bed on fire. Nothing serious, but the local firemen came rushing round and a mess was made. Don called a building-wide meeting, for the first time, to discuss what we should do to make the place more fireproof and what we should do in case of a real fire-of particular concern since the couple in the third floor front had an old guy with half a leg and a prosthesis he usually wouldn"t wear. Well, no one thought there was much chance of a serious fire in that solid building, which had firespray thingies in the hallway, and the old guy said he could make it down the stairs if he had to, but we had a long talk, and Don said that everyone should get a rope fire-ladder. He did. No one else. And I was on the ground floor. But it says something about him that he was basically a regular guy who cared about his neighbors, not a wooly-headed intellectual, and was a subtle man of action."
In time, Don started inviting Sale upstairs for lunch-they were both writing at home during the day. "He"d always serve "poorboys," which he said were standard in Houston," Sale says. "Hoagies, I guess we called them up here. Don had a beautiful apartment, kept it spa.r.s.ely decorated and furnished. Though he knew about modern art, there was very little of it on his walls, which were white. He liked things neat and plain." Sale was impressed by Don"s immersion in jazz. "He once said that if he had the choice, he would rather be blind than deaf-and this from a writer and avid reader-because he loved music," Sale recalls. "Though, you know, he never talked much about it, never showed off his knowledge of it." Birgit preferred cla.s.sical music to jazz, and usually commandeered the record player in the evenings.
After writing in the mornings, Don took long walks around the neighborhood. Almost every day he"d see-usually on the corner of West Eleventh and Sixth-a short, wild-haired, cheerful but determined woman carrying antiwar signs, or handing out leaflets for political rallies, or wearing a makeshift smock painted with the words "Money/Arms/War/Profit." This woman turned out to be his across-the-street neighbor, Grace Paley. Don knew her book The Little Disturbances of Man The Little Disturbances of Man, published in 1959. Since then, she"d written only a handful of new stories. She"d been busy raising her kids, helping with the local PTA, and organizing the Greenwich Village Peace Center, a group composed mostly of women, who helped teachers at P.S. 41 and whose opposition to the Vietnam War was an outgrowth of their concern for children. They"d meet in parks, one another"s apartments, or in church bas.e.m.e.nts, mimeographing flyers. Purple stains covered Grace"s hands. Her politics were never abstract or ideological; they were rooted in motherhood and the activities of her block. Don admired this about her. As he would say of her later, "[She is] a wonderful writer and troublemaker. We are fortunate to have her in our country."
"I was so interested in my friends," Grace said. "I didn"t want to leave them"-meaning that, after her book was published, she didn"t want to move into some insulated literary community. "I was very afraid...and my fear was the fear of loss, loss of my own place and my own people." Besides, her "sphere" of mothers and children and workers "created" her subject matter.
Nevertheless, by the time Don got to know her in 1965, she had begun to teach fiction writing, first at Columbia, where she had once worked as a secretary, then at Sarah Lawrence, located in Bronxville, half an hour"s drive north from Manhattan. Her kids, Nora and Danny, were teenagers, and Grace needed family health benefits. Her marriage to Jess Paley, a motion-picture cameraman, was shaky. He often worked away from home. Grace was growing steadily more intimate with a landscape architect and fellow political activist named Bob Nichols. She had met him in the late fifties when Village residents protested the city"s ban on folk music in Washington Square Park. Nichols would later redesign the park for pedestrian traffic. In 1967, Grace would leave her husband for him (she and Nichols married in 1972).
In Don, Grace saw a fellow worrier. "He was in his life and work a citizen," she wrote. "That means he paid attention to and argued the life of his street, his city (New York or Houston), his country. He never played a game of literary personalities." He became another member of her family, and he cared for her in turn. Briefly, they were lovers, more out of a need for mutual comfort than pa.s.sion. "There was sadness in our lightest conversations," she recalled. "He smoked and drank in the manner of American writers (his only untransformed cliche)," and she grieved for him, her neighbor and "true friend," every day.
"He was drinking more when he got back from Copenhagen than he had been when we first started going out in New York," Lynn Nesbit recalls. "Despite his new circ.u.mstances, he a.s.sumed we could just continue with our affair but it was over for me at that point. Sometimes he"d knock on my door at midnight but I wouldn"t let him in. Birgit must have been miserable."
Nesbit continued to represent Don"s work because, she says, she "had a professional responsibility to him. And I felt sorry for him."
As he continued to work on Snow White Snow White during the early part of 1966, readers began to identify him as a during the early part of 1966, readers began to identify him as a New Yorker New Yorker regular. Just as, in the 1830s and 1840s, regular. Just as, in the 1830s and 1840s, The Southern Literary Messenger The Southern Literary Messenger and and G.o.dey"s Lady"s Book G.o.dey"s Lady"s Book gave Edgar Allan Poe mainstream visibility, gave Edgar Allan Poe mainstream visibility, The New Yorker The New Yorker provided a steady, "respectable" home for Don"s radical reinventions of the short story. Not since Poe had anyone brought such ingenuity to the form. provided a steady, "respectable" home for Don"s radical reinventions of the short story. Not since Poe had anyone brought such ingenuity to the form.
"This Newspaper Here," a monologue by an old man full of "worrywine," appeared in The New Yorker The New Yorker"s February 12 issue. "See the Moon?" ran on March 12-with a last-minute addition comparing the care of a baby to the maintenance of a battleship. "The Balloon" was published in the magazine"s April 16 issue, around the time, coincidentally, that Andy Warhol"s "Silver Clouds" exhibit opened at the Leo Castelli Gallery.
In Don"s story, a "free-hanging," "frivolous," and "gentle" balloon expands mysteriously one night over Manhattan, filling most of the "air s.p.a.ce" and ab.u.t.ting the buildings. "There were reactions" from citizens, says the balloon"s inventor: Some people insisted on knowing the balloon"s meaning; others were suspicious because it displayed no advertising and appeared to be without purpose; some felt frustrated that it blocked their daily paths; others accepted its presence.
In the story"s final paragraph, the narrator admits that the balloon was a "spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease" he felt at his lover"s absence, and "with s.e.xual deprivation." This strange thing was not randomly conceived, then-longing is its source, and it is appropriately breastlike (or it is an image of pregnancy). Like loneliness, the balloon expands until it seems to fill the world. Paralysis and awe, intimacy and distance from others-reflected, here, is a profound ambivalence about desire.
But to really really plumb the story"s richness, we need to leap briefly from Don"s balloon to another famous flying contraption, the one in Edouard Manet"s 1862 lithograph plumb the story"s richness, we need to leap briefly from Don"s balloon to another famous flying contraption, the one in Edouard Manet"s 1862 lithograph Le Ballon Le Ballon.
As noted earlier, Paris in the 1850s and 1860s underwent a vast transformation, a historic moment that fascinated Don. Georges-Eugene Haussmann evicted the working cla.s.s from the center of the city, destroying the artisan guilds, redesigning the streets, and widening them to prevent insurrections.