5.
THE NEW MUSIC.
"I do believe this was my idea," Don said of becoming a writer. "I can"t blame anybody else for it."
In his senior year at Mirabeau B. Lamar High School, away for the first time from the sisters and priests who had been his teachers, he tested his idea. In the 1949 issue of Sequoyha Sequoyha, the high school"s literary magazine, he published a parody of Pilgrim"s Progress Pilgrim"s Progress. It was called "Rover Boys" Retrogression." His choice of targets, and the changes he worked on the original, revealed his state of mind and-remarkably-set the pattern for much of his future work. Not only did parody remain a central impulse throughout his career but, more important, he was already developing strategies for transforming personal material into allegory, fantasy, or absurd imagery.
His father"s influence appears, in this earliest locatable work, in two ways: Form is the foremost concern, not for its own sake, but for the way it embodies, economically, the ideas behind it; and an intensity of feeling is conveyed without revealing its sources. The story"s core remains safe from ridicule. These are weighty matters for a comic piece by a seventeen-year-old.
John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim"s Progress Pilgrim"s Progress, "an Allegory...[about] the way to Glory," in 1678. It traces the soul"s journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, detailing along the way the pitfalls of the Slough of Despond and the Valley of Humiliation. The New Yorker The New Yorker"s breezy style was in Don"s mind, as was "Hemingway as parodist," when he decided to lampoon Bunyan. Whereas the magazine"s wits tackled news items, and Hemingway, in Torrents of Spring Torrents of Spring, aimed his arrows at the American naturalists, Don chose-in his first year away from Catholic teaching-a sacred text. Reportedly, Bunyan wrote Pilgrim"s Progress Pilgrim"s Progress in jail, while being punished for conducting religious services that did not conform to the dictates of the Church of England. In rebellion against conformity and spiritual discipline, Don built his first published work around a pointed literary source. in jail, while being punished for conducting religious services that did not conform to the dictates of the Church of England. In rebellion against conformity and spiritual discipline, Don built his first published work around a pointed literary source.
"Rover Boys" Retrogression" follows two characters, Half-Asleep and Not-Quite-Awake, as they journey to the River of Respect Due. There, they fail to worship properly an "impressive array of state barges carrying great quant.i.ties of Personages, Dignitaries, Golden Calves, Sacred Cows, Cabbages, Kings, and Members of the School Board." Eventually, they reach Expulsion.
A preface accompanies the piece, in which Don explained: a parody, to be completely effective as a parody as a parody, must be a complete reversal of att.i.tude, set in the form of the work being parodied. As "Pilgrim"s Progress" is highly moral, the ensuing "Rover Boys" Retrogression" is not. It has been written as the ant.i.thesis of Bunyan"s book, not because the writer feels any perverse delight in caricaturing things as they are, but purely from an altruistic effort to respect the integrity of the parody form, as he sees it.
"Disingenuous though it is, the disclaimer allowed the story to escape whatever censorship existed," says Robert Murray Davis, the first scholar to track Don"s juvenilia. Don"s trouble with the St. Thomas Eagle Eagle gave him a tactic for smuggling heresy into print. The preface is noteworthy for another reason. Like his father, Don sought to educate his audience, to mount a crusade for his art. Many of Don"s later fictions are also, implicitly, forms of literary criticism. gave him a tactic for smuggling heresy into print. The preface is noteworthy for another reason. Like his father, Don sought to educate his audience, to mount a crusade for his art. Many of Don"s later fictions are also, implicitly, forms of literary criticism.
In fleeing the "School Board," and heading for Expulsion, Half-Asleep and Not-Quite-Awake parallel Don and Pat Goeters on their flight to Mexico. Nearly thirty years would pa.s.s before Don wrote plainly of the incident, in "Departures," and even then he mixed the material into a collage, instead of constructing a narrative or a memoir from it. From the beginning, stories and characterizations based on the conventions of literary realism failed to engage him; he was energized by the fusion of parody and myth, the high and the low, and by the alchemy of turning experience into a stylized essence.
He satirized the sacred, but gently-Bunyan was an iconoclast, one whom Don must have admired on some level. Don razzed the authorities and praised freedom-nothing surprising for an adolescent, except for the sophistication of its style. What is is surprising is the complex layering already evident in Don"s work. Aside from the surprising is the complex layering already evident in Don"s work. Aside from the Pilgrim"s Pilgrim"s parody and the buried personal references, a second literary source comes in for scrutiny: The Rover Boys Series for Young Americans. parody and the buried personal references, a second literary source comes in for scrutiny: The Rover Boys Series for Young Americans.
Edward Stratemeyer, writing under the pseudonym Arthur M. Winfield, published the first Rover Boys book, The Rover Boys at School, or The Cadets at Putnam Hall, The Rover Boys at School, or The Cadets at Putnam Hall, in 1899. Whitman Publishers reprinted this volume in a handsome edition in the 1930s. The Rover Boys, d.i.c.k, Tom, and Sam, are among the most obnoxious heroes in children"s literature, haughty, cruel, violent. The series kicks off with a disingenuous preface. Stratemeyer wrote, ""The Rover Boys at School" has been written that those of you who have never been at an American military academy for boys may gain some insight into the workings of such an inst.i.tution." The story is longer on high jinks than on insight. Stratemeyer referred to his characters as those "lively, wideawake"-as opposed to Half-Asleep or Not-Quite-Awake-"fun-loving Rover brothers." in 1899. Whitman Publishers reprinted this volume in a handsome edition in the 1930s. The Rover Boys, d.i.c.k, Tom, and Sam, are among the most obnoxious heroes in children"s literature, haughty, cruel, violent. The series kicks off with a disingenuous preface. Stratemeyer wrote, ""The Rover Boys at School" has been written that those of you who have never been at an American military academy for boys may gain some insight into the workings of such an inst.i.tution." The story is longer on high jinks than on insight. Stratemeyer referred to his characters as those "lively, wideawake"-as opposed to Half-Asleep or Not-Quite-Awake-"fun-loving Rover brothers."
"Rover Boys" Retrogression" is not just a rebellious parody of a cla.s.sic text; it is an homage to a book about about rebellion, and a disguised travelogue of Don"s escape from home. He took a theme-refusal of authority-and fashioned a collage around it. In so doing, he emphasized the piece"s structural principles. Significantly, he also found a way to get it into print, refusing to stay at a school where his work was not appreciated. rebellion, and a disguised travelogue of Don"s escape from home. He took a theme-refusal of authority-and fashioned a collage around it. In so doing, he emphasized the piece"s structural principles. Significantly, he also found a way to get it into print, refusing to stay at a school where his work was not appreciated.
"Rover Boys" Retrogression" signals one other uprising: Here, Don followed his father in embracing an art form and approaching it with serious playfulness, but it was his mother"s art (or the art she sacrificed for the family) that he chose to pursue. It was her dream that he would animate, and to succeed at it, he would do whatever he had to, whether his father liked it or not.
Don and Goeters were buddies now, after their Mexico adventure, and they did their best to stir excitement at home. They competed for girls, a friendly rivalry that Goeters usually won. He was tall, blond, and handsome. Don was a little gawky, with big horn-rimmed gla.s.ses. He, Goeters, and Carter Roch.e.l.le practiced journalism together. "In the fall of 1948, Don and I drew up a detailed plan for an entire page especially for teenagers to run every Sat.u.r.day in our local morning daily, the Houston Post, Houston Post," Roch.e.l.le recalls. "That September we borrowed his dad"s 1948 Studebaker and drove over to the newspaper"s headquarters, went into the city room and asked to see the editor. Amazingly, we were granted an audience. We presented our idea. The city editor, Harry Johnston, said he thought it was a great idea-which is why they had just started [a teen page]. Even so, he let us unfold our plan in detail, and it turned out that he liked our thinking better than what they were doing. We got to meet the managing editor, who also listened to our proposal and promised to consider it. A week later, the city editor offered me a job as a cub reporter. Don wasn"t hired, presumably because he was still seventeen while I was eighteen going on nineteen. When I initiated the teen page, I brought Don in as its record critic. Each week he"d review all the new LP records (LPs had just come in, the previous year)." Don filed pieces on Stan Kenton"s band-leading skills, and the odd syncopations in the music of Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. His work stood out among traditional articles on school activities and sports events. His reviewing lasted "about six months, until he and I had a couple of disagreements over editing and he gave it up," Roch.e.l.le says.
Often, Pat Goeters would take his mother"s car after school, and he and Don would go joyriding. Once again, late in his career, Don felt comfortable enough-personally and professionally-to write straightforwardly about his youth. In an autobiographical piece called "Chablis," he recounted: I remember the time, thirty years ago, when I put Herman"s mother"s Buick into a cornfield, on the Beaumont highway. There was another car in my lane, and I didn"t hit it, and it didn"t hit me. I remember veering to the right and down into the ditch and up through the fence and coming to rest in the cornfield and then getting out to wake Herman and the two of us going to see what the happy drunks in the other car had come to, in the ditch on the other side of the road.
Goeters says this pa.s.sage "refers to the time Don got me to take him to Galveston so he could drive past the house of a girlfriend who had recently dumped him. He wanted to drive by without stopping in order to ignore her. He told me that would serve her right. Then he insisted on driving on the return trip and drunkenly missed a turn, went off the road and bounced us across a field, tearing up the bottom of the car."
Don"s youngest brother recalled that when he was a teenager, he wasn"t allowed to drive his father"s car because "my older brothers had raced and wrecked the three earlier Corvettes my father owned until he had gotten fed up." In "Chablis," Don wrote, "There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep for a while while he was in his DWI period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep because she was a girl."
In "Grandmother"s House," a late dialogue piece, two of Don"s speakers reflect:
-Seventeen is a wild age.
-Seventeen is anarchy.
-I was atrocious when I was seventeen. Absolutely atrocious.
-Likewise.
-Drunk driving was the least of it.
-When you think about it now you turn pale.
As the Barthelme children grew, the dynamic shifted on North Wynden Drive. "Though we felt a fierce tribal loyalty with Don and Joan, an engagement with their exploits and opinions, they were young adults," Rick and Steve wrote in Double Down. Double Down. To some extent, Peter, too, felt stuck in the second Barthelme family-the ur-family being Mom and Dad, Don, and Joan. By the time Peter, Rick, and Steve were adolescents, their father had "for the most part excused himself from the child-rearing business to spend his energies on buildings he was designing and clients who needed endless care and persuasion." To some extent, Peter, too, felt stuck in the second Barthelme family-the ur-family being Mom and Dad, Don, and Joan. By the time Peter, Rick, and Steve were adolescents, their father had "for the most part excused himself from the child-rearing business to spend his energies on buildings he was designing and clients who needed endless care and persuasion."
In his late teens, Don was headstrong and stubborn like his father, emotionally guarded, furiously protective of the things that mattered to him-his mother, his writing, his friends. He looked "very much like his mother," his cousin, Elise, recalls. "Their mouth and jaws cupped into mischevious grins, conveying a bond between them that was innate and made stronger by mutual love and respect." The "Barthelme characteristics" included "expressive eyes and lithe body movements." Don had his mother"s "wry humor" and "kept his own counsel."
His father"s busy schedule gave Don more time, more room, to break away, race the car, drink and smoke, read, listen to music, and hone his writing, for which he received more and more attention. In the spring of 1949, his story "Integrity Cycle" (now lost) tied for fourth place in a Scholastic Magazine Scholastic Magazine contest, and he won the Texas Poet Laureate Award for a poem ent.i.tled "Inertia." The high school newspaper, the contest, and he won the Texas Poet Laureate Award for a poem ent.i.tled "Inertia." The high school newspaper, the Lamar Lancer, Lamar Lancer, said the poem addressed the "subject of world cooperation." said the poem addressed the "subject of world cooperation."
It would have been small consolation for the elder Barthelme to know that his son still carried the Basilian Order"s reverence for social diversity wherever he went, or that Don pursued even his leisure activities with the pa.s.sion of someone searching for meaningful principles. During his late adolescence, this pa.s.sion led Don into Houston"s jazz clubs. Nietzsche"s a.s.sertion that "without music the world would be a mistake" became his new spiritual dogma.
Don"s interest in jazz had developed early. In his upstairs bedroom, his father"s former study, he played the drums day and night, until the family could take no more. He moved his trap set outside, into the s.p.a.ce his father had once intended as a garage. The neighbors began to complain. Don arranged with them that he would play whenever they were gone. A picture, taken by his father sometime in the mid-forties, shows Don dressed in white shirt and pants, looking very serious behind a huge ba.s.s drum and a snare. A hi-hat, a crash, and a ride cymbal round out the set. Don"s hair is slicked back and his thick gla.s.ses shine. He props his hands on his drumsticks, which are propped on his right thigh. His fingers are graceful and long, nimble, an extension of the sticks. When he played, he"d keep time with his right hand on the ride cymbal while his left roamed over the snare, the bell of the crash, the hi-hat, diddling, filling, breaking, catching the beat off guard, switching tempos: steady rhythm, startling tangents. Sometimes he wrote musical scores, none of which survive, and he may have fiddled with horns, but the drums were the only instrument he learned to play well.
Pat Goeters recalls visiting Don "in his aerie" and listening to "New Orleans jazz on the radio (WWL in New Orleans-"Moonglow with Martin"). As it got late, Papa Barthelme would come to the bottom of the stairs and yell, "What"sa matter, ain"t Goeters got a home?" "
Don"s senior year in high school, he, Goeters, Carter Roch.e.l.le, and other friends went to "black clubs," Don said, "to hear people like Erskine Hawkins who were touring-us poor little pale little white boys were offered a generous sufferance, tucked away in a small s.p.a.ce behind the bandstand with an enormous black cop posted at the door. In other places you could hear the pianist Peck Kelly, a truly legendary figure, or Lionel Hampton, or once in a great while Louis Armstrong or Woody Herman. I was sort of drenched in all this." Houston was generally more relaxed about racial matters than most American cities. In few other metropolitan areas in the South in the 1940s would he and his "pale little" pals have enjoyed the freedom to enter such clubs.
From jazz, Don learned "something about making a statement," he said, "about placing emphases within a statement or introducing variations...[taking] a tired old tune...[and] literally [making] it new. The interest and the drama were in the formal manipulation of the rather slight material. And [the musicians] were heroic figures, you know, very romantic."
The local jazz was heavily inflected with Texas swing and rhythm and blues, called "race music" in those days. It was guitar-heavy, drum-heavy, with a four-beat, twelve-bar base. Don listened to the two black radio stations in town, KCOH and KYOK, both now defunct, whose DJs gave themselves monikers like "Mister El Toro" and "Daddy Deepthroat." The largest clubs, all southeast of downtown, were the Eldorado, at the corner of Elgin and Dowling streets ("it was strictly an African-American establishment," Roch.e.l.le recalls, "and we were underage as well, but they let us sneak in the back because we knew some of the people there"); the Club Ebony, at Rosewood and Dowling; the Club Savoy on Wheeler; and Shady"s Playhouse, at Elgin and Ennis.
In addition to jazz greats, Houston"s clubs featured talents like Lightnin" Hopkins, Albert "Ice Man" Collins, Johnny Ace, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and T-Bone Walker, whose R & B electric guitar stylings helped define what was later called "West Coast jazz." In 1949, Don Robey, a Houston businessman and reputed gambler, founded Peac.o.c.k Records to promote Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, a regular in Robey"s Bronze Peac.o.c.k Club. The record label thrived, putting Houston on the jazz map, along with Oklahoma City and Kansas City. It was a thrilling scene in which to be immersed.
In the various jazz styles that developed during this period, drummers were major innovators. The slightest variation in rhythm could violate or purify the music (depending on how one heard it). For example, Jo Jones, who got his start in the thirties playing with the Blue Devils in Oklahoma City (a band revered by the young Ralph Ellison), would often abandon the beat to play rhythmic variations on his band mates" solos, using the hi-hat as the focal point. This untethered the tune, gave it flight. Known for his delicate brushwork, he also shifted the beat away from the ba.s.s drum and tom-toms and moved it to the cymbals-in effect, lifting the rhythm from the bottom to the top, lightening the sound. Jones was part of a generation of musicians that included Chick Webb, Gene Krupa, Baby Dodds, Buddy Rich, and Sid Catlett. They streamlined jazz drumming, dropping the bells, whistles, and rattles that had characterized big-band percussion in the tens and twenties. They introduced subtle polyrhythmic playing and syncopation to expand swing and encourage improvisation. Webb was one of the first drummers to tune his drums melodically-he keyed his ba.s.s drum to the stand-up ba.s.s"s G string. "Some say drums have no part of the melody," Catlett once said. "They just provide the rhythm. I look at it like this: swing is my idea of how a melody should go. Now I ask you, what is swing without the drums?" Using swishes, crashes, strokes, thunderous rim shots to choke off a phrase, or accenting a piano"s ba.s.s line with snare taps to drive it into the forefront of a tune, these stickmen redefined jazz in their time, and Don paid close attention.
In the Paris Review Paris Review interview with J. D. O"Hara, Don lists as one of his strongest influences "Big Sid Catlett." Versatility distinguished Big Sid-his ability to move from big bands to small combos, from swing to bebop. He was Louis Armstrong"s favorite drummer; Satchmo used him from 1938 to 1942, and again from 1947 to 1949. In between, Catlett hooked up with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker for some of the earliest bop recordings. Don admired him for his capacity, and his willingness, to be a transitional figure, to carry the old into the new, to play the new interview with J. D. O"Hara, Don lists as one of his strongest influences "Big Sid Catlett." Versatility distinguished Big Sid-his ability to move from big bands to small combos, from swing to bebop. He was Louis Armstrong"s favorite drummer; Satchmo used him from 1938 to 1942, and again from 1947 to 1949. In between, Catlett hooked up with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker for some of the earliest bop recordings. Don admired him for his capacity, and his willingness, to be a transitional figure, to carry the old into the new, to play the new against against the old in ways that enriched the traditions the old in ways that enriched the traditions and and the innovations he pioneered. The depth of this achievement-and the fierce resistance to it, intially-is reflected in a Buddy Rich interview from 1956, in which Rich expressed his suspicions of change, praising the old big-band styles and excoriating bebop. "Whereas in the days when it was necessary to swing a band, when a drummer had to be a powerhouse, today more or less the "cool school" has taken over," Rich said, "and I don"t believe there"s such a thing as a "cool drummer." You either swing a band or you don"t swing a band and that"s what"s lacking today. There aren"t any guys who get back there and play with any kind of guts. And I like a heavyweight." the innovations he pioneered. The depth of this achievement-and the fierce resistance to it, intially-is reflected in a Buddy Rich interview from 1956, in which Rich expressed his suspicions of change, praising the old big-band styles and excoriating bebop. "Whereas in the days when it was necessary to swing a band, when a drummer had to be a powerhouse, today more or less the "cool school" has taken over," Rich said, "and I don"t believe there"s such a thing as a "cool drummer." You either swing a band or you don"t swing a band and that"s what"s lacking today. There aren"t any guys who get back there and play with any kind of guts. And I like a heavyweight."
Catlett made no such distinctions. He was a team player, serving the music. With the Teddy Wilson Quartet, in the 1940s, he could be completely selfeffacing, showcasing his band mates. With Benny Goodman"s orchestra, he could rein in the large group and drive them relentlessly toward a single destination. With Armstrong"s All-Stars, he could provide individual rhythms for each soloist, leading them to the grooves that best suited their particular strengths. He could make swing bop, and bop swing. He was playful and serious, high and low. He was Perelman and Hemingway.
After graduating from Lamar High School in the spring of 1949, Don wanted to hit the road with a small band. His father did not approve, and they argued. Eventually, Don defied his dad, packed up his drums, and did a series of engagements in southeast Texas. It"s impossible to know where he played, but in those days the Last Concert Cafe, a Mexican restaurant and dance hall on Nance Street in Houston, regularly hosted amateur jazz bands, as did the Tin Hall Dancehall and Saloon in Cypress, Texas, the oldest roadhouse in Harris County, and the Starlight Barber Shop and Pool Hall in Crockett. These were likely venues for a local group, catering to mostly middle-cla.s.s, and some mixed-race, crowds. The tour seems to have soured quickly. By September, Don had enrolled at the University of Houston, once again frustrating his father, who had hoped he would go to an Ivy League school.
6.
FROM BAUDELAIRE TO ROSENBERG.
Apparently worried that Don was frittering away his talents, his father seems to have tried to rein him in. Sometime during Don"s first, or perhaps at the start of his second, year in college, he gave his son the Marcel Raymond book. He also slipped Don a copy of Rabelais"s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gargantua and Pantagruel, with the counsel, "If you imitate a writer"s style, always choose the best." with the counsel, "If you imitate a writer"s style, always choose the best."
These gestures were generous and shrewd. Just as Don was starting his university education, his father rea.s.serted his role as primary mentor. He made sensitive choices: Both books suited Don"s interests and tastes, while appealing to his wit and verbal skills. They also insisted on the wisdom of heeding one"s elders. Gargantua is Pantagruel"s father. He laments his "advanced age" and the generational changes he has witnessed. He admits, ruefully, "I see the robbers, hangmen [and] freebooters...of today more learned than the theologians and preachers of my day. What can I say?" He implies that fathers have always sacrificed to give their children every advantage.
Raymond"s From Baudelaire to Surrealism From Baudelaire to Surrealism holds that progress must be based on tradition. It traces a consistent artistic line rooted in romanticism, noting the fruitful meanders and the dead ends facing young writers. Mallarme was an especially heroic figure to Raymond, who wrote that for the poet, "[T]he word with its vowels and diphthongs represents a kind of flesh" animated by the spirit of an "ideal world." By wrenching words from their habitual contexts, freeing them from common usage and cliche, Mallarme sought to "restore the integrity and primordial innocence of things that have been b.a.s.t.a.r.dized and disfigured." holds that progress must be based on tradition. It traces a consistent artistic line rooted in romanticism, noting the fruitful meanders and the dead ends facing young writers. Mallarme was an especially heroic figure to Raymond, who wrote that for the poet, "[T]he word with its vowels and diphthongs represents a kind of flesh" animated by the spirit of an "ideal world." By wrenching words from their habitual contexts, freeing them from common usage and cliche, Mallarme sought to "restore the integrity and primordial innocence of things that have been b.a.s.t.a.r.dized and disfigured."
Don would have recognized here a Christian allegory: language"s fall from grace and the writer"s attempt to save it. He would also have seen that a writer like Perelman, despite his humbler materials, was not so different from Mallarme. Inadvertently, in trying to steer Don in a more serious direction, his father gave him a map for the road he was already on. Still, in bestowing these books, the elder Barthelme implicitly embraced, or at least sanctioned, his son"s desire to become a writer (better that than the itinerant life of a jazz drummer).
"Did you ever realize that if you took all the wonderful things in the world and put them on city blocks one after the other, you would run like a rabbit from it?" This was the kind of question Don"s father asked his students when he started teaching at the University of Houston in 1946. By the time Don enrolled in the school in the fall of 1949, his father was a fixture in the architecture department-its first professor. Barthelme"s practice still flourished, though his reputation as a "son of a b.i.t.c.h" caused him more and more headaches with contractors. Additionally, though his projects had drawn the attention of other architects, none of them had made the kind of splash that changes the face of a city. Other modernists were making more visible marks in Houston. Herman Lloyd designed the city"s first International Style skysc.r.a.per. Completed in 1952, the twenty-one story Melrose Building on Walker Avenue was distinguished by turquoise spandrels and horizontal brise-soleils. Drivers in the north-south traffic on the Gulf Freeway, which led in and out of town, couldn"t miss it. Barthelme had been a local pioneer, but starting in the late forties, others began stealing the spotlight. When the University of Houston approached him, he was delighted to take up a new challenge.
The UH campus, southeast of downtown, had been a busy work in progress since the twenties. Flat, white, surrounded here and there by skinny new trees, the quadrangles and buildings, made of sh.e.l.l limestone, felt to students cold and imposing. The school was isolated from the rest of the city. World War II veterans crowded the campus; many of them lived in a haphazard trailer village on-site, while those with families occupied wooden barracks nearby. As Barthelme organized the architecture school, the noise and activity of fresh construction made cla.s.sroom focus difficult. Nevertheless, he managed with what he had.
Eventually, he designed a course called Concepts, and later expanded it to a two-year requirement, with a second half named Human Studies. "I invited guests from all disciplines each week," he said. "The subjects of these courses included s.p.a.ce, enclosure, change....I went wherever the subject led. Our criterion: Did it make sense?"
He remembered the one "important" nugget he"d gotten from Frank Lloyd Wright during the fight over the Stanley Marcus house. "You shouldn"t enclose s.p.a.ce," Wright said. "Human beings appreciate and enjoy everything about s.p.a.ce," Barthelme observed. "s.p.a.ce in which to breathe, s.p.a.ce in which to move. When you take s.p.a.ce away from them, you deprive them. But what do we do? We live in boxes." This conundrum vexed him as he led his students in the cla.s.sroom. While lecturing, he "realized that all architecture was enclosure-even the open squares are an enclosing form. All architecture based on a single concept!"
Teaching, as well as exposure to young people"s enthusiasms, renewed Barthelme"s energy. He continued to receive commissions and did some of his most innovative work during this period, including the West Columbia Elementary School and the first modern church in Houston. He also ran increasingly afoul of workers and contractors, making what many of them considered excessive demands and insisting on perfection. On one project, he made the contractors "rip [everything] out and buy new gla.s.s" when the gla.s.s didn"t meet his window specifications. Stories like this formed Barthelme"s suppertable talk, and reveal the heroic picture he presented to his children. (In Paradise, Paradise, Don writes of an architect who had "been working on transforming an old armory into a school and had just ordered the contractor to rip out and replace six thousand square feet of expensive cas.e.m.e.nt windows. Probably the man"s profit on the job." Later, the architect suspects the furious contractor of wiring a pipe bomb to his car.) Don writes of an architect who had "been working on transforming an old armory into a school and had just ordered the contractor to rip out and replace six thousand square feet of expensive cas.e.m.e.nt windows. Probably the man"s profit on the job." Later, the architect suspects the furious contractor of wiring a pipe bomb to his car.) Barthelme"s woes with manufacturers and bosses made it harder for him to get good prices on materials; eventually, he turned to teaching full-time. Years later, he admitted, "I really quit practicing because I could not get compet.i.tive bids."
Between cla.s.ses at the University of Houston, Don studied Marcel Raymond"s book. He may not have reacted to the volume the way his father had hoped-by turning away from popular writing-but the elder Barthelme had certainly known how to reach him. Many years later, From Baudelaire to Surrealism From Baudelaire to Surrealism still informed Don"s aesthetic views. For Raymond, the point of writing was not to represent the world as it is, but to engender startling new revelations. He called this activity "forc[ing]...the gates of Paradise." It happens, he said, when words "are no longer signs; [when] they partic.i.p.ate in the objects...they evoke." still informed Don"s aesthetic views. For Raymond, the point of writing was not to represent the world as it is, but to engender startling new revelations. He called this activity "forc[ing]...the gates of Paradise." It happens, he said, when words "are no longer signs; [when] they partic.i.p.ate in the objects...they evoke."
Fourteen years after reading this sentence, Don would write, "[A] mysterious shift...takes place as soon as one says that art is not about something but is is something...the literary text becomes an object in the world rather than a text or commentary upon the world." something...the literary text becomes an object in the world rather than a text or commentary upon the world."
Raymond said that "obscurity" is an "indispensable element in a poetics" that hopes to rescue language from shopworn uses. Don revived Raymond"s point in his 1982 essay, "Not-Knowing": "However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet-unspeakable, the as-yet-unspoken." Then he quoted Raymond on Mallarme: The poet"s style is a "whisper...close to silence."
From Raymond, Don learned to value language that captured or created immediate experience. immediate experience. A writer approached this goal by combining forms (phrases, imagery) in a way that triggered mental agitation, instead of melting the forms together so their properties vanished in an illusion of "reality." A writer approached this goal by combining forms (phrases, imagery) in a way that triggered mental agitation, instead of melting the forms together so their properties vanished in an illusion of "reality."
In the end, Raymond admitted that Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Rimbaud "failed" in their desire to create a "new sensibility." Their downfall and the defeat of anyone who heeds them was and would continue to be inevitable. Still, they could be likened to "Icarus or Prometheus," adventurous souls "illuminating the virgin lands into which others have ventured after them."
He concluded, "[S]ince romanticism...the poet has often performed the function of the look-out aboard ship. It is true that this poetry has few readers, and that it sometimes discourages readers; nevertheless, it registers the slightest changes in the atmosphere, it makes the gesture that others will imitate and develop (in writings that will be read and rewarded), and it is first to utter the long awaited word."
In Raymond, Don discovered the excitement and the sanction of a visionary literary tradition. At the same time, he caught an inkling of the difficulties involved, of the loneliness and misunderstandings likely in the life of such an artist-all of which would have seemed, to a nineteen-year-old, far more romantic than miserable.
Don"s copy of From Baudelaire to Surrealism From Baudelaire to Surrealism contained an introduction by Harold Rosenberg, a Brooklyn-born art critic who, along with William Phillips, Philip Rahv, Granville Hicks, and others writing in contained an introduction by Harold Rosenberg, a Brooklyn-born art critic who, along with William Phillips, Philip Rahv, Granville Hicks, and others writing in Partisan Review Partisan Review and and New Ma.s.ses, New Ma.s.ses, had sparked the 1930s debates about proletarian literature, art, and politics. had sparked the 1930s debates about proletarian literature, art, and politics.
Rosenberg"s introduction forcefully affected Don. It begins: "The best French poetry since Baudelaire has been enlisted in a siege against the cliche. This has not been by any means merely a question of taste. It has been more a matter of life and death." In "Not-Knowing," Don would echo almost word for word Rosenberg"s argument that the "Frenchman has so much tradition he can easily say anything, except what he wants to say...he must restore freshness to his language." The ultimate goal, Rosenberg said (a line Don quotes in his essay), is the "silencing of the existing rhetoric."
Rosenberg argued that American writing must stop the "cultural clatter" that threatened to obscure the nation"s romantic spirit. Following World War I, Williams, c.u.mmings, Stein, Pound, Moore, Eliot, and Stevens became "enthusiastically frenchified." "They learned from Paris what it meant to find a word that was free...or that stuck out...at an angle." Then a "depressing series of events took place...a new generation of American poets started out to invent themselves and found they had a philosophy, marxism." In the proletarian literature of the thirties the "cliche was restored to a premium," Rosenberg wrote. Young writers now had to reverse this trend. They had to understand that "verbal substance" equals "living substance," and "lift...up" their words in startling phrases that bring readers "face to face with existence." The "acid of poetry" will turn the commonplace to dust as it "burns each word away from the old links."
Thirty-two years after first reading Rosenberg, Don still followed his lead. That he depended so heavily on Raymond"s and Rosenberg"s remarks in composing "Not-Knowing" is revealing in many ways. It speaks of the consistency of Don"s beliefs, and of his loyalty to his literary mentors.
It"s also important to recall where he got the book.
In the 1980s, after living away from Texas for nearly twenty years, Don returned to Houston. He a.s.sumed a teaching position at the University of Houston. In returning to his father"s enclave, partaking of his father"s ident.i.ty at the very same inst.i.tution, and revisiting, for a crucial essay on writing, his father"s long-ago gift, Don seemed finally to accept the old man"s world. And yet the aesthetic he championed was one of which the elder Barthelme never approved. In the 1950s, Don"s attachment to Rosenberg"s vision signaled a break from his father, even though the latter had offered him the book. In the early 1960s, Don would work for Rosenberg in New York, learning fresh ways of thinking about abstract art and Pop Art, and moving far beyond his father"s concerns.
7.
BARDLEY.
"It was a bright shy white new university on the Gulf Coast. Gulls and oleanders and quick howling hurricanes." These lines from Don"s "See the Moon?" remain an apt description of the core campus of the University of Houston. "The teachers [were] brown burly men with power boats and beer cans."
Initially a junior college established in the 1920s, the university got a boost from the financial contributions of Hugh Roy Cullen. His money, earned in cotton and oil, went almost entirely into the campus infrastructure. These physical improvements helped the inst.i.tution secure university status, but Cullen"s generosity did not extend to the curricula or to research funding. Nor did the school attract top-notch personnel. By the time Don enrolled as a student in 1949, the faculty was a motley a.s.semblage of former public school teachers and instructors lured from more established universities around the country. In Don"s first year there, the school"s vision of itself changed from ambitions of greatness to a more practical and hardheaded approach, serving returning soldiers, and trying to expand its financial base by attracting as many students as possible. The architecture school was in its infancy; there was, as yet, no law school, and other professional programs were rare. The College of Technology was essentially a trade school.
On-site housing was scarce, except for the temporary barracks set up for married ex-servicemen. It was an urban campus, full of commuters and students from various social backgrounds, many of whom couldn"t afford more expensive schools. In 1949, construction on what would become the main administration building, Ezekiel Cullen, had just begun. Its sh.e.l.l-limestone facing (its "bright shy white" look), relief sculptures, and aluminum detailing would set the standard for future campus buildings, but at the time, the campus had no real center, no quads to speak of, no paths with any logical orientation. Like the house in which Don had been raised, the school underwent constant revision. Near the new administration building sat an oval reflecting basin. It had been there since 1939, intended to serve as a central gathering spot, but it was too small and spare a s.p.a.ce to draw many students, and it wouldn"t be effective as a plaza until it was completely redesigned and fountains were added in the 1970s. In the late forties, Don"s father and a new colleague of his named Howard Barnstone were teaching in barnlike metal structures, which would serve as the architecture school for nearly forty years, until Philip Johnson designed a building for the school that was modeled on plans for a never-made eighteenth-century palace.
Don had a strongly developed sense of citizenship, a loyalty to his city and its inst.i.tutions, including the school, and a pride in helping improve his local surroundings (a pride he"d learned from his father). Don"s acquaintances in his first semesters at UH describe him as a buoyant, eager young man, full of energy and projecting a confidence he may not always have felt. Joe Maranto, who edited the school"s newspaper, the Daily Cougar, Daily Cougar, said that Don attracted people "like a magnet." He was slender and tall, with light brown, slightly reddish hair. When he smiled, the corners of his mouth curled up, and he would raise his eyebrows mischievously, making his companions feel they were in on a joke with him. One day in the fall of 1949, he showed up in the Department of Journalism, ostensibly to make an appointment with a faculty adviser. Helen Moore, who was working for the department on a student fellowship, was struck by his "striding, almost jaunty walk," his pride and selfa.s.surance, his "deep and rich voice and the way that he spoke with a distinctly sharp enunciation" (having overcome his lip twitch of a few years before). When he looked at her, she said, "his blue eyes were serious and intense," and he listened to her closely. said that Don attracted people "like a magnet." He was slender and tall, with light brown, slightly reddish hair. When he smiled, the corners of his mouth curled up, and he would raise his eyebrows mischievously, making his companions feel they were in on a joke with him. One day in the fall of 1949, he showed up in the Department of Journalism, ostensibly to make an appointment with a faculty adviser. Helen Moore, who was working for the department on a student fellowship, was struck by his "striding, almost jaunty walk," his pride and selfa.s.surance, his "deep and rich voice and the way that he spoke with a distinctly sharp enunciation" (having overcome his lip twitch of a few years before). When he looked at her, she said, "his blue eyes were serious and intense," and he listened to her closely.
That afternoon, returning home, Don told his mother that he had met a "handsome girl" at the University of Houston. Years later, he confessed to Helen Moore that he had ducked into the journalism office on the pretext of needing advice because he had seen her sitting there. He enjoyed spreading his wings on campus. Exposed at home to a wider world of culture than most of his cla.s.smates, he could dazzle people with his erudition. And the times were heady. The war was over. Jackson Pollock was making waves, Miles Davis had just recorded The Birth of the Cool, The Birth of the Cool, John Cage had recently written and performed his Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, and transistor radios and portable tape recorders were popular. John Cage had recently written and performed his Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, and transistor radios and portable tape recorders were popular.
Maranto, a World War II veteran, had noticed Don"s column about Stan Kenton on the Houston Post Houston Post"s "Teen Page" when Don was still in high school. When he met Don at UH, Maranto, a fellow jazz lover, recruited this fine young talent for the Cougar. Cougar. More than ever, Don was immersed in More than ever, Don was immersed in The New Yorker The New Yorker"s style of humor. He "would quote Dorothy Parker, always in an appropriate way, at the right moment when it fit," Maranto recalled. He saw Don"s potential to become a new Benchley or Perelman, both of whom were "getting kind of tired about that time," but he also noted Don"s creative restlessness, and couldn"t predict which direction his work might take. "[W]riters like Steinbeck and Hemingway always got into the characters of people," Maranto said, but it didn"t appear that Don would emulate them because on some level, it seemed, he didn"t "really like people all that much."
Don typed quickly with only two fingers. In the cramped Cougar Cougar office, he "pecked away, usually writing a little something against one of the university departments, just having a ball," Maranto said. He would "break himself up writing those things; he was a joy to be around." Don was much more at home at the newspaper than in the cla.s.sroom. Most of his teachers let him down. As he wrote in "See the Moon?" they seemed more interested in "burning beef in their backyards, [these] brown burly men with power boats and beer cans," than in keeping up with the latest intellectual developments. The creative writing curriculum was minimal. He was so disillusioned that by spring term, he had stopped taking cla.s.ses. office, he "pecked away, usually writing a little something against one of the university departments, just having a ball," Maranto said. He would "break himself up writing those things; he was a joy to be around." Don was much more at home at the newspaper than in the cla.s.sroom. Most of his teachers let him down. As he wrote in "See the Moon?" they seemed more interested in "burning beef in their backyards, [these] brown burly men with power boats and beer cans," than in keeping up with the latest intellectual developments. The creative writing curriculum was minimal. He was so disillusioned that by spring term, he had stopped taking cla.s.ses.
Just as advocates of modern architecture fought with Beaux-Arts proponents in America"s architecture departments in the 1920s and 1930s, university English departments were split between philologists, who espoused the study of grammar and a historical approach to literature, and a diverse group of young professors (critics) who promoted the close reading of texts. The critics maintained that philological study merely cataloged-and thereby deadened-poetry and prose. Marxist critics felt that texts should be a.n.a.lyzed in an economic context, while the so-called New Critics believed that stories and poems should be studied as ideal formal constructs.
It was not until the 1930s that anything resembling a course of study in creative writing appeared on a university campus and it coincided with the rise of the New Criticism. In the 1920s, Allen Tate, one of the founders of the New Criticism, said that "we study literature today as if n.o.body ever again intended to write any more of it. The official academic point of view is that all the literature has been written, and it is now a branch of history...the young writer is not going to find out how to study the poem; he will only know how to study its historical background."
Tate and his comrades-John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks-argued that a text"s "quality" could be separated from its historical context and other circ.u.mstances of its production. Ultimately, quality lay in a text"s language. Writers from different periods could share formal properties. For example, Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot were spiritual kin, Tate said; they had in common the qualities of "irony, humility, introspection, reverence."
Don felt ambivalent about the New Criticism. He was already a good, close reader of texts, and he shared a number of the New Critics" beliefs. He was sympathetic to the argument that a dry, grammatical study of literature divorced thought from feeling. He appreciated subtlety and irony, key qualities in the canon of the New Criticism. He was also beginning to read and appreciate the modernists.
But he was powerfully swayed by Marcel Raymond"s historical awareness, Raymond"s tracing of a consistent literary tradition, and the implication that a writer must choose to ally himself with one tradition or another. This choice, Raymond felt, was essential to the kind kind of text a writer would produce. of text a writer would produce.