Hiding Man

[Dave Monroe]

Hiding Man:
A Biography of Donald Barthelme
Tracy Daugherty
Hardcover $35.00

St. Martin's Press
Published: February 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37868-4
ISBN-10: 0-312-37868-8
Trim: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
592 pages, Plus two 8-page b&w photo inserts


In the 1960s Donald Barthelme came to prominence as the leader of the
Postmodern movement. He was a fixture at the New Yorker, publishing
more than 100 short stories, including such masterpieces as "Me and
Miss Mandible," the tale of a thirty-five-year-old sent to elementary
school by clerical error, and "A Shower of Gold,"in which a sculptor
agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I? He had a
dynamic relationship with his father that influenced much of his
fiction. He worked as an editor, a designer, a curator, a news
reporter, and a teacher. He was at the forefront of literary Greenwich
Village which saw him develop lasting friendships with Thomas Pynchon,
Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, and Norman Mailer. Married four
times, he had a volatile private life. He died of cancer in 1989. The
recipient of many prestigious literary awards, he is best remembered
for the classic novelsSnow White, The Dead Father, and many short
stories, all of which remain in print today.  This is the first
biography of Donald Barthelme, and it is nothing short of a
masterpiece.

http://us.macmillan.com/hidingman

The New York Times
March 22, 2009
The Story Artist
By COLM TOIBIN


The best of Donald Barthelme’s stories have an exquisite, shimmering
beauty. They take immense risks with tone and content; they bathe the
known world in the waters of irony, rhythmic energy and exuberant
formal trickiness. The systems used in his style are close to the
thrilling moments of obscure mystery in John Ashbery’s poetry, or to
the non sequitur followed by pure sequitur in the plays of Beckett, or
to the deadpan radiant perfection in the sentences of Don DeLillo. It
is easy for work like Barthelme’s, so exciting when it first appears,
to date and seem stale, and eventually, on subsequent readings, to
become too smart for its own good — but this has not happened with
many of the stories. For making it new and strange, he is a heroic
figure in modern literature. And, even though fashions have changed
and he no longer sits center stage, he remains an important influence,
especially in the United States.

It is maybe right and fitting that Donald Barthelme the writer arose
in response to another exacting presence who also bore his name — his
father, Donald Barthelme the architect. The senior Barthelme created
important modern buildings in Texas, including the family home on the
outskirts of Houston, and spent his life preaching and teaching about
the need for a new and uncompromising modern style. (“Be prepared for
failure,” he told his son once he had seriously embarked on his career
as a writer.) Donald Jr., born in 1931, remembered moving when he was
8 to the house his father had built: it was, he said, “wonderful to
live in but strange to see on the Texas prairie. On Sundays people
used to park their cars out on the street and stare. . . . We used to
get up from Sunday dinner, if enough cars had parked, and run out in
front of the house in a sort of chorus line, doing high kicks.”

The early chapters of Tracy Daugherty’s admiring, comprehensive and
painstaking biography of Donald Barthelme, “Hiding Man,” emphasize the
challenging education he received in taste and theory from his father
and then the brilliant education he gave himself in Houston when he
was in his 20s. Barthelme was a journalist, a jazz lover, an art
lover, a moviegoer, an avid reader, a curator and, with his second
wife, a writer and designer of advertisements. He was also the
brilliant young editor of the magazine Forum, which he oversaw from
1956 (after he returned from the Korean War) to 1960, publishing
original work by figures like Leslie Fiedler, Hugh Kenner, William
Carlos Williams, Norman Mailer, Walker Percy and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
In 1960 he published Marshall McLuhan’s speech “The Medium Is the
Message.”

As a writer, Barthelme was deeply alert to what was happening in the
visual arts, reading the criticism of, say, Harold Rosenberg with the
same enthusiasm he brought to Beckett’s work as it began to appear in
English. Painters like de Kooning seemed to enter his spirit as much
as any authors he read; there is a sense in his work, as in that of
certain painters, that the human form or presence is worth treating as
merely an exciting aspect of line and gesture, tone and texture.

Like anyone ambitious and talented in a provincial city, Barthelme,
who was brought up Catholic, was open to depression and unease. He
loved the night, and it is easy to imagine how much he must have
enjoyed staying up late and drinking with his friends and his (second)
wife in Houston before, having published some stories, he left for New
York in 1962. A friend recalled, “We were both alcoholics by the time
he left Houston for New York, but it was in New York that he began to
drink every day.”

Barthelme came to New York at the invitation of Harold Rosenberg, to
work on the magazine Location, which brought him into the very center
of the city’s art world and the battles between Rosenberg and Clement
Greenberg over abstraction and image. These battles spilled out from
the studios and the galleries into bars like the Cedar Tavern, where
the artists and the critics congregated. Barthelme loved the city, the
seediness and the variety, the long nights of serious argument, the
drinking, the jazz clubs, the gallery openings. In Robert
Rauschenberg’s studio he noticed the “good New York grime” on the
windows with relish and approval. But his wife, who gave up her job in
Houston to join him, enjoyed New York rather less than Barthelme did.
It was inevitable that they would split.

Despite the late nights and the fun he was having in the city,
Barthelme used the discipline he had learned in Houston to continue
producing stories, working on his fiction in the magazine offices
every morning. By early 1963 he had enough stories for a first book.
He also had an aesthetic vision. In the second issue of Location he
took part in a debate about the future of fiction in which Saul Bellow
argued that the modern novel was “predominantly realistic” because
“realism is based upon our common life.” Barthelme countered that a
“mysterious shift . . . takes place as soon as one says that art is
not about something but is something,” when the literary text “becomes
an object in the world rather than a commentary upon the world.”

Also in 1963, Barthelme began writing for The New Yorker, where the
editor William Shawn thought his work should be read like poetry
rather than fiction; that same year, he had his first book accepted by
Little, Brown. Soon, he had a contract with The New Yorker, with which
he maintained an intense relationship for many years — becoming tense,
for example, when his editor Roger Angell, who accepted some stories
and turned others down, went on vacation. When his book appeared,
critics noted that he was “a member of the advance guard . . . very
far out indeed” and that he might turn existentialism into “as popular
an American institution as pizza pie.”

Soon, Barthelme began to travel in Europe; he fell in love with Birgit
Egelund-Peterson in Denmark. In Copenhagen he wrote one of his most
famous stories, “The Indian Uprising,” which Daugherty (a former
student of Barthelme’s) rightly calls “one of the most challenging and
beautiful stories written by an American.” When Birgit became
pregnant, they returned to America, where they were married and their
daughter, Anne, was born.

Back in New York, Barthelme continued his routine of working hard on
his fiction in the mornings, but he was unsettled. He loved walking
around the Village; he had a talent for friendship. He became close to
Grace Paley and had a brief fling with her. He continued to see his
literary agent Lynn Nesbit, who had been his lover before he left;
but, for her, the affair was over. He was drinking. The marriage to
Birgit was not working. Eventually his wife and daughter went back to
Denmark.

In the early 1970s, Barthelme began to teach. Since he had much to say
about writing, cared deeply about fiction, and loved talking and
arguing, he became a passionate and gregarious creative writing
professor. In 1981 he returned to Houston (now with his fourth wife)
to teach full time at the university. It was a triumphant return: as
his daughter Anne said, he loved Houston and “was a total rock star
there.” His second daughter was born in 1982. Seven years later
Barthelme died of throat cancer at the age of 58.

Donald Barthelme was lucky in many ways. He was lucky in the quality
of his upbringing and education, lucky, also, to find a home at The
New Yorker for work that might have seemed difficult and obscure; he
was lucky in love a number of times — his second wife, Helen,
especially, emerges in these pages as a wise and affectionate friend
throughout his life. He was lucky, too, that he continued to work on
his fiction to the end, work that in its very sharpness and newness
must have taken its toll. He was also fortunate in the way he could
drink, announcing to a friend in the 1980s that he was “a little drunk
all the time” without going through many periods where he was “falling
down.”

And he has been lucky, finally, in having a biographer who has not
dwelt too much on the darkness in Barthelme’s soul, the unevenness of
the work or the sadness and messiness of his life. Daugherty, instead,
has managed to make a case for a body of work in which the best
stories have the aura of a second act, and to create a convincing
narrative out of a life that was deeply engaged, passionate and maybe
even fulfilled, despite the demons, and out of a life of the mind that
was rigorous, exacting and, despite Barthelme’s early death, deeply
productive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/books/review/Toibin-t.html

Introduction to The Writings of Donald Barthelme

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_barthelme.html