Hiding Man_ A Biography Of Donald Barthelme Part 14

"We were glad to see each other, and [Don] was so...happy...that I was not angry at first," Helen claimed. "In fact, we hugged, laughed, and talked for several minutes. About the girl, Don said simply that 'she was not anyone who mattered.' " He had leapt eagerly into the sophisticated mess of the art world (whose s.e.xual att.i.tudes were considerably loosened by the growing use of birth-control pills).

Once more, Helen was swept into the whirl of art-world parties-most of them held in Elaine de Kooning's studio. One evening, Helen remarked dryly that there were an awful lot of parties in art circles, and Don replied, "[N]o one else works as hard as we did [in Houston]."

"Before long, [Don] became as pa.s.sionate as ever," Helen recalled. But after finding him with another woman, "it was impossible for me to respond to his gestures of love. I was affectionate but...felt nothing more."

Almost immediately, Don insisted that they live in different places. He offered to let her stay in the Fifteenth Street apartment while he looked for another spot. Discouraged, Helen "decided there was nothing for [her] to do." She returned to Houston and moved in with her mother.

Don's affair with Lynn Nesbit hastened the end of things. "Helen would have hung on forever," Herman Gollob says.

She resumed her work at the ad agency and began teaching again at Dominican College. "[W]ithin a short time," she said, "I started a new social life without Don." She was soaring above the mess.

Don felt restless on Fifteenth Street now-he a.s.sociated the apartment with Helen-and he hoped to find a less expensive place. An acquaintance told him about an empty rent-controlled flat on West Eleventh Street, near Sixth Avenue. Don checked it out, and in the spring of 1963, he moved into what would become his permanent home in Manhattan.

West Eleventh Street is in the heart of the West Village, famous for its bohemian past, when rents were low and rooms were widely available, before Sixth and Seventh avenues cut through the small, winding streets. Among those who have called the Village home are John Reed, Max Eastman, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan..."these nuts that call[ed] themselves artists," as one old-timer put it, "not even bothering to close [their] blinds."

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp climbed the arch in Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park and declared the "Independent Republic of Greenwich Village." When Eastman helped found The Ma.s.ses The Ma.s.ses in 1910, he meant to harness the neighborhood's literary talent to publish "what is too naked or true for a money-making press," a tradition carried on by in 1910, he meant to harness the neighborhood's literary talent to publish "what is too naked or true for a money-making press," a tradition carried on by The Partisan Review The Partisan Review and and The Village Voice The Village Voice. Don had landed in a literary haven (though, in the 1960s, bohemianism s.h.i.+fted somewhat to the East Village). The ghosts of some of America's greatest writers whispered on the street corners here. The Village, with its angled, curving lanes, was intoxicated with itself. Don felt right at home. (In one sense, Houston had prepared him for life here: the Bayou City's lack of zoning led to long stretches resembling the mixed-use neighborhoods Don found so appealing in the Village.) His apartment was one block west of the building where James Thurber had lived in the 1920s, and across the street from a brownstone once occupied by S. J. Perelman. Grace Paley lived with her husband, Jess, and their two children across the street in the Unadilla Apartments, a few doors from the Greenwich Village School. Grace would become one of Don's closest friends.

In 1963, Don paid around $125 a month for his railroad apartment on the building's second floor. Three central windows, the middle one given over to a small air conditioner, faced south, toward the school across the street. The apartment's walls were old and painted yellow. The kitchen was placed toward the back, overlooking a tiny yard below. Just off the living room, Don set up his desk and typewriter.

The rest of the s.p.a.ce remained empty for a while-Helen had asked Don to send their furniture back to Houston. "What about when you return to New York?" Don asked her. "I was puzzled and frustrated," Helen recalled, "but when I asked if he were ready for me to come back, his answer was 'not yet.' And so within a few days, the moving truck arrived [in Houston] and I established my own home once again."

On West Eleventh, Don wrote most of the stories that made him famous. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published a year before Don arrived in the Village, Jane Jacobs cited the neighborhoods around West Eleventh as models of good city life-short, lively streets that promoted "frequent contact with a wide circle of people" and provided opportunities for "humble" self-government by concerned neighbors. Don would celebrate these qualities in such stories as "The Balloon," "City Life," "The Gla.s.s Mountain," and in the novel Paradise Paradise. And as Grace Paley once pointed out, living across the street from a school meant that Don was one of the few American men writing in the mid-twentieth century who paid vivid attention to children.

"[O]nce in a while when I was low on cash I'd write something for certain strange magazines-the names I don't even remember. Names like Dasher Dasher and and Thug Thug," Don once told an interviewer. "I do remember picking up five hundred bucks or something per piece. I did that a few times. Kind of gory, or even Gorey, fiction" that will never resurface. One such story was "The Ontological Basis of Two," published in the June 1963 issue of Cavalier Cavalier (a cutrate (a cutrate Playboy Playboy) under the pseudonym Michael Houston. Don carried a copy of the magazine with him to Texas when he returned for two weeks right before Christmas.

A fanciful seduction tale, and a parody of B. F. Skinner's behavioral theories, the story is most notable for what it reveals of Don's preoccupations at the time. One character wears a "Ford Foundation overcoat"; another burns with a "Guggenheim-applicant feeling."

When Don saw Helen, he handed her the copy of the magazine. He told her that Playboy Playboy had turned the story down, killing his "hopes of a warm winter." had turned the story down, killing his "hopes of a warm winter."

He "wanted to avoid the places that had been part of our weekly ritual since 1956," Helen recalled. "I could see that he was cautious and unwilling to risk anything that might threaten his self-control." He told her he still wanted to live alone but that he "had not given up on a later reconciliation." She didn't respond; she simply told him about her new life and adventures. He asked her if the pilots who gave her flying lessons "were tall and blond and wore long white scarves." She invited him to the airfield-the Collier Airport in northwest Houston-but the thought of the place terrified him.

"[F]or me, the worst was past," Helen wrote in her memoir. "I had grieved for an entire year and could no longer feel...sorrow. My pride and my own expectations [made it] impossible for me to propose any kind of compromise." The night before Don returned to New York, he reiterated that for now he needed to be alone, to pursue his career. "As we walked to his car, I looked up at him and saw that tears were streaming down his face," Helen said. "It was the first and only time that I ever saw him cry."

26.

FOR I'M THE BOY

The first issue of Location Location-with a circulation of about five thousand copies-arrived in the nation's literary bookstores in May 1963. In addition to the Bellow, Koch, and McLuhan pieces, it featured photographs of Robert Rauschenberg's studio taken by Rudy Burckhardt, excerpts from an interview with Willem de Kooning by David Sylvester, a series of Saul Steinberg drawings, an excerpt of a Larry Rivers memoir, an essay on modern music by Peter Yates, and photographs of sculptures by Reuben Nakian, Mark di Suvero, David Smith, and Barnett Newman.

Don was not happy with the issue. Individual pieces pleased him, but he felt that the magazine lacked a coherent theme and that it wasn't sufficiently critical of the current state of the arts. In introductory notes, Rosenberg and Hess tried to explain the focus of the magazine-it would explore "certain aspects of [an] artist's work that will reflect something of the logic and direction of his enterprise," Hess said. It would concentrate one at a time on "single [art] objects" to indicate "something" of the object's "variety." Rosenberg suggested that the journal's aim was to overcome specialization in the arts, which had become fields of academic study in order to find niches in a culture that didn't care for them-" 'At last there is a place for the Artist in America,' sighed the poet as he was sworn in."

Rosenberg railed against the sorry state of American literature: "For twenty years poetry and fiction have had their goals set by a traditionalist imagination in harmony with the formal conservatism of the ma.s.s media. The result has been an incredible naivete in regard to the process of composition....The conditions of psychic self-enslavement and joylessness under which most current literary works are produced makes reading difficult for anyone but a s.a.d.i.s.t." Literary innovation depends "on criticism," Rosenberg said. Every writer must react "against the insufficiency of what he admires most."

It should be noted that Rosenberg's literary sensibility, and his hopes for Location Location, had been shaped by an earlier magazine, the Partisan Review Partisan Review, founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv in a Greenwich Village loft in 1934. Its first issues coincided with the rise of the John Reed Club. Phillips, the child of Jewish immigrants in East Harlem, and Rahv, a Russian transplant, were pressured by the club to express Soviet ideology in the magazine, in the style of socialist realism. Phillips and Rahv were Marxists, but they were modernists in their literary tastes, and eventually they broke with the club. This political/literary push-pull, with multiple contradictions and a strong polemical edge, continued to define Rosenberg's judgments about art and his editorial style.

Visually, Location Location celebrated collage-not only in the photographs of sculptures, paintings, and drawings but also in the variety of layouts and typefaces (courtesy of Don). celebrated collage-not only in the photographs of sculptures, paintings, and drawings but also in the variety of layouts and typefaces (courtesy of Don).

Edges, placement, shapes: These formal concerns are echoed in each of the texts. In the magazine's attention to "objects" and "acts," an existential outlook is apparent. In its interest in "Random Order," a desire to wrest freshness from tradition and spark a cultural revolution is just as plain.

Despite his dissatisfaction with the issue, Don felt proud of certain things. In preparing the Rauschenberg article, he had accompanied Rudy Burckhardt to Rauschenberg's studio and "noticed that the windows overlooking Broadway were dark gray with...good New York grime. Rauschenberg was then working on some of the earliest of his black-and-white silkscreen paintings, and the tonality of the paintings was very much that of the windows. We ran a shot of the windows alongside photographs of the paintings...instant art history."

Writers, editors, and publishers pressured Location Location to respond to the era's tumultuous events. In July 1963, Rosenberg received a note from Barney Rosset of Grove Press asking him to use the magazine to rally support for Henry Miller: "[The] New York State Court of Appeals has just banned to respond to the era's tumultuous events. In July 1963, Rosenberg received a note from Barney Rosset of Grove Press asking him to use the magazine to rally support for Henry Miller: "[The] New York State Court of Appeals has just banned Tropic of Cancer Tropic of Cancer in the entire state of New York." in the entire state of New York."

A few months later, the editorial staff of Basic Books solicited the magazine's help in rounding up tributes to John F. Kennedy. "The New York Times New York Times...received an unprecedented number of poems" about the a.s.sa.s.sination, the letter said. "Most of them were expressions of profound grief. A young President had been murdered, and with him, it seemed, died a new hope that he had generated for the world. But for the most part these poems were notable for their sincerity rather than for their poetry." Basic Books wanted to publish an anthology of worthy responses, and it felt the magazine was in a position to a.s.sist.

Rosenberg, Hess, and Don resisted the temptation to be topical, and they tried harder for thematic cohesiveness in the second issue, which appeared in the summer of 1964. They continued to champion formal experimentation: The issue featured a story by William Ga.s.s, poems by John Ashbery, photos of Ray Johnson's letter collages and of a retrospective of William Baziotes's work, and reproductions of new paintings by Willem de Kooning. The issue's most striking images were of de Kooning's studio: coffee cups half-filled with paint atop a paint-encrusted table resembling a coastal landscape; newspaper clippings, gloves, pamphlets pinned to a wall.

In a lead editorial piece ent.i.tled "Form and Despair," Rosenberg blasted literature's concern with "social and historical happenings" and urged writing to "examine its own practices," the way recent painting had done. The failure of American writers to consider form amounted to a "lack of seriousness," he said.

On the pages immediately following, Saul Bellow reb.u.t.ted these remarks. "A literature which is exclusively about itself?" he cried. "Intolerable!" There was good reason, he said, why the "modern novel is predominantly realistic," and that was because "realism is based upon our common life." Therefore, content-the "social" and the "historical"-was far more crucial than form, in his view.

Don weighed in on this debate, contributing an essay ent.i.tled "After Joyce"-his first formal statement of literary values (and only one of two essays on writing he would ever publish). He noted that a "mysterious s.h.i.+ft...takes place as soon as one says that art is not about something but is is something"-that is, when a literary text "becomes an object in the world rather than a commentary upon the world." He went on to say: "Interrogating older [literary] works, the question is: what do they say about the world and being in the world? But the literary object is itself 'world' and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world directly." something"-that is, when a literary text "becomes an object in the world rather than a commentary upon the world." He went on to say: "Interrogating older [literary] works, the question is: what do they say about the world and being in the world? But the literary object is itself 'world' and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world directly."

Instead of "listening to an authoritative account of the world delivered by an expert (Faulkner on Mississippi, Hemingway on the corrida)," the reader b.u.mps into "something that is there there, like a rock or a refrigerator." Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake remains "always remains "always there there, like the landscape surrounding the reader's home or the buildings bounding the reader's apartment. The book remains problematic, unexhausted."

Twice in "After Joyce," Don harkened back to the first fiction he had ever published, in his high school literary magazine. Pilgrim's Progress Pilgrim's Progress, which he had parodied in "Rover Boys' Retrogression," is an "object," just as Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake is an object, but John Bunyan did not is an object, but John Bunyan did not intend intend this "special placement" for his work, so he failed to reap any metaphysical benefits. Don pointed to Kenneth Koch's this "special placement" for his work, so he failed to reap any metaphysical benefits. Don pointed to Kenneth Koch's The Red Robins The Red Robins as an intentional literary object. "Koch's strategy is to re-enter the history of the novel and fix upon a particular kind of American sub-literature, that of the Rover Boys [and] Tom Swift....These books, sentimental, ingenuous, and trivial, furnish a ground of positions, att.i.tudes and allusions against which" Koch enacts his "search for poetry." as an intentional literary object. "Koch's strategy is to re-enter the history of the novel and fix upon a particular kind of American sub-literature, that of the Rover Boys [and] Tom Swift....These books, sentimental, ingenuous, and trivial, furnish a ground of positions, att.i.tudes and allusions against which" Koch enacts his "search for poetry."

Don insisted that art can change the world: "I do not think it fanciful...to say that Governor Rockefeller, standing among his Miros and de Koonings, is worked upon by them, and if they do not make a Democrat or a Socialist of him they at least alter the character of his Republicanism." At a minimum, a literary object forces a reader to consider: "What do you think of a society in which these things are seen as art?"

Don admitted he was promoting cultural terrorism, smuggling "Hostile Object[s]" into readers' hands with the aim of reviving "outmoded forms" and "celebrating life." The traditional novel, he said, was a "doomed tower."

Location did not make it to a third number. The magazine cost nearly thirty thousand dollars per issue to produce, and it didn't sell well in stores. Subscriptions were slow to acc.u.mulate. More to the point, tensions grew between Don and did not make it to a third number. The magazine cost nearly thirty thousand dollars per issue to produce, and it didn't sell well in stores. Subscriptions were slow to acc.u.mulate. More to the point, tensions grew between Don and Location' Location's founders, Hess and Rosenberg. They remained friends, but friends.h.i.+p was easier if they didn't work together. Like Don's father, Rosenberg and Hess were formidable intellectual figures. Don needed distance from them.

"[H]e was a talker, he had had to talk...[a]s he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous," Saul Bellow once said of Rosenberg in a thinly disguised fictional portrait. "Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people torn to bits." He "lived for ideas," and he could carry his listeners into "utterly foreign spheres of speculation." Don thrilled at all of this, but he had his own ideas, and felt, as he had felt in his father's house, that his thoughts couldn't grow in the shadow of the great man. to talk...[a]s he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous," Saul Bellow once said of Rosenberg in a thinly disguised fictional portrait. "Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people torn to bits." He "lived for ideas," and he could carry his listeners into "utterly foreign spheres of speculation." Don thrilled at all of this, but he had his own ideas, and felt, as he had felt in his father's house, that his thoughts couldn't grow in the shadow of the great man.

If Don disagreed with Rosenberg, he was made to feel he had missed something, and never allowed to forget it.

In an undated "Memorandum on Location Location Prospectus and Prospects," apparently addressed to Rosenberg and Hess between the first and second issues, Don said, "Let me confess now that my own idea for the magazine hasn't worked out." The memorandum is worth quoting at length because it reads like an aesthetic manifesto-even more so than "After Joyce." Prospectus and Prospects," apparently addressed to Rosenberg and Hess between the first and second issues, Don said, "Let me confess now that my own idea for the magazine hasn't worked out." The memorandum is worth quoting at length because it reads like an aesthetic manifesto-even more so than "After Joyce."

Don said he was embarra.s.sed at "being inside the establishment," forced to praise rather than critique great figures such as Willem de Kooning and Reuben Nakian. In his view, the establishment position had "fatal consequences": We are heavily committed to the leading figures of an achieved revolution. Most literary-art magazines come into being as the organs of revolutionary parties and see their missions in terms of promulgation of a radical doctrine, destruction of the existing order, and establishment of a new regime. Location Location enters as an apologist for an existing order. We are not defending a stockade but guarding a bank. enters as an apologist for an existing order. We are not defending a stockade but guarding a bank.

Speaking of American literature, he expressed the opinion that "we all seem radically bored" with it. "This is probably literature's fault rather than our own, but we have not found a way to make this radical boredom a principle which operates to the advantage of the magazine."

Don's solution? The magazine must stop "walking softly and carrying a big bouquet." Instead of interviewing artists and respectfully repeating their "ideas," Location Location should "think up a net for trapping" should "think up a net for trapping" unspoken unspoken ideas and "establish a factory for extracting the oil from them." Perhaps creating a "lexicon of key ideas" would be a place to start, he said. Maybe this "would [give us a] way of seeing what these ideas do, where they take the holder of the idea." ideas and "establish a factory for extracting the oil from them." Perhaps creating a "lexicon of key ideas" would be a place to start, he said. Maybe this "would [give us a] way of seeing what these ideas do, where they take the holder of the idea."

Then there was the "literary problem": Instead of having Bellow write about form in the novel, why can't we come out and say (if we believe it; I do) that American literature is best and most clearly seen in the extremes represented by Bellow on the one hand and William Burroughs on the other, and that neither of them can deliver a thoroughly satisfactory art-experience....In other words, we have to take a radical position with regard to American literature, admit its minor virtues and announce that it lacks necessity and point out its immense shortcomings.

Very few writers were "capable of supplying" pieces of the caliber Don sought. The only remedy he could see was a "more active role in the writing writing of the magazine on the part of the editors." of the magazine on the part of the editors."

"For I'm the Boy" appeared in Location Location's second issue. The story was Don's surest means to date of staking out a "radical position" on American literature. In its formal concerns, it was literary criticism masked as fiction.

Don meant the story to stand on its own, but he was mindful that it would appear in Location Location among certain other pieces, and he tweaked it accordingly. In the magazine, it came after Saul Bellow's dismissal of formal experimentation and Don's "After Joyce." "For I'm the Boy" rebuts Bellow and exemplifies the kind of fiction Don extolled in his essay. Its placement created the kind of fission Don hoped among certain other pieces, and he tweaked it accordingly. In the magazine, it came after Saul Bellow's dismissal of formal experimentation and Don's "After Joyce." "For I'm the Boy" rebuts Bellow and exemplifies the kind of fiction Don extolled in his essay. Its placement created the kind of fission Don hoped Location Location would model. would model.

"For I'm the Boy" concerns a man named Bloomsbury, who has just watched his wife fly away at an airport. She has left him after his repeated flirtations with another woman. Bloomsbury has brought to the airport two "friends of the family," Huber and Whittle. Their presence prevents an intimate good-bye, and turns the couple's parting into an awkward public ritual. As the men drive home, Huber and Whittle ply Bloomsbury for details about his marriage-they want a story-but Bloomsbury refuses them.

Now and then, his mind drifts into reveries about his wife and the "bicycle girl" he has courted: memories presented in mock-Joycean brogue, in contrast to the Jamesian formality of the narrative.

Formally, the story is a war of styles: rigorous content-based paragraphs versus freer-form pa.s.sages in stream-of-consciousness mode. This stylistic war continues the debate begun in the magazine's essays.

Don furnishes a "ground of positions, att.i.tudes and allusions"-a "cl.u.s.ter of a.s.sociations"-against which to enact the "search for his own poetry." Some of the allusions, such as the Joycean dialect and the name Bloomsbury, with its literary echoes, are obvious.

The story's t.i.tle is a line from the old Irish ballad "Bold O'Donahue": For I'm the boy to squeeze her, and I'm the boy to tease herI'm the boy that can please her, ach, and I'll tell you what I'll doI'll court her like an IrishmanWi' me brogue and blarney too is me planWith the holligan, rolligan, swolligan, molligan Bold O'Donahue.

Bloomsbury courts the bicycle girl "like an Irishman"-but he and the girl are merely sites of linguistic cl.u.s.tering, drawing together high and low art, a popular old ballad and Joyce's Ulysses Ulysses. Art emerges as the story's central concern.

Of course, a gathering of allusions (Bloom buried) does not a story make. More is at stake here.

On closer reading, we discover that Kierkegaard provides one of the story's foundations. In Part Two of Repet.i.tion Repet.i.tion, a young man, devastated over a broken love affair, says no words can capture his "soul anguish." The young man can only use others' others' words to approximate his feelings: snippets of poems and quotations. words to approximate his feelings: snippets of poems and quotations.

Then he recalls the biblical story of Job's trials, and the torment caused by his friends, who demand explanations of his anguish.

Bloomsbury is a contemporary version of Job and and of Kierkegaard's young man. He recalls his broken love affairs in a pastiche of others' words (the Irish ballad, traces of Joyce). And like Job, he resists the "friends of the family," who seek an accounting of his failures. of Kierkegaard's young man. He recalls his broken love affairs in a pastiche of others' words (the Irish ballad, traces of Joyce). And like Job, he resists the "friends of the family," who seek an accounting of his failures.

Bloomsbury knows that words cannot "explain" feeling. As Sartre wrote, responding to Kierkegaard, "The only way to determine the value" of a feeling "is, precisely, to perform an act which confirms and defines it...a mock feeling and a true feeling are almost indistinguishable."

"Give us the feeling," Bloomsbury's friends demand. He refuses, saying, "We can...discuss the meaning but not the feeling."

Here, the story's center is revealed: the key to the particular allusions its author had gathered. Why the name Bloomsbury? Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard, published the first British edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land The Waste Land, the second section of which, "A Game of Chess," is strongly echoed in Don's story in the domestic tension and the playful language.

Duncan Grant, a Bloomsbury artist, once said, "The artist must...above all retain his private vision." The character Bloomsbury seeks to do this, against mounting pressure from his friends. Once feelings are put into words, the feelings are betrayed; they have a.s.sumed a ritual posture for public consumption.

Which brings us to art, our most refined public expression of what is private, unreachable, unsayable. Finally, it fails-words cannot do the trick-but it is the best we have: a snippet here, a snippet there.

Rather than content content-an explanation of something-art's value lies in the fact that it offers forms forms for our experiences. for our experiences.

And yet we live in a world that demands explanations. Frustrated (and shaken by their own romantic failings), Bloomsbury's friends beat him with fists, a bottle, and a tire iron until "at length the hidden feeling emerged, in the form of salt from [Bloomsbury's] eyes and black blood from his ears, and from his mouth, all sorts of words."

As he had done in "The Darling Duckling at School," Don mined his private life to give the story emotional depth. The average reader does not know, and does not need to know, that Don was thinking of his first wife when Bloomsbury's wife rebuffs him with Mallarme. Nor does the average reader know, or need to know, that Don's second marriage was failing as he wrote the story. Helen had taken up flying. Bloomsbury muses, "[A]fter so many years one could still be surprised by a flyaway wife."

Still, these hidden "cl.u.s.ters" lend the story pathos, darkening its tone.

Finally, Don's quarrel with Saul Bellow energizes the piece. Don had in mind not only Bellow's essay in Location Location but also a much-discussed article from five years earlier, "Deep Readers of the World, Beware," published in but also a much-discussed article from five years earlier, "Deep Readers of the World, Beware," published in The New York Times Book Review The New York Times Book Review. In the article, Bellow mocked existential novelists (taking a swipe at Joyce along the way). He said that in their attempts to be "deep," existentialist writers "contrive somehow to avoid" feelings in their work. They prefer "meaning to feeling."

When Bloomsbury tells his friends, "We can...discuss the meaning but not the feeling," Don offered Bellow his response.

In the end, "For I'm the Boy" does not settle at the level of literary debate. Its author celebrates life, as Beckett does, with humor and odd moments of joy: "Once in a movie house Bloomsbury recalled Tuesday Weld had suddenly turned on the screen, looked him full in the face, and said: You are a good man. You are good, good, good." Though this memory does not help him escape his friends' violence, he recalls that the "situation [was] dear to him," and that he had "walked out of the theater, gratification singing in his heart." In Don's fiction, a fine line always exists between irony and genuine sentiment ("a mock feeling and a true feeling are almost indistinguishable"), but the ambiguity, too, is one of life's deep pleasures.

"For I'm the Boy"-so far, Don's most complex demonstration of a radical new fiction-found freshness in paths Joyce had scouted, and showed writers where they might go after Joyce. Nothing like it had ever appeared in American literature.

27.

COME BACK, DR. CALIGARI.

Since childhood, and as a newspaper arts reviewer, Don had been an inveterate moviegoer. Manhattan was movie theaterrich: Among them were the Thalia on the Upper West Side, with its repertory program; the Paris, in Midtown, with lush blue velvet walls; Cinema 1 and 2, across the street from Bloomingdale's; the Beekman, with sleek curtains that opened in a whisper before each feature; the Bleecker Street Cinema, with its resident cat, Breathless, named after the G.o.dard film; and in the Village, the 8th Street Playhouse, located next to the Electric Ladyland recording studios, where Jimi Hendrix did his thing.

In 1929, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu Nosferatu had its American premiere at the 8th Street Playhouse, although the theater was then called the Film Guild Cinema. In the early sixties, the vampire cla.s.sic and other gems of the silent era, surrealist masterpieces such as had its American premiere at the 8th Street Playhouse, although the theater was then called the Film Guild Cinema. In the early sixties, the vampire cla.s.sic and other gems of the silent era, surrealist masterpieces such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, played regularly in Chelsea bas.e.m.e.nts on rickety Bell & Howell projectors, too bright and p.r.o.ne to overheating, rented by impromptu film clubs. The old movies were also screened at the 92nd Street Y, but Don did not have to go there or seek out-of-the-way cubbyholes to watch amazing films. The French New Wave had hit, and New York's screens celebrated the precocious auteurs. As Phillip Lopate has written, "To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to partic.i.p.ate in what felt like an international youth movement. We in New York were following and, in a sense, mimicking the cafe arguments in Paris, London and Rome, where the cinema had moved, for a brief historical moment, to the center of intellectual discourse, in the twilight of existentialism and before the onslaught of structuralism."

Unique rituals characterized New York's rather insular cinema society. Rudy Franchi, former program director of the Bleecker Street Cinema, remembers that Breathless, the house cat, "a jet black smallish creature," would often "escape from the office area and start to climb the movie screen." He says, "I would sometimes get a buzz on the house phone from the projection booth with the terse message 'cat's on the screen.' " The audience cheered for Breathless to make it to the top, but he never got there before Franchi pulled him down.

The theater sold copies of Cahiers du Cinema Cahiers du Cinema and was "fanatical about proper projection and proper screen ratio," Franchi says. and was "fanatical about proper projection and proper screen ratio," Franchi says.

For Don, an added draw of the art-house theaters was their architecture. The tilted gla.s.s facade, horizontal orientation, and ribboned windows of the Beekman gave it a touch of the International Style. The auditorium of the Thalia, which was located on West Ninety-fifth Street, sloped upward upward toward the screen. The novelty of this wore off when a tall person sat in front of you. toward the screen. The novelty of this wore off when a tall person sat in front of you.

In the early 1960s, one of the pleasures of many foreign films was their naughtiness, as appealing to cinema buffs as what Lopate has called the movies' "existential self-pity." ("Unless I am mistaken," he wrote, "suicide was in the air, in the cinematic culture of the early sixties.") Films like Boccaccio '70 Boccaccio '70, in which a voluptuous woman on a poster comes to life and seduces a puritanical soul (a story sure to lure pale, solitary moviegoers) stirred controversy among those who also worked to ban books such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer Tropic of Cancer.

Scandals were fun, but the richest pleasure was finding a film before it got much press; a private discovery-best seen during an afternoon matinee in a nearly empty auditorium.

Many writers indulged in the guilty joy of sneaking off during the day to catch a flick. Arthur Miller lived just three blocks from the Beekman. George Plimpton also lived nearby, editing The Paris Review The Paris Review in his apartment. Sometimes the two could be seen, each sitting alone, watching an early-bird show. in his apartment. Sometimes the two could be seen, each sitting alone, watching an early-bird show.

In his first two years in New York, Don saw premieres of films by Fellini, Truffaut, G.o.dard, Jean Renoir, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni's breakthrough feature, L'Avventura L'Avventura, opened at the Beekman the year before Don arrived in Manhattan. In September 1963, the first New York Film Festival was held in Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall. Among other films, the festival screened Yasujiro Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon An Autumn Afternoon, Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel The Exterminating Angel, and Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water Knife in the Water.

But it was Antonioni whom everyone kept talking about. More than anyone else at the time (at least on a commercial scale), he took advantage of what his medium had to offer, much the way Jackson Pollock had privileged the drip and de Kooning the brush stroke on canvas. Antonioni's films did what only only films could do. He had a "way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape," Lopate wrote. "With his detachment from the human drama and his tactful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced [viewers] to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique." films could do. He had a "way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape," Lopate wrote. "With his detachment from the human drama and his tactful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced [viewers] to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique."