Tracy Daugherty - Hiding Man

HIDING MAN

ALSO BY TRACY DAUGHERTY

FICTION

Late in the Standoff

Axemans Jazz

It Takes a Worried Man

The Boy Orator

The Woman in the Oil Field

What Falls Away

Desire Provoked

NONFICTION

Five Shades of Shadow

A BIOGRAPHY OF DONALD BARTHELME

TRACY DAUGHERTY

ST. MARTINS PRESS NEW YORK

HIDING MAN. Copyright 2009 by Tracy Daugherty. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

The quotation from Donald Barthelme: Genesis of a Cool Sound, by Helen Moore Barthelme, is reprinted with the permission of Texas A & M University Press.

www.stmartins.com

Book design by Mspace/Maura Fadden Rosenthal

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daugherty, Tracy.

Hiding man : a biography of Donald Barthelme / Tracy Daugherty.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37868-4

ISBN-10: 0-312-37868-8

1. Barthelme, Donald. 2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 3. Postmodernism (Literature)United States. I. Title.

PS3552.A76Z66 2009

813'.54dc22

[B]

2008029881

First Edition: February 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother, my father, and my sister

Try to be a man about whom nothing is known.

Donald Barthelme, Snow White

I loved idiot paintings, tops of doors, decors, saltimbanques, canvases, signboards, popular engravings, obsolete literature, church Latin, badly-spelled pornographic works, novels by our grandmothers, fairy tales, little childrens books, old operas, folk refrains, popular rhythms.

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

... the author... historically died of a mortal disease but poetically died of longing for eternity.

Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author

THE LOST TEACHER

The assignment was simple: Find a copy of John Ashberys Three Poems, read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, dont sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.

A dutiful student, I walked to the Brazos Bookstore, a few blocks from my apartment, and purchased a paperback edition of the book (nobody walks in Houston, so this was more dutiful than it sounds). Next I made my way to Weingartens to pick up a bottle of red. I didnt drink much, and didnt know one wine from another. Then I went home.

I lived in an efficiency apartment in a slightly fixed-up, but not fixed up enough, old building near a freeway underpass southwest of downtown. Always, when I unlocked my door, I was greeted by loud scurrying. The bugs were so big, I felt sure Id return someday to find them pulling books from my shelves, rearranging the space more to their liking. The apartment was close to where my teacher lived when he was a young man, writing and publishing his first short stories. I didnt know this then, and if I had, it would have made me more self-conscious than I already was about my work.

Thus the assignment. I was in my first year of a Ph.D. program, but really I was just stalling for time while trying to write a novel. My fellow students, talented and confident, intimidated me. Determined to meet their standards and to perform perfectly, I wasnt performing at all. I edited in my head long before my hands scooched near a keyboard. My pages remained pristinely, sadly blank.

My teachers solution: Ashbery, sleeplessness, and alcohol. He didnt tell me I needed to loosen up, but we both knew that this was the case. I fed the stray cats in the weeds behind my building so they wouldnt mew all night, then settled at the card table where I ate and tried to write each evening. I switched on my Smith Corona electric typewriter. This was in the days before Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. The only mouse in my place had four legs and a tail. I opened the book:

At this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of listening, as though to the feeling of the wind before it starts....

What the hell was this? I rubbed my neck and tried again:

From the outset it was apparent that someone had played a colossal trick on something.

A colossal trick. Right. Well, my task was not to analyze or understand Three Poems, but to respond to its rhythms, take its music into my body, and come up with a similar score. I finished reading, only half-concentrating. My front window was busted, and mosquitoes invited themselves in and out of the room. I had tried covering the window with a sheet, but the sheet flapped raggedly in a breeze. The night before, my upstairs neighbor, another student, had shattered the pane by trying to climb the wall. He had come home drunk around midnight and discovered that hed lost his key, so he shimmied up the rainspout to reach his window. He slipped. His foot crashed through my glass, startling me awake.

I fiddled with the sheet. Through the window I glimpsed a streetwalker standing beside a light pole on the corner. She wore a long blue dress and flicked a Bic lighter off and on. The vice squad had chased hookers from one end of my neighborhood to another. Soon, the women would be driven from my street, too, but for now their presence charged the block with an undercurrent of danger and morbid titillation.

This was my life in Houston, in the grad-student boondocks of the area known as Montrose. I had come here because I wanted to be a writer.

And now, because I wanted to be a writer, I was stuck with Ashbery. I started to open the wine and realized I didnt own a corkscrew. Another walk to the store, keeping my head down as I passed the hooker. Evening, sugar, she said. I nodded and sped up. Back in my apartment, I poured a little wine into a Dixie cup. I sat down and started to type.

By one oclock, my flesh had served as an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord for the mosquitoes. I was bleary, yawning, and tipsy. A third of the bottle remained. My shirtsleeves sagged with sweat. I had filled four pages with abstract nonsense. I poured more wine and hit the keyboard again. All fall, my father held a trouble light beneath the car, I wrote. My family was not on the move.

Two more hours passed. Just after 3:00 A.M., the phone rang. I jumped, tipping the cup. Someones dead, I thought. A car crash, a stroke. I picked up.

Hows it coming? said Donald Barthelme.

Fine, I croaked. I think.

Good. Twelve pages, on my desk. In five hours. He clicked off.

Fast-forward twenty years, to the early winter of 2001. Im attending the Andy Warhol: Photography exhibit at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. The show displays many of Warhols photo-booth portraits of writers, artists, and celebrities from the 1960s, including a picture entitled Man with Newspaper: He Is a She, ca. 1963, featuring a shorthaired man in black glasses reading a tabloid. The tabloids front-page headline, all about a sex-change operation, says HE IS A SHE! The photographs interest lies in the contrast between the cheesy newspaper and the mans impeccable appearance. Hes well groomed and cleanly shaved, in a dark suit and fashionably thin tie. He peruses the paper with raised eyebrows and a tight mouth, just this side of shocked, just this close to lasciviousnesscampy, funny, an assured performance. The picture is rare in the Warhol collection in that its subject is not identified by name.