Hiding Man_ A Biography Of Donald Barthelme Part 17

Angell sent Don a telegram care of American Express in Copenhagen: "Indian Uprising victorious. Palefaces routed. Shawn scalped. In short, yes. Congratulations. Do you wish a fast advance? Will write you shortly." Two days later, he sent five hundred dollars to Lynn Nesbit. By the end of the month, Angell had sent Nesbit the "balance of the payment-I think it came to a further $761." She took her small cut and sent the money to Don.

Sentence by sentence, "The Indian Uprising" remains one of the most challenging and beautiful stories written by an American. Angell knew it was something special. "We want to run this story because it is a rare and brilliant one," he wrote Don. "We know that it will confuse and distress a good many readers and we know that it will infuriate others, but we are ignoring these considerations because they are far less important than what you are doing here. Because you are serious about your writing, we have agreed to drop almost all of our own preferences in style, punctuation, and construction; we have done so in spite of the fact that we...don't really agree with you about the effectiveness and usefulness of some of your stylistic devices. [What] Shawn does not not want is to have readers (and other writers) think that we have simply stopped caring or to think that we have, in the course of printing a 'different' kind of fiction, stopped proofing for grammar, consistency, and clarity." want is to have readers (and other writers) think that we have simply stopped caring or to think that we have, in the course of printing a 'different' kind of fiction, stopped proofing for grammar, consistency, and clarity."

As ever, the struggle started with commas. Don wanted very few in the story because he wished the "tone in certain places to be a drone, to get the feeling of the language pus.h.i.+ng ahead but uninflected." Angell countered that Shawn's "preference for the comma" was a "stoutly-held belief of his, and not a compulsion." Nevertheless, Don insisted that "we should try it without horrible commas clotting up everything and demolis.h.i.+ng the rhythm of ugly, scrawled sentences....Yes it is true that I am a miserable, shabby, bewildered, compulsive, witless and pathetic little fellow but please Roger keep them commas out of the story!!!!!!!"

In certain paragraphs, Don skipped verbs and conjunctions to get the "pus.h.i.+ng ahead" feeling he wanted. Angell and Shawn objected to these omissions-Shawn feared they would give the magazine "black eyes." Defending a particular sentence, Don said it "must not have an 'and,' I think. This construction [a long list lacking conjunctions] has parallels all through the thing and zee additional conjunction would be like most regrettable, sad & und undfortunate."

He explained his position: "When the sentences suddenly explode or go to h.e.l.l...it contributes materially I think to the air of fear etc etc hanging over the story." Of another grammatical lapse, Don said, "I think it is beautiful, if you'll forgive me. I mean like it also exists for its own sweet sake....The whole d.a.m.ned [story] is a tissue of whispers, hints and echoes and for that reason most annoying but I can't help that."

Over weeks of arguments about grammar and what Angell called "unnecessary misdirections" in the story, the men rea.s.sured each other of their mutual respect. Angell knew his letters were bullying, and he regretted it: "[P]lease don't get me wrong: I'm for this story most enthusiastically, and all [my criticisms are] meant to be helpful, not merely annoying."

For his part, Don wavered between fear that his story was being stomped by Shawn's stodginess and absolute faith in Angell. The latest galley "proof covered with little marks scared the h.e.l.l out of me," he confessed at one point. "But I trust that you will protect this beautiful story with your last dying breath there on West 43rd Street."

Writer and editor cemented their bond and defined their relations.h.i.+p-Don pus.h.i.+ng, Angell resisting, both giving ground-over "The Indian Uprising." By the end of the process, Don had agreed to more conventional forms of paragraphing, particularly when it came to dialogue, and to the addition of most of the commas Angell asked for. Angell began trolling for commas to delete delete, just to please Don. He tempered Shawn's worries that certain imagery in the story was "too wild."

For all the stylistic compromises, enough disagreements remained by the end of January that Angell nearly took the story "off the schedule." Remarkably, the editors were still quibbling with Don over commas. "[T]he difficult thing is that if even just one or two sneak back in the effect here, which must be that of a rush, confusion, hectic excitement, falling down stairs, etc, is vitiated. So I depend upon you, Roger, to not let this happen," Don wrote.

Seeking a "hushed" and "stuttering" quality in other sections of the story, Don did did ask for a comma or two. Shawn would not "give way" on this point. Angell explained that readers would think the addition of the commas was "sheer carelessness on your part and on our part," and he said, "It looks like sloppiness and it makes both you and the magazine look bad." He apologized for sounding "pompous" and reiterated, "I think there is enough respect and admiration all around for an eventual solution, and I don't want to go on pus.h.i.+ng you or annoying you...." ask for a comma or two. Shawn would not "give way" on this point. Angell explained that readers would think the addition of the commas was "sheer carelessness on your part and on our part," and he said, "It looks like sloppiness and it makes both you and the magazine look bad." He apologized for sounding "pompous" and reiterated, "I think there is enough respect and admiration all around for an eventual solution, and I don't want to go on pus.h.i.+ng you or annoying you...."

Don replied, "Pardon me for taking my self so seriously." Shortly thereafter, he wrote, "I understand, dear friend, that you and Mr. Shawn and the magazine are treating my little nightmare most kindly (in fact, I'm amazed that your patience didn't depart about two letters back)." He ended another note by saying, "The main thing is to preserve the tone, and what is essential is **562%% choke! gasp! can't go on...commas...quirk...water...."

Finally, in mid-February, Angell was able to write Lynn Nesbit that the "long struggles with THE INDIAN UPRISING have now been resolved, and the story is scheduled for the issue of March 6th." To Don, he wrote, "Thanks a million for your final compromise (or abject surrender)." He also addressed financial matters: Another issue for you to resolve-a much more pleasant one. You now have the sum of $1048.35 coming to you, due to something we call "cola readjustment." Don't worry about what it means-I think it's simply a further slicing of last year's melon-but we would like to know what part of this sum, if any, you would like to have applied against your debt here. You are entirely at liberty to take the entire sum and to leave the balance outstanding of $1000 on the books. Or we can knock off as little or as much of the debt as would suit your convenience.

Don took all but two hundred dollars. He noted ruefully that his agent's commission was "guarded by the alert Miss Nesbit who is privy to my every move (or almost)." "Miss Nesbit" still didn't know about Birgit, though she suspected that Don was having an affair.

Don told Angell that "Copenhagen is beginning to pall; has palled, in fact." Nevertheless, unexpected events would keep him from returning to the States for another several months.

"The Indian Uprising" was an "emotionally important" story to Don. "It was in part...a response to the Vietnam war," he said in an interview and a "political comment on the fact that we allow the heroin traffic in our country to exist." It was also a "response to certain things that were going on in my personal life at the time, and a whole lot of other things came together in that story." He said he couldn't sort it out for readers any "more clearly than that."

His letters to Angell offer further glimpses into the story's core. He said he wanted to limn the "secret places" of the "body" and the "spirit." He also wanted to "get" readers "to the problems of art and the resistance of the [artistic] medium. (Sculptors hacking away at blocks of granite etc relating back to all the hacking up of people in the story.)"

His "illegitimate" grammatical "maneuver[s]" were meant to produce a "very sharp effect of alienation" on the reader: Any tidying up of the story's style "would be disastrous for my liver," he said. The piece had to maintain its "discord" and "unpleasantness."

"The Indian Uprising" begins, "We defended the city as best we could"-a city that doesn't know what it has done to "deserve baldness, errors, infidelity." Fighting engulfs the streets, barricades are mounted, savages threaten the calm, ordered life of ordinary citizens whose luxuries include "apples, books, long-playing records." Drugs flood urban ghettos. Apparently , in the midst of all this action, a movie is being shot-or perhaps the violence is part of the film, scenes of comic mayhem reminiscent of Jean-Luc G.o.dard (he is mentioned, in pa.s.sing, in the story). At the end, "helicopters and rockets" kill children and destroy places "where there are children preparing to live."

The writing is dense, swift, packed with referents, and unspecific as to character and setting-a heady, frightening storm, like much of urban America in the 1960s.

Filled with parodic Parisian street names (as in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"), the piece is an eerie prophecy of May 1968 in France.

Various critics have seen the story as a satire on American film Westerns, "civilization" fighting "savages" to secure the country for its values. The story does does tie America's Indian wars to U.S. violence in Vietnam, but it's far too easy to say that murdering Indians was wrong, and Don was never content to say the obvious. tie America's Indian wars to U.S. violence in Vietnam, but it's far too easy to say that murdering Indians was wrong, and Don was never content to say the obvious.

Other critics read the story as a Freudian allegory of s.e.xual unease. The narrator repeats, "I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love." The Indians' "short ugly lances with fur at the throat" suggest phallic fear.

As to his later comment about the story's being a "response" to his private life: We know of Don's separation from Helen at the time, his fraught relations.h.i.+p with Lynn Nesbit, his whirlwind affair with Birgit. The "hordes of Indians and Frenchmen and Italians" he had seen in London had struck him as a thwarting of "human possibility." This impression, coupled with his domestic turmoil, touched the story and added to its hectic "unpleasantness."

Other readers have noted the range of modernist references in the piece-to T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Frank Wedekind-and suggest that Don is mocking Western literary tradition.

But none of these readings quite add up. They fail to explain why these specific materials are mixed here, or to fully convey the story's brilliance, mystery, and complexity.

So let's return to the street names. The narrator tells us that barricades are going up on "Rue Chester Nimitz" and "George C. Marshall Allee." Other avenues are named after American military commanders, but with a French twist-we are in an unreal urban landscape, neither New York nor Paris, but with echoes of both (Manhattan, we recall, was purchased from Indians). "Zouaves and cabdrivers" form battalions in the streets. Zouaves was a name for those fighting in the French Foreign Legion, whose fighting reputation was made in the Crimean War. They enjoyed enormous popularity in America just before our own Civil War.

Prior to 1968, barricades appeared in Paris during the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and in the days of the Commune in 1871. Manet painted them. So did Delacroix, Courbet, and Millet (when he wasn't drawing American Indians, figures inspired by the novels of James Fenimore Cooper). Daumier's lithograph The Uprising The Uprising, like Don's story, blurs background and foreground in portraying anarchy.

In each of the French revolutions, social cla.s.ses clashed, vying for power and justice; order and disorder fought for dominance, as they did in the United States during the 1960s, perhaps the closest our country has come to a second civil war, with rioting and political a.s.sa.s.sinations.

What Don has accomplished here is an overlay of French history on American experience, one time period on another, the way Robert Rauschenberg's silk screens show one image bleeding through to another. Once, in discussing Rauschenberg's methods, Don noted that "orphaned objects" come together-like stacks of detritus made to build a barricade.

Where does all this take us?

If we compare the various French revolutions, we see they all occurred at moments when leaders tried to tighten economic and political control, when economic systems s.h.i.+fted and narrowed, destroying old patterns of work and communal life. The barricades went up as people tried to retain their domestic and working lives, their living quarters, and their sense of justice. And of course, in the nineteenth century, the Paris of the barricades was the Paris of modernist art. They-city, barricades, and art-are cobbled together from the same sources.

In the 1850s, Napoleon III ordered Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, his prefect of the Seine, to redesign Paris. Haussmann proclaimed that redoing Paris "meant...disembowelling" the old city, the "quartier of uprisings and barricades"-and, not incidentally, the bohemian neighborhoods where Courbet, Manet, Baudelaire, Daumier, and later Rimbaud gathered. There, these artists lived in the gaps between the bourgeoisie and the laborers, and in the side streets populated by artisans' guilds, where Daumier's father once worked. There, they celebrated the "primitive" sensuality of life, as embodied in the archetypal n.o.ble savage. "The Savages of Cooper [are] right in Paris!" Paul Feval wrote in 1863. "Are not the great squares as mysterious as forests in the New World?" Baudelaire called Indians the New World equivalents of devil-may-care dandies, and Dumas wrote of uprisings and barricades"-and, not incidentally, the bohemian neighborhoods where Courbet, Manet, Baudelaire, Daumier, and later Rimbaud gathered. There, these artists lived in the gaps between the bourgeoisie and the laborers, and in the side streets populated by artisans' guilds, where Daumier's father once worked. There, they celebrated the "primitive" sensuality of life, as embodied in the archetypal n.o.ble savage. "The Savages of Cooper [are] right in Paris!" Paul Feval wrote in 1863. "Are not the great squares as mysterious as forests in the New World?" Baudelaire called Indians the New World equivalents of devil-may-care dandies, and Dumas wrote The Mohicans of Paris The Mohicans of Paris, his novel about urban "natives."

Haussmann's redesign displaced them all. He uprooted over 350,000 people in the inner city-roughly one-third of Paris's population at the time, most of it working-cla.s.s-and widened and straightened the boulevards so they'd be harder to blockade. This made them, as one journalist observed, paths "without turnings, without chance perspectives"-the imaginative perspectives Manet and others fought for in their art. The barricades and modernist aesthetics were weapons in a war against the rigid ordering of daily life, the absolute control by economic forces of every aspect of experience.

One hundred years after Haussmannization, the United States was the best expression of the vision that had sparked fighting in the streets of Paris, and that touched off violence, now, in American cities. As Rimbaud, Marx, and others pointed out, Haussmann's project depended on cheap labor, on colonizing others, spreading the "poisonous breath of civilization" to poorer, darker-skinned peoples.

In Southeast Asia, a century later, America extended and modernized this tradition (a.s.suming France's role in Vietnam). Indian uprisings indeed.

Street names like "Rue Chester Nimitz" and "George C. Marshall Allee" don't just combine one history and another; they suggest, like a silk-screen overlay, the culmination of a process: the surface as the latest incarnation of what lies beneath it-in this case, America as a perfected manifestation of Haussmann's "disembowelling."

As Don's narrator tries to sort out where he stands, he studies a map marked with blue and green, a hopeless attempt to locate opposing sides. Street gutters run with "yellowish" muck, like the fog in the streets of "Prufrock." These hues also recall the color schemes in Rimbaud's poems about the Paris Commune, most notably in "Chant de Guerre Parisien," "Les Incendiaires," and "Mauvais Sang." In Rimbaud's visions of the uprising, yellow dawns shade b.l.o.o.d.y streets, green-lipped corpses sprawl across paving stones, and cheap wine makes blue stains on the tablecloths of the poor (vin bleu was popular in a communard fight song). was popular in a communard fight song).

"The white men are landing!" Rimbaud wrote. They intend to corrupt the barbarians. The battle is on.

Like Courbet, Daumier, and others, Rimbaud celebrated the 1871 revolt as a poets' rebellion. As he saw it, it was an attempt by artists and workers to shake off Haussmann's order, to take back their living quarters, and to refuse the exorbitant prices pinching their daily lives. It was an a.s.sertion of s.e.xual and creative freedom-a carnival in the streets ("Oh that clown band. Oh its sweet strains") as much as a brief economic liberation: a political and libidinal Bill of Rights-again, as in the United States in the 1960s.

Along with Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett, Rimbaud was at the top of Don's reading list for young writers (a list he composed, years later, when he became a teacher). What did he learn from the Frenchman?

Consider the following description of a street barricade, written by Gustave Paul Cluseret, the Commune's first delegate of war. The barricades were makes.h.i.+ft constructions, he says, composed of "overturned carriages, doors torn off their hinges, furniture thrown out of windows, cobblestones where these are available, beams, barrels, etc." They are intended to "prevent enemy forces from circulating, to bring them to a halt."

Rimbaud's rebellion poems "make conscious the unconscious tendencies" of the revolution, according to critic Kristin Ross. In refusing logical expression and linearity, in recycling cliches, blurring referents (Which side are you on?), shoring up fragments of discourse-and dropping commas-he builds a language barricade.

Don's narrator fas.h.i.+ons a similar bricolage: "I a.n.a.lyzed the composition of the barricade nearest me and found two ashtrays, ceramic, one dark brown and one dark brown with an orange blur at the lip, a tin frying pan, two-liter bottles of red wine, three quarter-liter bottles of Black & White...a hollow-core door in birch veneer...."

All are "Prufrock"-worthy objects. Echoing Eliot still further, the narrator concludes, "I decided I knew nothing." Temporarily, he is brought to a halt. He can no longer circulate. "Turnings" and "chance perspectives" are necessary for him to proceed.

As we read, something else in "The Indian Uprising" nags at us, or should. Where have we heard before about redskins and palefaces skirmis.h.i.+ng in the field of art?

In 1939, Philip Rahv wrote that American literature was divided into two camps: the "drawing-room fictions" of writers like Henry James, who strain for the European refinement of Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, versus the "open-air" work of writers like Walt Whitman. "The paleface is a 'highbrow,' " Rahv wrote, "though his mentality...is often the kind that excludes and repels general ideas." And the "redskin deserves the epithet 'lowbrow'...because his reactions are primarily emotional, spontaneous, and lacking in personal culture."

In the twentieth century, the redskins overthrew the palefaces, Rahv stated. They were presently "in command of the situation, and the literary life in America has seldom been so deficient in intellectual power."

Rahv's literary Western was based on arguments about the merits of proletarian and modernist literature dating back to the 1930s.

In the 1970s, Don would make a visual collage t.i.tled "Henry James, Chief." He took an old photo of James and placed an orange strip across his forehead. Two white strips waver like feathers behind it. Don placed a small black triangle beneath James's eye: war paint, resembling a tear or silly clown makeup. By feathering James, Don played a Duchamp prank. More to the point, he turned the most famous paleface into a redskin.

In "The Indian Uprising," a captured Comanche says his name is Gustave Aschenbach: a redskin paleface.

In both instances, Don canceled Rahv's categories, rejecting a rigid view of American literature. At the same time, by playing with Rahv's metaphors, he joined the literary debate. (Harold Rosenberg may have reminded Don of Rahv's essay in his introductory remarks to the first issue of Location: Location: in the past, the "vanguard writer" in America has been "surrounded by the Indians of the press and the professoriat," Rosenberg wrote. Today, the "age of the Indian wars is by no means closed.") in the past, the "vanguard writer" in America has been "surrounded by the Indians of the press and the professoriat," Rosenberg wrote. Today, the "age of the Indian wars is by no means closed.") The controlled craziness of "The Indian Uprising" mounts a barricade against reductive views of politics, art, and personal engagements. Don mixed the high and the low (literary categories first distinguished during the Paris uprisings, which produced bushels of instant journalism, thoughtful poems, and memoirs). He also mixed the private and the public, the graphic and the comic, achieving what Rahv claimed American fiction could not manage: a volatile blend of emotion and intellect. More important, Don raised the level of the political debate, placing Rahv's argument in a much wider context. And he did all this while providing up-to-the-minute dispatches.

Given the vision of "The Indian Uprising," Don's grammatical battles with Angell and Shawn a.s.sume a metaphysical dimension-and explain why the comma war was so intense. It would be easy to reprove Shawn and Angell for their stylistic timidity, their caution in the face of a radical new fiction. But it was only natural that they would want to protect The New Yorker The New Yorker's standards of precision. And they must be lauded for publis.h.i.+ng the piece at all. Nothing like it had appeared-or has appeared since, aside from Don's own own fiction-in the pages of a mainstream American magazine. fiction-in the pages of a mainstream American magazine.

Don and Birgit moved restlessly from one address to another, to Spain and back, to Sweden. Angell could barely keep up with their wanderings, and he suspected something was wrong. In a letter, he tried to nudge Don into the open: "When am I going to hear about your fascinating life-your literary, culinary, linguistic, and military triumphs? When are we going to see your exhausted neo-Jamesian phiz again?"

And in another note, he wrote: I have worked out a theory about all your sudden changes of plans, your hitherings and thitherings: the CIA has finally begun to swing and has hired you as the 007 of the Central European literary scene. You are on the track of an implacable Commie-rat plagiarist who is engaged in a desperate plot to inflate the world [James] Baldwin-market. Now he has doubled back to Denmark, you are closing in, and any day now...

"I had a very gloomy call from Lynn [Nesbit] the other day," he said on another occasion. "[She] is very worried about you."

Don continued to write at an astonis.h.i.+ng pace, and Angell's letters to him contain a cautious mixture of encouragement and rejection. The magazine declined two pieces, "The Affront" (which would later appear in Harper's Bazaar Harper's Bazaar and turn up as part of and turn up as part of Snow White Snow White) and "The Short Life of Henry" (which Don seems to have sc.r.a.pped altogether). "G.o.d knows I am not asking for a formal, well-made story," Angell said regarding "The Affront," "but only some sense of arrival or completion near the end, instead of this trailing off...."

Always, Angell tried to cheer Don up: "I think it is true that original, nervy writing like yours is a riskier process than everyday fiction. I mean, a story...that strikes us as not quite quite right is perhaps more apt to be turned down than a safe-and-sound story that is faintly second-rate. You dare more, you are higher above the ground, and there are more lights on you, so that the faintest slip is instantly visible and probably fatal. It doesn't seem fair, somehow, but I don't know what to do about it. [The] big thing is that you are writing so much and writing so well. I'm delighted. Lynn is delighted. Shawn is delighted. Now right is perhaps more apt to be turned down than a safe-and-sound story that is faintly second-rate. You dare more, you are higher above the ground, and there are more lights on you, so that the faintest slip is instantly visible and probably fatal. It doesn't seem fair, somehow, but I don't know what to do about it. [The] big thing is that you are writing so much and writing so well. I'm delighted. Lynn is delighted. Shawn is delighted. Now you you be delighted. Congratulations." be delighted. Congratulations."

His support was more effective wrapped in money. Angell asked Don to renew his earlier agreement at a rate of "2010 cents a word minimum minimum," with "25% extra for first reading" and unspecified "COLA" adjustments. He advanced Don $250 against future work.

"[T]hanks for the new advance. Which was needed," Don replied. "Living off the fat of my head as I do I appreciate such things in scanty times."

Later, Angell wrote, "Our corporate mattress was getting a little lumpy from all the cash stuffed under it, and...we are increasing the size of our payments to you and to all our contract writers. It simply means that that dangling carrot has grown a little longer and I hope you will respond shortly to this subtle enticement." He added, "I ran into your friend Tom Hess the other day, who told me how miserable it made you to appear in The NewYorker. I told him to grind his little ax on somebody else. Now you can be ten percent more unhappy."

"I know no better way to start the day than to wake up $1000 richer than when you went to bed," Don responded. "And unexpected monies are much more beautiful than expected monies."

In April, Tom Wolfe published "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" and a sequel, "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker The New Yorker," in the New York Herald-Tribune New York Herald-Tribune. The articles attacked The New Yorker The New Yorker's stuffiness and William Shawn's tentative editorial style. Don was appalled: "I thought it was pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n nasty, just flat nasty. Vicious is I suppose the word," he told Angell.

Wolfe praised Don as The New Yorker The New Yorker's only "promising young writer." "I would rather have been cut up along with the rest of the troops," Don said to Angell. "Anyhow, the whole thing was sickeningly personal, I thought; and I hope you weren't angered to the point of challenging Tom Wolfe to zipguns in the park."

Don felt slightly sheepish, as Wolfe was now subletting his New York apartment.

Apparently, Wolfe failed to water Don's elm tree. When Don heard this news, he told Angell his "erstwhile tenant...killed my tree in the front of 113 W. 11 with either a burst of rhetoric or a single burning glance."

Angell rejected another of Don's stories, "Seven Garlic Tales," which The Paris Review The Paris Review picked up. Eventually, it, too, got folded into picked up. Eventually, it, too, got folded into Snow White Snow White. But Angell bought "Edward and Pia" as well as "Game," Don's grimly funny take on missile silos, underground military bunkers, and soldiers who are asked to unleash nuclear weapons in case of an international catastrophe. "I am not well," the narrator complains. He has been stuck in a bunker with a fellow soldier for 133 days "owing to" a bureaucratic "oversight": Shotwell and I watch the console. Shotwell and I live under the ground and watch the console. If certain events take place upon the console, we are to insert our keys in the appropriate locks and turn our keys. Shotwell has a key and I have a key. If we turn our keys simultaneously the bird flies, certain switches are activated and the bird flies. But the bird never flies. In one hundred and thirty-three days the bird has not flown.

Each soldier has been ordered to shoot his partner if the partner starts to behave strangely. "Is [Shotwell's] behavior strange? I do not know," the narrator says. "I am not well."

"A really curious thing happened here about this story," Angell wrote Don: We were on the point of turning this one down-an admiring rejection on the grounds that the situation of the not-quite-sane men watching the ICBM console, watching each other, and watching the b.u.t.ton, all in a system that had perhaps begun to go slightly and fatally haywire, was a familiar one. I mean familiar in literary terms. We sensed overtones of "Dr. Strangelove," remembered scenes from a couple of recent topical revues like the Second City, and noticed resemblances to Pinter. Nothing exact, no real imitation or exact echo, but there was this feeling that we had all encountered this situation before, so we thought, well, not quite right and too bad for old Don. What swung us over, after a day's further reflection, is the plain fact that all the writing here is just too good to miss-the story is terrifying and, to use the word honestly for once, unforgettable-and the even plainer fact that ICBM silos, console-watchers, sane or lunatic, are real, real, and that almost unbelievable fact is far more important than the weight of their previous appearance in fiction or drama. I think this is by far the best writing yet to appear on this theme, and we are d.a.m.ned lucky to have it. Thank you, buddy and that almost unbelievable fact is far more important than the weight of their previous appearance in fiction or drama. I think this is by far the best writing yet to appear on this theme, and we are d.a.m.ned lucky to have it. Thank you, buddy.

The story ran in the July 31 issue. On September 1, Angell informed Don, "I must tell you that you have a band of admirers in the Pentagon": A few days ago, I was lifting a gla.s.s Down East with a friend-of-a-friend, who turned out to be an a.s.sistant Secretary of Defense and he astonished me by asking all kinds of questions about you. At first, I thought he must be checking up on your draft status, but no-he was a reader. reader. He said that GAME had knocked them all for a loop in the Pentagon, and I asked was it because it was true, for G.o.d's sake, and he said no, heh, heh, but it was, er, saying something that needed saying. But then he went on and talked about THE INDIAN UPRISING and A PICTURE HISTORY...and wrote down the name of your book, so I concluded he was a real fan. I will leave it up to you to decide if it is a Good Thing for us to have Defense tyc.o.o.ns who dig your stuff He said that GAME had knocked them all for a loop in the Pentagon, and I asked was it because it was true, for G.o.d's sake, and he said no, heh, heh, but it was, er, saying something that needed saying. But then he went on and talked about THE INDIAN UPRISING and A PICTURE HISTORY...and wrote down the name of your book, so I concluded he was a real fan. I will leave it up to you to decide if it is a Good Thing for us to have Defense tyc.o.o.ns who dig your stuff.

Despite this amusing news, "troubles" plagued Don. He admitted to Angell that he had thrown a "rented typewriter on the floor and broke its back." What could trigger such frustration? Angell shared personal updates, hoping Don would reciprocate. On June 14, he wrote Don: Sat.u.r.day I watched my older daughter graduate from school. Beautiful girls and beautiful boys with their clean American hair s.h.i.+ning and white dresses moving in and out of the shadows of giant summer trees and Elgar and faculty babies playing on the lawn during the very serious commencement remarks delivered by a serious and nervous bald father (me) and the diplomas and the kissing and the wind blowing and just a small glistening of almost tears in everyone's eyes all followed by pineapple punch and chicken salad on paper plates and goodbye and goodbye. I could hardly stand it. Anyway, it's full summer again, and...the city is out of water, and you have been away much too long.

Angell's wistful tone and the pleasant American scene must have deepened Don's homesickness, but three more months would pa.s.s before he returned to Manhattan. He had many arrangements to make, much deciding to do. Birgit was pregnant.

31.

A VILLAGE HOMECOMING.

The "lease is up on the apartment [in New York] and my hair is falling out at an ever-accelerating rate and I haven't written a word of the novel that's supposed to be delivered in September. But none of these things is faintly as important as the problem of the divorce has suddenly become," Don wrote Helen on June 10, 1965. He came clean about Birgit and the pregnancy. Birgit had a "rather tragic history," he said; he was going to marry her and be a proper father to the child, and he wanted the baby to be an American citizen. If the divorce did not come through immediately, freeing Don to marry Birgit, and if the child arrived before the couple left Copenhagen, then they would have to "keep moving from country to country." Don would be like the Flying Dutchman.

The "immigration business" is "suitably Kafkaesque and hideous," he said. He hoped everyone in Houston was "prospering, as much as one can prosper in this evil world."

Helen thought Don was probably in love with Birgit, but she did not believe he wanted to be married again right now. She showed the letter to her sister Odell, who cursed Don as though he could hear her overseas. Helen had learned that a judge could grant a divorce within sixty days. Odell agreed that, under the circ.u.mstances, it was best to give Don what he wanted. Helen wrote him, insisting that what they were about to do was "wrong, wrong, wrong." We "cannot end love with a divorce," she said.

Don answered on July 5, asking her to go ahead with the divorce "without paying the lawyer's fees...for the time is growing short." Since January, he had been borrowing money to "buy bread and booze," but he promised to send some cash to Helen soon. He thanked her for her "magnanimity in this meaty matter."

As soon as she filed for divorce, a court record would appear in the daily papers, she reasoned. She didn't want Don's mother to learn the news that way, so she called Mrs. Barthelme. "I don't think you have to do this," Don's mother told her. The anguish in her voice made it difficult for Helen to speak. She told Mrs. Barthelme to talk to her son and that everything would be clear to her then.