This weekend I finished reading Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s fantastic new biography of postmodernist Donald Barthelme. Perfect thing to read this past cold, melancholy, drizzled week. The Barthelmes — a most talented family — seem to exist under a slight pall of depression. Very little sunshine in their works, but abundant intellect and fierce spirit.
Tracy Daugherty has truly outdone himself with this biography. It is dense, very incisive, and fascinating. I have been waiting for a study like this for years and had in fact suggested something along these lines more than a decade ago to Rick Barthelme. He was less than enthused at the time, but then it was far too close to his brother’s passing.
I learned much about the mysterious (to me at least) oldest of that triad of modern writing brothers. By the way, I agree fully with a comment the author made about the Brothers Barthelme, they are a much under-studied though quite rare family in American literature.
You see, I was priveleged enough to study writing under both Steve and Rick Barthelme, but Don has always held the mystique. All you have to do is read any of his brilliant and baffling texts to become electrocuted. You realize you’ve jumped off the pier into the gulf of literary experimentation. The Teachings of Don B., for all their Carlos Castaneda sound, prove to be the pseudo-semiotics courses of an American Italo Calvino in a Texas architecture school working nights for an ad agency. Bold stuff.
As Don once said and I like to apply to himself and his work, “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.”
Donald Barthelme’s work was complex, if not difficult, and so was his life. Though he himself dismissed the insightful effects of his own biography in comprehending his works, this is a welcome light in the dark illuminating one of America’s modern literary masters.
I find it fascinating, by the way, that two of the best (yet very, very different) modern authors, Don B. and John Updike, were both artists or architects as well as authors. This made their writings soar, as their Artistic Eye was quite unique and perhaps better than their contemporaries.
I will end with this excerpt from Don’s uber-sharp novelplay The King, because it is a chorus on a dream of a paradise regained, which for some reason today reminds me of the French masterpiece Manon of the Spring, always dancing, ever-twirling before her valley spring, on the verge of discovery and revenge and redemption:
“He is dreaming that there is no war, no Table Round, no Arthur, no Launcelot!”
“That cannot be! He dreams, of the softness of Guinevere, the sweetness of guinevere, the brightness of Guinevere, and the sexuality of Guinevere!”
“How do you know?”
“I can see into the dream! Now she enters the dream in her own person, wearing a gown wrought of gold bezants over white samite and carrying a bottle of fine wine, Pinot Grigio by the look of it!”
“What a matchless dream!”
“Under an apple tree…”
Thanks, Mr. Daughterty, for researching and writing this gem of discovery and return to paradise for the rest of us curious readers.
PS: Check out the stacks of free Barthelmismo available at Jessamyn’s long-running, excellent tribute page.
Also, for you WordPress geeks, check out the Donald B.-inspired minimalistic blog design: Barthelme.