Hiding Man

"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 . . . 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."—Colm Tóibín, The New York Times Book Review

"Not just a modest remembrance but a full-length, meticulously documented study. All dead authors should be so lucky . . . Daugherty was Barthelme's student in the '80s. The last time Daugherty saw him, six months before he died, his former teacher gave him a new assignment: 'Write a story about a genius.' He did, and I'd give it an A."—Steven Moore, The Washington Post

"Like a knowledgeable curator, Daugherty walks us through Barthelme's publications book by book, pausing for brilliant explications of the more challenging stories, such as 'Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,' which comes into sharper focus after Daugherty explains its relationship to a 1931 Jean Renoir film with a similar title. He interleaves this analysis with accounts of the writer's four marriages, affairs, teaching stints and other extracurricular activities in a respectful but not hagiographic manner. (He reveals, for instance, that Barthelme had drinking problems starting at 16, was fiscally irresponsible and smoked so much he died of cancer at 58.) I especially enjoyed Daugherty's fierce defense of Barthelme's works as socially responsible art, not as the aesthetic playthings that some critics accuse them of being. As life became more complicated in the 20th century, and as the media and corporations tried to define reality for consumers, Barthelme felt new tactics were necessary to render and to criticize this future-shocked world. Daugherty quotes from Barthelme's essay 'Not-Knowing' on the writer's 'need to refresh language continually, to keep it free of 'political and social contamination,' safe from co-optation by commercial interests.' While the traditional short story kept its blinkered head down, Barthelme's alert fiction grappled with the upheavals of his time, functioning as verbal guerrilla attacks against the rebarbative propaganda spouted by Madison Avenue and the White House. 'The disorientation in my stories is not mine,' Barthelme once said. 'It is what is to be perceived around us.' In this sense, his mind-bending stories are often more realistic than those of his mainstream contemporaries and still feel fresh and relevant, while theirs can sound quaint. Daugherty was Barthelme's student in the '80s. The last time Daugherty saw him, six months before he died, his former teacher gave him a new assignment: 'Write a story about a genius.' He did, and I'd give it an A."—Steven Moore, The Washington Post Book World

"Thoroughly researched and carefully documented (Daugherty pursues literary influences like an investigative journalist following the money), the book is more than the biography of an individual writer. Owing to Barthelme's pedigree, wide interests, and experiences, the book reads like a cultural history of the 20th century, taking in, among other things, modern architecture, the 'Baltimore Catechism,' the French Symbolists, Kierkegaard, jazz, the birth of television, Cahiers du Cinema and the French New Wave, Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum (where Barthelme served briefly as the director), Abstract Expressionism, Samuel Beckett, the 1960s, Watergate, and the rise of literary minimalism in the '80s. The result is a book that animates Barthelme and his fiction . . . Daugherty reveals how Barthelme's many influences and experiences shaped his work, and in language that is clear, direct, and free of jargon he offers interesting and illuminating approaches to his fictions . . . That said, now seems like an ideal time for a Barthelme renaissance. By disassembling the images and narratives we consume and come to accept as the world, Barthelme reminded us that far from being 'natural,' our financial markets and political and religious institutions are—like our houses—historical and cultural developments. One hopes a new generation of writers will follow Barthelme's path, moving beyond the bounds of representational fiction. One hopes Tracy Daugherty's Hiding Man will increase our nation's available stock of extremely intelligent and physically attractive readers."—David Thoreen, The Boston Globe

"You don't read this wonderful biography and think Don was just one more exceptional guy. In fact, it's obvious he was a maverick all along—a very erudite, well-informed one—who graciously took along companions, for the ride. Tracy Daugherty writes about 'the alchemy of turning experience into a stylized essence.' It was about alchemy, and Barthelme was a wizard. His writing needs to be re-read and reconsidered—not because of the times, not because it's neglected, but because he is among the most original and moving writers who ever existed. This book is an amazing account of what a life in writing really is. In fact, it's what living a life really is. How often do you read a book and think you've found out about that?"—Ann Beattie

"If you believe that Donald Barthelme was as important formally to the second half of the twentieth century of American fiction as Hemingway was to the first, this is an important book. He was, and it is. As its subject would have had it, Mr. Daugherty is deft rather than ponderous, allusive rather than probative, and surprising in his tenable explications of what Donald Barthelme wrote and in his private revelations of who Donald Barthelme was. Mr. Daugherty dutifully wrestles 'ineffable' to the ground. Gay sadness abounds and he has Donald Barthelme just right."—Padget Powell

"Donald Barthelme was a restless spirit, a cunning innovator, an incisive thinker, a funny and heartbreaking ironist, and a splendid prose stylist. He was also a wonderfully quirky and complicated person. Now the gifted fiction writer Tracy Daugherty has brought him out of the shadows and into the light in this rich, intimate, and thoroughly illuminating chronicle of the life and works of an American original. It is a major achievement."—Ed Hirsch

"The inimitable Don B is fortunate in his biographer: Hiding Man is a richly detailed, full-length portrait of the artist at all stages of his too-short life."—John Barth

"This superbly written and impeccably researched book is a model of what literary biographies should be: compassionate, yet scrupulously honest, revealing and unidealizing, with a sophisticated understanding of the interplay between the life and the work. The material on Barthelme's early struggles to establish himself as a writer is particularly fresh and poignant. Tracy Daugherty has captured this elusive, difficult and deeply touching man on the page, as much as anyone possibly can."—Phillip Lopate

"Sometimes when I’m writing I find myself wondering What Would Don Say? but there are few of us who can begin to approach the audaciousness and freshness of vision his writing first intruded into the staid halls of the publishing world. Tracy Daugherty’s investigation of this complex and private man is doubly fascinating for its portrait of the cultural moment into which Barthelme’s work exploded. No one has yet equaled Barthelme’s wit, his sexual and political candor, and his deep commitment to the possibilities of honest language. Daugherty lovingly but critically illuminates them all."—Rosellen Brown

"When Donald Barthelme was asked for his biography by the Paris Review in 1981, he replied, 'I don't think it would sustain a person's attention for a moment.' Now Tracy Daugherty has come to prove Barthelme wrong. Beginning in the early 1960s, Barthelme published 126 short stories—'pieces,' he called them—in the New Yorker. One of his several novels, a hallucinatory reworking of 'Snow White,' full of sexual intrigue and a murder, filled an entire issue of the magazine in 1967. He finished 16 books in his lifetime, and other collections of his works have followed. Henry James held that a writer's life couldn't be very interesting because most of it was spent sitting at a desk. But James was famously secret and didn't want his life examined. Barthelme, in Daugherty's estimation, lived up to the title of one his early stories, which gives his biography its title: ‘Hiding Man’ . . . I have been reviewing books for 40 years now, but this is my first time to write about a literary book set in Houston and dealing with places and people I know. I'm partial to this book and fascinated by the material . . . Hiding Man is thoroughly satisfying in tracking down the life and the writing . . . How I wish he had lived longer. He would be 78 this year."—Michael Berryhill, The Houston Chronicle

"The author of Snow White and numerous other postmodern classics gets a generous biography from a former student . . . Novelist Daugherty begins and ends with appreciative, affecting memories of his encounters with Barthelme during the 1980s, first as professor and grad student at the University of Houston, then as friends. The pages in between take a traditional look at a most unusual man and writer. Daugherty sketches the family's history in Texas, spending considerable time on the substantial architectural career of Barthelme's father, also named Donald. The biographer then glances at young Don's childhood and early manhood, noting numerous Oedipal conflicts that would crop up again. He points to the influences of Thurber and Perelman and The New Yorker, which later gave Barthelme his biggest break and most frequent exposure—though fiction editor Roger Angell never let his championship of the writer keep him from rejecting work he considered inferior. Daugherty usefully explores his subject's considerable background and expertise in the visual arts; Barthelme managed a Houston museum for a time and worked on an art magazine in New York. Married three times, he remained on genial terms with wives one and two, sired two daughters and loved women till throat cancer ended it all. He drank a lot too, and his biographer seems to see booze more as a creative lubricant than a smiling but bitter enemy. Barthelme enjoyed positive reviews until near the end of his life, when he left New York and returned to teach at the University of Houston, where the author avers he was treated as the great celebrity he indeed was in the literary world. Daugherty loves Barthelme's fiction, seldom uttering a discouraging word, and views his subject with affectionate, grateful eyes. Uses a spatula to apply icing rather than a blade to slice and reveal."—Kirkus Reviews

"Daugherty has written the first comprehensive biography of Donald Barthelme, a leader of the postmodernist movement of the 1960s who published over 100 short stories in The New Yorker. Daugherty took the title of one of Barthelme's early stories as his own, believing it to be an apt description of the man. For a time, Barthelme's works were largely out of print, but a resurgence of interest has changed that. Daugherty's book is an attempt to accumulate details about Barthelme from his colleagues, friends, and ex-wives while these resources are still available. He does an admirable job of examining the influence of Barthelme's father, a noted architect, on his early work as well as Barthelme's tumultuous private life, including his four marriages and his battle with depression and alcoholism."—Anthony Pucci, Library Journal

"This sprawling first biography of the writer Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) complements an exemplary account of the man and his milieu with a history of 20th-century architecture, film, philosophy, visual art and political activism—not to mention a stunning exegesis of Barthelme's work and a surfeit of vignettes from New York literary life in the 1960s and '70s. Daugherty, a professor of English and creative writing at Oregon State and former student of Barthelme, renders the writer of The Dead Father in all his complexity: the experimental iconoclast, the 'establishment figure' without a university degree who published more than 100 stories in The New Yorker, the citizen-activist, admitted alcoholic, the devoted if distant father and the 'prankster on the page.' While Daugherty firmly takes Barthelme's side in his four troubled marriages, he assesses the writer's legacy, his champions and detractors (e.g., Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner and the 'hundreds' of readers who canceled their New Yorker subscriptions in 1968 to protest the publication of his catty Snow White). Like Barthelme's best stories, this unapologetically literary and ambitious book is cultural and artistic bricolage at its finest."—Publishers Weekly