Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (Hardcover)
Description
In the 1960s Donald Barthelme came to prominence as the leader of the Postmodern movement. He was a fixture at the New Yorker, publishing more than 100 short stories, including such masterpieces as "Me and Miss Mandible," the tale of a thirty-five-year-old sent to elementary school by clerical error, and "A Shower of Gold,"in which a sculptor agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I? He had a dynamic relationship with his father that influenced much of his fiction. He worked as an editor, a designer, a curator, a news reporter, and a teacher. He was at the forefront of literary Greenwich Village which saw him develop lasting friendships with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, and Norman Mailer. Married four times, he had a volatile private life. He died of cancer in 1989. The recipient of many prestigious literary awards, he is best remembered for the classic novels Snow White, The Dead Father, and many short stories, all of which remain in print today. This is the first biography of Donald Barthelme, and it is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Tracy Daugherty's work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Georgia Review, and others. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Once a student of Donald Barthelme's, he is now Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University.
An Oregon Book Award FinalistIn the 1960s Donald Barthelme came to prominence as the leader of the Postmodern movement. He was a fixture at The New Yorker, publishing more than 100 short stories, including such masterpieces as "Me and Miss Mandible," the tale of a thirty-five-year-old sent to elementary school by clerical error, and "A Shower of Gold," in which a sculptor agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I? He had a dynamic relationship with his father that influenced much of his fiction. He worked as an editor, a designer, a curator, a news reporter, and a teacher. He was at the forefront of literary Greenwich Village which saw him develop lasting friendships with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, and Norman Mailer. Married four times, he had a volatile private life. He died of cancer in 1989. The recipient of many prestigious literary awards, he is best remembered for the classic novels Snow White, The Dead Father, and many short stories, all of which remain in print today. This is the first biography of Donald Barthelme, and it is nothing short of a masterpiece. "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 t
About the Author
Tracy Daugherty's work has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Georgia Review, and others. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Once a student of Donald Barthelme's, he is now Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University.
Praise for Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme…
“An excellent biography... Daugherty is right that the world seems ready for another look at what Barthelme accomplished for American fiction.” - Louis Menand, The New Yorker
“A fond biography… Daugherty’s enthusiasm is catching.” - Wall Street Journal
"[Daugherty's] book is a page-turner. One reads eagerly, chapter to chapter, marriage to marriage, waiting to see what happens next. That Daughtery has ferreted out this element and put it to use is an amazing and rare accomplishment." - Lorrie Moore, New York Review of Books
"Anchors a fascinating chapter in American letters by reclaiming and redefining a risk-taking writer whose edgy legacy is found in today’s most imaginative fiction." - Booklist, starred review "Like Barthelme's best stories, this unapologetically literary and ambitious book is cultural and artistic bricolage at its finest. - Publishers Weekly, starred review“An intimate considered account, filled with vivid characters, convincing insights into the writer’s process and the flavor of its subject’s difficult personal life.” - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "In the 1970s, he was considered the future of literature, and he still has fanatical supporters, my family being Exhibit A. But mostly he's regarded as a dead, twisted branch on the evolutionary tree of American letters. Tracy Daugherty's Hiding Man should help correct that." - Time Magazine
"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
"Lucky Daugherty to get Barthelme, but also lucky Barthelme to get Daugherty, and lucky all of us to get this great loving book." - Jonathan Lethem
" 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 hasDonald 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
