Iconoclast who found the limelight

A Biography
of Donald Barthelme

By Tracy Daugherty

St. Martin's Press.

592 pp. $29.95

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Reviewed by Floyd Skloot

Experimental or avant-garde writers are by definition fringe figures in the literary culture of their times. They push formal and stylistic boundaries away from the conventional, their innovative work seldom finding wide popular readership.

But the iconoclastic, Philadelphia-born fiction writer Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) was rare among postmodern trailblazers: His strange, jazzy, collagelike, non-narrative stories were routinely published in the New Yorker, and his novels were discussed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, giving them visibility and respectability. He was central to the aesthetic discussion, yet an affront to its orthodoxies.

After his death, Barthelme's work went out of print - and only recently found its way back, thanks in part to inclusion in the Penguin Modern Classics and in Farrar, Straus & Giroux's Classics series. Now that this cool, edgy champion of disruptive art - this figure who came to prominence in the antiauthoritarian '60s by confronting accepted notions of how fiction worked - has been recognized, it is clearly time for a biography.

Hiding Man, by fiction writer Tracy Daugherty, a student of Barthelme, fills that need. It is an intimate, probing, meticulous, deeply considered account of the life, filled with vivid characters and their witty talk, convincing insights into the writer's process, tension, and the flavor of its subject's often difficult personal life.

It also provides rigorous readings of Barthelme's individual works, an assessment of where and how he fits in the literary and artistic world of his time and ours. Framed by Daugherty's recollections of his own encounters with Barthelme, Hiding Man manages to be emotionally as well as intellectually satisfying.

Barthelme was the eldest son of a noted modernist architect from Galveston, Texas, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and eventually settled the family in Houston. Difficult, restless, intense, demanding, he was an outsized figure for his children to cope with. He married Helen Bechtold, a Philadelphia woman with a passion for writing and theater that she passed on to all their children. Four of them, growing up in what Daugherty calls a "hothouse ambience," became accomplished writers, with Donald, Peter, Rick, and Steve all publishing well-regarded novels. "Perhaps only the James family - Henry, William, Henry Senior - surpasses them in this regard," Daugherty writes.

Moving out on his own, Donald Barthelme gravitated quickly toward art, music, and literature. He was a jazz aficionado, played drums, appreciated and wrote about painting and sculpture, was a newspaper book reviewer and sometime journalist, edited a magazine. His taste across all art, influenced by his father's architectural practices, was for the unconventional, the ironic, the sweetly humorous. His was a hectic apprenticeship marked by the search for a suitable way to express his sense of weirdness, his impulse to challenge authority. That apprenticeship was interrupted when Barthelme was drafted and sent to Korea as a public information officer. After service, married for the first of four times, he settled in New York City, making a place for himself in Greenwich Village that lasted most of the rest of his life.

Daugherty's portrait of Barthelme discovering his literary voice, or rather his literary procedures, is richly shaded: "Not only did parody remain a central impulse through his career but, more important, he was already developing strategies for transforming personal material into allegory, fantasy, or absurd imagery."

Concerned less with linear, realistic storytelling, character development, or rounded emotional content, Barthelme came to view fiction writing as a matter of stylistic expression: "Style was the answer to life's stress, Don said. Style was something clean." In a fragmented world that defied sense or coherence, Barthelme "believed that style and manner are more central to art's effects than content." This self-consciousness and insistence on the author's fundamental presence in the story or novel, a declaration of art as being about the making of art rather than the capturing of reality, was at the heart of Barthelme's work and that of the postmodernist writers he influenced or resembled, such as William Gass, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, or Robert Coover.

What saved Barthelme from being just another marginalized experimentalist was the almost inexplicable favor he found with Roger Angell, the acclaimed editor of the New Yorker. Angell published and encouraged Barthelme, became his friend, supported him financially, defended him and his strange writings. Through a long, productive career, this relationship sustained the writer in his difficult, challenging art.

Daugherty does not hide Barthelme's personal struggles. Alcoholic, unfaithful, self-destructive, focused avidly on his writing, Barthelme was a hard man to know, though apparently easy for many to like, in retreat from distractions but also an engaged neighbor and teacher, an occasional political activist. "He was always two people," Daugherty writes. "the 'hiding man,' withdrawing from the world to work . . . and the citizen, working to better the world for others," especially in his challenge to the artistic limits imposed by popular taste. He died from throat cancer at 58, and Tracy Daugherty, in this excellent biography, makes us feel this loss as personal.