The Cultural Terrorist

Brandon D. Shuler

American Book Review, Volume 31, Number 1, November/December 2009,

p. 25 (Review)

Published by American Book Review

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.0.0000

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/374444

Access provided at 4 Feb 2020 13:57 GMT from University Of South Florida Libraries
 The Cultural Terrorist
Hiding Man:
A Biography of Donald Barthelme
Tracy Daugherty
St. Martin’s Press
http://us.macmillan.com/smp.aspx
592 pages; cloth, $35.00
Tracy Daugherty’s Hiding Man: A Biography of
Donald Barthelme ranks with Ted Morgan’s Literary
Outlaw’s (1988) exhaustive life history of William
S. Burroughs and Maynard Mack’s Alexander Pope:
A Life (1988) as one of the best all-inclusive stories
about a writing life. Few literary biographers leave
the reader with the sense of intimacy, compassion,
and understanding of the topic as Daugherty does.
Daugherty, with diligence and empathy, mines the
depths of the hiding man persona within Donald
Barthelme and reveals the real Don B.—the three-
time timid husband, the caring teacher, the shadowed
and respectful son, the lifelong student, and the
doting father. The Olympian climb of Hiding Man
and Barthelme’s life is as beautiful and interesting
as it is erudite and consuming. Daugherty’s work
reminds of us of the fragility of sustained genius, but
he also gives us Don B. as a person with the same
fears, hopes, insecurities, and aspirations as each of
us. When I finished reading Hiding Man, I closed the
book, laid it on my chest, and thought, “So, that’s
what made Donald Barthelme click.”
Daugherty weaves the story of Barthelme’s life
while remaining true to the facts and experiences
that shaped the Barthelme short stories and novels.
Daugherty leaps back and forth in Barthelme’s
lifetime to reiterate or highlight the experiences
that reflect themselves in Barthelme’s fiction. Not
since Virginia Woolf’s fictional biography Orlando
(1928) has an enigmatic and complex character such
as Barthelme been portrayed with such honesty and
palate-enticing prose. Artfully narrative, Hiding
Man reads more like a novel than a straightforward
biography. The narrative prose kept me though starved
for sleep pleading, “Just one more chapter.”
Hiding Man reads more like a novel
than a straightforward biography.
On the journey, Daugherty takes us deep into
the steamy bayous of Texas where it all started and
breaks down Barthelme’s intellectual struggle to
escape the shadows cast by his overbearing, yet well-
intentioned, father. Daugherty follows Don B. from
obscurity to his rise as Father of the Postmodern.
In between, we see all the intimate family holidays
and conversations of the family Barthelme where “a
number of men [were] competing for the attention
of a single woman.” Daugherty deconstructs the
complexities of the Barthelme family’s relations and
reconstructs the influence of Barthelme’s real-life,
modern day extension of the Snow White myth that
bore the narrative fruits of Barthelme’s Freudian-
themed stories. Daugherty explains Barthelme’s use
of Freudian literary theory in everyday terms and
juxtaposes the theory with the stories they inspired
in the Barthelme canon, all the while, keeping
Barthelme’s humor, wit, and intelligence intact.
With Barthelme, we be-bop through the
syncopation and energy-infused jazz scenes that
played an integral role in the rhythm and rhyme of his
Brandon D. Shuler
works. We follow Barthelme
through the humid streets
and alleyways of Houston’s
burgeoning jazz scene to the
cool, neon-filled streets of NYC
where Barthelme discovers his
artist inspiration and falls into
the raging jazz, literary, and art
scenes of NYC’s intellectual
elite. In the smoky bars of
Greenwich Village and Times
Square and the alcohol-laced
studio of Elaine de Koonig,
Barthelme learned “something
about making a statement” and
“about placing emphases within
a statement or introducing
variations…[taking] an old
tired tune…[and] literally
[making] it new.” Daugherty
dusts off the dirt and grime
Barthelme collected in these
seedy bars and dirty side-streets
of Houston and New York City
to reveal the shiny new writer
that would become one of the
most influential authors of the
late twentieth century.
Hiding Man’s importance
though lies in the illumination
of Barthelme’s reworking of the
novel’s convention. Barthelme,
the cultural terrorist, admitted
he was smuggling “hostile
object[s]” into readers’ hands
with the aim of reviving
“outmoded forms” and “celebrating life.” Barthelme
the heritage of the literary novel and passing his
held to the conviction that the traditional novel, such
knowledge on to those that follow him.
as Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
As Daugherty closes Hiding Man on Don
(1953), was a “doomed tower.” The competitive B.’s tragic, too-short life, Barthelme boards a plane
animosity Barthelme felt towards Bellow’s writing for Houston in an Oregonian blizzard imploring
and Barthelme’s first encounter with the stagnation Daugherty “to write a story about a genius.” If one
and apathy of the literary establishment of the 50s listens to Daugherty’s words closely, one can almost
and 60s at a Wagner College summer writing institute hear the dying Father ask, “Did I do it well?”
sparked the development of Barthelme’s unique and “Yes, marvelously well,” we say. “Superbly.
penetrating style. The Bellow incident, portrayed We will never see it done better.”
beautifully in Hiding Man, hardened Barthelme’s
commitment to expanding the possibilities of prose
fiction and strengthened him for the battles over
Brandon D. Shuler is a graduate student at the
form and punctuation his work would endure with University of Texas-Pan American. He is currently
his future The New Yorker editor, friend, and mentor, working on a literary biography of South Texas writer
Roger Angell. The New Republic’s reviewer Richard Hart Stilwell.
Gilman summarizes it best when he described
Barthelme as one of a “handful of American writers
who are working to replenish and extend the art
of fiction instead of trying to add to the stock of
entertainments.”
For any young writer answering the call of
the Shakespeare Squad, Hiding Man is a necessary
read. Barthelme’s climb from cub reporter at the
Houston Chronicle to his peak of prosperity and
frustration with The New Yorker is a writer’s road
map to success. The consternation with and search
for perfection Barthelme demanded in his work and
the subsequent creative rejuvenation he found as
head of the University of Houston’s creative writing
program is an inspiration. Barthelme’s devotion to
constant revisions, his reverence of the entire canon
of Western philosophy, and his struggles to rewrite
the constraints of the novel by experimenting with
traditional punctuation and conventional form
are Don B.’s way of preserving and forwarding
November–December 2009 Page 25