He was continually berating Donald for his avant-garde tastes in art and literature, which probably only made Donald more determined to maintain them. Another Barthelme brother, Peter, described their father as a “verbal bully,” and it seems as if his imposing presence and intelligence both inspired his many talented children and cast a shadow that none of them ever escaped.Ī girlfriend reported attending one of the father’s frequent slide shows in which he deliberately lingered over a photo of Donald’s first wife, just to see how it might affect her.
As Donald’s brothers Frederick and Steven described it in their grueling memoir, Doubling Down, the family home that their father designed was a wild agglomeration of wood and copper siding filled with “elegant Saarinen chairs, the bent birch of Aalto dining tables and chairs, almost every piece of furniture or fabric that Charles and Ray Eames ever designed.” It was the sort of house that would make a young man like Donald into something of a bricoleur, while at the same time teaching him to hate bricoleurs. The premier “de-loosener” in Barthelme’s life was probably his father, a Houston-based architect inspired by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Of course, people who develop well-organized methods of “loosening up” are rarely very “loose” to begin with. These were all hallmarks of the Barthelme “method”-one that served him well enough to produce more than a hundred short stories, five novels, several failed marriages, and countless failed relationships, and a career-long ability to charm readers even when those readers had no idea what he was doing. The intention was clear-to force his students to stop overthinking and over-managing their work and just let the words flow. Find a copy of John Ashbery’s “Three Poems,” read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, don’t sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.
0 kommentar(er)
