Customer Reviews

Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme

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This biography is a well researched, fascinating account of an American original. It reads like a novel, but also has the scholarship and insight into Barthelme's work that one would demand. It's also a personal and moving portrait since the author knew Barthelme at one point during his life. I highly recommend this. Should get noticed for awards and certainly deserves to be read for its pleasure.

I finished this over the weekend, in a matter of days after I picking it up, & I found it nothing short of masterly. Tracy Daugherty begins w/ a crucial understanding, namely, that Donald Barthelme's life & career set a challenge for American imaginative literature, for what it holds valuable. So this entire espresso-rich compendium of pertinent life-detail -- reaching back to the founding of Houston & of Greenwich Village, to the structure & symbolism of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, to the place of Andromache & Penelope in Homeric myth -- the entire book -- neglecting none of Barthelme's busy family, none of his stabs at reporting, at teaching, at art-curating, collage-making, radio-writing, jazz-playing, & none of his heavy drinking either, & certainly neglecting none of his many wives & lovers, a number of them (like Grace Paley) superb artists themselves -- still the entire biography never gets far from its argument. Barthelme's work, in Daugherty's ever-sensitive assessments, never lacks for the *edge* that drove it. As a writer, he was always up against the prevailing powers, & always subverting them w/ wit, intelligence, surprise, & a "golden ear" (to borrow the expression several of the former lovers & friends in this book find themselves using). In HIDING MAN Barthelme has a life-story worthy of the struggle to which he, all light-heartedly, dedicated his vocation. Anyone seeking to matter in the arts could learn from the fascinating, scrupulous, & highly humane scholarship Daugherty brings off here.

I can't imagine a better person to have written this first-rate biography of Donald Barthelme than Tracy Daugherty, who has brought his perspectives as writer, scholar, protege, friend, and person of integrity to bear on the artful revelation of one of our most important writers. Daugherty gives us a felt sense of the questions that drove Barthelme to become who he was and to make breakthroughs in language and consciousness. A student of Barthelme's at the same time as Tracy Daugherty, I can attest to his portrayal of Barthelme as mentor--demanding, generous, wise. But what fascinates me now, years later, is understanding Barthelme in the context of his time and as a shaper of new realities. Barthelme loved to put "a new thing into the world," and I can almost hear his clipped approval of Daugherty's biography of him, in all his complexity, brilliance, and humanness.

This is an excellent biography -- dense, detailed, insightful.

I have waited years and years for just such an in-depth study. Donald Barthelme definitely deserves the attention. He is America's Calvino. I studied writing under both his brothers, but Don B. has always held a deep fascination for me. He was an amazing writer and shook up the literary world.

I highly recommend this book. Now, let's go back and read his collected works.

Daugherty's writing is definitely skillful and often beautiful. This is one of the best biographies I've read in a long time. I found the description of the relationship between Barthelme and Roger Angell, Barthelme's New Yorker editor, especially interesting--even shocking as a glimpse into that world. It would seem, from this narrative at least, that Barthelme's entire career was pretty much made by Angell, but that Barthelme was also enslaved to the New Yorker because of the curious fiscal practice of paying writers advances for future work, thus ensuring that the impoverished Barthelme would remain in debt to the famous magazine.

The last quarter or third of this book disappointed me. The writing became coy in terms of what was left out. After multiple discussions of the towering influence Barthelme's father had on him, and how Oedipal themes of patricide flourished in Barthelme's work, Daughtery never tells us how Barthelme Sr. reacted to Jr.'s work, alcoholism, and career ups and downs. Barthelme Sr. even outlived Jr., but Sr. basically disappears from the latter portion of the book. I got a strong sense that information was being withheld by the author, that probably Daughtery is protecting living members of the Barthelme family with whom he needed to collaborate to do as good of a job as he did.

In summary I would say this is a near-great book but it's marred by this possible self-censorship and withholding. Perhaps we'll have to wait for another couple of decades for another generation to produce the truly great Barthelme bio.

Tracy Daugherty's "Hiding Man," the first biographical treatment of Donald Barthelme, provides a much needed re-evaluation of an author who soared to critical acclaim in the mid to late 1960's, with an entire issue of the New Yorker devoted to the publication of his first novel, Snow White (1967), only to succumb to a subsequent backlash with the growth of writing programs / MFA programs in the 1970's and 1980's and the Raymond Carver / New Realism mode adopted as the standard house style at Iowa and many other such places.

The Barthelme who emerges in these pages is neither the (early) critcal favorite nor the abstract postmodernist rendered in subsequent depictions, but instead a modernist with a dark, mordant sense of humor, and a surrealist's eye and ear for the judicious pastiche and juxtaposition, generating new meaning from context.

He is also a native Texan, with an architect father, who moves to New York for a lengthy period of time, before returning to Houston, and this narrative, too, places him with respect to the academy and his unrelenting humor. The subject of a recent NY Times piece on the short story as THE post-war American form (along with Flannery O'Connor and John Cheever), Donald Bartheleme remains as vital as the day "Me and Miss Mandible" first appeared: after this bio, start off with Dr. Caligari if Bartheleme is new for you--

An enjoyable, informative and interesting literary biography about a writer who was among my favorites in college. Barthelme's work is always challenging, undeniably "serious" literature, yet it's almost always fun and entertaining to read. Here the biographer gives us what feels like a complete and honest portrait of a man who was brilliant yet self-defeating, and both selfish and generous. Having read this, I feel less sure I would have liked Donald Barthelme personally had I met him, yet my respect for his work and its impact on the development of American literature are only strengthened.

Because Barthelme's life and career were cut short (it shouldn't be a "spoiler" to anyone interested in this book if I say he died of cancer in his fifties) this biography dwells mostly on his formative years and the build-up in his career to where he began to have some success and recognition. Many biographies of artists provide a lot of background about parents and the subject's environment as a child without this information having much relevance to what the artist eventually became. In this case, though, Daugherty gives us information about the home Barthelme grew up in, and the aesthetic philosophies and architectural work of his father, which help clarify where Donald Barthelme the developing writer came up with his daring, modernist approach.

This book is overall quite successful in what it tries to accomplish. This is essential reading for any serious fan of Barthelme or even modernist American literature, and if you're interested in American fiction from after mid-century, you'll probably find much to enjoy here as well.

Writing easy to read and engaging. You only have to read one Barthelme story to wonder what the guy's life was like. This book delivers the goods.

Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty's biography of Donald Barthelme, is an investigation of the education of an artistic sensibility. Barthelme never actually finished college, though he may have had enough credits for two BAs. The twelve years of Barthelme's life from eighteen to thirty are a long apprenticeship, working in journalism as his hero Hemingway did; going to Korea with the army and mostly reading; writing speeches for the president of the University of Houston; managing a great small magazine, Forum; directing the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art; moving to New York to run an art magazine for Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess. He didn't publish his own writing until he was well past 30. He really did read all of western Philosophy (as he told young writers to do for their own apprenticeships), as well as prodigiously in literature, before finally turning out his own product (he destroyed much of his "juvenile" writing, nearly all of what he'd done in his twenties). Any young writer would profit from a close study of Hiding Man, paying particular heed to what Barthelme read and asked family to send him when he was in the army in Korea--and to how he read, spider fashion from one book to the webs of other books connected to central texts. Daugherty's book is also an immensely sad story of a high functioning alcoholic and son of a fascinating, demanding, autocratic modernist architect father, whose regard and approval Barthelme never fully received or understood. Still, Hiding Man is instructive and heartening. This is how to describe a writer's life--tactfully, with the fiction as models for efficiency as well as for information about his life. The great surprise of Hiding Man is how much autobiography is available in Donald Barthelme's beautiful, quizzical, puzzle-piece stories and novels. This is a great book.