The Disappointment Artist Read Online Free Page A

art or great abomination ever could.

The Disappointment Artist
    Mrs. Neverbody vs. Edward Dahlberg
    My aunt Billie—Wilma Yeo (1918–1994) to her readers, to the world, to you—was among the first human beings I remember. Her Kansas City apartment is the site of one of my earliest, murkiest memories: seated on a carpet, I wept at seeing, on television, a depiction of a forest fire, one that routed a herd of panicked baby animals. Aunt Billie’s twin daughters, then young teenagers, laughed at me for weeping. In the memory, which plays like a length of corroded celluloid—grainy, broken at both ends, but reliably identical each time—Aunt Billie sweeps in, rescues and consoles me, lightly chastises her daughters.
    I lived with my parents in Kansas City, on the campus of the Kansas City Art Institute, from 1965, when I was two, until 1968, when my parents returned to New York City, and each of three or four of my earliest memories takes place there. Another involves television: taking shelter during a tornado warning, with my parents and a couple of their friends, in the basement of our stone house. George Burk, another painter on the faculty then at KCAI and my father’s best friend, brought for entertainment a six-pack of beer and a portable black-and-white, on which we watched
The Monkees
while the storm harmlessly passed. Yet another Kansas City memory is of seeing my first film in a theater:
Yellow
Submarine
. Counterfeit Beatles, animated Beatles, forest fires seen but unreal, tornados real but unseen—may one plead, Your Honor, post-modernism as an involuntary condition?
    That’s Kansas City’s whole place in my life: a small, strange place. Aunt Billie’s place in my life is larger. She was my first writer. And, though my father was a painter and I was trained for a career in his footsteps, as a visual artist, I somehow knew from the first to sit at the feet of any writer I encountered. Aunt Billie was primarily an author of children’s books, but her résumé boasted articles in
The Reader’s Digest
and
The
Saturday Evening Post
, and a biography of Thomas Hart Benton,
Maverick
with a Paintbrush
, which, though written simply enough for young readers, is solidly researched and a contribution to Benton studies. Her
Mrs. Neverbody’s Recipes
(J. B. Lippincott, 1968; the title page notes: “The following poems were first published in
Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine
”) was the first autographed book in my collection, which before I was even out of my teenage years had grown to include inscriptions from Allen Ginsberg, Robert Heinlein, Norton Juster, and Anthony Burgess. I was a nerdish and sycophantic kid, let me be the first to say. I revered writers, and still do. I loved my aunt Billie.
    So did my father, who’s still around. Sibling bonds were strong among my father and his two sisters and three brothers. They grew up together in Depression-era towns in Missouri and Iowa. But Aunt Billie (the second oldest) and my father (the runt) enjoyed a particular lifelong kinship as the two “creative” types. Their closeness defied and outlasted my father’s repeatedly throwing over the Midwest for, in turn, Columbia University, the army, Paris (on a painter’s Fulbright), and New York again.
    On the telephone my father still shouts, gives only rudimentary news, and suspects all he hears, feeling, perhaps rightly, that long-distance calls are a sham apparatus. He and Aunt Billie maintained their intimacy by writing letters. One day not long ago my father asked if I’d ever heard of Edward Dahlberg. I had some familiarity with that name, but I couldn’t imagine why he wanted to know.
    “Have a look at this,” he said, and handed me the letter.
    Dearest Brother—first of all I should say that I write this in an ego-centered search for an identity that I lost in a class at UMKC taught by Edward Dahlberg, a writer in residence for this semester. To describe him is impossible—I’ve read most of his