Howard Buten, a college dropout from Detroit, juggled three extraordinary lives.
In one, he was a cuddly, clumsy, speechless red-nosed clown named Buffo. It sold out in theaters around the world. Critics have compared him to Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx.
In another, he volunteered as an assistant with autistic children, went back to school to earn a doctorate in psychology, helped create a pioneering therapy for autism and opened a treatment center.
He has made a third life as a novelist. “Burt,” written in the voice of a disturbed 8-year-old, failed in the United States but achieved, improbably, “Catcher in the Rye” status in France, where it sold nearly a million copies and has become, to his amusement, and slight chagrin: a cultural sensation.
“Howard Buten is a kind of walking poem,” wrote the French writer and actor Claude Duneton in his introduction to Buten’s autobiography, “Buffo” (2005). “Images emanate from him, producing slow music, a concentric adagio like ripples on water.”
Mr. Buten died Jan. 3 in an assisted living facility near his home in Plomodiern, France, a town on the coast of Brittany. He was 74 years old.
His partner and sole survivor, Jacqueline Huet, said the cause was a neurodegenerative disease.
Buten’s three lives came together when he moved to France in 1981 after the unexpected success of “Burt,” which was published in French with a new title, “When I was five years old I killed myself” – the first sentence of the novel.
By day, Buten volunteered at an autism clinic before founding his own center in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris. In the evenings, in nightclubs and theaters, he was Buffo, an act that in 1998 won a Molière, the equivalent of a Tony Award. He wrote novels in his spare moments in cafes, on trains and in the back seats of taxis.
To organize his multifaceted life, Mr. Buten used a color-coding system in his calendar: yellow and orange ink for Buffo performances, black for appointments at the autism center, blue to block time for writing . “I manage these three aspects of my life quite well,” he told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps in 2003. “They are all necessary to me.”
They weren’t as disparate as they might seem.
After dropping out of the University of Michigan in 1970, Buten enrolled at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Venice, Florida. He toured with a circus for two years, then returned to Detroit and invented Buffo, a kind of circus. of homage to the famous Swiss clown Grock, a white-faced simpleton, mimic and player of musical instruments.
A star is not born.
“Howie was going absolutely nowhere,” his childhood friend Jim Burnstein, director of the University of Michigan’s screenwriting program, said in an interview. “He wrote a novel that no one wanted. His girlfriend left him. His dog Frank was run over. He was in a horrible place.
Hoping to lift himself up by doing good in the world, Mr. Buten volunteered at a center for children with developmental disabilities in Detroit. This happened in 1974, six years before the criteria for the diagnosis of autism were established by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association.
The first child he met was a 4-year-old boy named Adam Shelton.
“He bit, headbutted, pinched, and hit, himself and others,” Buten wrote in “Through the Glass Wall: Journeys into the Closed Worlds of Autistics” (2004). “He had no tongue. He didn’t come when he was called. He wouldn’t sit still in a chair.”
Mr. Buten worked with Adam almost every day. Unable to communicate with him, Mr Buten decided to imitate his actions: “rocking when he rocked, flapping when he flapped, shouting and humming when he shouted and hummed,” she wrote.
One day Adam began to imitate him.
Intrigued, Mr. Buten stuck with the approach, eventually using imitation to teach Adam acceptable social behaviors and more than a dozen words. While the method Mr Buten stumbled upon was not entirely new, studies have shown that the technique – called reciprocal imitation training – is a useful treatment for autism.
In dealing with Adam, Mr. Buten also came across a character for Buffo: a clown who can sing and make noise but is unable to speak.
“What I learned was how to be autistic,” Mr. Buten told the San Francisco Examiner in 1981. “It goes straight to Buffo: his mannerisms, his ways of speaking (or lack thereof), physical behaviors and Perceptions of reality are all real. autistic. Funny is a kind of idiot savant syndrome: adorable, childish, totally innocent.”
Adam was also on Buten’s mind when he wrote “Burt” (1981), which sold fewer than 10,000 copies in the United States but is still read in French schools.
“It’s about a child in a mental institution who is considered disturbed,” Buten told the Detroit Free Press in 1981. “I wrote it from the child’s point of view because I don’t think he’s disturbed. He added: “The point of the book is a statement about how adults in general don’t understand children even if it was them.”
At the beginning of the novel, Burt wanders the institute alone.
“I was sleepy,” Burt says. “I sat on my bed. It has sheets. At home it’s covered. It’s blue. I’ve had it since I was a child. My mom wants to throw it away but I won’t let her. But once I did something. I pissed on the blanket. It had a very pungent odor.
Howard Alan Buten was born on July 28, 1950 in Detroit. His father, Ben Buten, was a lawyer. His mother, Dorothy (Fleisher) Buten, had been a tap dancer and vaudeville performer while growing up.
Howie was precocious and artistic.
After his mother taught him to sing and dance, he taught himself to be a ventriloquist. His first singing gig was in a synagogue “as a sort of junior cantor,” he told the San Francisco Examiner. “I thought it was religious, but it was actually entertainment.”
He majored in Far Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, but spent most of his time skipping class and being a buffoon. Determined to pursue a career in real clowning, Mr. Buten did the math.
“I could go to clown college for 13 weeks and become a clown,” he told his friends. “Or I could go to the University of Michigan for two more years and become a clown.”
Although he never finished college, he earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California, in 1986. His clinic, the Adam Shelton Center, opened in 1996. “Burt” is was reprinted in the United States under the French title. in 2000, this time with a newfound appreciation.
“Burt narrates in one of the most fascinating voices since Holden Caulfield,” Rick Whitaker said in a review for the Washington Post, adding that Mr. Buten was “too good to be left to the French alone.”
The French worshiped Mr. Buten in a way that Americans never did, a mystery that would perplex him for a lifetime. It was done at Knight of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 1991.
Mr. Buten returned sporadically to the United States to play Buffo. In 2004, he played two nights at the State Playhouse in Cal State LA, a performance that a Los Angeles Times review described as “a sweet swirl of existential nonsense and sage understanding.”
Culture Clown, a French magazine, once asked him what happened when he left the stage.
“Buffo disappears and Howard comes back,” he said. “That’s why I feel uncomfortable during applause: Buffo is shy and Howard doesn’t like to take credit on his behalf.”