DONALD BARTHELME published seventeen books, including four novels and a prize-winning children’s book. He was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, winner of a National Book Award, a director of PEN and the Authors Guild, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in July 1989.
DAVE EGGERS is the author of How We Are Hungry, You Shall Know Your Velocity, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a 2000 finalist for the Pulitzer prize. He is the editor of McSweeney’s, a journal and book publishing outfit. In 2002 he founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing lab and tutoring centre for San Francisco youth.
Introduction by
DAVE EGGERS
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First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons 1987
Published in Penguin Books 1989
This edition published in Penguin Classics with an introduction by Dave Eggers 2005
Copyright © Donald Barthelme, 1987
Introduction copyright © Dave Eggers, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The author gratefully acknowledges permission from Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, Inc., to reprint the following: “Concerning the Bodyguard” and “Great Days” from Great Days.
Copyright © 1977,1978, 1979 by Donald Barthelme. “Concerning the Bodyguard” originally appeared in The New Yorker. “Letters to the Editore” from Guilty Pleasures. Copyright © 1974 by Donald Barthelme. Originally appeared in The New Yorker.
The following stories first appeared in The New Yorker. “Chablis,” “On the Deck,” “Opening,” “Sindbad,” “Jaws,” “Bluebeard,” “Construction,” and “January.”
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-138932-5
To Marion, Anne, and Katharine
Introduction by Dave Eggers
Chablis
On The Deck
The Genius
Opening
Sindbad
The Explanation
Concerning The Bodyguard
Rif
The Palace At Four A.M.
Jaws
Conversations With Goethe
Affection
The New Owner
Paul Klee
Terminus
The Educational Experience
Bluebeard
Departures
Visitors
The Wound
At The Tolstoy Museum
The Flight Of Pigeons From The Palace
A Few Moments Of Sleeping And Waking
The Temptation Of St. Anthony
Sentence
Pepperoni
Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
Lightning
The Catechist
Porcupines At The University
Sakrete
Captain Blood
110 West Sixty-First Street
The Film
Overnight To Many Distant Cities
Construction
Letters To The Editore
Great Days
The Baby
January
The question many people and engineers have asked recently, in board rooms and on the street, is this: If Donald Barthelme were to happen today—if he were to burst onto the scene in 2004 or 2005 or thereabouts—what would become of him? What kind of reception would he receive?
The answer is that people would be curious. Then they would probably be more or less dismissive. They might even club him in the street, using clubs meant for seals.
We live in serious times, and though this is not Donald Barthelme’s fault, he would pay dearly for it. The fact is that work like Don B’s—which is playful, subtle, beautiful, and more like poetry (in its perfect ambivalence toward narrative) than almost any prose we have—would be seen today as frivolous, as unserious. There is in most quarters of mainstream fiction a newspapering process going on, wherein stylistic deviations are disallowed, where innovations in style are seen as a sign of disengagement. When reading contemporary work with distinctive styles, some readers become impatient and most critics become enraged. Tell us the story, they say. Just tell it to us, get it across and get it over with. Spare us the frills.
In fact, if Donald Barthelme were to appear today, wearing corduroy and denim and a felt hat, it would be surprising if he were to find a publisher anywhere anyhow. He would be employed at a Mailboxes Etc., working the machine that sends the Styrofoam chips into the boxes to the people on the other side of the world who will have no idea how to dispose of them.
An exaggeration. In fact, all very excellent work finds a publisher sooner or later—this is the maxim that keeps us believing—so D.B. would have indeed been published. But would he have been published in some of the most robust mainstream weeklies, as he was for decades? No, no, no. Things are different in this century, thus far. There is not much time for things that don’t announce themselves and make fairly clear linear sense. And how often did Barthelme make clear linear sense? How often did his stories have a beginning, middle and end? How often did he tell a story in a goddamn simple and easy way?
Maybe once or twice, when he forgot himself.
These are the lies and truths we know about Donald Barthelme: He was for many years a sailor on a Japanese freighter called the Ursula Andress. He wore a stovepipe hat and drove a Chevy Lumina. He was wildly romantic and his prose was on par, in terms of imagery and evockery and lyricism, with Nabokov, and his sense of the absurd is rivaled only by Borges. He killed everything he ate. He dated the young Audrey Hepburn and the older Eartha Kitt.
But was Barthelme indeed the love child of Nabokov and Borges, as many have claimed? This could be so. Though, to be sure, he and V.N. were not too many years apart in age—more like contemporaries. Were they friends? It does not appear so. Rumor has it that Barthelme asked him a few questions at a party and Vlad said he would get back to him six months hence, once he could write the answers down on blue notecards. Four months later he was dead. V.N. was, that is.
That story is apocryphal.
How to read this book:
Put your feet in cold water. The Adriatic is recommended, in July. There will be small fish who will approach you. These fish are sort of like catfish, but much smaller, and sort of like eels. They will have faces like Wilfred Brimley and they will approach your feet as squirrels would approach a woman on a bench holding delicious nuts. These fish will not touch your feet; they will simply come near them, and will appear to be wildly content just to be near them, your feet. The water is just cold enough to be pure of heart.
With your feet in this water, read Forty Stories. Read the titles first and appreciate that these forty titles are among the best assemblage of titles ever assembled. Appreciate that “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” and “Porcupines at the University” have both been ranked by the relevant authorities among the top ten titles ever written, and appreciate that Barthelme has the chops to back up those titles with stories of extraordinary beauty and nuance. While you’re at it, appreciate that Barthelme seems to cover more ground in these short oddities than many a novelist will cover in books twice the length.
Read in small bites. Read one story and look out on the water and wonder what the hell Donald Barthelme looked like. You love him like an uncle but you’ve never seen even one picture of him. Go up the beach to your bag, and retrieve some white paper and a Sharpie. Now do some renderings of what Barthelme might have looked like, in terms of physical appearance. On the next page, please find fifteen such drawings. If there are readers of this introduction who knew Mr. Barthelme or saw pictures of him, please indicate, via this publisher, which image is closest. The author of this introduction will then be awarded a check for $70 for doing such a good drawing. Thank you in advance.
Here is a great sentence from David Gates’s introduction to Sixty Stories, a different but not entirely alien book, also by this author:
“Much of the pleasure in reading Barthelme comes from the way he makes you feel welcome even as he’s subjecting you to a vertiginously high level of entertainment.”
This is one of the most crucial things that the newcomer needs to know about Barthelme. Though his stuff is sometimes difficult to puncture, and sometimes difficult to follow, while you’re finding your way, he’s always grinning at you in a warm and very compassionate way. The reader gets the feeling that the author is a nice man. That he knows when he’s being difficult and when he’s full of shit. Knows how much of this and how much of that you can actually take. He differs from some of his contemporaries, and from many other forgers of new prose styles, in that he doesn’t ever give off the impression that he takes himself overseriously, and he seems genuinely to care whether or not his work is being read by you. He is a social writer. A writer who seems to be in the next room, waiting for you to finish and tell him what you thought.
Back to David Gates: Gates’s introduction is so good that you really should read it, too. It’s reprinted below, in very small type.
Donald Barthelme was still alive when this volume was first published back in 1981, and he himself signed off on its modest, no-spin title. I always wondered why, since title-giving was one of his great knacks. He’d called the original books in which these stories appeared Sadness or Great Days or Come Back, Dr. Caligari or Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and the titles of individual stories practically raise an index finger and give you the kitchy-coo: “1 Bought a Little City,” “Our Work and Why We Do It,” “The Falling Dog,” “See the Moon.” Even the one-worders—”Paraguay,” “Margins,” “Aria”—bristle (to use one of those words Bartheleme put his brand on) with strangeness. So why settle for Sixty Stories’ Maybe he despaired of coming up with any one title that could overarch such a various landscape, though that had never stopped him before. Or maybe, like the narrator in “I Bought a Little City,” he “didn’t want to be too imaginative.” He might have figured sixty was a good round number—it would have been like him to make a little game of caring about good round numbers—and then picked something unpretentious and reasonably euphonious to go with it. Sixty Texts? Sixty Fictions? Not just intolerable, but unpronounceable.
But about that word “stories.” Obviously Barthelme’s idea of a story subverts the still-standard Chekhovian template: modest deeds of modest people leading up to a modest epiphany. He wickedly characterized such pieces in a ready-to-rumble 1964 essay as “constructed mousetrap-like to supply, at the finish, a tiny insight typically having to do with innocence violated.” The parables of Kafka, the pastiches of S.J. Perelman, the monologues of Samuel Beckett, the swashbuckling absurdities of Rafael Sabatini, fairy tales, films, comic books—all these contributed as much to his sense of what a story might be as the exquisite contraptions of Dubliners or In Our Time. In later years, he could better afford to praise traditional or neotraditional fiction: he admired Updike and Cheever, Ann Beanie and Raymond Carver. But his own work continued to skitter away from any genre that seemed to spread its arms in suffocating welcome—including so-called “metafiction,” the genre to which critics most often accused him of belonging. He protested against this, and pointed out that only rarely—as in Snow White’s mid-novel questionnaire—did he explicitly make an issue of his fiction’s very fictiveness. Still, especially in such knockoffs of nineteenth-century storytelling as “Views of My Father Weeping” and “The Dolt,” he seems to savor conventional narrative for its quaintness rather than for any possibility that we might drift slackjawed into a state of suspended disbelief. For Barthelme, plots and characters aren’t fiction’s raison d’etre, but good old tropes it might be fun to trot out again. More than once he described his pieces as “slumgullions”: another word with the Barthelme brand, not merely pleasurable to the ear and the eye, but dead accurate. His stories are rich, dense, flavorsome throwings-together of this, that, and the other thing, concocted for the inextricable purposes of pleasure and sustenance.
Still, once he’d discovered and perfected what we think of as the Barthelme Story—”The Indian Uprising,” say, which slumgullionizes the Old West, 1960s urban alienation, Death in Venice, and God knows what-all—he got too restless to keep cranking out the product. As the narrator of “I Bought a Little City” says: “I thought, What a nice little city, it suits me fine. It suited me fine so I started to change it.” He went on to devise stories that are all dialogue (“Morning”), stories that arc quasi-essays (“On Angels”), quasi-parables (“A City of Churches”), quasi-parodies (“How I Write My Songs”) or quasi-legends (“The Emperor”), stories that appropriate large chunks of “found” material (“Paraguay”), stories that revert for a change to straight old-school narrative (“Bishop”), stories within stories (“The Dolt”), stories that seem to be pure freestyle riffing (“Aria”). They suited him fine. There was just one problem: terminally well-read as he was, Barthelme knew that all these forms had already been done to death. This is part of their charm for us: knowing that he knows that we know he knows it. But a writer as ambitious as Barthelme couldn’t stay in any of these outmoded modes for long. So then what?
Barthelme could probably have been happy among the High Modernists: marching shoulder-to-shoulder in the vanguard with Joyce and Woolf, Eliot and Pound, making it new. Kicking over the played-out paradigms, twisting linear narrative into a Möbius strip, making the haunt and main region of his song the consciousness of his consciousness of his consciousness, cutting up Baudelaire, Wagner, Jacobean drama, and contemporary pop songs and shoring the fragments against his ruins, building Homeric/Dantean epics out of blocks of text carved from Confucius and John Adams. From The Waste Land to Duchamp’s ready-mades—and on through Naked Lunch and “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel”—the twentieth century’s characteristic artistic procedure was (pick your term) collage, appropriation, assemblage, bricolage, or sampling. (Here’s an exchange from Barthelme’s “The Genius,” in this book’s companion volume, Forty Stories: “Q: What do you consider the most important tool of genius today? A: Rubber cement.”) This cut-and-paste, recombinatory method of making it new, of course, implied that there was nothing new, though the modernists didn’t go out of their way to advertise that. The hell of it was, by the time Barthelme came along, even making it new was getting old. Among the works he samples—along with Hamlet, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Muddy Waters’) “Mannish Boy”—is The Waste Land itself.
For Barthelme, the question of what to do after modernism had already done it all wasn’t mere intellectual-careerist hand-wringing; it was also a personal agon. His father was a party-line modern architect, an admirer of Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. “We were enveloped in Modernism,” Barthelme said in a 1981 interview with J.D. O’Hara. “The house we lived in, which he’d designed, was Modern and the furniture was Modern and the pictures were Modern and the books were Modern.” Since this house was in Houston, Texas, Barthelme also grew up enveloped in the energetically subversive Americana that such expatriate modernists as Pound and Eliot approved of on principle—think of Pound’s persona as the Americodger Old Ez—and recoiled from on instinct. He told O’Hara about listening to the radio and hearing Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, whose music was a high-spirited collage of country, jazz, blues, Mexican, and Bing Crosby pop. In the city’s black jazz clubs, he heard such visiting musicians as Erskine Hawkins and Lionel Hampton rework pop songs into fresh, vernacular-modernist works by improvising on their underlying structures. “You’d hear some of these guys take a tired old tune like ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ and do the most incredible things with it, make it beautiful, literally make it new,” he recalled. “The interest and the drama were in the formal manipulation of the rather slight material. And they were heroic figures, you know, very romantic.” He may have witnessed such cutting contests as the one evoked in his story “The King of Jazz,” in which the master trombonist Hokie Mokie (himself the successor to “Spicy MacLammermoor, the old king”) tries to fend off a younger competitor.
So Barthelme’s home and his community, as well as his reading and his writing, gave him a usefully acute case of the anxiety of influence—and the influence he seemed most anxious about was that of modernism itself. “Remember,” he told O’Hara, “that I was exposed early to an almost religious crusade, the Modern movement in architecture, which, putting it as kindly as possible, has not turned out quite as expected.” He was always interested in the way younger writers revere and then overthrow their forebears, sometimes by the process Harold Bloom calls “strong misreading”: Blake’s interpretation of Milton as a Satanic-prophetic visionary, to use one of Bloom’s examples, or the high-modernist practice of willfully misappropriating and miscontextualizing fragments of canonical literature, which were threatening to the degree that they were revered. Barthelme, like Bloom, could hardly miss the Oedipal overtones: his best novel, after all, is The Dead father, whose title character—a talking statue-carcass who reminds us of King Lear, Tolstoy, Jehovah, and Blake’s Nobodaddy—gets dragged to his grave, protesting and orating all the way. Yet Barthelme, as he liked to remind us, was “a doubleminded man.” The very baldness of that title suggests his bemusement at such an overfamiliar paradigm; no old-time modernist would have been so bathetically blunt.
Literary historians call Barthelme a postmodernist, and he didn’t resist the designation as strongly as he resisted being called a metafictionist. “Critics … have been searching for a term that would describe fiction after the great period of modernism,” he said in a 1980 interview with Larry McCaffery—” ‘postmodernism,’ ‘metafiction,’ ‘surfiction,’ ‘superfiction.’ The last two are terrible; I suppose ‘postmodernism’ is the least ugly, most descriptive.” But in the 1987 essay “Not-Knowing,” written two years before he died, he said he was “dubious” about the term and “not altogether clear as to who is supposed to be on the bus and who is not.” Since the word gets applied both to works supposedly weirder-than-modern (weirder than Finnegans Wake)) and to works far more conservative (Raymond Carver’s stories, Philip Johnson’s buildings), “postmodern” is useful as a chronological marker, like “eighteenth-century,” and worthless as a characterization of a particular esthetic, like “Baroque.” It might be most sensible, then, simply to look at Barthelme as one more writer who came along after older writers had already done what he would like to have done—as Dante came along after Virgil who came along after Homer—and who had a hard time, as writers have always had, figuring out how to reconcile his admiration for his predecessors with his ambition to make something of his own.
Barthelme’s particular Dead Father was Beckett—who had a Dead Father of his own. “I’m just overwhelmed by Beckett, as Beckett was by Joyce,” he told interviewers Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman in 1975. “By the way, let me make clear that I am not proposing myself as successor or heir to Mr. Beckett, in any sense. I’m just telling you that he is a problem for me because of the enormous pull of his style. I am certainly not the only writer who has been enormously influenced by Beckett and thus wants to stay at arm’s length … There are other lions in the path as well… It’s just that Beckett is the largest problem for me.” Here and there, Barthelme lets himself write in this or that Beckettian mode: the relentless comma-spliced monologue of “Traumerei” (cf. The Unnamable), the vaudevilleian-stichomythic banter of such late pieces as “The Leap” (cf. Waiting for Godot), or the comic pedantry of “Daumier” and “A Shower of Gold” (cf. Murphy). What’s more radically Beckettian is Barthelme’s compulsion to fly blind, to approach the unknowable as an area for exploration, and his sense of the mind’s cubistic noisiness. “The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude,” he told J.D. O’Hara. “As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it’s being poorly done.” (This, by the way, catches almost exactly Beckett’s tone and cadence—except Beckett might have used the formal “one” construction instead of the colloquial “you.”)
Like Beckett, Barthelme uses his well-nurtured taste and wide-ranging erudition to point up their ultimate uselessness. “Is it really important to know that this movie is fine, and that one terrible, and to talk intelligently about the difference?” his narrator asks at the end of “The Party.” “Wonderful elegance) No good at all!” Like Beckett, he’s a meticulous observer and compulsive cataloguer of the things of this world, knowing that they offer no certainty or security.
Red men in waves … accumulated against the barriers we had made of window dummies, silk, thoughtfully planned job descriptions … I analyzed the composition of the barricade closest to me and found two ashtrays, ceramic, one dark brown and one dark brown with an orange blur at the lip … a red pillow and blue pillow, a woven straw wastebasket… a Yugoslavian carved flute, wood, dark brown, and other items. I decided I knew nothing.
—”The Indian Uprising”
Like Beckett, he’s God-haunted yet unbelieving.
—We are but poor lapsarian futiles whose preen glands are all out of kilter and who but for the grace of God—
—Do you think He wants us to grovel quite so much?
—I don’t think He gives a rap. But it’s traditional.
—”The Leap”
And like Beckett—or like Shakespeare, for that matter—he doesn’t worry much about the distinction between the dark and the comic.
Yet Barthelme would never have written a line like Nell’s speech in Endgame-. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.” His is both a sunnier and a more worldly spirit. “The world is waiting for the sunrise,” his narrator says in “The Sandman.” (Neither the narrator’s own words nor Barthelme’s, of course; he’s quoting the old pop song.) And while we may well wait forever—in fact, isn’t that Rule One?—its failure to arrive doesn’t make the sunrise less real. Barthelme has a lively sense of the absurd, but no feel for the punishingly bleak; even if all is vanity, he doesn’t hold a little thing like that against the world and the flesh. “Anathematization of the world,” he writes in Snow White, “is not an adequate response to the world.” Both as writer and citizen, Barthelme cherished acts of political decency, like the narrator’s effort, in “The Sandman,” to get help for some black kids who’d been arrested for sodomizing and suffocating a little boy. “Now while I admit it sounds callous to be talking about the degree of brutality being minimal, let me tell you that it was no small matter, in that time and place, to force the cops to show the e kids to the press at alt. It was an achievement, of sorts.” That “of sorts” undercuts the “achievement” with a Beckettian sigh; still, the achievement remains. Similarly, though physical pleasure and human connection may be hard to come by and impossible to hang onto, Barthelme never seems to feel betrayed by their absence and never doubts their absolute value. In “The Zombies,” the ultimate symptom of deadening at the hands of a “bad zombie” is to “walk by a beautiful breast and not even notice.” So is Barthelme wiser and more humane than Beckett? Or just whistling in the dark, punking out on the ultimate implications of what he knew?
Beckett’s skepticism extends even to language itself—to the very language, that is, with which he expresses his skepticism about language. “You would do better, at least no worse,” his Molloy tells us, “to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words until all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.” Barthelme had no inclination to follow the old man to such an extremity; when it came to language, he was a believer—even a booster. “The combinatory agility of words,” he wrote in “Not-Knowing,” “the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.” He makes the anti-Beckettian argument that art, with its ability to “imagine alternative realities,” is “fundamentally meliorative,” that “the artist’s effort, always and everywhere, is to attain a fresh mode of cognition”—and that the writer’s particular task is “restoring freshness to a much-handled language.” Doesn’t this emphasis on manner rather than matter put Barthelme among literature’s marginal Crazy Uncles—Firbank, Edward Lear, John Lyly—instead of among its august Dead Fathers? Doesn’t it show Barthelme as deficient in moral earnestness? When O’Hara pressed him on this point, Barthelme had the answer ready. “I believe that my every sentence trembles with morality in that each attempts to engage the problematic,” he said. “The change of emphasis from the what to the how seems to me to be the major impulse in art since Flaubert, and it’s not merely formalism, it’s not at all superficial, it’s an attempt to reach truth, and a very rigorous one.”
Since a writer can no more invent a new vocabulary than a painter can invent a new spectrum, Barthelme’s project of restoring freshness to language—”to purify the dialect of the tribe” is how Pound put it—led him to ragpick words, phrases, tones of voice, and modes of diction from the obscure and neglected past, from the demotic present and from the surreal specialized lexicons of technology, philosophy, even the military. “Mixing bits of this and that from various areas of life to make something that did not exist before is an oddly hopeful endeavor,” he wrote in a short essay about his story “Paraguay.” “The sentence ‘Electrolytic jelly exhibiting a capture ratio far in excess of standard is used to fix the animals in place’ made me very happy—perhaps in excess of its merit. But there is in the world such a thing as electrolytic jelly; the ‘capture ratio’ comes from the jargon of sound technology; and the animals themselves are a salad of the real and the invented.” He had a good ear for bad writing: “I’m very interested in . . . sentences that are awkward in a particular way,” he said in a 1970 interview with Jerome Klinkowitz. In such pieces as “How I Write My Songs,” he elevated the ungainly—the passive voice, the ill-chosen word, the clunky cadence, the banal thought—to the poetic simply by putting a frame around it. “Another type of song which is a dear favorite of almost everyone,” his fictive songwriter Bill B. White tells us, “is the song that has a message, some kind of thought that people can carry away with them and think about. Many songs of this type are written and gain great acceptance every day.” He was even proud of the Orwellian “loudspeaker-like tone* he achieved in this sentence from “The Rise of Capitalism”: “Cultural underdevelopment of the worker, as a technique of domination, is found everywhere under late capitalism.” Why? In part, as he explained to O’Hara, because its “metallic drone” undercut the truth of its assertion with a dreary countertruth: nothing will ever be done about it. But also in part because, as the modernists knew long ago, ugliness has its weird beauty if you hold it up and look at it.
In his affectionate play with language, his erudition and his lurking earnestness about the redemptive force of art, Barthelme sounds less like Beckett than like Nabokov, that other man-mountain of late modernism. Nabokov, obviously, was the better linguist, but Barthelme read at least as widely and with a more open mind: not to reinforce a set of mandarin prejudices but to explode what few he ever had. (It’s hard to imagine Nabokov studying up on the conquest of Mexico, taking notes on hoodoo charms or listening to Muddy Waters.) Barthelme paid him notably, perhaps suspiciously, scant attention. (In his 1964 essay “After Joyce,” he kissed off Nabokov in a single sentence along with—for some reason—Henry Green; this was almost a decade after Lolita.) If Beckett was Barthelme’s Dead Father, Nabokov might have been his dark Uncle Claudius: uncomfortably like him, yet radically opposed in spirit. Like Nabokov, Barthelme can be clever and allusive to the point of obscurity, but he never pulls chilly practical jokes on his readers and never seeks, as Nabokov did, to misdirect them. As the narrator of “The Sandman” says of his willful, depressive, and sexy girlfriend, distance is not Barthelme’s thing—”not by a long chalk.” Beneath his surface of corruscating omniscience beats a kindly heart. He seems to want you to be in on his jokes, to share the joyous agility of his conceptual and linguistic leaps, the abundance of his cornucopiously stocked memory, and not to sit gazing at him from the cheap seats in resentful admiration. In essays and interviews, he explained with as little mystification as possible how he put together his pieces—considering that the process of writing is essentially mysterious—and how we might go about appreciating them. Much of the pleasure in reading Barthelme comes from the way he makes you feel welcome even as he’s subjecting you to a vertiginously high level of entertainment.
My comparing Barthelme with Beckett and Nabokov suggests that I think he, too, is a King of Jazz. Can he really hold his own in a cutting session with those cats setting the tempo, and Joyce and Woolf sitting at a table in the back listening for wrong notes? Who knows? He’s been gone less than fifteen years; we might have a clearer view of what he accomplished in another fifty. Certainly he’s become canonical: there he is, in every anthology and on the shelves of every bookstore, right after John Barth. But a lot of unread and unreadable people get to be canonical. Unlike such co-generationists as Harold Brodkey or Don DeLillo or John Gardner or Cormac McCarthy, he doesn’t do the High Seriousness thing. Which is odd, because the contemporaries he read with pleasure were folks like Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch, William Gass, Walker Percy, Garcia Marquez, Peter Handke—serious, some of them, to a fault. He’s got all the political, sociological, literary, philosophical, and spiritual anxieties any writer could be blessed with, yet reading him never feels like a duty. That wouldn’t bode well if you were bucking for King of jazz, though it might keep you from going out of print. Neither would the shortcoming he confessed to J.D. O’Hara—”1 don’t offer enough emotion”—if it were really true. He never emoted, but that’s a different thing. Any reader sophisticated enough to stick with Barthelme in the first place must sense the sadness he’s at such pains to evade with all his funning, and feel the joy when a last line—see “Report,” see “The Death of Edward Lear,” see “Traumerei”—hits home.
Barthelme is a quintessential writer of the twentieth century, looking Janus-faced to both the past and future, and with a third eye turned inward. Yet he’s also an anomaly. Nobody before him really reads much like him: neither Beckett or Nabokov, nor such minimalist realists as Hemingway, nor such fabulists as Kafka and Borges, nor such parodists and pasticheurs at Perelman and Firbank. Nor has he become anybody’s particular Dead Father. Once in a while, George Saunders or Mark Leyner or Jim Shepherd will write something that reminds us of him. (Compare Saunders’s “Pastoralia,” in which faux cavepeople are trapped in a futuristic theme park, with Barthelme’s “Game,” whose characters are confined in the control room of a missile silo.) A few even newer jacks seem to have read him—or to have read people who’ve read him. The preemptively self-ironic title of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius sounds like Barthelme; so does the artfully broken English at the beginning of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. But if there was ever a School of Barthelme, as there was a School of Carver, it’s left scarcely a trace. He’s too erudite, too intellectually nimble, and too many-minded. (That “doubleminded man” business is an undercount—in this book, by a factor of thirty.) An aspiring Barthelme imitator would first have to choose which Barthelme to imitate.
In “Not-Knowing,” Barthelme wrote that art is “a true account of the activity of mind.” These stories are reports of his expeditions into mapless worlds of language and thought, perception and memory, undertaken with no preconceptions about what he might tell us and how the reports might read—he had to go there first. Not stories of W doing X to Y with the result that Z, but stories of what goes on in a vast, various, and noisy consciousness, each story taking its unique shape from its creator’s intuition of what the piece itself demands. Each one singing its own tune in its own voice. So: Sixty Stories. Just what the man said. It’s not a modest title at all.
Personal sharing time:
1. I have not read all of Barthelme’s work. And was introduced to it well after I should have known his work. As has become the pattern of my life, I was told about him because a friend recognized similarities between his work and mine. When I finally read him—starting with Sixty Stories and followed immediately by this book you’re holding, about five years ago—I was astounded. And I felt like a thief. Or rather, that I was trodding on territory already better explored by D.B.
2. When rereading this book in the summer of 2004, I noticed more similarities, this time in stories I’d recently written, many years after first reading Forty Stories. Either he is my spiritual father or I am a crook.
3. I had a tough time reading this book this time around, because it’s one of the few collections that inspires me to the degree that every sentence I read makes me want to stop and write something of my own. He fires all of my synapses and connects them in new ways. He sends a herd of wildebeest through my mind. It’s a whole jungle full of animals, really, every color and shape, and he sends them scurrying all over my brain, screaming, defecating, fornicating.
4. That is the end of the Personal Sharing portion.
Now we will hear from Michael Silverblatt, noted and much-loved host of the syndicated American radio show Bookworm, and a former colleague of Donald Barthelme’s. First we will ask Michael questions, then we will print his answers. Those questions:
How many people can safely eat gumbo at a table for four?
Funny you should ask. As it happens Don cooked gumbo at our house on Linwood Avenue in Buffalo. We provided the fixings; he brought The Secret Ingredient. The lack of fresh okra in Buffalo caused Don some real consternation, but we Northeasterners didn’t know the difference. The Secret Ingredient worked its trick and ten people ate gumbo safely around a table for four. I don’t know that this would have worked without Don. (A true story—how did you know to ask about gumbo?)
Did Donald Barthelme allow his students to call him Buck?
(There are rumors to that effect.)
No one I knew ever called him Buck. This may have been a later development. I knew him well between 1971 and 1980, during those years people called him Don. Why would anyone call him Buck? I remember being too amazed to be in his presence to call him by any name at all. I remember that he never told people how to pronounce Barthelme, he would let them go on doing it the way they did the first time. I remember mumbling something or other until he told me to call him Don.
D.B’s prose is gregarious. Was D.B. gregarious or was he one of those types who’s funny in print but dour in person ?
I’m not sure about gregarious. Don tended to vanish from parties; I remember we once searched for him in a car, sure that he would get lost one snowy taxiless night. He even disappeared at parties in his own apartment. Dour? He was a little stern, always noble, very funny—but the funny things he said were a little dour. He advised me several times that “we were put here on earth to love one another.” I once heard him say, “You make my life a living hell,” to a dear friend and she answered, right back, “You make my life a living hell.” I remember that this was said in the friendliest way, while Don fixed barbecued ribs for supper. He liked to cook.
Corporal punishment figures into much of D.B.’s work—not overtly, but implicitly—and I wonder if it figured into his classrooms, too?
Donald could be terrifying, but he never threatened me with corporal punishment. Sometimes he would suddenly toss out a phrase like “Me pap! Me pap!” and be utterly disappointed that I didn’t know it came from “Endgame.” (The pap in question was sugar pap, the “me” Beckett’s Nagg.) It was a pop quiz.
How many feathers did D.B. wear in his headdress, and what did he name them?
I find this question unnerving. While I never saw the headdress in question, I do know that D.B. doctored a photograph of Henry James, providing James with a feather headdress of three feathers. I doubt they had names. This doctoring was titled Chief Henry James and turned up as a postcard sold in arty shops.
Did you ever meet D.B.’s father, and which of the fathers D.B.lists in “A Manual for Sons” do you suppose he was?
I never met his father, but I have spoken to one of the brothers, met two of the wives and one of the children. I can tell you that it is a remarkable family. Among writers, Don was a generous rouser of the clan, almost an activist. I think D.B. meant it when he said “Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.”
I can tell you this: as a teacher I never saw Don question the content of a story, only the language. And he edited word by word. He particularly dreaded conventional turns of phrase and predictable usages. Sometimes he would ask a class to vote for a better word to replace the shoddy one at hand. In other words Donald never changed a student writer’s sense of truth (insofar as that concept applies to fiction), only the language in which it is dressed. In this he was singularly non-authoritarian (see question about corporal punishment above).
Tell us one of your favorite D.B. memories, in less than 150 words.
He seemed sad. A friend and I talked about getting him a dog. We gave him a collection of some of our favorite objects and he arranged them into an altar; he really did like making collage. We all began making altars, kept in the corner of the room, or on a shelf. I had a Donald altar. Once, to cheer him up, we got him to sing. (For the curious: he sang “Marching Down Broadway” from Nillson’s Harry album—this album also had the song “City Life” which became the title of his best story collection.)
My favorite moment was going out with him visiting artists’ studios, looking at new work. One of the most thrilling things he taught me was how to look at art in the presence of the artist. He was very well regarded, partly because his comments were so roundabout. I remember he told one painter that the signature at the corner of his canvas was too large. I was with him when he asked the minimalist-formalist composer Morton Feldman if he led an orderly life, and asked Feldman for more messiness in his compositions.
Now tell us another, in 75 words.
Do you agree with this introduction’s assertion that if D.B. were to burst onto the scene today, that he would have a hard time finding a publisher, and could certainly not expect to appear so often in mainstream venues? (Our assertion here is that readers/critics no longer have patience for the intersection of stylistic eccentricity and meaning, that whimsy of any kind, digressiveness of any kind, is seen to indicate a lack of seriousness.)
Oh, I don’t know. Of course I agree that magnificent innovation is not in abundance right now. But that’s because a lot of what passes for innovativeness is rehashed Barthelme. As he wrote, about a similar circumstance (the death of postmodernism), “who can make the leap to greatness while dragging behind him the burnt-out boxcars of a dead aesthetic?” Donald’s sentences went about as far as you can go hooking Hemingway declaration (a sentence which had been the previous most-imitated style in America) to dreams, nonsense, surrealism. We don’t need another Donald. We need a better life.
What color were his eyes?
Brown.
Did he carry a ladder?
No
Did he eat animals?
Yes.
Did he laugh like a cheetah?
Often, or like dry leaves rustling.
That is the end of this introduction. The preparers hope it provided insight, but are keenly aware that it did not. This is the best book you will read this year, so please begin.
MY wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.