Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  Barthleme’s plotlessness was of a different, more disconcerting sort. It left readers without any of the bearings supplied by traditional fiction. Sometimes you didn’t have a clue as to where you were. Here, for example, is the beginning of “The Indian Uprising,” a famous early story that is in part a response to the Vietnam War, though you could be forgiven for not guessing that right away:

  We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. “Do you think this is a good life?” The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. “No.”

  But even the most collage-like of his stories were not mere abstractions, devoid of feeling or meaning. Barthelme distrusted the means of traditional fiction but not its end—to help make sense of things, a job rendered even more difficult, he thought, by the cluttered and cheapened culture in which he found himself. To a surprising extent, some of his work is even autobiographical. Barthelme drank too much and often felt guilty about it, and drinking, or regret about drinking, is a not uncommon theme in his work. He was also lonely and lovelorn; he married three times, and had a great many affairs. Romantic disappointment and sexual longing are even more frequent themes in the stories, and sometimes the drinking and the disappointment are combined: “Our evenings lacked promise. The world in the evenings seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it.”

  One of Barthelme’s better collections was called Sadness, and sadness is the default mood in most of his work. Not full-blown despair of the sort you find in Beckett, a writer Barthelme greatly admired, but melancholy, regret, disappointment, a sense of belatedness and unrequited longing, a feeling that life seldom turns out the way you’d hoped. But Barthelme’s sadness is tempered by his omnipresent humor, and by a sense that, on second thought, maybe things aren’t so bad after all. His story “The Leap of Faith” is probably inspired by that moment in Beckett’s The Unnameable when the narrator says, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Barthelme’s version, though unmistakably in Beckett’s manner, is less urgent and angst-ridden. Two characters are talking about whether or not to make a leap of faith—to find something, anything, worth believing in. “I can’t make it,” one of them says, but then they agree to keep trying, to try again another day. It ends this way:

  —Another day when the singing sunlight turns you every which way but loose.

  —When you accidentally notice the sublime.

  —Somersaults and duels.

  —Another day when you see a woman with really red hair. I mean really red hair.

  —A wedding day.

  —A plain day.

  —So we’ll try again? Okay?

  —Okay.

  —Okay?

  —Okay.

  There’s always another day in Barthelme, a redemptive sense of open-endedness, and a belief that small miracles are sometimes possible. Barthelme’s great story “The School” is set in a nursery school where a series of escalating catastrophes takes place. First the orange trees planted by the children die. Then the pet snakes and the herb garden—after, that is, the deaths of the gerbil, the white mice, the salamander. It gets worse: the puppy, the Korean orphan, heart attacks, a suicide, a drowning among the parents. The sense of impending doom is macabre but somehow hilarious at the same time. And then the not-quite-miracle takes place. There’s a knock at the door, the new gerbil walks in, and the children cheer wildly. It’s not precisely what they were hoping for—they wanted the teacher and his teaching assistant to have sex right there in front of them—but for now it’s enough.

  There are lots of such moments in Barthelme—not happy endings, exactly, but provisional ones, a hopefulness conjured sometimes out of nothing more than the author’s wish not to leave us (and himself) too far down in the dumps. For all his difficulty and occasional impenetrableness, Barthelme was at heart a generous writer who thought that his main task, especially in what he saw as a belated and diminished time, was to sneak up on the readers and startle them with a little dose of pleasure and surprise.

  He wasn’t just good at endings. Unlike many writers, he also had a knack for titles: “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,” “Our Work and Why We Do it,” “The Falling Dog,” “Nothing: A Preliminary Account.” He gave his collections irresistible names like Come Back, Dr. Caligari and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and he fussed over them. He designed the jackets and cover art himself, chose his own typefaces, tweaked and retweaked the contents and their order. If so many of his stories are collage-like, the same is true, on an even larger scale, for the collections themselves. The final one, Overnight to Many Distant Cities, even has mysterious interchapters, italicized fragments that function much the same way as those little newspaper snippets and ticket stubs in the collages of Braque and Picasso. They add a kind of texture, a connection to the world outside the picture frame or, in this case, the frame of the book. Barthelme puts it this way on the first page, right after the table of contents: “They called for more structure, then, so we brought in some big hairy four-by-fours from the back shed and nailed them into place with railroad spikes.”

  He thought of the collections not as compendiums—periodic sweepings-up of whatever work he had on hand—but as carefully arranged wholes where everything from the title to the cover art to the flap copy to the unsmiling, Ahab-like author photo at the back contributed to a unified effect. (For that reason, this edition departs from the usual Library of America custom of presenting a writer’s work chronologically, and instead reprints each of his nine collections exactly as it first appeared, with some uncollected stories added at the end. A disadvantage to this arrangement is that the first book, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, is uneven and even a little offputting at times. Readers brand new to Barthelme might want to start with the second, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, one of his strongest and most entertaining collections, and then go back after they’ve got their feet wet.) The individual volumes really are different in tone and feeling from one another—some more serious, some more playful—and, read in order, they don’t just show an arc of development, they offer a clue to Barthelme’s own thinking about what he was doing. He never wasted much, and in later books even repurposed old material, but he also made things harder for himself by rejecting anything that seemed easy or formulaic. The later work is gloomier, more death-haunted than the earlier, but never without that glimmer of hopefulness. The last line of that final individual collection, Overnight to Many Distant Cities, is a kind of cosmic weather prediction, promising but open-ended: “Tomorrow, fair and warmer, warmer and fair, most fair . . .”

  COME BACK, DR. CALIGARI

  To my mother and father

  Florence Green Is 81

  DINNER WITH Florence Green. The old babe is on a kick tonight: I want to go to some other country, she announces. Everyone wonders what this can mean. But Florence says nothing more: no explanation, no elaboration, after a satisfied look around the table bang! she is asleep again. The girl at Florence’s right is new here and does not understand. I give her an ingratiating look (a look that says, “There is nothing to worry about, I will explain everything later in the privacy of my quarters Kathleen”). Lentils vegetate in the depths of the fourth principal river of the world, the Ob, in Siberia, 3200 miles. We are talking about Quemoy and Matsu. “It’s a matter of leading from strength. What is the strongest possible move on our part? To deny them the islands even though the islands are worthless in themselves.” Baskerville, a sophomore at the Famous Writers School in Westport, Connecticut, which he attends with the object of becoming a famous writer, is making his
excited notes. The new girl’s boobies are like my secretary’s knees, very prominent and irritating. Florence began the evening by saying, grandly, “The upstairs bathroom leaks you know.” What does Herman Kahn think about Quemoy and Matsu? I can’t remember, I can’t remember . . .

  Oh Baskerville! you silly son of a bitch, how can you become a famous writer without first having worried about your life, is it the right kind of life, does it have the right people in it, is it going well? Instead you are beglamoured by J. D. Ratcliff. The smallest city in the United States with a population over 100,000 is Santa Ana, California, where 100,350 citizens nestle together in the Balboa blue Pacific evenings worrying about their lives. I am a young man but very brilliant, very ingratiating, I adopt this ingratiating tone because I can’t help myself (for fear of boring you). I edit with my left hand a small magazine, very scholarly, very brilliant, called The Journal of Tension Reduction (social-psychological studies, learned disputation, letters-to-the-editor, anxiety in rats). Isn’t that distasteful? Certainly it is distasteful but if Florence Green takes her money to another country who will pay the printer? answer me that. From an article in The Journal of Tension Reduction: “One source of concern in the classic encounter between patient and psychoanalyst is the patient’s fear of boring the doctor.” The doctor no doubt is also worrying about his life, unfolding with ten minutes between hours to smoke a cigarette in and wash his hands in. Reader, you who have already been told more than you want to know about the river Ob, 3200 miles long, in Siberia, we have roles to play, thou and I: you are the doctor (washing your hands between hours), and I, I am, I think, the nervous dreary patient. I am free associating, brilliantly, brilliantly, to put you into the problem. Or for fear of boring you: which? The Journal of Tension Reduction is concerned with everything from global tensions (drums along the Ob) to interpersonal relations (Baskerville and the new girl). There is, we feel, too much tension in the world, I myself am a perfect example, my stomach is like a clenched fist. Notice the ingratiating tone here? the only way I can relax it, I refer to the stomach, is by introducing quarts of Fleischmann’s Gin. Fleischmann’s I have found is a magnificent source of tension reduction, I favor the establishment of comfort stations providing free Fleischmann’s on every street corner of the city of Santa Ana, California, and all other cities. Be serious, can’t you?

  The new girl is a thin thin sketchy girl with a big chest looming over the gazpacho and black holes around her eyes that are very promising. Surely when she opens her mouth toads will pop out. I am tempted to remove my shirt and show her my trim midsection sporting chiseled abdominals, my superior shoulders and brilliantly developed pectoral-latissimus tie-in. Jackson called himself a South Carolinian, and his biographer, Amos Kendall, recorded his birthplace as Lancaster County, S.C.; but Parton has published documentary evidence to show that Jackson was born in Union County, N.C., less than a quarter mile from the South Carolina line. Jackson is my great hero even though he had, if contemporary reports are to be believed, lousy lats. I am also a weightlifter and poet and admirer of Jackson and the father of one abortion and four miscarriages; who among you has such a record and no wife? Baskerville’s difficulty not only at the Famous Writers School in Westport, Connecticut, but in every part of the world, is that he is slow. “That’s a slow boy, that one,” his first teacher said. “That boy is what you call real slow,” his second teacher said. “That’s a slow son of a bitch,” his third teacher said. And they were right, right, entirely correct, still I learned about Andrew Jackson and abortions, many of you walking the streets of Santa Ana, California, and all other cities know nothing about either. “In such cases the patient sees the doctor as a highly sophisticated consumer of outré material, a connoisseur of exotic behavior. Therefore he tends to propose himself as more colorful, more eccentric (or more ill) than he really is; or he is witty, or he fantasticates.” You see? Isn’t that sensible? In the magazine we run many useful and sensible pieces of this kind, portages through the whirlpool-country of the mind. In the magazine I cannot openly advocate the use of Fleischmann’s Gin in tension reduction but I did run an article titled “Alcohol Reconsidered” written by a talented soak of my acquaintance which drew many approving if carefully worded letters from secret drinkers in psychology departments all over this vast, dry and misunderstood country . . .

  “That’s a slow son of a bitch,” his third teacher remarked of him, at a meeting called to discuss the formation of a special program for Inferior Students, in which Baskerville’s name had so to speak rushed to the fore. The young Baskerville, shrinking along the beach brushing sand from his dreary Texas eyes, his sad fingers gripping $20 worth of pamphlets secured by post from Joe Weider, “Trainer of Terror Fighters” (are they, Baskerville wondered, like fire fighters? do they fight terror? or do they, rather, inspire it? the latter his, Baskerville’s, impossible goal), was even then incubating plans for his novel The Children’s Army which he is attending the Famous Writers School to learn how to write. “You will do famously, Baskerville,” said the Registrar, the exciting results of Baskerville’s Talent Test lying unexamined before him. “Run along now to the Cashier’s Office.” “I am writing doctor an immense novel to be called The Children’s Army!” (Why do I think the colored doctor’s name, he with his brown hand on the red radishes, is Pamela Hansford Johnson? Why do I think?) Florence Green is a small fat girl eighty-one years old, old with blue legs and very rich. Rock pools deep in the earth, I salute the shrewdness of whoever filled you with Texaco! Texaco breaks my heart, Texaco is particularly poignant. Florence Green who was not always a small fat girl once made a voyage with her husband Mr. Green on the Graf Zeppelin. In the grand salon, she remembers, there was a grand piano, the great pianist Mandrake the Magician was also on board but could not be persuaded to play. The Zeppelins could not use helium; the government of this country refused to sell helium to the owners of the Zeppelins. The title of my second book will be I believe Hydrogen After Lakehurst. For the first half of the evening we heard about the problem of the upstairs bathroom: “I had a man come out and look at it, and he said it would be two hundred and twenty-five dollars for a new one. I said I didn’t want a new one, I just wanted this one fixed.” Shall I offer to obtain a new one for Florence, carved out of solid helium? would that be ingratiating? Does she worry about her life? “He said mine was old-fashioned and they didn’t make parts for that kind any more.” Now she sleeps untidily at the head of the table, except for her single, mysterious statement, delivered with the soup (I want to go to some other country!), she has said nothing about her life whatsoever . . . The diameter of the world at the Poles is 7899.99 miles whereas the diameter of the world at the Equator is 7926.68 miles, mark it and strike it. I am sure the colored man across from me is a doctor, he has a doctor’s doctorly air of being needed and necessary. He leans into the conversation as if to say: Just make me Secretary of State and then you will see some action. “I’ll tell you one thing, there are a hell of a lot of Chinese over there.” Surely the very kidneys of wisdom, Florence Green has only one kidney, I have a kidney stone, Baskerville was stoned by the massed faculty of the Famous Writers School upon presentation of his first lesson: he was accused of formalism. It is well known that Florence adores doctors, why didn’t I announce myself, in the beginning, from the very first, as a doctor? Then I could say that the money was for a very important research project (use of radioactive tracers in reptiles) with very important ramifications in stomach cancer (the small intestine is very like a reptile). Then I would get the money with much less difficulty, cancer frightens Florence, the money would rain down like fallout in New Mexico. I am a young man but very brilliant, very ingratiating, I edit with my left hand a small magazine called . . . did I explain that? And you accepted my explanation? Her name is not really Kathleen, it is Joan Graham, when we were introduced she said, “Oh are you a native of Dallas Mr. Baskerville?” No Joan baby I am a native of Bengazi sent here by the UN to screw you
r beautiful ass right down into the ground, that is not what I said but what I should have said, it would have been brilliant. When she asked him what he did Baskerville identified himself as an American weightlifter and poet (that is to say: a man stronger and more eloquent than other men). “It moves,” Mandrake said, pointing to the piano, and although no one else could detect the slightest movement, the force of his personality was so magical that he was not contradicted (the instrument sat in the salon, Florence says, as solidly as Gibraltar in the sea).

  The man who has been settling the hash of the mainland Chinese searches the back of his neck, where there is what appears to be a sebaceous cyst (I can clear that up for you; my instrument will be a paper on the theory of games). What if Mandrake had played, though, what if he had seated himself before the instrument, raised his hands, and . . . what? The Principal Seas, do you want to hear about the Principal Seas? Florence has been prodded awake; people are beginning to ask questions. If not this country, then what country? Italy? “No,” Florence says smiling through her emeralds, “not Italy. I’ve been to Italy. Although Mr. Green was very fond of Italy.” “To bore the doctor is to become, for this patient, a case similar to other cases; the patient strives mightily to establish his uniqueness. This is also, of course, a tactic for evading the psychoanalytic issue.” The first thing the All-American Boy said to Florence Green at the very brink of their acquaintanceship was “It is closing time in the gardens of the West Cyril Connolly.” This remark pleased her, it was a pleasing remark, on the strength of this remark Baskerville was invited again, on the second occasion he made a second remark, which was “Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded Gertrude Stein.” Joan is like one of those marvelous Vogue girls, a tease in a half-slip on Mykonos, bare from the belly up on the rocks. “It moves,” Mandrake said, and the piano raised itself a few inches, magically, and swayed from side to side in a careful Baldwin dance. “It moves,” the other passengers agreed, under the spell of posthypnotic suggestion. “It moves,” Joan says, pointing at the gazpacho, which sways from side to side with a secret Heinz trembling movement. I give the soup a serious warning, couched in the strongest possible terms, and Joan grins gratefully not at me but at Pamela Hansford Johnson. The Virgin Islands maybe? “We were there in 1925, Mr. Green had indigestion, I sat up all night with his stomach and the flies, the flies were something you wouldn’t believe.” They are asking I think the wrong questions, the question is not where but why? “I was reading the other day that the average age of Chiang’s enlisted men is thirty-seven. You can’t do much with an outfit like that.” This is true, I myself am thirty-seven and if Chiang must rely on men of my sort then he might as well kiss the mainland goodbye. Oh, there is nothing better than intelligent conversation except thrashing about in bed with a naked girl and Egmont Light Italic.