Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  INTERVIEWER

  To get back to fear, why is it so central in your schema?

  BRECKER

  It has to do with the problem of finitude, of which fear is an aspect. A mind without limit would have no fear, not even the fear of death. There’d be nothing to fear. Death, for example, would be understood so perfectly that it could contain nothing that could perturb the mind. It’s the kind of thing the Eastern religions aim at. Obviously, we’ll never get there, to this kind of serenity, because of the limits of human understanding.

  But we are most ingenious, most ingenious. One of the finest religious inventions is the concept of absolution. I fall into error, confess it, and you give me absolution, or somebody gives me absolution. That cleansing—itself a very human idea, the washing-away—is of interest. It prevents us from being worse and worse, from in some sense stewing in our own juices. It makes new directions possible. It’s just a bloody marvelous conception, and there are others just as good, of which the idea of life after death is merely the first example. Life-after-death may be seen as coercive, or as providing hope, or as pure metaphor, or as absolute fact. What’s the truth of the matter? I don’t know.

  INTERVIEWER

  But people can get that from psychiatry, absolution. Admittedly, with greater difficulty.

  BRECKER

  And perhaps greater efficacy. But as an immediate thing, the fact of absolution is inspired. Although there’s a downside to that too, in that it restores one to the ranks of the blessed and the idea of there being a class of persons whom we agree to call blessed is a bit worrisome. There’s something psychologically worrisome about there being the blessed. I like better the notion that we are all sinners, from a psychological point of view. A sinner who knows himself to be a sinner is always tense, cautious, morally speaking.

  INTERVIEWER

  What influence would you say your books have had? What do you consider your audience?

  BRECKER

  Books are dealt with in different ways by professionals in a particular discipline and by ordinary readers. I try to write for both. Let’s say I write a book, a book dealing with the kinds of things we’ve been talking about. And you sit down to read my book. But let’s also say that you’re a specialist and you turn at once to the index—more or less to see where my book originated, if that’s the right word. And going through the index you note, say, references to Alfred Adler, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Dostoevsky, Huizinga, Konrad Lorenz, Otto Rank, Max Weber, and Gregory Zilboorg. So you feel you’ve read my book or at least have a pretty good sense of where it’s coming from, as people say nowadays. You might, with great courtesy, then skim the text in search of unfamiliar ideas, etc. etc. Or to see what I got wrong.

  As for influence, I think it’s very slight, tiny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s been influenced in any important way by my books. I’ve met lots of people who want to argue particular points, which leaves me at a bit of a disadvantage. I’m not so much interested in resolving varying Christologies or in debating specific religious ideas, techniques of atonement, for example.

  INTERVIEWER

  Can you accept a disinterested objectivity as finally normative, in regard to historical Christianity?

  BRECKER

  I’ve never found a disinterested objectivity. You have to view each tradition in the context of its own historical particularity, and these invariably militate against what might be called a disinterested stance. Very often people establish validity through the construction of a criterion, or a series of criteria, which they then satisfy. The criteria can be very elaborate. It’s a neat way of proceeding.

  The “good news” is always an announcement of a reconciliation of the particular into the universal. I have a lifelong tendency not to want to be absorbed into the universal, which amounts to saying a lifelong resistance to the forms of religion. But not to religious thought, which I consider of the greatest importance. It’s a paradox, maybe a fruitful one, I don’t know. Looking at myself, I say, hubris, maybe, the sin of pride, again, but this feeling exists and at least I can look at it, try to understand it, try to figure out how widespread it is. That is, are there others who feel this way? Again a paradox, a movement toward the universal: I don’t want to be the only one who wants to be out on a limb. Or I’m seeking validation from outside, etc. etc.

  INTERVIEWER

  On the question of—

  BRECKER

  Remember that I was the opposite of a charismatic figure, not a leader, not even a preacher. Perhaps because I had polio and was on crutches and all that. Polio might be said, by a shrink, to be the basis of my psyche in that it set me apart, involuntarily, and it may be that that apartness persisted, as a habit of mind. It would be curious if that accounted for my career, so-called. There are just too many variables to enable you to judge the quality of your own thought. Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me, as the proverb says.

  Also, there’s no progress in my field, there’s adding-on but nothing that can truthfully be described as progress. Religion is not susceptible to aggiornamento, to being brought up to date, although in terms of intellectual effort the impulse is not shoddy either. It’s one of the pleasures of the profession that you are always in doubt.

  BRECKER

  I think about my own death quite a bit, mostly in the way of noticing possible symptoms—a biting in the chest—and wondering, Is this it? It’s a function of being over sixty, and I’m maybe more concerned by how than when. That’s a . . . I hate to abandon my children. I’d like to live until they’re on their feet. I had them too late, I suppose.

  BRECKER

  Heraclitus said that religion is a disease, but a noble disease. I like that.

  BRECKER

  Teaching of any kind is always open to error. Suppose I taught my children a little mnemonic for the days of the month and it went like this: “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, all the rest have thirty-one, except for January, which has none.” And my children taught this to their children and other people, and it came to be the conventional way of thinking about the days of the month. Well, there’d be a little problem there, right?

  BRECKER

  I can do without certitude. I would have liked to have had faith.

  BRECKER

  The point of my career is perhaps how little I achieved. We speak of someone as having had “a long career” and that’s usually taken to be admiring, but what if it’s thirty-five years of persistence in error? I don’t know what value to place on what I’ve done, perhaps none at all is right. If I’d done something with soybeans, been able to increase the yield of an acre of soybeans, then I’d know I’d done something. I can’t say that.

  UNCOLLECTED STORIES

  Basil from Her Garden

  A: In the dream, my father was playing the piano, a Beethoven something, in a large concert hall that was filled with people. I was in the audience and I was reading a book. I suddenly realized that this was the wrong thing to do when my father was performing, so I sat up and paid attention. He was playing very well, I thought. Suddenly the conductor stopped the performance and began to sing a passage for my father, a passage that my father had evidently botched. My father listened attentively, smiling at the conductor.

  Q: Does your father play? In actuality?

  A: Not a note.

  Q: Did the conductor resemble anyone you know?

  A: He looked a bit like Althea. The same cheekbones and the same chin.

  Q: Who is Althea?

  A: Someone I know.

  Q: What do you do, after work, in the evenings or on weekends?

  A: Just ordinary things.

  Q: No special interests?

  A: I’m very interested in bow-hunting. These new bows they have now, what they call a compound bow. Also, I’m a member of the Galapagos Society, we work
for the environment, it’s really a very effective—

  Q: And what else?

  A: Well, adultery. I would say that’s how I spend most of my free time. In adultery.

  Q: You mean regular adultery.

  A: Yes. Sleeping with people to whom one is not legally bound.

  Q: These are women.

  A: Invariably.

  Q: And so that’s what you do, in the evenings or on weekends.

  A: I had this kind of strange experience. Today is Saturday, right? I called up this haircutter that I go to, her name is Ruth, and asked for an appointment. I needed a haircut. So she says she has openings at ten, ten-thirty, eleven, eleven-thirty, twelve, twelve-thirty— On a Saturday. Do you think the world knows something I don’t know?

  Q: It’s possible.

  A: What if she stabs me in the ear with the scissors?

  Q: Unlikely, I would think.

  A: Well, she’s a good soul. She’s had several husbands. They’ve all been master sergeants, in the Army. She seems to gravitate toward N.C.O. Clubs. Have you noticed all these little black bugs flying around here? I don’t know where they come from.

  Q: They’re very small, they’re like gnats.

  A: They come in clouds, then they go away.

  A: I sometimes think of myself as a person who, you know what I mean, could have done something else, it doesn’t matter what particularly. Just something else. I saw an ad in the Sunday paper for the C.I.A., a recruiting ad, maybe a quarter of a page, and I suddenly thought, It might be interesting to do that. Even though I’ve always been opposed to the C.I.A., when they were trying to bring Cuba down, the stuff with Lumumba in Africa, the stuff in Central America . . . Then here is this ad, perfectly straightforward, “where your career is America’s strength” or something like that, “aptitude for learning a foreign language is a plus” or something like that. I’ve always been good at languages, and I’m sitting there thinking about how my résumé might look to them, starting completely over in something completely new, changing the very sort of person I am, and there was an attraction, a definite attraction. Of course the maximum age was thirty-five. I guess they want them more malleable.

  Q: So, in the evenings or on weekends—

  A: Not every night or every weekend. I mean, this depends on the circumstances. Sometimes my wife and I go to dinner with people, or watch television—

  Q: But in the main—

  A: It’s not that often. It’s once in a while.

  Q: Adultery is a sin.

  A: It is classified as a sin, yes. Absolutely.

  Q: The Seventh Commandment says—

  A: I know what it says. I was raised on the Seventh Commandment. But.

  Q: But what?

  A: The Seventh Commandment is wrong.

  Q: It’s wrong?

  A: Some outfits call it the Sixth and others the Seventh. It’s wrong.

  Q: The whole Commandment?

  A: I don’t know how it happened, whether it’s a mistranslation from the Aramaic or whatever, it may not even have been Aramaic, I don’t know, I certainly do not pretend to scholarship in this area, but my sense of the matter is the Seventh Commandment is an error.

  Q: Well if that was true it would change quite a lot of things, wouldn’t it?

  A: Take the pressure off, a bit.

  Q: Have you told your wife?

  A: Yes, Grete knows.

  Q: How’d she take it?

  A: Well, she liked the Seventh Commandment. You could reason that it was in her interest to support the Seventh Commandment for the preservation of the family unit and this sort of thing but to reason that way is, I would say, to take an extremely narrow view of Grete, of what she thinks. She’s not predictable. She once told me that she didn’t want me, she wanted a suite of husbands, ten or twenty—

  Q: What did you say?

  A: I said, Go to it.

  Q: Well, how does it make you feel? Adultery?

  A: There’s a certain amount of guilt attached. I feel guilty. But I feel guilty even without adultery. I exist in a morass of guilt. There’s maybe a little additional wallop of guilt but I already feel so guilty that I hardly notice it.

  Q: Where does all this guilt come from? The extra-adulterous guilt?

  A: I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on . . . And these guys on these other planets, these lifeforms, maybe they look like boll weevils or something, on a much larger scale of course, were they told that they couldn’t go to bed with other attractive six-foot boll weevils arrayed in silver and gold and with little squirts of Opium behind the ears? Doesn’t make sense. But of course our human understanding is imperfect.

  Q: You haven’t answered me. This general guilt—

  A: Yes, that’s the interesting thing. I hazard that it is not guilt so much as it is inadequacy. I feel that everything is being nibbled away, because I can’t get it right—

  Q: Would you like to be able to fly?

  A: It’s crossed my mind.

  Q: Myself, I think about being just sort of a regular person, one who worries about cancer a lot, every little thing a prediction of cancer, no I don’t want to go for my every-two-years checkup because what if they find something? I wonder what will kill me and when it will happen, and I wonder about my parents, who are still alive, and what will happen to them. This seems to be to me a proper set of things to worry about. Last things.

  A: I don’t think God gives a snap about adultery. This is just an opinion, of course.

  Q: So how do you, how shall I put it, pursue—

  A: You think about this staggering concept, the mind of God, and then you think He’s sitting around worrying about this guy and this woman at the Beechnut Travelodge? I think not.

  Q: Well He doesn’t have to think about every particular instance, He just sort of laid out the general principles—

  A: He also created creatures who, with a single powerful glance—

  Q: The eyes burn.

  A: They do.

  Q: The heart leaps.

  A: Like a terrapin.

  Q: Stupid youth returns.

  A: Like hockey sticks falling out of a long-shut closet.

  Q: Do you play?

  A: I did. Many years ago.

  Q: Who is Althea?

  A: Someone I know.

  Q: We’re basically talking about Althea.

  A: Yes. I thought you understood that.

  Q: We’re not talking about wholesale—

  A: Oh Lord no. Who has the strength?

  Q: What’s she like?

  A: She’s I guess you’d say a little on the boring side. To the innocent eye.

  Q: She appears to be a contained, controlled person, free of raging internal fires.

  A: But my eye is not innocent. To the already corrupted eye, she’s—

  Q: I don’t want to question you too closely on this. I don’t want to strain your powers of—

  A: Well, no, I don’t mind talking about it. It fell on me like a ton of bricks. I was walking in the park one day.

  Q: Which park?

  A: That big park over by—

  Q: Yeah, I know the one.

  A: This woman was sitting there.

  Q: They sit in parks a lot, I’ve noticed that. Especially when they’re angry. The solitary bench. Shoulders raised, legs kicking—

  A: I’ve crossed both major oceans by ship—the Pacific twice, on troopships, the Atlantic once, on a passenger liner. You stand out there, at the rail, at dusk, and the sea is limitle
ss, water in every direction, never-ending, you think water forever, the movement of the ship seems slow but also seems inexorable, you feel you will be moving this way forever, the Pacific is about seventy million square miles, about one-third of the earth’s surface, the ship might be making twenty knots, I’m eating oranges because that’s all I can keep down, twelve days of it with thousands of young soldiers all around, half of them seasick— On the Queen Mary, in tourist class, we got rather good food, there was a guy assigned to our table who had known Paderewski, the great pianist who was also Prime Minister of Poland, he talked about Paderewski for four days, an ocean of anecdotes—

  Q: When I was first married, when I was twenty, I didn’t know where the clitoris was. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Shouldn’t somebody have told me?

  A: Perhaps your wife?

  Q: Of course, she was too shy. In those days people didn’t go around saying, This is the clitoris and this is what its proper function is and this is what you can do to help out. I finally found it. In a book.

  A: German?

  Q: Dutch.

  A: A dead bear in a blue dress, face down on the kitchen floor. I trip over it, in the dark, when I get up at 2 A.M. to see if there’s anything to eat in the refrigerator. It’s an architectural problem, marriage. If we could live in separate houses, and visit each other when we felt particularly gay— It would be expensive, yes. But as it is she has to endure me in all my worst manifestations, early in the morning and late at night and in the nutsy obsessed noontimes. When I wake up from my nap you don’t get the laughing cavalier, you get a rank pigfooted belching blunderer. I knew this one guy who built a wall down the middle of his apartment. An impenetrable wall. He had a very big apartment. It worked out very well. Concrete block, basically, with fibre-glass insulation on top of that and sheetrock on top of that—