MAN’S FACE
First published in The New Yorker, May 30, 1964. It is previously uncollected.
WASTELAND!
“Wasteland!” is an unpublished piece found among Barthelme’s papers in 1990. There are two versions. The version not published here is longer by some two typescript pages, and—not unlike T. S. Eliot’s “Notes on The Waste Land”—is organized by references to the “pages” of Lionel Bart’s imaginary script. Barthelme apparently scrapped this idea for organizing the piece and condensed the material for the version published here.
Although dating the piece with absolute accuracy has proven to be impossible, it can be said that it was written between 1964 and 1967, with the strong likelihood that it was written in 1965.
The British lyricist/composer Lionel Bart could read no music, but he nevertheless wrote a number of hit, near-hit, and nonhit musicals during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Most of them were adapted from well-known sources with new titles featuring a breathless exclamation point for emphasis. Lock Up Your Daughters! (based on Henry Fielding’s Rape upon Rape) was produced in 1959, followed by the major hit Oliver!—based on Dickens’s Oliver Twist—in 1960 (New York, 1963, with an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1968); Blitz! appeared in 1962; Maggie May in 1964; the disastrous failure Twang! (a Robin Hood musical) in 1965; and La Strada, based on the Fellini film, in 1969. In 1977 Bart offered Lionel, which was based on his own career and works!
Barthelme refers to his unpublished “Wasteland!” in “Games Are the Enemies of Beauty, Truth, and Sleep, Amanda Said” when Hector suggests to Amanda that one of the games they could play is “Broadway Flop” or “The Game of Ill-Conceived Musical Comedy.”
THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE
First appeared in Harper’s, June 1973. Reprinted in Amateurs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976) without collages, and again—without collages—in Forty Stories. The collages have been restored for this printing.
THE DRAGON
First appeared in “Notes and Comment,” unsigned, The New Yorker, February 26, 1972. Reprinted with minor changes in Guilty Pleasures.
NEWSLETTER
First published in The New Yorker, July 11, 1970. Previously uncollected.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
First published in The New Yorker, January 28, 1974. Reprinted in Guilty Pleasures.
WE DROPPED IN AT THE STANHOPE . . .
First published in “Notes and Comment,” unsigned, The New Yorker, December 25, 1978. Previously uncollected.
WELL WE ALL HAD OUR WILLIE & WADE RECORDS . . .
First appeared in Harper’s, June 1979, with illustrations by fames Stevenson. It was reprinted, without illustrations, as an interchapter in Overnight to Many Distant Cities.
DOWN THE LINE WITH THE ANNUAL
First published in The New Yorker, March 21, 1964. Reprinted with minor changes in Guilty Pleasures.
MONUMENTAL FOLLY
First appeared in The Atlantic, February 1976, with illustrations by Edward Sorel. The text only is reprinted here. Previously uncollected.
THE DASSAUD PRIZE
First appeared in The New Yorker, January 12, 1976. Previously uncollected.
PLAYS
The plays, perhaps, require special attention here, since they are practically unknown. Barthelme published no plays during his lifetime, even though he wrote quite a large number of pieces in dramatic form. Many, of course, appear as dialogue stories in Great Days, Forty Stories, and elsewhere. The three plays that appear here—only one of which, Snow White, appears to have been intended for actual stage production—are reworkings and recombinations of stories that Barthelme had published previously. They have been included in this volume because of their intrinsic interest, but also because they differ in significant ways from the prose pieces from which they were adapted.
In addition to these three, however, Barthelme wrote something in the way of seventeen dramatic adaptations of various kinds, most of which duplicate the prose versions almost verbatim. He worked with Wynn Handman at New York’s American Place Theatre on at least four different occasions: Snow White was given a full-scale rehearsed reading there in 1976; in 1975 American Place produced Straws in the Wind: A Revue by Various Authors and Composers, which included adaptations of “The Photographs” and “The School”; 1976 saw Conversations with Don B.: An Entertainment with Music Drawn from the Writing of Donald Barthelme, which included—among other things—adaptations of “That Cosmopolitan Girl” and “The Balloon.” The same theater presented a full main-stage production of Great Days in the spring of 1983. Great Days, the stage production, included “Momma,” “On the Steps of the Conservatory,” “Grandmother’s House,” “The Apology,” “Morning,” Great Days,” and “The Leap.” All these pieces, with the exception of “Grandmother’s House,” had earlier appeared in prose form in Great Days, the book. “Momma” was adapted from the story published first in 1978 in The New Yorker, and later became part of “The New Music” (the first half of which, it should be noted, was originally written as an unpublished story entitled “Pool”). “Grandmother’s House” had appeared previously in Sixty Stories.
“The Emerald,” an adaptation of the story first published in Esquire and reprinted in Sixty Stories, was proposed for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s National Television Theatre in 1981. In the synopsis of “The Emerald,” by Barthelme and Harrison Starr, they suggest that the “adaptation of the basic story would be enriched and elaborated to take advantage of the special opportunities for visual effects offered by the medium, but also, and most importantly, to provide a sense of the importance of the presence or absence of myth and the magical in contemporary life.” The adaptation targeted for National Television Theatre did not, apparently, get much beyond the draft stage (an unfinished twenty-four-page typescript exists, along with many pages of notes), but a full-length version of “The Emerald”—verbatim with the published story—does exist, and in March 1992 was performed at the Cardiff Giant Theater in Chicago. The two “Emerald” ’s may have been two different, though perhaps related, projects.
Some of Barthelme’s other dramatic work—like The Friends of the Family and The Conservatory—were written for National Public Radio’s Earplay and are discussed below.
THE FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY
The Friends of the Family was written as a radio play in the early 1970s. It intercuts sections from “For I’m the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You” (Come Back, Dr. Caligari, 1964) and “The Big Broadcast of 1938” (Come Back, Dr. Caligari) along with some apparently new material (the dialogue between Bloomsbury and the Woman beginning with the line “Differentiation” and ending with “Perhaps a bucket of fun?”). Previously unpublished.
THE CONSERVATORY
The Conservatory was written as a radio play in the 1970s. It uses intercut sections from “On the Steps of the Conservatory” and “Great Days,” both published in Great Days (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979). It is previously unpublished.
SNOW WHITE
Previously unpublished. Barthelme’s adaptation of Snow White was begun in 1974, using selected lines from the published novel almost verbatim. He rewrote the play at least once between 1974 and 1976, making major cuts and adding entirely new material. In 1976 Barthelme reworked it again—with the help of American Place Theatre director Wynn Handman—for a rehearsed reading which was performed before an audience at the American Place Theatre in New York City on June 10. The purpose of the reading, according to the program note, was to give Barthelme “an opportunity to participate in rehearsals, see his play with an audience and hopefully use this experience to further the development of the play and of himself as a playwright.” Barthelme was apparently not happy with the result. He wrote to thank Handman for his help on June 21: “The experience was invaluable to me. Not only did I learn what a poor play I had written, but also I got what I consider invaluable assistance in figuring out how it might be improved.” Despite Handman’s ur
ging that he continue to work on the play, Barthelme apparently decided that he’d had enough. It is, of course, difficult to say exactly why Barthelme decided his play was so “poor,” though it should be noted that authors are often discouraged by difficulties in staging and dramatic effect quite separate from the script. Readers, we think, will find the reading script interesting indeed, and an important complement to the novel from which it was adapted.
The text for this printing is that which was used for the rehearsed reading and was kindly made available by Mr. Handman. The typescript bears the evidence of a number of last-minute changes. Most of Handman’s stage directions, since they were specifically for the New York production, have been eliminated; all of Barthelme’s stage directions have been retained.
Author photograph by Bill Wittliff
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DONALD BARTHELME is a winner of the National Book Award and is the author of over seventeen books, including Flying to America, City Life (one of Time Magazine’s Best Books of the Year), and Sixty Stories, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was a founder of the renowned University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he taught for many years. He died in 1989.
KIM HERZINGER is a critic and fiction writer, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and writer on minimalism and other contemporary literary phenomena.
The Teachings of Don B. Page 29
