See What Can Be Done
The ultramodern architecture of Barthelme’s childhood no doubt lent him confidence and comfort with the ultracontemporary literary object. Poetry could be collected intact from the world, then stripped and compressed; a story could be a mosaic torqued to mirror human anxiety. One early story, “The Piano Player,” from his first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, begins this way:
Outside his window five-year-old Priscilla Hess, square and squat as a mailbox (red sweater, blue lumpy corduroy pants), looked around poignantly for someone to wipe her overflowing nose. There was a butterfly locked inside that mailbox, surely; would it ever escape? Or was the quality of mailboxness stuck to her forever, like her parents, like her name? The sky was sunny and blue. A filet of green Silly Putty disappeared into fat Priscilla Hess and he turned to greet his wife who was crawling through the door on her hands and knees.
“Yes?” he said. “What now?”
“I’m ugly,” she said, sitting back on her haunches. “Our children are ugly.”
“Nonsense,” Brian said sharply. “They’re wonderful children. Wonderful and beautiful. Other people’s children are ugly, not our children. Now get up and go back out to the smokeroom. You’re supposed to be curing a ham.”
“The ham died,” she said. “I couldn’t cure it. I tried everything. You don’t love me any more. The penicillin was stale. I’m ugly and so are the children. It said to tell you goodbye.”
“It?”
“The ham,” she said. “Is one of our children named Ambrose?...” She made a moue and ran a hand through her artichoke hair. “The house is rusting away. Why did you want a steel house? Why did I think I wanted to live in Connecticut? I don’t know.”
“Get up,” he said softly, “get up, dearly beloved. Stand up and sing. Sing Parsifal.”
“I want a Triumph,” she said from the floor.
The placement of unexpected things side by side is not only the spirit of surrealism but also the beating heart of both comedy and nightmare, and Barthelme’s work, despite its seemingly offhand oddness and its flouting of conventional storytelling, is capable of suddenly cohering in the marvelous way of Kafka. In the blackly humorous “The School,” death pervades all the group projects of an elementary school class, as the children themselves both decry and embrace it. In “Me and Miss Mandible,” a grown man awakes to find himself back in the fourth grade. These two stories, along with “Shower of Gold,” whose setting is a television game show, are perhaps Barthelme’s most widely anthologized stories, more conservatively structured, and “screamingly funny” although, apart from the undercurrent of horror, they are not especially typical.
Most of Barthelme’s stories are, in the way of “The Piano Player,” or “For I’m the Boy,” “sites of linguistic clustering,” cobbled verbal scraps collected jazzily in Joycean fashion from the buzzing urban culture to which he was so alert. He was a rainbow coalition ventriloquist, and his denser stories perhaps gasp for air. That his first three decades were spent in Houston, a sprawling city without zoning ordinances and resplendent with surreal juxtapositions (billboards next to churches next to barbecue shacks), must have been a deep and abiding influence—though his early reading of Mallarmé is usually given the credit. Although at times his stories seem similar to a political sketch by, say, Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce (though Barthelme admired S. J. Perelman, Perelman did not return the love and actually went as far as to complain to The New Yorker about Barthelme’s work when it began regularly appearing there), at other times, in their experimentalism and absurdist poetic chat (girded with a plangent cry), they can resemble a cross between Gregory Corso’s “Marriage” and the Guy Marks song “Your Red Scarf Matches Your Eyes.”
Barthelme indeed loved songs but worked hard to avoid any explicit sentimentality. Yet one can see how pure avoidance of sentimentality is impossible for him, and he often leaves it lying about in small shards for the (optional) taking. One reviewer called Barthelme’s literary terrain “the cratered landscape of the broken heart.” His short story “How I Write My Songs” is sturdy satire but beneath it is the voice of someone who is broke and clinging to the stilted truisms and timbers of a wrecked commercial ship. “The main thing is to persevere and to believe in yourself, no matter what the attitude of others may be or appears to be.” Bellow’s criticism to Barthelme’s face—“Do you really believe it’s that hard for people to talk to each other?”—shows that an avant-garde literary mind emerging from an emotionally laconic Texan male society to direct an art museum and read books translated from German and French (a collage in human form, a bricoleur in cowboy boots) was bound to be at least occasionally misunderstood. Geniuses can be the first to recognize one another and just as often the last.
In Tracy Daugherty’s extensive discussion of Barthelme’s work, he has a literary scholar’s predilection for locating, as if they were truffles, “lifts” and “echoes” and “resonant touchstones” (from Eliot, from Perelman, from Woolf). This sort of detective work, as if it were mapping the genome of a narrative, may seem to some the downside of graduate literary education (Daugherty was once in fact a graduate student of Barthelme’s): to paraphrase our current poet laureate, Kay Ryan, why become a doctor of something that can’t be fixed? Daugherty’s determined textual sleuthing—the kind of thing an average reader can now do on Google—means to be respectful and interesting, but it strains and sweats and risks the inadvertently hostile result of seeming to want to undermine the originality of the writer, one whom Daugherty himself claims as radical and original and at one point “the nation’s finest prose stylist.”
Daugherty’s comparisons are labor-intensive and sometimes unconvincing—“the sentences echo Dostoevski’s Notes from Underground,” he says even of an early newspaper article—and this gumshoe’s persistence in tracking influences and mimicries, serendipitous or intentional, sometimes bogs the biographer down:
Time ran an article on Black Orpheus and the French New Wave….Whether or not Don was thinking of this article, he clearly had in mind Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer as he began reworking “The Hiding Man.”... Like Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man, Burlingame has freed himself from the received ideas of society and church.
Even describing Barthelme’s early adult life in Houston, Daugherty can get startlingly sidetracked:
In the first seven months of his marriage, Don, in his capacity as an arts reviewer, could offer his wife a wide array of cultural excitement (whenever he could get her out)—from an evening of Mozart piano sonatas performed by Paur Badura-Skoda, fresh from the Viennese Conservatory, to the Latin singing of Joaquin Garay, best known as the voice of Panchito in Disney’s The Three Caballeros (“Disney’s horniest animated feature,” according to one reviewer).
The inner core of the biographical subject is invariably elusive, the golden needle in the biographer’s haystack of research. So what do we really want from a literary biography? Photographs, an index, a little gossip? Daugherty is cooperative on all these fronts. Among the many images collected in the book’s glossy inserts there are all four wives and both daughters; there are pictures of the young Barthelme with the impish look of a game-show host, replete with ironic smirk and a pair of thick-framed glasses. (Later, bearded and brooding wanly, his boyish sparkle fading, he was said by Pynchon to resemble Solzhenitsyn.) There are the beautiful Greenwich Village digs and more than one cigarette thrusting toward the camera lens. The index is admirable in the hypnotic way of indexes. And for gossip Daugherty lets us in on a brief affair Barthelme had with Grace Paley (all that short-story heat!). Paley lived across the street from him on West Eleventh Street, and Barthelme dedicated his sixth collection of stories, Amateurs, to her. There is also the tragedy of his third wife, who committed suicide by leaping off a roof in Copenhagen.
But in reading about a writer’s life, what are we finally asking for? A mystery to be solved
? To desire a coherent creature to emerge from scholarly clutter may be too wishful. A literary subject, trapped within the awkward amber of someone else’s prose voice, is offered up to the world in the stylistic rhythms and commonplaces of biographical storytelling (“Whereas Downtown writing seemed content with polemics, Don had always yearned for transcendence”). This situation, unless twisted into satire, would only be anathema to most subjects, especially one whose ear was as attuned to the exquisite sentence as Barthelme’s was.
A biography of a writer whose life is being given its enduring contours by the pen of a former student (Daugherty begins his book with a wonderfully memorable anecdote of an assignment and late-night call from Professor Barthelme) sets itself up to be a fraught endeavor. Moreover, scholarly baggage and enthusiasm can produce a quality of overstuffedness, making one long for the brisk, incisive stroll of a nonacademic biographer like Daniel Mark Epstein, Calvin Tompkins, or Diane Middlebrook. What can be hoped for here, even if vainly?
Suspense. Which is an unlikely effect in the life story of a famous contemporary writer—especially one whose life was essentially an ordinary bourgeois one—and yet Tracy Daugherty manages to bring about this improbable thing. His book is a page-turner. One reads eagerly, chapter to chapter, marriage to marriage, waiting to see what happens next. That Daugherty has ferreted out this element and put it to use is an amazing and rare accomplishment.
(2009)
Clarice Lispector
Before beginning this review, I took a quick, unscientific survey: Who had read the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector? When I consulted with Latin American scholars (well, only four of them), they grew breathless in their praise. She was a goddess; she was Brazilian literature’s greatest writer. Further inquiry revealed some misunderstandings about her life, a life that clearly had reached mythic proportions, with a myth’s errors and idiosyncratic details. Still, Lispector was held in reverent esteem by all four, though one believed she had died tragically in a fire (not so, although in her forties Lispector was burned on one side of her body, including her right hand, by a fire she accidentally started by smoking a cigarette in bed). Others were under the impression that she was a lifelong lesbian (also not so).
On the other hand, when I asked American and British writers (nine) whether they had read Lispector’s work, I could find very few who had even heard of her. Some had heard of her—they thought—but knew nothing about her and had not read her. Some had read her novels and recalled them as “intense.” Others had read a short story or two in some anthology or other. (I myself have spent most of my life in this last, somewhat dishonorable category.) I then went to Amazon.com—is there a more coarsely ironic place to assess the public reception of a Brazilian woman writer?—where the customer reviews from Brasília and São Paulo were glowing. But the American responses were often tepid, including one that suggested giving Lispector’s novel The Hour of the Star as an April Fools’ gift to a person you don’t like very much, telling that person it’s the best book you’ve ever read.
Even a devoted Lispector scholar named Nadia Battella Gotlib has titled an essay “Readers of Clarice, Who Are You?” (in the collection Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector), and has compared Lispector’s simultaneously resistant and ingenuous texts to the sweetened plaster that is used to kill cockroaches, a substance that lures the creature then hardens it from within, killing from the inside out. (This image is Lispector’s own.) To be a Lispector reader, Gotlib implies, one must necessarily be caught off guard and then taken up, as if in a beam of light, toward a place that is not death exactly but a kind of not-life. It is an “enchanted sacrifice”—though understandably perhaps not to everyone’s taste.
From the start Clarice Lispector, despite the South American sun, lived in the clouds and in cloudiness. She was to the public a charismatic obscurity, a witch, a recluse, a mystery: the “Brazilian Sphinx.” Her odd name made people think she was a man or working under a nom de plume (which she sometimes did, but Lispector was her actual name). She was a kind of feminist, but as someone who also at times wrote beauty advice columns and had a closet full of designer dresses, she was not a feminist’s feminist. When later in life her work was called hermetic and she herself a “sacred monster,” it was to her own great dismay. Elizabeth Bishop, who lived for decades in Brazil, thought Lispector was a gifted primitive, essentially self-taught and suffering from what Bishop thought of as Brazilian lassitude and unreliability. Though Bishop believed that Lispector’s novels were bad and that Lispector had read nothing (except Hesse, Spinoza, Flaubert, and Agatha Christie), Bishop admired Lispector’s short stories and translated several of them.
* * *
—
There was a whiff of the diva about Lispector: restless in a marriage that had no place for a sorceress’s eye (hard on the nannies), she was just as restless in an art form that didn’t really traffic in divas. She was a stern and prickly beauty: Slavic-boned and almond-eyed, a watchful expression of sex and hauteur residing simultaneously, as in the face of a cat. “Her eyes had the dull dazzle of the mystic,” wrote a friend. At the end of her life several portraits of her hung over the sofa in her Rio apartment, including one by de Chirico, painted in war-torn Italy when de Chirico needed money and Lispector was still a young diplomat’s wife. (Neither painter nor writer seems to have known who the other was.) Midlife she abandoned niceties. A demanding friend, she phoned people at all hours, including the middle of the night. She exhausted her psychoanalyst after six years of analysis and befriended his young daughter instead. She cultivated an unnerving stare. When she confronted a Brazilian publisher over unpaid royalties, right in his office, after waiting for him to return from lunch, she was handed cash of such a small amount that she left the building in a fury and gave all the money to a beggar.
She was mildly interested in the poor and wrote of them—ventriloquizing in their direction—as existential symbols. She spoke in an unconventional Portuguese that included a lisp, the correction of which she attempted but then shed, returning to the lisp. Her writing did not sound like the Portuguese anyone else was writing. “The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language,” wrote her friend the poet Lêdo Ivo. She was a fragmentist in a “shipwreck of introspection,” though her subjects were nothing less than the nature of time, the nature of the self, and the nature of language communicating these natures. In France she was viewed as a philosopher—and at times it does seem that calling her a novelist is a little like calling Plato a playwright—but when she attended a literary conference where her work was discussed in theoretical terms (she was a darling of deconstructionists; the renowned critic Hélène Cixous remains a Lispector devotee and, like many, refers to her as simply Clarice), Lispector left the panel early, saying later that not understanding a word that was being said about her own work made her so hungry she had to go home and eat an entire chicken.
She was a quiet torment to her translators, insisting that in her virtually untranslatable prose every comma be preserved. Ronald Sousa prefaces his translation of her 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H. by throwing up his hands. Lispector violated traditional expectations, he wrote, and “such violation has robbed me of useful ways of structuring my presentation….This result may or may not be called ‘translation,’ but then that undecidability is only fitting in regard to a work that may or may not be called a ‘novel.’ ”
First-time readers might be advised to start with the Giovanni Pontiero translations, which have been enthusiastically praised and do seem successfully to capture a real voice on the page. Oddly, Lispector’s own translations—of Agatha Christie, of Anne Rice—were widely considered careless and second-rate and done for the rather little money they paid.
* * *
—
Much of this is set forth in the impressively resear
ched new biography of Lispector Why This World by Benjamin Moser, a cultural journalist who for one intense period of his life forsook his day jobs (at Random House and Harper’s) and made Lispector his raison d’être, traveling the world to every place she had been, and creating an international history of the years 1920, when Lispector was born, to 1977, when she died. Moser’s is a well-written and remarkable book, and almost everything I can now say about Lispector’s life derives from it.
Lispector, the youngest of three beautiful and brilliant girls, came to Recife in the northeastern part of Brazil when she was five, a self-described “Russian immigrant” (actually Ukrainian) with her syphilitic mother and would-be mathematician father. They were escaping the Jewish pogroms that in the 1910s persisted in the villages and woods of the countryside of her birth. Her mother’s disease was contracted when she was raped by a gang of Russian soldiers. Only at the end of Lispector’s life did she discover that her mother, who died when Clarice was nine, wrote, too, keeping private journals. Lispector’s older sisters were writers as well. Nonetheless, she began as a law student and then a journalist, and remained a journalist throughout her life and in some ways remained a lawyer as well, in that much of her fiction involves seeking the precise words for crimes and interrogating the moral intricacies of facts.