DONALD BARTHELME
Forty Stories
Introduction by
DAVE EGGERS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
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
To Marion, Anne, and Katharine
FORTY STORIES
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
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 H
arold 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.