The Dead Father

by Donald Barthelme

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  A Manual for Sons

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Books by Donald Barthelme

  Copyright

  For Marion

  Introduction

  BY DONALD ANTRIM

  In the years since his death at the age of fifty-eight in 1989, Donald Barthelme’s stories and his several short novels have already begun to exist—to exist—as if they might have come from, and might now forever belong to, some time and place in the world that remains far removed from whatever political and literary circumstances and conditions defined, for author and reader alike, the particular moment and milieu—that recent yet impossibly long-ago time, that familiar yet faraway place—in which Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Snow White; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; City Life; Sadness; Guilty Pleasures; The Dead Father; and more than a half-dozen subsequent works were first sprung on the world, and found to be miraculous.

  When was that time, exactly? Or, more to the point: What was that time? And what are these works?

  Questions relating to Donald Barthelme’s writings are not always easy to answer. Or I should say that they are wonderfully not easy to answer. Barthelme himself, in “Not-Knowing,” an essay devoted to the act of writing, stresses the importance, to a writer of fiction, of a certain type of anxiety—the anxiety that inevitably accompanies working without concrete or material awareness of what, precisely, one has to write; or even of how one might set out to write; or whether, for that matter, a thing can be written. The position is far from defeatist. Barthelme speaks not to a sense of resignation (either to human ignorance or to limitations in knowledge); rather, “Not-Knowing” suggests the limitations imposed by the simply and ordinarily known, those historically decreed attitudes, plans, and structures (even including, one might suppose when thinking of The Dead Father, great varieties of traditional narrative storytelling approaches, if obeyed only out of the writer’s anxiety over anxiety) that seem to stand in such contrast to his own beautifully funny and absurd creations. In “Not-Knowing,” Barthelme insists on the potentials residing in the writer’s anguish and invention. The writer, Barthelme writes in the essay, “is one who, embarking on a task, does not know what to do.”

  That said, The Dead Father, first published in 1975, is in every way a novel written by a writer suffering no shortages in the “what to do” department. It is a book that might be described—or begun to be described?—as a comicomythic patricide narrative, with excursions. It might serve, along the way, as a catalog of the endlessly various techniques that Barthelme, in all his works, has at hand’s reach: the lists and the slang terms; the miniature fables and the possibly-never-before-heard clichés; throwaway lines, invented words, and shaggy-dog stories-within-stories. The Dead Father appears to be about pretty much everything: fatherhood; sex; religion and our place in it; and the history (or philosophical pseudohistory) of the novel’s land and its people, a few of whom turn out to be made of cardboard, as are some of the local animals, which is a fact that does not inhibit the Dead Father from slaying them with his sword. “A Manual for Sons,” the satirical primer that appears near the funereal close of the novel and that is presented as a translation from English into English, can stand alone as one of his most powerful short works.

  And the Dead Father? As a character, the Dead Father might be described as a “who,” a “what,” or a “why.” He is gargantuan, violent, and lascivious; conniving and dishonest; Godlike and human. Tied and restrained with ropes and cables, he is tugged across the countryside by a regiment of men led by (who else?) a son. At points, he is armed and murderous; at other points he is unarmed and equally murderous. The Dead Father, we learn, is made of metal. He is alive and nonetheless not alive. He is infantile, a child, and old and impotent. He is, in other words, an archetype made of archetypes, inhabiting a land that is real and imaginary.

  Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom—even, counterintuitively, an obligation to freedom—a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it. Donald Barthelme’s made-up worlds contain and communicate, in a manner that is at once ineffable and recognizable—It’s Barthelme! we say to ourselves—aspects of the spirit of self-invention and political and sexual revolution that largely characterized (at least as I think of those times) the 1960s and ’70s, the years when a major part of his output, including most of the stories later collected in 60 Stories, was appearing regularly in The New Yorker.

  Those were the years, hazy and mythical-seeming to me now, that began with the assassination of Kennedy and continued through the Vietnam war, the Great Society, the Watergate break-in, and the energy crisis, with stops for the moon landing and LSD. Gravity’s Rainbow and the works of John Barth and Robert Coover and William Gaddis could be read almost as guidebooks to an America in which nothing could be trusted on appearances, and everything good was in danger of vanishing, because our fathers had let us down. This was the America I saw and imagined when I was growing up. And while I was not a mature reader during the period in my life that coincided with the appearance on the scene of much of Barthelme’s work—mainly, I was just a kid—I was nonetheless on my way. Reading Barthelme became a part of my learning. I remember the thrill I felt when I discovered him. I remember thinking: At last!

  In his surface disorder and his comic chaos, Donald Barthelme brings his own astonishing brand of order to the world. It is an order found through an awareness we acquire while reading, an awareness that the world we can’t quite see is the one worth looking at. “Not-knowing” is, after all, Barthelme’s genius, a fact that is particularly apparent if the anxious writer’s problem of “what to do” is expressed as an actual question. For Barthelme, the answer to that question would have been: Play.

  It’s an invitation. Reading The Dead Father, laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive. Not a lot of time has gone by since the world lost Donald Barthelme. Either that or a great deal of time has gone by. It’s difficult to tell. Today, in the year 2004, in the era of the second Bush administration and its wars in the Middle East, of planetary warming and the War on Terror, the world looks very much like a Donald Barthelme world. Where is he when we need him? Fewer than thirty years have passed since the publication of The Dead Father. Perhaps this brave novel about everything is, as it once was and will likely be in years to come, a book for our times.

  January 2004

  Donald Antrim has published three novels: Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker.

  The Dead Father’s head. The main thing is, his eyes are open. St
aring up into the sky. The eyes a two-valued blue, the blues of the Gitanes cigarette pack. The head never moves. Decades of staring. The brow is noble, good Christ, what else? Broad and noble. And serene, of course, he’s dead, what else if not serene? From the tip of his finely shaped delicately nostriled nose to the ground, fall of five and one half meters, figure obtained by triangulation. The hair is gray but a young gray. Full, almost to the shoulder, it is possible to admire the hair for a long time, many do, on a Sunday or other holiday or in those sandwich hours neatly placed between fattish slices of work. Jawline compares favorably to a rock formation. Imposing, rugged, all that. The great jaw contains thirty-two teeth, twenty-eight of the whiteness of standard bathroom fixtures and four stained, the latter a consequence of addiction to tobacco, according to legend, this beige quartet to be found in the center of the lower jaw. He is not perfect, thank God for that. The full red lips drawn back in a slight rictus, slight but not unpleasant rictus, disclosing a bit of mackerel salad lodged between two of the stained four. We think it’s mackerel salad. It appears to be mackerel salad. In the sagas, it is mackerel salad.

  Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead.

  No one can remember when he was not here in our city positioned like a sleeper in troubled sleep, the whole great expanse of him running from the Avenue Pommard to the Boulevard Grist. Overall length, 3,200 cubits. Half buried in the ground, half not. At work ceaselessly night and day through all the hours for the good of all. He controls the hussars. Controls the rise, fall, and flutter of the market. Controls what Thomas is thinking, what Thomas has always thought, what Thomas will ever think, with exceptions. The left leg, entirely mechanical, said to be the administrative center of his operations, working ceaselessly night and day through all the hours for the good of all. In the left leg, in sudden tucks or niches, we find things we need. Facilities for confession, small booths with sliding doors, people are noticeably freer in confessing to the Dead Father than to any priest, of course! he’s dead. The confessions are taped, scrambled, recomposed, dramatized, and then appear in the city’s theaters, a new feature-length film every Friday. One can recognize moments of one’s own, sometimes.

  The right foot rests at the Avenue Pommard and is naked except for titanium steel band around ankle, this linked by titanium steel chains to dead men (dead man n. 1. a log, concrete block, etc., buried in the ground as an anchor) to the number of eight sunk in the green of the Gardens. There is nothing unusual about the foot except that it is seven meters high. The right knee is not very interesting and no one has ever tried to dynamite it, tribute to the good sense of the citizens. From the knee to the hip joint (Belfast Avenue) everything is most ordinary. We encounter for example the rectus femoris, the saphenous nerve, the iliotibial tract, the femoral artery, the vastus medialis, the vastus lateralis, the vastus intermedius, the gracilis, the adductor magnus, the adductor longus, the intermediate femoral cutaneous nerve and other simple premechanical devices of this nature. All working night and day for the good of all. Tiny arrows are found in the right leg, sometimes. Tiny arrows are never found in the left (artificial) leg at any time, tribute to the good sense of the citizens. We want the Dead Father to be dead. We sit with tears in our eyes wanting the Dead Father to be dead—meanwhile doing amazing things with our hands.

  1

  Eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun doing its work in the sky.

  The men are tiring, said Julie. Perhaps you should give them a break.

  Thomas made the “break” signal waving his arm in a downward motion.

  The men fell out by the roadside. The cable relaxed in the road.

  This grand expedition, the Dead Father said, this waltz across an unknown parquet, this little band of brothers …

  You are not a brother, Julie reminded him. Do not get waltzed away.

  That they should so love me, the Dead Father said, as to haul and haul and haul and haul, through the long days and nights and less than optimal weather conditions …

  Julie looked away.

  My children, the Dead Father said. Mine. Mine. Mine.

  Thomas lay down with his head in Julie’s lap.

  Many sad things have befallen me, he said, and many sad things are yet to befall me, but the saddest thing of all is that fellow Edmund. The fat one.

  The drunk, Julie said.

  Yes.

  How did you come by him?

  I was standing in the square, on a beer keg as I remember, signing people up, and heard this swallowing noise under my feet. Edmund. Swallowing the tap.

  You knew, then. Before you signed him up.

  He begged. He was abject.

  A son of mine, nevertheless, said the Dead Father.

  It would be the making of him, he said. Our march. I did not agree. But it is hard to deny someone the thing he thinks will be the making of him. I signed him up.

  He has handsome hair, Julie said. That I’ve noticed.

  He was happy to throw away the cap-and-bells, said Thomas. As we all were, he added, looking pointedly at the Dead Father.

  Thomas pulled an orange fool’s cap tipped with silver bells from his knapsack.

  To think that I have worn this abomination, or its mate, since I was sixteen.

  Sixteen to sixty-five, so says the law, said the Dead Father.

  This does not make you loved.

  Loved! Not a matter of love. A matter of Organization.

  All the little heads so gay, said Julie. Makes one look a perfect fool, the cap. Brown-and-beige, maroon-and-gray, red-and-green, all bells chilattering. What a picture. I thought, What perfect fools.

  As was intended, said the Dead Father.

  And had I been caught out-of-doors without it, my ears cut off, said Thomas. What a notion. What an imagination.

  A certain artistry, said the Dead Father. In my ukases.

  Let us lunch, said Julie. Although it’s early.

  The roadside. The tablecloth. Ringle of dinnerbell. Toasted prawns. They disposed themselves around the cloth in this fashion:

  Quite good.

  Not so bad.

  Is there mustard?

  In the pot.

  Something in it.

  What?

  Look there.

  Pick it out with your finger.

  Nasty little bugger.

  Pass the prawns.

  And for dessert?

  Fig Newtons.

  They sat contentedly around the cloth, munching. Ahead of them, the lunch fires of the men. The cable slack in the roadway.

  Soon we will be there, said the Dead Father.

  Fourteen days or fifteen days, I reckon, Thomas said. If we are headed right.

  Is there any doubt?

  There is always doubt.

  When we are there, and when I wrap myself in its warm yellowness, then I will be young again, said the Dead Father. I shall once more be wiry.

  Wiry! Julie exclaimed. She stuffed a part of the tablecloth into her mouth.

  My dear, Thomas said. He extended a hand which of itself and without guidance grasped one of her handsome breasts.

  Not in front of him.

  Thomas removed the hand.

  Can you tell us, he asked, what that hussar had done? The one we saw hanged by the neck from the tree back down the road a bit.

  Disobeyed a ukase, said the Dead Father. I forget which ukase.

  Oh, said Thomas.

  Nobody disobeys a ukase of mine, said the Dead Father. He chuckled.

  Smug, isn’t he, said Julie.

  A bit smug, said Thomas.

  A bit, the Dead Father said.

  They gazed at each other fondly. Three fond gazes roving like searchlights across the prawns.

  They packed up. Thomas gave the signal. The cable jerked. The sun still. Trees. Vegetation. Wild gooseberries. Weather.

  I’ll let you have a wipe of it sometimes, the Dead Father said. Both of you.

  Thanks, Julie said.

  When I embrac
e or am embraced by its damned fine luster, the Dead Father said, all this will seem worthwhile.

  He paused.

  Even the cable.

  Another pause.

  Even those galoots you hired to haul on the cable.

  Volunteers, every one, Thomas said. Delighted to be in your service. To be wearing your livery.

  No matter. When I clutch its fine golden strands to my ancient bosom—

  His hopes are got up, I’m afraid, Julie said.

  Thomas flang his sword into a bush.

  It’s not fair! he exclaimed.

  What’s not fair?

  Why do I feel so bad? he asked, looking round him in every direction, as if for an answer.

  Are you ill?

  I could use a suck of the breast, Thomas said.

  Not in front of him.

  They retired from the Dead Father’s view, behind a proliferation of Queen Anne’s lace. Julie seated herself on the ground and opened her blouse. Two bold breasts presented themselves, the left a little smaller than the right but just as handsome in its own way.

  Ah! said Thomas, after a time. Nothing like a suck of the breast. Is there more?

  While I live, beloved.

  Thomas indulged himself further.

  Julie buttoned her blouse. They emerged hand-in-hand from the Queen Anne’s lace, Thomas swabbing his chops with the hand that was not hand-in-hand.

  A bit left out, said the Dead Father. A bit. That is what I feel, at this moment.

  Suffer, said Thomas, reclaiming his sword from the bush.

  Excluded, said the Dead Father.

  It is because you are an old fart, Julie explained. Old farts don’t get much.

  The Dead Father leaped to his feet and stormed off down the road, upon receiving this information. His golden robes flaring all about him. The cable trailing.

  He has slipped his cable, said Thomas.

  They stormed off after him. When they caught up, they found a terrible scene.

  The Dead Father was slaying, in a grove of music and musicians. First he slew a harpist and then a performer upon the serpent and also a banger upon the rattle and also a blower of the Persian trumpet and one upon the Indian trumpet and one upon the Hebrew trumpet and one upon the Roman trumpet and one upon the Chinese trumpet of copper-covered wood. Also a blower upon the marrow trumpet and one upon the slide trumpet and one who wearing upon his head the skin of a cat performed upon the menacing murmurous cornu and three blowers on the hunting horn and several blowers of the conch shell and a player of the double aulos and flautists of all descriptions and a Panpiper and a fagotto player and two virtuosos of the quail whistle and a zampogna player whose fingering of the chanters was sweet to the ear and by-the-bye and during a rest period he slew four buzzers and a shawmist and one blower upon the water jar and a clavicytheriumist who was before he slew her a woman, and a stroker of the theorbo and countless nervous-fingered drummers as well as an archlutist, and then whanging his sword this way and that the Dead Father slew a cittern plucker and five lyresmiters and various mandolinists, and slew too a violist and a player of the kit and a picker of the psaltery and a beater of the dulcimer and a hurdy-gurdier and a player of the spike fiddle and sundry kettledrummers and a triangulist and two-score finger cymbal clinkers and a xylophone artist and two gongers and a player of the small semantron who fell with his iron hammer still in his hand and a trictrac specialist and a marimbist and a maracist and a falcon drummer and a sheng blower and a sansa pusher and a manipulator of the gilded ball.