Uncollected Works

by Thomas Pynchon

  Barthelme, however, happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make the rest of us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight “reality.” What he called his “secret vice” of “cutting up and pasting together pictures” bears an analogy, at least, to what is supposed to go on in dreams, where images from the public domain are said likewise to combine in unique private, with luck spiritually useful, ways. How exactly Barthelme then got this into print, or for that matter pictorial, form, kept the transitions flowing the way he did and so on, is way too mysterious for me, though out of guild solidarity I probably wouldn’t share it even if I did know. The effect each time, at any rate, is to put us in the presence of something already eerily familiar … to remind us that we have lived in these visionary cities and haunted forests, that the ancient faces we gaze into are faces we know….

  Of course Barthelme could work in more daylit modes as well. The parodies of works that for one reason and another gave him the pip, though wicked, are straightforward enough. “Two Hours to Curtain” is a closely observed and affectionate piece of reporting. The radio plays and pieces like “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” suggest how much sheer fun he must have had writing dialogue. You can feel him sometimes getting lightheaded with it. It could be generational, the result of coming up during the “golden age” of radio drama, when speech, music, and sound effects had to fill the audience’s attention and carry the whole show. I imagine him working on the Batman piece trying not to laugh too much at his own work because that might get in the way of maintaining the idiotically slow pulse he wanted, not at all his usual narrative tempo, which ran between frenzied and warp drive.

  There are also pieces too free of form to be parody, too funny to be simple invective, that express Barthelme’s deep annoyance with any number of selected offenders„the federal government, Thanksgiving, just about anything from California, not perhaps geographical so much as psychological California, with its reputation for granting asylum to, call them wishful thinkers, seeking to deny, in mostly unorthodox ways, the passage of time, and what time brings in the way of aging, the evils of history, the turns of Fortune. Like most writers who are serious about what they do, Barthelme could not afford any such luxuries, and so had little patience with anyone who appeared to him to be indulging them.

  See, for example, “The Teachings of Don B.” Though it has the look of a writerly reflex to some piece of industry gossip about Carlos Castaneda’s deal with Simon & Schuster for the first Don Juan book, Barthelme is also here enjoying a surrender to annoyance with the parties involved, the book itself, and the culture of eternal youth that has allowed it to flourish. The operative text here would seem to be from II Corinthians, “For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.” Wise satirical practice requires the sensitivity and skill of a fugu chef at controlling toxicity, that is, knowing how long to suffer, and how gladly, and when to give in to rage, and the pleasure of assaulting at last the fools in question. Barthelme’s timing in this regard was flawless, though unfortunately he was prevented from becoming a worldclass curmudgeon on the order of, say, Ambrose Bierce, by the stubborn counter-rhythms of what kept on being a hopeful and unbitter heart. Much of this journeyman impatience with idiocy concealed a tenderness and geniality which always shine through whenever he drops the irony, even for a minute. That, and, of course, his inescapable sadness. That elegaic voice„“The wives of the angry young man are now married to other people„doctors, mostly.” That “mostly.” You think of the music of Dietz and Schwartz, of Fred Astaire singing Dietz and Schwartz, just that combination of grace and disenchantment, darkish lyrics and minor modalities.

  Melancholy. As any Elizabethan could tell you if they all weren’t dead, melancholy is a far richer and more complex ailment than simple depression. There is a generous amplitude of possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a sense of humor. Barthelme’s was a specifically urban melancholy, related to that look of immunity to joy or even surprise seen in the faces of cab drivers, bartenders, street dealers, city editors, a wearily taken vow to persist beneath the burdens of the day and the terrors of the night. Humor in these conditions leans toward the anti-transcendent„like jail humor and military and rodeo humor, it finds high amusement in failure and loss, and it celebrates survival one day, one disaster, to the next.

  But behind Barthelme’s own slick city-sophisticate disguise still lounged, alarmingly, this good old Dairy Queen regular in some conspicuous hat, around in whose backseat opened containers had been known to roll, harboring the mischievous daydreams of a Texas rounder, not to mention a lengthy stretch of DNA dedicated just to locating and enjoying various highly seasoned pork products. On the principle that you can take the boy out of the country but not vice versa, Houston, Texas, his hometown before New York, must have caused Barthelme some lively internal discomfort over the course of a love-hate affair with the place that went on, it seems, for most of his life. From what I remember of Houston at about that same time, it could have provoked the one emotion just as easily as the other, and in Texas-size quantities, too. The Astrodome was brand new in those days. Air conditioning in the city was ubiquitous. There were schemes afoot to put a dome over part of downtown and air-condition it, creating what today we would call a mall. Entire boulevards were dedicated to churches, side by side, one after another, allowing you to drop the family car in low and actually cruise places of worship. The nearest venue for dope, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, then as now, was Austin. The new NASA space center out by Buffalo Bayou was hiring heavily, while from the marshlands around it, mosquitoes were busy spreading an encephalitis epidemic. Sir John Barbirolli had fashioned of the Houston symphony an exquisitely first-rate instrument, while teenage musical heresy focused on California surf culture„though the Gulf only had surf during hurricanes, all kinds of kids could still be observed driving around with some stick in some woody, flaunting boards that never caught a wave, as if trying to make it all be Califomia. Anyplace but what it was.

  Whatever psychological traces of Houston he may have retained, Barthelme fortunately also brought along his Southwestern food consciousness to New York, though the theory of Tex-Mex eats he found there must have alarmed him, based as it was on tomato sauce, and tasting like Italian food made with Tabasco. The recipes reprinted in this volume may thus have developed out of some nostalgic necessity.

  Those recipes. That oxtail soup mix. That “burgoo,” with the frozen ducks in it? A notable moment in chef psychopathology, to be sure„yet such is Barthelme’s genius that even the most porkophobic or duck-intolerant among us is drooling, unashamed, by recipe’s end. His ingredients tend to come from outside New York, back in the U.S., brand names always good for some evocation of his native region, mostly canned or otherwise preserved, food meant to sit on shelves or in freezers for months before being used, each meal, each can opened or dinner defrosted, being an occasion for sadness, because, like using a dream or a memory in a piece of writing, it’s taking something back inside the passage of time that otherwise might have continued on, suspended, exempt. This is a cuisine of solitude, suggesting too many nights of unfamilied boredom and eating over the sink, a life-style that was certainly not for Don B. He disliked being alone, preferring company, however problematical, to no company. In cities such a willingness to socialize can lead a man up peculiar streets indeed, anything from all-out Uzi-toting misanthropy to a full Dickensian embrace of human diversity, foolishness and all. But to move in that direction, to open up instead of shut down, meant risking the possibility of finding spiritual dimensions sooner or later hiding inside a space he thought he owned and knew, and what would the next step have to be after that? Herbs, crystals, astrology? California?

  Nevertheless, here are two illustrated stories, “The Photographs,” about the scientific discovery of the soul, and �
�The Dassaud Prize,” about a competitive search for God, and what are we to make of them? Two British scientists, after getting into another of those stupefyingly stretched-out exchanges, agree to destroy their photographs of the soul. Their French counterparts, failing to discover God, generate as a by-product this museumful of madinventor gear. In both stories reachings after the transfinite fall apart, into twit dialogue, into eccentric technological dreaming, reentangled with Earth and the earthbound. In a writer less attendant upon the given world, this might have been occasion for some cheap glee. But this being another luxury Barthelme couldn’t afford, he was obliged to stick with reliable melancholy a less dramatic mode but one he struggled for and came by honorably.

  Not to try to make any case for Barthelme as any heavy-duty metaphysician. Heaven forfend. He was too connected to calendar dates and named streets, too engaged with the quotidian„like Garcia Marquez’s magician Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude, “in spite of his immense wisdom and mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of daily life.” Because his verifiable miracles are all literary in nature, Barthelme is probably not about to make saint anytime soon, either. But along with his published work, his other great gift to us is precisely his melancholy, presented, if we will but look, as praxis and example, a way to get us through, trading off time for spectacle, now and then even providing, as they used to sing at the end of Hee Haw, “a smile and a laugh or two.” If this is not exactly a guide for the perplexed, it is still a good honest push back against the forces that favor tragedy, and who of us wouldn’t like to have left something like that behind us?

  All things, in any event, will be set right when the biopic or Donald Barthelme Story is aired at last. This will be a made-for-cable-TV miniseries starring Barthelme lookalike Luke Perry in the title role. Paul Newman, in his first small-screen appearance, will have a cameo as Norman Mailer, for which he will win an Emmy. In the picture, Barthelme will return, sometime in the final installment, to Houston. Neighbors from long ago will bring him casseroles, Kiri Te Kanawa and Willie Nelson will come sing medleys of country classics to him in a vividly lit Astrodome before a sellout crowd. Ravishing Texas tomatoes of all shapes and sizes, played by starlets who think they have to be kind to the second assistant director, will fling themselves upon the person of Don B., cooing, squealing, gaga. Bartenders in sorrowful-looking crossroads saloons, where the records on the jukebox are all from Barthelme’s youth, will fix him perfect city drinks such as martinis and Singapore slings, and everything will be on the house.

  He will go sit in out-of-the-way Mexican eateries scarfing all afternoon and evening on chef specials not available to the average customer, featuring chiles you need a Department of Energy permit even to plant, and so forth. He will get the key to the city and a ride on a fire truck. Reviewers who trashed his work years ago will now fly into town, paying the full fare out of their own pockets, to apologize abjectly. All his books will show up again on the bestseller lists. Mike Ovitz of CAA will call from Hollywood with high-budget movie plans for some story the author has forgotten he wrote, and Barthelme will put him on hold while he goes to the fridge for another beer.

  As catastasis yields to catastrophe, shots of Barthelme are gradually replaced with shots of people talking about him, and shots of the city, parkland, sunsets, hospitals, and the like. The last we get to see of him, Barthelme is driving some gray primercoated outlaw’s dream of a Trans-Am, pulling onto some freeway, softly thundering away into the evening humidity, Lightnin’ Hopkins on the soundtrack singing “Baby Please Don’t Go,” the camera pulling back into a helicopter shot, swooping upward as credits roll„production, technical, Houston and New York second units, dialogue coaches, duck wranglers. Lights beginning to come on all across the crowded prairie. Album is available on Rounder Records. Studio logo. Two seconds of quiet, neutral darkness. Then a promo for the news at ten.

  Thomas Pynchon

  1984 by George Orwell

  George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, a small town in Bengal near the Nepalese border, and in the middle of a highly productive opium district. His father was there working as an agent for the British Opium Department, not arresting growers but supervising quality control of the product, in which Britain had long enjoyed a monopoly. A year later, young Eric was back in England with his mother and sister, and did not return to the region until 1922, as a junior officer of the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma. That job paid well, but when he came home on leave in 1927, much to the distress of his father, he decided to chuck it, because what he really wanted to do with his life was be a writer, and that is what he became. In 1933, with the publication of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, he adopted the pseudonym of George Orwell, which was the name he was known by from then on. Orwell was one of the names he had used while tramping round England, and may have been suggested by a river of the same name in Suffolk.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell’s last book – by the time it came out, in 1949, he had published twelve others, including the highly acclaimed and popular Animal Farm. In an essay from the summer of 1946, ‘Why I Write’, he recalled, ‘Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.’ Shortly after this, he was at work on Ninteen Eighty-Four.

  In a way, this novel has been a victim of the success of Animal Farm, which most people were content to read as a straightforward allegory about the melancholy fate of the Russian revolution. From the minute Big Brother’s moustache makes its appearance in the second paragraph of Nineteen Eighty-Four many readers, thinking right away of Stalin, have tended to carry over the habit of point-for-point analogy from the earlier work. Although Big Brother’s face certainly is Stalin’s, just as the despised Party heretic Emmanuel Goldstein’s face is Trotsky’s, the two do not quite line up with their models as neatly as Napoleon and Snowball did in Animal Farm. This did not keep the book from being marketed in the United States as a sort of anti-communist tract. It arrived in the thick of the McCarthy era, when ‘Communism’ was damned officially as a monolithic, worldwide menace, and there was no point in even distinguishing between Stalin and Trotsky, any more than for shepherds to be instructing sheep in the nuances of wolf recognition.

  The Korean conflict (1950–53) would also soon highlight the alleged Communist practice of ideological enforcement through ‘brainwashing’, a set of techniques said to be based on the work of I. P. Pavlov, who had once trained dogs to salivate on cue, as the Soviet technocrats after him were conditioning their human subjects into political reflexes that would be useful to the State. The Russians were supposed to be sharing these methods with their puppets, the Chinese and North Korean Communists. That something very much like brainwashing happens in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in lengthy and terrifying detail, to its hero, Winston Smith, did not surprise those readers determined to take the novel as a simple condemnation of Stalinist atrocity.

  This was not exactly Orwell’s intention. Though Nineteen Eighty-Four has brought aid and comfort to generations of anti-communist ideologues with Pavlovian-response issues of their own, Orwell’s politics were not only of the Left, but to the left of Left. He had gone to Spain in 1937 to fight against Franco and his Nazi-supported fascists, and there had quickly learned the difference between real and phony anti-fascism. ‘The Spanish war and other events in 1936–7,’ he wrote ten years later, ‘turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it.’

  Orwell thought of himself as a member of the ‘dissident Left’, as distingu
ished from the ‘official Left’, meaning basically the British Labour Party, most of which he had come, well before the Second World War, to regard as potentially, if not already, fascist. More or less consciously, he found an analogy between British Labour and the Communist Party under Stalin – both, he felt, were movements professing to fight for the working classes against capitalism but in reality concerned only with establishing and perpetuating their own power. The masses were only there to be used – for their idealism, their class resentments, their willingness to work cheap – and to be sold out, again and again.

  Now, those of fascistic disposition – or merely those among us who remain all too ready to justify any government action, whether right or wrong – will immediately point out that this is pre-war thinking, and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one’s homeland, altering the landscape and producing casualties among friends and neighbours, all this sort of thing, really, becomes irrelevant, if not indeed subversive. With the homeland in danger, strong leadership and effective measures become of the essence, and if you want to call that fascism, very well, call it whatever you please, no one is likely to be listening, unless it’s for the air raids to be over and the all clear to sound. But the unseemliness of an argument – let alone a prophecy – in the heat of some later emergency, does not necessarily make it wrong. One could certainly argue that Churchill’s war cabinet had behaved no differently than a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to self-defined wartime necessity.