Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Donald Barthelme

  Barthelme’s particular Dead Father was Beckett—who had a Dead Father of his own. “I’m just overwhelmed by Beckett, as Beckett was by Joyce,” he told interviewers Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman in 1975. “By the way, let me make clear that I am not proposing myself as successor or heir to Mr. Beckett, in any sense. I’m just telling you that he is a problem for me because of the enormous pull of his style. I am certainly not the only writer who has been enormously influenced by Beckett and thus wants to stay at arm’s length … There are other lions in the path as well… It’s just that Beckett is the largest problem for me.” Here and there, Barthelme lets himself write in this or that Beckettian mode: the relentless comma-spliced monologue of “Traumerei” (cf. The Unnamable), the vaudevilleian-stichomythic banter of such late pieces as “The Leap” (cf. Waiting for Godot), or the comic pedantry of “Daumier” and “A Shower of Gold” (cf. Murphy). What’s more radically Beckettian is Barthelme’s compulsion to fly blind, to approach the unknowable as an area for exploration, and his sense of the mind’s cubistic noisiness. “The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude,” he told J.D. O’Hara. “As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it’s being poorly done.” (This, by the way, catches almost exactly Beckett’s tone and cadence—except Beckett might have used the formal “one” construction instead of the colloquial “you.”)

  Like Beckett, Barthelme uses his well-nurtured taste and wide-ranging erudition to point up their ultimate uselessness. “Is it really important to know that this movie is fine, and that one terrible, and to talk intelligently about the difference?” his narrator asks at the end of “The Party.” “Wonderful elegance) No good at all!” Like Beckett, he’s a meticulous observer and compulsive cataloguer of the things of this world, knowing that they offer no certainty or security.

  Red men in waves … accumulated against the barriers we had made of window dummies, silk, thoughtfully planned job descriptions … I analyzed the composition of the barricade closest to me and found two ashtrays, ceramic, one dark brown and one dark brown with an orange blur at the lip … a red pillow and blue pillow, a woven straw wastebasket… a Yugoslavian carved flute, wood, dark brown, and other items. I decided I knew nothing.

  —”The Indian Uprising”

  Like Beckett, he’s God-haunted yet unbelieving.

  —We are but poor lapsarian futiles whose preen glands are all out of kilter and who but for the grace of God—

  —Do you think He wants us to grovel quite so much?

  —I don’t think He gives a rap. But it’s traditional.

  —”The Leap”

  And like Beckett—or like Shakespeare, for that matter—he doesn’t worry much about the distinction between the dark and the comic.

  Yet Barthelme would never have written a line like Nell’s speech in Endgame-. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.” His is both a sunnier and a more worldly spirit. “The world is waiting for the sunrise,” his narrator says in “The Sandman.” (Neither the narrator’s own words nor Barthelme’s, of course; he’s quoting the old pop song.) And while we may well wait forever—in fact, isn’t that Rule One?—its failure to arrive doesn’t make the sunrise less real. Barthelme has a lively sense of the absurd, but no feel for the punishingly bleak; even if all is vanity, he doesn’t hold a little thing like that against the world and the flesh. “Anathematization of the world,” he writes in Snow White, “is not an adequate response to the world.” Both as writer and citizen, Barthelme cherished acts of political decency, like the narrator’s effort, in “The Sandman,” to get help for some black kids who’d been arrested for sodomizing and suffocating a little boy. “Now while I admit it sounds callous to be talking about the degree of brutality being minimal, let me tell you that it was no small matter, in that time and place, to force the cops to show the e kids to the press at alt. It was an achievement, of sorts.” That “of sorts” undercuts the “achievement” with a Beckettian sigh; still, the achievement remains. Similarly, though physical pleasure and human connection may be hard to come by and impossible to hang onto, Barthelme never seems to feel betrayed by their absence and never doubts their absolute value. In “The Zombies,” the ultimate symptom of deadening at the hands of a “bad zombie” is to “walk by a beautiful breast and not even notice.” So is Barthelme wiser and more humane than Beckett? Or just whistling in the dark, punking out on the ultimate implications of what he knew?

  Beckett’s skepticism extends even to language itself—to the very language, that is, with which he expresses his skepticism about language. “You would do better, at least no worse,” his Molloy tells us, “to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words until all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.” Barthelme had no inclination to follow the old man to such an extremity; when it came to language, he was a believer—even a booster. “The combinatory agility of words,” he wrote in “Not-Knowing,” “the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.” He makes the anti-Beckettian argument that art, with its ability to “imagine alternative realities,” is “fundamentally meliorative,” that “the artist’s effort, always and everywhere, is to attain a fresh mode of cognition”—and that the writer’s particular task is “restoring freshness to a much-handled language.” Doesn’t this emphasis on manner rather than matter put Barthelme among literature’s marginal Crazy Uncles—Firbank, Edward Lear, John Lyly—instead of among its august Dead Fathers? Doesn’t it show Barthelme as deficient in moral earnestness? When O’Hara pressed him on this point, Barthelme had the answer ready. “I believe that my every sentence trembles with morality in that each attempts to engage the problematic,” he said. “The change of emphasis from the what to the how seems to me to be the major impulse in art since Flaubert, and it’s not merely formalism, it’s not at all superficial, it’s an attempt to reach truth, and a very rigorous one.”

  Since a writer can no more invent a new vocabulary than a painter can invent a new spectrum, Barthelme’s project of restoring freshness to language—”to purify the dialect of the tribe” is how Pound put it—led him to ragpick words, phrases, tones of voice, and modes of diction from the obscure and neglected past, from the demotic present and from the surreal specialized lexicons of technology, philosophy, even the military. “Mixing bits of this and that from various areas of life to make something that did not exist before is an oddly hopeful endeavor,” he wrote in a short essay about his story “Paraguay.” “The sentence ‘Electrolytic jelly exhibiting a capture ratio far in excess of standard is used to fix the animals in place’ made me very happy—perhaps in excess of its merit. But there is in the world such a thing as electrolytic jelly; the ‘capture ratio’ comes from the jargon of sound technology; and the animals themselves are a salad of the real and the invented.” He had a good ear for bad writing: “I’m very interested in . . . sentences that are awkward in a particular way,” he said in a 1970 interview with Jerome Klinkowitz. In such pieces as “How I Write My Songs,” he elevated the ungainly—the passive voice, the ill-chosen word, the clunky cadence, the banal thought—to the poetic simply by putting a frame around it. “Another type of song which is a dear favorite of almost everyone,” his fictive songwriter Bill B. White tells us, “is the song that has a message, some kind of thought that people can carry away with them and think about. Many songs of this type are written and gain great acceptance every day.” He was even proud of the Orwellian “loudspeaker-like tone* he achieved in this sentence from “The Rise of Capitalism”: “Cultural underdevelopment of the worker, as a technique of domination, is found everywhere under late capitalism.” Why? In part, as he explained to O’Hara, because its “metallic drone” undercut the truth of its assertion with a dreary countertruth:
nothing will ever be done about it. But also in part because, as the modernists knew long ago, ugliness has its weird beauty if you hold it up and look at it.

  In his affectionate play with language, his erudition and his lurking earnestness about the redemptive force of art, Barthelme sounds less like Beckett than like Nabokov, that other man-mountain of late modernism. Nabokov, obviously, was the better linguist, but Barthelme read at least as widely and with a more open mind: not to reinforce a set of mandarin prejudices but to explode what few he ever had. (It’s hard to imagine Nabokov studying up on the conquest of Mexico, taking notes on hoodoo charms or listening to Muddy Waters.) Barthelme paid him notably, perhaps suspiciously, scant attention. (In his 1964 essay “After Joyce,” he kissed off Nabokov in a single sentence along with—for some reason—Henry Green; this was almost a decade after Lolita.) If Beckett was Barthelme’s Dead Father, Nabokov might have been his dark Uncle Claudius: uncomfortably like him, yet radically opposed in spirit. Like Nabokov, Barthelme can be clever and allusive to the point of obscurity, but he never pulls chilly practical jokes on his readers and never seeks, as Nabokov did, to misdirect them. As the narrator of “The Sandman” says of his willful, depressive, and sexy girlfriend, distance is not Barthelme’s thing—”not by a long chalk.” Beneath his surface of corruscating omniscience beats a kindly heart. He seems to want you to be in on his jokes, to share the joyous agility of his conceptual and linguistic leaps, the abundance of his cornucopiously stocked memory, and not to sit gazing at him from the cheap seats in resentful admiration. In essays and interviews, he explained with as little mystification as possible how he put together his pieces—considering that the process of writing is essentially mysterious—and how we might go about appreciating them. 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.

  My comparing Barthelme with Beckett and Nabokov suggests that I think he, too, is a King of Jazz. Can he really hold his own in a cutting session with those cats setting the tempo, and Joyce and Woolf sitting at a table in the back listening for wrong notes? Who knows? He’s been gone less than fifteen years; we might have a clearer view of what he accomplished in another fifty. Certainly he’s become canonical: there he is, in every anthology and on the shelves of every bookstore, right after John Barth. But a lot of unread and unreadable people get to be canonical. Unlike such co-generationists as Harold Brodkey or Don DeLillo or John Gardner or Cormac McCarthy, he doesn’t do the High Seriousness thing. Which is odd, because the contemporaries he read with pleasure were folks like Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch, William Gass, Walker Percy, Garcia Marquez, Peter Handke—serious, some of them, to a fault. He’s got all the political, sociological, literary, philosophical, and spiritual anxieties any writer could be blessed with, yet reading him never feels like a duty. That wouldn’t bode well if you were bucking for King of jazz, though it might keep you from going out of print. Neither would the shortcoming he confessed to J.D. O’Hara—”1 don’t offer enough emotion”—if it were really true. He never emoted, but that’s a different thing. Any reader sophisticated enough to stick with Barthelme in the first place must sense the sadness he’s at such pains to evade with all his funning, and feel the joy when a last line—see “Report,” see “The Death of Edward Lear,” see “Traumerei”—hits home.

  Barthelme is a quintessential writer of the twentieth century, looking Janus-faced to both the past and future, and with a third eye turned inward. Yet he’s also an anomaly. Nobody before him really reads much like him: neither Beckett or Nabokov, nor such minimalist realists as Hemingway, nor such fabulists as Kafka and Borges, nor such parodists and pasticheurs at Perelman and Firbank. Nor has he become anybody’s particular Dead Father. Once in a while, George Saunders or Mark Leyner or Jim Shepherd will write something that reminds us of him. (Compare Saunders’s “Pastoralia,” in which faux cavepeople are trapped in a futuristic theme park, with Barthelme’s “Game,” whose characters are confined in the control room of a missile silo.) A few even newer jacks seem to have read him—or to have read people who’ve read him. The preemptively self-ironic title of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius sounds like Barthelme; so does the artfully broken English at the beginning of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. But if there was ever a School of Barthelme, as there was a School of Carver, it’s left scarcely a trace. He’s too erudite, too intellectually nimble, and too many-minded. (That “doubleminded man” business is an undercount—in this book, by a factor of thirty.) An aspiring Barthelme imitator would first have to choose which Barthelme to imitate.

  In “Not-Knowing,” Barthelme wrote that art is “a true account of the activity of mind.” These stories are reports of his expeditions into mapless worlds of language and thought, perception and memory, undertaken with no preconceptions about what he might tell us and how the reports might read—he had to go there first. Not stories of W doing X to Y with the result that Z, but stories of what goes on in a vast, various, and noisy consciousness, each story taking its unique shape from its creator’s intuition of what the piece itself demands. Each one singing its own tune in its own voice. So: Sixty Stories. Just what the man said. It’s not a modest title at all.

  Personal sharing time:

  1. I have not read all of Barthelme’s work. And was introduced to it well after I should have known his work. As has become the pattern of my life, I was told about him because a friend recognized similarities between his work and mine. When I finally read him—starting with Sixty Stories and followed immediately by this book you’re holding, about five years ago—I was astounded. And I felt like a thief. Or rather, that I was trodding on territory already better explored by D.B.

  2. When rereading this book in the summer of 2004, I noticed more similarities, this time in stories I’d recently written, many years after first reading Forty Stories. Either he is my spiritual father or I am a crook.

  3. I had a tough time reading this book this time around, because it’s one of the few collections that inspires me to the degree that every sentence I read makes me want to stop and write something of my own. He fires all of my synapses and connects them in new ways. He sends a herd of wildebeest through my mind. It’s a whole jungle full of animals, really, every color and shape, and he sends them scurrying all over my brain, screaming, defecating, fornicating.

  4. That is the end of the Personal Sharing portion.

  Now we will hear from Michael Silverblatt, noted and much-loved host of the syndicated American radio show Bookworm, and a former colleague of Donald Barthelme’s. First we will ask Michael questions, then we will print his answers. Those questions:

  How many people can safely eat gumbo at a table for four?

  Funny you should ask. As it happens Don cooked gumbo at our house on Linwood Avenue in Buffalo. We provided the fixings; he brought The Secret Ingredient. The lack of fresh okra in Buffalo caused Don some real consternation, but we Northeasterners didn’t know the difference. The Secret Ingredient worked its trick and ten people ate gumbo safely around a table for four. I don’t know that this would have worked without Don. (A true story—how did you know to ask about gumbo?)

  Did Donald Barthelme allow his students to call him Buck?

  (There are rumors to that effect.)

  No one I knew ever called him Buck. This may have been a later development. I knew him well between 1971 and 1980, during those years people called him Don. Why would anyone call him Buck? I remember being too amazed to be in his presence to call him by any name at all. I remember that he never told people how to pronounce Barthelme, he would let them go on doing it the way they did the first time. I remember mumbling something or other until he told me to call him Don.

  D.B’s prose is gregarious. Was D.B. gregarious or was he one of those types who’s funny in print but dour in person ?

  I’m not sure about gregarious. Don tended to va
nish from parties; I remember we once searched for him in a car, sure that he would get lost one snowy taxiless night. He even disappeared at parties in his own apartment. Dour? He was a little stern, always noble, very funny—but the funny things he said were a little dour. He advised me several times that “we were put here on earth to love one another.” I once heard him say, “You make my life a living hell,” to a dear friend and she answered, right back, “You make my life a living hell.” I remember that this was said in the friendliest way, while Don fixed barbecued ribs for supper. He liked to cook.

  Corporal punishment figures into much of D.B.’s work—not overtly, but implicitly—and I wonder if it figured into his classrooms, too?

  Donald could be terrifying, but he never threatened me with corporal punishment. Sometimes he would suddenly toss out a phrase like “Me pap! Me pap!” and be utterly disappointed that I didn’t know it came from “Endgame.” (The pap in question was sugar pap, the “me” Beckett’s Nagg.) It was a pop quiz.

  How many feathers did D.B. wear in his headdress, and what did he name them?

  I find this question unnerving. While I never saw the headdress in question, I do know that D.B. doctored a photograph of Henry James, providing James with a feather headdress of three feathers. I doubt they had names. This doctoring was titled Chief Henry James and turned up as a postcard sold in arty shops.

  Did you ever meet D.B.’s father, and which of the fathers D.B.lists in “A Manual for Sons” do you suppose he was?

  I never met his father, but I have spoken to one of the brothers, met two of the wives and one of the children. I can tell you that it is a remarkable family. Among writers, Don was a generous rouser of the clan, almost an activist. I think D.B. meant it when he said “Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.”