Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Donald Barthelme

  I can tell you this: as a teacher I never saw Don question the content of a story, only the language. And he edited word by word. He particularly dreaded conventional turns of phrase and predictable usages. Sometimes he would ask a class to vote for a better word to replace the shoddy one at hand. In other words Donald never changed a student writer’s sense of truth (insofar as that concept applies to fiction), only the language in which it is dressed. In this he was singularly non-authoritarian (see question about corporal punishment above).

  Tell us one of your favorite D.B. memories, in less than 150 words.

  He seemed sad. A friend and I talked about getting him a dog. We gave him a collection of some of our favorite objects and he arranged them into an altar; he really did like making collage. We all began making altars, kept in the corner of the room, or on a shelf. I had a Donald altar. Once, to cheer him up, we got him to sing. (For the curious: he sang “Marching Down Broadway” from Nillson’s Harry album—this album also had the song “City Life” which became the title of his best story collection.)

  My favorite moment was going out with him visiting artists’ studios, looking at new work. One of the most thrilling things he taught me was how to look at art in the presence of the artist. He was very well regarded, partly because his comments were so roundabout. I remember he told one painter that the signature at the corner of his canvas was too large. I was with him when he asked the minimalist-formalist composer Morton Feldman if he led an orderly life, and asked Feldman for more messiness in his compositions.

  Now tell us another, in 75 words.

  Do you agree with this introduction’s assertion that if D.B. were to burst onto the scene today, that he would have a hard time finding a publisher, and could certainly not expect to appear so often in mainstream venues? (Our assertion here is that readers/critics no longer have patience for the intersection of stylistic eccentricity and meaning, that whimsy of any kind, digressiveness of any kind, is seen to indicate a lack of seriousness.)

  Oh, I don’t know. Of course I agree that magnificent innovation is not in abundance right now. But that’s because a lot of what passes for innovativeness is rehashed Barthelme. As he wrote, about a similar circumstance (the death of postmodernism), “who can make the leap to greatness while dragging behind him the burnt-out boxcars of a dead aesthetic?” Donald’s sentences went about as far as you can go hooking Hemingway declaration (a sentence which had been the previous most-imitated style in America) to dreams, nonsense, surrealism. We don’t need another Donald. We need a better life.

  What color were his eyes?

  Brown.

  Did he carry a ladder?

  No

  Did he eat animals?

  Yes.

  Did he laugh like a cheetah?

  Often, or like dry leaves rustling.

  That is the end of this introduction. The preparers hope it provided insight, but are keenly aware that it did not. This is the best book you will read this year, so please begin.

  Chablis

  MY wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.

  My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have it. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, “Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy’s girl?” The baby says, “Momma,” and she doesn’t just say it once, she says it repeatedly, “Momma momma momma.” I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.

  The kind of dog the baby wants, my wife says, is a Cairn terrier. This kind of dog, my wife says, is a Presbyterian like herself and the baby. Last year the baby was a Baptist—that is, she went to the Mother’s Day Out program at the First Baptist twice a week. This year she is a Presbyterian because the Presbyterians have more swings and slides and things. I think that’s pretty shameless and I have said so. My wife is a legitimate lifelong Presbyterian and says that makes it O.K.; way back when she was a child she used to go to the First Presbyterian in Evansville, Illinois. I didn’t go to church because I was a black sheep. There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep among us, the oldest one being the black sheep for a while while he was in his DWI period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep because she was a girl.

  Our baby is a pretty fine baby. I told my wife for many years that she couldn’t have a baby because it was too expensive. But they wear you down. They are just wonderful at wearing you down, even if it takes years, as it did in this case. Now I hang around the baby and hug her every chance I get. Her name is Joanna. She wears Oshkosh overalls and says “no,” “bottle,” “out,” and “Momma.” She looks most lovable when she’s wet, when she’s just had a bath and her blond hair is all wet and she’s wrapped in a beige towel. Sometimes when she’s watching television she forgets that you’re there. You can just look at her. When she’s watching television, she looks dumb. I like her better when she’s wet.

  This dog thing is getting to be a big issue. I said to my wife, “Well you’ve got the baby, do we have to have the damned dog too?” The dog will probably bite somebody, or get lost. I can see myself walking all over our subdivision asking people, “Have you seen this brown dog?” “What’s its name?” they’ll say to me, and I’ll stare at them coldly and say, “Michael.” That’s what she wants to call it, Michael. That’s a silly name for a dog and I’ll have to go looking for this possibly rabid animal and say to people, “Have you seen this brown dog? Michael?” It’s enough to make you think about divorce.

  What’s that baby going to do with that dog that it can’t do with me? Romp? I can romp. I took her to the playground at the school. It was Sunday and there was nobody there, and we romped. I ran, and she tottered after me at a good pace. I held her as she slid down the slide. She groped her way through a length of big pipe they have there set in concrete. She picked up a feather and looked at it for a long time. I was worried that it might be a diseased feather but she didn’t put it in her mouth. Then we ran some more over the parched bare softball field and through the arcade that connects the temporary wooden classrooms, which are losing their yellow paint, to the main building. Joanna will go to this school some day, if I stay in the same job.

  I looked at some dogs at Pets-A-Plenty, which has birds, rodents, reptiles, and dogs, all in top condition. They showed me the Cairn terriers. “Do they have their prayer books?” I asked. This woman clerk didn’t know what I was talking about. The Cairn terriers ran about two ninety-five per, with their papers. I started to ask if they had any illegitimate children at lower prices but I could see that it would be useless and the woman already didn’t like me, I could tell.

  What is wrong with me? Why am I not a more natural person, like my wife wants me to be? I sit up, in the early morning, at my desk on the second floor of our house. The desk faces the street. At five-thirty in the morning, the runners are already out, individually or in pairs, running toward rude red health. I’m sipping a glass of Gallo Chablis with an ice cube in it, smoking, worrying. I worry that the baby may jam a kitchen knife into an electrical outlet while she’s wet. I’ve put those little plastic plugs into all the electrical outlets but she’s learned how to pop them out. I’ve checked the Crayolas. They’ve made the Crayolas safe to eat—I called the head office in Pennsylvania. She can eat a whole box of Crayolas and nothing will happen to her. If I don’t get the new tires for the car I can buy the dog.

  I remember the time, thirty years ago, when I put Herman’s mother’s Buick into a cornfield, on the Beaumont highway. There was another car in my lane, and I didn’t hit it, and it didn’t hit me. I remember veering to the right and down into the ditch and up through
the fence and coming to rest in the cornfield and then getting out to wake Herman and the two of us going to see what the happy drunks in the other car had come to, in the ditch on the other side of the road. That was when I was a black sheep, years and years ago. That was skillfully done, I think. I get up, congratulate myself in memory, and go in to look at the baby.

  On The Deck

  THERE is a lion on the deck of the boat. The lion looks tired, fatigued. Waves the color of graphite. A grid placed before the lion, quartering him, each quarter subdivided into sixteen squares, total of sixty-four squares through which lion parts may be seen. The lion a dirty yellow-brown against the gray waves.

  Next to but not touching the lion, members of a Christian motorcycle gang (the gang is called Banditos for Jesus and has nineteen members but only three are on the deck of the boat) wearing their colors which differ from the colors of other gangs in that the badges, insignia, and so on have Christian messages, “Jesus is LORD” and the like. The bikers are thick-shouldered, gold earrings, chains, beards, red bandannas, a sweetness expressed in the tilt of their bodies toward the little girl wearing shiny steel leg braces who stands among them and smiles—they have chosen her as their “old lady” and are collecting money for her education.

  To the right of the Christian bikers and a bit closer to the coils of razor wire forward of the lion is a parked Camry (in profile) covered with a tarp and tied down with bright new rope, blocks under the wheels, the lower half of its price sticker visible on the window not completely covered by canvas. The motor is running, exhaust from the twin tailpipes touching the thirty-five burlap-wrapped bales stacked at the back of the car. There is someone inside the car, behind the wheel. This person is named Mitch. The exhaust from the car irritates the lion, whose head rolls from side to side, yellow teeth bared.

  In front of the tied-down red Camry, a man with a nosebleed holding a steel basin under his chin. The basin is full of brown blood, brown-stained blooms of gauze. He holds the basin with one hand and clutches his nose with the other. His blue-and-red-striped shirt is bloody. “Hello,” he says, “hello, hello!” Gray institutional pants and brown shoes. There’s a tree, an eight-foot western fir, in a heavy terra-cotta pot between his legs. He appears to be trying to avoid bleeding on the tree. “They don’t have anything I want,” he says. A basketball wedged between the upper branches on the left side. Immediately to the left and forward of the fir tree, a yellow fifty-five-gallon drum labeled in black letters PRISMATEX, a hose coiled on top of it; bending over the PRISMATEX, her back turned, a young woman with black hair in a thin thin yellow dress. Concentrate on the hams.

  The tilting of the deck increases; spray. The captain, a red-faced man in a blue blazer, sits in an armchair before the young woman, a can of beer in his right hand. He says: “I would have done better work if I’d had some kind of encouragement. I’ve met a lot of people in my life. I let my feelings carry me along.” At the captain’s knee is the captain’s dog, a black-and-white Scottie. The dog is afraid of the lion, keeps looking back over his shoulder at the lion. The captain kisses the hem of the young woman’s yellow dress. There’s a rolled Oriental rug bound with twine in front of the Scottie, and in front of that a child’s high chair with a peacock sitting in it, next to that a Harley leaning on its kickstand (HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS in script on the gas tank). The owner of the boat, sister of the woman in the yellow dress, is squatting by the Harley cooking hot dogs on a hibachi, a plastic bag of buns by her right foot. A boyfriend lies next to her, playing with the bottom edge of her yellow shorts. “Sometimes she’s prim,” he says. “Don’t know when you wake up in the morning what you’re going to get. I’m really not interested just now. At some point you get into it pretty far, then it becomes frightening.”

  “A smooth flight isn’t totally dependent on the pilot,” says the next man. There’s a bucket of raw liver between his knees, liver for the lion, he’s up to his elbows in liver. Next, a shuffleboard court and two men shoving the brightly colored disks this way and that with old battered M-I rifles. “I put two forty-pound sacks of cat food in the bed and covered them neatly with a blanket but she still didn’t get the message.” Further along, a marble bust of Hadrian on a bamboo plant stand, Hadrian’s marble curls curling to meet Hadrian’s marble beard, next to that someone delivering the mail, a little canvas pushcart containing mail pushed in front of her, blue uniform, two shades of blue, red hair. “Everyone likes mail, except those who are afraid of it.” Everyone gets mail. The captain gets mail, the Christian bikers get mail, Liverman gets mail, the woman in the scandal-dress gets mail. Many copies of Smithsonian. A man sitting in a red wicker chair.

  Winter on deck. All of the above covered with snow. Christmas music.

  Then, spring. A weak sun, then a stronger sun.

  You came and fell upon me, I was sitting in the wicker chair. The wicker exclaimed as your weight fell upon me. You were light, I thought, and I thought how good it was of you to do this. We’d never touched before.

  The Genius

  His assistants cluster about him. He is severe with them, demanding, punctilious, but this is for their own ultimate benefit. He devises hideously difficult problems, or complicates their work with sudden oblique comments that open whole new areas of investigation—yawning chasms under their feet. It is as if he wishes to place them in situations where only failure is possible. But failure, too, is a part of mental life. “I will make you failure-proof,” he says jokingly. His assistants pale.

  Is it true, as Valéry said, that every man of genius contains within himself a false man of genius?

  “This is an age of personal ignorance. No one knows what others know. No one knows enough.”

  The genius is afraid to fly. The giant aircraft seem to him … flimsy. He hates the takeoff and he hates the landing and he detests being in the air. He hates the food, the stewardesses, the voice of the captain, and his fellow passengers, especially those who are conspicuously at ease, who remove their coats, loosen their ties, and move up and down the aisles with drinks in their hands. In consequence, he rarely travels. The world comes to him.

  Q: What do you consider the most important tool of the genius of today?

  A: Rubber cement.

  He has urged that America be divided into four smaller countries. America, he says, is too big. “America does not look where it puts its foot,” he says. This comment, which, coming from anyone else, would have engendered widespread indignation, is greeted with amused chuckles. The Chamber of Commerce sends him four cases of Teacher’s Highland Cream..

  The genius defines “inappropriate response”:

  “Suppose my friend telephones and asks, ‘Is my wife there?’ ‘No,’ I reply, ‘they went out, your wife and my wife, wearing new hats, they are giving themselves to sailors.’ My friend is astounded at this news. ‘But it’s Election Day!’ he cries. ‘And it’s beginning to rain!’ I say.”

  The genius pays close attention to work being done in fields other than his own. He is well read in all of the sciences (with the exception of the social sciences); he follows the arts with a connoisseur’s acuteness; he is an accomplished amateur musician. He jogs. He dislikes chess. He was once photographed playing tennis with the Marx Brothers.

  He has devoted considerable thought to an attempt to define the sources of his genius. However, this attempt has led approximately nowhere. The mystery remains a mystery. He has therefore settled upon the following formula, which he repeats each time he is interviewed: “Historical forces.”

  The government has decided to award the genius a few new medals—medals he has not been previously awarded. One medal is awarded for his work prior to 1956, one for his work from 1956 to the present, and one for his future work.

  “I think that this thing, my work, has made me, in a sense, what I am. The work possesses a consciousness which shapes that of the worker. The work flatters the worker. Only the strongest worker can do this work, the work says. You must be a f
ine fellow, that you can do this work. But disaffection is also possible. The worker grows careless. The worker pays slight regard to the work, he ignores the work, he is unfáithful to the work. The work is insulted. And perhaps it finds little ways of telling the worker…. The work slips in the hands of the worker—a little cut on the finger. You understand? The work becomes slow, sulky, consumes more time, becomes more tiring. The gaiety that once existed between the worker and the work has evaporated. A fine situation! Don’t you think?”

  The genius has noticed that he does not interact with children successfully. (Anecdote)

  Richness of the inner life of the genius:

  (1) Manic-oceanic states

  (2) Hatred of children

  (3) Piano playing

  (4) Subincised genitals

  (5) Subscription to Harper’s Bazaar

  (6) Stamp collection

  The genius receives a very flattering letter from the University of Minnesota. The university wishes to become the depository of his papers, after he is dead. A new wing of the Library will be built to house them.

  The letter makes the genius angry. He takes a pair of scissors, cuts the letter into long thin strips, and mails it back to the Director of Libraries.

  He takes long walks through the city streets, noting architectural details—particularly old ironwork. His mind is filled with ideas for a new— But at this moment a policeman approaches him. “Beg pardon, sir. Aren’t you—” “Yes,” the genius says, smiling. “My little boy is an admirer of yours,” the policeman says. He pulls out a pocket notebook. “If it’s not too much trouble …” Smiling, the genius signs his name.