Review: Padgett Powell on Donald Barthelme
When I tried to read Donald Barthelme, anticipating his arrival as a teacher in the fledgling writing program at the University of Houston in 1981, where I was a nearly thirty-year-old fledgling, expecting to meet women but not anyone who might tell me how to write, I could not read him. The stuff—the early stuff in Come Back, Dr. Caligari—struck me as impenetrable. I thought we were looking at Andy Warhol on acid. I had no compass with which to locate the writing. I knew of, say, Picasso, and how that worked, but I did not know you could do in words what Picasso did with paint. I slipped the three Barthelme books back into the library and waited for the end.
Donald Barthelme walked into the room, dropped a file on the podium, swung back toward us, and was shaking hands before we could get up. I was surprised—Andy Warhol on acid would not shake your hand, certainly not firmly. At worst this was Andy Warhol on booze. He was in an urban cowboy suit—jeans, Luccheses, pearl-snapped yoke shirt, a nice gentle plaid. Nice direct gaze at you, blue-eyed. This was a red-blooded, on-the-ground dude, slightly amused at the entire proposition, our being there, his being there, the there of it all.
This sense of a sane normalish man’s man that his person conveyed became my key to unlocking the Picasso mess of the writing. At the center of the cubist or impressionist or just abstract insult were these concrete moments of men or women in emotional delicacy. The business of emotion—“emotion of the better class, hard to come by,” as he would put it to The Paris Review—was a preoccupation never not important to Barthelme. It was what could vindicate you of wacko mode. “All right. We have wacko mode. What must wacko mode do?” we were asked one day when someone had tendered, I think, a dialogue between unnamed characters who were discussing, among other concerns and obliquely, a garter snake’s having eaten a Christmas bauble and having had a rough go because of the unhappy Yuletide ingestion. We sat there, on our hands, not harboring the first clue what wacko mode must do, not daring an answer. “Break their hearts,” Don Barthelme said. “Class dismissed.” The last thing I’d seen in all I’d not seen in the impenetrable writing was the breaking of a heart.
“The Indian Uprising,” set in present-day New York City, is an anthologized representation of Barthelme:
We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. “Do you think this is a good life?” The table held apples, books, long playing records. She looked up. “No.”
And then in the center of these Commanches and their war clubs clattering on the soft yellow pavements (hard to clatter on a soft surface; pavements not customarily yellow or soft—improbabilities, we might say impressionisms, that secure credence somehow; Matisse could render pavements soft and yellow) we get this, and it is not unlike other plain realistic nougats in the centers of other difficult abstract candies: “I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.” This is the heartbreak at the center of this particular wacko mode (though note the desentimentalizing wackoish effect of repeating “more in love”). There is a real person in emotional extremis down in the doodads of the surreal, a real person in rational trouble in the irrational soup. Once the reader realizes there is a reliable emotional base below the chaos, she can relax and survey the chaos, which is rendered in spectrally clean lines in service to the vigorest imagination on record.
Encountering Barthelme in anthology, as many readers do, restricts the impression of him to this kind of surreality much of the time. Were the wacko mode v. human minuet not in the nutshell it is in “The Indian Uprising,” I’d not have mentioned it. On the whole the minuet in Barthelme is looser, and the nutshell not a nut or a shell.
And now the Library of America has laid another of its doozies on us: the Collected Stories of Barthelme. This book, edited and introduced by Charles McGrath, who was the heir apparent to William Shawn at The New Yorker and whose displacement from that ascension was so imprudent that it required the invention of the locution went sideways—as in “The New Yorker was poised to be great forever until it went sideways”—accomplishes at least three things. It ends the debate, according to the indefatigable young critic Michael Giltz, as to whether one should recommend Sixty Stories or Forty Stories to the Barthelme newcomer. Tracy Daugherty, author of the fine Barthelme biography Hiding Man, says, “I’m finding that the value of the LOA edition, with all the stories back to back to back, is that it shows not only [Barthelme’s] variety and development, but his absolute radical confidence, right from the start. I seem to remember some of his early letters to friends referencing his ‘modes of attack’ with each new story he'd try. Astonishing surety, at least where the writing was concerned.”
The third thing this book does is more modest. It represents the book of the second half of the twentieth century in American letters of the better class. I say this without the bias that might be expected of me, who would not have had a career absent meeting Mr. Barthelme, and without the probative bloviation that would ordinarily be expected to follow an assertion as modest as this one. If the bloviation that precedes the assertion is not probative, it is not in me. The book is hovering here in the house like a secular, profane Bible, emanating a scriptural essence.
Padgett Powell is the author of six novels and three books of short stories, most recently Cries for Help, Various, as well as a volume of essays, Indigo: Arm Wrestling, Snake Saving, and Some Things in Between.
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