THE TEACHINGS OF DON B.
Other Books by Donald Barthelme
Amateurs
City Life
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
The Dead Father
Flying to America
Forty Stories
Great Days
Guilty Pleasures
The King
Not-Knowing
Overnight to Many Distant Cities
Paradise
Sadness
Sixty Stories
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
Snow White
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
THE
OF
DON B.
Satires, Parodies, Fables,
Illustrated Stories,
and Plays of Donald Barthelme
Edited by Kim Herzinger
Copyright © 1992 by The Estate of Donald Barthelme
Preface and editing copyright © 1992 by Kim Herzinger
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Some of the pieces that appear in this book were originally published in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, The Houston Post, Mademoiselle, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Ontario Review, and The Village Voice.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barthelme, Donald. | Herzinger, Kim A., 1946– editor. | Pynchon, Thomas author of introduction.
Title: The teachings of Don B. : satires, parodies, fables, illustrated stories, and plays of Donald Barthelme / Donald Barthelme ; edited by Kim Herzinger.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017055405 | ISBN 9781640090262
Classification: LCC PS3552.A76 A6 2018 | DDC 818/.5409—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055405
Cover design by Gerilyn Attebery
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
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Preface
Donald Barthelme’s work is uncat egorizable. It’s so notoriously uncategorizable, in fact, that its uncategorizability is almost the first thing we notice about it. Categories are a way of signifying meaning in advance, and Barthelme concedes nothing in advance; his work playfully resists being resolutely fixed. “They called for more structure,” Barthelme once wrote, “so we brought in some big hairy four-by-fours from the back shed and nailed them into place with railroad spikes.”
Barthelme himself was often asked how he distinguished between, say, a “story” and a “satire,” or a “satire” and an “essay”—and equally often his answer was quite intentionally ambiguous. He simply did not concern himself overmuch with the kinds of rules that are supposed to govern such things. A piece of writing, he once said, is “an itself, if it’s successful.” Still, in 1974, Barthelme brought in some of the work from his back shed and published it in Guilty Pleasures, a book over which, he said in an interview, he “went to some trouble to label . . . non-fiction to distinguish it from the stories.” It was, he admitted, “a somewhat difficult line to draw,” but it was a reasonably firm line, nevertheless. “I think of it [Guilty Pleasures] as journalism. A certain part of it was written out of anger, obviously a very creative emotion, at the government. I just feel that [these pieces] ought to be thought of as distinct from the fiction.”
These were pieces, he wrote in the book’s short preface, which were “written on all sorts of occasions and in response to all sorts of stimuli and overstimuli.” Most of Guilty Pleasures was made up of parodies (“a disreputable activity, ranking only a little higher on the scale of literary activity than plagiarism”) and satires (“simple expressions of stunned wonder at the fullness and mysteriousness of our political life”). The remaining pieces had to do with “having one’s coat pulled, frequently by five people in six directions. Some are brokeback fables and some are bastard reportage and some pretexts for the pleasure of cutting up and pasting together pictures, a secret vice gone public.”
Barthelme’s “satires, parodies, and fables” were the guiding notion for this book, and the reader will note that the terms satire, parody, and fable are all used in the introduction to Guilty Pleasures. The reader will also note that they are not quite as clearly defined as an editor hell-bent on guidance, not to mention a title, might wish. Still, these are robust terms with robust histories—a number of sprightly books, and a great many very dreary ones, have been written about their nature—and after all, Barthelme uses the terms himself. Happily, at least some of the pieces we wanted to put in this book were pretty clearly parodies and satires, recognizably so. These terms, we thought, would not disappoint. Unhappily, though, we had to admit that many pieces were both parody and satire, some were probably fables as well, some might reasonably be called stories, and some more would do perfectly well in a book of essays, thank you. Barthelme’s work is chocka-block with rambunctious items that do not so easily settle down inside even the wonderfully expandable frameworks suggested by satire, parody, and fable.
Nor does his helpful introduction to Guilty Pleasures entirely solve the problem of what to call the pieces in this book. Publishers, the editor considered, might balk at a book titled The Satires, Parodies, Brokeback Fables, Bastard Reportage, and Secret Vices of Donald Barthelme. And readers, turning immediately to the “Secret Vices” section, might be somewhat disappointed to find there none of the more well-publicized vices, but instead a series of ingenious prose pieces illustrated by an equally ingenious series of pictures. In a 1976 Pacifica Radio interview, Barthelme had occasion to call one of his pieces “an odd ox . . . a whatchacallit.” This seemed, for a giddy moment, a way out of the quandary. But, somehow, a book titled The Odd Oxen and Whatchacallits of Donald Barthelme did not seem to do justice to the quality of the work within.
Stirred, but weary, the editor gave up. The issue was decided, and this book is titled—or subtitled—The Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme, The editor means it when he says it, even though he may not be entirely confident that he knows what he means. He asks for generosity from those who hanker for precision. And anyway, he blames Barthelme. It’s Barthelme, after all, who refuses to have us believe in what the world would have us believe. It’s Barthelme who continually displays in his work an unlimited freedom of formal invention. It’s Barthelme who fractures every rule. And it’s Barthelme who shows us that the rules no longer obtain, or perhaps that they never obtained. And it’s precisely this that makes him one of the most important and influential writers of our time. Blame him.
Deciding exactly what in Barthelme’s work might legitimately be called a parody, satire, or fable—as opposed to a story, an essay, or a whatchacallit—was difficult enough. But that was by no means the only difficulty.
Readers have every reason to believe that a piece of writing comes full born from the mind of the author, each work being discrete from any other work, complete with a handsome title which, as it were, provides a kind of border around the piece, disallows leakage, and admits of no confusion whatsoever. But Barthelme’s working methods were quite different indeed. First, he knew what all good writers know: nothing is written that might not someday be used elsewhere. In a number of cases, parts of a published piece, or parts of an otherwise unpublished piece, were to find homes quite distant from where they began. Second, Barthelme often worked by a kind of inspired juxtaposition—the cunning method of the collagist—revising, changing, reco
mbining, and intercutting to create entirely new works from the refreshed fragments of the old. Third, some pieces were moved about almost wholly, the only major change being that they acquired entirely new frames in the process. And as we know, new frames tend to make new pictures. One of Barthelme’s unsigned “Notes and Comment” pieces, for instance, first appeared in The New Yorker in 1975. It appeared again, in very slightly altered form, in his limited-edition collection Here in the Village in 1978, and once again—slightly altered for context—in his essay “Not-Knowing,” first published in 1985. It’s a wonderful piece, a lovely piece, and it fits snugly inside every context Barthelme devised for it. But where, the bedeviled editor must ask, should we put it now? Though it could have found a perfectly happy home in this volume, you will not find it here. Don’t despair, however. In a forthcoming volume of essays, you will have your chance to read it: twice.
The satires, parodies, fables, illustrated stories, and plays that do appear in this book are of four kinds: (1) unpublished work; (2) uncollected work; (3) work—other than the novels, of course—which did not appear in either of his two compendium collections, Sixty Stories and Forty Stories; and (4) work which, though later collected, first appeared in significantly different form. Editorial information will be kept to a minimum, but certain crucial information (the likely dates of composition for unpublished work, the dates of publication for uncollected work, the identification of variant texts, and so on) is included in the “Notes” at the back of the book. A number of the published and unpublished pieces in this book were not given titles by Barthelme. The first-line short titles we have adopted have no definitive status. These short titles exist only to provide a convenient way of identifying otherwise untitled pieces.
We hope, of course, that readers will smile upon the pieces collected here. Donald Barthelme was, to quote Robert Coover, “one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters.” For those unfamiliar with his work, this book hopes to introduce them to some of the things that are so remarkable about it: its brilliant and sudden juxtaposition of modes, its accent and pace and intonation, its irreducibility, its problematic engagement with the world, its bereaved amusement, its power to influence an entire generation of writers who came after him. For those who are already familiar with Barthelme’s work, this book is a kind of replenishment. And it will remind them, too, of what they have been missing.
Kim Herzinger
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Wynn Handman and the American Place Theatre; Lee G. Campbell of Joseph the Provider Books; Wylie, Aitken & Stone; Julie Grau; Thomas Pynchon; Wayne Alpern; Derek Bridges; and Angela Ball.
And particularly special thanks to Marion Knox Barthelme, Frederick Barthelme, and Steven Barthelme, without whom the book could not have been put together.
Contents
Preface by Kim Herzinger
Acknowledgments
SATIRES, PARODIES, FABLES, AND ILLUSTRATED STORIES
The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge
I wrote a letter . . .
Challenge
Three Great Meals
Languishing, half-deep in summer . . .
The Palace
Mr. Foolfarm’s Journal
Natural History
The Joker’s Greatest Triumph
The Author
I was gratified this week . . .
When I didn’t win . . .
Return
At last, it is time . . .
The Inauguration
Games Are the Enemies of Beauty, Truth, and Sleep, Amanda Said
An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware
I have for some time . . .
The Great Debate
Snap Snap
Ming
Donald Barthelme’s Fine Homemade Soups
Adventure
Heliotrope
The Angry Young Man
Cornell
I am, at the moment . . .
Now that I am older . . .
Speaking of the human body . . .
A woman seated on a plain wooden chair . . .
That guy in the back room . . .
They called for more structure . . .
A Nation of Wheels
Kissing the President
And Now Let’s Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show!
Bliss . . .
Brain Damage
Many have remarked . . .
Swallowing
The Young Visitirs
My lover said to me . . .
That Cosmopolitan Girl
L’Lapse
More Zero
The Story Thus Far:
Bunny Image, Loss of: The Case of Bitsy S.
Two Hours to Curtain
The Royal Treatment
Man’s Face
Wasteland!
The Educational Experience
The Dragon
Newsletter
The Photographs
Well we all had our Willie & Wade records . . .
Down the Line with the Annual
Monumental Folly
The Dassaud Prize
PLAYS
The Friends of the Family
The Conservatory
Snow White
Notes
Satires, Parodies,
Fables, and
Illustrated Stories
THE TEACHINGS OF DON B.: A YANKEE WAY OF KNOWLEDGE
While doing anthropological fieldwork in Manhattan some years ago I met, on West Eleventh Street, a male Yankee of indeterminate age whose name, I was told, was Don B. I found him leaning against a building in a profound torpor—perhaps the profoundest torpor I have ever seen. He was a tallish man with an unconvincing beard and was dressed, in the fashion of the Village, in jeans and a blue work shirt. After we had been introduced, by a mutual acquaintance, I explained to him that I had been told he knew the secrets of certain hallucinogenic substances peculiar to Yankee culture and in which I was professionally interested. I expressed a wish to learn what he knew and asked if I might talk with him about the subject. He simply stared at me without replying, and then said, “No.” However, taking note of the dismay which must have been plain on my face, he said that I might return, if I wished, in two years. In the mean-time, he would think about my proposal. Then he closed his eyes again, and I left him.
I returned in the summer of 1968 and found Don B. still leaning against the same building. His torpor was now something very close to outright gloom, but he greeted me civilly enough. Again I asked him if he would consider taking me under instruction. He stared at me for a long time and then said, “Yes.” But, he warned me, states of nonordinary reality could not be attained by just anybody, and if just anybody did, by accident, blunder into a state of nonordinary reality, the anybody might bloody well regret it. Yankee culture was a fearsome thing, he told me, and not to be entered into lightly, but only with a prepared heart. Was I willing, he asked, to endure the pain, elation, shock, terror, and boredom of such an experience? Was I, for example, ticklish? I assured him that I was ready and was not ticklish, or not overmuch. He then led me into the building against which he had been leaning. He showed me into a small but poorly furnished apartment containing hundreds of books stacked randomly about. In the center of the room a fire was blazing brightly. Throwing a few more books on the fire, Don B. invited me to be seated, and we had the first of what proved to be a long series of conversations. The following material, reproduced from my field notes, has been edited somewhat to eliminate the dull parts, but in the main reflects accurately what took place during the period when I was Don B.’s apprentice.
In dealing with any system of world interpretation different from our own, it is necessary to make use of the technique of suspended judgment. This I have done, and I urge the reader to do so also.
June 11, 1968
We were sitting cross-legged
on the floor of Don B.’s apartment, facing each other, with the fire, which was kept going even in summer, between us. I decided to ask Don B. about the fire, for it was markedly hot in the room.
“Why is the fire burning, Don B.? It’s hot in here.”
Don B. gazed at me for a time without answering. Then he said: “Fire bums because it is his nature to burn. Fire is a friend. But one must know how to treat him. He contains a thousand invisible brillos which, unleashed, can cause considerable harm to life and property. That is why we have fire engines. The fire engines throw water on Fire and drown the invisible brillos. They fear water.”
“What is a brillo, Don B.?”
“A sort of devil who is invisible.”
“But why doesn’t your fire burn a hole in the floor?”
“Because I understand Fire and know his secrets,” Don B. said. “When I was a boy in the city of Philadelphia, Fire seized many houses, shops, and other buildings and burned them to the ground. But he never seized my house because I knew his secrets and he knew I knew his secrets. Therefore he stayed away.”
“What are his secrets, Don B.?”
Don B. laughed uproariously.
“You are a fool,” he said. “You are not a man of knowledge. Only a man of knowledge can understand secrets. Even if I told you Fire’s secrets, they would be of no use to you.”
“Can I become a man of knowledge, Don B.?”
Don B. fell silent. He stared at his knees for some moments. Then he gave me an intense look.
“Maybe,” he said.
I went away filled with a powerful and deep sense of warmth.
June 13, 1968
We were sitting as before on the floor of Don B.’s apartment.
“What is a man of knowledge, Don B.?” I asked him.
“A man of knowledge,” Don B. replied, “is one who knows. He not only knows, he knows that he knows. He has an ally to help him know.”
“What does the ally do, Don B.?”