DONALD BARTHELME
COLLECTED STORIES
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
City Life
Sadness
Amateurs
Great Days
FROM Sixty Stories
Overnight to Many Distant Cities
FROM Forty Stories
Uncollected Stories
Charles McGrath, editor
LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS
DONALD BARTHELME: COLLECTED STORIES
Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 2021 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Published in the United States by Library of America.
Visit our website at www.loa.org.
Come Back, Dr. Caligari © 1964 by Donald Barthelme. Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts © 1968 by Donald Barthelme. City Life © 1970 by Donald Barthelme. Sadness © 1972 by Donald Barthelme. Amateurs © 1974 by Donald Barthelme. Great Days © 1979 by Donald Barthelme. Overnight to Many Distant Cities © 1983 by Donald Barthelme. Reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press and the Estate of Donald Barthelme.
Sixty Stories © 1981 by Donald Barthelme. Forty Stories © 1987 by Donald Barthelme. Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Donald Barthelme.
“Edwards, Amelia,” “A Man,” “Basil from Her Garden,” and “Tickets” © 1972, 1985, 1989 by Donald Barthelme. Reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press.
Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc. and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.
ISBN 978–1–59853–684–3
eISBN 978–1–59853–696–6
Contents
Introduction by Charles McGrath
COME BACK, DR. CALIGARI
Florence Green is 81
The Piano Player
Hiding Man
Will You Tell Me?
For I’m the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You
The Big Broadcast of 1938
The Viennese Opera Ball
Me and Miss Mandible
Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight
Up, Aloft in the Air
Margins
The Joker’s Greatest Triumph
To London and Rome
A Shower of Gold
UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICES, UNNATURAL ACTS
The Indian Uprising
The Balloon
This Newspaper Here
Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning
Report
The Dolt
The Police Band
Edward and Pia
A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking
Can We Talk
Game
Alice
A Picture History of the War
The President
See the Moon?
CITY LIFE
Views of My Father Weeping
Paraguay
The Falling Dog
At the Tolstoy Museum
The Policemen’s Ball
The Glass Mountain
The Explanation
Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel
The Phantom of the Opera’s Friend
Sentence
Bone Bubbles
On Angels
Brain Damage
City Life
SADNESS
Critique de la Vie Quotidienne
Träumerei
The Genius
Perpetua
A City of Churches
The Party
Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft Between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916
A Film
The Sandman
Departures
Subpoena
The Catechist
The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace
The Rise of Capitalism
The Temptation of St. Anthony
Daumier
AMATEURS
Our Work and Why We Do It
The Wound
110 West Sixty-First Street
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
The School
The Great Hug
I Bought a Little City
The Agreement
The Sergeant
What to Do Next
The Captured Woman
And Then
Porcupines at the University
The Educational Experience
The Discovery
Rebecca
The Reference
The New Member
You Are as Brave as Vincent van Gogh
At the End of the Mechanical Age
GREAT DAYS
The Crisis
The Apology
The New Music
Cortés and Montezuma
The King of Jazz
The Question Party
Belief
Tales of the Swedish Army
The Abduction from the Seraglio
The Death of Edward Lear
Concerning the Bodyguard
The Zombies
Morning
On the Steps of the Conservatory
The Leap
Great Days
(FROM) SIXTY STORIES
Eugénie Grandet
Nothing: A Preliminary Account
A Manual for Sons
Aria
The Emerald
How I Write My Songs
The Farewell
The Emperor
Thailand
Heroes
Bishop
Grandmother’s House
OVERNIGHT TO MANY DISTANT CITIES
They called for more structure . . .
Visitors
Financially, the paper . . .
Affection
I put a name in an envelope . . .
Lightning
That guy in the back room . . .
Captain Blood
A woman seated on a plain wooden chair . . .
Conversations with Goethe
Well we all had our Willie & Wade records . . .
Henrietta and Alexandra
Speaking of the human body . . .
The Sea of Hesitation
When he came . . .
Terminus
The first thing the baby did wrong . . .
The Mothball Fleet
Now that I am older . . .
Wrack
On our street . . .
The Palace at Four A.M.
I am, at the moment . . .
Overnight to Many Distant Cities
(FROM) FORTY STORIES
Chablis
On the Deck
Opening
Sindbad
Rif
Jaws
Bluebeard
Construction
Letters to the Editore
January
UNCOLLECTED STORIES
Basil from Her Garden
Edwards, Amelia
A Man
Tickets
Chronology
Note
on the Texts
Notes
Introduction
BY CHARLES MCGRATH
DONALD BARTHELME was, by his own design, a hard writer to categorize. Even at the height of his fame, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, there were readers who just didn’t get him, or suspected his work was a hoax or a joke they weren’t in on. At The New Yorker, where he was a regular contributor for decades, clerks in the library were expected to type up on index cards brief summaries of every article, fact or fiction, that appeared in the magazine. Barthelme’s cards sometimes contained just one word: “gibberish.”
By most standards, many of his stories aren’t stories at all. They don’t have plots, or even realistic, believable characters, and they touch on human emotion only indirectly. Barthelme loved arcane vocabulary, and called such pieces “slumgullions”—stews, that is. In the manner of visual artists like Duchamp and Rauschenberg, they incorporated all sorts of found materials: snippets from ad copy, old travel guides, textbooks, and instruction manuals, even other writers. The range of references and allusions in his stories is vast and encyclopedic: cheesy movies, nineteenth-century philosophers, opera, country-and-western, military history, art, architecture, soft-core pornography. For a while he even took to illustrating his work with engravings and pictures clipped from old books and magazines. He once wrote, only half-joking, that “the most essential tool for genius today” was rubber cement.
Many of the stories feel like riffs, jazzy improvisations on the way people speak: musician-talk, military lingo, art-jargon, academic highbrow. He was like his character Hokie Mokie, in the story “The King of Jazz,” of whom it is said, he “can just knock a fella out, just the way he pronounces a word. What intonation on that boy! God almighty!” Still other stories are retellings, or reimaginings, of older stories: Captain Blood, Bluebeard, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Barthelme’s version of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet includes a reference-book summary of the novel; a woodcut of Eugénie herself, holding a ball for some reason; and the word “butter” repeated ninety-seven times.
Barthelme was also fascinated by the trite and clichéd, and sometimes incorporated snatches of writing that were deliberately clumsy and hackneyed, or else close to incomprehensible, like this one, from “Paraguay,” a story that also includes lengthy cribbings from obscure books:
Relational methods govern the layout of cities. Curiously, in some of the most successful projects the design has been swung upon small collections of rare animals spaced (on the lost-horse principle) on a lack of grid. Carefully calculated mixes: mambas, the black wrasse, the giselle. Electrolytic jelly exhibiting a capture ratio far in excess of standard is used to fix the animals in place.
One of his favorite devices was the list, an occasion for tossing in all sorts of rag-picked stuff just for its own sake: “two ashtrays, ceramic, one dark brown and one dark brown with an orange blur at the lip; a tin frying pan; two-litre bottles of red wine; three-quarter-litre bottles of Black & White, aquavit, cognac, vodka, gin, Fad #6 sherry; a hollow-core door in birch veneer on black wrought-iron legs; a blanket, red-orange, with faint blue stripes; a red pillow and a blue pillow; a woven straw wastebasket; two glass jars for flowers; corkscrews and can openers; two plates and two cups, ceramic, dark brown; a yellow-and-purple poster; a Yugoslavian carved flute, wood, dark brown; and other items.” Many stories of this assembled sort have an almost painterly quality; they remind you of Warhol sometimes, in their fascination with found objects and cultural detritus, and of Kurt Schwitters, in their collage-like layering of seemingly random elements.
But toward the end of his career Barthelme wrote stories so minimal and pared-down they were almost abstract, just alternating lines of overheard conversation preceded by a dash. Almost from the beginning, there were also stories that were monologues, stories that took the form of a catechism or a Q&A, stories that were out-and-out parodies, stories within stories, stories in the form of numbered lists, stories disguised as essays or interviews, and one story that consists of a single unfinished sentence seven pages long. Barthelme even wrote a few stories that seemed old-school, with real people and actual beginnings, middles, and ends. Late in his life he wrote a prize-winning children’s book, and though his gifts were not really novelistic, he nevertheless wrote four novels—extended, book-length narratives that paid a certain homage to the old conventions of the novel while also undermining them from within. If there’s a constant in his career, it’s restlessness and a dread of seeming predictable.
Barthelme hated labels, but grudgingly accepted that “post-modernist” might not be too far off the mark, and biologically, at least, he really was one. His father, Donald, Sr., was an architect who ardently championed the work of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. Modernism in the Barthelme household was practically a religion. The family lived in a modern house, designed by Don, Sr., so radical in its time and place, a Houston suburb in the ’50s, that people used to park outside and gawk. The furniture was modern, and so were the paintings and the books. The father was impatient and imperious, and he and his namesake, his eldest child, were frequently at odds. But Barthelme nevertheless inherited from his father an unassailable conviction that there had been a revolution in art, and that there was no going back to the old ways.
The contemporaries Barthelme allied himself with were of a similar bent, anxious to dispense with the tired and old-fashioned: Walter Abish, Robert Coover, William Gass, William Gaddis, Jerome Klinkowitz, John Hawkes, John Barth, Joseph McElroy, Susan Sontag, and Thomas Pynchon. In 1983 he famously invited them all to a meal at a SoHo restaurant. (Pynchon, it goes without saying, was a no-show.) The occasion came to be known as the Post-Modernists’ Dinner, and probably entailed a lot of wine and a certain amount of unspoken invidiousness, since some of his contemporaries resented Barthelme’s success at The New Yorker and privately accused him of selling out. Barthelme differed from his fellow postmoderns in at least two respects. He had little use for the notion of “metafiction,” so much in vogue back then: the idea that writing should call attention to its own made-upness. And he lacked the high seriousness of so many postmods, their habit of making grand pronouncements. Barthelme accepted that the age in which he found himself was not a golden one. He never pretended to greatness, and he made fun of those who did. His fallback, his signature, is always humor. For all his avant-gardism, and occasional difficulty, he is a very funny writer, even a jokey one at times. He’s more entertaining to read, and requires less heavylifting, than many of the post-moderns, and he enjoyed more popular success than just about any of them.
For much of the 1970s, in fact, if slush-pile submissions to The New Yorker were any indication, Barthleme was the most widely imitated writer in America. I was a young editor then and every week would come across a dozen or so wannabe Barthelmes. In 1973 one enterprising forger even managed to sell a passable Barthelme imitation—not to The New Yorker but to one of the little quarterlies. “Quite a worthy effort, as pastiches go,” Barthelme said of it, “and particularly successful in reproducing my weaknesses.” (For a while one of Barthelme’s brothers, Frederick, was among the imitators, and it wasn’t until he found a very different voice of his own that he, too, went on to become a regular New Yorker contributor.) But Barthelme’s heyday was short-lived. In a few years his imitators had been replaced by writers trying to copy Raymond Carver (Frederick Barthelme went through a phase of that, too) and the slush pile now overflowed with stories set in trailer parks.
The Barthelme example proved to be not just harder to copy than it looked but also so original it didn’t lead anywhere. You can see glints and traces of Barthelme in writers like Donald Antrim, Mary Robison, George Saunders, Nicholson Baker, and Dave Eggers, but Barthelme never inspired a whole school of fiction writing the way Carver did. Where Carver is rooted in the deepest tradition of American realism, Barthelme seems to come out of nowhere. Before becoming a
full-time writer, he worked as a museum director and editor of an arts magazine, and his roots, such as they were, were as much in the visual arts as in literature. He’s a one-off, and that turns out to be his greatest claim on posterity: he’s like no one else. He also embodies, more inventively and more entertainingly than any of his contemporaries, that moment in American fiction when so many writers were seized by a need to kill off their ancestors, throw out the old forms, and make everything new. One of his best stories, “A Manual for Sons,” later part of a novel, is a sort of guidebook to that moment: it’s about how to cope with dead fathers who won’t stay dead.
That Barthelme had such a long and fruitful relationship with The New Yorker—publishing 129 stories there over twenty-six years, not to mention dozens of “Notes and Comment” pieces, and even filling in as a temporary film reviewer in the ’70s—now seems remarkable, for he was in many ways the least likely New Yorker contributor ever. He was consciously arty, for one thing, with a formidable, bristling intellect, at a time when the magazine maintained a tone of studied casualness and unpretentiousness. He cultivated a long, mustache-less beard, which made him look like an Amish farmer or else Captain Ahab. Nor was his work especially well liked by many on the staff. The writer and editor William Maxwell said he just didn’t get what Barthelme was up to, but whatever it was, it wasn’t fiction, and the magazine’s then managing editor used to stalk testily around the office and quiz people: Did they really understand this Barth-helm, or however he said his name?
But he had two important allies: Roger Angell, the editor who discovered him, and William Shawn, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, who readily embraced Barthelme, as he did so many experimental writers. In the beginning, what Shawn and Angell saw in Barthelme was probably another humorist, in the tradition, say, of S. J. Perelman, whose work Barthelme began to admire when he was still in high school, and who got him to start reading The New Yorker in the first place. His first published piece in the magazine, in the issue of March 2, 1963, was not one of his slumgullions but what The New Yorker called a “casual,” a piece of light humor—in this case, a parody of an Antonioni screenplay. As Barthelme’s work began to evolve in new and more daring directions Shawn and Angell stuck with it—they even relaxed, just for him, some of the magazine’s usual fussiness about punctuation—and the relationship proved mutually beneficial, as it did with so many longtime New Yorker contributors. In this case, Barthelme got an audience, something like a steady income (though it was never enough, and he was frequently in debt to the magazine), and the freedom to experiment. The magazine got a controversial but also widely admired writer who helped dispel the cloud of the so-called New Yorker story: the magazine’s reputation—outdated then but still lingering—for publishing stories that were mostly plotless evocations of suburban ennui.