Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Remembering Barthelme.

Just about the time I came along as a writer, another writer rose to prominence, fame and popularity who sent me into conniptions of frustrated rage (accompanied by gnashed teeth and gnarled knuckles) whenever I tried to read him and also every time I would crank pieces of canary-yellow (real cheap) paper into my Selectric typewriter, type furiously and then rip the pages out of my machine rapaciously filled with hope that my work might soon be published in The New Yorker. Alas, in short order, my hopes were dashed, as I would begin crossing out entire paragraphs because I thought what I had just written didn't measure up.

The Famous Writer's name was Donald Barthelme, and I had no business trying to read him, no less trying to write like him.

This was in the 1970s when I lived in Iowa City and subscribed to The New Yorker. Hardly an issue of that magazine did not include a Barthelme short story.

Here's why I could neither read nor write like The Famous Writer: In the early 1970s I was an undiagnosed ADHD. (That mental disability was first mentioned in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1968, and was unknown to the general public until the late 1980s.) I arrived at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop in 1970, with a boatload of untold stories and an impaired capacity to concentrate.

Barthelme's writing method was to heap unrelated details on other unrelated details (and those on still more) to create, as they say in Wikipedia, "a hopelessly fragmented verbal college" of found facts, objects and details. Every time I attempted to read Barthelme, my brain shattered the story into millions of glass slivers. I was unable to gestalt Barthelme's writing into a seamless comprehensive whole, and enjoy it as someone with a normal functioning brain might.

There where plenty of older writers on the scene at the time who were at the top of their game and whose writing I could enjoy and use for inspiration, novelists like Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip Roth who wrote stories about recognizable characters in situations of dramatic conflict with more-or-less conventional story structures and endings. Donald Barthelme at the time was a much younger writer attracting widespread attention who seemed to write out of a totally new set of concerns. The humor of his stories appealed to me at least at first.

Barthelme was the young, brash, daring post-Modernist writer on the flying trapeze whose leaps of language defied gravity. And Barthelme never used a net. He carried on in the tradition of T.S. Elliot's Wasteland and James Joyce Ulysses and sometimes employed Beckett's gruesome humor. Not surprisingly I found all three of those writers difficult to read.

I thought about Donald Barthelme as I read Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter, which is a beautifully, poignantly written collection, one I'd recommend to writers as an excellent source of inspiration. One of Baxter's essays is entitled "The Donald Barthelme Blues." It opens with an expert pastiche of Barthelme's writing style:

"The same day that a friend called with the news that Donald Barthelme had died, a freight train derailed outside Freeland, Michigan. Among the cars that went off the tracks were several chemical tankers, some of which spilled and caught fire. Dow chemical was (and still is) reluctant to name these chemicals, but one of them was identified as chlorosilene. When chlorosilene catches fire, as it did in this case, it turns into hydrochloric acid. Upon being asked about the physical hazards to neighbors and onlookers near the fire, a company representative interviewed on Michigan Public Radio, said, 'Well, there's been some physical reactions, yes, certainly. Especially in the area of nausea, vomiting-type thing.'

"'The area of nausea, vomiting-type thing:' This area familiar to us all where bad taste, hilarity, fake authority, and cliché seem to collide, was Donald Barthelme's special kingdom," writes Baxter. "'I have a few new marvels here I'd like to discuss with you just briefly,' says the chief engineer in 'Report.' Consider for instance the area of real-time online computer-controlled wish evaporation." [This reminds me of a device Vonnegut might have come up with.] Baxter goes on to write, "Like his creation Hokie Mokie, the King of Jazz, no one could top Barthelme at deadpan riffs like these—these collages built from castoff verbal junk—and imitation was beside the point because the work was not a compendium of stylistic tics but grew out of a spiritual enterprise owned up to in the work, a last stay against wish evaporation." Baxter's description could not be more accurate.

When I finish reading a Barthelme story today (with ADHD medication coursing in my bloodstream) I ask myself, What's the point? What sweet oddities his stories seem today? Like chocolate truffles. And how strange it is that they would have for a time taken the literary world by storm? I can't find the slightest bit of humanity anywhere among them. Humor? Yes. In abundance. But humanity? Only ice runs in those veins.

Baxter's appreciation of Barthelme is far more generous: "The work [writes Baxter] was a comfort, in the way the blues are a comfort, in its refusal to buy stock in the official Happiness Project, in its loyalty to 'inappropriate longings' a phrase he particularly valued."

For me Barthelme was never comparable to the Blues, which I've always taken to be sincere and full of heart; rather, Barthelme turned literary endeavors into a rarified, cool jazz that ultimately left me feeling numb. There was in his stuff an element of turning literature into a parlor game, a trend I observed running through graphic design at the time (in the 1970s) perhaps finding inspiration in TV programs like Monte Python, which also loved to do riffs on "found" art work from the Victorian era. In fact, Barthelme used to place Victorian-era illustrations among his stories and write humorous, cool captions under them.

That's literary fashion for you. In the 1970s Barthelme was fresh. Brand new. His writing fell into fashion. And then it fell out. In the 80s and 90s I was so happy to see younger writers coming up who wrote with passion and joy about recognizable characters encountering conflict rather than being influenced by Barthelme's grim humor. It was as though these younger writers had somehow skipped over being influenced by The Great Writer, maybe now not so great in hindsight looking back fifty years.

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