Trying to describe Donald Barthelme’s politics is as dodgy as trying
to label his work, but Watergate sure did get him revved up. Nixon by
then had already mutated into a desperate and impersonal force, no
longer your traditionally human-type president but now some faceless
subgod of folly. Barthelme, perhaps as a species of anarchist curse,
just calls him “the President.” The rage behind it, provoked by the
ongoing spectacle of national politics in the U.S. as presided over by anybody,
is natural enough if you look at the regimes Barthelme happened to be
working under. Among many sad consequences of his passing is that we
won’t know what he might have done with Bush as a subject, although
“Kissing the President,” in its consideration of Reagan, may give off
premonitory hints.
One out of several humiliating features about writing fiction for a
living is that here after all is just about everybody else, all along
the capitalist spectrum from piano movers to systems analysts,
cheerfully selling their bodies or body parts according to time-honored
custom and usage, while it’s only writers, out at the fringes of the
entertainment sector, wretched and despised, who are obliged, more
intimately and painfully, actually to sell their dreams, yes, dreams
these days you’ll find are every bit as commoditized as any pork bellies
there on the financial page. To be upbeat about it, though, in most
cases it doesn’t present much moral problem, since dreams seldom make it
through into print with anything like the original production values
anyway. Even if you do good recovery, learning to write legibly in the
dark and so forth, there’s still the matter of getting it down in words
that can bring back even a little of the clarity and sweep, the
intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary
experience. So it’s a safe bet that most writers’ dreams, maybe even
including the best ones, manage to stay untranslated and private after
all.
Barthelme, however, happens to be one of a handful of American
authors there to make the rest of us look bad, who know instinctively
how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle
their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight
“reality.” What he called his “secret vice” of “cutting up and pasting
together pictures” bears an analogy, at least, to what is supposed to go
on in dreams, where images from the public domain are said likewise to
combine in unique, private, and, with luck, spiritually useful ways. How
exactly Barthelme then got this into print, or for that matter
pictorial, form, kept the transitions flowing the way he did and so on,
is way too mysterious for me, though out of guild solidarity I probably
wouldn’t share it even if I did know. The effect each time, at any rate,
is to put us in the presence of something already eerily familiar … to
remind us that we have lived in these visionary cities and haunted
forests, that the ancient faces we gaze into are faces we know.
Of course Barthelme could work in more daylit modes as well. The
parodies of works that for one reason and another gave him the pip,
though wicked, are straightforward enough. “Two Hours to Curtain” is a
closely observed and affectionate piece of reporting. The radio plays
and pieces like “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” suggest how much sheer
fun he must have had writing dialogue. You can feel him sometimes
getting light-headed with it. It could be generational, the result of
coming up during the “golden age” of radio drama, when speech, music,
and sound effects had to fill the audience’s attention and carry the
whole show. I imagine him working on the Batman piece trying not to
laugh too much at his own work because that might get in the way of
maintaining the idiotically slow pulse he wanted, not at all his usual
narrative tempo, which ran between frenzied and warp drive.
There are also pieces too free of form to be parody, too funny to be
simple invective, that express Barthelme’s deep annoyance with any
number of selected offenders—the federal government, Thanksgiving, just
about anything from California, not perhaps geographical so much as
psychological California, with its reputation for granting asylum to,
call them wishful thinkers, seeking to deny, in mostly unorthodox ways,
the passage of time, and what time brings in the way of aging, the evils
of history, the turns of Fortune. Like most writers who are serious
about what they do, Barthelme could not afford any such luxuries and so
had little patience with anyone who appeared to him to be indulging
them.
See, for example, The Teachings of Don B. Though it has the
look of a writerly reflex to some piece of industry gossip about Carlos
Castaneda’s deal with Simon & Schuster for the first Don Juan book,
Barthelme is also here enjoying a surrender to annoyance with the
parties involved, the book itself, and the culture of eternal youth that
has allowed it to flourish. The operative text here would seem to be
from 2 Corinthians: “For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves
are wise.” Wise satirical practice requires the sensitivity and skill of
a fugu chef at controlling toxicity, that is, knowing how long
to suffer, and how gladly, and when to give in to rage, and the
pleasure of assaulting at last the fools in question. Barthelme’s timing
in this regard was flawless, though unfortunately, he was prevented
from becoming a world-class curmudgeon on the order of, say, Ambrose
Bierce by the stubborn counterrhythms of what kept on being a hopeful
and unbitter heart. Much of this journeyman impatience with idiocy
concealed a tenderness and geniality that always shine through whenever
he drops the irony, even for a minute. That and, of course, his
inescapable sadness. That elegaic voice: “The wives of the angry young
man are now married to other people—doctors, mostly.” That “mostly.” You
think of the music of Dietz and Schwartz, of Fred Astaire singing Dietz and Schwartz, just that combination of grace and disenchantment, darkish lyrics and minor modalities. ... [mehr] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/23/donald-barthelmes-slick-city-sophisticate-disguise/
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