The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme

I. Biography

Donald
Barthelme Jr., short story writer, novelist, editor, journalist, and
teacher, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 7, 1931 to Donald
and Helen Barthelme.  He was the oldest of five children growing up
in Houston, Texas.  As Donald Sr. was establishing himself as a
well-known architect, Donald Jr. sought out on journalism at his hometown
schools, St. Thomas and Lamar High School in Houston. 

When Donald Jr., graduated from high school he wanted to pursue his
vocation in journalism and in the fall of 1949, he enrolled at the
University of Houston where he worked and later ran the Daily
Cougar.  Just as Barthelme began to see his career develop in front
of him, he was drafted into the Army right before he was about to
graduate.  However, to his delight, while doing his service he was
asked to work for an Army newspaper.  When he returned about 
two years later, he got a job as a reporter for the Houston Post. 

In the following years, Barthelme moved up and became the editor of
Acta Diurna, a weekly newsletter for the University of Houston's faculty
and staff.  As time went on Barthelme founded and edited a paper
called the Forum at the University.  As people began to see his
capability, he soon was asked and agreed, to be the director of the
Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.  However, following his heart's
desire he resigned one year later to become a contemporary fiction and
fantasy writer.

In 1964, Donald began his journey of becoming a great
writer.  His first novel Snow White (1967) set the stage of
his writings.  Snow White, The Dead Father (1975), and
Paradise (1986) were three of his famous metaphorical novels in
which he entices the reader to want to find the understanding of the
title.  After many years of success and awards,  Donald
Barthelme had won while residing in New York, he decided to return home to
Houston in 1980. After settling down, Barthelme found that he had throat
cancer. 

In 1989 Donald Barthelme Jr., died on July 23 at the age of 58. 
He left behind him 4 wives (Donald had married four times), one daughter,
and a great number of mourners who had loved and respected his writings
and stories.

II.   Literary Works

Donald Barthelme began writing his books in volumes. 
Barthelme incorporates advertising slogans, comic-book captions, catalogue
descriptions, and jacket blurbs from records and books into a style that
features verbal puns, non-sequiturs, and fracture dialogues and
narratives. Donald Jr. was quickly praised for his inventiveness and
technical skill, which was well shown in Guilty Pleasures and
Amateurs. Guilty Pleasures contains miscellaneous parodies
and a satirical piece while Amateurs includes many short stories
from the 1970s.  Snow White, Barthelme's first novel was a
dark comic and erotic parody of the popular fairy tale.  Snow
White has commonly been interpreted as an examination of the failure
of language and the inability of literature to transcend or transform
contemporary reality.  The Dead Father is often considered one
of Donald's most sustained and cohesive narrative works, while in
Paradise he uses spare, formalistic prose marked by both a sense of
playfulness and sorrow to create a male fantasy that is simultaneously
funny, disturbing, and deeply moving.

III.  Awards

Guggenheim fellowship, 1966
Time magazine's Best Books of the Year
list, 1971, for City Life
National Book Award for children's
literature, 1972, for The Slightly Irregular
Fire Engine or the
Hithering Thithering Djinn
Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the national
Institute of Arts and Letters,1972
Jesse H Jones Award from the
institute of Letters, 1976, for The Dead Father
Nominated for National
Books Critics Circle Award, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Los Angeles
Times Book Prize, all for Sixty Stories, all in 1982

IV.  Barthelme's Influences and Motives

Donald Barthelme felt his genealogical decent from a select few
traditional writers: Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Laurence
Sterne's Tristram Shady, the stories of Heinrich von Kleist, Flaubert's
Bouvard and Pecuhet and Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. Donald
Barthelme was an original and influential American writer of short
fiction.  In many of his stories, Barthelme concentrated on a single
bit of cultural junk and speculated on its range of implications. 
But even in his best stories Sam Kent commented in his article
"Contemporary vs. postmodern," "he was always in fear of danger of being
engulfed by the cultural dreck--second-hand language, second-hand beliefs,
second-hand emotions--he took as his subject so that his work sometimes
appeared to be a symptom of cultural malaise rather than a response to
it."

V.  Remarks and Criticism

'Antinovelist', 'mimimalist', 'metafictionist', and 'perhaps the final
post-Enlightenment writer', are just a few of the many names Donald
Barthelme Jr., was given for his contemporary fiction.  Richard
Gilman commented in The Confusion of Realms that Barthelme was "one of a
handful of American writers who are working to replenish and extend the
art of fiction instead of trying to add to the stock of entertainment's,
visions and human documents that fiction keeps piling up." 

Lois Gordon elaborated that idea in her book Donald Barthelme, that he
"rejects traditional chronology, plot, character, time, space, grammar,
syntax, metaphor, and simile, as well as the traditional distinctions
between fact and fiction.  What used to organize reality--time,
space, and the structure of language--is now often disjointed, and
language, and the difficulties in using it, becomes the very subject of
his art.  Most obvious is....its refusal to be orderly reflection of,
and comment upon, a stable, external world."  Herbert Mitgang, a
writer for the New York Times, called him "among the leading innovative
writers of modern fiction." 

As Charles Molesworth writes, "For Barthelme the success is not if the
story strikes us as true, but rather if it shows us how it works." 
Overall Donald Barthelme Jr. has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim and
is particularly praised as a stylist who offers vital and regenerative
qualities to literature.

VI.  Barthelme's Works

Come Back, Dr. Caligari (short stories) 1964
Snow White (novel)
1967
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (short stories) 1968
City
Life (short stories) 1970
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the
Hithering Thithering Djinn
(juvenilia) 1971
Sadness (short stories)
1972
Guilty Pleasures (satire) 1974
The Dead Father (novel)
1975
Amateurs (short stories0 1976
Sixty Stories (short stories)
1981
Overnight to Many Distant Cities (short stories) 1983
Paradise
(novel) 1986
Sam's Bar (novel) 1987
Forty Stories (short stories)
1987
The King (novel) 1990

The Teachings of Don B.: The Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated
Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (satire, fables, short stories, and
dramas) 1992

\Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme (essays)
1997

... Это может быть только Георг Фогель, Петер Дингельдайн или я, потому как мы трое - самые старослужащие. Ты должен устроить, чтобы тех двоих услали на заготовку фуража - тогда фельдфебелю придется назначить меня. Йонас вытаращил глаза.
- И во время этой поездки ты намерен ускользнуть у старика из-под носа? Ну нет, ты точно спятил!
На это Шубкель, который все хорошенько обмозговал, возразил:
- Говорю же, тебе не о чем беспокоиться. До сих пор, из дружеского расположения, ты защищал меня от назначения в караул, а теперь - опять-таки из дружеского расположения - я прошу тебя это устроить. Тебе ничто не грозит, а я буду по гроб жизни благодарен и обещаю оказать любую услугу, какой ты от меня потребуешь.
Теперь Йонас сообразил, что Шубкель не шутит, и его даже пот прошиб.
- И ты думаешь, будто из дружеского расположения я помогу тебе подвести себя под прогнание сквозь строй?
- Ничего не поделаешь, дружище, я должен отсюда убраться. Исполни мою просьбу
- не будет беды ни для тебя, ни для меня. А если откажешься, придется искать другой, ненадежный путь - тогда, может статься, меня схватят и впрямь прогонят сквозь строй, и этот грех падет на твою душу. Шубкель продолжал уговаривать приятеля, а у капрала делалось все тоскливее и неуютней на душе, потому как он думал, что лишится друга. Но в конце концов он не мог больше противиться и скрепя сердце обещал Шубкелю исполнить его просьбу.
Ландграф, который был человеком въедливым и педантичным, строго различал большой и малый выезд. При большом он выезжал в карете, в сопровождении эскорта из гусар и приличного числа верховых офицеров. Но поскольку была зима, он отдавал предпочтение малому выезду: то есть ехал один в санях, где на козлах, рядом с кучером сидел только его гайдук. Однако сзади, на подножке, стоял гренадер с ружьем на караул, и так как в этом положении должен был он оставаться при самом жестоком морозе зачастую по многу часов, не имея возможности ухватиться за что-нибудь, когда сани подбрасывало на ухабах или при поворотах швыряло из стороны в сторону, он был пристегнут под коленями к двум железным ручкам - изобретение, которым ландграф очень гордился...