Literary Encyclopedia: Barthelme, Donald

Story Writer, Novelist, Editor, Journalist.
Active 1964-1989 in USA, North America

“Perpetual worrier, patron of the misfit/ and misguided, the oddball, the longshot, irreverent black sheep in every family. . . ”. This is how the poet and scholar Edward Hirsch begins his “Apostrophe” to Donald Barthelme in the February 17, 1992, issue of The New Republic. And rightly so, as this picture describes a writer who challenged and changed the nature of then-contemporary experimental fiction with his energetic and challenging experiments.

The critic George Wicks called Barthelme “the leading American practitioner of surrealism today . . . whose fiction continues the investigations of consciousness and experiments in expression that began with Dada and surrealism a half century ago.” And Barthelme has been described in many other ways, such as in an article in Harper’s where Josephine Henden classified him as a an angry sado-masochistic – though I would question this. Barthelme was always humanistically, satirically, mild-mannered as he reflected on man’s limitations and foibles.

Barthelme had the good fortune to be born of an avant-garde architect Donald and a sensitive, imaginative and literary mother, Helen Bechtold. Soon after his birth in Philadelphia, where his parents had met, the family—which would ultimately grow to include a daughter and three more sons also destined to become writers—moved to Galveston and then to Houston where the senior Donald made his mark in designing very un-Houstonian homes and buildings, ultimately opening his own architectural firm and beginning a long and distinguished career as professor of architectural design at the University of Houston and at Rice University. Young Barthelme was reared and educated in a family that revered the avant-garde in architecture, art, and nearly all media. His father was said to have given the young Barthelme a book of modern French poetry that stimulated his imagination and helped to give birth to his challenging way of engaging with the world.

Barthelme’s relationship with his father, however, became tense, a struggle between a rebellious son and a demanding father. In later years they would have tremendous arguments about the kind of literature Barthelme was interested in and wrote. Though his father was avant-garde in art and aesthetics in many ways, he did not approve of the post-modern and deconstruction. Barthelme’s attitude toward his father is delineated in the novels The Dead Father and The King as he is pictured in the characters King Arthur and Lancelot. Barthelme’s independence also shows in his moving away from the family’s Roman Catholicism (his mother was especially devout), a cleavage that bothered Barthelme throughout his life just as did the cleavage with his father. He seemed much closer to his mother and agreeable to her strictures. Having essentially an existential outlook, Barthelme looked hard at life and found much wanting, thus developing a sad, satiric outlook. Barthelme the activist’s keen penetration does suggest avenues of improvement for the human condition such as starting with being aware, a major thrust of many of his writings. As Barthelme matured, he tended toward depression and ultimately dependence on alcoholism with which he struggled all his life, once seeking help at the Spring Shadows Rehabilitation Center in the 1980s, but in many of his writings he suggests avenues of improvement for the human condition, starting with being existentially aware. For example, in “Chablis”, we see the narrator’s growing consciousness of his love of his baby which overcomes traditional mid-life issues such as possible divorce, having multiple jobs, being short of money. The baby “looks most loveable when she’s wet, when she has just had a bath and her blond hair is all wet and she’s wrapped in a beige towel.” The story ends with the narrator remembering his black sheep years: “I get up, congratulating myself in memory, and go in and look at the baby.” In his story “On the Deck”, Barthelme exhibits an acute sense of people overcoming constraints figured in metaphors and symbols: a “grid [is] placed before the lion”, a Christian motorcycle gang’s old lady is a “little girl wearing shiny steel leg braces”, a Camry is “covered with a tarp and tied down”, “a basketball [is] wedged between the upper branches” of a tree upon which the narrator tries not to bleed. Then love and joy come to the fore as a man “kisses the hem of the young woman’s yellow dress”, a boyfriend plays “ with the bottom edge of her [sister’s] yellow shorts”, and then spring arrives with a “stronger sun”: “You came and fell upon me . . . I thought how good it was of you to do this. We’d never touched before.”

Barthelme began his writing career while in high school and published dozens of poems, short stories, and miscellaneous prose beginning in 1948. He attended the University of Houston, followed a liberal art curriculum, and studied creative writing under Ruth Pennybacker, the only writing professor he had. Then and later, Barthelme held a number of jobs, all of which are reflected upon in his writing. He worked for the Houston Post both before and after having served in the U.S. Army: “I worked for newspapers when I was not competent to do so. I reported inaccurately. I failed to get all the facts. I garbled figures. I wasted copy work”. He worked for a time as a public relations man: “We have a great spot for a poppycock man, to write the Admiral’s speeches. Have you ever done poppycock? . . . I wrote poppycock. Sometimes cockypap.” He worked as a curator of a modern art gallery: “Yes I know its shatteringly ingenuous but I wanted to be a painter. They get away with murder in my view”. Barthelme had close connections with a variety of artists and artist-types, and references to art and artists abound in his work, which often includes various kinds of graphics and print-collages sometimes created by Barthelme himself. Drafted in 1953, Barthelme’s service in the U.S. Army in Japan and Korea finds reference in his writing: “Korea green and black and silent . . . we whitewashed rocks to enhance our area . . . mine the whitest rocks.”

After his discharge in 1955 Barthelme moved back to Houston and in 1962 moved to New York and became managing editor of Location, an art and literature review on which he worked very hard and published such writers as Saul Bellow and Marshall McLuhan. His work for Location was incredibly demanding, and his drinking was beginning to take its toll as his second marriage began to crumble. Continuing his creative bent (having published his first professional story in Harper’s in 1961, “The Case of the Vanishing Product”), he found a home in The New Yorker in 1963 where he published “L’Lapse”. In this story, a mock-Antonioni scenario, Marcello, a failed poet and wealthy film critic, converses with Anna, a bored and elegant would-be-critic whose superficiality is pictured through her continuously sucking her over-large thumb. The conversational style is mock-Antonioni as life is pictured as dictated by film. The critic Lois Gordon summarizes the theme: “criticism, like art (film), which molds life, must cultivate ‘brilliant boredom’ and ‘empty anecdote’.” The background stage directions are hilarious as well as meaningful in their mundanity: “Shot of nail kegs at construction site. Camera peers into keg, counts nails. . . . Close shot of unsmoked filter-tip cigarette; it looks virginal, possibly inhibited. . . . Shot of electricity lurking in wall outlet.”

The great bulk of his work from then on was published in The New Yorker, and he began to publish his stories in collections beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari in 1964, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts in 1968, and City Life in 1970, a wonderful and characteristically insightful collection. Time magazine named City Life one of the best books of the year and described the collection as written with “Kafka’s purity of language and some of Beckett’s grim humor”. At times it seems that every story Barthelme published was unique, such is his formal originality: for example, a fresh handling of the parodic dramatic monologue in “The School” or a list of 100 numbered sentences and fragments in “The Glass Mountain”. Barthelme once wrote, “The only forms I trust are fragments”, an aspect of his writing which Joyce Carol Oates attacked in the New York Times Book Review essay of 1972 entitled “Whose Side Are You On?”: “This from a writer of arguable genius whose works reflect what he himself must feel, in book after book, that his brain is all fragments . . . just like everything else.” In another revealing observation, Barthelme once wrote “The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century in all media.” This observation and his comment on fragments provide a double-barreled method of approaching his stories which is very fruitful. The film and literary critic Richard Schickel in the 1970 New York Times Magazine article entitled “Freaked Out on Barthelme” concluded, “Almost all his stories, and in particular the later ones, are collages. Thus if you come away from one of his works confused, terribly aware of it as a jumble of images and ideas, you will have caught his basic drift.”

Although Barthelme was startlingly original and imaginative, he was said to have led a very uneventful and quiet life, traveling often in Europe during summers. While living in the East, he taught at State University in Buffalo, Boston University, and City College of the City University of New York before moving back to Texas and taking the position of writer-in-residence at the University of Houston. Though he did not originally want a child, he became dependent on his daughter Anne who gave him a renewed sense of life in a marriage that was faltering. He stated that he “could not have made it without” Anne. None of his four marriages was good for Barthelme, as reflected in a number of his stories that could be classed as “marital bliss is a myth” stories. For his daughter, he wrote his only children’s story The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, or the Hithering Thithering Djinn (1972) which later won the National Book Award, but only under protest by dissenting members of the committee. Not surprisingly, Barthelme’s work was and is still controversial. The New Yorker received more mail objecting to his short stories than to those of any other writer the magazine has published. His acceptance speech for the National Book Award was so clever that some said it should have been published.

At the University of Houston, Barthelme became known as a sensitive, creative, and encouraging mentor to young creative-writing students while he continued his own writings. His last major publication while living was a novel Paradise (1986), a shifting, engaging, perhaps partly autobiographical novel about Simon, a middle-aged fifty-three-year old looking backward and questioning his working life and unsuccessful marriage. Toward the end of the novel, Simon reflects that he has “hope . . . Not a hell of a lot of hope, but some hope.” Barthelme, inveterate smoker as well as drinker, continued to write after developing lip cancer, even employing his cancer as the subject of his story “Departures”: “I was on the operating table . . . a six-eyed giant was shining in my eyes . . . We had gathered here in this room to cut out part of my upper lip, into which a basal-cell malignancy had crept . . . [it] resembled a tiny truffle . . . My truffle was taken to the pathologist for examination. I felt the morphine making me happy. I thought: What a beautiful hospital.”

Barthelme lost considerable weight after the surgery, had difficulty refraining from smoking and drinking, and in finding the necessary strength to keep on teaching at the university. Months later, after his surgeon had said there was no reoccurrence of the throat cancer, an intern discovered a large inoperable tumor in his chest. Unhappy and depressed, Barthelme had mentioned several times that he wanted to “ to go to sleep and never wake up”. After entering the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in the summer of 1989, Barthelme soon died, leaving a considerable amount of unpublished work. Posthumous publications include The Teachings of Don B in 1992 and The King in 1990; the latter John Updike described as a “dazzling travesty of Mallory, set in the dark early days of World War II, [which] manages to be penetratingly sad and funny at once, to an uncanny degree.” This description seems applicable to Barthelme’s life itself and how it was lived and ended.

His most comprehensive and best work, his hundred or so short fictions, are well represented in 40 Stories and 60 Stories, both published by Penguin Books, and his second wife Helen Moore Barthelme sheds valuable light on his most productive years in Houston and New York in her reminiscences in Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound, 2001. Barthelme’s “cool sound” arises from his unique and imaginative use of literary methods to represent and examine the comedy of intentions in his sweeping, critical, and accepting view of humanity. In looking at a falling dog, examining the loss of garbage cans, or conversing with a computer, Barthelme seemed to have hoped to discover (and often did) a new view or principle upon which to found a value.

Barthelme’s thoughts and work were largely the result of twentieth-century angst as he read extensively, for example in Pascal, Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Ionesco, Becket, Sartre, and Camus. (He also read widely in pop-culture, various journals and magazines, and other writers such as T.S. Eliot whom he often quoted, and James Joyce whose linguistic experiments he often challenged.)

Donald Barthelme’s work will continue to disturb and challenge the sensitive reader and, in this fragmented and collage-like world, will suggest avenues that may lead us to perhaps sadder but more appreciative and richer lives. Having written highly original and especially influential novels, short stories, and miscellaneous pieces, Barthelme is assured a notable place in American literary history. Though Barthelme in life was a twentieth-century modern, his legacy also lies in twenty-first century relevance, and he should be ranked with, for example, Don de Lillo and David Foster Wallace.

We can now only hope with Edward Hirsch that Barthelme is someplace

raising [his] wine glass to the Holy Ghost,
your ‘main man,’ and praising the mysteries,
Love and Work, looking down at the weather
which, as you said, is going to be fair
and warmer, warmer and fair, most fair.

William B. Warde, University of North Texas
First published 06 May 2004

To cite this article, you may wish to use one of the following formats:
Chicago Style: William B. Warde, University of North Texas, "Barthelme, Donald" in The Literary Encyclopedia [online database] Profile first published 06/5/2004 [cited 19 Nov. 2005]; available from World Wide Web @ http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=280
MLA Style: William B. Warde, University of North Texas. "Barthelme, Donald." The Literary Encyclopedia. 6 May. 2004. The Literary Dictionary Company. 19 November 2005. <http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=280>

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