Barthelme (2013)

In which the author makes peace with the void

When I think of 2013, my mind returns a blank, not a total blank, maybe more of a vague sense of nothingness. And pain. That year was the first full year after the death of my wife, aged 44, from breast cancer. My first memory of 2013, is day-to-day survival. Numbness. Alcohol. Sleeping pills. Overwhelming anxiety about my step-children (that year 9 and 13), who came to stay with me two days a week, spending the rest of the time with their father, my late-wife's ex-husband.

My life revolved around waiting for the kids to come back, then saying goodbye, and then waiting for the kids to come back. Plus, I lived across the street from the school, which had a YMCA daycare, pre-school. The older one would drop the younger one off, then come visit me for half-an-hour, then head off to middle school. I would head for the bus and the commute downtown to work, where I would tell my colleagues I was "parenting 30 minutes at a time."

That's about all I remembered about 2013, until I forced myself to try harder. There were events, right? I took the kids to a summer YMCA family camp in Haliburton. That was a highlight. The younger one did lots of dance lessons. She loved that. The 13-year-old did what 13 year olds do: grew enormously. What did I do?

I published no fiction. I wrote no fiction.

The Danforth Review. Oh, yes? Folks kept submitting, I kept selecting, TDR continued publishing.

Issues in 2013: 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48.

I wrote about books and things on my blog, The Underground Book Club, 11 things to be exact:

May 19 - Auster & Coetzee

June 2 - Primo Levi

June 3 - Julian Barnes

June 9 - Best Canadian Stories 2012

June 22 - Spencer Gordon

July 6 - Sam Lipsyte

July 7 - Donald Barthelme

July 8 - Leon Rooke

July 17 - Peter Roman

August 17 - Maitland & de Costa (first published in the Winnipeg Review)

October 15 - Melia McClure (first published in Q&Q)

I also had a personalish blog, but that one's gone.

I went through a series of journals where I wrote frequent letters to my late-wife. Dear Kate. Here's what up. I felt deeply lonely, sure, and the only person who I felt would understand is the one who wasn't there.

People would ask me if I was dating. I got on the apps and tried a bit, but no one could hold my attention or draw my affection. My heart had one focus; my anxieties were all immediate. Household management and parenting.

In the fall I changed jobs within my employer. Moving to one much quieter. My capacity to focus on work had clearly diminished. I got a gym membership, but lacked commitment. My parents sold the house of my childhood, where they had lived since 1965. Where Kate and I had gotten married in the backyard in 2007.

The change of jobs meant I had to give up my work Blackberry, so I purchased my first ever personal cell phone, an iPhone 5. I'm not an early adopter.

Thanksgiving 2013, my brother and sister-in-law laid out a beautiful fall farm table and their place in Grey County. I had taken the kids there, then taken them to Kitchener to be with their father's family, then returned to the farm. It was a beautiful spread, a beautiful time, and I felt completely dissociated from it. Just unable to be present in the moment.

I have said elsewhere that I felt part of me died when Kate died. She took part of me with her. Ever since her death, I have been disconnected from the world, certainly the world as I had known it, and then what is the world now? Do I know it? Can I? The disassociation has sometimes been stronger, sometimes weaker, but it has always been there, since May 2012. More on this later, likely.

Putting this together, I realized I had forgotten most of those Underground Book Club pieces, but not the Barthelme, thus the reason why he is highlighted here. I remember seeking out Barthelme during that time. His short stories showcase an absurd world, and I felt strongly that I was living in one. We'll turn fully to Barthelme in a moment.

To round out 2013, though, I need to mention that at Christmas that year, Toronto experienced an ice storm, and my house lost power for about three days. My in-laws were staying with me at the time. They're British. When the power went out, they said: "Find your camping stove, we need to make a pot of tea."

The kids were there, too, until we discovered that their father had power at his house. He came and picked up the kids (or maybe they just wandered over there; he lived in the neighbourhood, but far enough to away to be unaffected by this particular power outage). He didn't invite the kids' grandparents over to his house, let alone me.

My parents had moved into a 7th floor rental apartment nearby. Their power went out. Then it flickered back on. My father decided to take the elevator down to the basement to get the mail. On the way back up, the power went out again. He laid down on the floor and waited to be rescued.

My father-in-law sat in my living room in his winter coat, doing The Globe and Mail crossword, sipping his tea.

I had bought myself Mike Tyson's memoir and read the first 100 pages in a day.

The power came back on. My in-laws informed me that their daughter had decided to drive up from North Carolina, and they needed to stay in my house another week until she arrived. I told them, no, they would not. They called their son, who lived outside Hamilton, and he came and picked them up. Much alcohol was consumed.

It was the time of resolutions, and I knew I needed to get better. I had been telling myself not to test the bottom. But I felt miserable, perpetually, and I knew no way to get better except incrementally. Willfully. In 2014, I would commit myself to slow improvement. I would cut my alcohol consumption dramatically. I had stopped the sleeping pills already.

Soon, though, I would discover that not only was my heart broken, my heart was broken. I had three blocked arteries and would require a triple coronary by-pass, but that's a 2014 story. All's well that ends well, and I'm still here.

*

Barthelme, Donald (1931-1989)

I've been contemplating what to say about DB, and then I looked up what I wrote in 2013 about Barthleme, responding to Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (1983).

I sought out Barthelme in 2013 for the reasons stated above. I did a little Googling and found Not Knowing and also Flying to America: 45 More Stories (2007). I had first encountered Barthelme as an undergraduate, but not in a class. A girl I knew said she was taking a crazy course, and I asked about it. It was Contemporary American Lit or something like that, taught by Eric McCormack, who had recently published Inspecting the Vaults (1987), a Barthlemesque collection of short fiction. I asked this girl what was crazy about it, what she was asked to read, and she shared Barthelme's Sixty Stories (1981). I have distinct memories of reading the story, "Game."

Hear T.C. Boyle read "Game" (The New Yorker podcast, 2014).

The New Yorker offers this quotation from “Game,” setting up the reading:

Shotwell and I watch the console. Shotwell and I live under the ground and watch the console. If certain events take place upon the console, we are to insert our keys in the appropriate locks and turn our keys. Shotwell has a key and I have a key. If we turn our keys simultaneously the bird flies—certain switches are activated and the bird flies. But the bird never flies. In one hundred thirty-three days the bird has not flown. Meanwhile Shotwell and I watch each other. We each wear a .45 and if Shotwell behaves strangely I am supposed to shoot him. If I behave strangely Shotwell is supposed to shoot me. We watch the console and think about shooting each other and think about the bird. Shotwell’s behavior with the jacks is strange. Is it strange? I do not know. Perhaps he is merely a selfish bastard, perhaps his character is flawed, perhaps his childhood was twisted. I do not know.

Later, in another undergraduate class, Postmodern American Lit, I read Barthelme's novel, Snow White (1967). Goodreads sets up the novel this way:

Barthelme’s first novel, Snow White, is a countercultural, experimental reconstruction of the Disney version of the traditional fairytale. In Barthelme’s modern day world, Snow White is a seductive woman waiting for her prince to return to New York.

That's about all I thought of Barthelme until 2013, when it suddenly became important for me to check in with him again. Actually, in 2009 Lorrie Moore had rang some bells for Barthelme in The New York Review of Books, where she wrote a review essay of Hiding Man (2009), a biography of Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty.

What stuck with me from that review, was knowledge that Barthelme's father had engaged him early in the art world of surrealists and American modern abstraction:

Perhaps artists of any time tend to possess introverted dispositions that need bracing and enlivening to exude even the cool, feigned indifference preferred in Barthelme’s later 1950s jazz age. “Edward worried about his drinking,” Barthelme wrote in the early story “Edward and Pia.” “Would there be enough gin? Enough ice?”

In the October 25, 2024 issue of The Times Literary Supplement, Ana Alicia Garza wrote about two new Charles Dickens books. Those books weren't of interest to me, but I was keenly interested in how she began her review:

Tension between knowing and not knowing propels Charles Dickens’s fiction. There are characters who have a sound knowledge of the worst of human nature and use this to their advantage. These are the baddies. Murdstone, Fagin, Ralph Nickleby, Sikes and Quilp are good examples. The characters who do not possess the requisite knowledge of the ways of the world are extremely vulnerable to the manipulations and schemes of the first group: Nicholas (father and son) and Kate Nickleby, David Copperfield and Pip as young men, Joe Willet and Mr Wickfield are obvious cases; they have to walk through flames in order to earn the knowledge needed to live a safe and satisfactory life. Some don’t make it.

Not knowing? I immediately thought of the title of Barthelme's essays and interviews.

Not knowing, for Barthelme, is actually knowing. That is, it is acknowledgement of that fact that we don't know. To not know, is to be aware, viz Beckett et al, of the void. And awareness of the void is what I was all about, day by day, hour by hour, through all of 2013.

I think that's why Barthelme called to me then, and why he remains important as a touch stone, now.

Can any of us say we understand the world, in the way that Dickens might have said it? We have all past through the 20th century and all of its disasters and refracted images, the abstract impressionists, the genocides, the multi-media blurring.

There is no going back, was one of my 2013 conclusions. Grief does not open up an avenue to return; it offers insights of a new future. One after the end.

In 2014, I would look to J.G. Ballard.

But more on that next time.

*

Underground Book Club - Sunday, July 7, 2013 - Donald Barthelme

We're due for a Donald Barthelme revival. Or at least I was, because of passages like this (from an interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Serman, 1975):

BARTHELME: [On teaching creative writing] About the only thing I give them [the students] in the way of general pronouncements is that I forbid them absolutely to use weather in any form. ... Weather, weather. Thunderstorms, rain.

I say, "This is an entirely artificial prohibition and as soon as you leave my class you can use all of the weather you want. But for this space of time, weather is verboten."

That immediately gets rid of a lot of really bad writing.

RUAS: Why, because --

BARTHELME: -- Because it's so easy to use weather as the equivalent of an emotion, and you know --

RUAS: -- And Shakespeare's already done it better than anyone else can.

BARTHELME: Yes, and one very good student, at the start of this semester, said, "What, no weather? What would Lear be without weather?"

And I said, "The exception to this rule is if you write Lear."

*

My favorite quotations from Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews:

“There’s nothing more rewarding than a fresh set of problems.”

“There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem.”

“Beckett’s work is an embarrassment to the Void.”

“To quote Karl Kraus, ‘A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.’”

“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.”

*

Most people probably encounter Barthelme in a classroom, which is unfortunate, especially if he is taught as part of the post-modern crowd, which of course he is (part of it, and taught that way). His fiction may be of the 1960s & 1970s, but his influence (and potential influences) span backwards and forwards in time.

Not-Knowing begins with two substantial essays, "After Joyce" and "Not-Knowing," which establish Bartheleme's bona fides as a Modernist and a Texan. His father was an architect and high on the intellectual curve for his time. Barthelme's interviews and essays show his deep immersion in aesthetic debates from visual art, to buildings, to books. While he may have picked up some avant garde tendencies from his father, his pater didn't appreciate Donald's sense of humour, or the advent of the "post-" prefix.

What one senses in all of this is the primal conflict, perhaps best illustrated by noting the title of what of Barthelme's novels, The Dead Father (1975).

"Not enough emotion" and "too many jokes" were what Barthelme considered the weaknesses of his fiction. We might identify here instead an anxiety to simply be himself. But what was that?

Barthelme situates his work, like Joyce (and his other oft cited influence, Gertrude Stein) in the perpetual state of becoming. Or as he calls it, Not-Knowing:

The not-knowing is not simple, because it's hedged with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives.

There is also the ongoing argument with those who don't "get it," those content to be hip to be square.

Barthelme quotes Kenneth Burke (from "The Calling of the Tune"):

For the greater the dissociation and discontinuity developed by the artist in an otherworldly art that leaves the things to Ceaser to take care of themselves, the greater becomes the artist's dependence upon some ruler who will accept the responsibility for doing the world's "dirty work."

Puzzle that one out for a moment, before reading Barthelme's response:

This description of the artist turning his back on the community to pursue his "otherworldly" projects (whereupon the community promptly falls apart) is a familiar one, accepted even by some artists. Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the other writers of the transition school (Burke mentions them specifically) are seen as deserters, creating their own worlds, which are thought to have nothing to do with the larger world. The picture is, I think, entirely incorrect. ...

Burke's strictures raise the sticky question of what art is "about" and the mysterious shift that takes place as son as one says that art is not about something but is something. In saying that the writer creates "dissociation and discontinuity" rather than merely describing a previously existing dissociation and discontinuity (the key word is "developed"), Burke notices that with Joyce and Stein the literary work becomes an object in the world rather than a text or a commentary upon the world -- a crucial change in status which was also taking place in painting. With Joyce, and to a lesser degree with Gertrude Stein, fiction altered its placement in the world in a movement so radical that its consequences have yet to be assimilated.

*

Barthelme wrote that in 1964, just when the Sixties were becoming the Sixties. He then went on to become one of the leading literary innovators of his generation. His short stories and novels kept up the beat. The times were a-changing. At least, so it seemed for a while. They don't really change. They just modulate within a frequency. (What frequency, Kenneth?)

Check on the podcast by The New Yorker: Chris Adrian reads “The Indian Uprising,” by Donald Barthelme, and discusses it with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

*

As much as Barthelme was on his period, part of what we mean by literary influence is that the artist was ahead of her time. I think this is true of Barthelme. There is much (too much) "knowingness" in the 21st century, despite all of the quakes, wars, economic and environmental meltdowns. And I don't just mean Dubya's "you're with us or agin us." So-called progressives can be just as closed-minded as the ultra-dumb, I mean, right?

"Dissociation and discontinuity developed by the artist"? In the interviews Barthelme repeatedly asserts that he's a "realist." Amen to that. He's also a language-magician and an idea-jerking philosopher (joker, midnight toker).

BARTHELME: I say it's realism, bearing in mind Harold Rosenberg's wicked remark that realism is one of the fifty-seven varieties of decoration.

We're talking about art, people.

Repeat after me. Donald Barthelme revival. Donald Barthelme revival.

ADDENDUM

I remembered another life event I want to add. My wife and I used to take the kids camping. In 2013, I wanted to take the kids camping to keep up the activity, but I felt I couldn’t do it alone. I asked friends with kids if they would come with us. They did. We went camping. At the park entrance, we registered. I was asked for my phone number, and I gave it.

The attendant asked, “Are you Kate’s husband?”

I wasn’t expecting that. My number, our number, was associated with the park’s account.

“No,” I said. “She is deceased.”

“Pardon me?” the attendant said, so I repeated myself.

I said, “I’d appreciate it if you could take her name off of this account.”

“For sure.”

We would go camping annually, with the same friends, for a number of years.