Time will tell.
Meanwhile, maybe write a little piece about. . not writing?
II. TRIBUTES AND MEMORIA
Introduction to Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
Although it’s neither my first memorial tribute to Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) nor my last,1 what follows — written at the request of Donald’s brother Frederick (himself an accomplished novelist, editor of The Mississippi Review, and alumnus of the Hopkins Writing Seminars) to introduce a posthumously published collection of Don’s nonfiction2—is the one I think best suited to open this “Tributes and Memoria” section of Final Fridays.
“HOW COME YOU write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.”
Asked another, smiling but serious, “How can we become better writers than we are?”
“Well,” DB advised, “for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.”
“But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester. . ”
“That, too,” Donald affirmed, and twinkled that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-11th-Street twinkle of his. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping: Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”
Although I count myself among my late comrade’s most appreciative fans — invariably delighted, over the too-few decades of his career, by his short stories, his novels, his infrequent but soundly-argued essays into aesthetics, and his miscellaneous nonfiction pieces (not to mention his live conversation, as above) — I normally see The New Yorker, in which so much of his writing was first published, only in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. I have therefore grown used to DB-ing in happy binges once every few years, when a new collection of the wondrous stuff appears (originally from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; anon from Putnam; later from Harper and Row; finally from Random House) and I set other reading aside to go straight through it, savoring the wit, the bite, the exactitude and flair, inspired whimsy, aw-shucks urbanity, irreal realism and real irreality, wired tersitude, and suchlike Barthelmanic pleasures.
Finally, it says up in that parenthetical list of his publishers. The adverb constricts my spirit; I feel again what I felt when word came of Donald’s illness and death in 1989, at age merely-58, in the fullness of his life and happy artistry: my maiden experience of survivor-guilt, for we were virtual coevals often assigned to the same team (or angel-choir or Hell-pit) by critics friendly and not, who require such categories — Fabulist, Postmodernist, what have they. We ourselves, and the shifting roster of our team-/choir-/pit-mates,3 were perhaps more impressed by our differences than by any similarities, but there was most certainly fellow-feeling among us — and was I to go on breathing air, enjoying health and wine and food, work and play and love and language, and Donald not? Go on spinning out my sometimes hefty fabrications (which, alphabetically cheek-by-jowl to his on bookshelves, he professed to fear might topple onto and crush their stage-right neighbor), and Donald not his sparer ones, that we both knew to be in no such danger?
Well. One adds the next sentence to its predecessors, and over the ensuing years, as bound volumes of mine have continued to forth-come together with those of his other team-/choir-/pit-mates, it has been some balm to see (impossibly posthumous!) Donald’s appearing as before, right along with them, as if by some benign necromancy: first his comic-elegaic Arthurian novel The King (1990); then The Teachings of Don B. (1992), a rich miscellany eloquently foreworded by T-/C-/P-mate Thomas Pynchon; now Not-Knowing; and still to come, a collection of hitherto unpublished and/or uncollected short stories.
Benign it is, but no necromancy. We owe these last fruits not only to Donald’s far-ranging muse, but to the dedication of his literary executors and the editorial enterprise of Professor Kim Herzinger of the University of Southern Mississippi. Thanks to that dedication and enterprise, we shall have the print-part of our fellow whole, or all but whole. Never enough, and too soon cut off — like Carver, like Calvino, all at their peak — but what a feast it is!
ITS COURSE IN hand displays most directly the high intelligence behind the author’s audacious, irrepressible fancy. The complementary opening essays, “After Joyce” and “Not-Knowing” (that title-piece was for years required reading in the aforementioned graduate fiction-writing seminar at Johns Hopkins); the assorted reviews and pungent “comments” on literature, film, and politics; the pieces “On Art,” never far from the center of Donald’s concerns; the seven flat-out interviews (edited after the fact by the interviewee) — again and again I find myself once again nodding yes, yes to their insights, obiter dicta, and mini-manifestoes, delivered with unfailing tact and zing. See, e.g., “Not-Knowing”’s jim-dandy cadenza upon the rendering of “Melancholy Baby” on jazz “banjolele”: as astute (and hilarious) a statement as I know of about the place of “aboutness” in art.4 Bravo, maestro banjolelist: Encore!
Here is a booksworth of encores, to be followed by one more: the story-volume yet to come, a final serving of the high literary art for which that high intelligence existed.
And then?
Then there it is, alas, and for encores we will go back and back again to the feast whereof these are end-courses: back to Come Back, Dr. Caligari, to Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, to Snow White and City Life and the rest. Permanent pleasures of American “Postmodernist” writing, they are. Permanent literary pleasures period.
The Passion Artist (tribute to John Hawkes)
Shortly after the author’s death on May 15, 1998, this tribute to John Hawkes was first published in The New York Times Book Review.1
THE DAY AFTER Frank (“The Voice”) Sinatra died in California at age 82, a no less distinctive American voice — in certain quarters even more prized, though in the nature of things less widely known — was stilled in Providence, Rhode Island. With the death at age 72 of John Hawkes — fiction writer, fiction mentor, and fiction live-reader extraordinaire—we lost one of the steadily brightest (and paradoxically darkest) lights of American fiction through our century’s second half: a navigation star for scores of apprentice writers however different their own literary course, and as spellbinding a public reader of his own work as I have ever heard, who have heard many. Passion was this writer’s subject, even when manifested by non-human characters (the narrator/protagonist of his novel Sweet William is a horse; the deuteragonist of The Frog is a very French amphibian); impassioned was his manner as author, teacher, reader, and friend. He was, to echo another of his titles, truly a Passion Artist: for five decades one of our most original literary imaginations and masterful prose stylists.