Pretty Goes with Pretty

Donald Barthelme: Flying to America

Donald Barthelme has a new book out this week, Flying to America. The book gathers forty-five short pieces not already anthologized in 40 Stories, 60 Stories, The Teachings of Don B., or Not-Knowing. It also includes a few stories never before published anywhere, and previously difficult-to-find “Sam’s Bar,” an illustrated story I once I saw in a library but have never seen in its originally released format.

Over at the New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal has a nice write up of Barthelme [via Maud Newton].

"Bellow, Cheever, Updike, Malamud—I hold in the highest regard," Barthelme said, "I'd be a fool not to." But he has lost a certain kind of race to Saul Bellow: Barthelme's tastes were catholic—he didn't like camps—but he has become a cult writer, and non-fans are not obliged to read him.

The new issue of McSweeney's is apparently Barthelme-heavy as well, though I haven’t seen it yet.

Writing with a Red Crayola

From our vantage out on the edge, Zappa and the Velvet Underground, and other more conventionally strange bands, were Vichy-puppet right-wingers, ordinary musicians trying to do something different and still function within the rock & roll framework. We said fuck the framework, listen to this, motherfucker. And then busted your eardrum.

Oxford American’s music issue has plenty to offer besides the article I mentioned in last week’s marathon post. Another feature, tying in tangentially with my recent posts on music and books, is a series of reminiscences by writers who led past lives as rockers, to one degree of success or another. Sven Birkerts, Warren Zanes, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Mike Powell, and James Whorton Jr. all offer a peek into their musical pasts. (Zanes, late of the Del Fuegos, has a particularly entertaining piece, which among other things relates his realization while onstage that he was going bald: “Everyone in the audience was looking toward the stage. They knew…. I was torn between playing the guitar and feeling for damage.”)

The real highlight, though, is the piece by Frederick Barthelme (brother of Donald, who I’ve written about before). Barthelme was the original drummer for the Red Crayola, possibly the longest-running art rock band out there. Anyone at all interested in the band should enjoy the article; it gives a lot of insight into the band’s beginnings.

Because we couldn’t play all that well, we had to do something else, something more interesting, and since we were art-inclined, we went that route, leaning on every possible art idea at every turn. Soon we were making “free music,” playing long improvised pieces heavily invested in feedback, random acts of auditory aggression, utterances of all kinds. We began to have big ideas about ways to listen to music, and what “music” was.

As players, some of us were better than others. Mayo could play a little guitar and already had that odd touch on the instrument that he has today—his playing was wonderful and startling, very spare, full of asides and quotations, and always giving you the impression he was about to screw the pooch, musically speaking. Steve Cunningham could play a bit of bass, and did so, fearlessly. As a drummer, I was like the last guy selected for the dodge-ball team—no time, no coordination, no nothing. So I was spectacular on drums. And all this worked fine because in the larger scheme of things, we didn’t really want to play well. Playing well was what we were against.

Barthelme departed from the Red Crayola after their second or third album, finding his own success as a writer and teacher instead. Since his second novel, Second Marriage, published in 1984, Barthelme’s fiction has been of a more realist bent—everyday people, usually living in the south. But his first book, War and War, was published in 1971 and was written between 1966–69, when he was still a member of the Red Crayola. The book is experimental (and out of print), unlike his more well-known work. If it is spoken of at all, it is usually noted for being similar (and inferior) to brother Donald’s metatextual, language-obsessed style.

It’s one of my favorite books on my shelves—not for its content but for its dated yet wonderful cover. Don’t ask me to explain it; I just like it. The book itself is a stream-of-consciousness pastiche of fiction and (drug-addled? art-school pretentious? merely youthful?) fact. It’s less a novel than a description of the novel Barthelme is writing. It’s a combination of lists, diagrams, photographs, and a constant self-awareness of truth and lies and revision, both of truth and of lies.

It's not a particularly great book, but Crayola fans may want to search it out, both because it's a document from the band's earliest days and because Mayo Thompson appears throughout the novel. For instance (click on the image if you can't read the text):

Elsewhere on pgwp:

• Donald Barthelme is King
• Two posts on experimentalism vs. accessibility in music and writing: part I, part II
• About that other, "more conventional" art rock band, the Velvet Underground, and that other directionless jam band, the Grateful Dead
• "Listen to this, motherfucker. And then busted your eardrum." Oh yeah? Fred, let me tell you about Glenn Branca

Simple Pleasures: Plot and Character, Prose and Structure

Maybe the previous post is being too reductive. Probably is. But what spurred me to post, in addition to the correspondence I mentioned there, was a second correspondence I was having with another friend, on a different subject entirely. We were talking books and I mentioned my current obsession with Graham Greene. I mean it: I am obsessed with the guy. After reading two books in the last six months I’ve become addicted to his books like they’re Girl Scout cookies. A couple chapters into re-reading The Power and the Glory, I put it down and decided to do this obsession right. I’m starting from the beginning and reading through his entire oeuvre. I may even read his three-volume biography concurrently. What I mean is, I’m obsessed.

The last time I was this obsessed with an author, I was in college and the author was Donald Barthelme. To this day it’s difficult for guests to be in my living room and not comment on the number of Barthelme books around. But how did I get from Barthelme, where concept, language, and a collagist approach to prose squash such traditional notions as plot and character, to Greene—who is known for nothing if not taut plots and the inner turmoil of his characters? I read The Power and the Glory as a freshman in college and enjoyed it, but at the time it struck me as solid but nothing special. “Special” was something like the chronologically fluid Catch-22 or Barthelme’s absurd and abstract treatment of Snow White.

There’s a parallel there with my taste in music then and now. While I was so in love with Can or even Low—groups that in their own way were deconstructing the song to reveal certain elements buried under the more obvious, more tangible ones—I was also reveling in Barthelme, the Fiction Collective, Pynchon, Sorrentino. The mechanics of writing were the thing—the means, not the ends. Ronald Sukenick’s Long Talking Bad Condition Blues had not a single dot of punctuation; Mark Amerika’s Kafka Chronicles was a stream-of-consciousness hail of noise. Now, whenever I pick up a novel that seems more pleased with its structure than with its story, I toss it aside. Mark Danielewski is the heir to the tradition right now. Some are touting him as a genius but I just want to throw his books across the room. It’s too labored. At least Mark Amerika realized (rightly) that his vision belonged on the web. It’s beyond print; why try to constrain your vision, so driven by typographic dances and a hyper-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure structure, to a book format?

Yes, it makes me cranky. The same way Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s new record made me cranky for its faux-experimentation. But like I said yesterday, that’s not to say I can’t appreciate it when it’s done right. Look at an author like David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas is a technically exhilarating novel, but all the bravura Mitchell displays in the actual writing is in support of a plot, of characters, of a larger theme—in other words, of telling an absorbing story. Musically you need look no further than Bjork to see someone go about as far out there as you can get yet still retain emotion, never mind a melody.

A far less extreme but much more unlikely example is the newest hot shit, Peter Bjorn & John. Who would think that a band responsible for the earworm of the year, “Young Folks,” would effortlessly drop in more cerebral tracks like “Poor Cow,” “Start to Melt,” or the album highlight “Roll the Credits” ? These guys ably demonstrate that it’s easy to have a handle on your mechanics without sacrificing heart. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but that’s the point: you don’t have to try so hard!

Which brings me back to Graham Greene. If ever there was an author who had such complete control over his mechanics, put to perfect use in support of the story he wants to tell, it’s Greene. No element overpowers the other. One of the books I read last year that has spurred me on this kick, The End of the Affair, is the perfect example. After setting up all three sides of a triangle, giving us tantalizing scenes and memorable supporting characters, Greene flips it two-thirds in and gives us a brand-new narrator. In lesser hands it would feel forced, artificial. Take for instance Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, a perfectly excellent novel that nearly derails at the two-thirds mark when it shifts from third to first person. But Greene pulls it off, leading to great emotional payoff. Thus far the books I’ve read by Greene don’t feel Big and Important—there’s no aspiration to Nobel here—but when I’m finished with the book all I want to do is go back to page one and start over. What more should a book, or a record, wish to accomplish?

Barthelme is King

I don’t know how I missed this, but back in March the Dalkey Archive put Donald Barthelme’s two previously out-of-print novels, Paradise and The King, back in print. What great news for you all!

I discovered Barthelme back when I was in college. In a Creative Writing 101 class the grad student/teacher passed on one of Barthelme’s short stories, "Cortes and Montezuma." For me, it was one of those awakening moments. I had never read anything like it. That was eleven years ago; ever since I’ve religiously stopped in the “B” section anytime I’m in a used bookstore, looking not just for a Don B. book I might not already have (there are very few at this point) but any version of a Don B. book I don’t have. I have all the short story collections and novels as first editions, plus the variety of paperback versions that followed in the 80s, and of course easy-to-find collections that have come since (40 Stories, 60 Stories, Teachings of Don B., and Not-Knowing). I’ve even got a couple rare small press books he did, though there are a few more out there that are too pricey for me. (And if anyone out there sees Sam’s Bar or his children’s book, The Hithering Dithering Djin, hit me up!)

All that is to say that I am obsessive when it comes to Barthelme. I’ve read it all. Twice, at least. And for as long as I’ve been collecting his books, only the novels Snow White and The Dead Father have been in print (in addition to the aforementioned collections). Barthelme is often credited as being one of the true masters of the short story, but as a novelist he is underrated. Granted, his novels are all comprised of very short, tableau-like chapters—they often evoke the feeling of flipping through a surreal photo album rather than following a real plot—but it is just this reason that his novels are so wonderful. He is able to stretch out in his novels; where some of his short stories might seem slight, his novels (particularly Snow White and The King) become like paintings on the page. Each chapter is not necessarily connected sequentially to the next, but neither are his juxtapositions abrupt nor without thought. You can step back from a Barthelme novel as if you were in a museum: with a little distance, backing away from each small detail, the whole image coheres as if without effort.

Until now, however, it might have been difficult to really see how well Barthelme could accomplish this, since only Snow White and The Dead Father have been in print. Snow White (a sexually liberated and slightly surreal retelling of the fairy tale) is brilliant, of course. The Dead Father, meanwhile, is less so—despite that many other critics think is a high point in his career. The “plot” is more abstract—a convoy of people are carrying the oversized, statue-like (but talkative) eponymous character across a desolate landscape—and the structure more experimental (i.e,. the story-within-the-novel that appears 2/3 of the way in). Personally I felt as if I was always held at arm’s length with this book, not really sure if I was grasping its true intent. I’m still not sure if it is a noble failure or half-baked experiment.

Barthelme followed this with Paradise, my least favorite of his novels. Least favorite, in fact, because it is at the other extreme in comparison to The Dead Father. This is his most straightforward work of his career, as it tells the story of a newly divorced man who happens to find a gorgeous penthouse apartment in New York, which he must share with three beautiful and sexually free lingerie models—hence the title of the book. Barthelme is of course subverting everything that this cliché fantasy plot would imply, but the novel nevertheless lacks the daring prose that marked his short stories and first two novels.

Which brings us to what I feel was Barthelme’s best moment—The King, his fourth and final novel, originally published in 1986, not long after he passed away. The King returns to similar territory as Snow White, appropriating a well-known story (in this case, King Arthur) and treating it in a collagist style. But The King is more ambitious than Snow White. It has more to say, is more experimental (without falling over the deep end), and holds together stronger than anything he’d done before.

In The King, Barthelme tells the story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, but places the action in the middle of World War II. Unlike a theater troupe reinterpreting Shakespeare in a new time and place, however, Barthelme crashes the story right into the reality, forcing anachronisms against each other. Arthur and the knights are still on horseback, chasing after the grail. But meanwhile Hitler is off in Germany making a ruckus, and that Churchill fellow is making a power grab against Arthur. Eventually the Grail and Atomic Bomb are confused as one and the same. The book is at once hilarious and moving. The prose is vivid, almost filmic. And I’ve frankly not seen a novel imbued with such distinct imagination as this. Hopefully now that the Dalkey Archive has put it back in print The King will be given its rightful critical praise. Many a McSweeney contributor has displayed their fondness for Barthelme (i.e., ripped off wholesale certain “Barthelmic” absurdities), but The King, more than anything else Barthelme has ever written, really highlights how untouchable Don B. really is.

Bonus Barthelme Material:

—Speaking of the McSweeney's–Barthelme connection, an early issue of the Believer printed Don B's syllabus for the class he taught at the University of Houston.

—For the cash-shy, Jessamyn's Barthelme site is a great resource. Lots of stories available there for zilch. Highly recommended if you're not sure whether you'd like his stuff. I suggest the aforementioned "Cortes and Montezuma," "Some of Us had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,"  or "The first thing the baby did wrong..." (Come on: "The baby's name was Born Dancin'.")