Spotlight on … Donald Barthelme Sixty Stories (1981)

 

‘Decades after his premature death—in 1989 at the age of 58—Donald Barthelme might be the one indisputably minor American short story writer of the last century who remains a pleasure to read and reread. He focused primarily on surreal, unpredictable short stories that were often good but rarely great. He experimented with form restlessly and surprisingly from one story to another but rarely created anything that hadn’t been seen before in the works of those writers he admired—Samuel Beckett, Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Alain Robbe-Grillet and S.J. Perelman. He could amuse the heck out of readers but rarely made them laugh out loud. And he composed each story as if it were an idiosyncratic fling designed to please nobody but himself.

‘As his biographer and former student Tracey Daugherty recalled, when Barthelme taught creative writing at the University of Houston in the 1980s, he gave his students the following assignment:

Find a copy of John Ashbery’s “Three Poems,” read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, don’t sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.

‘The intention was clear—to force his students to stop overthinking and over-managing their work and just let the words flow. These were all hallmarks of the Barthelme “method”—one that served him well enough to produce more than a hundred short stories, five novels, several failed marriages, and countless failed relationships, and a career-long ability to charm readers even when those readers had no idea what he was doing.

‘Barthelme’s was a restless, hungry and, to a large extent, unformed intelligence, and almost every one of his stories encapsulates his odd narrative charm in all its loose and shaggy glory. A lifelong “fan of” (rather than, say, “adherent to”) the existentialism of Sartre and Kierkegaard, he sympathized with their notions of the human personality as a vast, always-yearning shopping bag of emptiness. In his story “Daumier,” the central character designs surrogates who can go out in the world and (unlike their progenitor) achieve satiation. The “authentic self,” the narrator argues,

is a great dirty villain.… It is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuffed full.

‘For Barthelme, the notion that individuals are continually “hankering” after more stuff with which to make themselves feel whole is more than a philosophical concept—it was a way of producing stories that often resemble hungry collages of various wild stuff the author has seen, imagined, imitated, and heard—which is probably why the typical Barthelme paragraph is stuffed with numerous unrelated facts, fantasies, quotations, and the names of real people who aren’t actually the real people they might have actually been. (Such as, for example, Daumier, and the surrogates he releases into the world.)

‘By the time Barthelme died, the meta-fictional landscape had pretty much already subsided—and with the possible exception of Pynchon—whose fabulations were growing increasingly concerned with the real world of Reaganomics (Vineland) and 9/11 (Bleeding Edge)—most of the writers who attended Barthelme’s Postmodern Dinners in New York were fading from center stage in Manhattan’s always-fickle literary scene. But while the likes of Barthelme, Gass, Robert Coover, and Walter Abish were no longer celebrated as much as the new generation of so-called “minimalists,” it’s hard not to see Barthelme’s influence in the work of those who came after him: Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, and even Donald’s younger brother Frederick. These so-called more “realistic” writers all seemed Barthelmian in their own quiet ways, producing short and loosely plotted stories about lost people in broken relationships, always moving homes and jobs, and never quite happy wherever it is they happen to be. They told their stories, like Barthelme, as sequences of short, eccentric, perfectly formed little scenes. And just like Barthelme, they broke our hearts, over and over again—whether wild or mundane, weirdly unbelievable or all too believable—with reflections of our common, ineffable, and totally surreal human life.’ — Scott Bradfield

 

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Further

Donald Bathelme @ Wikipedia
Donald Barthelme, The Art of Fiction No. 66
DB @ goodreads
A brief survey of the short story part 16: Donald Barthelme
The Magnificent Jumble of Donald Barthelme’s Stories
On the Avant-Garde Literary Genius of Donald Barthelme
The Beastly Beatitudes of Donald B.
Donald Barthelme’s Reading List by Believer Mag
Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse
Donald Barthelme and the Emergence of Modern Satire
The Writing Process of Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme on Art, Writing, Problems, and More.
Donald Barthelme: Weirdly Brilliant
SUSAN CHOI ON DONALD BARTHELME
Delicate Relations to the Real: Walking Donald Barthelme’s Houston

 

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Extras

Donald Barthelme interviewed by George Plimpton

Donald Barthelme reads “Brain Damage”

Donald Barthelme & Stephen Banker, 1978 interview

Roger Angell on Donald Barthelme’s Snow White

 

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Interview

 

INTERVIEWER You’re often linked with Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and others of that ilk. Does this seem to you inhuman bondage or is there reason in it?

BARTHELME They’re all people I admire. I wouldn’t say we were alike as parking tickets. Some years ago the Times was fond of dividing writers into teams; there was an implication that the Times wanted to see gladiatorial combat, or at least a soccer game. I was always pleased with the team I was assigned to.

INTERVIEWER Who are the people with whom you have close personal links?

BARTHELME Well, Grace Paley, who lives across the street, and Kirk and Faith Sale, who live in this building—we have a little block association. Roger Angell, who’s my editor at the New Yorker, Harrison Starr, who’s a film producer, and my family. In the last few years several close friends have died.

INTERVIEWER How do you feel about literary biography? Do you think your own biography would clarify the stories and novels?

BARTHELME Not a great deal. There’s not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there. The passage in the story “See the Moon?” where the narrator compares the advent of a new baby to somebody giving him a battleship to wash and care for was written the night before my daughter was born, a biographical fact that illuminates not very much. My grandmother and grandfather make an appearance in a piece I did not long ago. He was a lumber dealer in Galveston and also had a ranch on the Guadalupe River not too far from San Antonio, a wonderful place to ride and hunt, talk to the catfish and try to make the windmill run backward. There are a few minnows from the Guadalupe in that story, which mostly accompanies the title character through a rather depressing New York day. But when it appeared I immediately began getting calls from friends, some of whom I hadn’t heard from in some time and all of whom were offering Tylenol and bandages. The assumption was that identification of the author with the character was not only permissible but invited. This astonished me. One uses one’s depressions as one uses everything else, but what I was doing was writing a story. Merrily merrily merrily merrily.
Overall, very little autobiography, I think.

INTERVIEWER Was your childhood shaped in any particular way?

BARTHELME I think it was colored to some extent by the fact that my father was an architect of a particular kind—we were enveloped in modernism. The house we lived in, which he’d designed, was modern and the furniture was modern and the pictures were modern and the books were modern. He gave me, when I was fourteen or fifteen, a copy of Marcel Raymond’s From Baudelaire to Surrealism, I think he’d come across it in the Wittenborn catalogue. The introduction is by Harold Rosenberg, whom I met and worked with sixteen or seventeen years later, when we did the magazine Location here in New York.

My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.

INTERVIEWER Music is one of the few areas of human activity that escapes distortion in your writing. An odd comparison: music is for you what animals were for Céline.

BARTHELME There were a lot of classical records in the house. Outside, what the radio yielded when I was growing up was mostly Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys; I heard him so much that I failed to appreciate him, failed to appreciate country music in general. Now I’m very fond of it. I was interested in jazz and we used to go to black clubs to hear people like Erskine Hawkins who were touring—us poor little pale little white boys were offered a generous sufferance, tucked away in a small space behind the bandstand with an enormous black cop posted at the door. In other places you could hear people like the pianist Peck Kelley, a truly legendary figure, or Lionel Hampton or once in a great while Louis Armstrong or Woody Herman. I was sort of drenched in all this. After a time a sort of crazed scholarship overtakes you and you can recite band rosters for 1935 as others can list baseball teams for the same year.

INTERVIEWER What about the moral responsibility of the artist? I take it that you are a responsible artist (as opposed, say, to X, Y, and Z), but all is irony, comic distortion, foreign voices, fragmentation. Where in all this evasion of the straightforward does responsibility display itself?

BARTHELME It’s not the straightforward that’s being evaded but the too true. I might fix your eye firmly and announce, “Thou shalt not mess around with thy neighbor’s wife.” You might then nod and say to yourself, Quite so. We might then lunch at the local chili parlor and say scurrilous things about X, Y, and Z. But it will not have escaped your notice that my statement has hardly enlarged your cosmos, that I’ve been, in the largest sense, responsible to neither art, life, nor adultery.

I believe that my every sentence trembles with morality in that each attempts to engage the problematic rather than to present a proposition to which all reasonable men must agree. The engagement might be very small, a word modifying another word, the substitution of “mess around” for “covet,” which undresses adultery a bit. I think the paraphrasable content in art is rather slight—“tiny,” as de Kooning puts it. The way things are done is crucial, as the inflection of a voice is crucial. The change of emphasis from the what to the how seems to me to be the major impulse in art since Flaubert, and it’s not merely formalism, it’s not at all superficial, it’s an attempt to reach truth, and a very rigorous one. You don’t get, following this path, a moral universe set out in ten propositions, but we already have that. And the attempt is sufficiently skeptical about itself. In this century there’s been much stress placed not upon what we know but on knowing that our methods are themselves questionable—our Song of Songs is the Uncertainty Principle.

Also, it’s entirely possible to fail to understand or actively misunderstand what an artist is doing. I remember going through a very large Barnett Newman show years ago with Tom Hess and Harold Rosenberg, we used to go to shows after long lunches, those wicked lunches, which are no more, and I walked through the show like a certifiable idiot, couldn’t understand their enthusiasm. I admired the boldness, the color and so on but inwardly I was muttering, Wallpaper, wallpaper, very fine wallpaper but wallpaper. I was wrong, didn’t get the core of Newman’s enterprise, what Tom called Newman’s effort toward the sublime. Later I began to understand. One doesn’t take in Proust or Canada on the basis of a single visit.

To return to your question: If I looked you straight in the eye and said, “The beauty of women makes of adultery a serious and painful duty,” then we’d have the beginning of a useful statement.

INTERVIEWER In addition to all the incredible things you write about, such as a balloon expanding “northward all one night” from Fourteenth Street to Central Park or “thousands of thousands of porcupines” descending upon a university, you often feature quite realistic—even topically current—items in your stories, such as And Now Let’s Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show! and Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning, in which the events you describe actually happened. How do you see these and other aspects of our culture fitting into the general premises of your art? On the surface, it seems like a pretty big jump from the porcupines to Robert Kennedy.

BARTHELME The Ed Sullivan piece was not a story but an assignment for Esquire. And nothing in the Robert Kennedy story actually happened except the bit in which Kennedy comments adversely on the work of a geometric painter. I was in that particular gallery on a day when Kennedy came in and made the comment reported. The rest of the story is, like, made up. It’s not that aspects of the culture “fit into” any premise of mine, rather that the work is to this or that degree shaped by the culture.

INTERVIEWER Do you have any consciously formed notions about time and space that influence you work? Perception and imagination? Or, forgive me, “reality”?

BARTHELME No.

INTERVIEWER Can you tell me about any of your favorite writers and reasons for liking them? Or artists in other media?

BARTHELME Among writers of the past, I’d list Rabelais, Rimbaud, Kleist, Kafka, Stein, and Flann O’Brien. Among living writers, Beckett, Gass, Percy, Marquez, Barth, Pynchon, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Grace Paley.

INTERVIEWER Do you have any favorite comedians, and reasons for liking them?

BARTHELME The goverment.

 

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Book

Donald Barthelme Sixty Stories
Penguin

‘This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme’s literary output during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writer came to prominence–producing the stories, satires, parodies, and other formal experiments that altered fiction as we know it–and wrote many of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Due to the unfortunate discontinuance of many of Barthelme’s titles, 60 Stories now stands as one of the broadest overviews of his work, containing selections from eight previously published books, as well as a number of other short works that had been otherwise uncollected.’ — Penguin

Excerpts

Glass Mountain

1. I was trying to climb the glass mountain.

2. The glass mountain stands at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue.

3. I had attained the lower slope.

4. People were looking up at me.

5. I was new in the neighborhood.

6. Nevertheless I had acquaintances.

7. I had strapped climbing irons to my feet and each hand grasped sturdy plumber’s friend.

8. I was 200 feet up.

9. The wind was bitter.

10. My acquaintances had gathered at the bottom of the mountain to offer encouragement.

11. “Shithead.”

12. “Asshole.”

13. Everyone in the city knows about the glass mountain.

14. People who live here tell stories about it.

15. It is pointed out to visitors.

16. Touching the side of the mountain, one feels coolness.

17. Peering into the mountain, one sees sparkling blue-white depths.

18. The mountain towers over that part of Eighth Avenue like some splendid, immense office building.

19. The top of the mountain vanishes into the clouds, or on cloudless days, into the sun.

20. I unstuck the righthand plumber’s friend leaving the lefthand one in place.

21. Then I stretched out and reattached the righthand one a little higher up, after which I inched my legs into new positions.

22. The gain was minimal, not an arm’s length.

23. My acquaintances continued to comment.

24. “Dumb motherfucker.”

25. I was new in the neighborhood.

26. In the streets were many people with disturbed eyes.

27. Look for yourself.

28. In the streets were hundreds of young people shooting up in doorways, behind parked cars.

29. Older people walked dogs.

30. The sidewalks were full of dogshit in brilliant colors: ocher, umber, Mars yellow, sienna, viridian, ivory black, rose madder.

31. And someone had been apprehended cutting down trees, a row of elms broken-backed among the VWs and Valiants.

32. Done with a power saw, beyond a doubt.

33. I was new in the neighborhood yet I had accumulated acquaintances.

34. My acquaintances passed a brown bottle from hand to hand.

35. “Better than a kick in the crotch.”

36. “Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

37. “Better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish.”

38. “Better than a thump on the back with a stone.”

39. “Won’t he make a splash when he falls, now?”

40. “I hope to be here to see it. Dip my handkerchief in the blood.”

41. “Fart-faced fool.”

42. I unstuck the lefthand plumber’s friend leaving the righthand one in place.

43. And reached out.

44. To climb the glass mountain, one first requires a good reason.

45. No one has ever climbed the mountain on behalf of science, or in search of celebrity, or because the mountain was a challenge.

46. Those are not good reasons.

47. But good reasons exist.

48. At the top of the mountain there is a castle of pure gold, and in a room in the castle tower sits…

49. My acquaintances were shouting at me.

50. “Ten bucks you bust your ass in the next four minutes!”

51. …a beautiful enchanted symbol.

52. I unstuck the righthand plumber’s friend leaving the lefthand one in place.

53. And reached out.

54. It was cold there at 206 feet and when I looked down I was not encouraged.

55. A heap of corpses both of horses and riders ringed the bottom of the mountain, many dying men groaning there.

56. “A weakening of the libidinous interest in reality has recently come to a close.” (Anton Ehrenzweig)1

57. A few questions thronged into my mind.

58. Does one climb a glass mountain, at considerable personal discomfort, simply to disenchant a symbol?

59. Do today’s stronger egos still need symbols?

60. I decided that the answer to these questions was “yes.”

61. Otherwise what was I doing there, 206 feet above the power-sawed elms, whose white meat I could see from my height?

62. The best way to fail to climb the mountain is to be a knight in full armor–one whose horse’s hoofs strike fiery sparks from the sides of the mountain.

63. The following-named knights had failed to climb the mountain and were groaning in the heap: Sir Giles Guilford, Sir Henry Lovell, Sir Albert Denny, Sir Nicholas Vaux, Sir Patrick Grifford, Sir Gisbourne Gower, Sir Thomas Grey, Sir Peter Coleville, Sir John Blunt, Sir Richard Vernon, Sir Walter Willoughby, Sir Stephen Spear, Sir Roger Faulconbridge, Sir Clarence Vaughan, Sir Hubert Ratcliffe, Sir James Tyrrel, Sir Walter Herbert, Sir Robert Brakenbury, Sir Lionel Beaufort, and many others.2

64. My acquaintances moved among the fallen knights.

65. My acquaintances moved among the fallen knights, collecting rings, wallets, pocket watches, ladies’ favors.

66. “Calm reigns in the country, thanks to the confident wisdom of everyone.” (M. Pompidou)3

67. The golden castle is guarded by a lean-headed eagle with blazing rubies for eyes.

68. I unstuck the lefthand plumber’s friend, wondering if–

69. My acquaintances were prising out the gold teeth of not-yet dead knights.

70. In the streets were people concealing their calm behind a façade of vague dread.

71. “The conventional symbol (such as the nightingale, often associated with melancholy), even though it is recognized only through agreement, is not a sign (like the traffic light) because, again, it presumably arouses deep feelings and is regarded as possessing properties beyond what the eye alone sees.” (A Dictionary of Literary Terms)

72. A number of nightingales with traffic lights tied to their legs flew past me.

73. A knight in pale pink armor appeared above me.

74. He sank, his armor making tiny shrieking sounds against the glass.

75. He gave me a sideways glance as he passed me.

76. He uttered the word “Muerte”4 as he passed me.

77. I unstuck the righthand plumber’s friend.

78. My acquaintances were debating the question, which of them would get my apartment?

79. I reviewed the conventional means of attaining the castle.

80. The conventional means of attaining the castle are as follows: “The eagle dug its sharp claws into the tender flesh of the youth, but he bore the pain without a sound, and seized the bird’s two feet with his hands. The creature in terror lifted him high up into the air and began to circle the castle. The youth held on bravely. He saw the glittering palace, which by the pale rays of the moon looked like a dim lamp; and he saw the windows and balconies of the castle tower. Drawing a small knife from his belt, he cut off both the eagle’s feet. The bird rose up in the air with a yelp, and the youth dropped lightly onto a broad balcony. At the same moment a door opened, and he saw a courtyard filled with flowers and trees, and there, the beautiful enchanted princess.” (The Yellow Fairy Book)5

81. I was afraid.

82. I had forgotten the Bandaids.

83. When the eagle dug its sharp claws into my tender flesh–

84. Should I go back for the Bandaids?

85. But if I went back for the Bandaids I would have to endure the contempt of my acquaintances.

86. I resolved to proceed without the Bandaids.

87. “In some centuries, his [man’s] imagination has made life an intense practice of all the lovelier energies.” (John Masefield)6

88. The eagle dug its sharp claws into my tender flesh.

89. But I bore the pain without a sound, and seized the bird’s two feet with my hands.

90. The plumber’s friends remained in place, standing at right angles to the side of the mountain.

91. The creature in terror lifted me high in the air and began to circle the castle.

92. I held on bravely.

93. I saw the glittering palace, which by the pale rays of the moon looked like a dim lamp; and I saw the windows and balconies of the castle tower.

94. Drawing a small knife from my belt, I cut off both the eagle’s feet.

95. The bird rose up in the air with a yelp, and I dropped lightly onto a broad balcony.

96. At the same moment a door opened, and I saw a courtyard filled with flowers and trees, and there, the beautiful enchanted symbol.

97. I approached the symbol, with its layers of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess.

98. I threw the beautiful princess headfirst down the mountain to my acquaintances.

99. Who could be relied upon to deal with her.

100. Nor are eagles plausible, not at all, not for a moment.

 

Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning

From “Robert Kennedy And His Times,” by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., paperback edition, pp. 877-8 (footnote)…

“I never met Robert Kennedy nor did I talk to people who had. The story was begun while I was living in Denmark in 1965…the only ‘true’ thing in it was Kennedy’s remark about the painter. I happened to be in the gallery when he came in with a group; I think the artist was Kenneth Noland. Kennedy made the remark quoted about the ruler—not the newest joke in the world. The story was published in New American Review well before the assassination. I cannot account for the concluding impulse of the I-character to ‘save’ him other than by reference to John Kennedy’s death; still, a second assassination was unthinkable at that time. In sum, any precision in the piece was the result of watching television and reading the New York Times.” (Barthelme to author, July 16, 1977.)

* * *

K at His Desk

He is neither abrupt with nor excessively kind to associates. Or he is both abrupt and kind. The telephone is, for him, a whip, a lash, but also a conduit for soothing words, a sink into which he can hurl gallons of syrup if it comes to that. He reads quickly, scratching brief comments (“Yes,” “No”) in corners of the paper. He slouches in the leather chair, looking about him with a slightly irritated air for new visitors, new difficulties. He spends his time sending and receiving messengers. “I spend my time sending and receiving messengers,” he says. “Some of these messages are important. Others are not.”

Described by Secretaries

A: “Quite frankly I think he forgets a lot of things. But the things he forgets are those which are inessential. I even think he might forget deliberately, to leave his mind free. He has the ability to get rid of unimportant details. And he does.” B: “Once when I was sick, I hadn’t heard from him, and I thought he had forgotten me. You know usually your boss will send flowers or something like that. I was in the hospital, and I was mighty blue. I was in a room with another girl, and her boss hadn’t sent her anything either. Then suddenly the door opened and there he was with the biggest bunch of yellow tulips I’d ever seen in my life. And the other girl’s boss was with him, and he had tulips too. They were standing there with all those tulips, smiling. ”

Behind the Bar

At a crowded party, he wanders behind the bar to make himself a Scotch and water. His hand is on the bottle of Scotch, his glass is waiting. The bartender, a small man in a beige uniform with gilt buttons, politely asks K. to return to the other side, the guests’ side, of the bar. “You let one behind here, they all be behind here,” the bartender says.

K Reading the Newspaper

His reactions are impossible to catalogue. Often he will find a note that amuses him endlessly, some anecdote involving, say, a fireman who has propelled his apparatus at record-breaking speed to the wrong address. These small stories are clipped, carried about in a pocket, to be produced at appropriate moments for the pleasure of friends. Other manifestations please him less. An account of an earthquake in Chile, with its thousands of dead and homeless, may depress him for weeks. He memorizes the terrible statistics, quoting them everywhere and saying, with a grave look “We must do something.” Important actions often follow, sometimes within a matter of hours. (On the other hand, these two kinds of responses may be, on a given day, inexplicably reversed. ) The more trivial aspects of the daily itemization are skipped. While reading, he maintains a rapid drumming of his fingertips on the desktop. He receives twelve newspapers, but of these, only four are regarded as serious.

Attitude Toward His Work

“Sometimes I can’t seem to do anything. The work is there, piled up, it seems to me an insurmountable obstacle, really out of reach. I sit and look at it, wondering where to begin, how to take hold of it. Perhaps I pick up a piece of paper, try to read it but my mind is elsewhere, I am thinking of something else, I can’t seem to get the gist of it, it seems meaningless, devoid of interest, not having to do with human affairs, drained of life. Then, in an hour, or even a moment, everything changes suddenly I realize I only have to do it, hurl myself into the midst of it, proceed mechanically, the first thing and then the second thing, that it is simply a matter of moving from one step to the next, plowing through it. I become interested, I become excited, I work very fast, things fall into place, I am exhilarated, amazed that these things could ever have seemed dead to me.”

Sleeping On the Stones of Unknown Towns (Rimbaud)

K. is walking, with that familiar slight dip of the shoulders, through the streets of a small city in France or Germany. The shop signs are in a language which alters when inspected closely, MOBEL becoming MEUBLES for example, and the citizens mutter to themselves with dark virtuosity a mixture of languages. K. is very interested, looks closely at everything, at the shops, the goods displayed, he clothing of the people, the tempo of street life, the citizens themselves, wondering about them. What are their water needs?

“In the West, wisdom is mostly gained at lunch. At lunch, people tell you things.” The nervous eyes of the waiters. The tall bald cook, white apron, white T-shirt, grinning through an opening in the wall. “Why is that cook looking at me?”

Urban Transportation

“The transportation problems of our cities and their rapidly expanding suburbs are the most urgent and neglected transporta- tion problems confronting the country. In these heavily popu- lated and industrialized areas, people are dependent on a system of transportation that is at once complex and inadequate. Obsolete facilities and growing demands have created seemingly insoluble difficulties and present methods of dealing with these difficulties offer little prospect of relief.”

K Penetrated with Sadness

He hears something playing on someone else’s radio, in another part of the building. The music is wretchedly sad; now he can (barely) hear it, now it fades into the wall. He turns on his own radio There it is, on his own radio, the same music. The sound fills the room.

Karsh of Ottawa

“We sent a man to Karsh of Ottawa and told him that we admired his work very much. Especially, I don’t know, the Churchill thing and, you know, the Hemingway thing, and all that. And we told him we wanted to set up a sitting for K. sometime in June, if that would be convenient for him, and he said yes, that was okay, June was okay, and where did we want to have it shot, there or in New York or where. Well, that was a problem because we didn’t know exactly what K.’s schedule would be for June, it was up in the air, so we tentatively said New York around the fifteenth. And he said, that was okay, he could do that. And he wanted to know how much time he could have, and we said, well, how much time do you need? And he said he didn’t know, it varied from sitter to sitter. He said some people were very restless and that made it difficult to get just the right shot. He said there was one shot in each sitting that was, you know, the key shot, the right one. He said he’d have to see, when the time came.”

Dress

He is neatly dressed in a manner that does not call attention to itself. The suits are soberly cut and in dark colors. He must at all times present an aspect of freshness difficult to sustain because of frequent movements from place to place under conditions which are not always the most favorable. Thus he changes clothes frequently, especially shirts. In the course of a day he changes his shirt many times. There are always extra shirts about, in boxes. “Which of you has the shirts?”

A Friend Comments K’s Aloneness

“The thing you have to realize about K. is that essentially he’s absolutely alone in the world. There’s this terrible loneliness which prevents people from getting too close to him. Maybe it comes from something in his childhood, I don’t know. But he’s very hard to get to know, and a lot of people who think they know him rather well don’t really know him at all. He says something or does something that surprises you, and you realize that all along you really didn’t know him at all. “He has surprising facets. I remember once we were out in a small boat. K. of course was the captain. Some rough weather came up and we began to head back in. I began worrying about picking up a landing and I said to him that I didn’t think the anchor would hold, with the wind and all. He just looked at me. Then he said ‘Of course it will hold. That’s what it’s for.”‘

K on Crowds

“There are exhausted crowds and vivacious crowds. “Sometimes, standing there, I can sense whether a particular crowd is one thing or the other. Sometimes the mood of the crowd is disguised, sometimes you only find out after a quarter of an hour what sort of crowd a particular crowd is. “And you can’t speak to them in the same way. The variations have to be taken into account. You have to say something to them that is meaningful to them in that mood ”

Gallery-going

K. enters a large gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, in the Fuller Building. His entourage includes several ladies and gentlemen. Works by a geometricist are on show. K. Iooks at the immense, rather theoretical paintings. “Well, at least we know he has a ruler.” The group dissolves in laughter. People repeat the remark to one another, laughing. The artist, who has been standing behind a dealer, regards K. with hatred.

K Puzzled by His Children

The children are crying. There are several children, one about four, a boy, then another boy, slightly older, and a little girl, very beautiful, wearing blue jeans, crying. There are various objects on the grass, an electric train, a picture book, a red ball, a plastic bucket, a plastic shovel. K. frowns at the children whose distress issues from no source immediately available to the eye, which seems indeed uncaused, vacant, a general anguish. K. turns to the mother of these children who is standing nearby wearing hip-huggers which appear to be made of linked marshmallows studded with dia- monds but then I am a notoriously poor observer. “Play with them,” he says. This mother of ten quietly suggests that K. himself “play with them. ” K. picks up the picture book and begins to read to the children. But the book has a German text. It has been left behind, perhaps, by some foreign visitor. Nevertheless K. perseveres. “A ist der Affe, er isst mit der Pfote.” (“A is the Ape, he eats with his Paw.”) The crying of the children continues.

A Dream

Orange trees. Overhead, a steady stream of strange aircraft which resemble kitchen implements, bread boards, cookie sheets, colanders. The shiny aluminum instruments are on their way to complete the bombings of Sidi-Madani. A farm in the hills.

Matters (from an Administrative Assistant)

“A lot of matters that had been pending came to a head right about that time, moved to the front burner, things we absolutely had to take care of. And we couldn’t find K. Nobody knew where he was. We had looked everywhere. He had just withdrawn, made himself unavailable. There was this one matter that was probably more pressing than all the rest put together. Really crucial. We were all standing around wondering what to do. We were getting pretty nervous because this thing was really. . . Then K. walked in and disposed of it with a quick phone call. A quick phone call!”

Childhood of K as Recalled by a Former Teacher

“He was a very alert boy, very bright, good at his studies, very thorough, very conscientious. But that’s not unusual, that de- scribes a good number of the boys who pass through here. It’s not unusual, that is, to find these qualities which are after all the qualities that we look for and encourage in them. What was unusual about K. was his compassion, something very rare for a boy of that age—even if they have it, they’re usually very careful not to display it for fear of seeming soft, girlish. I remember, though, that in K. this particular attribute was very marked. I would almost say that it was his strongest characteristic.”

Speaking to No One but Waiters, He—

“The dandelion salad with bacon, I think.”
“The rysstafel.”
“The poached duck.”
“The black bean puree.”
“The cod fritters.”

K Explains a Technique

“It’s an expedient in terms of how not to destroy a situation which has been a long time gestating, or, again, how to break it up if it appears that the situation has changed, during the gestation period, into one whose implications are not quite what they were at the beginning. What I mean is that in this business things are constantly altering (usually for the worse) and usually you want to give the impression that you’re not watching this particular situation particularly closely, that you’re paying no special attention to it, until you’re ready to make your move. That is, it’s best to be sudden, if you can manage it. Of course you can’t do that all the time. Sometimes you’re just completely wiped out, cleaned out, totaled, and then the only thing to do is shrug and forget about it.”

K on His Own Role

“Sometimes it seems to me that it doesn’t matter what I do, that it is enough to exist, to sit somewhere, in a garden for example, watching whatever is to be seen there, the small events. At other times, I’m aware that other people, possibly a great number of other people, could be affected by what I do or fail to do, that I have a responsibility, as we all have, to make the best possible use of whatever talents I’ve been given, for the common good. It is not enough to sit in that garden, however restful or pleasurable it might be. The world is full of unsolved problems, situations that demand careful, reasoned and intelligent action. In Latin America, for example.”

As Entrepreneur

The original cost estimates for burying the North Sea pipeline have been exceeded by a considerable margin. Everyone wonders what he will say about this contretemps which does not fail to have its dangers for those responsible for the costly miscalcula- tions, which are viewed in many minds as inexcusable. He says only “Exceptionally difficult rock conditions.”

With Young People

K., walking the streets of unknown towns, finds himself among young people. Young people line these streets, narrow and curving, which are theirs, dedicated to them. They are every- where, resting on the embankments, their guitars, small radios, long hair. They sit on the sidewalks, back to back, heads turned to stare. They stand implacably on street corners, in doorways, or lean on their elbows in windows, or squat in small groups at that place where the sidewalk meets the walls of buildings. The streets are filled with these young people who say nothing, reveal only a limited interest, refuse to declare themselves. Street after street contains them, a great number, more displayed as one turns a corner, rank upon rank stretching into the distance, drawn from the arcades, the plazas, staring.

He Discusses the French Writer, Poulet

“For Poulet, it is not enough to speak of seizing the moment. It is rather a question of, and I quote, ‘recognizing in the instant which lives and dies, which surges out of nothingness and which ends in dream, an intensity and depth of significance which ordinarily attaches only to the whole of existence.’ “What Poulet is describing is neither an ethic nor a prescription but rather what he has discovered in the work of Marivaux. Poulet has taken up the Marivaudian canon and squeezed it with both hands to discover the essence of what may be called the Marivaudian being, what Poulet in fact calls the Marivaudian being. “The Marivaudian being is, according to Poulet, a pastless futureless man, born anew at every instant. The instants are points which organize themselves into a line, but what is important is the instant, not the line. The Marivaudian being has in a sense no history. Nothing follows from what has gone before. He is constantly surprised. He cannot predict his own reaction to events. He is constantly being overtaken by events. A condition of breathlessness and dazzlement surrounds him. In consequence he exists in a certain freshness which seems, if I may say so, very desirable. This freshness Poulet, quoting Marivaux, describes very well. ”

K Saved from Drowning

K. in the water. His flat black hat, his black cape, his sword are on the shore. He retains his mask. His hands beat the surface of the water which tears and rips about him. The white foam, the green depths. I throw a line, the coils leaping out over the surface of the water. He has missed it. No, it appears that he has it. His right hand (sword arm) grasps the line that I have thrown him. I am on the bank, the rope wound round my waist, braced against a rock. K. now has both hands on the line. I pull him out of the water. He stands now on the bank, gasping. “Thank you.”

—April 1968

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Welcome back! No, by some crazy fluke, Paris is having the mildest summer I can remember so far. Considering what most of the rest of Europe is going through, I’m feeling guilty while also, you know, enjoying it. Sorry for your heavy heat. Your time with your mom sounds great! Fantastic! Um, in the US people light off their own fireworks a lot, but here, at least in Paris, it’s mostly people just gathering to watch the big official show. And in the US there isn’t a big military parade and all that stuff, or I don’t think so. I’ve always wanted a Bill Henson, so thanks for reading my mind, love. Of the ones in the post, mm, maybe the second from the bottom one? What would be your pick? Love making the Zoom meeting tonight with our film producer not the explosive nightmare I fear it will be, G. ** Bill, Thank you, Bill. I rarely read horror fiction, but I always think I really should. It seems like I could learn some tricks from that stuff. Maybe I’ll try dipping in courtesy of ‘Up from Slavery’. ** Misanthrope, Serves you right, ha ha. What’s the latest on your hernia situation? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yes, I hoped it would make for a refreshing change of pace. How’s stuff with you, Ben? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I could’ve used a little more sleep last night, but, other than that, I’m barreling along. My favorite foods … cold sesame noodle, cheese quesadilla (high five), የፆም በይይአነቱ (Ethiopian dish), hot fudge banana split, seitan stroganoff, bean and cheese burrito from this fast food chain in Los Angeles called Poquito Mas. Favorite Tsui Hark? Hm, maybe ‘We’re Going to Eat You’ and ‘The Master’? A lot of really good ones, though. I like ‘Sleepaway Camp’ too, another high five. I really need to watch some stuff. I’ll figure that out. Have a great Czech fairy tale adaptation-style day! ** Charlie, Well, I meant and mean it. It’s true: Charlie sounds really nice in a French mouth. Most people I know here try to pronounce my name in the American way, but they can’t help themselves, so it usually sounds like Denn-EES’. Meaning they say ‘Denn-EEE’ but add an ‘s’ at the end, which is thoughtful of them. Charlie is a good name. Everyone I know whose name is Charlie is awesome basically across the board. I didn’t hit the fun fair because I promised to go with two friends, and they haven’t found the time yet. But they’d better hurry up, or …’. ** trees, Hey, Ted! Ha ha, I’m sure Gagosian must have snatched up PaintingWholesaleChina by now. I just got your two booklets in the mail yesterday! I’m excited to read them. Thanks so much! Nail those reviews, duh. Thanks about the film. Super excited, can’t for you to be able to see it. Love, me. ** Darbz 🐘🎪, Hi. I like that the elephant is the same size as the circus tent and could destroy it easily if it wanted to. Sorry to mention Mr. Crash. I only met him once at a gig where he was really, really drunk and threatened to beat me up because I was wearing a badge for a band that he liked. Go figure. Well, I mean, yeah, John Lennon was a billion times more famous than Darby, and the timing was a problem, so, yes, Lennon got all the headlines. That therapist/doctor sounds really promising, obviously. But, oh god, mom’s permission. I hope she’s in a really good mood when you ask her. Nice about the Klepto-derived bootie. I only wrote with pen and paper for years and years, and then I tried typing in a doc as an experiment, and I got spoiled rotten. I hope you got to write a lot yesterday. Goodbye from deep inside my ‘The Wizard of Oz’ pop-up book! ** Steve Erickson, Well, hobble with as much style as you can for a while, I guess? Ah, your Dream Syndicate thing is up. Very curious to read it. Everyone, Steve has reviewed the new boxset by the arguably seminal LA-based band The Dream Syndicate right here. Re: ‘sleep paralysis demon’, good guess? ** Gray_gary, Hey, G_g. Vibing, nice. Some kids say that at least. I’m not sure if they’re the cool kids. You’re trying to make ‘new narratives that trap ghosts’? That is a lofty and exciting goal to say the least. We have a ghost in our new film. It’s being very tricky to manifest properly. Do you have a lot of stuff on your walls? I mean other than the dancing light? Mine are pretty much just expanses of white, and I get very good light, so I only have one lamp. My head is okay, but it’s full of the film I mentioned, which is good, mind you, but it is a bit cramped. I would love to send you the ghost in our film, especially if you can help us manifest it. Not sure how though. Don’t be bored. You don’t sound bored. ** Right. I recently read some stories by Donald Barthelme after a long time, and I remembered what an incredible and clever craftsman he was, and I thought I would pass him along. See you tomorrow.