The Teachings of Don B.:
Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays
By Donald Barthelme
Edited by Kim Herzinger
Turtle Bay Books, 352 pages, $25
It is an important clue to the nature of the artist-to this artist in particular, but also to all worthy of the name-that the late Donald Barthelme should have left behind so much first-rate work that was in his lifetime either unpublished, uncollected or, if collected, assembled under the rather furtive title ”Guilty Pleasures,” which he collectively characterized as
”journalism,” for lack of a better word, or used as filler in his last collection, ”Overnight to Many Distant Cities.”
In fact, these brilliantly surreal ”interchapter pieces,” read in sequence by themselves, look excitingly like a novel in progress-one that perhaps didn`t quite pan out; Barthelme once told an interviewer who wanted to know if he was working on a novel, ”I`m always working on a novel, but they keep crumbling in my hands.”
As the editor here points out, Barthelme`s work is best categorized as uncategorizable, categories being ”a way of signifying meaning in advance,” and the canny Don B. liked to hit us from our blind sides. We have many, as indicated in the title piece, which on the surface is nothing more than a parody of Carlos Castaneda but whose subtitle, ”A Yankee Way of Knowledge,” specifies its larger target as all those busily profiteering hip new forms of brainlessness to a people all too ready to embrace them.
”The four natural enemies of the man of knowledge,” Don B. tells the narrator, ”are fear, sleep, sex, and the Internal Revenue Service.” The narrator, who doesn`t know a martini when he sees one, asks Don B. whether he`s conquered these enemies. ” `All but the last,` he said with a grimace.
`Those sumbitches never give up.` ”
Speaking of martinis brings us to an example of the radical economy practiced by Barthelme and many writers-despite the impression of waste we get from so much good work not seen before now-by which a story may appear totally transformed in one collection while still other bits and pieces pop up like hallucinations in a novel.
”Brain Damage,” one of his illustrated stories (whose use of collages Barthelme considered a ”secret vice”), is recovered here in its pristine New Yorker form before it was revised drastically in ”City Life.” This original tells us about our near relatives the Wapituil, who ”are like us to an extraordinary degree” and in fact ”have everything that we have, but only one of each thing” because of their short attention span.
”They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone and a Martini, one of each. The Martini and the telephone are kept in the Museum of Modern Art. . . . The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time.” (This is followed by what looks like a woodcut of a woman in Victorian dress writhing in an antique chair and covering her face in shame.)
In keeping with the satirical thrust of the whole collection, another brief illumination in the same story epiphanizes the bureaucratic inertia of America`s last quarter-decade or so: ”My own idea about whether or not to plug in the (blue electrical) flowers is . . . in that gray area where nothing is done, really, but you vacillate for a while, thinking about it. The blue of the flowers is extremely handsome against the gray of that area.”
Even some of Barthelme`s straight parodies, such as a dead-on nailing of Bret Easton Ellis, manage economically to satirize the culture that excretes such writing and improve on the original at the same time. ”More Zero”
closes with this line: ”I don`t see Ti-Ti and my mother is marrying yet another bastard and I feel very tense and there`s an 8.5 earthquake but I don`t notice it because I`m listening to Kitchen and I`m very tense.”
A number of pieces here, such as ”The Educational Experience,” reprint stories that made Barthelme`s two big compendium collections, ”Sixty Stories” and ”Forty Stories,” but in the process lost their graphics, which are here restored. But the funniest graphics are in the previously uncollected ”The Dassaud Prize,” which relates a turn-of-the-century scientific competition ”to find-that is to say, locate in time and space-God,” although ”many in the scientific community ignored the Prize and continued to occupy themselves with purely secular pursuits.”
The accompanying illustration shows a Victorian gent in natty smoked glasses suavely doffing a soup plate as he flirts with two demure young women in a park, all three ambulating gracefully on half-size bicycle tires clamped to their ankles. And you thought the roller-blade was new!
Some scholar has got to do something learned and dense on where Barthelme got these pictures, or whether he drew them himself, especially the one that accompanies these words: ”The eminent Dr. Morceau succeeded in producing in the laboratory a cross between a printing press and a bat. For this achievement he was sent to Devil`s Island.”
Another surprise by this continually surprising writer is the amount of quality material Barthelme was content to publish unsigned and untitled as Notes and Comment pieces for the New Yorker, such as ”Languishing, half-deep in summer. . .”, in which the author/narrator answers one of the personal ads from the New York Review of Books and meets a young woman as ravishing and witty as the one in the fictional ”Lightning” in ”Overnight to Many Distant Cities.” After cooling out ”with about half a gallon of kir,” Mindy Sue confides the perils of periodical love: ”You should see what springs from semiotexte. Or praxis 4. Let me tell you, if a journal runs its logo in lower case, what you get is the lower depths. With mauve teeth, usually.”
As Thomas Pynchon points out in his introduction, it didn`t take much to push Barthelme`s satire button, and my favorite among the signed satirical pieces-though this one is sneakily signed ”William White”-is ”Challenge,” which reports the consternation in the publishing community caused by ”the superiority of the Japanese-made book review to the faltering domestic product,” which tends ”to be handwritten, typically by either John Kenneth Galbraith or Joyce Carol Oates.”
The ”Nakamichi Model 500, for instance”-which may or may not refer to a certain daily reviewer for The New York Times-is ”capable of decon-
structing a book of average length in seven seconds,” while another model introduced a ”sensational `muting` or self-canceling feature (although in fairness it must be noted that this was based on original research done in this country by Lehmann-Haupt and others).”
Publishers Weekly, ”already under pressure from the Department of Labor for its exclusive employment of thirteen-year-old girls, laid off its entire work force, using blue bubble gum as severance pay,” and the National Book Critics Circle ”made private representations to the President demanding savage import quotas, hinting that its members would have a thing or two to say about the Reagan memoirs.”
This collection ends with Barthelme`s three unpublished and unproduced plays-”The Friends of the Family,” a radio play that adapts two stories from his first story collection, ”Come Back, Dr. Caligari”; another radio script, ”The Conservatory,” based on two stories from ”Great Days”; and ”Snow White,” a stage play that adhered closely to his first novel and got as far as a dress rehearsal before the author decided it was a bad effort. The editor, Kim Herzinger, rightly reminds the reader that authors tend to underrate their dramatic achievements, just as he prudently warns us-regarding Barthelme`s recipes, which read deliciously-that ”writers often eat hurriedly.”
This writer`s hypercritical stance toward his work becomes clear in the wonderful ”Ming,” found on a computer disk after his death, in which Flash Gordon`s nemesis comments scathingly on ”Star Wars,” aka SDI: ”We can`t even do airplanes right. . . . Frankly, this stuff scares the hell out of me. I may be merciless, but I`m not a damned fool.”
Interestingly, Barthelme`s first publication for the New Yorker (on March 2, 1963), included here, was ”L`Lapse: A Scenario for Michelangelo Antonioni,” whose parody of the post-World War II sensibility of existential meaninglessness now seems like a declaration of independence from the terminal pointlessness of that theme and that kind of artist (”Another damn Italian with a camera”) and the beginning of postmodernism.
So it`s appropriate that his last volume (except for a forthcoming book of essays) include an unsigned report on a dragon with identity problems who checks into a hospital`s Intensive Despair Unit but is refused euthanasia. After being mistaken for ”a malingering sanitation truck,” he is diagnosed by a garbage colonel over gibsons: ”You suffer . . . from a sort of general meaninglessness.” ”Since the thirteenth century,” the dragon replies.
When the colonel suggests, however, that the dragon might qualify for the president`s endangered species list, he spoils things by asking, ”Are men on it? . . . The colonel rose in a great fit of anger and threw his glass into the fire.”
Despite what Herzinger calls his ”bereaved amusement” at our follies, Barthelme never crossed us off his list; and for all of us who miss him ”The Teachings of Don B.” is indeed a replenishment.
