Donald Barthelme

BOBBIE ROE: Is the new generation of writers more concerned than their predecessors with politics, economics, and social class?

DONALD BARTHELME: I think that there are lowered expectations, not æsthetic expectations for the work, but lowered expectations in terms of life. My generation, perhaps foolishly, expected, even demanded, that life be wonderful and magical and then tried to make it so by writing in a rather complex way. It seems now quite an eccentric demand.

Americans have political problems that they don’t recognize as political. The impoverishment of the country by the arms race is a good example. Money spent on arms is, among other things, useless money in terms of the economy because it’s stored. It’s in nerve gas, aircraft carriers, the Stealth bomber. I gave a reading at the University of Alabama a couple of years ago, and on the way to the campus we passed an airfield packed with military aircraft, trillions of dollars’ worth of planes stacked up there, National Guard stuff, not even first-line stuff. The cost, the weight of this, is not understood by most Americans. They don’t know where their money’s going. They know they’re pressed for money and that their school systems are being eighty-sixed by national accrediting organizations, but they don’t connect this to that National Guard elephant graveyard. Black people think that they’re poor because they’re black and the white folks control the money. This is true, but black folks are damaged more by lousy economic policy than by racism.

When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble.

LARRY MCCAFERRY: Like a lot of painters in this century, you seem to enjoy lifting things out of the world, in this case words or phrases, and then...

DONALD BARTHELME: And then, sung to and Simonized, they’re thrown into the mesh.

...St. Vincent’s emergency room is one of my favorite emergency rooms in the whole world. I know it well, from the time I accidentally stabbed myself in the chest with an X-Acto knife (paltry two stitches), and the time our former babysitter got raped, and the time my daughter ate the roach poison and I went down there, carrying kid and can, and the Poison Control Center there said, “Mister, that stuff don’t even bother the roaches—they just get high on it, is all.”

LARRY MCCAFFERY: Do you recall the germinating idea for The Dead Father?

DONALD BARTHELME: A matter of having a father and being a father.

MCCAFFERY: In some basic sense the book deals with the notion that we’re all dragging around behind us the corpses of our fathers, as well as the past in general.

BARTHELME: Worse—dragging these ahead of us. I have several younger brothers, among them my brother Frederick, who is also a writer. After The Dead Father came out, he telephoned and said, “I’m working on a new novel.” I said, “What’s it called?” and he said “The Dead Brother.” You have to admire the generational wit there.

Finnegans Wake is not a work which encourages emulation. Ezra Pound announced early on that in those portions of it that he had read, the rewards were not worth the decipherment. Writers borrow Joyce’s myth-patterning or stream-of-consciousness and regard Wake as a monument or an obsession, in any case something that does not have to be repeated.

There were five children. In the late thirties my father built a house for us, something not too dissimilar to Mies’s Tugendhat house. It was wonderful to live in but strange to see on the Texas prairie. On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare. We had a routine, the family, on Sundays. We used to get up from Sunday dinner, if enough cars had parked, and run out in front of the house in a sort of chorus line, doing high kicks.

There’s always the tension between losing an audience and doing the odd things you might want to try. The effort is always to make what you write nourishing or useful to readers. You do cut out some readers by idiosyncrasies of form. I regret this.

Any fool can cry wolf; to cry sheep is inspired, the work of a subtle, contradancing mind.

Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.

Originality is the last refuge of a hero...