Don"s mother asked one of the medical men if he had ever "seen a miracle." The doctor said, "Yes, I have."
Eventually, treatments to reduce calcium levels in the bloodstream gave Don some relief. He startled in and out of consciousness and experienced days of vivid lucidity. Some of his students came to see him. He asked about their welfare. Were they writing? How were their finances? What was the latest gossip? He discussed chemotherapy with Marion. He asked her to call the UH English Department and tell them he didn"t know when he"d return. Don"t be "overly optimistic" with them, he told her.
According to Maggie Maranto, when George Christian came to visit, Don told him "regretfully and with deep feeling that he was afraid he was finally being paid back for all his sins. His Catholicism was always in the background during his lifetime, but [it] must have come back to haunt him in his last moments."
Beverly Lowry stopped by but didn"t stay long. He peered at her with "love, sadness, skepticism." He "loved women, you know, and he had his vanity-he didn"t really want me there," she says.
The doctors kept him on heavy doses of morphine. He began to have trouble breathing. Within a few days, he slipped into a coma, from which he would not awaken. Helen came to see him, though he was unaware of her presence. There she met Anne for the first time. "I"ve heard of you all my life," Anne told her. "It was all good."
On Sunday, July 23, 1989, at 5:55 A.M. A.M., Don died. He was fifty-eight years old. Days earlier, when he had first been admitted to the hospital, he was groggy, suffering from a surfeit of calcium in the blood. A doctor asked him, "Do you know where you are, Mr. Barthelme?"
Don said, "In the antechamber to Heaven."
He was cremated on July 25. "I remember going to the wake," says George Williams. "It was in some student"s backyard-I don"t remember whose. We"re all drinking J & B, and there are these candles lit all around the yard, nothing ostentatious. At one point I"m aware that there"s this white box on the table-Don"s ashes. Marion had brought it. I was surprised when I picked it up. It weighed more than I thought it would."
A short time later, a memorial service was held in the Rothko Chapel. Other remembrances took place in New York and on the University of Houston campus.
EPILOGUE.
THE FINAL a.s.sIGNMENT.
After Don"s death, his books drifted, one by one, out of print and out of reach. As of this writing, some of them have popped up in new editions: The Dead Father, Paradise, The Dead Father, Paradise, and and The King. Sixty Stories The King. Sixty Stories and and Forty Stories Forty Stories reappeared, featuring appreciations by popular young writers (David Gates and Dave Eggers). Still, Don remains largely hidden. reappeared, featuring appreciations by popular young writers (David Gates and Dave Eggers). Still, Don remains largely hidden.
"The movement of history always takes place behind one"s back, behind one"s back," he wrote. Nothing prepares you for time"s changes-even if you"ve managed to place yourself in the center of modern consciousness.
As if to underscore this point, two days after militants attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Michiko Kakutani wrote, "Language failed this week....In a day when hype and hyperbole have become a staple of cable news, in a day when the word "reality" has become a.s.sociated with stagemanaged fame-fests...words felt devalued and inadequate to capture the disasters at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and near Pittsburgh."
In part, she blamed the failure of language on American writers who had abandoned the "effort to write about American public life" in the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s and beyond. She chided certain novelists (Ann Beattie, Harold Brodkey, Philip Roth) for focusing "on the private realm of the self, on the convolutions of the individual psyche. Others, like John Barth and Donald Barthelme, contented themselves with performing postmodern experiments with fable, farce and recycled fairy tales," she said.
A few days later, also in the Times, Times, Edward Rothstein argued that September 11 "challeng[ed] the intellectual and ethical perspectives of...postmodernism." "In general postmodernists [question] a.s.sertions that truth and ethical judgment have any objective validity," he claimed. "But such a.s.sertions seem peculiar when trying to account for the recent attack. This destruction seems to cry out for a transcendent ethical perspective." Edward Rothstein argued that September 11 "challeng[ed] the intellectual and ethical perspectives of...postmodernism." "In general postmodernists [question] a.s.sertions that truth and ethical judgment have any objective validity," he claimed. "But such a.s.sertions seem peculiar when trying to account for the recent attack. This destruction seems to cry out for a transcendent ethical perspective."
He concluded that postmodernism was "perverse...a form of guilty pa.s.sivity in the face of ruthless and unyielding opposition."
By implying that "postmodernism" had, figuratively speaking, provided the terrorists with flight plans, he appeared to be marching alongside televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They insisted that America"s secularism, its acceptance of gay rights, abortion, and civil liberties had enraged G.o.d to the point that G.o.d loosed ma.s.s destruction upon the land. So who, according to these views, was to blame for the slaughter of innocents? By implication, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU; Ann Beattie and Donald Barthelme.
It could be argued that, like Hilton Kramer in the 1970s, Rothstein and others seized upon a moment of uncertainty and masked themselves behind aesthetics to advance a political agenda.
"Postmodernism" does not-cannot-denote a single ethos. Nor is it solely the province of artists, writers, and academics; if by "postmodern," we mean style over substance, a blurring of values, and vague historical awareness, then the conditions for it are set by lawyers, real estate developers, money speculators, televangelists, and the nation"s professional political cla.s.s, along with its symbiotic companion, the popular media.
Remember Don"s remark: "The disorientation in my stories is not mine. It is what is to be perceived around us."
Far more important than squabbles over postmodernism was the speculation, in the press and on the Internet, about literature"s continuing efficacy in the face of modern disasters. Rosellen Brown said, "I don"t think people are going to lose interest in telling stories about how people live their lives." When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, she said, "ordinary people were going about their lives, putting cream in their coffee, picking up the phone to start the day; the ordinariness of those lives is what seizes us." But Joan Didion suggested that definitions of the ordinary may have shifted for Americans. She said a "different level of apprehension" would appear in her work from now on, reflecting increased apprehension in daily life.
Writing in a special edition of The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Richard Ford said, "I remember very well the day my father died. It was in the early morning of a Sat.u.r.day in 1960," and he told the story of that day in rich and vivid detail. But then he admitted, "Of course, I can tell you about all these events...this intimacy...because my father didn"t die by having a jet airplane fly through his window and obliterate him without a thought....My father died, if there is such a way to die, properly: in his house, in his bed." Richard Ford said, "I remember very well the day my father died. It was in the early morning of a Sat.u.r.day in 1960," and he told the story of that day in rich and vivid detail. But then he admitted, "Of course, I can tell you about all these events...this intimacy...because my father didn"t die by having a jet airplane fly through his window and obliterate him without a thought....My father died, if there is such a way to die, properly: in his house, in his bed."
He added, "It is an axiom of the novelist"s grasp on reality that a death"s importance is measured by the significance of the life that has ended. Thus to die, as so many did on Sept[ember] 11-their singular existences briefly obscured-may seem to cloud and invalidate life entirely." And, by extension, may invalidate the novel"s "grasp on reality."
In the days following the WTC"s collapse, the south side of St. Vincent"s Hospital, down the block from Don"s old apartment, became a wailing wall where people tacked up pictures and descriptions of individuals lost in the ash and melted steel. Don had once delighted in the children"s artwork, advertising, and books on display in the Village"s windows. Now, pages and pages of prose covered the neighborhood"s walls: physical details, personality profiles, urgent pleas for help-thousands of fragments of stories, stories in the making, stories interrupted. "Fragments are the only forms I trust."
Newspaper and television pundits claimed that humor and irony had died in the attacks. No one felt like laughing. Satire-particularly of politicians-seemed in poor taste. Yet bizarre "disorientations" remained all around us, and begged to be spoofed. For instance, two weeks after the towers fell, while rescue workers continued to dig for bodies, the Aegis Realty Corporation ran a full-page ad in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, touting "Trump Tower, the World"s #1 Address" in mid-Manhattan. "Your clients and customers will be overwhelmed by the luxurious surroundings," read the text, next to a photo of a looming skysc.r.a.per. touting "Trump Tower, the World"s #1 Address" in mid-Manhattan. "Your clients and customers will be overwhelmed by the luxurious surroundings," read the text, next to a photo of a looming skysc.r.a.per.
Postmodernism, anyone?
The Verizon telephone company bought a two-page ad in the September 23, 2001, edition of The New York Times: The New York Times: "All of us at Verizon want this message of hope and recovery to ring loud and clear across the world." The ad quoted John Lennon: "Imagine all the people living life in peace," and proclaimed, "Let freedom ring." Multiple ironies blessed this notice. Songs by Lennon, who had been shot to death in New York City some twenty years before, had been virtually banned from certain radio stations after the attacks because programmers felt his utopian lyrics were inappropriate now. Cell phone sales had increased dramatically, as several pa.s.sengers on the doomed planes contacted their families, using their phones, to say good-bye-good news for Verizon. "All of us at Verizon want this message of hope and recovery to ring loud and clear across the world." The ad quoted John Lennon: "Imagine all the people living life in peace," and proclaimed, "Let freedom ring." Multiple ironies blessed this notice. Songs by Lennon, who had been shot to death in New York City some twenty years before, had been virtually banned from certain radio stations after the attacks because programmers felt his utopian lyrics were inappropriate now. Cell phone sales had increased dramatically, as several pa.s.sengers on the doomed planes contacted their families, using their phones, to say good-bye-good news for Verizon.
The free market, seizing every occasion to sell its products, was part of the "American way of life" under siege on September 11. One way to "let freedom ring" was to purchase a cell phone and invest in America"s economy. President George W. Bush called his "war on terrorism" a fight between "freedom" and "fear," and urged Americans to keep on shopping.
In "City Life," Don wrote, "[W]e are locked in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor. To describe it takes many hundreds of thousands of words. Our muck is only part of a much greater muck-the nation-state-which is itself the creation of that muck of mucks, the human consciousness. Of course all these things also have a touch of sublimity...."
Despite tectonic shifts, this "muck" remains the same. Modernity Modernity hasn"t changed, with its struggles between old and new modes of existence, its economic and social conflicts, its urban disruptions. Buildings reach for the sky. Buildings fall. hasn"t changed, with its struggles between old and new modes of existence, its economic and social conflicts, its urban disruptions. Buildings reach for the sky. Buildings fall.
It"s an architectural problem.
The past haunts the present, and the future broods somewhere out of sight.
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," first published in 1919, T. S. Eliot said, "No poet, no artist of any sort, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead." Extrapolating from Eliot"s remarks, we must consider not only individual writers but whole generations, historical moments, literary eras.
So when we notice a line from Georg Buchner"s Woyzeck Woyzeck-"And the moon looked at him so kindly!"-played upon by Don-"See the moon? It hates us"-the past and the present clasp hands. Buchner feeds Don. Don updates Buchner. Centuries connect and converse. Our understanding of the "modern," and the muck of human consciousness, expands.
In his final novel, mindful of the future"s pressure on the past, Don wrote, "Things yet to come will make us sadder still." But the body of his work, with its humor, its delight in the everyday, suggests we"ll carry on-like angels, like Snow White"s little men, like the ordinary men and women we are-in search of new principles, with the "best will in the world!"
In the summer of 1984, I visited Don in New York. Kirk and Faith Sale were out of town. I stayed in their apartment. Marion and Katharine were away.
That first night, Don followed me down to the Sales"s place to make sure I had everything I needed. The shelves were filled with books about Vietnam, Marxism, student protest movements. I said, "Your generation has witnessed so much. Mine is asleep." Don looked at me as if to say, Well then, wake up.
Next morning at seven o"clock, he banged on the door to rouse me. "You"re in New York. You don"t want to waste your days!" Together, we toured several art galleries in SoHo. At one point, he made a big show of giving money to a street beggar. He walked me down a cobbled alley and pointed to a loft window. "That"s where I built a harpsichord," he said. We happened upon a street fair with live music and dancing, and I saw how happy it made Don. In that moment, his life in Houston seemed to me constricted-convenient, perhaps, familiar, easy on the child, but lacking the protein that Don"s mind and sensibilities required.
That night, we walked to the Village Vanguard and listened to the Woody Shaw band. Don got very drunk. We both thought the drummer was a s...o...b..at; his pretensions and stylistic flair overwhelmed the music. As we left, Don stumbled on the steps leading to the street. He wouldn"t let me help him up.
The last time I saw him was in February 1989, six months before he died. I had invited him to give a reading at Oregon State University, where I taught.
His gaunt face startled me. "Corvallis isn"t bad for a small town," he said, looking around. "At least it has a Mexican restaurant." The afternoon was mild. "Is anyone here smarter than you?" he asked me.
"Sure. Plenty of folks," I said.
"Good. The only way to keep learning is to surround yourself with people smarter than you are."
The day before, an acquaintance of mine admitted he wouldn"t be attending the reading. "I only read dead authors," he"d said.
When I mentioned this to Don, he quipped, "Tell your friend to stick with me."
He insisted I take him to a liquor store so he could buy a bottle of wine. I knew he shouldn"t drink, but he was still my teacher and now he was my guest. I couldn"t refuse him. He purchased an inexpensive Pinot Grigio. In the parking lot, we glimpsed a small helium balloon floating in the air, advertising Fuji film. "My lovely balloon," Don murmured.
In his motel room, we shared the bottle and talked about colleagues, friends, books; drumming, Houston, the Village Vanguard.
He told me he had sold a new story, "Tickets," to The New Yorker. The New Yorker. "It"s a relief to know I still have some juice," he said. The story is about diminished circ.u.mstances, a man making the best of life in a rather provincial city. "It"s a relief to know I still have some juice," he said. The story is about diminished circ.u.mstances, a man making the best of life in a rather provincial city.
"I"m afraid of dying," he said, and we sat quietly.
Later, in a fiction-writing cla.s.s, one of my students asked him, "What"s kept you working for so many years?" He stroked his beard and tapped a booted foot. "All my life I"ve been interested in intoxication, in dazzling the mind," he said. "Your mind is constantly capable of surprising you if you work it hard enough."
That night, in the small campus auditorium where the reading was to be held, he asked the stage manager to tweak the lighting just so. It took several minutes before Don felt satisfied with the atmosphere. He carried typed copies of his stories and excerpts of his novel in progress, The King, The King, in a manila folder with a reproduction of one of Jasper Johns"s in a manila folder with a reproduction of one of Jasper Johns"s Target Target paintings on the cover. paintings on the cover.
During the reading, he modulated his weakened voice perfectly. Now and then I saw him lift his right foot ever so slightly-a subtle dance behind the podium. He didn"t challenge listeners with his most difficult pieces. Instead, he offered the funniest, most straightforward work: "Chablis," "The Baby," "Conversations with Goethe," "I Bought a Little City."
During the Q and A portion of the evening, someone asked him if his work was autobiographical. He said, "Don"t confuse the monster on the page with the monster here in front of you."
After the reading, Don and I walked to my car. The weather had turned. The sidewalks had iced over. He stumbled and I reached for him. He shrugged me off. "Don"t treat me like an invalid," he said.
In a local bar, he settled into a chair with a gla.s.s of white wine and talked generously, long into the night, with my students and colleagues. When we were alone once more, on the way to his motel, he turned and asked me, "Did I do okay for you?"
I recalled the end of The Dead Father. The Dead Father. Just before he"s covered in his grave, the Dead Father, speaking of the role he has played, of the life he has lived, asks his son Thomas, "Did I do it well?" Just before he"s covered in his grave, the Dead Father, speaking of the role he has played, of the life he has lived, asks his son Thomas, "Did I do it well?"
Oh yes. Oh yes. Marvelously well.
The following morning, ice covered western Oregon. The snow was thick as cotton. Don needed to get back to Houston, for which I was still mighty homesick. The airport was ninety miles away. Unexpectedly, planes were still flying. My windshield wipers froze. We slid a few blocks on our way to the freeway. I couldn"t see. "I"m afraid this isn"t going to work," I said.
"No," Don said. "We don"t want to be badly killed."
I called a cab for him, and promised to pay the taxi company the exorbitant fare. Don was grateful. As we placed his bags in the trunk, I thought of his story "Departures": "I cannot imagine the future...[you are] sailing away from me!"
"Write a story about a genius," he told me. A teacher"s last a.s.signment to his student.
"Okay."
He shook my hand. "Work well," we told each other. "Be well." He was driven away into a blizzard.
CHRONOLOGY.
1931.
Born April 7 in Philadelphia to Donald (an architect) and Helen Bechtold Barthelme.
1932.
Barthelme family moves to Galveston, Texas.
1937.
Barthelme family moves to Houston.
19451946
Writes for Eagle, Eagle, the St. Thomas High School newspaper. the St. Thomas High School newspaper.
19481949
Wins short story and poetry awards in Sequoyha, Sequoyha, the Lamar High School literary magazine. the Lamar High School literary magazine.