<< After reading Godot at the newsstand, after he started going to work in the mornings on his screened porch, where once, having eaten breakfast with Helen, he’d spend three or four hours banging away on his Remington, smoking, and filling the wastebasket with discards, perhaps it was inevitable that Barthelme would follow his literary star to New York City. There, he would be snubbed by Saul Bellow and befriended by Grace Paley; he would bother Roger Angell at The New Yorker about his layouts, having done plenty of magazine layouts himself; and he would become, in a remarkably compressed time period, an indelible voice of his time, his prolific work heaped with critical superlatives, all of them deserved and none of them quite capable of capturing the work, which continues to resist categorization and qualification. He would be compared to Kafka, Borges, Pynchon, a drug addict (“Donald Barthelme either takes pills, does dope, drinks an awful lot, or has one of the unique literary imaginations of the present age,” the Washington Post), a maker of presumably metaphorical “paintings,” “sculptures,” “cherry bombs,” and “funny language machines.” Somehow, even in its 592 outstandingly researched and beautifully written pages, Daugherty’s biography cannot quite account for the suddenness of Barthelme’s achievement, from the confidence and speed with which he goes from reading Godot at the newsstand to reinventing the contemporary short story. Nor can Daugherty’s, or anyone’s, biography of Barthelme accustom us to his untimely, sudden end. Just after the publication of Sixty Stories, after two decades of literary life in New York, Barthelme returned to Houston, to a teaching job at the University of Houston, his alma mater. He published Overnight to Many Distant Cities, his first new collection since 1979’s Great Days, in 1983, and received execrable, inexplicably hostile reviews. In the New York Times, Joel Conarroe wrote that while the emperor might not be naked, his suit seemed “threadbare.” I respectfully disagree. I love this collection as I love all of Barthelme’s work, though what I love most is the title. It moves me, as so many of his titles move me—written as they are by a genius of concision, his titles alone can be entire works of art. “Our Work and Why We Do It.” “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel.” “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.” “Overnight to Many Distant Cities” stirred in me an intimation, both of loneliness and possibility. Barthelme was listed in the Houston white pages, and sometimes, in my unhappy teenage years, I looked at his number and dared myself to call him. I never got up the nerve. Barthelme died in 1989, at the age of fifty-eight. I was at college and heard the news from a friend who worked at a Kinko’s to which one of the Barthelme brothers had brought Don Jr.’s will. We lost a hometown hero, but literature lost an all-time great. >>
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