BOOKS
309
amusing way of relating the experience of reading Tolstoy, and no
more, and it is also a gesture (Mark Twain 's gesture in
Innocents
Abroad
as he scrutinizes the Old Masters), and it is also a lucid
description of an exasperated modern writer-a son, not a father. Like
so much of Barthelme's work, the sketch itself is mercurial, it can't be
leaned on, and it is in a book
(City Life)
that itself oscillates wildly
between cool sardonic jokes and a deep sense of despair. It is at once so
light and so heavy.
Sadness
is more of this uneven same, and so, too, is
The Dead Father.
What's a son to do? After Joyce, after Pound, after Joseph Stalin,
and Mao Tze Tung? "You must become your father, but a paler,
weaker version of him. The enormities go with the job, but close study
will allow you to perform the job less well than it has previously been
done, thus moving toward a golden age of decency, quiet, and calmed
fevers . Your contribution will not be a small one, but 'small' is one of
the concepts that you should shoot for." That is, the son is
to
become a
humorist. Small is beautiful. Large is the Father.
It
is in fact the
restraint of humor that checks the course of Barthelme's irony, and cuts
his questioning short. "I am a double-minded man," the narrator of
"The Leap" intones in Barthelme's most recent collection of stories,
Great Days,
and then has wonderful fun with Kierkegaard. Perhaps
this is the true spectacle in Barthelme's fiction: an intelligent irony,
dire in its Kierkegaardian swerve, inclosed by, tripped up by, daunted
by a loony humor. We witness the expiration of authority in
The Dead
Father,
but what of the Living Mother? "She was often underly
generous. " There she is, spilled into a meditation on "The New
Music" in
Great Days.
She is the Terrible Mother to the same extent
that He is the Furious Father, humorously reduced, as true, as ludi–
crous, as dumb, as powerful as Repression itself. "Momma didn't 'low
no clarinet played in here. Made me sad." So the complaint is figured
in the speech of Huck and Holden, and it, not the discourse of the
ironist, predominates. This voice, wistfully smart, speaks everywhere
in
Great Days.
It is as though Barthelme, so alert
to
what is shallow in
discourse, has grasped in its deep the rock-hard childishness, the
indomitable immaturity, that speaks in all our speech, and has begun
now
to
experiment with it. Daddy's dead, and Momma didn't 'low. In
"Belief" four senior citizens sit on a bench in Washington Square Park
and discuss-things. A single article of belief is at last produced. It is an
injunction taken from Hasidic writing:
It
is forbidden to grow old.
There is a chorus: "I could do without irony." After the dead father, the
great day.
NEIL SCHMITZ
