Larry McCaffery
An Interview with Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme is the author
of
two novels,
Snow White
(1967) and
The Dead Father (1975),-
however, he is probably best knownjor
his seven collections
of
short fictions, many
of
which individually appeared
originally in the
New Yorker.
The collections were:
Come Back, Dr.
Caligari (1964),- Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968),- City
Life
(1970),-
Sadness (1972),- Amateurs (1976),"
and
Great Days
(1979). He also published
Guilty Pleasures
(nonfiction) in 1974.
Larry McCaffery :
You've published two novels, but most of your
work has been in short fiction .
Donald Barthelme:
Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a
kind of immediate gratification - the relationship of sketches to
battle paintings. Over a period of years I can have a dozen bad
ideas for novels, some of which I actually invest a certain amount
of time in. Some of these false starts yield short pieces; most don't.
The first story in
Sadness
-
"La Critique de la Vie
Quotidienne" - is salvage.
McCaffery :
Do stories typically begin for you by landing on you, like
the dog in "Falling Dog"?
Barthelme:
Well, for about four days I've been writing what amounts
to nonsense. And then suddenly I come across an interesting
sentence - or at least interesting to me: "It is not clear that Arthur
Byte was wearing his black corduroy suit when he set fire to the
Yale Art and Architecture Building in the spring of
1968."
I don't
know what follows from this sentence; I'm hoping it may develop
into something. I did know someone who was at Yale teaching in
the architecture department at the time of that notorious fire; I'm
not sure if the date was
1968,
I'd have to check. I don't believe they
ever found out who set it; I certainly have no idea. But I'm
positing a someone and hoping that tragic additional material
may accumulate around that sentence.
McCaffery:
At the end of your story "Sentence," your narrator says
that the sentence is "a structure to be treasured for its weaknesses,
