DONALD BARTHELME
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as opposed to the strength of stones." Am I right in assuming that
one of the things that interests you most about the sentence as an
object is precisely its "treasured weaknesses"?
Barthelme:
I look for a particular kind of sentence, perhaps more
often the awkward than the beautiful. A back-broken sentence is
interesting. Any sentence that begins with the phrase, "It is not
clear that. .. ," is clearly clumsy, but preparing itself for greatness
of a kind . It's a way of backing into a story-of getting past the
reader's hard-won armor. Then a process of accretion occurs, like
barnacles growing on a wreck or a rock . I'd rather have a wreck
than a ship that sails. Things attach themselves to wrecks; strange
fish find your wreck or rock to be a good feeding ground. After a
while you've got a situation with possibilities.
McCaffery:
Have you ever studied philosophy oflanguage in any kind
of systematic way?
Barthelme:
No . I spent two years in the Army in the middle of my
undergraduate days at Houston. When I came back to the
university , which must have been about 1955, there was a new
man - Maurice Natanson - teaching a course titled "Sociology
and Literature" that sounded good. I enrolled, and he talked
about Kafka and Kleist and George Herbert Mead. I wasn't a
particularly acute or productive student of philosophy , but in that
and subsequent classes, I got acquainted with people Mauri was
interested in: Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre , and
company.
McCaffery:
You were originally interested in journalism, weren't you?
Barthelme:
It seemed clear that the way to become a writer was to go
to work for a newspaper, as Hemingway had done - then, if you
were lucky, you might write fiction . I don't think anybody believes
that anymore. But I went to work for a newspaper while I was still
a sophomore and went back to the newspaper when I got out of
the Army. I was really very happy there - thought I was in high
cotton.
McCaffery:
By the late fifties , when you became editor of the
Forum,
you were obviously already interested a great deal in parody and
satire as literary forms . What so attracted you to this type of
writing?
Barthelme:
People like S.J. Perelman and E.B. White-people who
could do certain amazing things in prose . Perelman was the first
true American surrealist - ranking with the best in the world sur–
realist movement-and West was another. Also, Wolcott Gibbs-
