190
PARTISAN REVIEW
body who publishes Singer, Merwin, Lem, Updike, Borges, and
Marquez has got to be said to be various in terms of taste . Plus
Grace Paley and Susan Sontag and Ann Beattie, and who knows
who else.
McCajJery :
I've noticed that in your last few books you seem to have
dropped the interest in typographical or graphic play that was so
evident in
City Life
and
Guilty PLeasures.
What got you interested in
this sort of thing in the first place?
Barthelme:
I think I was trying to be a painter, in some small way.
Probably a yearning for something not properly the domain of
writers. Maybe I was distracted by the things painters can do. I
had an ambition toward something that maybe fi ction can't do–
an immediate impact-a beautifully realized whole that can be
taken in at a glance and yet still be studied for a long time .
Flannery O'Connor says, very sourly, very wittily, that she
doesn't like anything that looks funny on the page. I know what
she's talking about, but on the other hand, I'm intrigued by things
that look funny on the page . But then there was the flood of
concrete poetry, which devalued looking funny on the page.
McCaffery :
I recall a comment of yours that you not only enjoyed
doing layout work but that you could cheerfully become a
typographer. Did you do all your own visual work?
Barthelme:
They're mostly very simple collages, Ernst rather than
Schwitters.
McCaffery:
Have you tried your own hand at drawing?
Barthelme:
Can't draw a lick.
McCaffery :
At the end of the title story in
City Life,
Ramona com–
ments about life's invitations "down many muddy roads" that she
accepted: "What was the alternative?" I find a similar passivity in
many of your characters - an inability to change their lot. Does
this tendency spring from a personal sense of resignation about
things or are you trying to suggest something more fundamental
about modern man's relationship to the world?
BartheLme:
The quotation you mention possibly has more to do with
the great world than with me . In writing about the two girls in
"City Life" who come to the city, I noticed that their choices,
which seem to be infinite, are not so open-ended. I don't think this
spirit of resignation, as you call it, has to do with any personal
passivity; it's more a sociological observation. One attempts to
write about the way contemporary life is lived by most people. In
a more reportorial fiction, one would of necessity seek out more
