DONALD BARTHELME
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something to tie onto, like an almanac or a telephone book. And
discoveries - a list of meter maids in any given city will give you a
Glory Hercules .
McCaffery :
Who are some of the contemporary writers you find most
interesting?
Barthelme:
Along with the South Americans, who everyone agrees are
doing very well, I think the Germans: Peter Handke, Max Frisch ,
certainly Grass, Thomas Bernhard, who did
Correction.
I think the
Americans are doing very well. The French perhaps less so.
McCaffery:
Raymond Federman says that while Samuel Beckett had
devised a means of taking the world away from the contemporary
writer, Garcia Marquez has shown writers a way to reconnect
themselves with the world.
Barthelme:
I don't agree with Ray that that's what Beckett has done;
the Marquez portion of the comment seems more appropriate. I
think they've both opened things up, in different ways. Marquez
provided an answer to the question of what was possible after
Beckett-not the only answer, but a large and significant one.
Robert Coover, among American writers, seems to be doing
something parallel, with good results .
McCaffery:
Do you feel that New York City has helped shape your
sensibility over the years?
Barthelme:
I think my sensibility was pretty well put together before I
came here. Although I've now lived here close to twenty years,
I've also lived in other places in the meantime - Copenhagen for a
year, Paris, Tokyo. I like cities. But this is a tiny corner of New
York , very like a real
village
village. Once I was walking down
Seventh Avenue with Hans Magnus Enzensberger , we'd just
finished lunch , and we bumped into my daughter, who was then
about eight. I introduced them , and she went home and told her
mother she'd just met Hans Christian Andersen. And in a way she
had.
McCaffery :
Do you see any changes having taken place
In
your
approach to writing over the past twenty years?
Barthelme:
Certainly fewer jokes, perhaps fewer words .
