The Dead Father

Donald Barthelme

A halt. The men lay down the cable. The men regard Julie from a distance. The men standing about. Pemmican measured out in great dark whacks from the pemmican-whacking knife. Edmund lifts flask to lips. Thomas removes flask. Protest by Edmund. Reproof from Thomas. Julie gives Edmund a chaw of bhang. Gratitude of Edmund. Julie wipes Edmund's forehead with white handkerchief. The cable relaxed in the road. The blue of the sky. Trees leant against. Bird stutter and the whisper of grasses. The Dead Father playing his guitar. Thomas performing leadership functions. Construction of the plan. Maps pored over and the sacred beans bounced in the pot. The yarrow sticks cast. The dice cup given a shake. Shoulder blade of a sheep roasted and the cracks in the bone read. Peas agitated in a sieve. The hatchet stuck into a great stake and its quivers recorded. First-sprouting onion caught and its peels palpated. Portents totted up and divided by seven. Thomas falls to the ground in a swoon.

The man in the mask said that I was wrong and had always been wrong and would always be wrong and that he was not going to hurt me. Then he hurt me, with documents.

Schemed, mostly. Scheming away night and day, toward the achievement of ends. I woke up angry one morning and stayed angry for years--that was my adolescence. Anger and scheming. How to get out. How to get Lucius. How to get Mark. How to get away from Fred. How to seize power. That sort of thing. And a great deal of care-of-the-body. It was young. It was beautiful. It deserved care.

I will never be reconciled, the Dead Father said, never. When I am offended, I award punishment. Punishment is a thing I'm good at. I have some rather fine ones. For anyone who dares trifle. On the first day the trifler is well wrapped with strong cords and hung upside down from a flagpole at a height of twenty stories. On the second day the trifler is turned right side up and rehung from the same staff, so as to empty the blood from his head and prepare him for the third day. On the third day the trifler is unwrapped and waited upon by a licensed D.D.S. who extracts every other tooth from the top row and every other tooth from the bottom row, the extractions to be mismatching according to the blueprint supplied. On the fourth day the trifler is given hard things to eat. On the fifth day the trifler is comforted with soft fine garments and flagons and the attentions of lithesome women so as to make the shock of the sixth day more severe. On the sixth day the trifler is confined alone in a small room with the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the seventh day the trifler is pricked with nettles. On the eighth the trifler is slid naked down a thousand-foot razor blade to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the ninth day the trifler is sewn together by children. On the tenth day the trifler is confined alone in a small room with the works of Teilhard de Chardin and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the eleventh day the trifler's stitches are removed by children wearing catcher's mitts on their right and left hands. On the twelfth day

Your questions are good ones, he said. Your concern is well founded. I can I think best respond by relating an anecdote. You are familiar I take it with the time Martin Luther attempted to sway Franz Joseph Haydn to his cause. He called Haydn on the telephone and said, "Joe, you're the best. I want you to do a piece for us." And Haydn just said, "No way, Marty. No way."
You have got the centuries all wrong and the telephone should not be in there and anyway I do not get the point, said Edmund.
You see! Thomas exclaimed. There it is! Things are not simple. Error is always possible, even with the best intentions in the world. People make mistakes. Things are not done right. Right things are not done. There are cases which are not clear. You must be able to tolerate the anxiety. To do otherwise is to jump ship, ethics-wise.

If At-Swim-Two-Birds was difficult and Agape Agape was even harder, The Dead Father is more difficult still. Don't read this expecting to figure it out. You know that nagging feeling that accompanies you at the beginning of most stories, the feeling that keeps whispering, Don't worry, I know all this doesn't make sense right now, but if you read along far enough, if you keep on flipping them pages at some point there is going to be an aha moment where you finally figure out why that one girl was taking off her shirt or why what that big thing is that they are dragging along the ground with cables or who the guy named Thomas is. Well, this feeling is one that it is best not to hold hands with when you read The Dead Father. As the story goes along the feeling will shrivel and shrink and starve to death and ultimately disappear. Because it doesn't make sense.
I have some theories about what The Dead Father means but I don't care to share them. Read it yourself if you don't mind mystification.

Agape Agape

William Gaddis

No but you see I've got to explain all this because I don't, we don't know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I've brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again my damn leg look at it, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armour in the dining hall feel like I'm being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions I've got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled before everything collapses and it's all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that's what it's about, that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?

And now even untrained person can do it! Back with Plato's chance persons pouring out Fur Elise without a flaw till the last perforation in the roll passes over the corresponding hole in the tracker bar and democracy comes lumbering into the room with the piano player hunched over the keyboard half as big as the piano itself.

The history of the piano as a soci-technological criticism of the West--written by a dead man. I've been reading a lot of difficult books lately--Agape Agape would count as one of these. There are no pauses, there is less punctuation, Gaddis' stream of consciousness style jumps tracks so often it takes continual focus to follow the story, but it is worth it. Don't be daunted.
You'll come away from Agape Agape wondering just how wonderful the Progress is that we have made. Especially when one considers Art and creativity, Gaddis is poking at the intelligence that has taken the meaning out of intelligence. If any better proof is needed, this blog surely is sufficient. A musician was once needed to provide music. Then just a piano. Now we only need an arrangement of electrical circuits. Good thoughts once went through much rigor. Now foolish little boys can think and their thoughts can flow out their fingers and through wires and into a box and out into the world of boxes where they are readily available and readable by the whole world, or at least all of it that counts (which definition proves Gaddis' point: no internet, no count--only people who are safe). I don't have to be intelligent, I don't have to think, I don't have to make sense or be in any way coherent in order to publish. This isn't as good as we thought it was. Shouldn't there be some level of filter, shouldn't there be something that keeps every yahoo like me from taking shits on paper and calling it art? If we don't keep our standards and the rigor of our art (something that technology and our wonderful democratic spirit is trying to destroy) we lose our right to have any art at all. Art isn't just what people want it to be. Art is the objective, objective beauty, objective skill, objective value. Art is not what I think it is. Nor what I say it is. Art is art.

At Swim-Two-Birds

Flann O'Brien

It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed in whole-some fashion by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administered in private. The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic. In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service. It would be incorrect to say that it would lead to chaos. Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before--usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature. Conclusion of explanation.
That is all my bum, said Brinsley.

What is wrong with Cryan and most people, said Byrne, is that they do not spend sufficient time in bed. When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body. Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

Sweeny the thin-groined it it
in the middle of the yew;
life is very bare here,
piteous Christ it is cheerless.

Grey branches have hurt me
they have pierced my calves,
I hang here in the yew-tree above,
without chessmen, no womantryst.

I can put no faith in humans
in the place they are;
watercress at evening is my lot,
I will not come down.

I'll see you damned first, said the Good Fairy excitedly.

Do anything to spoil the good yarn you have made of it so far, and I will arise and I will slay thee with a shovel. Eh, boys?

The vocation of the pooka, said the Pooka, is one that is fraught with responsibilities, not the least of these being the lamming and leathering of such parties as are sent to me for treatment by Number One, which is the First Good and the Primal Truth and necessarily an odd number. My own personal number is Two. As regards the second objection you make about the tail, I mus state that I personally belong to a class that is accustomed to treat with extreme suspicion all such persons as are unprovided with tails. Myself I have two tails in the bed here, my own tail of loose hair and the tail of my nightshirt. When I wear two shirts on a cold day, you might say that I appear to have three tails in all?

Perhaps more than Joyce, Flann O'Brien captures a lyrical limerick-like speech that is most like you'd imagine Irishmen to speak if Irishmen were allowed to speak. I doubt if you go to Ireland, you will hear many men or women speak like Flann's characters. Maybe if you go to a pub where beers with names such as 'The Wrastler' are served. But give the Irish some time to get soused and pound down a couple of pints of a good dark porter or perhaps a mealy stout and their speech turns to the lilt O'Brien captures. Like a primal instinct or an urge of nature, the poetical discourse of the Irish people is rooted deep and it will take many generations of English and American tyranny to abolish it. Perhaps never.
But books like At-Swim-Two-Birds are doing their best to stem the tide of the hegemony of foreign discourse on the green isle. It takes a good deal more work to read something by Flann O'Brien than it does by Mark Twain, but O'Brien's payoff is better. The form may bewilder you. The storyline may lack sense. The wording may be excessive and more stuck on itself than any prima donna, but you'll never find something so pleasing to the ear and stomach. The words in At-Swim-Two-Birds go deeper than most. The small intricacies of the book are more pleasant for the fact that they don't serve too many purposes. They are there because they weren't put elsewhere, especially nowhere.
How can you not love a book that audaciously begins with Chapter 1 and forgets to ever put in another chapter?

Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner

He believes that all serious writers have a vocation, a sort of mystical call. What they exploit is not intelligence or training, but a glorious gift that is also an obligation.

To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve--who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game. In the next two weeks we spent a few dollars on white paint and dotted swiss, and were settled. The storeroom next to the furnace, warm and dry, would by my study until Junior arrived. I set up a card table for a desk and made a bookcase out of some boards and bricks. In my experience, the world's happiest young man is a young professor building bookcases, and the world's most contented couple is composed of that young professor and his wife, in love, employed, at the bottom of a depression from which it is impossible to fall further, and entering on their first year as full adults, not preparing any longer but finally into their lives.

Eden. With, of course, its serpent. No Eden valid without serpent.

Does this bother you? he said. Kick me if it does. But I admit I've taken a kind of comfort from your bad luck. I've seen someone else tied and helpless, though for very different reasons. You've been constant, a rock, and I've admired you for that. But I've wondered what your life might have been if Sally hadn't got polio. You were upward bound when we first knew you, headed up like a rocket. Success might have taken you away from her--you wouldn't have been the first one. You've done a lot anyway, but maybe not all you might have done if you hadn't had the greater obligation of looking after her. I think your marriage did to you something like what mine did to me.

But in this script there will be no such ending.

Of all the people I know, Sid Lang best understands that my marriage is as surely built on addiction and dependence as his is. He tells me what under other circumstances would infuriate me--that he takes some satisfaction in my ill luck, that it gives him comfort to see someone else in chains. He says too that he would not be unchained if he could, and he knows I wouldn't either. But what he doesn't understand is that my chains are not chains, that over the years Sally's crippling has been a rueful blessing. It has made her more than she was; it has let her give me more than she would ever have been able to give me healthy; it has taught me at least the alphabet of gratitude. Sid can take his guilty satisfaction in my bad luck if he pleases. I will go on pitying for what his addiction has failed to give him.

This is in my mind a beautiful story of marriage. Not because it is the firmest or most solid or cleanest or most smooth marriage, but because come the end of the story, they are still together and discovering that they are happier because of it. Even in the difficult characters of Sid and Charity (a marriage that would surely be what we call failed) we see a desire towards mutual understanding and help.
Most gloriously though is the commonality of this story. These people are not extraordinary. They live lives somewhat charmed (but no more than an idyllic lunch or time spent with someone you love or moments in a warm chair with a book) and they grind out the struggle beneath a weight of misfortune. Shit does, it turns out, happen but it does not taint us. We don't have to use perfume to disguise the world from ourselves. We just have to shovel it.
I wish I could say these things better. But at the moment I can't. Only, if you read The Good Soldier, do not consider the book finished without reading this, Crossing to Safety.

The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

You can't kill a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely the minuet--the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?

Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it--the husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears--for I was such a fool that I should never have known what she was or was not--and the blackmailing lover. And then the other lover came along...

For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
So, for a time, if such a passion came to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar ; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.
And yet I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman--or no, that is the wrong way of formulating it. For every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He will travel over no more horizons; he will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders; he will retire from those scenes. He will have gone out of the business.

Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney Bayham, pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn't really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad.

And no doubt, she had her share of the sex instinct that makes women be intolerably cruel to the beloved person.

I don't know. I know nothing. I am very tired.

In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor--a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career. For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small meannesses. It is really death to do so--that is why so many marriages turn out unhappily.

If ever you feel the need to be depressed by a picture of four very confused, clutching, petty, and vain people, The Good Soldier is for you. This perhaps puts it a little harsh, and I do not want to sound like a prude. But my reasons for such a harsh castigation of Ford's two couples are clearer: it's not that they are like so many pauper children mucking about in the sewers--we all of us aren't much better than that--nor is it that they are selfish people who don't care for much outside of themselves--I don't think I could recognize a human who wasn't selfish--nor is it even that they glory in their own vanity--I believe most people are secretly as consoling and petting of their persons; no, what is most dismal about The Good Soldier is that not one of the four tries. There is not even a feeling to inspire. No one is reaching for the shining sun, those lighter realms of the atmosphere where love is pure and kindness exists. It doesn't matter so much how far the stretching fingers are, but it does matter that fingers stretch.
The Good Soldier is incredibly well written--the story drips out of Ford's fist like so much sand, he relates the tale with more control than many and far better style than more. For that reason alone it's almost worth reading, only, it would be such a dreary story.
Thankfully, I bear some charm which I cannot explain. The book I read immediately after The Good Soldier was the antidote to everything that was poison in Ford's book. Look up to see what I mean.

The Centaur

John Updike

The Founding Fathers, he explained, in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. I am a paid keeper of Society's unusables--the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant. The only incentive I can give you, kid, to behave yourself is this: if you don't buckle down and learn something, you'll be as dumb as I am, and you'll have to teach school to earn a living.

That some forgotten artist in an irrevocable sequence of hours had labored, doubtless with authentic craft and love, to produce this ugly, dusty, browned, and totally ignored representation seemed to contain a message for me which I did not wish to read.

Haste and improvidence had always marked our domestic details. The reason, it came to me, was that our family's central member, my father, had never rid himself o the idea that he might soon be moving on. This fear, or hope, dominated our home.

This was my first experience with Mr. Updike. It won't be my last, but I am not feeling a fire to search him out in print with any hurry. The Centaur is a good book; well-written, good for reading, good for thinking, and with just enough touch of mystery and high-handed thought to keep you searching, thinking, and feeling humble.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of The Centaur was Updike's willingness to blend the ancient myth of Chiron into his story rather than just use it as the basis for his story. I entered this book imagining that it would be a retelling of the old myth; The Centaur was a retelling but also just a telling. Updike moves from the modern era to the mythological era in the space of sentences and blends the life of our hero with the life of Chiron--so much that the narrative often speaks as if our hero were a centaur and the characters he interacts with were indeed various pillars of Greek mythology. Updike even helpfully provides an index at the back of the book to link which characters with which myths.
\If you haven't noticed the reason I'm referring to "our hero" is because I can't remember the main character's name.\
But if you do choose to read this book, be careful for you take a heavy load upon your shoulders. The main character, our not so memorable hero, seems to be slowly dragged down throughout the pages, to be caught in the thickest of mires of deep black goo. He seems tired of life--as you might expect from the Chiron myth--but to see it brought to reality in a man, especially a school teacher is numbing.
Interesting style and interesting story combine to give a force to the emotion of the story. It's worth checking out.