Final Fridays (30 page)

Well.

Well? A writer-friend from Kansas who knows about water-wells informs me of the important distinction between dry wells and “gurglers,” which may cease producing for a time but eventually resume; he encourages me to believe that I'm still a Gurgler. I hope that's the case—but if in fact my well turns out to be dry, I remind myself that as we've aged, my wife and I have been obliged to put other much-enjoyed pleasures behind us: snow- and water-skiing, tennis, sailboat-cruising on the Chesapeake, and yes, even vigorous youthful sex (but certainly not love and intimacy, and as someone once wisely observed, “Sex goes, memory goes, but the memory of sex—that never goes”). If my vocation—my “calling”!—has joined that sigh-and-smile list of Once Upon a Times, its memory will be a fond one indeed.

Time will tell.

Meanwhile, maybe write a little piece about . . . not writing?

Although it's neither my first memorial tribute to Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) nor my last,
¹
what follows—written at the request of Donald's brother Frederick (himself an accomplished novelist, editor of
The Mississippi Review
, and alumnus of the Hopkins Writing Seminars) to introduce a posthumously published collection of Don's nonfiction
²
—is the one I think best suited to open this “Tributes and Memoria” section of
Final Fridays
.

 

 

“H
OW COME YOU write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way
he
does.”

Asked another, smiling but serious, “How can we become better writers than we are?”

“Well,” DB advised, “for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.”

“But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of
literature
, from Gilgamesh up through last semester. . . .”

“That, too,” Donald affirmed, and twinkled that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-11th-Street twinkle of his. “You're probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping: Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”

Although I count myself among my late comrade's most appreciative fans—invariably delighted, over the too-few decades of his career, by his short stories, his novels, his infrequent but soundly-argued essays into aesthetics, and his miscellaneous nonfiction pieces (not to mention his live conversation, as above)—I normally see
The New Yorker
, in which so much of his writing was first published, only in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. I have therefore grown used to DB-ing in happy binges once every few years, when a new collection of the wondrous stuff appears (originally from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; anon from Putnam; later from Harper and Row; finally from Random House) and I set other reading aside to go straight through it, savoring the wit, the bite, the exactitude and flair, inspired whimsy, aw-shucks urbanity, irreal realism and real irreality, wired tersitude, and suchlike Barthelmanic pleasures.

Finally
, it says up in that parenthetical list of his publishers. The adverb constricts my spirit; I feel again what I felt when word came of Donald's illness and death in 1989, at age merely-58, in the fullness of his life and happy artistry: my maiden experience of survivor-guilt, for we were virtual coevals often assigned to the same team (or angel-choir or Hell-pit) by critics friendly and not, who require such categories—Fabulist, Postmodernist, what have they. We ourselves, and the shifting roster of our team-/choir-/pit-mates,
³
were
perhaps more impressed by our
differences
than by any similarities, but there was most certainly fellow-feeling among us—and was I to go on breathing air, enjoying health and wine and food, work and play and love and language, and Donald not? Go on spinning out my sometimes hefty fabrications (which, alphabetically cheek-by-jowl to his on bookshelves, he professed to fear might topple onto and crush their stage-right neighbor), and Donald not his sparer ones, that we both knew to be in no such danger?

Well. One adds the next sentence to its predecessors, and over the ensuing years, as bound volumes of mine have continued to forth-come together with those of his other team-/choir-/pit-mates, it has been some balm to see (impossibly posthumous!) Donald's appearing as before, right along with them, as if by some benign necromancy: first his comic-elegaic Arthurian novel
The King
(1990); then
The Teachings of Don B.
(1992), a rich miscellany eloquently foreworded by T-/C-/P-mate Thomas Pynchon; now
Not-Knowing
; and still to come, a collection of hitherto unpublished and/or uncollected short stories.

Benign it is, but no necromancy. We owe these last fruits not only to Donald's far-ranging muse, but to the dedication of his literary executors and the editorial enterprise of Professor Kim Herzinger of the University of Southern Mississippi. Thanks to that dedication and enterprise, we shall have the print-part of our fellow whole, or all but whole. Never enough, and too soon cut off—like Carver, like Calvino, all at their peak—but what a feast it is!

 

ITS COURSE IN hand displays most directly the high intelligence behind the author's audacious, irrepressible fancy. The complementary opening essays, “After Joyce” and “Not-Knowing” (that title-piece
was for years required reading in the aforementioned graduate fiction-writing seminar at Johns Hopkins); the assorted reviews and pungent “comments” on literature, film, and politics; the pieces “On Art,” never far from the center of Donald's concerns; the seven flat-out interviews (edited after the fact by the interviewee)—again and again I find myself once again nodding
yes, yes
to their insights, obiter dicta, and mini-manifestoes, delivered with unfailing tact and zing. See, e.g., “Not-Knowing”'s jim-dandy cadenza upon the rendering of “Melancholy Baby” on jazz “banjolele”: as astute (and hilarious) a statement as I know of about the place of “aboutness” in art.
⁴
Bravo, maestro banjolelist: Encore!

Here is a booksworth of encores, to be followed by one more: the story-volume yet to come, a final serving of the high literary art for which that high intelligence existed.

And then?

Then there it is, alas, and for encores we will go back and back again to the feast whereof these are end-courses: back to
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
, to
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
, to
Snow White
and
City Life
and the rest. Permanent pleasures of American “Postmodernist” writing, they are. Permanent literary pleasures period.

Shortly after the author's death on May 15, 1998, this tribute to John Hawkes was first published in
The New York Times Book Review
.
¹

 

 

T
HE DAY AFTER Frank (“The Voice”) Sinatra died in California at age 82, a no less distinctive American voice—in certain quarters even more prized, though in the nature of things less widely known—was stilled in Providence, Rhode Island. With the death at age 72 of John Hawkes—fiction writer, fiction mentor, and fiction live-reader
extraordinaire
—we lost one of the steadily brightest (and paradoxically darkest) lights of American fiction through our century's second half: a navigation star for scores of apprentice writers however different their own literary course, and as spellbinding a public reader of his own work as I have ever heard, who have heard many.
Passion
was this writer's subject, even when manifested by non-human characters (the narrator/protagonist of his novel
Sweet William
is a horse; the deuteragonist of
The Frog
is a very French amphibian);
impassioned
was his manner as author, teacher, reader, and friend. He was, to echo another of his titles, truly a Passion Artist: for five decades one of our most original literary imaginations and masterful prose stylists.

Hawkes's books number nearly a score, from
The Cannibal
in 1949 (actually from a privately printed verse-collection in 1943, but the author never returned to poetry except in his prose, which never left it) through
An Irish Eye
in 1997. Mostly novels, all of modest heft, plus a scarifying story-and-novella collection and a volume of short plays, they have in common a preoccupation with the horrific, suffused with the erotic and redeemed by the comic. One sees affinities with Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor; to mention such affinities, however, is to be reminded of Hawkes's difference from those compatriots, all of whom he admired. Like theirs, his fiction is in the American-gothic grain, but his material is more cosmopolitan—closer in this respect to that of his bookshelf-neighbor Hawthorne, or to Poe. A Hawkes novel may be set in England, Germany, Maine, Alaska, the Caribbean, “Illyria,” or some Transylvania of the soul; literal places are less important to him than the geographies of passion and language. His imagination, like Kafka's, is powerfully metaphorical. And dark. And comic.

It has been also one of the most consistent among our contemporaries', both in quality and in voice. One never knew what Hawkes would write of next—Nepal? Patagonia? The Moon?—but one recognized at once that narrative voice: the sensuous cadences refracting comic-horrific scenes (a boy plays Brahms outside the door of the lavatory where his father is committing suicide; an earnest but hapless male teacher is set upon and all but castrated by his murderous Maenad students in St. Dunster's Training School for Girls—and comes back for more); the fearsome, unexpected details (a sexually voltaged foursome retrieve from a dark pit in a ruined medieval fortress a rusted, toothed iron chastity belt; a dead horse's
ears are “as unlikely to twitch as two pointed fern leaves etched on glass”); the ubiquitous sensuality and trademark rhetorical questions (“[Did she not] note Seigneur's unsmiling countenance and his silence and the way he stood at a distance with his feet apart and that strange mechanical staff gripped in a firm hand, its butt in the sand and its small iron beak towering above his head on the end of the staff? Wouldn't this sight be quite enough to instill in most grown women . . . the first unpleasant taste of apprehension? But it was not so . . .”).

Hawkes-lovers recognize at once that such passages as the above (from
Virginie, Her Two Lives
) are, among other things, disquietingly
comic
: neither de Sade played straight nor de Sade played for laughs, but de Sade (and the artist) compassionately,
impassionedly
satirized. “I deplore . . . nightmare,” Hawkes declared in an interview with Robert Scholes; “I deplore terror. [But] I happen to believe that it is only by traveling those dark tunnels, perhaps not literally but psychically, that one can learn . . . what it means to be compassionate.” What nightmare? Which terror? “My fiction,” he goes on to say, “is generally an evocation of the nightmare or terroristic universe in which sexuality is destroyed by law, by dictum, by human perversity, by contraption, and it is this destruction [that] I have attempted to portray and confront in order to be true to human fear and . . . ruthlessness, but also in part to evoke its opposite, the moment of freedom from constriction, restraint, death.”

Yes, well: also, one might add, to provoke the cathartic
laughter
at sexual and fictive “contraption” afforded by that hard but pleasurably won freedom. So charged with Eros is just about everything in a typical Hawkes fiction that my private ground-rule for him was
No
literal
sex ever to be described, Jack
—a rule that I neglected to inform
him of until after its brief infraction in a couple of the later novels, but to which he gratifyingly returns in the last ones.

 

The last ones
—that's not easily said. Hawkes's fiction has been widely admired from the start by literary critics and his fellow writers: His book-jackets are garlanded with enthusiastic testimonials from the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, Donald Barthelme, Leslie Fiedler. But his standing, alas, has ever surpassed his following, and that's a pity, for he's no more for connoisseurs only than is an excellent wine. For those unfamiliar with his fiction, a fine first taste is
Humors of the Blood & Skin, A John Hawkes Reader
: a self-assembled degustation with autobiographical notes by the author and a beautiful introduction by William H. Gass.
²
But really, one can begin anywhere: The voice is all of a piece.

Whatever one thinks of the post-World-War-Two American phenomenon of poets and novelists as professors in creative writing programs, it has most certainly afforded a generation of aspiring writers and students of literature close access to practitioners of the art; in the best cases, to
masters
of the art, impassioned (that word again) about their coaching and their coachees as well as about their own congress with the muse. By all accounts, John Hawkes was among the chiefest of these. After a stint driving ambulances in Italy and Germany in the closing months of World War II, he married his indispensable,
sine qua non
Sophie (who with their four grown children survives him), graduated from Harvard and published his first novel in 1949, worked for six years at his alma mater's university
press, began teaching there as an instructor in English, and in 1958 shifted to Brown, where he anchored the graduate writing program until succeeded upon his retirement by his close friend and distinguished writer-comrade Robert Coover. I too am a beneficiary of that post-war phenomenon, and inasmuch as a certain number of apprentice writers have gypsied between Brown and Johns Hopkins, we have over the decades had a number of alumni in common, every one of whom revered Hawkes as an intense, convivial, time-generous,
impassioned
mentor/coach as well as an inspired, inspiring artist. “Plus,” the writer Mary Robison once said, concluding her introduction of him to an audience in Baltimore, “he wears the most adorable clothes, and anybody who doesn't think so can go straight to hell!”