Donald Barthelme: America’s Weirdest Literary Genius

Among members of my family, the word bath is pronounced “baff.” It’s not that we have some hereditary speech defect or obscure regional accent. It’s because at one point or another, we all read Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White, a retelling of the classic fairy tale, and became obsessed with it. In Barthelme’s version, the seven dwarfs say “baff” instead of “bath.” I don’t know why. But now we do too. (The dwarfs also sleep with Snow White and sell Chinese-themed baby food for a living. They still say “heigh-ho,” though.)

There aren’t many writers who have ascended into the literary ionosphere and then fallen back down to earthly obscurity with the nose-bleeding steepness of Barthelme. In the 1970s, he was considered the future of literature, and he still has fanatical supporters, my family being Exhibit A. But mostly he’s regarded as a dead, twisted branch on the evolutionary tree of American letters. The first major biography of him, Tracy Daugherty’s Hiding Man (St. Martin’s; 581 pages), should help correct that.

Reading Barthelme, you’d think he crawled from the steaming wreckage of an asteroid that originated in the outer solar system. In fact, he grew up in Houston. Born in 1931, the son of an influential architect, he was a good-looking, headstrong kid with ironic eyebrows like circumflex marks. He was restless and rebarbative, full of jittery, sarcastic energy and the kind of confidence that forms only around a tiny seed of insecurity. After experimenting with college, journalism and marriage in Houston, he got sick of the provinces and lit out for New York City at 31.

Manhattan in the ’60s was afizz with folk rock, Pop art and Abstract Expressionism. Soon it was afizz with Barthelme too–the New Yorker picked up on his strange genius and provided a very conventional venue for his very unconventional fiction. Barthelme wasn’t interested in plots or characters. He confabulated his stories out of different strains of language–philosophy, psychology, scientific jargon, advertising, adventure stories–which he then crashed into one another, demolition-derby style, to demonstrate how hilariously inadequate they were for describing the world around us. In “Paraguay,” for example, he employs the language of industrial production as art criticism: “Sheet art is generally dried in smoke and is dark brown in color. Bulk art is air-dried, and changes color in particular historical epochs.” (Barthelme quotes lose some of their magic out of context, like a colorful shell removed from a tide pool.) In Snow White–to which the New Yorker devoted almost an entire issue in 1967–the heroine sighs, “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!”

A prodigious smoker and drinker, Barthelme died in 1989 of throat cancer, having already seen critics begin to dismiss him as a novelty act. In truth, the mistake we made with Barthelme was expecting him to be the beginning of something. He was the end of something–the green flash in the brilliant sunset of modernism. But in his ceaseless reconfiguration of broken words, he gave voice to our longing for unbroken ones and freed us to go off in search of them–like the dwarfs in Snow White who, on the novel’s final page, “DEPART IN SEARCH OF A NEW PRINCIPLE HEIGH-HO.”