Flying to America by Donald Barthelme
FLYING TO AMERICA
***
Other Books by Donald Barthelme
Amateurs
City Life
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
The Dead Father
Forty Stories
Great Days
Guilty Pleasures
The King
Overnight to Many Distant Cities
Not-Knowing
Paradise
Sadness
Sam’s Bar
Sixty Stories
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
Snow White
The Teachings of Don B.
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
Copyright © 2007 by The Estate of Donald Barthelme
Preface and editing copyright © 2007 by Kim Herzinger
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barthelme, Donald.
Flying to America : 45 more stories / Donald Barthelme ;
edited and with a preface by Kim Herzinger.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58243-917-4
1. Experimental fiction, American.
I. Herzinger, Kim A., 1946–II. Title
PS3552.A76F59 2007
813'.54 — dc222007015211
Jacket design by Gerilyn Attebery
Interior design by David Bullen
Shoemaker Hoard
www.shoemakerhoard.com
10987654321
CONTENTS
Preface
Flying to America
Perpetua
Edward and Pia
The Piano Player
Henrietta and Alexandra
Presents
Among the Beanwoods
You Are as Brave as Vincent Van Gogh
The Agreement
Basil From Her Garden
Paradise Before the Egg
Three
Up, Aloft in the Air
Bone Bubbles
The Big Broadcast of 1938
This Newspaper Here
Tales of the Swedish Army
And Then
Can We Talk
Hiding Man
The Reference
Edwards, Amelia
Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight
Pages from the Annual Report
The Bed
The Discovery
You Are Cordially Invited
The Viennese Opera Ball
Belief
Wrack
The Question Party
Manfred
A Man
Heather
Pandemonium
A Picture History of the War
The Police Band
The Sea of Hesitation
The Mothball Fleet
Subpoena
The New Member
To London and Rome
The Apology
Florence Green Is 81
Tickets
Notes
Preface
In the fifteen years since we began the project of putting together all of Donald Barthelme’s unpublished and uncollected work, we’ve published his satires, parodies, fables, illustrated stories, plays, essays, reviews, occasional pieces, and interviews. But the crown of the project was always understood to be the publication of Barthelme’s unpublished and uncollected stories. It is the stories, after all, that established his genius and influence, and which radically transformed what twentieth-century American literature could be. Saddening as it is to have to accept that after these there will be no more stories, there is still reason to celebrate. All of Donald Barthelme’s work is now available in book form, and the importance of his achievement can now be fully appreciated.
Sixty Stories, it was once said, was Barthelme’s attempt to establish his canon. Forty Stories, then, might be seen as his attempt to enlarge it. Flying to America: 45 More Stories, which contains every story not collected in Sixty Stories and Forty Stories, twelve stories never collected in any of the individual published volumes, and three previously unpublished stories, is a crucial addition — perhaps the crucial addition — to his existing canon.
The forty-five stories in Flying to America display the range of Barthelme’s talents as well as a rare peek into the working methods of a supreme literary collagist. Some of Barthelme’s most dedicatedly experimental stories are available here. “Florence Green Is 81,” “The Sea of Hesitation,” “The Viennese Opera Ball,” “Bone Bubbles,” and “Flying to America,” for instance, demonstrate that any assumptions a reader might bring to a Barthelme story will be subject to challenge and disruption. “Florence Green Is 81,” the first story in Barthelme’s very first book, announced immediately and definitively that Barthelme’s kind of joking was not going to be joking around. As the title of that first book, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, suggests, “Florence Green Is 81” was a statement as well as a plea — Barthelme clearly thought that it was the likes of Caligari, that dislocated and aesthetically challenging figure, that required a comeback. We had had quite enough of that well-worn hero, Shane, and the forms and formulae that had created and sustained him. “Bone Bubbles” is a piece in which Barthelme’s experiment in word collision reminds us of such tablet breakers as Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs, or even Mallarmé. The title story, “Flying to America,” is a superb example of Barthelme’s collage method of construction, a story that itself absorbed bits and pieces of previously published work, and then lent itself — in bits and pieces — to no fewer than three subsequently published stories.
Many of the stories in Flying to America were generated by the aesthetic and cultural issues that engaged Barthelme throughout his writing career: the perils of the unfulfilled life; the modern tendency toward conformist nonconformity; the blindness of obsession; the relationship between art and life, politics and life, sex and life; the necessity of continuing to ask questions even as we are aware of the inevitability of not knowing the answers. “Perpetua,” to call on one example, features a woman perpetually in search of an authentic, nonconformist individualism, only to demonstrate that the very act of consciously setting out to make herself different can become the worst kind of cliche, leading to a kind of drained theatrical one-upmanship of idiosyncrasy that she is doomed to repeat — perpetually. “To London and Rome” offers a vision of married life mechanistically attached to money and acquisition, where the flatness and terror of the unfulfilled life portrayed in the main text is juxtaposed to a column of statements and “stage directions” that remind us of the joy-stripped world of Harold Pinter’s theater of menace. The marvelous “Tickets,” the last story Barthelme published in The New Yorker, features that numbingly formal, almost-British voice he so often used — a voice we associate with Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, not to speak of that great line of English comic writers from Wodehouse and Sir Henry Howard Bashford to Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard — completely absorbed in its own obsessions, delivered by a character whose unremitting confidence only serves to reveal his incomparable blindness. “The Agreement,” to call on one last example, is constructed around one man’s series of recurring and increasingly anxious questions, questions that are unanswerable because, to quote Barthelme himself, “the Project Life is in some sense beyond his abilities.”
Here are stories in which the attitudes and processes of two seemingly mutually exclusive worlds are wonderfully mixed or transposed and thereby refreshed. In “The Police Band,” for instance, a police riot squad trains to perform its job of calming crowds and maintaining ord
And here, too, are stories motivated by Barthelme’s persistent anger at institutional bureaucracy and, especially, at the dangerous follies of government. “Subpoena,” “The Reference,” “The New Member,” come to mind, as does “The Mothball Fleet,” in which an “Admiral” who once believed in the mission of those destroyers and battleships, and the meaning of the flag they flew, now gathers the same ships to attack a government he no longer trusts. “I believed,” the Admiral tells us. “Then, over time, I discovered that they were lying. Consistently. With exemplary skill, in a hundred languages. I decided to take the ships.” It is the kind of Vietnam-era story we might have expected Barthelme to write, a furious comic parable restrained by its own seriousness, but sustained by an irony which is his last defense against a government which has rendered him helpless, angry, and immensely sad. It is the kind of story we might, perhaps, expect Barthelme to write now, if he had lived to see something of the Vietnam era making its ugly return.
In the papers examined after Barthelme’s death, in 1989, there were a number of “fits and starts” — fragments, beginnings, and unfinished pieces. But for a writer who published significantly and continuously for almost thirty years, there just weren’t that many. Nor were there many unpublished pieces that we could say were complete. Of them, “Among the Beanwoods” and “Heather” both revisit the linguistic torque we find in Barthelme’s best work. “Pandemonium,” on the other hand, was a piece Barthelme was working on very late in his life, and is very likely an early draft, a sketch of what he intended eventually to do. Unpolished as it may be, “Pandemonium” is still a lively little thing, and serves at the very least to provide us a look at his writing in process.
As was the case with The Teachings of Don B. and Not-Knowing, the two companion volumes to Flying to America, the work that appears in this book falls into four categories: (1) unpublished work; (2) uncollected work; (3) work — other than the novels — that did not appear in his two compendium collections, Sixty Stories and Forty Stories; and (4) work that, though perhaps later collected, first (or in one case later) appeared in significantly different form. Editorial information has been kept to a minimum, but certain crucial information has been included in the “Notes” at the back of the book.
For those truly dedicated followers of Barthelmismo who already know and love Donald Barthelme’s work, Flying to America is a rare and wonderful treat — to have in your hands at long last a handsome number of previously uncollected and even a few unseen stories. For those new to Barthelme, here is an opportunity to discover the literary giant whose influence was singular to many of today’s most celebrated writers. Picking up where Sixty Stories and Forty Stories left off, here — sadly but thankfully — are the final forty-five.
Kim Herzinger
FLYING TO AMERICA
Flying to America
18 March
Sing, goddess, the brilliance of Perpetua, who came then to lend her salt-sweet God-gift beauty to the film. Sing the beauty of the breasts of a Perpetua, like unto the cancelment of action at law against you, sing the redness of her hair, like unto the anger of Peleus’ son who put pains a thousandfold upon the Achaeans. Sing the hauteur of Perpetua, like unto that of a thief of fine porcelains, sing the movement of her naked leg under the long gray gown, like unto the progress of that sad song, the Borodin Quartet in D Major. Sing the whiteness of her brow, like unto a failed poem pulped into Erasable Bond, sing her sudden smile, like unto the shriek of that swan which hid Zeus the powerful. Sing, goddess, the rancor of Perpetua, which is plain to see, sing her gold-glistering trumpet, with which she promulgates her rancor and earns her daily bread, by the sweat of her lip. Sing, goddess, the mystery of Perpetua, of which I cannot speak, without undue emotion, sing her stern eye, which tells me that, among the sons of men, I am not worthy.
Perpetua showed us her breasts.
“Yes, they’re wonderful,” I said.
All of the members of the crew were smiling.
She has just left her husband, Harold.
“Order is not interesting,” Perpetua said. “Disorder is interesting.”
“Thank you, Perpetua. Ezra will call you when we’re ready for you.”
20 March
Two days of inactivity.
The script is terrible.
Ezra said: “This script is no good.”
I maintained a grave and thoughtful silence. Then I asked: “Who have you hired?”
“Joan,” Ezra said. “Marty. Mitch. Marcello.”
“Who are they?”
“Marty,” Ezra said, “is a C.O. whose draft board requires him to work for extremely low pay at some hardship in a job with provable social utility.”
“Are we that?”
“I presented us as a leprosarium.”
This was reasonable.
“Mitch,” Ezra said, “has come from the asylum.”
“Which?”
“The Maryland Motherhouse of Our Lady of Perpetual Chagrin.”
“Is he a nun?”
“He is not.”
“In what capacity was he there?”
“In the capacity, borderline case.”
“Very good. Go on.”
“The podesta’s brief against Marcello,” Ezra said, and paused, “I have chosen to disbelieve.”
“And Joan?”
“Mail fraud.”
Mail fraud is not something that bothers me much.
“O.K., Ezra. You have done a good job. Monday we begin.”
“How?” Ezra asked. “With this script?”
“Have you never heard of grace?”
21 March
I heard a noise outside. I looked out of the window. An old woman was bent over my garbage can, borrowing some of my garbage. They do that all over the city, old men and old women. They borrow your garbage and they never bring it back.
My apartment is nearly empty. I’ve thrown everything out. Books, pictures, most of the furniture. The parquet needs a waxing, its brown has changed to brown-gray. The plants are withering because I don’t water them. My wife and child are gone.
The telephone rang. It was the genius (one of the people we’ve hired for the film).
“They haf removed the tooth,” he told me.
“Fine. Did it hurt?”
“Not so much. But I am worrying.”
“What about?”
“I haf the tooth. Which in your opinion museum should I donate it to — the Smithsonian or rather the Metropolitan?”
“The Smithsonian. Absolutely the Smithsonian.”
22 March
Thinking about the “Flying to America” sequence. This will be the film’s climax. But am I capable of mounting such a spectacle? And will the man from Brewers’ Natural (the bank that put up the money for the film) understand?
23 March
The first day of shooting. It took the crew to the desert. Perpetua came along to watch. It was necessary for me not to watch Perpetua watching.
“Tom,” Ezra said, “we should have stars.”
“No stars,” I said.
“Stars have bigger heads than ordinary people,” Ezra argued. “Bigger heads photograph better.”
“No stars.”
Shooting in the desert was a mistake but an instructive mistake. I blew my whistle. The crew gathered around. I explained the sequence. We’d be shooting two parallel blue lines each one a mile long. I could smell resistance. Resistance-pheromones being released all around me.
Ezra took me aside. “What they object to is not the sequence but the whistle. They don’t like to be whistled at.”
The whistle stayed up in the air for a long time.
Everyone looked at the whistle.
We shot the two parallel blue lines each a mile long.
Something wrong. The scene has no movement, no impact.
What about printing the words of Christ in red, across the bottom of each frame?
Dismal to want to succeed but I can’t help it. I watched the whistle, still in the air.
25 March
I was once a monster of a kind. I was bookish. Half man, half book.
No longer. Now I am worried about making the film.
Even today I am tempted to go to the library and find a book about great trumpet playing and read it so that when the moment comes (Perpetua is a trumpet player, with the New World Symphony Orchestra) I can discourse knowledgeably on the subject. I resist the impulse.
“And is it not the case,” said Ezra when we first met, “that I have been associated with the production of nineteen major motion pictures of such savage originality, scalding vérité, and honey-warm sexual indecency that the very theaters chained their doors rather than permit exhibition of these major motion pictures on their ammonia-scented gum-daubed premises? And is it not the case,” said Ezra, “that I myself with my two sinewy hands and strong-wrought God-gift brain have participated in the changing of seven high-class literary works of the first water and four of the second water and two of the third water into major muscatel? And is it not the living truth,” said Ezra, “that I was the very man, I myself and none other without exception, who clung to the underside of the camera of the great Dreyer, clung with my two sinewy hands and noble well-wrought thighs and cunning-muscled knees both dexter and sinister, during the cinematization of the master’s ‘Gertrud,’ clung there to slow the movement of said camera to that exquisite slowness that distinguishes this masterpiece from all other masterpieces of its water? And is it not chapter and verse,” said Ezra, “that I was the comrade of all the comrades of the Dziga-Vertov Group who was first in no-saying, firmest in no-saying, most final in no-saying, to all honey-sweet commercial seductions of whatever water and capitalist blandishments of whatever water and ideological incorrectitudes of whatever water whatsoever? And is it not as true as Saul become Paul,” Ezra said, “that you require a man, a firm-limbed long-winded good true man, and that I am the man standing before you in his very blood and bones?”