Old Flaming Youth

Jean Stafford (1915–1979)
From Jean Stafford: Complete Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Interview with Kathryn Davis on the novels of Jean Stafford: “She never sentimentalized anything” (Library of America)

“When Joan Didion met Jean Stafford” (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” Jean Stafford
• “The Empress’s Ring,” Nancy Hale
• “The Bouquet,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Buy the book
Jean Stafford: Complete Stories & Other Writings
46 stories in all
List price: $35.00
Web Store price: $28.00

“There’s a rhythm in Victor dance music that brings joy with every step.” Illustration for a magazine advertisement from the 1920s by Victor Talking Machine Company for Victrola phonographs “in great variety of styles from $25 to $1500.” Image: eBay.

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When Jean Stafford’s third (and final) novel, The Catherine Wheel, appeared at the beginning of 1952, a staff writer for The New York Times Book Review asked if family members in Colorado had been worried by her childhood ambition to become a writer. “My father was a writer of Western stories under the name of Jack Wonder,” she responded, “and he wrote stories with titles like ‘The Transmogrified Calf’—so that I certainly didn’t shock him.” If anything, in her public statements she usually passed over or downplayed the role, both positive and negative, that her father played in her education.

John Stafford was the son of Richard Stafford, an Irish immigrant who had moved to Missouri from Kansas and built up a fortune as the proprietor of a thousand-acre cattle ranch. When his father died in 1899, John Stafford inherited a significant portion of the estate; Jean, looking through her father’s papers years later, realized the value of the bequest was close to three hundred thousand dollars. After brief posts as a reporter in New York and Chicago, John Stafford lived with his mother in Missouri until his marriage to Ethel McKillop in 1907. He published his first and only book, a Western adventure titled When Cattle Kingdom Fell, in 1910 and later wrote Western stories for pulp magazines under such names as Jack Wonder, Ben Delight, and O. B. Miles. In 1912, the Staffords moved to Covina, California, where they purchased a ten-acre walnut ranch and built an eight-room house; their fourth child, Jean, was born in 1915. Living off his inheritance, Stafford took on the role of an eccentric gentleman farmer, devoting most of his energies to his dream of becoming a successful author.

Five years later, the family’s life in Covina (later described by the children as “idyllic” and noted for its “pastoral serenity”) was disrupted when John Stafford decided to sell the ranch and move the family to San Diego to be closer to the stock exchange—where he proceeded to lose the entirety of his inheritance gambling on the market over the following year. In 1922, with an infusion of cash from John’s mother, John and Ethel Stafford decided to try their luck in Colorado, and they apparently oversold the idea to their children. In a biography of Jean Stafford, Charlotte Margolis Goodman writes that the children “had been duped about the West by their mother, whose notions of that terrain were principally derived by postcards sent by friends, and by their father, who had filled their heads with pictures of a mythical West that no longer existed.”

The reality of the twentieth-century “West” proved far more mundane. “Colorado was just as uninteresting as California and more spread out,” a Jean wrote as a teenager in an essay that appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera after winning a statewide contest. “It was monstrous that we had been tricked by Tom Mix and Zane Grey and all the others whose bloated fancies have produced such glamorous exaggerations about dashing cowpunchers on big roans defying death on landslides in order to do justice to the black-mustached villains.”

The Staffords first lived in Colorado Springs and later moved to Boulder so their oldest daughter, Mary Lee, could live at home while attending the University of Colorado. Jean’s mother took on odd jobs, eventually converting their home into a boarding house for female college students, while Jean’s father spent his days and nights in the basement writing increasingly unconventional stories and working on an equally unpublishable diatribe lamenting the American system of finance and debt. He also wrote pieces about his idea for a mysterious weapon and, after Hiroshima, ecstatically claimed that the atomic bomb was his “long-cherished dream of a Hell Ray come to life.”

On the one hand, John Stafford’s erudition, oddly formed as it was, and his enthusiasms for classics of literature, for his treasured Encyclopædia Britannica (one of the few possessions he had brought from California), and for dictionaries were all shared by his young daughter, who began writing poems and stories at an early age. She found a ready audience—and an unsparing critic—in her father. On the other, as she grew older, she began to realize he was as much a liability as an asset. Unshaven, shabbily dressed, reclusive, unemployed and unemployable, John Stafford “sat in the filthy basement furnace room on an old leather seat salvaged from an abandoned car,” writes Goodman. “There he typed his manuscripts on an archaic typewriter, and the sounds of his muttering and cursing would go up the hot-air registers, much to the embarrassment of his wife and children.” None of Jean’s childhood friends could recall ever seeing the inside of her home.

In her early twenties, as she began in earnest on a career as writer, Stafford wrote to a friend, “Pa writes from five in the morning until eight at night not stopping for lunch. He asked me the other day how many words I wrote per day. I said about fifteen hundred. He gasped. He said he thought he wrote at least 5,000 which is his minimum.” The piles of unpublished, unread manuscripts accumulated more quickly than the inevitable rejection letters. “Mother said she did not understand how I could write, having witnessed Dad’s thirty-year miscarriage,” she told another friend. In yet another letter, she admitted, “Look, what consoles me is this; I am unpublished, and I hope to Christ that when I am published, he will be dead.” In letters sent in the late 1940s to her ex-husband, the poet Robert Lowell, Stafford pointed out that usually in her stories “the father is either dead or cruelly driven away,” and she recalled “my early poverty which had been needless; I remembered all the humiliation, the half-hunger, the shabby, embarrassing clothes, the continual oppression, my mother’s tears and my father’s dreadful laugh.” When she visited her father for the last time in 1951, she was horrified anew and wrote to her agent, “seeing him again, I am amazed that all of us did not commit suicide in our cradles.” He died fifteen years later, at the age of 91.

“My theory about children is my theory about writing,” she told a Boston Morning Herald reporter a little more than a year after “Old Flaming Youth,” a story about four adolescent girls, appeared in the December 1950 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “The most important thing in writing is irony, and we find irony most clearly in children. The very innocence of a child is irony.” More than a dozen of the 46 stories published by Stafford are about children and are set either in the fictional town of Adams, a thinly disguised version of Boulder, or in other rural Western locales. While she seemed to have had little problem imagining the world through the eyes of children, “Stafford struggled to find a satisfactory portrait for a character based on her father,” writes Ann Hulbert, another of Stafford’s biographers. “Although her father was the original inspiration for her style, he was only rarely its successful subject.” His presence in her fiction is usually indirect, and “Old Flaming Youth,” Goodman points out, “abounds in father figures”: absent (the fathers in both families are dead), barely present (a doddering grandfather who mutters to himself on the porch), and intrusive (a stepfather who “every single night would fly off the handle about something”).

“Reflecting Stafford’s ambivalent feelings about her own father, this grim story, with its mixture of comedy and despair, is reminiscent not only of Mark Twain, but of the stories of Flannery O’Connor and James Purdy,” notes Goodman, who thinks “it deserves a better fate than it was granted when Stafford chose to omit it from her Collected Stories [1969].” Virtually forgotten since its publication seventy years ago, “Old Flaming Youth” is restored to print in a new Library of America volume, Jean Stafford: Collected Stories & Other Writings, and we present it here as our Story of the Week selection.

  

Notes: The sound recordings mentioned in the story are: “St. James Infirmary Blues,” made famous in 1928 by Louis Armstrong; “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” by James Campbell and Reginald Connelly and recorded by several artists in the late 1920s, and “Sleepy Time Gal,” released by Ben Bernie and His Orchestra in 1925, which spent 13 weeks of the following year atop the Billboard chart.

Love Nest was a brand of candy bar and Hippolyte, of marshmallow creme. Girls’ Friendly is an Episcopal social organization for girls and young women, founded in England in 1875 and in the United States in 1877. Faith Baldwin was a prolific and popular American writer of romance fiction whose novels often had working women as their protagonists.

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We knew it must have been the Ferguson twins who had stolen Janie’s gold bracelet because no one else had been in the house that day except the iceman and he had only come onto the back porch. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Personal Is Political

Carol Hanisch (b. 1942)
From Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can

Interesting Links
“Fifty Years Ago, Protesters Took on the Miss America Pageant and Electrified the Feminist Movement” (Roxane Gay, Smithsonian Magazine)

“A Women's Liberation Timeline 1960–1977” (Ann Medina, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union Herstory Project)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Southern Peace Walk: Two Issues or One?” Barbara Deming
• “A Matter of Freedom,” Juanita Nelson
• “Women in Politics,” Fannie Barrier Williams

Buy the book
Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can
589 pages
List price: $39.95
Web Store price: $29.95

Front cover of Notes from the Second Year, 1970, edited by Shulie Firestone and Anne Koedt, the collection in which “The Personal Is Political” appeared. (Click to see full cover.) The cover photograph was by freelance photojournalist David Robison. Image courtesy of Duke University Libraries Collection & Archive.

“The Personal Is Political.” As a slogan, it has become ubiquitous in many spheres of public life, a catchphrase used in situations and contexts far removed from its original purpose a half century ago, when it was coined for the title of a paper written to defend women’s consciousness-raising groups from their belittlement by activists in both the civil rights and women’s movements.

Carol Hanisch does not actually use the phrase in the paper—although she comes close: “One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems.” In a subsequent essay written nearly four decades later, in 2006, she clarifies that she didn’t give the paper its famous title when Shulie Firestone and Anne Koedt included it in the 1970 collection Notes from the Second Year. And she reminds us that the term “political was used here in the broad sense of the word as having to do with power relationships, not the narrow sense of electoral politics.”

An Iowa native and graduate of Drake University, Hanisch was the New York City office manager for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), an organization that since the late 1940s had been fighting against segregation in the South. In 1967 she became a founding member of the action group New York Radical Women, which often held their early meetings in the SCEF office. The following year, she came up with the idea for the group’s most famous action, a protest against the Miss America beauty pageant that, after a daylong demonstration on the Atlantic City boardwalk, concluded with the unfurling of a “Women’s Liberation” banner during the nationally televised contest.

At the beginning of 1968, under the auspices of the SCEF, Hanisch moved to Gainesville, Florida, to organize women into the movement. In the introduction to the newly published anthology Women’s Liberation!, Honor Moore and Alix Kates Shulman recall how “women in small groups, in many thousands of living rooms, kitchens, and newly opened women’s centers throughout the country, practiced CR [consciousness-raising] by describing their maltreatment and exploitation in a range of ordinary experiences concerning sex, race, class, family, jobs, housework, health care, childcare, and more.” Many SCEF staff members of both sexes were extremely skeptical of the women’s liberation movement and especially of consciousness-raising, which was dismissed, Hanish writes, as “navel-gazing” and “personal therapy” and certainly “not political.”

“‘The Personal Is Political’ paper and the theory it contains,” she continues, “was my response in the heat of the battle to the attacks on us by SCEF and the rest of the radical movement.” Originally an internal memo written in reply to a document by an SCEF staff member who had criticized CR, the paper was rescued from probable oblivion by another activist, Kathie Sarachild, who suggested it to Firestone and Koedt for their anthology. Hanisch could not have predicted, of course, how widely her memo would be disseminated, nor could she have anticipated how its title would be embraced, popularized, appropriated, and distorted. “Like most of the theories created by the Pro-Woman Line radical feminists, these ideas have been revised or ripped off or even stood on their head and used against their original, radical intent,” she concludes in her more recent essay. “While it’s necessary that theories take their knocks in the real world, like everything else, many of us have learned that once they leave our hands, they need to be defended against revisionism and misuse.”

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For this paper I want to stick pretty close to an aspect of the Left debate commonly talked about—namely “therapy” vs. “therapy and politics.” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Stranger Than Fiction

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
From James Weldon Johnson: Writings

Interesting Links

“James Weldon Johnson’s Ode to the ‘Deep River’ of American History” (David W. Blight, The New Republic)

Audio recording: “Under the Bamboo Tree,” performed by Harry Macdonough and John H. Bieling, 1903, transferred from a Victor sound disc (Library of Congress)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Matter of Principle,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Désirée's Baby,” Kate Chopin
• “Thurgood Marshall and the 14th Amendment,” James Poling

Buy the book
James Weldon Johnson: Writings
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $28.00

Also available
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Paperback
List price: $9.95
Web store price: $7.50

The songwriting team of Cole and Johnson Brothers: Bob Cole, James Weldon Johnson, and J. Rosamond Johnson, 1900, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.

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As the nineteenth century ended and the new century began, Jacksonville school principal James William Johnson (the “Weldon” would come later) underwent two dramatic experiences that would inform his writing and activism for the remainder of his life.

The first incident occurred in 1895, the year after he graduated with honors from Atlanta University and became the principal of the Stanton School, his own alma mater and the school where his mother had taught math. “I had an academic education, but had had no special training as a teacher,” he recalled in his memoir Along the Way. “It seemed that the first practical step for me to take would be to see how they did things at the white central grammar school and make a comparison with the way we did things at Stanton.” The superintendent of Jacksonville schools thought it a splendid idea and Johnson met with the school’s principal, who allowed him to watch how classes were conducted that day. “I spent the entire forenoon going from class to class observing and making mental notes. As I entered each room I introduced myself to the teacher as the principal of Stanton School. . . . My self-introductions were met with varying degrees of graciousness, politeness, embarrassment, and stiffness. Most of the pupils exhibited undisguised curiosity.”

Johnson thought that his trip went well—until the parents found out. A few days later he was surprised to learn that his quiet visit “had raised a hullabaloo” as objections were raised to the very presence of a Black man in the classrooms of their children. “The affair was fomented to such an extent that the board of education felt it necessary to hold a meeting to inquire into the matter and fix the responsibility for my action.” Both the superintendent and the school’s principal stood their ground, however, and the affair eventually blew over.

The second incident was far more terrifying. On May 3, 1901, The Great Fire tore through Jacksonville, destroying 150 city blocks and nearly 2,500 buildings. The governor declared martial law and dispatched militia units to the city. A young reporter from New York (“with eyes and hair so dark that they blanched the whiteness of her face”) happened to be visiting Jacksonville at the time of the fire, and she wrote an article on the disaster’s disproportionate damage to the city’s Black neighborhoods. By this time Johnson had become a relatively significant figure in the city; he was both the president of the Florida State Teachers Association (an organization for Black teachers) and a lawyer—the first African American in the county to pass the state bar exam. She sought Johnson’s help fact-checking the piece before she submitted it for publication. They arranged to meet in the city’s new Riverside Park, where they sat on a bench to review the article.

Suddenly they heard shouting and the barking of dogs, and they found themselves face to face “with eight or ten militiamen in khaki with rifles and bayonets” who had “rushed to the city with a maddening tale of a Negro and a white woman meeting in the woods.” Amid the growing crowd that surrounded him, tore his clothing, covered him with bruises, and screamed for his death, Johnson noticed a lieutenant among the militia members who seemed to emit “a quivering message from intelligence to intelligence” and who stepped in and loudly announced with authority that Johnson was his prisoner. The crowd followed the militiamen to a streetcar, which would take them with their captives to the provost marshal, who, as it happened, was a lawyer Johnson knew well. The lieutenant dismissed his comrades halfway to their destination and escorted the couple for the remainder of the trip to the provost headquarters.

“I was already anticipating the burlesque finale to this melodrama—melodrama that might have been tragedy,” Johnson wrote in his memoir. “Major B—— showed astonishment and some embarrassment when he recognized me.” The marshal quizzically stated the charge made against Johnson, who responded, “I know there is no use in discussing law or my rights on any such basis as, ‘Suppose the lady is white?’ so I tell you at once that according to the customs and, possibly, the laws of Florida, she is not white.” The matter was immediately dismissed and the marshal attempted to justify the actions of the militia, to which Johnson responded, “You know as well as I do, if I had turned my back once on that crowd or taken a single step in retreat, I’d now be a dead man.” For weeks and months after the ordeal, Johnson “would wake often in the night-time, after living through again those few frightful seconds, exhausted by the nightmare of a struggle with a band of murderous, bloodthirsty men in khaki, with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets.”

During the next four years Johnson moved between Jacksonville and New York. He and his brother Rosamond had united with songwriter Bob Cole to write popular songs, many of which found their way into Broadway musicals, two of which were written for Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 presidential campaign, and one of which, “Under the Bamboo Tree,” became a huge national hit, with 400,000 copies of the sheet music sold in a year. (Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien made the song famous all over again in Meet Me in St. Louis.) In 1905, shortly after Johnson began working on a novel, Charles Anderson, a prominent Black politician and an official in the Roosevelt administration, urged him to apply for a consular position—a suggestion Johnson jokingly dismissed. The next year, however, he reconsidered and soon was appointed U. S. Consul in Venezuela (1906–1909) and then in war-torn Nicaragua (1909–1912).

While at both posts, he continued working on his novel. Shortly before his return to the United States, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published anonymously to disappointing initial sales, but the first printing sold out three years later, after Johnson revealed himself as the author and then printed and distributed several thousand copies of a glowing review that had appeared in Munsey’s Magazine. It is during this period that he changed his name to James Weldon Johnson, “Jim Bill Johnson will not do for a man who pretends to write poetry or anything else,” he told a friend.

At the end of 1915, as sales continued to pick up, Johnson devoted one of his daily columns in The New York Age, where he had been editor for over a year, to a brief overview of the novel’s critical reception. His article, “Stranger Than Fiction,” reprinted below, was in part prompted by rumors (which, in the end, proved false) concerning the late Mrs. Frank Leslie, who had built a publishing empire from the debt-ridden magazine business run by her husband until his death in 1880. Mrs. Leslie left the bulk of her estate to support the cause of women’s suffrage. The will was challenged by, among others, the children of Frank Leslie’s sons from a previous marriage, who attempted to preempt claims from her side of the family by alleging that Mrs. Leslie’s birth mother in New Orleans was a slave and that, based on an antebellum law, her relatives had “no heritable blood.” Johnson connected this high-society gossip to the reactions that greeted his novel and its depiction of “passing.”

Note: One of the reviewers quoted by Johnson refers to the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, a nineteenth-century Ukrainian-born painter who kept a voluminous diary from the age of 13 and who died in Paris at the age of 26.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.

Stranger Than Fiction

A couple of years ago the writer of these columns wrote and published anonymously a novel entitled, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” The book aroused considerable comment and produced a wide difference of critical opinion between reviewers on Northern and Southern publications.

Northern reviewers generally accepted the book as a human document, while Southern reviewers pronounced the theme of the story utterly impossible. A few of the Northern reviewers were in doubt as to whether the book was fact or fiction.

Here are extracts from the reviews in three newspapers which illustrate the three sorts of opinion expressed by the critics:

Naturally the name of the writer of “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” can never be divulged by the publishers of this most remarkable human document. That it is not fiction we are prepared to believe from the sincerity and directness of the work as well as from the fact that it would be impossible for any one to portray such a character without making a hero of the subject if he were a colored man, and it is unthinkable and impossible that a white man could ever gain such an interior view of the life of a person of colored blood. As a dispassionate selfanalysis it would rank with the confessions of St. Augustine, and, as a human document, is far superior to the famous “Diary” of Marie Bashkirtseff which electrified the word some years ago.—Portland (Me.) Express.

Here is an extract from the review of one of the undecided critics:

It is a remarkable human document, being the story of a colored man who was sufficiently light in color to pass as a white man * * *. If the story be a true one, it is more remarkable than any piece of fiction ever written of the colored race * * *. That is just the puzzling thing about the book. It reads more like fiction than fact, yet there is a semblance of truth in it * * *. It is an X-ray portraiture of the soul of a Negro * * *. The most wonderful story of self-revelation, either in fact or fiction, that has been published in many years.—Springfield (Mass.) Union.

Here is a representative opinion of the Southern reviews, which pronounced the idea around which the story was built to be absurd and impossible:

The publishers’ note stating that the book gives “a glimpse behind the scenes of the race drama” is not borne out. The publishers’ assertion that the mistreatment of the Negroes by white persons in America is “actually and constantly forcing an unascertainable number of fair complexioned people over into the white race” is based upon ignorance of the fact that it is not by complexion alone that race is ascertainable. Only ignorance can see any possibility of a mixture of Anglo-Saxons to distinguish between a North American mixed blood and a white person.—Louisville Courier-Journal.

We reproduced the opinion from the Maine and Massachusetts papers only to throw into stronger relief the opinion from the Courier-Journal. Here is a writer calmly asserting that the slightest tinge of African blood is discernible, if not in the complexion, then in some trait or characteristic betraying inferiority. This is, of course, laughable. Seven-tenths of those who read these lines know of one or more persons of colored blood who are “passing.”

But the cause of our digging through our files of clippings about “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” was the recent news in the New York dailies concerning the sensational developments in the proceedings to break the will of Mrs. Frank Leslie, widow of Frank Leslie, the great magazine publisher, in which it was alleged that she was a daughter of Charles Follin, of Louisiana, and that her mother was a Negro slave.

Mrs. Leslie was one of the remarkable women of this city. On the death of her husband, the various Leslie publications were in a precarious condition. She took them in hand and, by energy and intelligence, placed them on a paying basis. When she died she left an estate of almost two million dollars.

If Mrs. Leslie was a colored woman, and there are reasons to believe the allegation to be true—a large sum was spent by those who make the allegation in an investigation of Mrs. Leslie’s history and pedigree; and in “Who’s Who” no mention is made of Mrs. Leslie’s mother—we say, if she was a colored woman, her case is stranger than any fiction.

Originally published in The New York Age, December 23, 1915.

Tickets

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989)
From Donald Barthelme: Collected Stories

Interesting Links
“A Brief Survey of the Short Story: Donald Barthelme” (Chris Power, The Guardian)

“Photograph from The Postmodernists Dinner—Jill Krementz” (Edwin Turner, Biblioklept)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Making It!” Seymour Krim
• “Shiftless Little Loafers,” Susan Orlean
• “A Box to Hide In,” James Thurber

Buy the book
Donald Barthelme: Collected Stories
145 stories | 1,004 pages
List price: $45.00
Web Store price: $32.00

“The ‘cancellations’ are paintings in which a rendering of a well-known picture, an Edvard Munch, say, has superimposed on it a smaller, but yet not small, rendering of another but perhaps not so well known picture, an El Lissitzky, say, for example the ‘Untitled’ of 1919–20, a rather geometrical affair of squares and circles, reds and blacks. . . .” (from “Tickets”)
     Left: Self Portrait (in Distress), 1919, oil on canvas by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. WikiArt.
Right: Untitled, 1919–20, preliminary drawing for a project commemorating Rosa Luxemburg, pencil, ink and gouache on paper by Russian artist El Lissitzky (1890–1941). State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki.

In the spring of 1983, the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon responded to a letter he had received from Donald Barthelme:

By the time your kind invitation caught up with me, it was already too late—on May 17th I was between coasts, Arkansas or Lubbock or someplace like ‘at, so I couldn’t have been there anyway. But thank you for asking me—since I’m feeling more and more these days like a one-shot flash-in-the-pan amateur, it is at least a pleasant fantasy for me to think about mingling with you professional folks.

Barthelme had invited Pynchon to the event that came to be known as the Postmodern Dinner. Barthelme planned it for weeks; it was held at an expensive restaurant in the SoHo section of Manhattan, and the guests comprised a veritable Who’s Who of Postmodernism: Walter Abish, John Barth, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, William H. Gass, John Hawkes, Susan Sontag, and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as photographer Jill Krementz (married to Vonnegut, she took pictures of the guests) and literary agent Lynn Nesbit, whom Barthelme called “the mother of postmodernism.”

The event seems to have been both remarkable and awkward. “I couldn’t figure it out,” Walter Abish told Barthelme’s biographer Tracy Daugherty. Abish had helped plan the dinner, mostly by seconding everyone Barthelme had suggested for the guest list. “You couldn’t take it at face value. Everyone gave a short little speech about their work and their friendship with the other people there. Hawkes was very eloquent, warm and nice. Gaddis was, as always, very quiet. Donald was both withdrawn and a dynamo. He was the center though he didn’t dominate in any way. It was puzzling. I left with questions.” The list of famous writers prompted Pynchon to jokingly wonder if he would be reading about the dinner in People or in The New York Review of Books.

“How different from one another those above-mentioned teammates are!” John Barth later wrote, reflecting on the men who had gathered for both that dinner in 1983 and a symposium at Brown University in 1988. “Indeed, other than their nationality and gender, their common inclination to some degree of irrealism and to the foregrounding of form and language, and the circumstance of their having appeared on the literary scene in the 1960s or thereabouts, it is not easy to see why their names should be so frequently linked.”

One aspect of his writing that distinguished Barthelme from his “teammates” was a sense of humor that found a ready home in The New Yorker. “Barthelme decided that he wanted to be a New Yorker writer when he was a teen-ager,” writes Louis Menand, “and what drew him to the magazine was the humor writing. He loved James Thurber and Dorothy Parker; he thought S. J. Perelman was a genius.” His first piece in the magazine, “L’Lapse,” appeared in 1963 and parodied the screenplay for L’Eclisse, a movie by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. “The humorist is the hiding man in Barthelme’s stories,” adds Menand, “the reassurance that we are in the company of a friendly spirit, someone who knows about more than just collecting rubbish and tearing things up.”

Barthelme published “Tickets,” his last story for The New Yorker, twenty-six years later, and it is the selection that closes the new Library of America volume bringing together 145 of his stories. Kim Herzinger, who edited three of Barthelme’s posthumously published collections, writes that the story “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.” In February 1989, after he had been informed that the magazine had accepted the story, Barthelme told Daugherty, “It’s a relief to know I still have some juice.” Six months later, he died from a recurrence of the throat cancer that had hospitalized him the previous year.

Notes: Among Barthelme’s musical references: Carl Orff is a German composer whose works include the orchestral cantata Carmina Burana (1937). Three operas are mentioned: Die Walküre (1870) by the German composer Richard Wagner, La Damnation de Faust (1846) by the French composer Hector Berlioz, and Der Barbier von Baghdad (The Barber of Baghdad, 1858) by the German composer Peter Cornelius.

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I have decided to form a new group and am now contemplating the membership, the prospective membership, of my new group. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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