Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (130 page)

It was now the turn of the decade. Through Gébler’s connections, O’Brien (Mrs Gébler, as she was) had picked up part-time work as a reader for the publisher Hutchinson. Impressed by her fluent reports, they offered her £25 for a catalogue-filler. She dashed off
The Country Girls
in a few weeks, followed by
The Lonely Girl
in 1962 and
Girls in Their Married Bliss
in 1964. It was a decade of rebellion – whether James Dean’s in southern California or Jimmy Porter’s in London – and her novels about two Irish moral dissidents were hugely successful. It certified their success when the first volume was publicly burned by the parish priest in her home village.

Gébler was now in his mid-forties and had never been able to reproduce his early success. He found himself overshadowed by a woman whom he had always looked down on intellectually. In O’Brien’s trilogy, Kate’s infidelities, with distinguished lovers, did not help things along. The marriage was dissolved, angrily, in 1964. O’Brien suggests – something confirmed by her son Sasha’s later memoir – that Gébler could not live with his wife’s eclipsing him and convinced himself, in an extremity of paranoia, that he had actually written her bestselling trilogy. Those books forlornly express the view that ‘there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t kill any woman the minute she draws attention to his defects’. Kate and Baba, the trilogy concludes, will never find happiness. And O’Brien herself? In a late interview she confided that, ‘now I am 78 years of age … I haven’t met the man with whom my
whole being, heart, soul and body would be miraculously entwined. I didn’t. My prayer has not been answered in that, nor is it likely to be.’

The trilogy ends on a note of terminal embitterment. O’Brien has given numerous hints that she has sought help along the way in psychotherapy. She records treatment by the trendy 1960s guru R. D. Laing whom she met socially ‘with Sean Connery’ (the true O’Brien touch). Laing gave her LSD, which was ‘terrifying’ – whether it helped or not she does not say. In the last volume of the trilogy, Kate attacks a railway station weighing machine for obscure reasons and is, for a while, hospitalised. Forcible hospitalisation in a mental institution is the harrowing subject matter of O’Brien’s later novel,
In the Forest
(2002).

In the decades after the initial trilogy, now a successful woman of letters, O’Brien wrote fluently – novels, drama and non-fiction. Anger blazes, inextinguishably if sometimes smoulderingly, in virtually every word she put on paper. She revisits the woes of marriage, and pays out sadistic husbands, in
Time and Tide
(1992). She revisits the sexual nastiness of Ireland in
A Pagan Place
(1970), in which the girl heroine is seduced by a priest (this, O’Brien says, is her favourite among her own novels). Her campaign against the Irish Church has been unremitting. In one of the most strident of her novels,
Down by the River
(1996), an incestuously raped fourteen-year-old becomes the focus of a right-to-abortion battle. If they could, one suspects, the priesthood of her native land would make a bonfire of all her works – with Edna O’Brien on top. Her two-minded feelings about the IRA are laid out in
House of Splendid Isolation
(1994). She commemorated her eightieth year in 2011 with a string of lively interviews, the promise of a memoir (one which, it was hoped, would name names – who was that prominent politician ‘Duncan’ in
Girls in Their Married Bliss
?) and a collection of short stories,
Saints and Sinners
(2011). There was by now no question into which category the author placed herself. Reviews were indulgent, while noting that changes in post-Good Friday Agreement Ireland had rather passed her by. Exile was in danger of becoming dislocation and a relapse into savage nostalgia.

It’s entirely possible to fail to understand or actively misunderstand what an artist is doing.

A novelist and short-story writer whose work is jaggedly absurd, minimalist, wittily allusive, aggressively trivial, consciously postmodern – and above all funny (not a word which automatically collocates with ‘postmodern’) – Barthelme was born in Philadelphia, the child of two high-achieving, first-generation students at Ivy League Pennsylvania University. If a fairy godmother had hovered over infant Donald’s cradle, she would doubtless have waved a Ph.D. scroll as well as the traditional wand. If any writer of the twentieth century is a child of the university ethos, it is Donald Barthelme. His whole life would intertwine with the academic world.

When he was two, the family removed to the University of Texas at Houston where his father eventually became a professor of architecture. Donald Barthelme Sr’s tastes were advanced for the time and even more so for the place. He built himself a Mies van der Rohe house which his son recalls as seeming as exotic as a jewel in the head of a toad, in the featureless, windblown Texas plains. Another unimpressed son dismissed it as ‘swoopy’ and not at all homey.

Donald enrolled himself as a student at Houston – it was convenient, but a mistake. His relationship with his namesake father would be troubled throughout their lives. They fell out over issues ranging from his parents’ (particularly his mother’s) Catholicism to the kind of literature Donald eventually wrote (under his father’s name, minus the easily overlooked ‘Jr/Sr’ suffix). He had decided, aged ten, that he would be a writer, although what kind was not immediately apparent. James Thurber and Edgar Allan Poe were early favourites – both pushing him towards brevity. In his teens he became a devotee of jazz, took up drums and had hopes of making it as a musician. Oddly, so did his friend, John Barth, in his youth. A doctoral thesis remains to be written on the coincidence (e.g. ‘The Percussive Syntagm – Postmodernist Arrythmias’.) Barthelme majored in journalism, and was a powerhouse on the student newspaper while at university. He married in 1952. He left university as the Korean War broke out and, like other young men of his age group, was conscripted for a cause whose point was never entirely clear. It was all the less clear since peace broke out immediately after his infantry training. He persuaded the army ‘his weapon was a typewriter’ (they had intended assigning him to the bakery) and served his country for two years, editing an army newspaper.

On his discharge in 1955, Barthelme returned to Houston where he read and pondered philosophy under the guidance of Maurice Natanson – a thinker (only six
years older than Barthelme) who is credited with introducing awareness of existentialism and phenomenology to the US. It was a partnership. A witty philosopher, Natanson was particularly interested in the connection of his subject with creative writing and explores the theme in his best-known book,
The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature
(1997). The foundation of Barthelme’s later fiction would be Kierkegaard and Kafka rather than the post-romantic recklessness of the currently vogueish ‘Beats’. For a few years Barthelme bounced around his home town, searching for his groove. He worked on local newspapers, edited little magazines, reviewed jazz, and for a short period was the director of an art museum. He supplemented his income by short-contract university teaching and helped set up a creative writing programme at his alma mater. Over these years he was dependent financially on his father, which rankled with both Barthelmes.

His career took a definite direction with his move to New York (‘our Paris’, as he called it), where he became a regular contributor of short fiction to the
New Yorker
under its editor, William Shawn, one of the great (if largely unrecognised) literary patrons of the time. Barthelme’s first story in Shawn’s pages, ‘L’Lapse’, a typically riddling title, was published in 1963. It nestled between pieces by John Cheever and Hannah Arendt. New York, with its lively modern jazz scene, avant-garde art and ‘filth on the streets’, was more of a home town to Barthelme than Houston ever was. Over the next few years he recruited a discriminating readership as the master of the bizarre scenario. What was grey ‘theory’ in other hands was as zany and comic as
Mad
magazine in his. In one of the more famous of his pieces, ‘Mr. Edward LEAR, Nonsense Writer and Landscape Painter Requests the honor of Your Presence On the Occasion of his DEMISE. San Remo 2:20 a.m. The 29th of May’ (the invitation is accompanied by an RSVP). In another, King Kong is appointed ‘adjunct professor of art history at Rutgers’. In yet another, ‘The King of Jazz’, ‘Hokie Mokie’, with the death of ‘Spicy MacLammermoor’, a (trom)’bone man, finds himself ‘king of jazz’ – a verdict confirmed by white critics, who find in his ‘few but perfectly selected notes the real epiphanic glow’. Along comes a Japanese trombonist who does to black music what the Lexus does to Chrysler, or the Fuji apple to the humble Granny Smith (Barthelme, while on R&R in the army, had been impressed how frighteningly good jazz was in Tokyo).

Best known among Barthelme’s novels (or ‘anti-novels’) is
Snow White
(1967), a literary fantasy on Disney’s cartoon fantasia of the original German fairy story. Barthelme’s Snow White (the story begins with a corporeal inventory of her ‘beauty spots’ – including that on her buttock) misconducts herself disgracefully with her dwarfs in the shower. Like all his fiction, disconnectedness – a kind of asyntax – requires the reader to leap acrobatically from one sentence to another, often slipping.
Always he wrote ‘against expectation’, as he put it: dismantling the conventional. Barthelme, a modest writer, never saw himself as more than snot on the sleeve of high literature – appreciative admirers see him as a welcome antidote to pervasive high seriousness and the portentousness of critical ‘theory’. He was both ‘pomo’ and ‘accessible’. On the whole, Barthelme had little time for critics (most of whom he believed ‘want me to stop what I’m doing’). He was of the firm belief that the only valid criticism of a work of art was another work of art. He was, above all else, a generous writer: Thomas Pynchon wrote
Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973) while living rent-free in Barthelme’s New York basement.

Barthelme’s short-story collections include:
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
(1968),
City Life
(1970),
Sadness
(1972) and
Great Days
(1979). ‘Sadness’ could well be the title for all of them, permeated as they are with a kind of exhausted, but none the less jaunty, world-weariness. New York was eventually too much, and his income too little – he needed a salary. Incredibly, as his biographer informs us, he never earned more than $1,000 a year from his books and depended almost entirely on his
New Yorker
stipend, a debt he never cleared. Barthelme returned to Houston to teach creative writing, quirkily, for the last years of his life. You could, despite what Thomas Wolfe said, go home again. Whether you would be happy there was something else. He had many lovers (some of them, like Grace Paley, fellow postmodernists), married four times (the last successfully) and died prematurely of throat cancer. Years of abusive drinking contributed to his death and, arguably, to the fractured syntax of his narratives. He had, one friend observed, ‘an alcoholic’s attention span’. And, alas, an alcoholic’s abbreviated life-span. Did he know where he was, Barthelme was asked as he lay dying in hospital. Yes, he replied, ‘in the antechamber to heaven’.

In 1992, there were four books by black women on the best-seller lists – at the same time. Terry McMillan’s, Alice Walker’s and two of mine. Now that’s exhilarating!

Until the post-mortem exploiters get down to their work, Toni Morrison’s life will be principally known from her own many accounts in interviews. She was born
Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on the banks of Lake Erie. The state had been on the frontline of the abolition of slavery seventy years earlier, but where the Woffords lived was integrated. Chloe’s mother, she recalled, was careful never to observe the informal segregation of cinema audiences, looking left and right of the aisle before she sat down. Chloe’s father was a ship-welder and her grandparents had been sharecroppers. Her family, in terms of the restricted social scale accessible to blacks, was moving up but aspired to a yet higher place.

Chloe was encouraged to read widely in childhood (Jane Austen and Tolstoy are cited) while surrounded, conversationally, by oral narratives and blues lyrics brought from the South. Her mother belonged to a book club, parting with ‘hard earned money’ to do so. Chloe recalled being the only black child in her first grade class and the best reader. She was not, however, to forget her place in American life. In her early teens, she served as a housemaid for local white families: ‘I started around 13. That was the work that was available: to go to a woman’s house after school and clean for three or four hours. The normal teen-age jobs were not available. Housework always was. It wasn’t uninteresting. You got to work these gadgets that I never had at home: vacuum cleaners. Some of the people were nice. Some were terrible. Years later, I used some of what I observed in my fiction.’

In 1949 she gained entrance to Howard University, an elite institution for black students. She took a BA in English and went on to Cornell University to pursue research on William Faulkner. He seemed to her ‘the only writer who took black people seriously. Which is not to say he was, or was not, a bigot.’ It was at university that she renamed herself ‘Toni’. Her motive for doing so has been analysed in various ways – it being a name beloved by home permanent-wave merchandisers, targeted at young white women. On graduation, she was appointed an English instructor at Texas Southern University before returning as a junior professor at Howard – an academic career was in prospect.