Houston Chronicle: Books: Fiction Explored From Frederick Barthelme...
By Ann Waldron, Book Editor
[Photo of Frederick Barthelme by Larry Evans, Chronicle Staff]
And now we have Frederick Barthelme, "experimental novelist."
Some people think he's better than his brother, Donald, whom the New York Times Magazine called "the most interesting writer in American today."
Other people think Frederick is a put-on, a dabbler too lazy to write so people can understand him.
He's had two novels published -- "Rangoon" and "War and War." An excerpt from a third "Ten Bears", appeared in Works in Progress, but was turned down for publication by the publisher who had contracted for it.
Frederick Barthelme is back in his native Houston, working occasionally at the Contract Graphics gallery, "relaxing," thinking about writing, talking about a new musical group, discussing his work.
"It's strange being out of New York," he said. "You lose contact. But I've stopped worrying about it. I decided to give up the posture of the famous New York writer down on his luck."
What posture has he assumed?
Well he's at work on a fourth novel, but hasn't written a line in three months.
"I wouldn't write anything until I could write something that would really knock me out," he said. "Most of the work I've done is limited, on the arcane side. There's some kind of truncation, the reader doesn't get involved in it. I'm trying to cross that boundary without becoming Jacqueline Susann. I don't mean telling a story. I'm not interested in a story. I'm more interested in saying that John killed Sally in one exquisite sentence than I am in the fact that he killed her.
"I don't know why that is. That's just the way I'm built, little lady."
Frederick Barthelme grew up in Houston, one of the five children of Donald Barthelme Sr. He went to Tulane and the University of Houston, amassing 212 hours, but no degree in seven years.
He painted and his work appeared in several group shows around town. "I was writing, too," he said. "I wrote some plays, very strange, only 1000 words, some only one sentence. They were a cross between painting and drama. In my brash youth, with my vast knowledge of painting, I decided painting was confining. I wrote short stories and never tried to publish them. All the characters were horses. They talked and went to communion."
He played drums in a three-man band, Red Krayola, which made two records and played concerts here and in California.
In 1967, he went to New York and worked for a while at the Kornblee Gallery. "I sat there and answered the phone and talked to people who came in."
Then he quit work to write fulltime. How did he live? "With a friend," he said, "and she had a good job."
Barthelme worked hard, and waded through a first novel, "Hof." "It's never been published," he said, "and I've robbed it for other books."
His brother, Donald Barthelme Jr., author of "Snow White" and "City Life," helped him find an agent. It had taken Frederick only three or four months to write "Hof," and although it didn't sell, several publishers asked "what Mr. Barthelme is writing now?" So Frederick obligingly sat down and wrote "War and War" in one month.
Doubleday bought "War and War" in 1968. It wasn't published until June, 1971, because the editor who bought it left, the second editor didn't get along with Frederick and the third editor didn't do anything. Finally the fourth editor was found.
Meanwhile, Barthelme put together another novel, "Rangoon," which he says is a "combination of stuff," presumably some of the bits and pieces of "Hof," and a new publisher, Winter House, brought it out in 1970. "Rangoon" is illustrated by Mayo Thompson, an old friend of Frederick's Red Krayola days.
"'War and War' is the leading edge of my development," Barthelme said with a straight face. "It's more serious."
Neither book got much critical attention. "War and War" was panned on Page 46 of the New York Times Book Review.
Barthelme started on "Ten Bears" and came back to Houston last summer to finish it. Doubleday decided not to publish it, and Barthelme say it's "in limbo."
Meanwhile, he says he's learning how to relax.
"I used to hate Houston," he said. "I used to think it was a real dump. Now it doesn't bother me, except that the air is rotten and the terrain is flat and the trees were all designed by Roy Hofheinz' engineers."
What does he read? He doesn't seem to be a great reader. "In 1967 I was very hot on John Barth," he said, "and Wilfrid Sheed and William Gass. I never could stand Tom Wolfe. When I was writing 'War and War' I was going through a mock-intellectual period and read a lot of philosophy. I'd read ten pages and be so bored I couldn't go on. I read the mystics, the Don Juan books -- that's sort of life-living made simple, 'Cliff's Notes' on living life. I used to read Simenon and Dick Francis. I liked Alfred Jarry's 'Ubu Roi.'"
What will become of Frederick Barthelme? Who knows?
An editor at Doubleday wrote a meme that said, "This guy is a genius and... in the long run he is better than his brother...he really plows new ground...it's frighteningly good."
"I do not believe that fiction is a microcosm. I do not believe that fiction is a "little world" which is in some vague way a reconstruction of a possible "real world." A fiction is autonomous, and while it is necessarily referential in character, it is ideally an addition to as against a reconstruction of a possible world.
"Lazlo says that fiction describes a process or method of working (specifically writing) which holds as its originary impulse the imagination, and which does not necessarily submit to any regulation other than that imagination. I find this definition satisfactory."
-- From "War and War," by Frederick Barthelme.
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