“Excuse me, but are you Donald Barthelme?” I asked, to which he replied, “No, my name is William Burroughs.”
Of course, I’d heard of him — didn’t he write something crazy about drugs? Oh, yeah, that Naked Lunch, which Tommy Muller-Thym liked? I recall thinking — and though I didn’t have any business to take up with him, he was so friendly that when Mr. Burroughs, perhaps bored or feeling lonely at that moment, asked me if I wanted to sit and chat with him for a few minutes, I did. What we talked about were my doubts and hopes regarding what I had started to guardedly think of as a potential second vocation behind that of either becoming a musician (doubtful) or a high school teacher (far more probable). He was teaching at City as a special visitor, as was another Bohemian sort, Peter Orlovsky, also somewhere down the hall; of a congenial bent of mind, he listened to my plaintive musings patiently, saying things like “Oh, I’m sure you’ll succeed at whatever you try, young man.” Later, after I’d snooped around about his past, I was surprised to learn that he had built a youthful reputation as a drug-crazed sexual deviant who had once shot his wife, a supposed wreck of a human being. But for those ten or so minutes that I passed with him, he seemed as genteel and kindly as any writer I’d ever meet, not a single bit of self-centeredness or meanness in his being — which is to say, he was an anomaly, though I did not know that at the time. (I didn’t even know if he was gay — at least he did not check me over the way some men downtown in the Village did during my occasional excursions to see a show or check out music. Instead he seemed like he would have been perfectly at home in some midwestern high school counselor’s office.)
Looking over the first page of my short story, he nodded with appreciation: “Very nice,” he said, rubbing his chin — what else could he say? Whether he meant it or not didn’t really matter to me — not then, not now. Above all, his kindness was obviously something I would never forget.
Barthelme, it turned out, occupied a small and windowless office at the far end of the Quonset hut halclass="underline" I found him, with Burroughs pointing from his doorway and saying, “Just follow the smoke,” for, indeed, as I got down to that end, a few dense plains of filterless Pall Mall fumes, hanging magically in the air, seemed to lead inside: There I saw Donald Barthelme for the first time. He was wearing a blue denim shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and reading a New York Post with a pencil in hand (was he editing their prose?). He looked, with a longish beard and oval face, like a Dutch sea captain, or a little like a milder, less severe version of Solzhenitsyn. With sandy hair just dropping over his ears and broad shoulders, he seemed a sturdy man in his mid-forties, if that. Surely a writer, if only for his wire-rimmed glasses and nicotine-stained fingers (right hand). He barely looked up when I finally walked in and asked, “Professor Barthelme?” after which, hearing why I was there, he told me to sit down and offered me a smoke. (I happily accepted, puffing away anxiously.) Within a few minutes, however, he had read enough of my piece — which he’d already started marking up with a pencil, mainly correcting punctuation, but laughing a few times, over what I did not know — and without much deliberation gave me permission, by way of a signed note, to enroll in a class he was teaching for beginner’s fiction.
I’d take two workshops with him as an undergraduate, and another while (somehow) advancing, on fellowship, into the MFA program at City. All his workshops were wonderfully intimate and easygoing, but, for the sake of brevity, I’ll just summarize here my experiences. In my initial class with him, he had us work mainly on notions of form and voice. His first assignment required that we go out and interview someone, and transcribe it in a narrative way. My subject, whom I found along 125th Street, was a young black kid whose life story, already at the age of twelve, would have made many a Fieldston and Horace Mann student faint: addict mother, dead father, brothers in jail. I felt bad afterward — I had asked him too much, in effect hitting the poor kid over the head with the shittiness of his life. Another assignment involved writing a sestina, then a sonnet, after Shakespeare. At the same time, he had us reading crazy books like Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, The Blood Oranges by John Hawkes, and, among others, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, all of which, I have to confess, despite their sophistication, left me, cut from a primitive, emotionally blunt cloth, a little cold.
But I eagerly responded to the written assignments. No amount of work bothered me, as I seemed to have all the time and energy in the world, no matter how cluttered my schedule. For about fifteen hours a week, I helped recently arrived students, mainly from Eastern Europe, with their writing assignments as part of my SEEK work-study program duties — my guess is that my formal English grammar was far better than it is now — and working at that Columbia library, as well as showing up for band rehearsals on the weekends. I still had so much energy left over that at the end of the day, it was nothing for me to spend half the night up by a desk, smoking up a storm while delving into whatever tasks lay before me. (At that age, the early twenties, you can eat, romp with your girlfriend, run around Central Park, romp some more, watch TV for an hour, bullshit on the telephone with whomever for a half an hour, read a chapter out of a textbook, romp yet again, and still have enough juice left over to swim across the East River if you want to.)
Once we finally got around to our first attempts at fiction — though the use of that word fiction sounds overly lofty in connection with what I was doing in those days — we settled into a routine fairly common to writing workshops everywhere. Sitting at the head of a conference table (or classroom), Mr. Barthelme listened as his students, having passed out Xeroxed or mimeographed copies of their pieces (both kinds of now-archaic machines were in use in that always budget-challenged school), read from them aloud, while the others prepared themselves to make hopefully constructive comments, Barthelme presiding as if over a committee. (He must have done the same elsewhere, for he also taught occasionally at the much vaunted Valhalla of writing, Iowa, where the true and glorious future of American letters awaited the world.) I won’t go into that process any further, except to say that Barthelme did the brunt of his more insightful work, mainly as an editor, during his office hours — though if a word or phrase caught his ear in class, he might say something complimentary or funny about it. And while he left most of everything else to his students, I will say that, as far as I could tell, he seemed to genuinely enjoy his role as a teacher.
My first pieces for him, incidentally, were either earthbound, leaden, and, given the influence of Hemingway, whose work I was then studying in another class, overly formal, or absolutely mad in the spirit of experimentation. Never writing about anything of importance to me, I seemed at my best inventing names — Charlie Lopso was one of them, and Opanio Santinio another, the latter being a stand-in for me. At the same time, I seemed to have somehow become, while reading ancient Egyptian history for yet another class, intent upon writing a humorous narrative about a scribe named Exetus lurking along the fringes of the pharaoh’s court during the building of the Great Pyramid — later I became fixated on a bread maker in ancient Rome (which I’ve always warmed to — the baker reminding me of my father, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time — and that setting, in ancient times, wonderful simply because it reminded me of how those New Testament texts always made me feeclass="underline" hopeful, without really knowing just why). In other words, I drifted around like crazy, without much focus or serious intent. Nevertheless, Barthelme seemed most interested in improving whatever fledgling skills I had, which were not many, and though I finished that course feeling I had learned something about writing — perhaps that it really wasn’t for me — I had liked the social aspect of it enough (where else did one commune with other students in so direct a fashion?) that I decided to continue on along those creative lines for the hell of it.