Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme.

Davis, Robert Murray

Donald Barthelme. Kim Herzinger, ed. John Barth, intro. New York. Random House. 1997. xviii + 332 pages. $27.50. ISBN 0-679-40983-1.

All reviewers wonder if their work has any effect, so it is heartening to see that Kim Herzinger apparently read my WLT review of The Teachings of Don B., which suggested that reprinting inferior work might, at this point, do nothing to advance Donald Barthelme's posthumous reputation. In the introduction to Not-Knowing, Herzinger maintains that it would ill serve Barthelme and his readers to leave anything at all out of print and inaccessible to general readers as well as specialists. He delicately avoids the inarguable fact that collections of this kind sell best when the author's name is still familiar.

Of course, specialists will track down fugitive material (that, in the Hollywood joke, wasn't released but escaped), but they should be grateful to have the material in a form that is not only handy but provides unobtrusive textual and explanatory notes. Still, even specialists sometimes read for pleasure, and the pieces in this collection will provide varying degrees. Lowest on the scale - and indeed on the scale of usefulness to the scholar - are those written for the "Notes and Comment" section of the New Yorker. In style and general attitude, they represent very little advance over the journalism which Barthelme produced as an undergraduate and as a reporter for the Houston Post. Most are so topical or parochial that if Barthelme's name were not here, for the first time, attached to them, they would be virtually unreadable.

With one exception, the pieces on art seem little better: they tend to describe work better seen (or not) or to offer jargonic generalized praise. The seven interviews, most of which Barthelme edited carefully before allowing them to be published, give useful information about the way he worked and his view of the result. There are inevitable repetitions from one to the other, but these reinforce key points about his esthetic - notably and rather surprisingly in view of his reputation as a postmodernist, his argument that every writer, indeed every person, is at bottom a realist.

The best material, two essays on writing published in 1964 and 1987, are not only the best written but the most useful for showing Barthelme's intellectual development from a rather knee-jerk follower of the avant-garde to a subtle and independent theorist. These essays reveal, more than anything else in the collection, how intelligent Barthelme was and how much reading and thought underlay the apparently casual style and discontinuous structure of his stories.

But we do not read Barthelme for opinions, even for the view that art - all art, he says - is a meditation upon the world. His real genius was in presenting his material not as reasoned argument but in a voice or series of voices which put always in doubt issues of reliability and decidability. To use one of his favorite quotations - from Harold Rosenberg - the result was an "anxious object," anxious about whether it was a work of art or a piece of junk. Some of the nonfiction is junk, but if the collection leads to a better appreciation of Barthelme's fiction or, better still, back to the fiction itself, it justifies its existence.

Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma