BOOKS
Malin, Irving & Landers, Robert K.
The Dead Father DONALD BARTHELME Farrar, Straus $7.95 IRVING MALIN Donald Barthelme is a metaphysical writer. He assumes that we want to know answers to eternal questions. In "On Angels," a...
...We share with him the illusion that the father is more than a "word," that he exists and dies...
...He apparently gives up the quest for final solutions...
...One can attempt to imagine the moment...
...And thus, as it seems to me, has Matthews all along comprehended Castro and his revolution...
...Not content merely to correct the false report, Matthews created a legend, one which was perhaps even more false...
...but neither does he permit it to interfere with his "respect," with his belief "that Castro is himself groping for a form of government and society that respects human dignity and self-development...
...My own approach to the Cuban leaders and their Revolution," he writes, "has always been influenced by my respect for their character and ideals...
...they are not punctuated...
...How odd...
...These questions remind us of angelic plight...
...But how could I do harm?' he asked in astonishment...
...The "end" of The Dead Father is curiously moving...
...he fathers new worlds of belief, action, faith-or anti-worlds of these-and achieves results...
...But earlier, in explaining "revolutionary justice," he remarks, "A revolution is a law unto itself...
...He accepts his "burden...
...But that hardly seems like much of an answer...
...Although the entire book is so determinedly lifeless, it refuses to surrender to this condition...
...He interrupts the journey to insert other plots, rulebooks on fatherhood, meaningless bits of dialogue (unflattering to women) and these in effect take control...
...All figure and all ground mine, out of my head...
...He steps in and out of the work, offering sermons, spiritual headlines ("Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world"), and odd asides...
...Matthews notes "how quickly popular moods can change," and points out that "When the Cubans had freedom of the press they abused it through venality and corruption...
...All colors mine...
...they lack preparation because they have been wrenched from stability...
...The answers are not clear...
...How did they look at the instant the question invaded them, flooding the angelic consciousness, taking hold with terrifying force...
...These various inversions, subversions, perversions-I'm beginning to mirror Barthelme!-suggest that life is unbalanced and unruly...
...They are on edge...
...Usually confined to one side of "the story," the war correspondent easily comes to feel more sympathy for his suffering subjects than obligation to his remote readers...
...These are written in capital letters...
...The interruptions are viewed as the main event or, better yet, as cancellations...
...and, as well, to regard war as the inescapable reality, justifying almost any brutality, so long as his subjects mean well, so long as they are, in a word, idealists...
...But he cannot escape from his own condition...
...There is no meaning except retraction and rebellion...
...Penetrating Fulgencio Batista's lines to get that historic interview (conducted in whispers in a thicket of woods) must have required considerable enterprise on the part of the then-57-year-old Matthews, but that cannot have been a requirement with which he was unfamiliar...
...He begins with the journey of the father and his family across mysterious lands and final burial on the last page...
...Thus artistic and metaphysical dimensions co-exist...
...He reverses himself: "All lines my lines...
...He proclaims that he did not want fatherhood: "I never wanted it, it was thrust upon me...
...it makes its own laws, which is almost like saying that it is lawless...
...as a war correspondent, he had been with the Italian army in the Abyssinian War, with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, and in Italy and North Africa in World War II: his friend, Ernest Hemingway, in 1938, in a blurb for Matthews' book on the Abyssinian and Spanish wars, had called him "the straightest, and ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today...
...they often pollute the world...
...What does it look like, this something better...
...Yet this should not have been too surprising...
...Snow White, his previous novel, appeared in 1967...
...She recognizes, like the angels, that she is alone in an empty world which cannot offer easy answers...
...when they had elections they were, with few exceptions, fraudulent...
...So is Barthelme...
...Supposing that somehow he does know, and that the revolution is as he judges, one wonders why, in that case, Castro and his revolution cannot abide a free press or free elections...
...If Matthews does not wholly ignore "the worst," it cannot be said that he approaches Castro's Cuba with excessive skepticism, or even consistency...
...The angels are overwhelmed suddenly...
...Perhaps he understands that despite the sudden fall of fundamental questions (which cannot be answered here and now), he must not run away from his talent...
...and so, to dispel this debilitating belief, Castro sent out for a foreign journalist, who turned out to be Herbert Matthews ol The New York Times...
...He puts them into uncertain, "mid-life" positions: "They were overtaken suddenly by a fundamental question...
...Matthews first met Castro in the Sierra Maestra in February, 1957, only a few months after Castro's calamitous (only a fraction of the force of 82 survived) "invasion" of Cuba from Mexico in a twin-engined yacht...
...It was written before "On Angels...
...The revolution in effect says: 'Necessity knows no law...
...the revolution is necessary.' A lot of traditional legality, morality, and some hard-won fruits of civilization are brushed aside in the process...
...You take my meaning...
...The father resembles Snow White and the angels...
...In dismissing allegations of torture being in use in Cuba, he declares, "I am as certain as I can be of anything that Fidel Castro and his close associates would not authorize or knowingly stand for the use of physical torture...
...They command his attention, suggesting that "stops" along the journey are more significant than the end...
...The question was 'What are angels?'" These sentences are worth close study...
...He is master of ceremonies, offering these to cleanse our hearts and minds...
...How can he picture their plight...
...Barthelme is aware of the irony...
...At one point he writes: 'Trying to break out of this bag that we are in...
...Although Barthelme tries to answer the question of angels, he ends his story-essay with the line: "He said they are continuing to search for a new principle...
...She is at midpoint...
...He is such an intelligent resourceful writer that he compels us to walk on the edge with him, to look down at "large gaps" of meaning, and yet possess impossible love for our strange condition...
...She is terrified despite her coolness...
...He considers our spiritual condition...
...In his new novel, The Dead Father, Barthelme seems to offer more fixed positions...
...But Barthelme intrudes-more quietly than in other works-and indicates that he is also uncertain...
...The last words of Snow White are: "The heroes depart in search of a new principle/heigh-ho...
...We have the most wonderful plans for Cuba!'" Those plans since have unfolded, of course, to reveal such wonderful features as political prisoners by the tens of thousands and forced-labor camps, but Matthews remains nevertheless enthralled by Castro's idealism...
...He pleads...
...Fidel Castro and the men and .women who during the past two decades fought and worked with him to make the Cuba Revolution," he writes now, "have responded to and acted upon idealistic motives...
...he opens new worlds...
...Barthelme should "logically" offer blank pages to affirm the meaningless-ness of words, plots, fatherhood...
...they "fly" from the page...
...Barthelme is darker here than in previous works...
...United Press reported, and it was widely believed, that Castro had perished in the effort...
...Revolution in Cuba HERBERT L. MATTHEWS Scribners, $15 ROBERT K. LANDERS One afternoon in January, 1959, as they strolled in the garden of a villa in the fishing port of Cojimar, Herbert Matthews suggested to the newly triumphant Fidel Castro "that the power he now held in his hands could do great harm, as well as great good, for Cuba...
...He prefers to rest and play it safe...
...Snow White is unsure of her position as woman...
...he refuses to die-disturbs our sense of order...
...One wonders how Matthews can truly know, without benefit of free elections, how inspiring to the majority it is...
...they reveal his artistic strategies...
...How does the concept 'something better,' arise...
...Barthelme wants to picture "something better" but he understands that his words-indeed, all words!-are not enough...
...In the resulting series of articles-which was later to lead National Review to quip that Castro got his job through The New York Times -Matthews revealed to the world that Castro-whom he described as the head of "a revolutionary movement that calls itself socialistic" and that was seeking "a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist"-was "alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable fastnesses of the Sierra Maestra at the southern tip of the island...
...There is a mirror effect...
...It is a curious work- a mixture of fiction, essay, myth, ritual, and parody-but it makes us think once more of metaphysical questions...
...He is playful, of course, because he has already created the angelic predicament...
...He does not, to his credit, entirely ignore ugly fact ("The worst that can be said of the revolutionary regime-at least as I see it-is that the practice of holding political offenders in prison and rehabilitation labor camps goes on, year after year...
...Barthelme does not write a progressive work...
...They cannot clarify ultimate questions...
...Ultimately, Barthelme is deceptive...
...it is hard to separate them...
...The impulse behind true revolutionary action must be spiritual, which is to say moral and/or patriotic, not material and not simply an exercise of power...
...He usually masquerades as smooth writer, but he cares about age-old questions...
...In "On Angels," a piece which appears in City Life, he humanizes angels...
...We expect the journey to continue-there have been many false starts and conclusions-and when "bulldozers" the last word, buries the pleading father (who asks "one minute more"), we are unhappy...
...He is in an impossible, suicidal condition-one of eternal sadness-and he ends without answers...
...What gave us the idea that there was something better...
...We may not like his strategy, but it is merely an underlining of previous positions...
...There is continuity, but the fact that the "dead" father is half-alive-he speaks during the journey...
...Matthews judges that Castro's "radical social revolution" has been "an impressive accomplishment, and clearly an inspiring one to a majority of the Cuban people, especially the young...
...He now grasps that Castro "had no fixed or precise political ideas of any kind while he was in the Sierra," but whether the Cuban leaders appear to him as democrats or anti-democrats, Communists or anti-Communists, he preserves intact his respect for their "ideals...
...Matthews was, after all, essentially a war correspondent, and the manufacture of heroic myth happens to be the tropism of the war correspondent...
...It is time to reread him and to think of these lines from "Daumier," a piece in Sadness- "There are always openings, if you can find them, there is always something to do...
...The distinctions between life and death-this world and another- are not clear...
...But we must continue on separate paths, wondering about the enigmatic interrelationships of art, spirit, and life...
...nor can she create appropriate conventions of behavior...
...he also refuses to play proper, established roles...
...He wonders about their "look...
...Nearly two decades aftef receiving that encomium, then, Matthews was in the mountains of Cuba, interviewing a dead man...
...He, like the angels, finds that he must create new patterns, but he is terrified by such open possibility...
...At this, Castro "stopped in his tracks with a startled look on his face, turned toward me and put his hands on my shoulders...
...And Barthelme sees himself in her...
...They have sought to make a better Cuba for the Cuban people and to achieve for Cuba a stronger, more dignified position in world affairs...
...He writes...
...He rants...
...he creates...
...he designs pages...
...His father is the "source" of his condition, the creator, and he is not in complete control...
...He again resembles his heroes...
...she cannot turn back to established forms and act like fairy-tale heroines...
Vol. 103 • June 1976 • No. 12
