Electric Literature Logo Mobile Menu 22% of article read LIT MAGS THE SCHOOL A short story by Donald

Barthelme, recommended by Steven Polansky INTRODUCTION BY STEVEN POLANSKY JUMP TO STORY

SHARE ARTICLE Share on... DEC 31, 2014 ISSUE NO 137 The School Written by Donald Barthelme
Recommended by Steven Polansky In the Fall of 1972, I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at SUNY
Buffalo, where I spent one anarchic year — in the Student Union I accidently stepped on a couple
copulating on the floor — then fled. I’d come to Buffalo hoping to work with John Barth, a luminary
there, and a leading figure in American post-modernist fiction. (I couldn’t have told you then, in any
satisfactory way, what “post-modernist” meant.) When I applied, I didn’t know that Barth had decided
to leave Buffalo for Johns Hopkins (via Boston University). I went to Buffalo expecting Barth, and got
Barthelme, whose post-modernist light was not a watt less luminous. In each of my two semesters at
Buffalo, I took a graduate fiction writing seminar with Barthelme. In each seminar I produced two
stories. For me an impressive output never to be repeated. All four of my stories were futile,
sycophantic travesties of stories in Barthelme’s collection, City Life, then all the rage. I wanted
Barthelme to like my work, and me, but I could not tell what he thought of either. In class and out,
Barthelme was courtly but aloof, and I wasn’t ever sure he knew my name. I was not clever or
sophisticated enough, not free enough in spirit and imagination, insufficiently steeped in world
literature and music and, especially, in the visual arts, even to approach the kind of arch and high-gloss
and often brilliant literary maneuvers of which Barthelme was master. I’d read half a dozen of
Barthelme’s stories in The New Yorker. I didn’t understand them, could not have explicated those texts
for love or money. But I admired their brittle, ironic surface, and Barthelme’s wit and manifest
refinement. Since leaving Buffalo I’ve read most of his work, and with, perhaps, a bit more
comprehension. Barthelme’s short fiction is unapologetically difficult. In a 1987 essay, “Not-Knowing,”
Barthelme writes: “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art.
However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him.
He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.” Barthelme
published some 70 stories in The New Yorker. Other writers have held a comparable sway over that
magazine’s short fiction empire — Irwin Shaw, John O’Hara, John Cheever, J.D. Salinger (despite his
relatively meager output), John Updike, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro — all of them writers of
“straightforward” fiction. All of them susceptible of imitation, however pallid. Barthelme is inimitable,
sui generis — in this way, like Borges — his universe of discourse his alone. For an aspirant, such as I was,
nothing to be learned, except the crucial stuff: discipline, authority, audacity, and a scrupulous precision.
When I knew him, Barthelme was in his early forties. He died in 1989, at the age of 58. “The School,”
which appeared first in the 1976 collection, Amateurs, is one of Barthelme’s more accessible stories. To
describe it is to sound ridiculous: a very funny story about death and the negation of meaning, and the
only story ever written, by anyone, in which a resurrected gerbil is the bringer of hope. –Steven
Polansky Author of Dating Miss Universe: Nine Stories