Overnight to Many Distant Cities

by Donald Barthelme

A collection of eleven astonishing short stories focus on a group of people facing unusual situations or turning-points in their lives and the diverse consequences and alternatives of their futures

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

174 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) apparently collects sometimes surrealistic stories of modern life of American writer Donald Barthelme.

A student at the University of Pennsylvania bore Donald Barthelme. Two years later, in 1933, the family moved to Texas, where father of Barthelme served as a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme later majored in journalism.

In 1951, this still student composed his first articles for the Houston Post. The Army drafted Barthelme, who arrived in Korea on 27 July 1953, the very day, when parties signed the ceasefire, ending the war. He served briefly as the editor of a newspaper of Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post. Once back, he continued his studies of philosophy at the University of Houston. He continued to take classes until 1957 but never received a degree. He spent much of his free time in “black” jazz clubs of Houston and listened to musical innovators, such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelly; this experience influenced him later.

Barthelme, a rebellious son, struggled in his relationship with his demanding father. In later years, they tremendously argued about the kinds of literature that interested Barthelme. His avant-garde father in art and aesthetics in many ways approved not the postmodern and deconstruction schools. The Dead Father and The King , the novels, delineate attitude of Barthelme toward his father as King Arthur and Lancelot, the characters, picture him. From the Roman Catholicism of his especially devout mother, Barthelme independently moved away, but this separation as the distance with his father troubled Barthelme. He ably agreed to strictures of his seemingly much closer mother.

Barthelme went to teach for brief periods at Boston University and at University at Buffalo, and he at the college of the City of New York served as distinguished visiting professor from 1974-1975. He married four times. Helen Barthelme, his second wife, later entitled a biography Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound , published in 2001. With Birgit Barthelme, his third wife and a Dane, he fathered Anne Barthelme, his first child, a daughter. He married Marion Barthelme near the end and fathered Kate Barthelme, his second daughter. Marion and Donald wed until his death from throat cancer. People respect fiction of Frederick Barthelme and Steven Barthelme, brothers of Donald Barthelme and also teachers at The University of Southern Mississippi.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

As others have said -- a more even Barthelme, with fewer risks, fewer peaks or outright failures. These stories are odd in more normal ways that his earlier more audacious experiments in form and content. Peculiar characters, stylized dialogue, bits of incident that wouldn't show up in a realist story, even if the main plotline seems essentially believable. And so, the standouts were more pleasantly interesting here that crazy blow-outs, usually revolving around relationships. Opener Visitors, The Sea of Hesitation, and then, in the collection's only fairy tale (and a postmodern one, at that!) The Palace at 4 a.m., which I rather loved. I know, I know, I should just cut to the chase and read 60 stories or 40 stories, and I will, but I like approaching Barthelme slowly through these peripheral sources (which are arguably more primary since they're the original forms).

[James Marlowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The following is the ending to the story, "The Sea of Hesitation," as well as one of my favorite passages of Don B.

------------------

Is this will-lessness, finally? Abulia, as we call it in the trade? I don't think so.

I pursue Possibility. That's something.

There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, "Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch." The initial smash of glance on glance. Then, the drawing near. This takes a long time, it seems like months, although only a few minutes pass, in fact. Languor is the word that describes this part of the process. Your persona floats toward her persona, over the Sea of Hesitation. Many weeks pass before they meet, but the weeks are days, or seconds. Still everything is decided. You have slept together in the glance.

She takes your arm and you leave the newsstand, walking very close together, so that your side brushes her side lightly. Desire is here a very strong factor, because you are weak with it, and the woman is too, if she has any sense at all (but of course she is a sensible women, and brilliant and witty and hungry as well). So, on the sidewalk outside the newsstand, you stand for a moment thinking about where to go, at eleven o'clock in the morning, and here it is, in the sunlight, that you take the first good look at her, and she at you, to see if either one has any hideous blemish that has been overlooked, in the first rush of good feeling. There are none. None. No blemishes (except those spiritual blemishes that will be discovered later, after extended acquaintance, and which none of us are without, but which are now latent? dormant? in any case not visible on the surface at this time). Everything is fine. And so, with renewed confidence, you begin to walk, and to seek a place where you might sit down, and have a drink, and talk a bit, and fall into each other's eyes, temporarily, and find some pretzels, and have what is called a conversation, and tell each other what you think is true about the world, and speak of the strange places where each of you has been (Surinam, in her case, where she bought the belt she is wearing, Lima in your case, where you contracted telegraph fever), and make arrangements for your next meeting (both of you drinking Scotch and water, at eleven in the morning, and you warm to her because of her willingness to leave her natural mid-morning track, for you), and make, as I say, arrangements for your next meeting, which must be this very night! or you both will die--

There is no particular point to this behavior. Or: This is the only behavior which has point. Or: There is some point to this behavior but this behavior is not the only behavior which has point. Which is true? Truth is greatly overrated, volition where it exists must be protected, wanting itself can be obliterated, some people have forgotten how to want.

[Troy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Barthelme?
This is a fast read and, for Barthelme, fairly conventional.

Unlike Sadness, which is the last collection of Barthelme shorts that I read, this collection is even. Sadness was wildly uneven, bordering on shit that I didn't even register as "writing" to a couple of stories that absolutely blew my mind - Scanners style. None of the stories in this collection made me scratch my head and shout at the book, "What the fuck was that?" But then again, nothing in the book made me re-think the way stories could be written, and nothing made me shout, "Oh damn that was good!" or laugh out loud and kick my couch in joy.

The short stories in this collection are sometimes VERY short. Each short story is prefaced by an even shorter story that is all in italics and whose title is simply the first few words. I'm not sure what binds all of the italicized stories or the regular short stories, and I'm not sure why the writer ping pongs between the two, but there does seem to be an overriding structure that I'm missing. Most of the stories revolve around relationships and a few, such as "Visitors," veer into Raymond Carver territory (and "Visitors" is one of the better stories in the collection). Almost all of the stories have lovely parts, but none of the stories reach the brilliance of "The School" or "The Sandman" or "Departures." There are still many moments of experimental awesomeness, like when Barthelme visually represents a bunch of kneeling women's butts like so: 00 00 00, or the way he uses a repeating sentence as a framing device to repeat aspects of loss. And there are moments of "regular" writing brilliance like in the story "Affection" where the three characters are practically screaming in order to communicate, yet are still failing.

All in all, great stuff, but not as insane as his earlier writings, and that solidity made for a pleasant read, but didn't leave anything that blew my mind, which in itself is surprising for Barthelme.

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overnight to Many Distant Cities is a selection of twelve short stories by Donald Barthelme, including: "Visitors", "Affection", "Lightning", "Captain Blood", "Conversations with Goethe", "Henrietta and Alexandra", "The Sea of Hesitation", "Terminus", "The Mothball Fleet", "Wrack", "The Palace at Four A.M.", and "Overnight to Many Distant Cities"

[Anetq · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surreal short stories and prose pieces - classic Barthelme in that sense, but somehow lacking the punch, humour and irony that normally makes his works fun to read. Then it turn into more of a collection of strangeness, even if the right pieces are all here.
I tend to agree with this, not too impressed, review: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/09/boo...

[Lauramarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know what it is about this book that makes me love it so so so much. But I do.

[Cooper Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald Barthelme (known to his cohorts as “Don B”) was one of America’s foremost “postmodern” fiction writers. “Postmodern” means—well, no one knows exactly what it means, but in fiction it generally comes down to fracturing the traditional narrative, switching from one point of view to another so that it’s not clear who the narrator is, toying with the language (inventing new words, punning, rhyming, spinning nonsense), satirizing cultural norms and particularly modern technology, and blurring the line between fantasy and reality. The grandparents of the postmodernist writers are James Joyce and the surrealists and dadaists of the early twentieth century; their parents include existentialists like Samuel Beckett; some of Don B’s most illustrious American siblings are Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) and John Barth (The Sotweed Factor).
Barthelme wrote only four long works (Snow White, The Dead Father, Paradise, The King); I find the techniques that work wonderfully in his short fiction tedious in the novels. (I also find most of Pynchon’s novels unreadable, probably because his techniques are also more suitable for [but not, of course, as lucrative in:] the short story). In Overnight to Many Distant Cities Don B shows a lot more variety of technique than in Great Days, which consists mostly of all-dialogue stories: in Overnight there are only a couple of “dialogue” stories, the rest are fractured (some more, some less) narratives. However, both books offer a wide range of subject matter: in Overnight, there are love affairs including a lesbian relationship, there are pirates, there is a conversation with Goethe, in a single story there are allusions to Wittgenstein and to blunders of the Civil War, there is a mothballed Navy fleet sailing down the Hudson River, there are troubles between a king and his estranged sprite-like companion, and there is a disjointed and zany tour through many cities of the world. The stories are bracketed by interstitial pieces, themselves stories or vignettes, most of them amusing and/or interesting but elusive of meaning.
Pynchon, who presumably knew Don B, called his work “melancholy;” to me, though it does satirize contemporary illusions, its primary characteristic is playfulness.* In spite of—or maybe because of—the stories’ wackiness, I found them fun reading.

*My novel Flea Circus is similarly playful, but more comprehensible.

From “Conversations with Goethe”

Today Goethe inveighed against certain critics who had, he said, completely misunderstood Lessing. He spoke movingly about how such obtuseness had partially embittered Lessing’s last years, and speculated that it was because Lessing was both critic and dramatist that the attacks had been of more than usual ferocity. Critics, Goethe said, are the cracked mirror in the grand ballroom of the creative spirit. No, I said, they were, rather, the extra baggage on the great cabriolet of conceptual progress. “Eckermann,” said Goethe, “shut up.”

From an interstitial piece:

Two women, one dark and one fair, wearing parkas, blue wool watch caps on their heads, inspecting a row of naked satyrs, hairy-legged, split-footed, tailed and tufted, who hang from hooks in a meat locker where the temperature is a constant 18 degrees. The women are tickling the satyrs under the tail, where they are most vulnerable, with their long white (nimble) fingers tipped with long curved scarlet nails. The satyrs squirm and dance under this treatment, hanging from hooks, while other women, seated in red plush armchairs, in the meat locker, applaud, or scold, or knit. Hovering near the thermostat, Vladimir Tatlin, in an asbestos tuxedo.

From “Captain Blood”:

The favorite dance of Captain Blood is the grave and haunting sardana, in which the participants join hands facing each other to form a ring which gradually becomes larger, then smaller, then larger again. It is danced without smiling, for the most part. He frequently dances this with his men, in the middle of the ocean, after lunch, to the music of a single silver trumpet.

From an interstitial piece:

That guy in the back room, she said. He’s eating our potatoes. You were wonderful last night. The night before that, you were wonderful. The night before that, you were terrible. He’s eating our potatoes. I went in there and looked at him and he had potato smeared all over his face. Mashed. You were wonderful on the night that we met. I was terrible. You were terrible on the night we had the suckling pig. The pig, cooking the pig, put you in a terrible mood. I was wonderful in order to balance, to attempt to balance, your foul behavior. That guy with the eye patch in the back room is eating our potatoes. What are you going to do about it?

From “Lightning”:

Edward Connors, on assignment for Folks, set out to interview nine people who had been struck by lightning. “Nine?” he said to his editor, Penfield. “Nine, ten,” said Penfield, “doesn’t matter, but it has to be more than eight.” “Why?” asked Connors, and Penfield said that the layout was scheduled for five pages and they wanted at least two people who had been struck by lightning per page plus somebody pretty sensational for the opening page. “Slightly wonderful,” said Penfield,” nice body, I don’t have to tell you, somebody with a special face. Also, struck by lightning.”

From “The Palace at Four A.M.”:

The King feels that your falling-out, over the matter of the refugees from Brise, was the result of a miscalculation on his part. He could not have known, he says, that they had bogle blood (although he admits that their small stature should have told him something). Exchanging the refugees from Brise for the twenty-three Bishops of Ho captured during the affair was, he says in hindsight, a serious error; more bishops can always be created. He makes the point that you did not tell him that the refugees from Brise had bogle blood but instead expected him to know it. Your outrage was, he thinks, a pretext. He at once forgives you and begs your forgiveness. The Chair of Military Philosophy at the university is yours, if you want it. You loved him, he says, he is convinced of it, he still cannot believe it, he exists in a condition of doubt. You are both old; you are both forty. The palace at four A.M. is silent. Come back, Hannahbella, and speak to him.

[Brad Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wish that I had liked this. It's sooo postmodern, and has a certain sensibility to the prose and even some plots reminiscent of the era that I enjoyed, but overall this was kind of a mess. I couldn't for the life of me discern a plot, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I mean I liked Bernadine Evaristo, Infinite Jest, even parts of Barth's work, but this was just so abstract and jumped around in ways that made it impossible to follow. The whole collection is to be read as one book, with italicized sections acting as connecting tissue, but I couldn't find anything worth keeping in that either.

That being said, there were a few stories I enjoyed and found interesting and definitely worth the time. Just not many, unfortunately.

[Hugo L.B · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What an infinity of leeks, lentils, turnips, green beans we tossed into the pot over the years" Pg.131

Barthelme's sprightly and scything style is preposed acerbically in this collection. Notable stories, often numbering 3-7 pages include 'Lightening', 'The sea of hesitation' especially its closing sequence "people have forgot how to want' - hermetic, drawling and sanguine. 'hotel terminus' a desiccated story of kind of love and kind of broken people running out of ways to live, not easily forgotten.

[Jim Ivy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps my favorite short story writer. Another fantastic collection. Barthelme knows how to keep it very interesting. Sad that I have yet to read a novel of his that does the same.

[Addington · Rating 4 out of 5]

felt like a fever dream. i do not know how someone came up with these words and put them in this order, but i enjoyed it.

[Marcus Mennes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered Barthelme via Thomas Pynchon's lively introduction to the anthology “The Teachings of Don B.” In his introduction Pynchon discusses “Overnight to Many Distant Cities” and writes: "…dreams seldom make it through into print with anything like the original production values…even if you do good recovery learning to write legibly in the dark and so forth, there’s still the matter of getting it down in words that can bring back even a little of the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience…Barthelme, however, happens to be one of a handful of American authors…who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right past the checkpoints of daylight reality.”

It is profoundly difficult to relate a dream to another person. How do we capture the random, half-realized sub-text and describe it using common images and language? Dreams are situational, in that you kind of have to be there. It is similar to telling a joke…rationalized, it ceases to be funny. So too dreams are the product of circumstance, mood, barometric pressure...

Perhaps one reason people aren’t more in the habit of writing down their dreams is because they determine them not important enough to chronicle. I’ve kept a dream journal sporadically since childhood, and some of the most imaginative writing I’ve produced has been at my bedside, with a flashlight, at six a.m., fresh out of a dream state. I’m not under the illusion that my dreams are somehow important, prophetic, or even that interesting. What draws me to the dream state are the expansive possibilities, in a place where non-sequiturs are the norm, and time is elongated to a point where episodes that seem to last for hours or days are compressed into a few minutes of rapid eye movement. Meanings are displaced, common phenomenon is represented by opposites, and logic gives way to fallacy…it is stuff I could never invent in the waking state.

It’s a worn cliché but we do spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, wrapped in blankets in this comatose zone our brains need for recharging. Assuming you sleep the recommended eight hours each night, which is quite neatly 1/3 of your day, which means you will sleep 56 hours a week, 256 hours a month, 2,912 hours every year, and let’s say you live to be 80 years old, you will have slept for 232,960 hours, give or take a few hundred to account for Leap Years and odd numbered months…

I’m no mathematician, but these numbers appear significant. One third of our time on earth is spent viewing the internal movies projected on our skull walls. We play many roles every night in an interior life quite separate from the one we know.

For centuries dream researchers have studied the phenomenon through the scientific method, analyzing data, examining cause and effect. Today, we are closer than ever to realizing the biological function of dreams, perhaps, but when I say closer than ever, read: not very far. Dream interpretation is a personal matter. An outsider, even a trained psychiatrist, can only interpret the circumstances, themes, symbols, and their corresponding meaning to a limited degree. I’m not going to weigh in on the debate about the ultimate meaning, whether dreams are just the random firing of neurons, or whether they have some predictive, problem solving power…

But here I am chasing a red herring. What I really mean to suggest via this long-winded digression is: “Overnight to Many Distant Cities” is best approached in a semi-conscious way, open to the fleeting possibilities implicit in the dream state. The act of dreaming is closely related to fiction writing, or indeed any creative act or artistic process. Here, Barthelme projects his images from a strange, yet familiar zip code in the mind’s eye.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The favorite dance of Captain Blood is the grave and haunting Catalonian sardana, in which the participants join hands facing each other to form a ring which gradually becomes larger, then smaller, then larger again. It is danced without smiling, for the most part. He frequently dances with his men, in the middle of the ocean, after lunch, to the music of a single silver trumpet."

I liked Donald Barthelme's Forty Stories a lot and rated it with four stars. Alas, his Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983) has been a disappointment and, in fact, if not for the last piece in the set, the title story, I would have to rate the book even lower than with two stars.

Overnight is a collection of small literary pieces, of which many but not all are very short stories. They are interspersed with "interludes", for some reason printed in italics, but I am too obtuse to discern connections between the "stories" and the intervening material. It would be nice to be able to say that the longer pieces form a mosaic of literary snapshots of life, but then the verb "form" implies some sort of design, which is missing, or maybe again I am too dull-witted to recognize it. The pieces of the mosaic seem to be randomly thrown onto the pages, lacking any unifying order, sort of like a lazy avant-garde painter randomly squeezing colors out of paint tubes onto the canvas.

But let's not quibble about the lack of unifying theme; after all Heraclitus said "The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony." But then the reader would probably want the individual pieces of the mosaic to distinguish themselves in some way - be interesting, amusing, funny, perhaps make some point, carry a message, etc. Alas, only two out of the 24 pieces have made an impression on me: Captain Blood is a wildly funny post-modern take on the activities of the famous buccaneer, who dances sardana with his crew, "after lunch, to the music of a single silver trumpet." Then the title piece, a collection of scenes that the narrator remembers from his visits to many distant places, does convey the deep and intense feeling of nostalgia, beautifully rendered in Barthelme's prose.

Some pieces are quite hard to get through: I particularly dislike the bewildering and opaque interlude about teaching a baby not to tear pages out of books and the piece called Wrack composed solely of unfocused and rambling dialogue. Mr. Barthelme can write great prose, but this is not his best work and the set would be a poor introduction to his writing for a novice reader.

Two stars.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally enjoyable and light as a toothpick, following John Barth's collection. This is another contemporary writer David Foster Wallace admired, so I took his recommendation seriously. Barthelme has a healthy imagination and a propensity to juxtapose multiple sources of incoming information (TV on, radio on, cooking dinner, listening to the lady one's cooking for and wondering whether she'll have a smoke with her Scotch), which made me grin more than once. I read nearly all of this collection of short stories flying between New York and Chicago, but I wasn't rushing: they're short. They're also funny, strange and poetic. The writer writes beautifully about love, too. We'll meet again.

"I am, at the moment, feeling very jolly. Hey hey, I say. It is remarkable how well human affairs can be managed, with care."

[Amelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven, but moments are delightful. Divvied between the more- and less-fantastical, obviously with many on the margins. Of the more-fantastical, "Captain Blood" is very fun. "A woman seated on a plain wooden chair...", which immediately follows it, is underwhelming until the very last line. Of the less-fantastical, "Terminus" is heartbreaking.

Nothing feels unconsidered, but not everything feels significant. This is a personal response, and the reading's very much worth it for the moments that do.

[Lokimcgraw · Rating 2 out of 5]

To me this was fairly impenetrable. Postmodernism is not my cup of tea and the stories seemed so fragmented and experimental, like concrete that didn't have the necessary ingredients to set properly. Felt cold and hard-edged, merciless and hopeless. Probably my shortcoming but I just didn't get it.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired May 2006
Gift from Jenn

[Z.rob]

simple in grandeur, this collection of short stories is a...

greatest read!

[Austin Storm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the vignettes in between the stories as much as the stories. Barthelme's Paris Review writer series interview helped me appreciate his work more than I did at first reading.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can read this again and again. Put it down and pick it up again after time. Still excites me.

[Aaron Akira]

https://www.goodreads.com/