Great Days

by Donald Barthelme

This new collection of stories marks a departure in Barthelme's work with the introduction of a new mode in which he abandons all forms of characterization other than dialogue in an attempt to shift and alter reader expectations and perceptions.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, American

172 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those were Great Days of the twentieth century and all other times…
Rebellions became a tedious routine occurring almost on schedule The Crisis reports…

– Yes, success is everything. Morally important as well as useful in a practical way.
– What have the rebels captured thus far? One zoo, not our best zoo, and a cemetery…
– Clementine is thought to be one of the great rebel leaders of the half-century. Her hat has four cockades.
– I loved her for a while. Then, it stopped.

Cortés and Montezuma opens an unknown page in the conquering of America…

Down by the docks, Cortés and Montezuma walk, holding hands. “Are you acquainted with a Father Sanchez?” Montezuma asks. “Sanchez, yes, what’s he been up to?” says Cortés. “Overturning idols,” says Montezuma. “Yes,” Cortés says vaguely, “yes, he does that, everywhere we go.”

The King of Jazz delivers a glorious jazzy gig…

“Can you distinguish our great homemade American jazz performers, each from the other?”
“Used to could.”
“Then who was that playing?”
“Sounds like Hokie Mokie to me. Those few but perfectly selected notes have the real epiphanic glow.”
“The what?”

On the Steps of the Conservatory reveals some wonders of studying in conservatory…

– Yes, sometimes we paste things on the naked models – clothes, mostly. Yes, sometimes we play our Conservatory violins, cellos, trumpets for the naked models, or sing to them, or correct their speech, as our deft fingers fly over the sketch pads…

Those were the greatest days in the history of the best of the worlds.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Surprising references to Abba and Joan Armatrading made me remember that this is late 70s stuff from the Don. It’s his next to last collection, and it’s a last-of-the-summer-wine moment. We look back fondly on the young sprightly avantgardist of the mid 60s who could turn summersaults in mid-sentence and land on a moth’s wing whilst lighting a cigarette (they hadn’t all given up in those days, in fact, it was compulsory to smoke in the 60s, there were classes in schools and tests) but now the old dog kind a drags himself over to your armchair and snuffles on your hand which is all sad and sorrowful and sweet and a bit ech where’s my handkerchief too. He can still do a few tricks but no, these ain’t great days no more.
One final collection to go which got slaughtered by the critics. I am not looking forward to that. But this is what you get when you decide to read all of an author’s books. Completists beware.

[Noah Leben · Rating 5 out of 5]

To me, reading Barthelme is like gazing at shadows upon a wall and trying to guess the objects that threw them. He creates through omission, obfuscation and misdirection. These colloquies are so bare they border on skeletal and they're all the more beautiful for it. This book feels, at times, like an artifact of a world just barely resembling our own. Short enough to be read in a sitting, but endlessly fascinating. Highly recommended.

If this is a minor work I can only imagine the mastery of the major.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the time this was published (1979), this slim collection of Barthelme short stories was described as a "departure" for him in that he relies entirely on dialogue to form any sense of characterization (or, really, narrative). Barthelme is always fascinating and odd--sometimes his ideas are unique (like choosing to inquire about the job of a body guard and writing the story almost entirely in questions) and sometimes his characters are eccentric to the point of ridiculousness (they talk past one another or make the kind of nonsense statements that reframe ordinary situations asking the reader to reconsider what might normally be overlooked). Overall, a kind of uneven collection, but always humorous and engaging. I'll leave you with a piece from the last story which supplies the title for the whole collection:

- There's a thing the children say.
- What do the children say?
- They say: Will you always love me?
- Always.
- Will you always remember me?
- Always.
- Will you remember me a year from now?
- Yes, I will.
- Will you remember me two years from now?
- Yes, I will.
- Will you remember me five years from now?
- Yes, I will.
- Knock, knock.
- Who's there?
- You see?

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WORDS I LOOKED UP AFTER READING THIS BOOK
coatimundis | pertinacity | seraglio | houngan | ixias | vichyssoise

[Alex V. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished off Great Days at the terrible laundromat near my house, the one where there is a knife and a roll of toilet paper on the counter of the office where they break a twenty, the one that has a Robocop video game console that isn't actually a Robocop game but something else, the one that has a dryer that sounds like it might spew anti-matter any second now, the one with TheGreen Mile going full blast on an old TV to no one during that scene where the execution goes wrong and just then I got to the part in the short story "The Zombies" where he says:

If a bad zombie gets you, he will scarify your hide with chisels and rakes.

and it felt like a fuse blew in my head. Bzzzzrrrzzk. I hadn't understood a single thing in this book, but each sentence felt like a spark, like when you touch the red and the black jumper cables together. I wondered if the lights would go out in the laundromat when I read that. If the clothes would never dry. If I'd have to feed quarters into some slot in the cosmos just to get seven minutes more of existence, just one more of these sizzling nibble of glowing gibberish. Like the timing on a Rube-Goldberg machine, I hit the end of Great Days just as the dryer tumbled and squealed to a halt and I could leave both these worlds behind me.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think that anyone would argue that Great Days is Barthelme's finest work and I'm not going to either. It is, however, highly enjoyable in parts and strangely unnerving in others. Any reader of Sixty Stories will already be familiar with quite a few of the highlights. Special mention has to go out to "Cortés and Montezuma," "The King of Jazz," and "Tales of the Swedish Army." The experimental colloquies are, as noted, haunting in their obliqueness, leaving so much to the imagination that the gaps left for the reader to fill in result in participatory fiction. No one can better Barthelme's restless experimentation with the short form.

A must for the converted.

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, let me say that certain other Barthelme stories are near flawless. This collection, however, does not seem to have a lot of those. Most of it is taken up by absurd free-associative dialogues that read a bit like drastically overlong and unfunny Jerk City comics. In the middle come the actual stories, and these are largely better in their brisk, surrealist swirls. Even the repurposed Found Text section is fairly amazing. I assume most of these are reprinted in later collections though, so save your time and just go straight there instead.

[Judson · Rating 4 out of 5]

My introduction to Barthelme gets 4 stars, only because I didn't think every single very short story or play was as absurdly brilliant as all the others. If I had my copy right here, I'd go so far as to quote from it, probably a passage that predicts what 2009 U.S.A. living is like with silly accuracy. I'm gonna keep reading Donald Barthelme for the rest of life.

[Dan]

I borrowed this much longer than I intended. To the lovely young woman who I inadvertantly stole this off of, I apologize greatly....

[Cooper Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

For three decades Barthelme, who died in 1989, was a BIG NAME in American short story writing and a major influence on other writers. Here are some gushy blurbs from the covers of Great Days: “Whimsical, elusive and miraculously inventive…a classic satirist.” “Barthelme is rather a miracle of variousness and vigilance.” “He shatters the whole language only to reinvent it.” “One of our best and most adventurous writers.” “Challenging and funny…further proof, if we need it, that Donald Barthelme deserves his reputation as a major literary phenomenon of these great days.”
His stories are indeed whimsical and inventive—and usually only half-comprehensible. Most of the tales in this collection consist of dialogues between unidentified characters. (The debt to Samuel Beckett is unmistakable.) The range of subject-matter is wide: there are dialogues between Cortes and Montezuma, among four senior citizens sitting in a park, between a person who has just been rejected for admission to a Conservatory and her pal, who is a member; there is a story about zombies visiting a human community en masse to find wives; there is a query into the lives and minds of bodyguards; there is a dialogue between two characters who are trying to decide whether today is the day to make a Kierkegaardian leap of faith.
The stories are playful and, despite their half-incomprehensibility, remarkably fun to read.
Listen:

From “Cortes and Montezuma”:

Cortes and Montezuma are walking, down by the docks. “I especially like the Holy Ghost. Qua idea,” says Montezuma. “The other God, the Father, is also—“ “One God, three Persons,” Cortes corrects gently. “That the Son should be sacrificed,” Montezuma continues, “seems to me wrong. It seems to me He should be sacrificed too. Furthermore,” Montezuma stops and taps Cortes meaningfully on the chest with a brown forefinger, “where is the Mother?”

From “The Apology”:

—I was unforgivable.
—I don’t disagree.
—He’ll never come back.
—Say you’re sorry.
—I’m not sorry.
—Genuine sorrow is gold. If you can’t do it, fake it.
—I’m not sorry.
—Well screw it. It’s six of one and half dozen of the other to me. I don’t care.
—What?
—Forgive me I didn’t mean that.
—What?
—I just meant you could throw him a bone is all I meant. A note written on pale-blue notepaper, in an unsteady hand. “Dear William, it is one of the greatest regrets of my life that—“
—Never.

From “The Abduction from the Seraglio”:

The thing is, and I hate to admit it, but Constanze’s a little dumb. She’s not so dumb as a lady I once knew who thought the Mark of Zorro was an N, but she’s not perfect. You tell her that you heard via the jungle drums that there’s a vacancy in Willie Jake Johnson’s bed and her eyes will cut to the side just for a moment, which means she’s thinking. She’s not conservative. I’m some kind of an artist, but I’m conservative. Mine is the art of the possible, plus two. She, on the contrary, spent many years as a talented and elegant country-music groupie. She knows things I do not know. Happy dust is $1,900 an ounce now, I hear tell—she’s tasted it, I haven’t. It’s a small thing, but irritating. She’s dumb in what she knows, if you follow me.


From “Great Days”:

—If you need a friend I’m yours till the end.
—Your gracious and infinitely accommodating presence.
—Julia’s is the best. Best I’ve ever seen. The finest.
—The muscle of jealousy is not in me. Nowhere.
—Oh it is so fine. Incomparable.
—Some think one thing, some another.
—The very damn best believe me.
—Well I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.
—Well, would you like to see it?
���Well I don’t know, I don’t know her very well do you?
—Well, I know her well enough to ask her.
—Well, why don’t you ask her if it’s not an inconvenience or this isn’t the wrong time or something.
—Well, probably this is the wrong time come to think of it because she isn’t here and some time when she is here would probably be a better time.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barthelme's short stories will define 2010 for me. Their humor and wisdom, their brevity and oddity, are marvelous. For any one dud, there are five great pieces. This collection comforted me during the most stressful two weeks of my first semester at graduate school. I'll seek out and read "The Leap" with pleasure again. A pair of poetic sentences and a few passages that moved me follow:

"Thank people for their kindness, thank them for their courtesy. Thank them for their thoughtfulness. Thank them for little things they do if they do little things that are kind, courteous, or thoughtful."

"She will undoubtedly move on and up and down and around in the world, New York, Chicago, and Temple, Texas, making everything considerably better than it was, for short periods of time. We adventured. That's not bad."

"Skin of dreams, paint marks, red scratches, grass stains."

"The supporting company plays in the traditional way, but Lear himself appears shouting, shaking, vibrant with rage."

- Love, which is a kind of permission to come closer than ordinary norms of good behavior might usually sanction.
- Back rubs.
- Which enables us to see each other without clothes on, for example, in lust and shame.
- Examining perfections, imperfections.
- Which allows us to say wounding things to each other which would not be kosher under the ordinary rules of civilized discourse.
- Walkin' my baby back home.
- Love which allows us to live together male and female in small grubby apartments that would only hold one sane person, normally.
- Misting the plants together - the handsome, talented plants.
- He who hath not love is a sad cookie.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired Jul 31, 1998
Corner Stone Book Shop, Plattsburgh NY

[Tim]

Read the 1980 Pocket books paperback, not the hardcover (pictured).

[Dan Edelstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

okay

[Paul Allman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Later Don B -- utterly unique and to me, funny, serene, and heartbreaking.