Anyone who messages or emails me privately about how these three writers were first recently connected will receive a free copy of one of my published books by independent publishers and as signable by me. Certain to be a good investment, if I can be immodest enough to predict. Alternatively, you might opt for an anthology that I edited and published for other authors’ work. One example: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/10/nemonymous-ten/
My decision is final as to the correct answer to that question, and, should you indeed get it right, I cannot guarantee which book I send you, but I shall try to fulfil your wishes. This offer is only relevant as long as available supplies of my previous publications exist.
NOT available: GAUCHE STORIES, WEIRDMONGER and the novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT.
If it is the rare LAST BALCONY hardback collection or the NULL IMMORTALIS, CERN ZOO, CONE ZERO and ZENCORE anthologies, that you choose, their being so heavy in weight, I shall be charging some of the postage costs overseas from the UK.
When I read these books by Lautréamont, Barthelme and Jackson, my thoughts on them will appear in the comment stream below….
( For above connection ‘conundrum’, my email is shown here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/05/d-f-lewis-books-for-down-bodying-sale/ )
“It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity. Consequently, shrinking soul, turn on your heels and go back before penetrating further into such uncharted, perilous wastelands.”
— Maldoror, Comte de Lautréamont
In many ways, having now started to Dabble in the Diabelli. of this ‘evil’ book, I would be ashamed to have been witnessed reading it on a train. But I can see elements of the ‘WEIRDMONGER’ stories and other dark gauchenesses of mine in it, and I protect myself by creating prophylactic thoughts of ‘irony’ and ‘unreliable narrator’ in its connection, and recognising the amount of influence it apparently had on famous artists and writers that followed Lautréamont, except he had no influence on me, because I had not read this shocking work till today!
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I have read hardly any Shirley Jackson before. And my son told me recently that I need at least to read her short stories.
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I can’t recall reading any Donald Barthelme before today. Thanks to Mike Sauve for once letting me know that Barthelme said that the author is “a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances, a St. Sebastian absorbing in his tattered breast the arrows of the Zeitgeist…” — ‘a role osmotic with the critic’, someone else said, in relation to this quote. And the writer Rhys Hughes has been praising his work for many years.
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I intend to read (and review below) some stories by Barthelme and Jackson over the coming period, starting with Barthelme’s THE SANDMAN, mainly because I very recently reviewed ‘The Sandman’ by E.T.A. Hoffman here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/11/the-sandman/ — I’ll leave you to decide if there is any linkage, other than the fact that I read the Hoffman because of an academic book by Nicholas Royle called THE UNCANNY (here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/the-uncanny-by-nicholas-royle/) that dealt with Sigmund Freud’s essay called ‘The Uncanny’ that in turn dealt in detail with Hoffman’s ‘The Sandman’!
THE SANDMAN by Donald Barthelme
“Susan’s perception that America has somehow got hold of the greed ethic and that the greed ethic has turned America into a tidy little hell is not, I think, wrong.”
This is a letter seemingly from a man to his girl friend’s ‘shrink’ about her decision to give up paying for the cost of such psychotherapy in favour of buying a piano. The question remains – who is the inferred automaton? I vote for the letter writer who ended up voting for the piano!
THE INTOXICATION by Shirley Jackson
”’I don’t really think it’s [the world] got much future’, she said, ‘at least the way we’ve got it now.”
Seems, by chance, to echo the quote I have already used for Barthelme’s Sandman above! A short tale of an older man at a party talking to the host’s seventeen year old daughter in the kitchen. A then prophecy of the lies of later populism? — ”’Gallia est omnia [sic] divisa in partes tres,’ his host said…”
THE BALLOON by Donald Barthelme
“….we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now…”
A tale of a balloon that spreads like a subversive canopy across blocks of the city, eventually subsuming the sky, with all questions channelled into a personal romantic problem that had tethered it there in the first place. Maybe it was created by whoever wrote about it, in retroactive narration, here in this story? Many people found it calming and therapeutic to walk under the shadow of its greys and browns. I consider it to be an iconic story, but far more amorphous than any such icone could otherwise be considered to be.
THE DAEMON LOVER by Shirley Jackson
“It occurred to her that perhaps she ought to not to wear the blue silk dress; it was too plain, almost severe, and she wanted to be soft, feminine.”
Like Barthelme’s balloon at a wedding about to be punctured? The soft canopy of nightmare spreads as the woman awaits her bridegroom, a tall man in a blue suit, and she worries about her dress for the wedding, after a fitful sleep and now a coffee, searches the street for him, asks others whether they have seen him, and there is something about unsuitable chrysanthemums… and a soon-to-be horrific moment with a rat to airbrush because the ending has still to be reached, before her print dress caught and tore….
My review of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/13/28361/
Mt reviews of other horror stories of a similar ilk: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
THE CITY OF CHURCHES by Donald Barthelme
The secret is in the end of this story about a town made up of nothing but churches, as a car-rental salesperson called Cecilia speaks to an estate agent for accommodation…but the secret itself can only be solved by an exchange of conversation midway through:
“What a view!” Mr. Phillips exclaimed. “Come here and look.”
“Do they actually ring these bells?” Cecelia asked.
“Three times a day,” Mr. Phillips said, smiling.
“Morning, noon, and night. Of course when they’re rung you have to be pretty quick at getting out of the way. You get hit in the head by one of these babies and that’s all she wrote.”
Beware Spoilers-in-hindsight.
CHARLES by Shirley Jackson
With the third week of kindergarten Charles was an institution in our family; the baby was being a Charles when she cried all afternoon; Laurie did a Charles when he filled his wagon full of mud and pulled it through the kitchen; even my husband, when he caught his elbow in the telephone cord and pulled telephone, ashtray, and a bowl of flowers off the table, said, after the first minute, “Looks like Charles.”
This the story of little boy Laurie’s stories to his parents about ‘fresh’ Charles, each new story told by Laurie after he returns from kindergarten each day. In fact, the tales of Charles’ misdeeds in the classroom grow far more from Charles simply being ‘fresh’ in a negative way to growing grimmer and grimmer, until we receive a glimmer of truth at the end. It may be no coincidence that CHARLES is an anagram of CLASHER and that HELLRAISER is embedded in both boy’s names together. Perhaps Laurie is nearly unreal? By the way, I shall now call my left elbow by the name of Charles.
PLEASE NOTE:
My further reviews of Shirley Jackson stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/stories-by-shirley-jackson-2/
PLEASE NOTE:
My further reviews of Donald Barthelme stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/stories-by-donald-barthelme-2/