ABOUT THREE YEARS ago I began to notice that the natural arc both of my reading and my writing was suffering what might be called an autumnal change. The change began to manifest itself as I was entering my seventies, an age that is not yet quite winter but is certainly no longer spring or summer.
Suddenly the tide seemed to be ebbing, although I continued to read and write at more or less my accustomed pace.
First, the balance of my writing seemed to have shifted from mostly fiction to mostly nonfiction. After Duane’s Depressed —in my opinion my best novel—the one fictional effort that I really liked was Loop Group , my second Hollywood novel. By the time I wrote it I actually knew something about the place and gave a good accounting of it. (I also liked my final tetralogy, The Berrybender Narratives ; but I seem to share these last enthusiasms with very few.)
Once the new century got underway I began mostly to occupy myself with nonfiction. This is in accordance with my long held belief that age doesn’t favor the novelist. The poet Richard Howard and many others ridicule this point, but I remain wedded to it. There are, of course, exceptions—in the arts as in life there are exceptions. But, in the main, fiction’s greatest achievements were made by the middle-aged.
Part of the problem, if there is a problem (rather than just a fixation of mine), is that the level of the writer’s octane changes. It becomes harder and harder—or, at least, has with me—to produce the high burn that fiction needs.
I suppose this caveat needs to be taken with a grain of salt, since I keep saying I’m finishing up with fiction even as I allow myself another novel, and yet another. (The reason for this is not a desire to use up my last few drops of artistic testosterone; the reason for this is money—need of—which is seldom far from my mind; I suspect it’s seldom far from most writers’ minds. I said earlier that, thanks to the fortune-teller’s conviction, the need of money seldom has determined my artistic decisions, which is to a point true. But the necessity of money nags. I like the feel of having a fresh book to sell, just in case.)
In the back of my mind it may be that I still keep General Custer handy, in a pinch. There’s always room for another book on Custer, and someday, for some reason, I may end up writing one.
However solid and settled one’s patterns and habits, when it comes to writing, the coming of age will generally force one to come up with variations: shortcuts, maybe, or long cuts: whatever seems likely to produce good writing.
Lately, spurred on by an excellent New Yorker piece by Louis Menand, I stood looking for a while at my shelves of fiction by American writers of the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties whom Mr. Menand calls, and who sometimes thought of themselves as, postmodernists. These would include William H. Gass, Robert Cover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and a few others. Of these I think Pynchon produced the one true masterpiece—V —and there are quite a few short story masterpieces scattered among the lot, several of them by Donald Barthelme, though, if I had to include only one story from these writers it would be William H. Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid,” which I included in my anthology Still Wild .
What I thought of Donald Barthelme, who produced about 150 short stories, is that his was a true artistic high-wire act. If his stories weren’t perfect they were dead.
Perfection is not to be achieved every day; no one knew that better than Donald Barthelme. I suspect he got there maybe a dozen times in his short fiction, and wrote one novel, The Dead Father , that is still important. Like many writers of his time he tended toward Beckett as he got older—indeed, Beckett himself only became Beckett as he aged—his early fiction is quite florid, unlike the spare masterpieces of his great phase. Indeed the whole postmodernist school, if it was a school and if it was postmodern, had the problem of following Beckett, just as an earlier generation of prose writers had the problem of following Hemingway—and they knew it.