I first encountered Donald Barthleme by way of The New Yorker Fiction podcast where I heard an excellent reading of his story “I Bought a Little City”. I consequently set about devouring everything of his I could find. He now holds a secure place in my pantheon of favourite writers, wedged somewhere between Richard McGuire and P. G. Woodehouse.

One has the sense when reading Barthleme’s work of the empirical and the insane being held in tight proximity to one another. In his handling of form Barthleme can be highly precise on both the sentence and story level. He had a background in architecture, which perhaps lent him a drive toward the empirical. At the same time, within and around this precisely measured prose, Barthelme’s writing is often experimental, and chaotic. One of his stories, for example, is a single perfectly correct sentence which runs for several pages. His protagonists, similarly, in perfectly rational terms contained within a perfectly rational structure, display extremes of emotional instability and indulge in behavior which borders upon insanity.

One of my favourite Barthleme stories (of which there are many) is “Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916”. The story is a meager two and a half pages of prose which detail, as the title suggests, the disappearance of an aircraft. Exactly how or why the aircraft in question has come to be misplaced is never explained. This, for me, epitomizes Barthleme’s brilliance – for an aircraft to vanish is implausible (they are large and thus hard to misplace), and yet the fact of not seeing the thing one expects to see – the thing one could have sworn was there a moment ago, the rising panic as one realises that one will be tasked with providing an explanation for an error which remains beyond one’s own understanding – feels very familiar.

The disappearance of the plane is described alternately by the eponymous Paul Klee, and by the Secret Police, who have been watching him. The title and the style of the prose suggests the exacting empiricism of an inquest. The Secret Police prove to be equally baffled by the aircraft’s disappearance as Klee, however. Indeed, the Secret Police are less concerned about the missing aircraft or apportioning blame and far more concerned about their own loneliness, which borders upon existential dread. ‘There is a secret sigh that we sigh, secretly’ The Secret Police say. ‘We yearn to be known, acknowledged, admired even.’ When Paul Klee decides to alter the manifest, thereby hiding his error, the Secret Police applaud this decision, adding ‘[w]e would like to embrace him as a comrade and brother but unfortunately we are not embraceable.’

Barthleme speaks to me because he has little truck with power. His sympathy is not with those who demand explanations, but with the poor souls caught in the business of being human. He embraces the ways in which rational structures, be they literary, legal, or political, can contain and even exacerbate those volatile and emotionally-charged elements which would appear to be their antitheses. We often view madness and marginalisation as connected – that madness disqualifies one from holding any kind of power. Indeed, it is many a lazy writer who makes an antagonist or clown ‘crazy’ in order to discourage examination or viewer empathy. Barthleme shows us, however, that those individuals who have apparent power – soldiers protecting nuclear missiles, teachers, billionaires, the secret service – are just as ‘mad’ as the powerless. Indeed, Paul Klee seems to suffer far less than the individuals who police him – he likes to draw, he eats chocolate, he has a romantic partner, whereas the ‘omniscient’ Secret Police just want to be loved.

Barthleme also appeals to me because he realises that human beings are ridiculous. For Barthleme, above and within the humdrum of the everyday is a palpable turmoil, where the decisions made by the hegemony seem to be founded upon eminently non-empirical motivations. What separates Barthleme from the Kafkas of the world is his pathos. All of his characters, even the most unhinged and dangerous, seem to be palpably human, and Barthleme, if he does not love them for it, at least allows them to exist as they are without judgment. The Secret Police, like so many of Barthleme’s characters, stagger under the weight of a power they are utterly unsuited to wield. They do not realise it, but their power and their sorrow are deeply imbricated. Barthelme does not hate the Secret Police – he wants to throw a blanket over their shoulders and tell them that everything is going to be okay. Their ridiculousness is protected and even facilitated by the unbending structures which surround them. Humanity, perfectly broken as it is, endures through chaos in Barthleme’s works. Aircraft vanish, careers come under peril, nuclear warheads are guarded by maniacs, cities are purchased by love-sick tyrants, and yet, as Paul Klee says ‘drawings and chocolate go on forever.’