The "Bishop" Stories of Donald Barthelme

The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man.

—D.B., "Critique de la Vie Quotidianne"

The story was called "See the Moon?" I can't remember now where I first read it, but it was probably in an anthology in the mid–1960s. It was my first encounter with the fiction of Donald Barthelme, and I was bowled over. Such wit, such verbal cleverness, such pace, and all of it served up with such an abiding sense of melancholy that you didn't know whether to break out laughing or break down crying. It was the first short story I had ever read that was heartbreakingly funny. And unfortunately I would have to wait many years to read its like again.

"See the Moon?" is a little tale about an expectant father on the eve of the birth of his first child by his second wife. He already has a teenaged son (who pesters him with late-night phone calls) by his first wife. The expectant father had once been "promising," he tells us. He had once written "poppy-cock, sometimes cockypap" for a university president down on the Gulf Coast. But now he is "unsalaried," a circumstance that led to his divorce from the first wife. He's conducting "lunar hostility studies" these days, he says. He's convinced the moon hates us. Why? He doesn't say. He also suffers from "light-mindedness." He has a friend named "Cardinal Y" who suffers from light-mindedness too. Cardinal Y insists on wearing one red sock and one black sock even after his housekeeper has "pointedly rolled his red socks together and black socks together hinting red with red, black with black." He and the cardinal carry on a conversation:

"Upon what does the world rest?" I asked.

"Upon an elephant," he said.

"Upon what does the elephant rest?"

"Upon a tortoise."

"Upon what does the tortoise rest?"

"Upon a red lawnmower."

I wrote in my book playful.

All in all a troubled fellow is our anonymous expectant father. He's looking for answers and not finding any, and he will soon be a father again. Is that why the moon hates us? Does it have something to do with the moon's effect on the menstrual cycle? "Gog," he calls his little son-to-be, who, in the funniest riff in the story, he compares to a battleship:

It's like somebody walks up to you and says, I have a battleship I can't use, would you like to have a battleship. And you say, yes yes, I've never had a battleship, I've always wanted one. And he says, it has four sixteen-inch guns forward, and a catapult for launching scout planes. And you say, I've always wanted to launch scout planes. And he says, it's yours, and then you have this battleship. And then you have to paint it, because it's rusting, and clean it, because it's dirty, and anchor it somewhere, because the Police Department wants you to get it off the streets. And the crew is crying, and there are silverfish in the chartroom and a funny knocking noise in Fire Control, water rising in the No. 2 hold, and the chaplain can't find the Palestrina tapes for the Sunday service. And you can't get anybody to sit with it. And finally you discover that what you have here is this great, big, pink-and-blue rockabye battleship.

The story ends with the narrator lying on his glider on the front porch, where he has been throughout, looking at a copy of a girlie magazine (called Man) and realizing, as he gazes at "Unfolded Ursala Herring," that he prefers the pin-up to his present wife, whose name is Ann. This isn't reassuring to the expectant father. In closing he tells us, "In another month Gog leaps fully armed from the womb. What can I do for him? I can get him into aa, I have influence. And make sure no harsh moonlight...