Age of Elkin
Time was, Stanley Elkin was a go-to for the MFA crowd. I recall the titles of his works rolling off many a young writer’s reverent tongue back in the 1990s and 2000s. Even if you hadn’t read him, which I had not, his reputation preceded him in such a way that you never quite forgot that funny, old-timey name—four trochaic syllables like a sorcerer’s utterance invoking the spirit of a minor American god. You were told he was both comic and ingenious, irreverent and formidable. You did not suspect he was postmodern until someone told you that he hung out with Gaddis, Gass, Barthelme and Coover—The Unread Masters. Francine Prose urged him on her students and wrote beautifully about their friendship. William Gass, pal and unabashed fan, became his posthumous St. Paul. Everyone seemed to have something to say about Elkin.
Yet lately, and like so many brilliant, highly imaginative maximalists in a conservative era when a pop musician wins the Nobel for literature and genre midlist dominates elite book awards, he seems to have been relegated to the literary memory hole once more. Dalkey Archive has kept the Elkin flame burning, but few others seem to discuss him anymore.
It’s not surprising. For one thing, he represents much that is no longer fashionable: Total imaginative freedom, freely coarse language, Devil-may-care humor, dream-like plotting and digression, explosive artistic liberty, long and beautified and self-consciously wondrous sentences. Many find his brand of dead-white-male roguishness uncouth. Publishers today have purportedly settled on fiction that makes use only of calm, collected, useful sentences penned by the scholastic equivalent of a thoroughbred horse. They want writers to know their limits. They are the limits.
But Elkin had no limits. Here is the opening of The Franchiser:
Past the orange roof and turquoise tower, past the immense sunburst of the green and yellow sign, past the golden arches, beyond the low buff building, beside the discrete hut, the dark top hat on the studio window shade, beneath the red and white longitudes of the enormous bucket, coming up to the thick shaft of the yellow arrow piercing the royal-blue field, he feels he is home. Is it Nashville? Elmira, New York? St. Louis County? A Florida key? The Illinois arrowhead? Indiana like a holster, Ohio like a badge? Is he North? St. Paul, Minn? Northeast? Boston, Mass.? The other side of America? Salt Lake? Los Angeles? At the bottom of the country? The Texas udder? Where? In Colorado's frame? Wyoming like a postage stamp? Michigan like a mitten? The chipped, eroding bays of the North-west? Seattle? Bellingham, Washington?
Somewhere in the packed masonry of states.
It’s a mistake to think this kind of riffing was fully appreciated even in the 1970s when it was published. Elkin complained that editors kept urging him to be a “taker-outer” as opposed to a “putter-inner.” He made a fair enough point to Random House: “I don’t believe that less is more,” he said. “I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.” Surely this stands to reason. It can be enlightening after all to hang a question mark on certain clichés—less is more, write what you know, find your voice, etc.—not just because challenging dusty ideas is within the writer’s bailiwick, but because common wisdom can be representative of a supermajority merely stuck in their ways, the crowd’s hostility to individual thinking. As the 21st-century Cult of Less continues its advance across the West like an empire of black mold, reading the work of Elkin is like coming upon an illuminated medieval manuscript that sets your eyes aglow with its richness of language, obscure incantation, forgotten possibilities, ancient dick jokes. Is this how archaic peoples of a former age used to think, talk? What have we really lost in the interceding half-century of mono-acculturation?
Here is my favorite paragraph from the middle of The Franchiser:
Yet the lights were on in Colorado Springs.
Colorado Avenue was a garden of neon. The lights of the massage parlors burned like fires. The sequenced circuitry of the drive-ins and motels and theaters and bars was a contagion of light. A giant Blue Boy’s statue illuminated by spots like a national monument. The golden Shell signs, an old Mobil Pegasus climbing invisible stars in the sky. The traffic lights, red as bulbs in darkrooms, amber as lawn furniture, green as turf. The city itself, awash in light, suggested boardwalks, carnivals, steel piers, million-dollar miles, and, far off, private homes like upturned dominos or inverted starry nights. Down Cheyenne Mountain and Pikes Peak niagaras of lights were laid out like track. Don’t they know? he wondered. Is it Mardi Gras? Don’t they know? And he had a sense of connection, the roads that led to Rome, of nexus, the low kindling point of filament, of globe and tubing, as current poured in from every direction, rushing like electric water seeking its own level to ignite every conductor, conflagrating base metals, glass, the white lines down the centers of avenues bright as tennis shoes, stone itself, the city a kind of full moon into which he’d come at last from behind its hidden darker side. The city like the exposed chassis of an ancient radio, its embered tubes and color-coded wire.
Elkin is a language artist above all; all else is secondary. I get a little thrill reading phrases like “garden of neon” and “bright as tennis shoes,” captivating, idiosyncratic metaphors that seem to leap fully formed into the imagination like Athena from the head of Zeus. In the name of cutting the fat, editors would routinely trim these sorts of descriptions and digressions. In our own age, obedient writers who got the message began doing the trimming themselves. Elkin was among the last of his breed who kept at it.
One thing that also seems to have been trimmed from fiction is the integration of matters of economic status—labor, income, property, inheritances—money, that is, and how the financials of modern survival shape character. Contemporary novels may mention a broke writer’s freelance paycheck, a professor after tenure, or vaguely defined office work of some sort, but this is usually to get an ugly topic out of the way so we can focus on what really matters: internet culture, Millennial cynicism, political moralizing, trauma plots. Writers like Elkin and many of his peers not only treated the matter with natural seriousness but integrated it into story and character, making use of capital as a method of commenting on life, fate, and, yes, capitalism itself.
The Franchiser, as an example, follows Ben Flesh who, in a funny early scene, inherits a “prime rate” from a rich benefactor and sets out to use it to open and manage his franchise stores (ice cream parlors, dance halls, movie theaters) across the country. The story is about much else—commercialism, family, death, sickness—but it concludes in the loss of his access to this bank rate and thus his inevitable fall. Similarly, The Magic Kingdom opens with Eddy Bale at audience with none other than Queen Elizabeth II of England to ask for a donation so that he can take a group of dying children on a Disney World trip. She does hand him a check—of a kind—and the tale takes off from there. These stories, like the plots of our own lives, hang upon the material fact of cash and status, and it is this commercial logic of buying and selling that drives his stories forward just as it often has the biggest hand in driving our own lives forward.
In his lifetime, Elkin never attained the heights of his illustrious compatriots and supporters—Coover, Bellow, Roth. He received admiring letters from some of them, however. Bellow: “What I have to say simply is that you’re the real thing.” I can only imagine Elkin reading this and feeling his heart and spine dance, as if his very soul had been charged with electricity. He did not finally receive this note, however, until 1992, just three years before he died. And that was more or less it; Bellow in the years prior never knew well or spoke much of Elkin—the tragedy of exceedingly high praise seldom given. Elkin was always up for giving a reading, but was frustrated unto his death by the fact that he just wasn’t often invited to do so. His writer friends, like Gass, though they made a show of promoting their man, seemed to have to take pains to explain to readers why Elkin was so great. Francine Prose does a one-page study of some Elkin sentences in her book Reading Like a Writer:
Compressed into a single sentence is an entire way of life, a stratum of our class and caste system, a key to the narrator’s character, a window on his existence, along with all the manner of little throwaway extras tossed in, for instance the satisfaction of figuring out the meaning of an “oyster-in-an-r-month” or “my playboy astronomy.” The sentence gives us a fairly accurate sense of the narrator’s confidence, his boastfulness, his sense of entitlement—aspects of his character that will be humbled by his unexpected and overpowering sexual attraction to the bear. Once again, it’s useful to imagine the boring summary phrases with which a less skillful author might have conveyed the same information.
Yes, sure. Although analyses like these can be valuable, they’re an insufficient method of communicating the power of his peculiar talents. Like digging note-by-note into Mozart (or in Elkin’s case maybe Schoenberg). I have read the wonderful novella, “The Making of Ashenden,” from which the analyzed sentences are taken—and which is indeed about a rich pervert who fucks a brown bear—and I never was able to figure out the meaning of “oyster-in-an-r-month” on my own without asking around. Once I knew (oysters were once apparently eaten only in the months containing the letter r: September to April), I felt rather unsatisfied, like having dug in the earth for treasure and emerged only with a rusted tin box of darning needles. I’ve never been titillated by puzzles and brain teasers or trivia, precisely because I find this type of cheap activity senseless and distracting.
And the sad and simple fact here is that too much of Elkin is distracting, and it’s unfortunately when he’s most distracting that his prose begins to misfire.
[Mr. Moorhead] is not, as Eddy Bale vaguely wishes, a ship’s doctor, someone ruined, a hardened stray from the China trade, the belowdecks, palmetto-fanned heats and ruthlessnesses of tubs and packets, the steamy African river routes, or the pack-ice Murmansk and Greenland ones—some drummed-out being, some tainted, weary wiz. […] But far from being in disgrace, he is, despite Eddy Bale’s garish dreams for him, an eminent man.
In this description, from early in The Magic Kingdom, we get an apophatic non-description of what Mr. Moorhead is not. Such a play could work in the right circumstances—but here I struggle a bit more than I should have to. After all, what are these “ruthlessnesses of tubs and packets” or the “pack-ice Murmansk and Greenland ones”? Mr. Moorhead, we learn, is not “ruined” or “drummed-out” or a “tainted, weary wiz.” So, then—what is he? I don’t know what to think, where to put my imagination. So I reread the passage. But all I learn is that, in addition to not knowing what he is not, I am doubly unsure what I am supposed imagine he is. So, why all this—why not just tell us that he was “eminent” rather than that he is “not … a ship’s doctor”?
This kind of idle literary algebra doesn’t just take away from the novel, it leaves the mind empty and humming, starved of sustenance despite overeating, an organ thrashing with frustrated orgasm. I found these moments in his books exasperating.
And yet, and yet! The Colorado Springs paragraph I’ve reread many times because I find it so marvelous and appreciate it as a kind of prose-poetry, for it captures something indelible about American commerce and small towns out West. But many of his digressions prove only that some attempts at wondrous language can make for windy bloviating. Ben Flesh in The Franchiser, for another example, at one point goes on and on about his movie theater franchise for over fourteen pages, and I admit that I felt the urge to start skipping. He name-checks movie titles, he talks of snacks, of moviegoers, of carpet quality, film posters, ticket sales, popcorn, prices. The least appealing moments in his writing seem to happily abandon the reader, the story itself, as he flies off on verbal peyote trips. You personally may delight in every last one of these, and I did love some of them myself, but the fact is that most readers will not. This is the tough-love game of the postmodernists. “You want to enjoy me, do you?” they seem to say. “Well! You’re going to have to earn it, bub.” The worst among them merely attempt to induce a literary Stockholm Syndrome in their readers; the best of them, like Elkin, are at least funny.
Elkin’s earliest work is his strongest, evidence of a more disciplined artist in his prime. My favorite story of his is “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers,” from his first collection of the same name. A grumpy grocer has just lost his 23-year-old son. The anger, befuddlement and mourning animate every phrase, from the man’s dealings with customers, shoplifters and employees to a run in with a sympathetic local cop. We have the same Elkin language we love, but here it’s tied up with a man moving through life just as we do, the frustration of maintaining relations within a corrupted world that cannot understand your pain, in a way that makes readers tally up our own losses against the sense that life will inevitably betray us. The experience of death is universal, and here we witness its complications rendered in just detail, all inside a cramped Brooklyn grocery store, for about 30 pages. It’s a marvelous and dense story, and I suggest anyone interested in Elkin begin with this collection.
Ten years later, a high-flying and less disciplined Elkin wrote the brilliant but uncontrolled The Franchiser and ten years after that the orgiastic The Magic Kingdom. Very funny, fun, interesting but uneven books that fall into unfortunate periods of slog. In the new Dalkey editions of these two novels, we have fresh and insightful introductions by Elkin boosters Adam Levin and Rick Moody. But their commentary has a certain “if you like that kind of thing” attitude to it. A similar feeling of exhaustion or resignation exists even in William Gass’s famous introduction (also reproduced in the Dalkey edition). Again these superfans feel they must patiently explain to us why we should love Elkin. Their hearts are in the right place, I suppose, but we’re already tipped off to the problem even as they begin their downtrodden sermons. “I shall simply say briefly what moves me most when Stanley Elkin’s prose becomes my consciousness, and simply hope that others will be drawn to it,” writes Gass in his semi-despairing opening paragraph. Does that strike you as the enthusiastic endorsement it’s intended to be?
The new introduction-writers in these updated editions compare Elkin’s use of language to the innovations of artists like Jimi Hendrix and jazz virtuosos like Johnny Hodges and Wayne Shorter. This is apt—more apt than they know. For one can, after all, understand folk music listeners who may stumble upon, say, the jazz of Keith Jarrett, have no idea what they’re hearing, and give up. If you’re into something like Bob Dylan, that is, storyteller-songwriters who compose self-contained pop songs of six minutes or less, you’ll confront the long, winding experimentations of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in a state of dumb incomprehension. Whether you return to it to try to understand it better will depend upon whether you’re a musician yourself with an elevated interest in understanding jazz. Indubitably, this is what happened with Elkin all his life. As his work confounded broader readerships and his audience diminished over time, his fate was gradually reduced to that of “writer’s writer.”
But it must be said—crucially it must be reiterated for it is undeniably true—that still the average Top 40 listener who gives his ear over to Miles Davis, even for a short while, will have his experience of music vastly improved by so doing. The same goes for reading Elkin. For writers and readers, especially those looking for the beautiful and funny and original and challenging, Stanley Elkin has gifts for you, infinite things to teach you about what language can or may do when untethered from the fetters of neo-prudery. His gardens of neon may not be clearly marked in all those jungles of digression, but the adventure is more than worth the trouble.
Tyson Duffy is a writer living in Atlanta. He publishes a monthly newsletter at https://substack.com/@
