Shouting Down the Silence

A Biography of Stanley Elkin

David C Dougherty

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252091018
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Shouting Down the Silence presents the first complete biography of Stanley Elkin, a preeminent novelist who consistently won high marks from critics but whose complexities of style seemed destined to elude the popular acclaim he hoped to attain. From the publication of his second novel, A Bad Man, in 1967 to his death in 1995, Elkin was tormented by the desire for both material and artistic success. Elkin's novels were taught in colleges and universities, his fiction received high praise from critics and reviewers (two of his novels won National Book Critics Circle Awards), and his short stories were widely anthologized--and yet he was unable to achieve renown beyond the avant-garde, or to escape the stigma of being an "academic writer." He wanted to be Faulkner, but he had trouble being Elkin. Drawing on personal interviews and an intimate knowledge of Elkins's life and works, David C. Dougherty captures Elkin's early life as the son of a charismatic, intimidating, and remarkably successful Jewish immigrant from Russia, as well as his later career at Washington University in St. Louis. A frequent participant at the annual Bread Loaf Writers' conference, he was the friend--and sometime antagonist--of other important writers, particularly Saul Bellow, William Gass, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Coover. Despite failed attempts to bridge the gap from his academic post to wide popular success, Elkin continued to write essays, stories, and novels that garnered unerring praise. His was a classic dilemma of an intellectual aesthete loath to make use of the common devices of popular appeal. The book details the ambition, the success, the friction, and the foibles of a writer who won fame, but not the fame he wanted.

1

“A Sum of Private Frequencies”

[I]t is still his—uniquely inflected, Gibson-timbered, a sum of private frequencies and personal resonances, as marked as his thumbs—because the show must go on and he must be on it.

—The Dick Gibson Show

More than a decade after his death in 1995, Stanley Elkin’s place in twentieth-century literary history appears to be even more in question than it was during the final decade of his life. He emerged from the cultural and literary revolutions of the 1960s as a prominent Young Turk, a radical innovator in both style and theme, whose influence among the literary community was by 1980 almost universally acknowledged. One could confidently have predicted that he would be recognized by future generations as a leading figure in the literary history of his time. He won many major awards; in his roles as mentor, university teacher, presenter and leader at a variety of influential writers’ conferences, and extraordinarily successful reader on the lecture circuit, he impressed his force and example on an entire generation of younger writers. He was arguably by 1980 among the dozen most influential fiction writers in North America. As his work matured and his themes took on a greater seriousness during the 1980s, however, Elkin watched in disappointment as his sales plummeted and as other writers emerged as the era’s leading stylists. As his health deteriorated, his novels were remaindered and shortly after his death a posthumous national Book Critics Circle Award was more a recognition of the value of Elkin’s oeuvre than of his final novel’s individual merits. Elkin’s novels and collections of stories eased out of print, to be issued by Dalkey Archive Press in an effort to keep the work available long enough for readers to catch up with the talent of this truly extraordinary, and brilliant, literary innovator.

Although he was a generous mentor to many younger writers, Elkin may have contributed to the decrease in his works’ popularity both in the general reading public and the literary community by insisting on the absolute uniqueness of his art. Much as he resisted in his personal life the “myth of the American Artist,” he maintained, consistently and sometimes stubbornly, that his work should not be approached via the context of the many literary movements that emerged out of the 1960s. Although Elkin was a true original, an eccentric and often outrageous creative person, he lived a life that was quite unlike the prevailing myth of the American artist. Unlike Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, who lusted after adventure and the public spotlight, often projecting their own thinly described experiences as the source of their work, Elkin lived a quiet upper-middle class life in University City, Missouri. His protagonists often reflect elements of Elkin’s personality, although he insisted that his characters weren’t autobiographical—a claim this biography contests. The flamboyant antisocial behavior of his protagonists originated in Stanley’s imagination, not in his experience. Moreover, he took an interest in politics and is believed by friends and associates to have voted generally Democratic and progressive, but he was largely uninterested in policy issues and only occasionally supported specific candidates or platforms. Overall, politics didn’t occupy center stage in his life. He invented a famous telephone call from President Nixon to end his masterpiece about communication and radio, The Dick Gibson Show (1971), in which Nixon’s frustrations about his inability to end the Vietnam War mirror on a national scale the personal anxieties of those persons who stay up all night to listen to and participate in the comparatively new entertainment phenomenon of talk radio. And one of his final essays, unfortunately never published, was about the theatricality of the 1992 Democratic Convention, recalling, perhaps, Mailer’s journalistic innovations in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and St. George and the Godfather. But his closest friends agree that for Elkin politics was more a spectator sport than a serious preoccupation.

Moreover, in an age that chronicled author affairs in the tabloids and in which the serial marriages of such writers as Hemingway, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth rated gossip column notice, very little scandal ever wafted near Elkin. He married Joan Jacobsen on January 17, 1953, and they remained together for the rest of his life. He dedicated most of his books to her, and her art—she’s a gifted painter—adorns several of his book jackets. One of his final novellas, “Her Sense of Timing,” is a thinly disguised tribute to their love and his dependence on Joan as his health deteriorated during the 1980s. He and his family lived in University City, Missouri, about which he wrote the charming essay “Why I Live Where I Live” (1980). There were few hints, except for his recreational and subsequently medicinal use of marijuana, of personal scandal. He was, however, a gregarious man who needed very much to be the center of any gathering, and his behavior was often innocently and sometimes deliberately outrageous. But his skills as a raconteur and wit were so compelling that his colleagues and acquaintances eagerly accommodated him. I want to make public my gratitude to Joan for the patient and supportive help she has provided in piecing together this life history. She has offered leads, anecdotes, encouragement, wise counsel, and inspiration.

My goal is to guide the reader through the life history of an extraordinarily talented, complex, and original creator whose life and work were driven by a paradox central to the American artistic experience of his era. From the publication of his second novel, A Bad Man (1967), to his death, Elkin was driven by the desire for both commercial and artistic success. These two goals contained the seeds of their inevitable contradictions and therefore propelled him in conflicting directions. Although materially and professionally successful by middle-class measures, even by standards for university faculty, Elkin felt that he never received the recognition and rewards his art deserved. From the 1970s forward, he often expressed regret about, and occasionally even resentment of, his lack of popularity with general readers. Here’s a version he shared in 1989: “All things being equal, I’d rather be me than Stephen King. But I wouldn’t mind having a small percentage of King’s sales. He wouldn’t even miss them.”¹ Among the shrewdest observers of American culture during the second half of his century, Elkin understood the artistic and ethical costs of fame and material success. He eloquently exemplified the compromises that can lead to material success and its discontents in many of his characters, particularly Dick Gibson, Ben Flesh of The Franchiser (1976), and Bobbo Druff of The MacGuffin (1991), without the condescension and even condemnation characteristic of many serious American writers. Moreover, his several brushes with Hollywood showed him another variation on what it takes to achieve success and fame. Much of his creative life was consumed by a desire to capture the Horatio Alger version of the American dream, a goal undoubtedly fueled by his excruciatingly complicated relationship with his immigrant father, who became a well-to-do salesman and a manifestation for his son of the possibility that one can through hard work and talent obtain wealth, comfort, material well-being, and power. This overwhelming need, with both practical and psychological ramifications, inevitably affected Elkin’s relationships with other writers, whose success he from time to time envied, though he generally remained in cordial relationships with the individuals. Although it would be a facile generalization to propose that this paradox is true of all writers of Elkin’s time and place, the temptation of ready wealth and instant success was especially powerful during a half-century when the authority of the written word was increasingly challenged by that of the visual image, and during which the film industry eagerly converted narratives—excellent, good, mediocre, and wretched—into box office enterprises. The artist in Elkin, however, always recognized the compromises this definition of success would involve.

On the other hand, Elkin was trained in the professional study of literature as an historical and formalist critic. He was subsequently affiliated with two distinct but related artistic communities, the university creative writing program and the writer’s conference or workshop environment. He was therefore influenced by the vocation, widespread in American universities at mid-century, of the artist as one whose principal obligations are remaining true to his vision and resisting both the pernicious influences of materialism and the pressures of even the literary community to influence one’s unique vision. Elkin’s close reading of William Faulkner for his doctoral thesis and many seminars he subsequently taught reinforced this view. In Faulkner he found a mentor and an intimidating role model—a truly major writer negotiating his own careful path between his gregarious nature as both artist and raconteur, and the need to isolate himself to discover and shape his vision. This is a literary debt Elkin often acknowledged. In 1989 he confirmed that several sections of his favorite among his novels, George Mills (1982), contained deliberate adaptations of Faulknerian techniques, specifically those of Absalom, Absalom! Moreover, the technique of his masterwork, Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom, owes much to that of Faulkner’s masterpiece of the macabre, As I Lay Dying. After completing his dissertation, as a member of the English Department at Washington University Elkin participated in what can be called a regional center of artistic renewal. He had grown up in Chicago, during the decade that Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell played leading roles in the creation of a new, distinctly midwestern, fiction. When he moved to St. Louis he joined a creative writing faculty on the verge of achieving international literary prominence. Elkin’s early successes were instrumental in establishing the university’s English Department as a center of creative excellence, able subsequently to draw established writers like Howard Nemerov and William Gass to join Elkin, Jarvis Thurston, Mona van Duyn, and John Morris. His reputation helped the university to bring many established writers to campus for shorter-term Hurst fellowships. As a mentor at Bread Loaf and later Sewanee, and as a teacher of creative writing at Washington University and a visiting professor at several universities, Elkin participated, occasionally abrasively, in the nurturing of American creative writing during the second half of the twentieth century.

In spite of the support system for his creativity these networks of colleagues provided, Elkin became increasingly insistent on the uniqueness of his art. As his fame spread in literary communities in the United States, France, England, Germany, and Japan, he adamantly denied that his work was allied with, or should be read in the context of, such literary groups as “Jewish American writers”; although born Jewish, and although the characters in most of his early stories are Jews, Elkin was an atheist and most of his later characters’ religious affiliations are ambiguous, though several were born in Jewish communities. He once maintained that the only “legitimate” Jewish American writer was not Joseph Heller, Bellow, Roth, or Elkin, but Isaac Bashevis Singer, who “writes out of an essentially Jewish tradition—almost a Hebraic tradition. He knows the rules; he knows the forks; and therefore he is a Jewish writer.” He even more vigorously disassociated himself from the black humor movement of the 1960s. He reacted very strongly to this “label” when it was used to describe the temper and tone of his early successes, notably Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966) and A Bad Man. He once snapped that “black humor is a term invented by Time Magazine” and consistently maintained that he simply didn’t understand what the term meant. He also defended his position by pointing out that black humorists paint a generally pessimistic picture of life by presenting disease, deformity, stupidity, or depravity as objects of humor, whereas he maintained that, despite the preoccupation of his fiction with disease, defeat, disappointment, and suffering, his work was optimistic. He once told an interviewer, “A writer has only two things to say. He says ‘yes’ or he says ‘no.’ To anything. He approves or he disapproves. It’s of no matter, it’s absolutely of no consequence whether he approves or disapproves. The important thing is the writer’s style, the writer’s invention.”² And, like his contemporary John Updike, Elkin consistently chose “yes,” despite his eloquent rendering of life’s risks and disappointments.

He also responded even more aggressively to claims that he was a satirist. He maintained that satirists have political agendas, a desire to change or improve the world by mocking a person, organization, or institution. He claimed that despite, for example, his emphasis on the standardizing effects of consumer culture in The Franchiser, his goal was aesthetic rather than political—and that the artist who succumbs to the temptation to “change the world” risks trivializing the aesthetic goals of serious writing. Late in his life Elkin maintained equally stubbornly that he didn’t consider himself a “metafictionist,” a writer who creates works in which the philosophical creation of a system of reality is analogous to the artist’s creating a narrative. He did, however, defer to interpretations claiming that The Living End (1979), a “triptych” of novellas, plays with the notion of the artist as creator/God, which is a tenet of much metafictional theory. Another paradox in the life of this uniquely creative personality asserts itself: he thrived on interaction with his fellow artists, and was a notoriously stern taskmaster in his creative writing classes, often reducing male and female students to tears with his merciless comments on their stories; his cabin at Bread Loaf was called the “Dragon’s Den.” By contrast, he was unusually generous to young writers by reading their work and providing book jacket comments about their materials when they were published. Although he cultivated his image as a tough, hard-nosed critic, he was often a resource for struggling writers—but only if they were serious about the work they were doing. Despite his need for and generous participation in the wide variety of literary communities, however, Elkin insisted, perhaps wrong-headedly and surely stubbornly, that he was absolutely unique as a creative artist. He represented himself as one who cannot be read in the light of literary movements, but thereby isolated himself as a writer who refused to be affiliated with any literary context.

His life story, moreover, is an inspiring chapter in the human drama of overcoming obstacles. His adult life would bring far more than anyone’s fair share of health problems, which he eventually faced with courage and which transformed his writing toward seriocomic contemplation of our mortal condition. He suffered his first heart attack at age thirty-eight, and then was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis four years later, although undiagnosed symptoms had presented earlier. As one close friend from graduate school put it, Stanley’s diagnosis transformed him from a hypochondriac in his youth to a near-stoic contemplator of the universal human fate that we inevitably suffer our broken bodies³—as well as broken dreams. In response to one symptom of his disease, a loss of function in his hands, he became one of the first important American writers to use a word processor. During a time when many artists and cultural observers lamented the depersonalization of writing through this technology, Washington University invested in a word processor for a writer whose handwriting had become undecipherable. Using what he subsequently referred to not only as a “dedicated” (that is, an early computer whose sole application was text creation) but also a “devoted” word processor, Elkin completed five important novels. He also used it to write his third book of novellas and an impressive number of essays, culminating in the collection Pieces of Soap (1992). Despite—and because of—his illnesses and their many related complications, his writing continued to grow in aesthetic richness and philosophical depth.

The title of this biography is a phrase Elkin created to describe his novel-in-copyediting, The Dick Gibson Show, a study in alienation, paranoia, and the possibility of communicating. When his editor asked for jacket copy, Elkin responded, in his own handwriting,

Dick Gibson is an itinerant radio man who has been in radio since the beginnings. This is the story of his apprenticeship, an apprenticeship as long as life. As fatal and roundabout as evolution. Using radio as a metaphor, the novel is about the human voice, which is, as Gibson finds out, the sound that the soul makes. The Dick Gibson Show shows us something important, whether it is laughing in one register or crying out in another, shouting down the silence. Also, it is very dirty.⁴

This is a good description of many Elkin protagonists, and of their creator’s life as well. His characters, and Elkin, both as a novelist and personality, are LOUD. They talk and talk, asserting themselves against the eternal silence that surrounds us. As his life progressed, especially after his father’s death in 1958, his heart attack, and then his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, Elkin was increasingly preoccupied by human mortality. And it didn’t take a heart attack to get the message across to him—the very first line of his first published novel, Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964), reads, “Everybody dies, everybody. Sure.” But as the message of nature became increasingly personal, Elkin became persuaded that artistic, strategic, and ornate language is our best and only response to the silence that surrounds and awaits us. As the literary work and character to which he alludes more often than any other single literary source puts it, “the rest is silence.” Hamlet doesn’t want to stop talking. Neither does Elkin. Neither do his characters. As Faulkner, his role model, said in his Nobel Prize address, “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” As the squire Jöns in Ingmar Bergman’s great film The Seventh Seal (1957) puts it when told to “be silent” by the knight as they await Death’s final assault, “I shall, soon enough. But under protest.” Elkin became silent “under protest” in 1995, but his artistic v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. “A Sum of Private Frequencies”
• 2. When Stanley Elkin Was a Little Boy: New York and Chicago, 1930–48
• 3. College, Graduate School, and the Army, 1948–57
• 4. Family Crises, Graduate School, and a Literary Career, 1957–60
• 5. “Become a Strong Man”: St. Louis, Europe, First Base, Full Houses, and the Big Time, 1960–65
• 6. “Convicted of His Character”: Kibitzers, A Bad Man, Additions, and Catastrophe, 1965–68
• 7. “Strange Displacements of the Ordinary”: Recovery and The Dick Gibson Show, 1968–70
• 8. “Blessèd Form”: Novellas, a Sabbatical Year Abroad, and a Death Sentence, 1971–73
• 9. “Making America Look Like America”: Hollywood Beckons, a Breakthrough Novel, and a Cane, 1974–77
• 10. Heaven and Hell, St. Louis and Mexico, the First Crusade, and South America: Life’s Greatest Hits and a Major Disappointment, 1978–82
• 11. Disney World and Alaskan Rabbis: A Masterpiece, a Flop, the Elkin Essay, and More Bad Medical News, 1983–88
• 12. “But I Am Getting Ahead of Myself”: Back to the Movies, Another Trilogy, More Awards, and the Last Years, 1989–94
• 13. “The Stanley Elkin Chair”: The Silence Descends, Posthumous Fiction, and Awards
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index