Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

My point, then, is that the stories in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers are right bang smack dab in the middle of realism. I may get things wrong, or even silly — as I do in the improbable scene in “In the Alley” when my protagonist, top-heavy with incurable cancer, checks himself out of the hospital to wander the city and goes into a bar to die in an unfamiliar neighborhood; or in red-hot centered “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe,” where — ending the story, as stories never should end, with a gesture — I have Ed throw his money away. But most of the stories have conventional, realistic sources. Only “On a Field, Rampant” and “A Poetics for Bullies” owe less to the syllogistic, rational world (though they’re not experimental, none of my writing is; I don’t care for experimental writing and, in my case at least, experimental writing would be if I did it in German or French) than they do to some conjured, imaginary one — and, sure enough, only in those stories am I more preoccupied with language than I am with realism’s calmer tropes. I offer the battle of the headlines from “On a Field, Rampant”:

“ ‘DOCKER WOULD BE KING,’ ” a man said, reading an imaginary headline. “ ‘IMMIGRANT CARGO HANDLER SAYS HE’S NATION’S RIGHTFUL MAJESTY!’ ”

“ ‘PRETENDER HAS MEDALLION WHICH TRACES LINEAGE TO ANCIENT DAYS OF KINGDOM.’ ”

“ ‘ “AMAZING RESEMBLANCE TO DUKE” SAYS DUKE’S OWN GATEMAN.’ ”

“ ‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE.’ ”

“ ‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE, DARES DUKE TO DUEL!’ ”

“ ‘MAKE-BELIEVE MONARCH.’ ”

“ ‘CARGO CON MAN CLAIMS KINGDOM!’ ”

“ ‘KHARDOV CREATES KINGDOM FOR CARGO KING.’ ”

“ ‘WHO IS KHARDOV?’ ”

I offer, also, the abrasive, brassy up-frontiness of the opening paragraph in “A Poetics for Bullies”:

I’m Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants — and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.

The point here is that a “higher” or more conscious — if not conscientious — style is not only less realistic than the sedate and almost passive linears of the butcher’s quiet street, but also much more aggressive and confrontational. (Only consider the two operative words in the titles of those two stories—“rampant” with all its up-in-your-face forepawardlies and dug-in hind-leggedness, and “bullies”—and you’ll take my meaning.) In fiction and style not formed by the shared communal linkages between an author and the compacts, struck bargains, and done deals of a reasonable, recognizable morality — my law of just desserts — it’s always the writer’s service. Whatever spin, whatever “English” he puts on the ball is his. It’s his call. He leads, you follow. He leads, you play catch-up. (It’s that wallow in the ego again, the self’s flashy mud wrassle.) Obviously this makes for difficulties that most readers — don’t kid yourself, me too — don’t much care to spend the time of day with, let alone hang out with long enough to pass any tests of time.

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

Damn near everyone.

Now I don’t know how true this next part is, but it’s a little true I should think. I’m trying to tell what turned me. Well, delight in language as language certainly (I’d swear to that part). But something less delightful, too. It was that nothing very bad had happened to me yet. (I was a graduate student, protected up to my ass in the ivy.) My daddy’s rich and my mama’s good lookin’. Then my father died in 1958 and my mother couldn’t take three steps without pain. Then a heart attack I could call my own when I was thirty-seven years old. Then this, then that. Most of it uncomfortable, all of it boring. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t hop, I couldn’t jump. Because, as the old saying should go, as long as you’ve got your health you’ve got your naïveté. I lost the one, I lost the other, and maybe that’s what led me toward revenge — a writer’s revenge, anyway; the revenge, I mean, of style.

One final word about the stories in this collection and I’m done. I’m particularly fond of at least four of them: “Perlmutter at the East Pole” for its main character and the curses he invents, “The Guest” for its situation and humor, “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers” for its situation and humor, and the truth, I think, of its perceptions and characters, and “A Poetics for Bullies,” for its humor and energy and style. I like the “Ed Wolfe” story a bit less, but I like it — for the imagery in the opening paragraph, for a lot of its dialogue, and for one reason no one could ever possibly guess. Remember Polish jokes? I could be absolutely wrong about this, but I think I may have contributed to the invention of them in this story. It was published in the September 1962 issue of Esquire . In August of that I year I went off to Europe to write my first novel. Up to that time I’d never heard a Polish joke, but when I returned to America in June 1963, they were all the rage. Everyone was telling them. I think I invented the stereotype they are built on. A complete serendipity, of course, like penicillin or certain kinds of clear plastic, but my serendipity. What a claim to fame — to have invented the Polish joke. But it proves my point, I think, the one about the distance to which a writer’s ego will stoop to have, whatever the cost, to him or to others, its own way.

STANLEY ELKIN

1990

Greenspahn cursed the steering wheel shoved like the hard edge of someone’s hand against his stomach. Goddamn lousy cars, he thought. Forty-five hundred dollars and there’s not room to breathe. He thought sourly of the smiling salesman who had sold it to him, calling him Jake all the time he had been in the showroom: Lousy podler . He slid across the seat, moving carefully as though he carried something fragile, and eased his big body out of the car. Seeing the parking meter, he experienced a dark rage. They don’t let you live, he thought. I’ll put your nickels in the meter for you, Mr. Greenspahn , he mimicked the Irish cop. Two dollars a week for the lousy grubber. Plus the nickels that were supposed to go into the meter. And they talked about the Jews. He saw the cop across the street writing out a ticket. He went around his car, carefully pulling at the handle of each door, and he started toward his store.

“Hey there, Mr. Greenspahn,” the cop called.

He turned to look at him. “Yeah?”

“Good morning.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Good morning.”

The grubber came toward him from across the street. Uniforms, Greenspahn thought, only a fool wears a uniform.

“Fine day, Mr. Greenspahn,” the cop said.

Greenspahn nodded grudgingly.

“I was sorry to hear about your trouble, Mr. Greenspahn. Did you get my card?”

“Yeah, I got it. Thanks.” He remembered something with flowers on it and rays going up to a pink Heaven. A picture of a cross yet.

“I wanted to come out to the chapel but the brother-in-law was up from Cleveland. I couldn’t make it.”

“Yeah,” Greenspahn said. “Maybe next time.”

The cop looked stupidly at him, and Greenspahn reached into his pocket.

“No. No. Don’t worry about that, Mr. Greenspahn. I’ll take care of it for now. Please, Mr. Greenspahn, forget it this time. It’s okay.”

Greenspahn felt like giving him the money anyway. Don’t mourn for me, podler , he thought. Keep your two dollars’ worth of grief.

The cop turned to go. “Well, Mr. Greenspahn, there’s nothing anybody can say at times like this, but you know how I feel. You got to go on living, don’t you know.”