Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

“It’s a free park, ain’t it?” one said. “When are you going to speak? Are you going to speak or ain’t you?”

“People must…” a voice said suddenly, clearly. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” So abruptly had the voice broken into all their consciousnesses that even the boys looked away to see its source.

“It’s the Professor,” someone at the edge of one of the groups said, and Morty could see the sudden turning of a dozen heads, faces slamming alert.

“Where?” one asked.

“There. It’s the Professor. The Professor is going to speak.”

The groups dissolved, the speakers around whom they had been standing suddenly abandoned in mid-sentence, their mouths still open in stunned discouragement. Thirty feet away Morty saw the tattooed man appear as the crowd around him broke up. He had put on a hat and was buttoning his shirt.

Morty stumbled after the rushing crowds, but his knapsack was an almost unbearable weight now and he could not keep up. Already the crowds had re-formed into a single mass. Morty caught up and tried to push through but they shoved him back, his assertiveness, even his knapsack, no longer seeming to have any effect on them.

“People must serve…” the voice sang out, hopelessly hidden from Morty. He was struck by its precision and strength and clarity, by the wholesome sweetness of its range and timbre. He could not really tell if it was the voice of a man or a woman. It could even have been a child’s.

“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, trying to say,” it went on.

This would be it, Morty thought, alarmed and startled and pleased. This would be it and it would be worth it. That was the incredible thing. For a moment he regretted the ordinance that forbade platforms, but then he realized it made no difference that he couldn’t see the speaker.

“People must serve…” the voice said again, very slowly. “It’s what I’ve been trying to say, to make you understand, it’s what you must learn for the guilt…it’s the only thing that will help it, the guilt…help the guilt — People must serve…”

The splendid beauty of the voice thrilled him. Even the others were hushed. Far away, against a tree, the policeman leaned, his face as rapt as any there. The man who believed in fire and the man who never asked questions stood together, staring toward the voice, their faces, like Morty’s own, waiting, calm.

“People must serve—” the voice said, tired now, strained with the effort of mouthing the first premise of the universe “—must serve their necessity. People must serve their necessity — knuckle under to their necessity.”

Morty waited for the voice to go on. In the silence that followed the last pronouncement he and everyone else — there were hundreds now, it seemed, perhaps thousands — stood in thick, sedative patience.

They waited like that for five minutes, perhaps ten.

Then someone shrugged. And another did. And a man sighed. And a fourth coughed. And someone else was the first to turn around and walk away. And then, in a distant corner of the square, a rough voice began a new address. And then Morty could not see where the people had stood to listen to the voice. “Tch, tch,” Morty said sadly. “Tch tch tch.” It was the beginning of his compassion.

They had no preparation, no facts, no languages, no questions, no years behind them of jungle and pole and city and sex, no totems, no tokens, none of the trillion knowledges, none of the patience that Morty brought there. What would they have heard, what could they have made of it? To them it had been babble, less than nonsense. He had prepared, and everything had been made good. Redeemed, he thought. He was excited as he had never been excited. No. Yes. Once, he thought. When he had first conceived of what his life must be.

He had begun to tremble. A man, passing him, stared. “What’s eating that one?” he heard him say to his wife.

Morty slipped the straps of his knapsack off his shoulders and down over his arms and let it fall behind him. He turned and climbed on it, standing slowly, awkwardly, striving violently for balance on the soft, uncertain perch.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Morty Perlmutter began. He was glad the weather was warm. He would have weeks of it yet. In the fall the nights would be cool, but there were the big, folded Cajawohl heat leaves in his knapsack. If he was careful the Sambatlian total-food berries might last half a year. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he repeated. “Ladies and gentlemen and Rose Gold…”

Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.

Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.

Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.

In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he would have three children. Elkin’s postgraduate studies were interrupted in 1955 when he was drafted to the U.S. Army. He served at Fort Lee in Virginia until 1957 and then returned to Illinois to resume his education. In 1960, Elkin began teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

Elkin’s novels were universally hailed by critics. His second novel, A Bad Man (1967), established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review . Despite his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1972, Elkin continued to write regularly, even incorporating the disease into his novel The Franchiser (1976), which was released to great acclaim. Elkin won his first National Book Critics Circle Award with George Mills (1982), an achievement he repeated with Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His string of critical successes continued throughout his career. He was a National Book Award finalist two more times with Searches and Seizures (1974) and The MacGuffin (1991), and a PEN Faulkner finalist with Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1994). Elkin was also the recipient of the Longview Foundation Award, the Paris Review Humor Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Even though he was confined to a wheelchair toward the end of his life, Elkin continued teaching classes at Washington University until his passing in 1995 from congestive heart failure.