Stanley Elkin: Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

For reasons not in the least clear to me, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers has turned out to be my most enduring work, if by “enduring” one refers not to a time scheme encompassing geological epochs, or, for that matter, scarcely even to calendrical ones, but to those few scant handfuls — twenty-four since it was first published by Random House in hardback in 1966—of years barely wide enough to gap a generation. Not counting down-time, when it was out-of-print, or the peculiar half-life when it was in that curious publisher’s limbo, known to the trade (but never entirely understood, at least by this prefacer) as “out-of-stock,” it has been in print under sundry imprimaturs (Berkley Medallion, Plume, Warner Books and, until I actually looked it up in Books in Print where I couldn’t find it, I had thought Dutton’s Obelisk editions, and, now, Thunder’s Mouth Press), oh, say, eighteen or nineteen years. Set against the great timelines of history this ain’t, of course, much — not in the same league with astronomy’s skippy-stony’d light years certainly, or even, for that matter, the same ballpark as the universe, but we’re talking very fragile book years, mind, which are to life span approximately what dog years are to the birthdays of humans. At a ratio of seven-to-one (seven doggie years equalling forty-nine bookie years), that would make my criers and kibitzers, depending on how the actuaries count that half-life, either eight-hundred-and-eighty-two, or nine-hundred-and-eleven-years old. A classic, antique as Methuselah — the test, as the saying goes, of time.

In addition — more new math — two of these stories, “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers” and “The Guest,” were adapted for and produced on the stage. “Criers” has been a radio play on the Canadian Broadcasting System, and one, “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe,” was bought for the movies, though it never made the cut. (“Ed Wolfe,” published in Esquire in 1962, was my first mass-market sale and put me, quite literally, on the map. Well, at least on Esquire’s rigged 1963 chart about America’s “Literary Establishment,” where I found myself in shameless scarlet, short-listed among a small, arbitrary bundle of real writers — realer, in any event, than me — in what that magazine deemed to be “The Red Hot Center.” [Just Rust Hills and Bob Brown kidding around.] It thrilled me then, it embarrasses me now. Had I had more sense it would have embarrassed me then, too. God knows it angered a lot of important critics who wrote letters to the editor, columns, even essays about it, a short-lived tempest in a tea bag not unlike the one old John Gardner provoked when he made his pronouncements about moral fiction. Not art for art’s sake but hype for hype’s — like the PENs and Pulitzers, NBAs and National Book Critics Circle Awards, and all those other Masterpieces of the Minute that might not last the night.) “A Poetics for Bullies” was recorded on an LP by Jackson Beck, the radio actor and famous voice of Bluto in the Popeye cartoons, and somewhere loose in the world is a cassette tape of “The Guest” which I recorded for an outfit called the Printed Word. Oh, and eight of the nine stories in C & K —“Cousin Poor Lesley and the Lousy People” is the exception — have been anthologized, a few of them — the “Criers,” “Guest,” “Ed Wolfe” and “Bully” stories — several times, almost often. “Criers” and “Ed Wolfe” were in The Best American Short Stories annuals back in the days when Martha Foley was Martha Foley. Indeed, for many years during the late sixties, the decade of the seventies, and into the eighties (it’s starting to fall off), the stories have provided me and my family with a kind of widow’s mite, a small annuity—“sky money,” I like to call it. (I regard myself as a serious writer, even a professional one, but deep in my heart I think of most of the money I receive from my writing as essentially unearned. This isn’t, as you may suppose, a poetic wimp factor kicking in — I’m no art jerk — so much as the heart’s negotiated quid pro quo , all ego’s driving power trip, the rush many writers get out of their almost sybaritic wallow in the unfettered luxury of their indulged imaginations. (What, they’ll pay for this? I may be a badass, but I’m an honorable badass.) Anyway it — the money from the stories, all sources — never amounted to that much. I come cheap, after all. Maybe, top-of-the-head, all-told, thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars since 1966, my going rate for having passed the test of time. Nothing solid as a fortune, I admit, but tighter than loose change — something like the cumulative yield on a small CD, say.

What isn’t clear to me, though, is why. Why this book, why these stories? Surely I’ve written better books. Surely I’m a better writer now than I was when I wrote these stories. (Five of them, including the title story, one of my favorites, were written when I was still back in graduate school, for Christ’s sake, and only three, “The Guest,” “A Poetics for Bullies” and “Perlmutter at the East Pole,” were published after I’d published my first novel and before I’d written a second one.) So why? Why, really? I’d like to know.

One thing, certainly, is the accessibility of their style and (not behind that — indeed, quite the opposite — in absolute hand/ glove relationship to the relative simplicity of the style) plain speaking’s package deal with realism, time’s honored literary arrangement between ease and verisimilitude. Here, for example, is Feldman, the butcher, returning to his store after a quick trip to the bank for change for his cash drawer. (In the story, had I been a better stylist in the realistic tradition, I would have used the word “silver” instead of “change.”)

The street was quiet. It looks like a Sunday, he thought. There would be no one in the store. He saw his reflection in a window he passed and realized he had forgotten to take his apron off. It occurred to him that the apron somehow gave him the appearance of being very busy. An apron did that, he thought. Not a business suit so much. Unless there was a briefcase. A briefcase and an apron, they made you look busy. A uniform wouldn’t. Soldiers didn’t look busy, policemen didn’t. A fireman did, but he had to have that big hat on. Schmo, a man your age walking in the street in an apron. He wondered if the vice-presidents at the bank had noticed his apron. He felt the heaviness again.

There’s something comforting, almost soothing, about realism, and it’s nothing to do with shocks of recognition — well it wouldn’t, would it, since shocks never console — or even with the familiarity that breeds content, so much as with the fact that the realistic world, in literature, at least, is one that, from a certain perspective, always makes sense, even its bum deals and tragedies, inasmuch as it plays — even showboats and grandstands — to our passion for reason. The realistic tradition presumes to deal, I mean, with cause and effect, with some deep need in readers — in all of us — for justice, with the demand for the explicable reap/sow benefits (or punishments), with the law of just desserts — with all God’s and Nature’s organic bookkeeping. And since form fits and follows function, style is instructed not to make waves but merely to tag along, easy as pie, taking in everything that can be seen along the way but not much more and nothing at all of what isn’t immediately available to the naked eye.