Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“‘Oh.’

“‘I didn’t want this to happen.’

“‘Oh.’

“‘I didn’t.’

“‘Well, say,’ I said. ‘What’s the big deal, Flash? What’s so terrible? Me? Say, is that what you think? You feel bad ’cause of me? Now, look, don’t be silly. I’ll be all right. Hey, old buddy, cheer up. That’s terrific news. That’s swell. That’s really swell, Flash.’

“‘Would you be our best man?’

“‘Your best man? You’ve got some sense of humor, Dedman.’

“‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked you.’

“‘No. Listen. I lost my nerve for a second, that’s all. I’m honored. You just try to get someone else for best man and see what happens to you.’

“Dedman gulped. We gulped in our games, but this was the real thing — the true-blue gulp, and no joke. ‘I wouldn’t have another best man,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t, Ace.’

“And so they were married and I’d won the game. But Dedman was right. The game was over. But it went into extra innings anyway. It was over because it wasn’t a game any more; now it was something I needed to keep me alive. Something I needed —betraying him and betraying him, hooked on his doom.

“I called him in to see me. He looked shitty — she must really have been working him over. Poor Dedman. I told him he was a married man now and had responsibilities; school was out for good now, and he’d better consider his future, I told him. And he nodded, agreed. And that’s when I gave him the money. For his businesses. Dedman’s businesses. But Dedman had no sense about money. And the businesses failed. Because I never gave him enough, you see! Always just a few thousand dollars less than what I knew they would need. They were timed to fail. Two years, three, and he’d be back again. What did it cost me over the years? That lunch counter? That dry-cleaning franchise? That school-supply store? Ten thousand? Fifteen? Those small-time businesses that bled him and bled him, so that he lived always in a crisis of failure. Dedman’s seven lean years that kept me alive.

“He came to our wedding in New York. He paid his own plane fare and stayed in a hotel. I saw him when he came through the receiving line. Jesus, he looked lousy. She did some job on him, that bitch. He shook my hand.

“‘ Que será será , Chief?’ I asked.

“‘ Comme ci, comme ça , Ace.’”

“Take him.” the warden whispered. “ Take him! ”

And at first, when they didn’t move, Feldman thought that they had found him innocent. “Why, I’m innocent,” he said. All along, the more they had talked, the more they had made their case, pushing him closer and closer to this last closed corner of their justice, the less guilt he had felt. He wasn’t guilty. He was not. He was no bad man. How I love my life, he thought. How I cherish it. It is the single holiness. My icicle winter snots like the relics of saints. How pious I am, how blessed. I accept wars, history, the deaths of the past, other people’s poverties and losses. Their casualties and bad dreams I write off. I remember all the disasters that have happened and all the disappointments of the generations from time’s beginning to its end, and still I am permitted to live.

But then the warden repeated his command, and they started to close in.

But perhaps the warden’s anger had betrayed him. It may have been an accident, or that he had simply forgotten — the foolish warden — or had maybe never known of the expert, still in the gym, who had been practicing to kill Feldman with a single punch. And possibly they would only beat him very badly, inexpertly. The homunculus would not rip his heart. He would recover. Or perhaps such an “accident” was God’s sign that the Diaspora was still unfinished, and that until it was, until everything had happened, until Feldman had filled the world, all its desert places and each of its precipices, all its surfaces and everywhere under its seas, and along its beaches, he could not be punished or suffer the eternal lean years of death.

Why, I am innocent, he thought, even as they beat him. And indeed, he felt so.

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.

A one-year-old Elkin in 1931. His father was born in Russia and his mother was a native New Yorker, though the couple raised Stanley largely in Chicago.