Biography
Stanley Lawrence Elkin was born on May 11, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, a traveling salesman and noted storyteller, later moved to the Chicago area, where Elkin spent his early childhood. At the age of twenty-two, while enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana, Elkin married Joan Marion Jacobson, an aspiring young artist. Two years later, in 1955, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he served two years in the field of radio communications. After his tour of duty, Elkin and his wife spent some time in Europe, especially Rome and London, where he began writing what would later be his first novel, Boswell. Returning to the United States, Elkin resumed his studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana, continuing his graduate work in English and working for the student magazine, Accent, which published his first short story, “Among the Witnesses,” in 1959.
Before receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1961, Elkin took a position teaching English at Washington University in St. Louis. He was visiting lecturer at institutions such as Smith College, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Yale University, and Boston University. Beginning in 1983, he held the title of Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University. Elkin died of a heart attack in St. Louis in 1995, after long suffering from multiple sclerosis, first diagnosed in 1961. He was survived by his wife and three children (a daughter and two sons).
Analysis
Often erroneously categorized as a “black humorist,” Stanley Elkin wrote novels and short stories that bristle with a kind of modern satiric language and a blending of the ordinary and the bizarre that characterize much of the black humor that emerged in the 1960’s. Unlike contemporaries such as Joseph Heller, J. P. Donleavy, and Kurt Vonnegut, however, Elkin did not produce works that are particularly pessimistic or given to excessive lamentations over the inadequacies of contemporary culture. The world Elkin depicts in his fiction is indeed bleak, desolate, and unforgiving, but Elkin’s characters always seem to manage somehow, always seem to exhibit a certain kind of moral fortitude that enables them to persevere.
It is Elkin’s treatment of his characters that is perhaps the most striking element in his fiction, causing his work to stand apart from that of the black humorists. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Elkin does not disrespect the characters he satirizes, even when those characters have despicable traits or engage in criminal—even cruel—behavior. In addition, his characters have the ability to make moral choices, a characteristic lacking in most protagonists in works of black humor. Despite Elkin’s elaborate, artful characterizations, however, his fiction—because of his overpowering style, his artful use of language and metaphor (far beyond the characters to which he typically ascribes the gift of language), and his lack of emphasis on plot—has been somewhat of an enigma to literary scholars, who have struggled to understand the significance of his works and their place in the context of contemporary American literature.
Boswell
Elkin’s first novel, Boswell, centers on the protagonist James Boswell, conceived as a loose parody of the eighteenth century biographer who pursued the most eminent man in the London of his day, Samuel Johnson, eventually befriending him and writing his biography. Elkin’s Boswell is also a pursuer of celebrities, but in twentieth century America, the task is more complicated—and the reasons for undertaking the task more pathological. Boswell is obsessed with death: the certainty of death and the prospect of having lived a meaningless life. In this regard, Boswell seems almost existential in nature. Unlike the earlier existential novelists, however, and unlike Elkin’s contemporaries, who often see life in the modern world as vacuous and absurd, Elkin pushes past this categorization, causing his protagonist to make a life-affirming gesture, to take from the confusion and chaos of modern life some organizing principle, or affirmative stance, that can overcome his oppressive feelings of meaninglessness. In Boswell’s case, as he stands outside, unable to cross the police barrier in front of the hotel where celebrities are gathering at his own request, he finally comes to understand the inherent injustice of a world that gives special status, even immortal status, to certain individuals while others are left in meaningless obscurity. The novel ends with Boswell’s uncharacteristically democratic gesture: He begins to shout opposition to these celebrities, choosing to remain an outsider just on the eve of his acceptance into their circle.
Boswell was received rather cautiously by critics and reviewers. The work’s lack of plot—not much really “happens” in the novel—and Elkin’s intense, almost overwhelming rhetorical style, with his seemingly inconsistent juxtaposition of formal speech and street slang (often coming from the same character, in the same paragraph), caused several critics to denounce the work as too artificial, too self-conscious, and too uncontrolled. Peter J. Bailey, in defense of Elkin, has argued that the early characterizations of Elkin were unfair for a number of reasons. For one thing, Elkin’s literary antecedents were misunderstood. He was not trying to write realistic plot-based fiction and failing; instead, he was writing antirealistic, comedic novels of excess, very much like his contemporaries Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme. The confusion, according to Bailey, comes about because other such novelists use language that is extravagant, rhetorically excessive, and comical. With Elkin, the language is the language one hears every day, the language of shopkeepers and grocers. This realistic speech in the midst of bizarre situations makes Elkin’s work more insidious—and, Bailey argues, more effective.
A Bad Man
With his second novel, A Bad Man, Elkin continues what he began in Boswell. Like most of Elkin’s novels, it focuses on a single protagonist who tells his own story, a protagonist who seeks to heal his disparate, chaotic life through a single profession, or obsession, as the case may be. Leo Feldman, a department store magnate, seeking a way to test his resolve, strength, and fortitude, has himself put into prison for doing his customers illegal favors. In prison, Feldman confronts the system, personified by the warden, and ultimately confronts death itself in many guises, just as Boswell had done before him. The consummate salesman, Feldman is keenly aware of the art of selling himself, promoting the self, and he seeks to do this as he fights the warden and the system.
The Dick Gibson Show
In his third novel, The Dick Gibson Show, Elkin turns to the world of radio broadcasting, a perfect medium for the depiction of the loner, the orphan (a characteristic of many Elkin protagonists), the marginal modern hero who lives isolated from others yet seeks a kind of renewal, a connection with an understanding, sympathetic “audience.” The novel spans Gibson’s career (which coincides with the introduction of radio as a mass medium). The format at which he excels is the talk show and, later, the telephone call-in shows that became popular in the 1960’s. The callers telephone to articulate their despair, their feelings of inadequacy, and their inability to order their lives—feelings Gibson shares. Rather than succumb to these feelings, however, Gibson uses his position as adviser to help himself overcome them. In the callers themselves he finds a substitute for the family he has spent his life seeking in vain.
The Franchiser
The Franchiser, Elkin’s fourth (and, some argue, his best) novel, was published in 1976. The protagonist, Ben Flesh, is yet another loner—a man living on the road in a late-model Cadillac, opening franchises across the country—but a loner who feels at home anywhere in the United States. The opening sentence of the novel catalogs the various places to which he travels: Wherever he is, “he feels he is home.” Putting absolute faith in the newly emerged system of franchising, Flesh seeks to celebrate and homogenize the United States itself. For him the franchising system is the perfect democratic scheme, the means by which all Americans can participate. The novel ultimately shows the scheme to be misleading, but despite Flesh’s setbacks—his businesses begin to fail, he is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis—the novel does not end in despair. Flesh recovers and begins again, revealing an indomitable spirit, a certain moral fortitude that is characteristic of Elkin’s heroes.
George Mills
Elkin is perceived, even by those who look disparagingly at his fiction, as a master of the depiction of American popular culture, the world of hamburger joints, radio spots, and storefronts, the language of the jingle, shoptalk, and the hype of the sales floor. American consumer culture is Elkin’s peculiar specialty, and his poetic treatment of it raises it almost to the level of myth. In Elkin’s fifth novel, George Mills, he attempts to reveal the extent of these mythic proportions.
The story of George Mills, a blue-collar worker in St. Louis, is depicted in the context of his ancestry: He comes from a long line of “working stiffs,” beginning with a stable boy during the Fifth Crusade. It is as though George’s bloodline had been cursed: Each generation passes on a peculiar capacity to serve, each generation is destined to be followers, never leaders, and each generation is doomed to retain forever the hope that somehow God will come through in the end, that at the last minute something will happen to change their fate. The world of George Mills is a world where God is a trickster and a bully. Life is absurd, because what happens to people is merely God’s trick, “God’s fast one.” Somehow Mills manages to retain his dignity, however, managing a kind of embrace of all those who are also the butt of God’s jokes.
Stanley Elkin’s the Magic Kingdom
In Stanley Elkin’s the Magic Kingdom, Elkin carries the idea of life being God’s practical joke to an even more poignant level. The novel probes the obsession of Eddy Bale, a Londoner who has recently lost his son to a terminal illness, to take a group of terminally ill children from their home in England to Disney World and the Magic Kingdom in Florida. The effort he expends to raise the money, make the travel arrangements, and orchestrate the medical needs of the children is enormous—his own personal battle against the inevitable. He hires a nurse, Mary Cottle, who is thirtyish, a self-imposed exile from romantic relationships because she is a disease carrier (every child born to her would be destined to be diseased and blind). Again the reader sees Elkin’s dark vision of the world, a vision that critics justly compare to that of the nihilists, the black humorists, but Elkin’s dark vision somehow refuses to remain dark. After losing a child during their week in Florida, and after making the arrangements for the body to be returned, Bale and Cottle end the novel in a frenzied sexual encounter that is, in an odd, perhaps perverted way, a gesture of renewal, a feeble attempt to repopulate the world, to replace the diseased children, even if they must be replaced with more diseased children.
The Rabbi of Lud
The Rabbi of Lud explores Elkin’s Jewish heritage: It concerns a rather cynical rabbi of Lud, New Jersey, by the name of Jerry Goldkorn. In the opening chapters, Elkin presents a series of descriptions that suggest his vision of the modern landscape: desolate, dirty, and reeking of death. The town’s major feature, indeed its major business, consists of cemeteries and mortuaries. Lud, as Elkin describes it, is a closed system, a place he calls “thanatopsical,” after the Greek word for death. It is the quintessential wasteland, T. S. Eliot’s image that overwhelmed twentieth century fiction and poetry—the empty, spiritually defunct landscape of modern humanity. Rabbi Goldkorn is in a spiritual crisis, or rather a series of spiritual crises, involving his family and his career. He eventually moves to Alaska to be the rabbi of the Alaskan pipeline, a typically Elkian metaphor for the ultimately useless career.
Despite this rather forbidding depiction of modern life, however, and despite the trials that beset the rabbi, Goldkorn is basically happy in his long-standing marriage to his wife, Shelley, and he enjoys his work—even finds it noble to a degree, despite the inevitability of its failure. The end of the novel characteristically reveals Elkin’s refusal to paint a completely dismal picture of modern life. Obligated to deliver a eulogy for his friend Joan Cohen, Rabbi Goldkorn—after discussing the hopelessness of life and the inevitability of death—delivers a rather strange, visionary series of blessings that catalog the things in life there are to celebrate, small things such as eating fruit and smelling wood.
The MacGuffin
At fifty-eight, Robert “Bobbo” Druff finds himself “on the downhill side of destiny” in The MacGuffin. A streets commissioner in an unnamed midsize American city reminiscent of Elkin’s own St. Louis, Druff sees his own health declining just as federal highway funds are drying up (a situation that is this novel’s version of the energy crisis in The Franchiser). He cannot get any respect, from others or even from himself. His seething resentment fuels his paranoid fantasies and his raging, often misdirected rants in which the pathos of Arthur Miller’s delusional Willy Loman is transformed into pure spiel. He and his maker play a variation on the familiar Descartean theme: not a philosophical Cogito, ergo sum, but a self-assertive “I rage, therefore I am.”
The novel’s title alludes to the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s love of arbitrary narrative contrivances to keep his plots moving, and as such it underscores the absurdity of Druff’s “pointless odyssey.” In a life, and a novel, filled with non sequiturs, Druff compensates for life’s indignities by imagining plots in which he figures prominently, especially plots to dethrone, or decommission him. In this way, he salvages some measure of dignity from his otherwise clownish life. Although The MacGuffin is wildly funny, it is Druff’s fears and frustrations, along with a sense of personal injustice, that drive both the novel’s streets commissioner and Elkin’s high-energy prose.
Other works
The same combination of fear, frustration, rage, and revenge figures prominently in the three novellas that make up Van Gogh’s Room at Arles. In Her Sense of Timing, the wife of a suffering but insufferable wheelchair-bound professor of geography leaves him at a particularly inopportune moment. In the title novella, a small-time college teacher wins a foundation grant only to find that entry into the select company of academic powerhouses makes him feel even more unworthy and resentful. The third novella features an English working-class girl snubbed by the royal family. She reveals all to a British tabloid in Town Crier Exclusive, Confessions of a Princess Manqué: “How Royals Found Me ’Unsuitable’ to Marry Their Larry.”
The combination is also present in Mrs. Ted Bliss, albeit in a different key. Far less pyrotechnic than most of Elkin’s earlier novels, Mrs. Ted Bliss depicts one of Elkin’s most likable (as well as most passive) protagonists. She is a former butcher’s wife, now a widow (widowhood being her occupation), who has traveled from Russia to Chicago only to find herself, in her eighties, virtually imprisoned in a Miami condominium tower. As if caught in a parody of a fairy tale, she is cut off from and fearful of the outside world.
Her losses, particularly that of her husband, leave her in much the same condition the unraveling myelin of Elkin’s own multiple sclerosis left him: exposed, irascible, tragicomically human. Stubbornly, helplessly trapped in her evacuated building as a hurricane approaches, she becomes Elkin’s King Lear on the stormy heath. Where Lear rages, however, she merely waits, in the company of the building’s security guard: a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. They do what they can to see each other through the storm. “Everything else falls away,” Elkin writes, brilliantly and elegiacally, at novel’s as well as career’s end: “Family, friends, love fall away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that’s left is obligation.”
Again and again, Elkin shows his readers the resilience of the human spirit, the ability humans have to cope with the chaos of modern life, the meaninglessness of human values, and the entropy from which cultural systems suffer. The major characters in Elkin’s novels, novellas, and collections of short fiction share the black humorist’s understanding of the condition of modern culture yet ultimately offer a constructive, if not ideal, response. All of his characters share a certain morality, a willingness to admit life’s meaninglessness, but also a necessity of struggling against it with whatever strength they can muster. This almost dignified response in the face of life’s absurdity is Elkin’s particular legacy and is the measure by which his works are best understood.