Last reviewed: June 2017
American novelist and short story writer
May 11, 1930
Brooklyn, New York
May 31, 1995
St. Louis, Missouri
Stanley Lawrence Elkin had the distinction of multiple tenancy in some of the most compelling camps of contemporary fiction: He is categorized along with writers such as Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth as a prominent contributor to the postwar Jewish American renaissance; he is often compared with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Bruce Jay Friedman, and other so-called black humorists; and he was allied with Robert Coover, William Gass, and John Hawkes by virtue of his self-conscious craftsmanship and postrealist sensibilities. Born in 1930 in Brooklyn, Elkin described his father as an energetic salesman who was always ready with a good joke or story. His father appears to be the model for Elkin’s parade of word-drunk middle-class obsessives, the “vocalized vocations,” manic drummers, and eccentric raconteurs that dominate his novels. He credited his mother for paving the way to his writing career by financing a trip to Europe that temporarily relieved him of the demands of writing his dissertation (on William Faulkner) and that enabled him to complete his first novel, Boswell.
Elkin was reared on Chicago’s South Side, where his early aptitude for writing stories led to his decision to enter the University of Illinois in Urbana, where he first majored in journalism and then in English. His extracurricular activities included contributing to the literary magazine and performing in radio dramas. He earned his B.A. degree in 1952 and his M.A. degree in 1953, the year he married Joan Marion Jacobson. His progress toward his Ph.D., which he would earn in 1961, was interrupted by service in the Army from 1955 to 1957. While he was stationed at Fort Lee, Virginia, he produced a training manual on forklift trucks and acted in local plays. Elkin resumed his teaching duties at Washington University in St. Louis, where he became a tenured professor. His honors include the Longview Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy grant, The Sewanee Review Prize (in 1981, for Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits), and the National Book Critics Circle Award (in 1983, for George Mills). Stanley Elkin.
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The absurd joke of human mortality is a persistent theme in Elkin’s fiction, attributable in part to the fact that Elkin was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1961. Yet the optimistic energy that pervades his writing—the effervescent play of language that is Elkin’s signature—suggests possibilities for achievement that belie the second-banana status of his protagonists. Elkin described writing as “a total bath in the self,” and all of his pitchmen are inveterate wordmongers, heroes in and of the language they sell. They are orphans, itinerants, and hangers-on, but they are exalted by their harangues, puns, metaphors, and liberal alliterations, all of which testify to a resistance movement against dull conformity or passionless accommodation. “I am a strategist, an arranger, a schemer,” his Jim Boswell confides, setting the precedent for the talent that best serves the Elkin hero: a capacity for instigation and imaginative drive.
Elkin quickly departed from the more restrained social comedies of Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers to establish a loosely episodic style in which, as Elkin himself contended, “the sentence is its own excuse for being” and the ego’s excesses are unquestioned imperatives. There is department store owner and “favor-peddler” Leo Feldman, of A Bad Man, whose imprisonment leads to a deadly struggle against Warden Fisher and the sterilization of the human spirit; there is Ben Flesh, of The Franchiser, who devotes himself to the expansion of a rather vulgar but peculiarly American poetry—a communal neon landscape; there is Dick Gibson, radio man, who infiltrates and expounds his passions through the air, and there is George Mills, who is the descendant of a thousand years worth of coat-holders and observers from the wings, cutting a comic figure at once ordinary and essential. Even the hellbound Ellerbee, a liquor store owner and contemporary Job who finds himself beleaguered by God’s own “bottom line” (which justifies human suffering according to what makes for a better story), carries the banner of shuffling human dignity in The Living End.
Elkin’s fiction features the self-indulgent, all-consuming human voice, and it is this central characteristic which crowds out some of the traditional structural concerns of the novel. Every wild, vaudevillian incident is an excuse for lush rhetoric in love with itself. The world is at once heartbreaking and crazy, like the pilgrimage to Walt Disney World of the physically grotesque and the fatally ill in The Magic Kingdom, the plots fantasized by an over-the-hill streets commissioner in the Alfred Hitchcock-inspired The MacGuffin, the monstrous and monstrously funny resentments of the two college professors in Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, or the more pointed and personal obsessions of Elkin himself in the collection of essays entitled Pieces of Soap, in which, as Helen Vendler has pointed out, Elkin’s “Pagliacci clown suit alternates with his Ancient Mariner weeds.” Rhetorical richness and furious clowning are the hallmarks of the idiosyncratic art Elkin painfully and painstakingly honed right up to Mrs. Ted Bliss, the novel he completed just before his death from heart failure in 1995.