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 1966of 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 publishers 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 couldnt find it, I had thought Duttons Obelisk editions, and, now, Thunders Mouth Press), oh, say, eighteen or nineteen years. Set against the great timelines of history this aint, of course, much not in the same league with astronomys skippy-stonyd light years certainly, or even, for that matter, the same ballpark as the universe, but were 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 Esquires rigged 1963 chart about Americas 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 arts sake but hype for hypes 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 & KCousin 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 (its starting to fall off), the stories have provided me and my family with a kind of widows mite, a small annuitysky 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 isnt, as you may suppose, a poetic wimp factor kicking in Im no art jerk so much as the hearts negotiated quid pro quo, all egos driving power trip, the rush many writers get out of their almost sybaritic wallow in the unfettered luxury of their indulged imaginations. (What, theyll pay for this? I may be a badass, but Im 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 isnt clear to me, though, is why. Why this book, why these stories? Surely Ive written better books. Surely Im 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 Christs sake, and only three, The Guest, A Poetics for Bullies and Perlmutter at the East Pole, were published after Id published my first novel and before Id written a second one.) So why? Why, really? Id 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 speakings package deal with realism, times 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 wouldnt. Soldiers didnt look busy, policemen didnt. 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.

Theres something comforting, almost soothing, about realism, and its nothing to do with shocks of recognition well it wouldnt, 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 Gods and Natures 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 isnt immediately available to the naked eye.

My point, then, is that the stories in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers are right bang smack dab in the middle of realism. I may get things wrong, or even silly as I do in the improbable scene in In the Alley when my protagonist, top-heavy with incurable cancer, checks himself out of the hospital to wander the city and goes into a bar to die in an unfamiliar neighborhood; or in red-hot centered I Look Out for Ed Wolfe, where ending the story, as stories never should end, with a gesture I have Ed throw his money away. But most of the stories have conventional, realistic sources. Only On a Field, Rampant and A Poetics for Bullies owe less to the syllogistic, rational world (though theyre not experimental, none of my writing is; I dont care for experimental writing and, in my case at least, experimental writing would be if I did it in German or French) than they do to some conjured, imaginary one and, sure enough, only in those stories am I more preoccupied with language than I am with realisms calmer tropes. I offer the battle of the headlines from On a Field, Rampant: