Pieces of Soap Read online

  To Joan

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Performance and Reality

  Plot

  Acts of Scholarship

  The Law of Average

  What’s in a Name?

  The First Amendment as an Art Form

  The Muses Are Heard

  An American in California

  At the Academy Awards

  The Rest of the Novel

  Pieces of Soap

  PART TWO

  A Preface to the Sixties (But I Am Getting Ahead of Myself.)

  Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1980

  Foreword to Arthur Schnitzler, Plays and Stories

  A la Recherche du Whoopee Cushion

  Introduction to Early Elkin

  Introduction to The Six-Year-Old Man

  Introduction to The Coffee Room

  Foreword to Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers

  My Father’s Life

  My Middle Age

  Why I Live Where I Live

  Where I Read What I Read

  A Kinsey Report

  My Shirt Tale

  Summer: A True Confession

  The Mild One

  My Tuxedo: A Meditation

  Three Meetings

  Some Overrated Masterpieces

  INTRODUCTION

  By Sam Lipsyte

  If you didn’t know any better, the guy on stage looked pretty jolly, a kindly, balding, white-bearded fellow in a wheelchair (“MS,” an audience member here in this packed hall at Brown University near the end of the 1980s whispered), an avuncular gent ready to embrace the crowd with warm wit. I knew a little bit better, but when he opened his mouth what rumbled out still shocked and mesmerized, and if you took a second gander you saw now in this moonish middle-aged man a sly ferocity, a devilish need to provoke, to push, like his notorious creation Push the Bully. He sure as shit wasn’t Santa Claus, and he was going to let you know it with astonishing lyricism and perversity.

  “My name is Stanley,” Stanley Elkin began, reading from an essay (“What’s in a Name?”) collected in this book. A simple enough declaration, but what followed (go read the opening, I’ll wait) was a long paragraph about what somebody named Stanley might do to your child, a riff more funny, disturbing, and poetic than any three steps of the tongue down the palette, any humdrum life lights or loin fires. The piece soon veered away from first-person molester hypotheticals, but not before words like “fork” and “grimes” and “bespittled” had lodged new resonances in my noggin.

  I’d read him, in fevers of bliss, already, a few of his novels and short stories, always dazzled by his language and humor, but it was another thing to see him in person. He was all sprezzatura on the page, his circus utterances unfurling with seeming ease. Up in the lights you could sense struggle, agon, some inner grimace, probably more to do with physical discomfort than anything. Certainly he knew how to read his prose—he was maestro and orchestra at once—and it was the music I’d come to hear.

  I had just recently been privy to this idea that some artists give aspiring ones “permission,” and I had adopted that feeling about Elkin. Reading his books, you realized how lazy most writing is, how instead of just skating in circles on the rinky-dink ice of dull utterance, you could try to put life into every line, to see every clause as an opportunity for some kind of close-up magic, a pigeon of felt actuality bursting from your fist. (“Try” was—alas, is, for everyone but Elkin—the operative word.) But the fireworks weren’t just for the sake of the spectacle, or the trick. It all needed, in some marvelous way, to connect to that larger entity, the show. Elkin once laid down what he called “the rules” in a radio interview: “Form perfect sentences and flesh these sentences out in high structures of imagination.”

  Elkin did so, again and again, in novels like The Living End, George Mills, The Magic Kingdom, and The Dick Gibson Show, as well as in short stories like “A Poetics for Bullies.”

  That night in Providence he was part of a largish gathering of writers, all friends of a sort, invited by the great Robert Coover. These were the so-called postmodernists, those in step with John Barth’s famous essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” purveyors of an exciting anti-realism, though such appellations would grow more and more meaningless. Still, in those days, the particular camps in contemporary American literature seemed fairly well demarcated. Later they’d dissolve into the mist, but that’s another story.

  Also on hand were William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass, a colleague of Elkin’s at Washington University in St. Louis. Gaddis was dapper and anxious, Gass was a shaggy wizard, Barthelme charming, and if they constituted some kind of pantheon (and they did to me), Elkin was a gruff but fair-minded war god, assuming the war was one waged against the forces out to stifle daring prose, deep comedy, and an honest (complex, contradictory, horrified, celebratory) sense of the world.

  Pieces of Soap is pure Elkin, and something different as well. While there’s no real separation on the sentence level between Elkin the fiction writer and Elkin the essayist, he does employ, like a wrestler (see his memorable grappler Boswell), a variety of new grips. Elkin explores many themes, including literature, movies, sex, small-town comforts, big-time diseases, and many other topics quotidian, epic, or, mostly, both. He understands the Shakespearean stakes and poetry in a breakfast spread, or, as in the title essay, a collection of “wrapped motel, hotel, airline, railway, and steamer soaps.” Elkin does not keep his pieces of soap for Proustian remembrance, and, he says, he “writes more from the grave robber’s viewpoint than the collector’s.” He traces his soap-collecting compulsion to the past (which Faulkner, one of Elkin’s permission-givers, and subject of his Ph.D. thesis, reminded us is not even past), to his traveling salesman father. Once Elkin starts using his soaps, they become talismans against mortality, or at least a way to measure the life left to him.

  Elkin also makes incisive forays into theories of craft. He reveals the true nature of plot (it’s “isometric”) and novels (“For conveying ideas, novels are among the least functional and most decorative of the blunt instruments”). Elkin’s thoughts on fiction are as brazen and astute and often as entertaining as his fictions. His adventures in Hollywood, described in two brilliant pieces here, are as much about himself, and America, as they are about the celebrity-industrial complex circa 1989. By now a “cripple,” he falls out of a hotel shower, “my pale Missouri body falling from grace—only no one falls from grace so much as from its absence . . .”

  “Schmuck,” his connection, his old Yale acquaintance, TV honcho David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood) calls Stanley, for resigning himself to a shower without grab bars. Sometimes Elkin is a schmuck. He makes great art from the fact. Often he leads with his wounds. He lures you, traps you with them. Not that you mind, of course. It’s part of the magic, the show. (“Never the winner of my anecdotes . . . but the fall guy, the whiner take all.”) The schmuck also confesses to trying to be an asshole, and losing the game, as when he attempts to humiliate a former Democratic Party nominee for president for what Elkin perceives as phony courtesy at a cocktail party. But the old pol handles him perfectly. Awful for Elkin, but all the better for us, for the story.

  Yes, Elkin is funny, one of the funniest ever (radio interviewer: “Is there any pain or humiliation that is too great for humor?” Elkin: “No. No, there isn’t”). He was also one of the most serious ever. He was often amused, but his books were never merely amusing. Too much was on the line. His vision of society, culture, absurdity, the stations of the self, the sufferings and charms of the body, were all too acute for light humor. The title of a recent TV show and website, Funny or Die, almost has it right. Yet what it misses is everything. Funny
and die is more like it. But also funny and live, in bigness and in smallness, in sickness and in health, and in the case of Stanley Elkin, not just live but perdure, beyond life, in some of the most original and thrilling prose in the language.

  PERFORMANCE AND REALITY

  There is in literature an element of what I shall call “crossover.” In primitive form it is often little more than echo, or allusion, and is borrowed from one thing and imposed on another for what might almost be homeopathic reasons, growing a sort of interest, as money grows interest—lump-sum momentum like a chain letter no one has broken.

  We frequently see the crossover in story titles. E. M. Forster writes A Room with a View, A Passage to India; Bob Coover “The Cat in the Hat for President.” Joan Didion calls her novel A Book of Common Prayer, Thornton Wilder his play The Skin of Our Teeth. Indeed, it isn’t only authors who consciously mine the allusive, magical properties inherent in prior names—inherent after the fact—history itself does it. “World War Two” is a crossover, catchy as a tune. Not sequential convenience, mind you, though that’s certainly part of it, but actual art. So artful and catchy, in fact, that the one on the drawing boards, if it ever happens, will be called “World War Three.”

  Writers of advertising copy and the editors of popular magazines are perhaps the most expert, certainly the most self-conscious, practitioners of this form—and it is a form—with its values of pun and slogan. It would be an interesting exercise to examine the titles of the news articles in just one issue of Time magazine. I’m too lazy to take the trouble, and too troubled to take the pains, but if I were a better person and had the character for it, I’m certain that what I would find would be a kind of cornucopia of recombinant and essentially literary elements—in-jokes for outsiders.

  But whether the source is literary or idiomatic—usually it’s idiomatic—the intended effect, when it is not merely cute, is always the same—new wine in old bottles, some recycled but incremental and compounded sense of the world, the lifting of one occasion to enhance another.

  Some years ago, to no one’s particular notice, I thought to call a collection of bits and pieces from my previous books Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits. I thought it an inspired title. The model was from the recording industry, an allusion to what, in America, has become almost a genre—Wayne Newton’s Greatest Hits, Elvis’s . . . : the habit of reissuing in a new package the popular but out-of-print blockbuster golds and platinums of established stars. Often these anthology recordings are promoted in TV commercials with the note, like a surgeon general’s disclaimer on a package of cigarettes, that it’s not available in stores.

  My intentions had been honorable. That is, like all honorable intentions, they were born out of frustration and despair. All I’ve ever wanted, as I tell my friends, is to be rich and famous and to live forever without pain. My title, I felt, was pure crossover ironic, not in the least cute, pure art. I have no greatest hits of course, no golds, no platinums, none of the fabulous and rare ores, elements, and alchemicals of the Las Vegans; in me metallurgy reduced to mere spin-off, simple dross. Anticipating, I even tried to make the case with my publisher that we should use the other crossover phrase as well and display prominently on the jacket the fact that the book was “Not Available in Stores.” An in-joke for an outsider. For me, I mean.

  To this point, at least, I’ve been talking only along the fringes of art and fiction, my notion of crossover simplistic—allusions, slogans, and puns, statutory miles from my argument. But even allusions, slogans, and puns with their pentimento, almost geological, layers and palimpsest arrangements, do in primary colors what good fiction with its infinite palette must always try to do.

  Let me tell you about the flamenco dancer.

  The flamenco dancer sits in the café against the whitewashed walls, slouched in his wooden chair. While the women dance, a guitar player, his feet oddly stolid and flatfoot on the small platform, leans his ear against the back of his instrument as if he is tuning it. Another gazes impassively across the fretted fingerboard of his guitar as though he were blind. The family—it is impossible to know relationships here, to distinguish husbands from brothers, sisters from wives—a mysterious consanguinity undefined as the complicated connections in circus; only the standing, hand-clapping man in the suit, shouting encouragement like commands, seems in authority here, or the woman, her broad, exposed back and shoulders spilling her gown like the slipped, toneless flesh of powerful card players. Even the slouching brother? husband? nephew? son? is attentive but demure, the women’s hair pulled so tightly into their comb tiaras you can see the deep, straight furrows of their scalps. Their arrhythmic clapping is not so much on cue as beside it, beneath it, random as traffic, signaled by some private, internal urging like spontaneous pronouncement at a prayer meeting. Yes. Like testimony, like witness. Except for this—the finger snapping, the hand claps never synchronous as applause, the occasional gutturals of the men and the abrupt chatter of the women like a musical gossip—they do not seem absorbed, or even very interested, their attention deflected, thrown as the voice of a ventriloquist, loss of affect like a dominant mood. Inside the passionate music and performance they are rigid, distracted as jugglers. The men and women, patient in their half circle of chairs as timid Johns, polite whores in a brothel, seem even less aware of each other than they are of the performers, kinship and relationship in abeyance, whatever of love that connects them dissolved, intimacy stoicized, the curious family in the cavelike room suddenly widowed, suddenly widowered, orphaned, returned to some griefless condition of independence.

  And now the bailora completes her turn. Like some human beast, she seems to rise from the broad, tiered flounces of her costume as from a package of waves at a shoreline, the great, fabric petals of her long train swirled, heaped as seawater at her feet, her immaculate ass, hips, thighs, and tits a lesson in the meaty rounds of some mythic geometry, her upper arms spreading from her shoulders like wings, angled to her forearms, her forearms angled to her wrists, her wrists and hands and fingers and long Latin nails a squared circle of odd, successive dependencies, the stiff, queer displacement of the askew fingers like some hoodoo signal to charm the bright arrogance of the dance.

  The man in the suit—when did the cigarette, burned out now, only a dead ash longer than the intact paper that supports it, go into his lips?—beats an asyndeton, paratactic, ungrammatical applause. It is that same deliberate offbeat accompaniment that earlier had almost but not quite violated the heel clicks and toe taps of the bailora. No matter how studiously the audience in the café tries to keep up with it, they cannot fall in with this artful dodger.

  Now the flamenco dancer rises from his chair. Slim and grave as a bullfighter he moves in his gypsy silks and gabardines, his trapezist’s pasodoble entrances and heroics. Alone, it is as if he marches in a procession, deadpan as a saint, solemn as Jesus. He looks like a condemned man leading an invisible party of executioners and priests to his gallows, the host at his own murder feast. There is nothing epicene or hermaphroditic in his bearing, yet he could almost be the embodiment of some third sex, or no, some sexual specialist, a fucker of virgins, say, of nymphets and schoolgirls and all the newly menstrual. In his tight, strange clothing, the trousers that rise above the waist and close about his spine, the small of his back, the narrow jacket and vest that just meet them, leaving off exactly where the trousers begin, not a fraction of an inch of excess material, sausaged into his clothes as the girls’ hair had been into their comb tiaras, the bulge of his genitals customized, everything, all, all bespoke, fitting his form, seamless as apple peel, the crack in his ass, the scar on his hip, he seems dressed, buttocks to shoulders, in a sort of tights, some magic show-biz gypsy latex.

  And now he is in position on the platform, conducted there by the asyncopatic hand claps of the man in the suit.

  At first he appears the perfect flamenco analogue of a bullfighter. If the women, with their elaborate hand and arm movements, had seemed to flo
urish banderillas and brandish lances, the flamenco dancer with his minimal upper-body gestures and piledriver footwork, seems to wield capes, do long, stationary passes, slow-motion veronicas, outrageous down-on-one-knee rodillas. Indeed, with his furious heel-toe, heel-toe momentum, he seems at times to be the actual bull itself, pawing the ring of platform in flamenco rage. Bullfighter and bull, as the dancing woman had seemed an extension of the actual sea.

  This is what the flamenco dancer looks like.

  He has the face of a cruel, handsome Indian and looks insolent as a man in a tango. There are layers of indifference on his face like skin, like feature itself, some fierce inappetency and a listlessness so profound that that itself might almost be his ruling passion, some smoky nonchalance of the out-of-love. Not cold, not even cool, for these words at least suggest an idea of temperature, and the flamenco dancer seems to have been born adiabatic, aseptic. What, on someone else’s face, might look like sneer, snarl, contempt, may, on his, signify no more than the neutral scorn and toughness on the face of a bulldog.

  Now the flamenco dancer is possessed by his duende, his musical dybbuk. His is jondo, profound—death, anguish, tragedy. The larger issues. (Music is hard. In prose, music is very hard to do, unconvincing as lyrics, a cappella on a page. Avoid trying to render music. Avoid the sensations of orgasm. Steer clear of madmen as protagonists, and likewise eschew a writer as a hero of the fiction. And it’s swimming at your own risk in the stream of consciousness. “Knowing believes before believing remembers,” says Faulkner in a Joe Christmas section in Light in August. What the hell does that mean?) And the guitarist is singing his serious soleares, calling his cante like a ragman, whining his tune like a cantor. Davvening despair.

  I am no longer what I was [he sings,

  calls, whines, davvens]

  now will I be aga-ain

  I am a tree of sadness

  in the shadow of a waa-aall . . .