Stanley Elkin: The Living End
[Published at www.playbackstl.com, May 2004]
I suppose it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading Stanley Elkin (1930 – 1995), the celebrated, though never mainstream writer who taught at Wash U for 35 years. Despite a St. Louis Hall of Fame Star, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, and praise from more than a few literary somebodies (including his Wash U colleague William Gass, who writes about him in this month’s Harper’s), Elkin just hadn’t made it into my reading life. He’s in now, thanks to an “Elkin rediscovery project‚Äù by the non-profit publisher Dalkey Archive Press, which just completed a six-year process of restoring and republishing most of the author’s books. The recent re-release of The Living End (Dalkey Archive Press; 133 pages; $11.95), originally published in 1979, marks the project’s completion and my entrance into Elkin’s fictional world.
Told in three parts, this short novel follows three connected characters in three locations: Heaven, Hell and Minneapolis. The three characters are these: Ellerbee, a doomed but congenial liquor store owner who’s shot dead by some thugs, then sent to Heaven and then immediately to Hell; Ladlehaus, one of the liquor-store thugs, who eventually dies in old age and runs into Ellerbee in Hell; and Quiz, a groundskeeper who hears Ladlehaus’s in-grave pleas for help, but is later zapped dead by God for talking during a children’s concert He’d been enjoying.
With Elkin’s droll touch, all this moves quickly with the reader smiling. When Ellerbee goes to Heaven and catches sight of God, he says, “He’s beautiful. I’ve never… It’s ecstasy.” St. Peter replies, “And you’re seeing Him from a pretty good distance.” Later, when God visits Hell, He riffs on His powers (“And omnipotence—that takes it out of you!”), as does, later, His son (“I raised the dead. I ran them up like flags on poles… Miracle was my métier”).
In describing his Heaven and Hell, Elkin embraces the clichés of both—choirs and angels; pitchforks and demons—but then makes both his own through imaginative language and description. In Hell, a body smolders “like a building watched by firemen” amid “the tumbled kaleidoscope variations of warted deformity.” And “Nerves like hideous body hair grew long enough to trip over and lay raw as live wires or shoelaces that had come undone.” It’s all vivid and ghoulish but goofy, too, a bit like a Simpsons Halloween special.
And not unlike The Simpsons, this novel (which of course came first) thrives on the juxtaposition of goofiness and what in other contexts would be seriousness. Elkin takes up the essential, eternal matters—creation, death, faith—then wraps them in the funny papers.
Eventually, though, his literary ambitions make more of their presence known, and despite the humor that’s on every page, a budding sincerity and gravity begin to take hold, providing memorable and sad images one imagines Elkin felt most serious about: long-dead, Ladlehaus has “his consciousness locked into his remains like a cry in a doll‚Äù; and later, when the same character hears beautiful music and harmonies above the ground, Elkin writes, “What he had for eyes wept what he had for tears.”
The book has a finale and then some. God gives an unprecedented speech, for the first time explaining why children suffer, how to do certain disco steps, the cause of inflation (“It’s the mark-up,’ He said.”) But the speech gets fiercer, with God demanding of those surrounding him, “‘So, what do you make of Me, eh?’” (“He looks like someone driving nails, Christ thought.”) God then summons all the dead, asking the damned, “‘I gave you pain. Do you appreciate the miracle? To make it up out of thin air, deep, free-fall space, the gifted, driven atoms of remonstrance?”
The speech’s point, we learn, is to allow God to answer a question He hasn’t yet been asked: Why are you about to destroy the world? His answer—”Because I never found my audience‚Äù—is serious, and a little bit funny, and certainly cryptic, and should probably be left so for the reader who helps Elkin find an audience of his own.
