In the summer of 1995, I was asked to read a passage from Stanley Elkin’s work at a memorial service for him, to be held during the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. Stanley had died that May.
I was honored to have been asked, because I was a huge fan of Stanley’s fiction and because he had been a dear friend.
In fact, I was such an ardent fan that it often struck me as astonishing and highly unlikely that we had become friends. To me, spending time with Stanley seemed like the equivalent of being invited to hang out with the Dalai Lama on a beautiful porch—on a succession of beautiful porches—at the various writers’ conferences (first Breadloaf, then Sewanee) at which Stanley and I taught. Actually, it seemed better than hanging out with the Dalai Lama: Stanley was funnier and louder, told dirtier jokes, and had a bigger personality. Certainly Stanley was a more eloquent complainer than I imagined the Dalai Lama being, even (or especially) at the spiritual leader’s lowest moments. There was something about crankiness, Stanley’s own crankiness and the crankiness of others—the performative aspect of crankiness, let’s say—that delighted him. I always felt he liked me best when I was most irritated, or irritable, and when I was able to transform that irritability (and he did, so well) into humor.
For more than a decade before his death, Stanley and I had spent weeks in the summer on those porches, most often with our families—with my husband, Howie, and Stanley’s wife, Joan, and sometimes with our children, for whom those conferences provided an excuse to enact their version of some Lost Boys or (worst case) Lord of the Flies scenarios, running wild across the scenic campuses with the other writers’ kids. Stanley and Joan’s daughter, Molly, older than my own kids, was already great fun to talk to, as she has remained.
When we weren’t sitting on the porches, we were eating (mostly awful) conference food, attending readings, giving readings, teaching classes, reading student manuscripts, and having manuscript conferences. Those last three elements of our job description were the main focus of Stanley’s complaints, which would rise to a fever pitch of annoyance, of grievance, of righteous fury—and then subside. And then he would go off to meet his lucky, grateful, and understandably anxious students. Stanley was known to be a fierce critic of student work; to say that he didn’t suffer fools gladly doesn’t begin to describe the intensity of his disapproval, of his response to anything he found careless, false, or second rate.
As I’ve said, I was honored to have been asked by the conference director and poet Wyatt Prunty to speak at Stanley’s memorial. But I was also nervous about it, for several reasons.
One of those reasons was that, unlike many writers, Stanley was a terrific reader of his own work. He managed to get it all across: the cadence, the force and sheer exuberance of his language, the nervy plots, his frequently pathetic, repulsive, and profoundly sympathetic characters, the grossness and obscenity, the poetry, the all-too-rare gift for writing “serious” fiction that could make its readers laugh out loud. The off-the-charts energy of his sentences, his ability to reanimate and reconstruct the written word, his talent for using a particular word in a way in which (as far as you knew) it had never been used before, and which made you stop and think until you figured out how and why it was precisely the right word, that no other word would have done.
And his maximalism: the continual testing, testing, to see how much weight a sentence could sustain, how long it could go on without losing its clarity, its logic. In an interview, Stanley said that there were writers who took things out and writers who put things in, and that he was one of the latter. One of the things I remember saying at the memorial service was that I kept several of Stanley’s novels near my desk, and that whenever I felt I’d written a lazy sentence, a cliché, or a sloppy or inexact passage of description, I’d open one of Stanley’s books at random, and every sentence I read would inspire me to go back to my own writing and work harder. I still have his books near my desk, and his sentences still function that way for me.
I’d heard Stanley read many times, and every one of those readings had been a stellar and unforgettable performance. He usually claimed to be reading from a work in progress, but how could something so perfect and polished be in progress? In progress toward what? Each performance outdid the previous one in its brilliance, its poetry, its humor, its honesty, its pure cringe-inducing ballsiness.
I heard him read the early pages of The Magic Kingdom, in which a grieving father named Eddy Bale manages to convince the Queen of England to kick-start his obsessive, well-meaning, but ultimately disastrous program to bring dying children to Disneyland; a description of heaven and hell (some of it in the voice of God) from The Living End; the beginning of The Rabbi of Lud, one of the darkest and funniest meditations on Judaism (and New Jersey) ever written. It’s telling that both Howie and I remember Stanley standing up when he read, though by the time we met him, his multiple sclerosis had advanced to the point at which that would have been unlikely, or impossible. He was sitting—it only seemed as if he were standing.
One thing I knew for certain was that I didn’t want to read, at Stanley’s memorial service, anything I’d heard him read. I didn’t want to hear his voice in my head, reminding me—as he would never have done in life, because, for such a notorious curmudgeon, he was unfailingly polite and kind to me—of what a lousy job I was doing.
And also, because he’d died just a few months before, and because I was still extremely sad about his death, I was afraid I might find it hard to keep my composure throughout the reading. I have strong feelings about speakers at memorial services not compelling the assembled mourners to witness their emotional breakdowns. It always seems somehow . . . unhelpful. I’d spoken at several memorial services in the months leading up to that summer (it was one of those times when, as sometimes happens, a number of loved ones die in dizzyingly quick succession) and somehow I’d managed to keep it together when I’d been asked to say something.
I found it consoling to recall an evening, several summers before, en route to dinner in Vermont, when we’d passed a lovely rural cemetery and Stanley had greeted the tombstones—the dead—with a hearty, expansive wave. “See you soon, guys!” he’d called out.
Stanley loved to be right.
So the question was: What to read?
The one thing I knew was that it needed to be outrageous. Stanley once said that he didn’t realize his work was funny until someone else told him that it was, but really, he had to have known that it was shocking—to most people, if not to everyone. Why else would he have begun the Elizabeth and Stewart Credence Memorial Lecture, which he delivered at Brown University in 1987, a talk that, in theory, was about the significance of names, with a passage that—to the distinguished audience in attendance—would have made Lolita sound like Mary Poppins in the Park?
Could you be mugged by a Stanley? Could a Stanley rape you? Tops, I might molest your kid, but you’d never know it, and neither would she. What, a little suntan lotion rubbed along the bottom of her swimsuit like a piping of frosting around a birthday cake? What, a spot of spilled tea on the sunsuit, my finger in the bespittled handkerchief moist from what it wouldn’t even occur to you was drool before it was saliva, and vigorously brushing across what won’t be breasts for another half dozen years yet, my grunt the two- or three-tone guttural hum of deflection, nervous and oddly dapper as the tugs, pats, and twitches of a stand-up comic, distracting as the shot cuffs of magicians and cardsharps, all random melody’s tangential rove? Because how could you ever guess at my intentions and interiors, my inner landscapes and incisor lusts, the thickening at my throat like hidden shim, the ponderous stirrings of my ice-floe blood, deep as resource, buried as oil in my gnarled and knotty groin, my clotted sexual circuits?
Incisor lusts. Ice-floe blood. Those two phrases illustrate what I mean by Stanley’s use of words in ways that have never been used before, locutions that stop us and make us pause until we’re struck by their perfect correctness.
I felt that Stanley would have wanted the passage I read at his service to be extreme, delighting (even wallowing) in the demands and the aspirations, the exaltations and humiliations, the protuberances and excrescences of the flesh, as only Stanley—and I am not exaggerating here—as only Stanley could.
But if that was the criterion, I certainly had a range to choose from. I could have picked a section from The Dick Gibson Show, one of the passages in which a pharmacist named Bernie Perk becomes infatuated with, stalks, and finally falls deeply in love with a female customer, entirely because of the size (super-large) and quantity of the sanitary napkins and female hygiene products that she purchases in his shop each month. I could have chosen the raunchy sexual encounter with his wife that Eddy Bale recalls while waiting to make his sales pitch to the Queen of England.
Stanley could be as funny and unrelentingly forthright about death and disease as he was about sex. I could have read the scene in which Ellerbee is killed in The Living End, or opened The Franchiser at random and read about the onset and inexorable progress of its hero’s multiple sclerosis. If all I’d wanted was to offend my audience, I could have gone for the always reliably upsetting subject of race and quoted the opening of The Bailbondsman.
But somehow the choice seemed . . . preordained. The only passage I could read, the only passage I wanted to read, was from The Making of Ashenden, a novella that is among my favorite of Stanley’s works.
Specifically, I wanted to read the scene in which the hero, Brewster Ashenden, fucks a bear.
I know one dirty joke about a sexual relationship between a man and a bear (punch line: the bear says, “You don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”) and I’ve been told that there is actually a whole category of jokes about that species (as it were) of bestiality. It seems unlikely that, in his long career as a joke teller and joke listener, Stanley didn’t hear one such joke.
But one of the reasons that I admire the novella so much, and why it seems to me so characteristic of Stanley’s work, is that it takes something that could be a joke, and that in fact is sort of a joke, and turns it into something profound, something beautiful and mysterious—that is, into art. By the novella’s conclusion, the apparent joke has become something as transcendent and primal as the cave paintings at Altamira—as mystical and vibrant as one of those Northwest Coast bear masks that seem to come alive, to jitter and wink as you look into their abalone-shell eyes.
At least at the beginning, The Making of Ashenden is not a joke about a bear—but a joke about the rich. Brewster Ashenden is an old-school rich guy, not one of those thuggish modern rich guys, like the Trump boys, but an American aristocrat. In a 1930s or ’40s movie, he would have been played by Cary Grant or David Niven.
His inherited family money is not only historical but elemental, having come from land (real estate), air (Brewster’s grandmother, a chemical engineer, discovered how to store oxygen in tanks), fire (Brewster’s father promoted and sold the first matchbooks), and water (a branch of the family pioneered the sale of bottled mineral water). He lives a life of leisure and perpetual motion, insinuating himself into heroic human rights interventions, running with the bulls at Pamplona, hanging out with mafiosi, diving with Cousteau. He is the Most Interesting Man in the World without the beard or the cockiness. He is also the perfect houseguest:
All my adult life I have been a guest in other people’s houses, following the sun and seasons like a migratory bird, an instinct in me, a rich man’s cunning feel for ripeness, some oyster-in-an-r-month notion working there which knows without reference to anything outside itself when to pack the tennis racket, when to bring along the German field glasses to look at a friend’s birds, the telescope to stare at his stars, the wet suit to swim in beneath his waters when the exotic fish are running. It’s not in the Times when the black dinner jacket comes off and the white one goes on; it’s something surer, subtler, the delicate guidance system of the privileged, my playboy astronomy.
Near the start of the novella, Ashenden’s parents die, and death hangs over the book, reappearing, as death is accustomed to do, at unexpected moments and in new and unusual guises. As usual, love and death go hand in hand—propelling Ashenden out of the shallows and into waters deeper than any he could have prepared for or anticipated.
Among his hosts is a wealthy Briton named Freddy Plympton, who has, on the grounds of his castle, a private zoo—housing only animals that appear on the family crest and coat of arms. “Lions, bears, elephants, unicorns (‘a pure white rhinoceros actually’) leopards, jackals . . . pandas, camels, sheep and apes. The family is an old one, the list long.”
And the bear? The bear is at once domesticated (after all, she lives in a zoo) and totally wild: libidinous, uninhibited, impassioned.
Probably Stanley would have preferred me to read the entire novella, and I wished that I could have. Then I could have included more of the passages that I most love—for example, Ashenden’s description of the funerary customs (and the haberdashery) of the rich attending his mother’s and father’s funerals, weeks apart.
Couturiers of Paris and London and New York . . . taxed to the breaking point to come up with dresses in death’s delicious high fashion, the rich taking big casualties that season, two new mourning originals in less than two weeks and the fitter in fits. The men splendid in their decent dark. Suits cunningly not black, off black, proper, the longitudes of their decency in their wiry pinstripes, a gent’s torso bound up in vest and crisscrossed by watch chains and Phi Beta Kappa keys in the innocent para-militarism of the civilian respectable, men somehow more vital at the graveside in the burdensome clothes than in Bermudas on beaches or dinner jackets in hotel suites with cocktails in their hands, the band playing on the beach below and the telephone ringing.
Or the moment when Ashenden, out for a walk on Freddy’s land, catches a smell in the air that makes him realize he is not strolling in a lovely, verdant park, but in a zoo without cages:
The odor of beasts is itself a kind of meat—a dream avatar of alien sirloin, strange chops and necks, oblique joints and hidden livers and secret roasts. There are nude juices in it, and licy furs, and all the flesh’s vegetation. . . . Separated as we are from animals in zoos by glass cages and fenced-off moats, and by the counter odors of human crowds, melting ice cream, peanut shells crushed underfoot, snow cones, mustard, butts of bun—all the detritus of a Sunday outing—we rarely smell it. What gets through is dissipated, for a beast in civilization does not even smell like a beast in the wild.
And yet I continued to believe that if Stanley had been obliged to choose a selection for me to read, he would have chosen the scene with the bear.
I can’t imagine or exactly recall what I actually read. I am not a prudish person; at least I don’t think of myself that way. But some of the passages describing Ashenden’s romance with the bear are so (not to put too fine a point on it) filthy that I honestly couldn’t see myself reading them to a roomful of strangers. I just don’t think I would have had the nerve to do that—to say those words. I don’t have a marked-up copy, so I can’t be sure, but I assume that I must have read a bowdlerized (sorry, Stanley!) condensation that would have included relatively mild paragraphs such as these:
It was a Kamchatkan Brown from the northeastern peninsula of the U.S.S.R. between the Bering and Okhotsk seas, and though it was not yet full grown it weighed perhaps seven hundred pounds and was already taller than Ashenden. It was female, and what he had been smelling was its estrus, not shit but lust, not bowel but love’s gassy chemistry, the atoms and hormones and molecules of passion, vapors of impulse and the endocrinous spray of desire. What he had been smelling was secret, underground rivers flowing from hidden sources of intimate gland, and what the bear smelled on Brewster was the same. . . .
The bear snorted and swiped with the broad edge of her forepaw against each side of Ashenden’s peter. Her fur, lanolized by estrus, was incredibly soft, the two swift strokes gestures of forbidden brunette possibility . . .
And of all the things he’d said and thought and felt that night, this was the most reasonable, the most elegantly strategic: that he would have to satisfy the bear, make love to the bear, fuck the bear. And this was the challenge which had at last defined itself, the test he’d longed for and was now to have. Here was the problem: Not whether it was possible for a mere man of something less than one hundred and eighty pounds to make love to an enormous monster of almost half a ton; not whether a normal man like himself could negotiate the barbarous terrains of the beast or bring the bear off before it killed him; but how he, Brewster Ashenden of the air, water, fire and earth Ashendens, one of the most fastidious men alive, could bring himself to do it—how, in short, he could get it up for a bear!
But he had forgotten, and now remembered: it was already up.
Surely, that would be enough, perhaps more than enough, for the audience to get a sense of what this section was about—and to be properly outraged and (I hoped) amused and moved. Enough for them to leave the service with some sense of how unique Stanley was and how far—into some entirely new literary domain, some unexplored region of our psyches—he was willing to take us, his grateful readers.
I don’t know how I somehow missed the part about the memorial service not being only for Stanley. Either no one told me or (more likely) I wasn’t paying attention. Or maybe they told me and I chose not to listen or believe it; maybe it occurred to me how much Stanley would have hated sharing the bill with someone else, even another brilliant and singular writer.
In fact, two writers were being memorialized, both of whom—their presence, their spirit, their work—had exerted a significant and lasting influence at Sewanee. The other honoree, who had also died that year, was the great Peter Taylor, whose work—including his marvelous novel A Summons to Memphis, with its restrained, mannerly, yet devastating portrait of a southern family—could not have been, at least on the surface, more unlike Stanley’s.
Peter Taylor had close connections in the area. He had roots in Tennessee. He had been married to the sister of Jean Justice, who was married to the poet Donald Justice, who also taught at the conference. His connections were southern folk with soft voices and impeccable manners.
I suppose I was just so preoccupied with what I had to do that afternoon that I failed to notice that the people filing into the room were not your usual writers’ conference crowd—not just the students and faculty members and staff I’d grown to know. Gradually it occurred to me: all of these strangers were white, nearly all were old, most of them had white hair. Or blue hair. They were proper southern men and women, to whom old money and position, like Brewster Ashenden’s, were by no means a joke.
I had a moment of hesitation (actually, more like terror) when the truth finally dawned on me and I saw who would be listening to me read Stanley’s graphic description of Brewster Ashenden—a younger and perhaps more cosmopolitan version of some of the gentlemen in the audience—and his tryst with a bear.
In my memory, Stanley’s part of the service came second. And I was far too distracted by the daunting task ahead of me to listen to what was being said about Peter Taylor, though under other, less stressful circumstances, I would have been eager—fascinated—to listen to the eulogies of, and the readings from, this extraordinary American writer.
Finally it was my turn. I looked out at the innocent, polite, genteel fans, the readers—and mourners—who had no idea that they were about to hear a raunchy ursine love scene. I’d believed that it was my mission to be outrageous—but this outrageous, with these people? I felt almost sick—on the edge of panic. Over the edge of panic.
Then I saw, in the audience, Joan and Molly Elkin and my husband, and any number of writers I loved and admired, writers and friends who had also loved and admired Stanley. And again I felt that certainty: this was what Stanley would have wanted. Go out there and shock the hell out of these decent, upstanding citizens of the South.
I read the scene between Ashenden and the bear, and I tried not to look at anyone but Joan and Molly and Howie. I read the final paragraph, in which it ultimately becomes clear that Ashenden’s attachment to his new animal friend has progressed from the purely carnal to something more spiritual—something closer to love.
He started back through art to the house, but first he looked over his shoulder for a last glimpse of the sleeping bear. And he thought again of how grand it had been, and wondered if it was possible that something might come of it. And seeing ahead, speculating about the generations that would follow his own, he thought, Air. Water, he thought. Fire, Earth, he thought . . . And honey.
Then I went outside and, as soon as I got to a sheltered place where I hoped no one could see me, I burst into tears.
A year or so before, I had been one of the judges on the panel when Stanley’s Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, a collection of novellas, was chosen as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. After a long and heated discussion among the panelists, a process—having to decide between Stanley Elkin and Philip Roth—that illustrates the basic folly of literary contests and prizes, it was decided that the prize would go to Roth, for Operation Shylock. The winner and the finalists were all invited to attend the ceremony and accept their prizes for winning and for almost winning.
Molly Elkin accepted the award for her father, conveying his regrets for not attending, for having been prevented from doing so by a disease. That illness wasn’t the multiple sclerosis, Molly explained, but a writer’s ego.
The audience laughed. I remember thinking that while Stanley could hardly be said to hold his talent in low regard, he was, in his work, among the least egomaniacal and vain of writers. A more self-conscious, more self-protective novelist would never have revealed what Stanley revealed: things that no one—the writer included—was supposed to think about, let alone put on paper. I can think of many writers who seem always to be peeking at us from around the edges of their work, as if to remind us: This isn’t me. I don’t really think like this. I don’t know how I even know about these things, or these words. But Stanley wasn’t one of them.
Stanley was not only a maximalist of language, but also one of truth. That was one of the most astonishing and special qualities of his work: that piling on more and more—more metaphors, more words, more sentences, more humor, more energy—as a way of delving into, bringing to light, and forcing us to look directly into the heart of the simultaneously dark and scintillating mystery of what makes us human. He should be read widely, praised endlessly, admired by everyone. Well, maybe not everyone, but certainly by all those who care about language, about literature, about life.