On Stanley Elkin

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 past 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, 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 (as 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 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...