Life of Stanley Elkin

Very good news out of Illinois. An uncorrected advance proof of Shouting Down the Silence: A Biography of Stanley Elkin by David C. Dougherty, the most faithful scholar of his work, arrived yesterday. It is slated for publication next April by the University of Illinois Press.

Although my favorite Elkin novel remains The Dick Gibson Show—a novel that I wrote about for Dougherty, in fact—the fiction after 1972, after he was diagnosed in London with multiple sclerosis, is what every critic of Elkin must come to terms with. When I met him in 1976 he had just begun to use a cane, and he complained to me about how physically difficult it had become to write—the tingling in the fingers of his left hand made his skin crawl when he touched the keyboard. He described a cold metallic sensation. He tried wearing a glove, which helped only a little.

He was working on The Franchiser—the U.S. Postal Service lost my autographed first edition in a cross-country shipment—and he liked to read its latest pages during the sessions of my independent study with him. “Theory and Practice of Fiction” was our course title, if I remember correctly. In the original draft of The Franchiser, Ben Flesh describes the rooms of a Holiday Inn with closeup photographic fidelity. Farrar, Straus & Giroux instructed him to change the hotel’s name. Thus the Travel Inn of the published version. He gave me a final assignment: “What has Stanley lost [by having to change the name]?” Nothing, I argued. “I ought to flunk you,” he scribbled on my paper, but didn’t.

I learned my lesson and have never strayed from it since. Elkin was far better and more important than other novelists of his generation with bigger reputations—Updike, Barth, Doctorow, Pynchon, Stone, Oates. With any luck, Dougherty’s biography will ignite an Elkin boom. Get in your pre-order at Amazon. Don’t delay. Do it now.