Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

By Stanley Elkin

“This imagination of Elkin’s sneaks up, tickles, surprises, shocks, and kills. It makes stories that are deadly funny.” —The New York Times

Each of the nine short stories collected here feature two types of people—the troubled and the troublemakers. In “The Guest,” a homeless man gleefully takes credit for a robbery he did not commit. “In the Alley” tells the story of a terminally ill man who begrudgingly outlives his initial prognosis. And the satiric “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe” features a charismatic salesman auctioning off his life’s possessions in order to determine his value in the world.   Laced with wit, Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers is a keenly observed collection that puts Elkin’s comic artistry on full display.   This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Oct 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453204146

Stanley Elkin

Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and essays. Born in the Bronx, Elkin received his BA and PhD from the University of Illinois and in 1960 became a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where he taught until his death. His critically acclaimed works include the National Book Critics Circle Award–winners George Mills (1982) and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995), as well as the National Book Award finalists The Dick Gibson Show (1972), Searches and Seizures (1974), and The MacGuffin (1991). His book of novellas, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award.

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Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Stanley Elkin

For

JERRY    BEATY

HERB    BOGART

BOB    BROWN

DAN    CURLEY

DAVE    DEMAREST

BILL    GASS

IRWIN    GOLD

BILL    GUGGENHEIM

AL    LEBOWITZ

KERKER    QUINN

HARRY    RICHMAN

GEORGE    SCOUFFAS

and

JARVIS    THURSTON

Contents

PREFACE by Stanley Elkin

CRIERS AND KIBITZERS, KIBITZERS AND CRIERS

I LOOK OUT FOR ED WOLFE

AMONG THE WITNESSES

THE GUEST

IN THE ALLEY

ON A FIELD, RAMPANT

A POETICS FOR BULLIES

COUSIN POOR LESLEY AND THE LOUSY PEOPLE

PERLMUTTER AT THE EAST POLE

A BIOGRAPHY OF STANLEY ELKIN

PREFACE

For reasons not in the least clear to me, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers has turned out to be my most enduring work, if by enduring one refers not to a time scheme encompassing geological epochs, or, for that matter, scarcely even to calendrical ones, but to those few scant handfuls—twenty-four since it was first published by Random House in hardback in 1966—of years barely wide enough to gap a generation. Not counting down-time, when it was out-of-print, or the peculiar half-life when it was in that curious publisher’s limbo, known to the trade (but never entirely understood, at least by this prefacer) as out-of-stock, it has been in print under sundry imprimaturs (Berkley Medallion, Plume, Warner Books and, until I actually looked it up in Books in Print where I couldn’t find it, I had thought Dutton’s Obelisk editions, and, now, Thunder’s Mouth Press), oh, say, eighteen or nineteen years. Set against the great timelines of history this ain’t, of course, much—not in the same league with astronomy’s skippy-stony’d light years certainly, or even, for that matter, the same ballpark as the universe, but we’re talking very fragile book years, mind, which are to life span approximately what dog years are to the birthdays of humans. At a ratio of seven-to-one (seven doggie years equalling forty-nine bookie years), that would make my criers and kibitzers, depending on how the actuaries count that half-life, either eight-hundred-and-eighty-two, or nine-hundred-and-eleven-years old. A classic, antique as Methuselah—the test, as the saying goes, of time.

In addition—more new math—two of these stories, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers and The Guest, were adapted for and produced on the stage. Criers has been a radio play on the Canadian Broadcasting System, and one, I Look Out for Ed Wolfe, was bought for the movies, though it never made the cut. (Ed Wolfe, published in Esquire in 1962, was my first mass-market sale and put me, quite literally, on the map. Well, at least on Esquire’s rigged 1963 chart about America’s Literary Establishment, where I found myself in shameless scarlet, short-listed among a small, arbitrary bundle of real writers—realer, in any event, than me—in what that magazine deemed to be The Red Hot Center. [Just Rust Hills and Bob Brown kidding around.] It thrilled me then, it embarrasses me now. Had I had more sense it would have embarrassed me then, too. God knows it angered a lot of important critics who wrote letters to the editor, columns, even essays about it, a short-lived tempest in a tea bag not unlike the one old John Gardner provoked when he made his pronouncements about moral fiction. Not art for art’s sake but hype for hype’s—like the PENs and Pulitzers, NBAs and National Book Critics Circle Awards, and all those other Masterpieces of the Minute that might not last the night.) A Poetics for Bullies was recorded on an LP by Jackson Beck, the radio actor and famous voice of Bluto in the Popeye cartoons, and somewhere loose in the world is a cassette tape of The Guest which I recorded for an outfit called the Printed Word. Oh, and eight of the nine stories in C & K—Cousin Poor Lesley and the Lousy People is the exception—have been anthologized, a few of them—the Criers, Guest, Ed Wolfe and Bully stories—several times, almost often. Criers and Ed Wolfe were in The Best American Short Stories annuals back in the days when Martha Foley was Martha Foley. Indeed, for many years during the late sixties, the decade of the seventies, and into the eighties (it’s starting to fall off ), the stories have provided me and my family with a kind of widow’s mite, a small annuity—sky money, I like to call it. (I regard myself as a serious writer, even a professional one, but deep in my heart I think of most of the money I receive from my writing as essentially unearned. This isn’t, as you may suppose, a poetic wimp factor kicking in—I’m no art jerk—so much as the heart’s negotiated quid pro quo, all ego’s driving power trip, the rush many writers get out of their almost sybaritic wallow in the unfettered luxury of their indulged imaginations. (What, they’ll pay for this? I may be a badass, but I’m an honorable badass.) Anyway it—the money from the stories, all sources—never amounted to that much. I come cheap, after all. Maybe, top-of-the-head, all-told, thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars since 1966, my going rate for having passed the test of time. Nothing solid as a fortune, I admit, but tighter than loose change—something like the cumulative yield on a small CD, say.

What isn’t clear to me, though, is why. Why this book, why these stories? Surely I’ve written better books. Surely I’m a better writer now than I was when I wrote these stories. (Five of them, including the title story, one of my favorites, were written when I was still back in graduate school, for Christ’s sake, and only three, The Guest, A Poetics for Bullies and Perlmutter at the East Pole, were published after I’d published my first novel and before I’d written a second one.) So why? Why, really? I’d like to know.

One thing, certainly, is the accessibility of their style and (not behind that—indeed, quite the opposite—in absolute hand/ glove relationship to the relative simplicity of the style) plain speaking’s package deal with realism, time’s honored literary arrangement between ease and verisimilitude. Here, for example, is Feldman, the butcher, returning to his store after a quick trip to the bank for change for his cash drawer. (In the story, had I been a better stylist in the realistic tradition, I would have used the word silver instead of change.)

The street was quiet. It looks like a Sunday, he thought. There would be no one in the store. He saw his reflection in a window he passed and realized he had forgotten to take his apron off. It occurred to him that the apron somehow gave him the appearance of being very busy. An apron did that, he thought. Not a business suit so much. Unless there was a briefcase. A briefcase and an apron, they made you look busy. A uniform wouldn’t. Soldiers didn’t look busy, policemen didn’t. A fireman did, but he had to have that big hat on. Schmo, a man your age walking in the street in an apron. He wondered if the vice-presidents at the bank had noticed his apron. He felt the heaviness again.

There’s something comforting, almost soothing, about realism, and it’s nothing to do with shocks of recognition—well it wouldn’t, would it, since shocks never console—or even with the familiarity that breeds content, so much as with the fact that the realistic world, in literature, at least, is one that, from a certain perspective, always makes sense, even its bum deals and tragedies, inasmuch as it plays—even showboats and grandstands—to our passion for reason. The realistic tradition presumes to deal, I mean, with cause and effect, with some deep need in readers—in all of us—for justice, with the demand for the explicable reap/sow benefits (or punishments), with the law of just desserts—with all God’s and Nature’s organic bookkeeping. And since form fits and follows function, style is instructed not to make waves but merely to tag along, easy as pie, taking in everything that can be seen along the way but not much more and nothing at all of what isn’t immediately available to the naked eye.

My point, then, is that the stories in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers are right bang smack dab in the middle of realism. I may get things wrong, or even silly—as I do in the improbable scene in In the Alley when my protagonist, top-heavy with incurable cancer, checks himself out of the hospital to wander the city and goes into a bar to die in an unfamiliar neighborhood; or in red-hot centered I Look Out for Ed Wolfe, where—ending the story, as stories never should end, with a gesture—I have Ed throw his money away. But most of the stories have conventional, realistic sources. Only On a Field, Rampant and A Poetics for Bullies owe less to the syllogistic, rational world (though they’re not experimental, none of my writing is; I don’t care for experimental writing and, in my case at least, experimental writing would be if I did it in German or French) than they do to some conjured, imaginary one—and, sure enough, only in those stories am I more preoccupied with language than I am with realism’s calmer tropes. I offer the battle of the headlines from On a Field, Rampant:

‘DOCKER WOULD BE KING,’ a man said, reading an imaginary headline. ‘IMMIGRANT CARGO HANDLER SAYS HE’S NATION’S RIGHTFUL MAJESTY!’

‘PRETENDER HAS MEDALLION WHICH TRACES LINEAGE TO ANCIENT DAYS OF KINGDOM.’

‘ AMAZING RESEMBLANCE TO DUKE SAYS DUKE’S OWN GATEMAN.’

‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE.’

‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE, DARES DUKE TO DUEL!’

‘MAKE-BELIEVE MONARCH.’

‘CARGO CON MAN CLAIMS KINGDOM!’

‘KHARDOV CREATES KINGDOM FOR CARGO KING.’

‘WHO IS KHARDOV?’

I offer, also, the abrasive, brassy up-frontiness of the opening paragraph in A Poetics for Bullies:

I’m Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants—and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.

The point here is that a higher or more conscious—if not conscientious—style is not only less realistic than the sedate and almost passive linears of the butcher’s quiet street, but also much more aggressive and confrontational. (Only consider the two operative words in the titles of those two stories—rampant with all its up-in-your-face forepawardlies and dug-in hind-leggedness, and bullies—and you’ll take my meaning.) In fiction and style not formed by the shared communal linkages between an author and the compacts, struck bargains, and done deals of a reasonable, recognizable morality—my law of just desserts—it’s always the writer’s service. Whatever spin, whatever English he puts on the ball is his. It’s his call. He leads, you follow. He leads, you play catch-up. (It’s that wallow in the ego again, the self’s flashy mud wrassle.) Obviously this makes for difficulties that most readers—don’t kid yourself, me too—don’t much care to spend the time of day with, let alone hang out with long enough to pass any tests of time.

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

Damn near everyone.

Now I don’t know how true this next part is, but it’s a little true I should think. I’m trying to tell what turned me. Well, delight in language as language certainly (I’d swear to that part). But something less delightful, too. It was that nothing very bad had happened to me yet. (I was a graduate student, protected up to my ass in the ivy.) My daddy’s rich and my mama’s good lookin’. Then my father died in 1958 and my mother couldn’t take three steps without pain. Then a heart attack I could call my own when I was thirty-seven years old. Then this, then that. Most of it uncomfortable, all of it boring. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t hop, I couldn’t jump. Because, as the old saying should go, as long as you’ve got your health you’ve got your naïveté. I lost the one, I lost the other, and maybe that’s what led me toward revenge—a writer’s revenge, anyway; the revenge, I mean, of style.

One final word about the stories in this collection and I’m done. I’m particularly fond of at least four of them: Perlmutter at the East Pole for its main character and the curses he invents, The Guest for its situation and humor, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers for its situation and humor, and the truth, I think, of its perceptions and characters, and A Poetics for Bullies, for its humor and energy and style. I like the Ed Wolfe story a bit less, but I like it—for the imagery in the opening paragraph, for a lot of its dialogue, and for one reason no one could ever possibly guess. Remember Polish jokes? I could be absolutely wrong about this, but I think I may have contributed to the invention of them in this story. It was published in the September 1962 issue of Esquire. In August of that I year I went off to Europe to write my first novel. Up to that time I’d never heard a Polish joke, but when I returned to America in June 1963, they were all the rage. Everyone was telling them. I think I invented the stereotype they are built on. A complete serendipity, of course, like penicillin or certain kinds of clear plastic, but my serendipity. What a claim to fame—to have invented the Polish joke. But it proves my point, I think, the one about the distance to which a writer’s ego will stoop to have, whatever the cost, to him or to others, its own way.

STANLEY ELKIN

1990

CRIERS AND KIBITZERS, KIBITZERS AND CRIERS

Greenspahn cursed the steering wheel shoved like the hard edge of someone’s hand against his stomach. Goddamn lousy cars, he thought. Forty-five hundred dollars and there’s not room to breathe. He thought sourly of the smiling salesman who had sold it to him, calling him Jake all the time he had been in the showroom: Lousy podler. He slid across the seat, moving carefully as though he carried something fragile, and eased his big body out of the car. Seeing the parking meter, he experienced a dark rage. They don’t let you live, he thought. I’ll put your nickels in the meter for you, Mr. Greenspahn, he mimicked the Irish cop. Two dollars a week for the lousy grubber. Plus the nickels that were supposed to go into the meter. And they talked about the Jews. He saw the cop across the street writing out a ticket. He went around his car, carefully pulling at the handle of each door, and he started toward his store.

Hey there, Mr. Greenspahn, the cop called.

He turned to look at him. Yeah?

Good morning.

Yeah. Yeah. Good morning.

The grubber came toward him from across the street. Uniforms, Greenspahn thought, only a fool wears a uniform.

Fine day, Mr. Greenspahn, the cop said.

Greenspahn nodded grudgingly.

I was sorry to hear about your trouble, Mr. Greenspahn. Did you get my card?

Yeah, I got it. Thanks. He remembered something with flowers on it and rays going up to a pink Heaven. A picture of a cross yet.

I wanted to come out to the chapel but the brother-in-law was up from Cleveland. I couldn’t make it.

Yeah, Greenspahn said. Maybe next time.

The cop looked stupidly at him, and Greenspahn reached into his pocket.

No. No. Don’t worry about that, Mr. Greenspahn. I’ll take care of it for now. Please, Mr. Greenspahn, forget it this time. It’s okay.

Greenspahn felt like giving him the money anyway. Don’t mourn for me, podler, he thought. Keep your two dollars’ worth of grief.

The cop turned to go. Well, Mr. Greenspahn, there’s nothing anybody can say at times like this, but you know how I feel. You got to go on living, don’t you know.

Sure, Greenspahn said. That’s right, Officer. The cop crossed the street and finished writing the ticket. Greenspahn looked after him angrily, watching the gun swinging in the holster at his hip, the sun flashing brightly on the shiny handcuffs. Podler, he thought, afraid for his lousy nickels. There’ll be an extra parking space sooner than he thinks.

He walked toward his store. He could have parked by his own place but out of habit he left his car in front of a rival grocer’s. It was an old and senseless spite. Tomorrow he would change. What difference did it make, one less parking space? Why should he walk?

He felt bloated, heavy. The bowels, he thought. I got to move them soon or I’ll bust. He looked at the street vacantly, feeling none of the old excitement. What did he come back for, he wondered suddenly, sadly. He missed Harold. Oh my God. Poor Harold, he thought. I’ll never see him again. I’ll never see my son again. He was choking, a big pale man beating his fist against his chest in grief. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. That was the way it was, he thought. He would go along flat and empty and dull, and all of a sudden he would dissolve in a heavy, choking grief. The street was no place for him. His wife was crazy, he thought, swiftly angry. Be busy. Be busy, she said. What was he, a kid, that because he was making up somebody’s lousy order everything would fly out of his mind? The bottom dropped out of his life and he was supposed to go along as though nothing had happened. His wife and the cop, they had the same psychology. Like in the movies after the horse kicks your head in you’re supposed to get up and ride him so he can throw you off and finish the job. If he could get a buyer he would sell, and that was the truth.

Mechanically he looked into the windows he passed. The displays seemed foolish to him now, petty. He resented the wooden wedding cakes, the hollow watches. The manikins were grotesque, giant dolls. Toys, he thought bitterly. Toys. That he used to enjoy the displays himself, had even taken a peculiar pleasure in the complicated tiers of cans, in the amazing pyramids of apples and oranges in his own window, seemed incredible to him. He remembered he had liked to look at the little living rooms in the window of the furniture store, the wax models sitting on the couches offering each other tea. He used to look at the expensive furniture and think, Merchandise. The word had sounded rich to him, and mysterious. He used to think of camels on a desert, their bellies slung with heavy ropes. On their backs they carried merchandise. What did it mean, any of it? Nothing. It meant nothing.

He was conscious of someone watching him.

Hello, Jake.

It was Margolis from the television shop.

Hello, Margolis. How are you?

Business is terrible. You picked a hell of a time to come back.

A man’s son dies and Margolis says business is terrible. Margolis, he thought, jerk, son of a bitch.

You can’t close up a minute. You don’t know when somebody might come in. I didn’t take coffee since you left, Margolis said.

You had it rough, Margolis. You should have said something, I would have sent some over.

Margolis smiled helplessly, remembering the death of Greenspahn’s son.

It’s okay, Margolis. He felt his anger tug at him again. It was something he would have to watch, a new thing with him but already familiar, easily released, like something on springs.

Jake, Margolis whined.

Not now, Margolis, he said angrily. He had to get away from him. He was like a little kid, Greenspahn thought. His face was puffy, swollen, like a kid about to cry. He looked so meek. He should be holding a hat in his hand. He couldn’t stand to look at him. He was afraid Margolis was going to make a speech. He didn’t want to hear it. What did he need a speech? His son was in the ground. Under all that earth. Under all that dirt. In a metal box. Airtight, the funeral director told him. Oh my God, airtight. Vacuum-sealed. Like a can of coffee. His son was in the ground and on the street the models in the windows had on next season’s dresses. He would hit Margolis in his face if he said one word.

Margolis looked at him and nodded sadly, turning his palms out as if to say, I know. I know. Margolis continued to look at him and Greenspahn thought, He’s taking into account, that’s what he’s doing. He’s taking into account the fact that my son has died. He’s figuring it in and making apologies for me, making an allowance, like he was doing an estimate in his head what to charge a customer.

I got to go, Margolis.

Sure, me too, Margolis said, relieved. I’ll see you, Jake. The man from R.C.A. is around back with a shipment. What do I need it?

Greenspahn walked to the end of the block and crossed the street. He looked down the side street and saw the shul where that evening he would say prayers for his son.

He came to his store, seeing it with distaste. He looked at the signs, like the balloons in comic strips where they put the words, stuck inside against the glass, the letters big and red like it was the end of the world, the big whitewash numbers on the glass thickly. A billboard, he thought.

He stepped up to the glass door and looked in. Frank, his produce man, stood by the fruit and vegetable bins taking the tissue paper off the oranges. His butcher, Arnold, was at the register talking to Shirley, the cashier. Arnold saw him through the glass and waved extravagantly. Shirley came to the door and opened it. Good morning there, Mr. Greenspahn, she said.

Hey, Jake, how are you? Frank said.

How’s it going, Jake? Arnold said.

Was Siggie in yet? Did you tell him about the cheese?

He ain’t yet been in this morning, Jake, Frank said.

How about the meat? Did you place the order?

Sure, Jake, Arnold said. I called the guy Thursday.

Where are the receipts? he asked Shirley.

I’ll get them for you, Mr. Greenspahn. You already seen them for the first two weeks you were gone. I’ll get last week’s.

She handed him a slip of paper. It was four hundred and seventy dollars off the last week’s low figure. They must have had a picnic, Greenspahn thought. No more though. He looked at them, and they watched him with interest. So, he said. So.

Nice to have you back, Mr. Greenspahn, Shirley told him, smiling.

Yeah, he said, yeah.

"We got a shipment yesterday, Jake, but the schvartze showed up drunk. We couldn’t get it all put up," Frank said.

Greenspahn nodded. The figures are low, he said.

It’s business. Business has been terrible. I figure it’s the strike, Frank said.

In West Virginia the miners are out and you figure that’s why my business is bad in this neighborhood?

There are repercussions, Frank said. All industries are affected.

Yeah, Greenspahn said, yeah. The pretzel industry. The canned chicken noodle soup industry.

Well, business has been lousy, Jake, Arnold said testily.

I guess maybe it’s so bad, now might be a good time to sell. What do you think? Greenspahn said.

Are you really thinking of selling, Jake? Frank asked.

You want to buy my place, Frank?

You know I don’t have that kind of money, Jake, Frank said uneasily.

Yeah, Greenspahn said, yeah.

Frank looked at him, and Greenspahn waited for him to say something else, but in a moment he turned and went back to the oranges. Some thief, Greenspahn thought. Big shot. I insulted him.

I got to change, he said to Shirley. Call me if Siggie comes in.

He went into the toilet off the small room at the rear of the store. He reached for the clothes he kept there on a hook on the back of the door and saw, hanging over his own clothes, a woman’s undergarments. A brassiere hung by one cup over his trousers. What is it here, a locker room? Does she take baths in the sink? he thought. Fastidiously he tried to remove his own clothes without touching the other garments, but he was clumsy, and the underwear, together with his trousers, tumbled in a heap to the floor. They looked, lying there, strangely obscene to him, as though two people, desperately in a hurry, had dropped them quickly and were somewhere near him even now, perhaps behind the very door, making love. He picked up his trousers and changed his clothes. Taking a hanger from a pipe under the sink, he hung the clothes he had worn to work and put the hanger on the hook. He stooped to pick up Shirley’s underwear. Placing it on the hook, his hand rested for a moment on the brassiere. He was immediately ashamed. He was terribly tired. He put his head through the loop of his apron and tied the apron behind the back of the old blue sweater he wore even in summer. He turned the sink’s single tap and rubbed his eyes with water. Bums, he thought. Bums. You put up mirrors to watch the customers so they shouldn’t get away with a stick of gum, and in the meanwhile Frank and Arnold walk off with the whole store. He sat down to try to move his bowels and the apron hung down from his chest like a barber’s sheet. He spread it across his knees. I must look like I’m getting a haircut, he thought irrelevantly. He looked suspiciously at Shirley’s underwear. My movie star. He wondered if it was true what Arnold told him, that she used to be a 26-girl. Something was going on between her and that Arnold. Two bums, he thought. He knew they drank together after work. That was one thing, bad enough, but were they screwing around in the back of the store? Arnold had a family. You couldn’t trust a young butcher. It was too much for him. Why didn’t he just sell and get the hell out? Did he have to look for grief? Was he making a fortune that he had to put up with it? It was crazy. All right, he thought, a man in business, there were things a man in business put up with. But this? It was crazy. Everywhere he was beset by thieves and cheats. They kept pushing him, pushing him. What did it mean? Why did they do it? All right, he thought, when Harold was alive was it any different? No, of course not, he knew plenty then too. But it didn’t make as much difference. Death is an education, he thought. Now there wasn’t any reason to put up with it. What did he need it? On the street, in the store, he saw everything. Everything. It was as if everybody else were made out of glass. Why all of a sudden was he like that?

Why? he thought. Jerk, because they’re hurting you, that’s why.

He stood up and looked absently into