Reading all sixty two of Stephen Dixon’s uncollected stories in a single five hundred and sixty page marathon is a challenging experience. But then, Stephen Dixon has been forcing readers to confront their own assumptions about literature, society, their complacencies and preconceptions, and ideas of how and what a writer should write, for more than fifty years. What Is All This? is an apt title. It expresses a kind of bewilderment about being human, and the world we live in, which is the question that connects diverse stories that span several decades from the 1950s to the present day, reflecting the output of one ofAmerica’s most undervalued writers.
They include a clutch published in Playboy, written before the mind-shift that accompanied the 1970s revolution in sexual politics. It’s difficult to identify what has changed in the way we expect women to be written about, but we’ve definitely moved on. A story like ‘Shoe Laces’, dating from 1959, and featuring an overweight, overbearing, passive-aggressive wife, dominating the husband on his knees before her in the street, tying her shoes, probably couldn’t be written now, or not quite in just that way.
In one of the early stories – ‘Storm’ – fact and fiction merge to produce two versions of the same rape. But however the protagonist tries to rewrite it, the ending is always the same – he’s alone on a rocky promontory telephoning the woman he’s obsessed with and listening to her put the phone down. Like some of the other stories that depict stalking and violence, it makes uncomfortable reading. It’s part of Stephen Dixon’s skill that you don’t close the book, but keep on reading. The deliberate omission of eroticism inDixon’s depiction of the sexual act, even when abusive, makes it possible. He says that he doesn’t want to be salacious, doesn’t want people to become excited by his writing. But by detaching sex from its emotions and motivations, it often seems curiously sordid.
Stephen Dixon is one of America’s best exponents of the short story – his prose is bare, clipped down to the absolute minimum of words necessary to convey the meaning. And he chooses the words and arranges them like a poet. ‘The right words, in the right order, the right number of syllables’. Every sentence has its rhythm – staccato phrases rattling like hail on a tin roof, alternating with circuitous passages patterned with repetition. Sometimes there is nothing but dialogue. In ‘Biff’ we eavesdrop on a series of Pinteresque telephone conversations that seem innocent, but become increasingly sinister. It begins:
‘This weekend.’
‘What?’
‘I said let’s go this weekend.’
‘What?’
‘I said we’ll go again this weekend. For a trip. Just to be away.’
‘What?’
‘You telling me you still can’t hear?’
The subjects of his stories are people on the edge, and sometimes over it. In ‘The Bussed’, we’re translated into a future under a totalitarian regime where everything is done according to The Book. A man travelling home to his sick wife on the bus doesn’t have the right change for the fare and the incident escalates into full-blown revolt, violence and flight. It’s one of the more overtly political in the collection, alongside ‘China’, ‘Mr Greene’ (inspired by the Kennedy assassinations) and ‘The Leader’ (one of the few stories to be narrated by a woman), which relates Hitler’s visit to a brothel and addresses his rumoured sexual deviancy.
The stories are almost always narrated by a male voice – alienated, emotionally detached, stating the facts without comment or judgement. The characters are often morally ambiguous, always the thickness of a sheet of paper away from real criminality. One small flaw in character, one moral slip and something unstoppable is put in motion. In ‘The Man Who Read Beautiful Books’, a student fraudulently collecting benefits, in order to finish his postgraduate thesis, is tempted by a woman’s lure of the nubile daughters she wants him to meet. He becomes involved in a scam that becomes deeper and more dangerous until he only has one option. Since the story’s original publication in Playboy, that option has changed and Dixon has now replaced the original ending.
All the stories have been re-written – some had lain in drawers unfinished, some published in long-extinct magazines – but all have been newly edited and revised. Stephen Dixon’s style is unique, and still experimental enough to give a nod towards the future. For myself I grew tired of lonely, alienated males in dubious situations. These stories are not an uplifting read. Stephen Dixon’s ‘American Urban Realism’ is a dystopian view of humanity; stalkers, pointless violence, messy relationship break-ups, Hitler defecated on by prostitutes, people fleeing from authority. But I never grew tired of his prose. Dixonis a master of the short story form and what you can do with it. Every story is beautifully crafted, despite the bleakness of the subject matter, and he breaks all the rules of creative writing in the process. His work is shocking, thought-provoking, always remarkable and should be required reading for students of the form.
Any Cop?: Because of its time span, this might be a good introduction to Stephen Dixon, if you haven’t encountered this brilliant writer before. It’s a collection to dip into, rather than read from beginning to end. Don’t open it on a bad day!
Kathleen Jones
Bookmunch 