The Stories of Stephen Dixon

 

 Welcome to the world of Stephen Dixon, a world where, more times than not, we're thrust head first into crisis erupting in an apartment or shop or office or on the streets of Manhattan.

Jenifer Levin on Stephen Dixon's storytelling: "At its best, it is understated poetry: witty, heartbreaking, eye-opening. Stephen Dixon's genius (or compulsion) is to observe, then to speak; not because he chooses to, perhaps - but because, as with all compulsion, he simply cannot stop himself."

Oh, my goodness, the above observation hits the target smack in the middle. A Stephen Dixon short story spins and spins and spins and spins in an unending, compulsive gush, occasionally presenting multiple versions before (assuming a reliable narrator - always a shaky prospect with Dixon) landing on what actually happened.

The Stories of Stephen Dixon - 60 stories taken from a dozen previously published collections as well as chapters from his novel Frog. Recall I said crisis back there. Here's a batch of openings:

14 Stories: Eugene Randall blows his brains out with a pistol;

Cut: doctors want to cut the narrator's leg off just below the hip since gangrene has set in;

The Intruder: narrator walks into his apartment as his girlfriend is about to be raped;

In Time: two crazy sisters kidnap a guy named Charles;

Takes: a woman screams out the window, calls for help, since her apartment mate is being attacked.

As something of a compulsive writer myself, here's the opening paragraph for one of my favorites, The Franklin Stove: "My story's burning. As I write this. Just a short manuscript. I looked at the first page of this first draft of a story and thought no, this will only be another one I'll keep in a box by my typewriter for about a year and look at from time to time but never rewrite and later stick in my file cabinet with about a hundred more. I always thought I'd take one out of the box or cabinet one day and get an idea for it and rewrite it or just sit down without any idea of even rereading it and finish it and it would turn out to be a story I like and maybe as good as any I've written. This one might have. It's still burning. I threw it in the stove only a few seconds before I started writing this."

To share a keener taste for these Stephen Dixon blasters, I'll increase magnification and zero in on a quartet, tossing in several direct quotes and keeping to Stephen Dixon-like staccato sentences as a way of highlighting the American author's very distinctive, instantly recognizable writing style. Here goes:

GIFTS
Gordon Lish, premier NYC editor and ultimate literary authority back in the 1980s when this tale was written, encouraged fiction writers to begin their story with lines that really grab a reader. Lish termed the opening of a story "the attack."

Here's Stephen Dixon's attack for this three-pager: "I wrote a novel for Sarah and sent it to her. She wrote back, "For me? How sweet. Nobody has ever done anything or presented me with anything near to what you've just given me. I'll treasure it always. I must confess I might not get around to reading it immediately, since I am tied up to my neck and beyond with things I'm forced to do first."

Undaunted, the narrator, a guy by the name of Reece, paints a series of 15 painting, packs each one up in a separate crate and ships them off to Sarah. Sarah lets him know she's moved; she opened one crate, plans on hanging the painting over her fireplace - when she has room, that is. Meanwhile, she's stashed it safe in her closet. And when she has time, she'll open the other 14 crates. My God. An entire series!

As readers we can sense what's coming next - after all, very much like Stephen Dixon, Reece is obviously an obsessive dedicated to the arts. Reece writes a sonata, "The Sarah Piece," has it printed and sends it off to you know who. Sarah answers she's awestruck since it's written for the one instrument she can actually play. She lets him know so many great things are happening with her just now but sometime, maybe in a week or two or three, she'll definitely find time to play his sonata.

Not a man to be put off, our protein creator carves sculpture, builds furniture, bakes earthenware, writes poems, plays, essays, boxes everything up and off they go. Sarah says she put everything in a special room dedicated in his honor, the Arthur T. Reece Retreat room. But then Sarah says she's joking - she really gave all his stuff away, couldn't get rid of the crap fast enough. Oh, yes, crap - this time she's not joking, not one bit - she turned his every piece of everything into refuse.

The tale then takes an unexpected twist but enough with details. I chose Gifts to let readers know Stephen Dixon has his whimsical, humorous side.

THE FRAME
"I go into an art gallery and framing shop. . . . A different woman sits behind a long table at the end of the room." Turns out, this older woman is physically deformed, reminding the narrator of his physically deformed sister who died fourteen years ago at age twenty-five.

As much as the narrator is in the frame shop dealing with his print to be framed, speaking to the physically deformed older woman, he's back with Kathy, his sister, on that day in the hospital, the last day of Kathy's life. "She said nothing that last day. I was holding her hand when she died. I didn't hear a death rattle. Someone told me there's always one, but I didn't hear it. I held her hand. The right, the left. Mostly the right because that was the one nearest the side of the bed I was best able to sit on. . . . I was looking at her face. I'm so sad now I'm about to cry."

Like many other Stephen Dixon stories, The Frame reveals a mind in motion, a mind touched deeply by memory and the abiding force of love.

THE PAINTER
"So the great painter dies. Within minutes of his death the colors disappear from his paintings, the canvases crack and come apart, the frames fall to the floor. Millions of dollars' worth of paintings, perhaps a billion dollars' worth, are gone. Museum curators summon the police. Private collectors of his work -
No, the painter dies."

An intriguing as the first paragraph is, the narrator weaves more than a dozen colorful variations on the circumstances and facts relating to the great painter's life and death. One bit from this short story I found particularly charming: within minutes of his birth, the painter does his thing after the doctor cuts the umbilical cord: "The painter, no more than eight pounds, starts painting on the soiled sheet. The doctor cleans and dries him, puts a canvas on the floor, the painter crawls on top of it, paints a big circle and then a small circle inside. The outside of the big circle's white, the inside of the small circle's black, the space between the two circles is red."

Are we to understand this dimension of Stephen Dixon storytelling as suggesting any one story contains multiple renditions and accounts, touching on the theme of forking paths a la Jorge Luis Borges?



STOP
Stephen Dixon action fiction featuring a first-person narrator spinning out of control. I'll switch to objective third-person in my compressed retelling and hope this will serve as a further prompt for you, reader, to treat yourself to this collection.

First lines to open this five-pager: “A car stopped. Man got out. “You there,” he said. I dropped my package and started running. “Hey wait, where you running to?” He knew. He knew I knew."

Bad news, fella, you're a wanted man who’s been hunted down. The narrator, a bloke I’ll call Stu, sees the man get out of the car but he keeps on running.

A block later, the car catches up to Stu and the guys in the car tell him, as if enjoying a good joke, how great a runner he is. The car pulls ahead, they both get out and one guy shouts, “We only want to speak to you about something, so what’s the rush?”

No way, José. Stu doesn't stop, runs even faster. "Oh for godsakes," the driver calls out, "do you have to? We just ate." The car accelerates, cuts in front of Stu at the next sidewalk. Stu can't stop in time, slams right into the side of the car, collapses to the ground.

"Good, I immobilized him," says the guy ridding shotgun. Stu jumps up and he's off toward a building. "Hold up already," the guy hollers. But Stu is inside ringing all the building's bells. At this, the two guys jump out of the car and race after him. Stu braces one hand and one foot against the front door so they can't get in.

Stu hears a woman on the intercom, "Yes." "Let me in," Stu says, "emergency." Woman tells him, "No. Not until I know who it is." Stu calls out, "Police. We're chasing a man who just entered the building and we don't want to break down the door." Nope, without a name, the woman refuses to open up.

More bad news for Stu - the two guys cave in his foot. Stu takes off, looking for a back door but there isn't one so he runs up the stairs. Meanwhile, one of the guys knocks against his partner and they both tumble to the floor Laurel and Hardy style. They ask the woman on the intercom if the building has a back entrance. She says, no, the back of the building is flush with the river.

Second floor, huff, huff, third floor, huff, huff, fourth floor, fifth floor, opens door, Stu's out on the roof. Damn, he thinks, if one of the doors on the floors below were open, he could take his chances and get through to a back window and jump in the river but from up here he wouldn't survive the jump. Oh, no - he sees one of the guys from the car step out onto the roof.

Stu takes off, running away, roof to roof, all the buildings on the block connected, only separated by a two foot parapet. He reaches the last roof, looks around, no place to escape. The guy catches up, faces him. Stu asks why they are chasing him. The guy answers they didn't chase, they walked, they drove. Stu wonders if he should run around the guy, run back across the roofs, see if any of the doors are open.

Damn it to hell. Just then he sees the other guy come out of a door down at the far end. Then more men from other doors. He move toward the side where the river's beneath, looks down. He hears the guy say, "Don't jump. You say you don't know what we're after you for - well okay, maybe you're right and we're wrong."

"Who's jumping?" Stu tells him. Looks up - now a lot of men are out on the roof. He peers over the edge. A ocean liner is down there, all white. People are on the outside deck bundled up in warm coats and furs, looking up at him. Stu takes off his yellow sweater and waves it at them. Many of them wave back.

"You're not going to do any silly, are you? the guy asks. "I wouldn't," Stu answers, still waving his yellow sweater. "Then let me put these on you and you can come along." Stu puts out his hands; the guy slaps on the handcuffs.

The other men surround him. Stu breaks free and jumps off the roof down into the river next to the ocean liner, his yellow sweater trailing above him. From the liner he hears a loud single human noise.

Stu figures the jump from that high up should have done him in but no, he's surprised to pop up out of the water, alive. Immediately, a long poll with a hook catches his handcuffs and Stu can feel himself dragged alone in the water then hoisted up on deck of a small launch boat. A bunch of men roll him over on his belly and sit on him as if he was a very dangerous but prize rare whale.

------

If you are unfamiliar with Stephen Dixon, this collection of short stories could turn you into a huge fan. If you are like me, reading Stephen Dixon is like eating peanuts - once you start, it's hard to stop.


American author Stephen Dixon, born 1936