Life After Afterlife

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE LIVING END by Stanley Elkin; Dutton; 148 pages; $7.95

In first-rate comic art, the funnier the surfaces the sadder the depths. Nowhere is that clearer than in the novels and short stories of Stanley Elkin, whose improvisations on the American way and the English language make him our foremost literary jazz band. His most exuberant characters--a department store owner, a bail bondsman, an itinerant radio announcer--combine the energy and appetites of the Middle West with the legendary qualities of Sholom Aleichem's villagers. Elkin makes much joyful noise unto the Lord, but there is also banter to deflect the wrath, and complaining because it might do some good. There are no booming Faustian bargains in his work; just fast, uneasy verbal agreements between small businessmen and their omnipotent Wholesale Supplier.

In The Living End, an inspired fantasy superbly executed, God has all markets rigged:

Hell as well as Heaven. Absent is a brooding Satan or a slick Beelzebub to direct the traffic of the damned. Elkin's Hell is an anarchic ghetto, "the ultimate inner city" in perpetual and agonizing meltdown. "Its stinking sulfurous streets were unsafe," he writes. "Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as a cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like a hideous body hair grew long enough to trip over and lay raw and exposed as live wires or shoelaces that had come undone."

And Elkin's Heaven? A celestial froth of every storybook cliche. It is a theme park of pearly gates, angels with harps, ambrosia, manna, a Heavenly choir that sings, "Oh dem golden slippers" and a St. Peter who answers a would-be club member's wonderment with a snobby "We like it." Peter is not entirely accurate. There are lonely child musicians whom God has untimely plucked because he likes a tune now and then. And there are tensions in the best of families:

Mary has never quite recovered from the pain and confusion of childbirth, Joseph kvetches about cuckoldry, and Jesus sometimes feels like a designated hitter.

If all this seems like an eschatological Upstairs, Downstairs, with the damned as underprivileged and God as absentee slumlord, let the reader be assured that Elkin's Heaven and Hell are mainly framework. Unlike his other novels, centrifuges of virtuosity, The Living End is tightly structured, with a beginning, a middle and a sudden, inevitable end.

His new characters have less bulk but more definition: Ellerbee is the nicest of guys, a Minneapolis liquor-store owner who voluntarily supports the families of two employees who have been shot during a holdup.

When Ellerbee himself is gunned down behind the counter, he goes to Hell, where he joins armies of sinners double-timing through fire and filth.

His sins: selling demon rum, keeping his store open on the Sabbath, uttering an occasional "God damn it," having impure thoughts and failing to honor his parents, even though Ellerbee was orphaned as an infant and had never known them. He ignored what Elkin labels "the conventional wisdom." The corollary: in a cosmos ruled by an unforgiving stickler, "one can never have too much virtue."

There are even worse sentences in the afterlife. Ladle-haus, an accomplice of Ellerbee's murderer, is suddenly shunted from Hell to the black numbness of a cemetery in the Twin Cities. There, with the ability to talk to the unresponsive living, his nerves "insentient now as string," he longs even for the pain of Hell. He hears life sounds above him but can make no sense of them. History seems to have run amuck and nobody seems to care. Especially God, who reveals that He was never in it for the goodness. "Were you born yesterday?" he asks a perplexed saint. "You've been in the world. Is that how you explain trial and error, history by increment, God's long Slap and Tickle, His Indian-gift wrath? Goodness? No. It was Art! It was always Art. I work by the contrasts and metrics, by beats and the silences. It was all Art. Because it makes a better story is why."

It certainly does, and with The Living End Elkin must finally be recognized as the grownup's Kurt Vonnegut, the Woody Allen for those who prefer their love, death and cosmic quarrels with true bite and sting. ...

"Hell was harder to do than Heaven; Hell has its pitfalls," says Stanley Elkin in the air-conditioned living room of his suburban St. Louis home. "I wanted to do it without machinery, without an engine room."

Machines are not easy to humanize.

It is difficult to give them funny lines. Not that Elkin hasn't tried and succeeded. He was once requested to write dialogue for the computer that inseminated Julie Christie in the movie Demon Seed. The problem was, what should the thing answer when Christie asks how the act is to be performed? Elkin's solution: "Love . . . will . . . find ... a ... way." The produc ers, he recalls, thought his dialogue too in tellectual.

Elkin, 49, is, after all, a professor of English at Washington University in St.

Louis. But critical abstractions do not suit him. On Faulkner, for example, one of his favorite authors: "He writes with my heart in his pocket. He has almost a tender will. He is on our side, aggressively on mankind's side."

Readers of Boswell, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, A Bad Man, The Dick Gibson Show, Searches and Seizures and The Franchiser will also find that sentiment applicable to Elkin. His heroes, people with ordinary jobs and extraordinary energy, combine needs and vulnerabilities that are all too recognizable. His own father traveled the Middle West selling costume jewelry. "He was a wonderful salesman," says Elkin, who wears his father's 25-year Coro jewelry company pin on a gold neck chain. The energy of the pitchman and auctioneer excites his imagination. "But it is not enough to be a good pitchman," he says; "the consummate salesman also needs a customer who doesn't want to buy."

Elkin fans have never needed persuading, though, naturally, the author would like more customers. He was raised in Chicago, studied at the University of Illinois and joined the faculty of Washing ton University at the end of the '50s. His wife Joan is a painter whose portraits subtly combine elements of primitivism with psychological sophistication.

She works on the top floor of their spacious brick house. Elkin writes in the kitchen to be near the swimming pool and the bathroom. He has some trouble getting around. In 1961 he suffered the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a swelling of the optic nerve known as retro-bulbar opticneuritis. "It's a dumb disease," says Elkin. "It kills you by inches but you suffer by yards."

The writing goes on, however, as steadily as ever. He is 200 pages into his new book, George Mills, about a working-class man from south St. Louis. "George," he explains, " is cursed with blue-collar blood that goes back to the First Crusade.

The curse is never to be a privileged man."

Does Elkin feel privileged? "God, yes.

I feel safe. I never get pushed around. I was even affronted when the town's 'in dustrial hygienist' came to the house to in vestigate a neighbor's complaint that my swimming pool pump was too noisy."

Class conflict makes for good fiction, and in Elkin's novels the great social leveler is death. "Of course I'm obsessed with death," he admits. "The first words of my first book were 'Everybody dies.' But I'm also obsessed with death's alternative, which is life."

Excerpt

"'Sure,' God said. 'I'm Hero of Heaven. I call on Myself.' That was when He began His explanations. He revealed the secrets of books, of pictures and music . . . why marches were more selfish than anthems, lieder less stirring than scat, why landscapes were to be preferred over portraits, how statues of women were superior to statues of men but less impressive than engravings on postage. He told them how to choose wines and why solos were more acceptable to Him than duets. He told them the secret causes of inflation -- 'It's the markup,' He said -- and which was the best color and how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. He explained why English was the first language at Miss Universe pageants and recited highlights from the eighteen-minute gap."

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