In "The Victor," a story about a novelist's jealous reaction at not winning a major fiction prize his book has been nominated for, the writer, Robert Burmeister, is sitting at a table with his wife, his small-press publisher and his editor. The publisher, perhaps trying to ease the sting of losing, asks if Robert will have a new manuscript ready for publication the next year.
His wife answers for him: "Don't worry about this guy. Living is writing, writing is living, even the stomach flu along with a death in the family and cramps hardly stop him for a day, so expect one every year and only occasionally every other year, till you yell uncle."
Mr. Dixon is poking fun at himself, of course -- he is one of publishing's most prolific writers, and Robert Burmeister is his // alter ego.
"Long Made Short," which includes "The Victor," and "The Stories of Stephen Dixon" -- 60 stories that Mr. Dixon has selected as among his best, including pieces from "Frog," the novel nominated for the 1991 National Book Award -- are his 15th and 16th books since 1976. Next year, Henry Holt will bring out a new novel. He has won numerous prizes, has been awarded fellowships, and received accolades from the likes of Grace Paley, Irving Howe, John Hollander and his colleague in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, John Barth.
Yet beyond these writers, beyond Baltimore, and beyond anthologists and editors of scores of quarterly magazines and commercial ones (they include Playboy, Esquire, the Atlantic, Harper's) who have published more than 350 of his stories, Stephen Dixon's work is not terribly familiar. This itself is remarkable,and you have to ask why.
nTC It could be attributable to his non-commercial publishers, which have included small, though classy, presses such as North Point and Coffee House or Johns Hopkins University Press: When it comes to advertising budgets, there aren't any. As Burmeister blurts to his wife in "The Victor," when another novelist is announced the winner, "If they'd given the award to me and my little publisher and unhotshot editor and no agent or to speak of advance, half this joint would be empty next year. For the biggies pay for the event and the foundation and want returns for their own and on what they put in and certainly no threatening precedents, so they wouldn't take it nicely if the nobody from nowhere won."
Sour grapes? Sure. While there could be something to Burmeister's complaint, though, that is not the main reason for Mr. Dixon's limited reputation. It has to do with the nature of his storytelling, his fictive style -- distinctive and recognizable as it is -- that continually calls attention to itself. Here is a sample, from "Mac in Love":
I went downstairs and left the building. Coming up the stoop as I was going down it was Jane's closest friend. Ruth said "Hello,Mac, you just up to see Jane?" I said "Yes, and how are you, Ruth? Nice day out. Actually, the whole week's been grand. Some weather we're having. Just look at that sky. No I'm serious: really look at the sky." I pointed. She looked. I said "Blue as can be. And people talk about pollution. But then they also say most pollution can't be seen. The experts say that, I mean, and that what appears to be clean air because the sky looks clean doesn't necessarily have to be clean air but dirty except it doesn't look dirty because most pollutants, because of something to do with particles and refraction, can't be seen by the average naked eye. Well it's nice having the illusion if we can't have the fact. What I mean is isn't it nice that even if the air's dirty it at least looks clean? Even though it isn't, I'm saying. Or rather they're saying -- the experts.
A pure storyteller -- in the mode of John Cheever or Isaac Bashevis Singer or Peter Taylor or Raymond Carver -- Stephen Dixon is not. Nor does he want to be. That is not his aim. He is an improvisational writer and plot is generally not his interest, nor is character development, nor is epiphany nor illumination or resolution, at least not in any traditional way. Pure storytellers often want you to suspend your disbelief that you are reading fiction. Mr. Dixon continually makes you aware that you are reading fiction.
Stylistic gaming is the story, whether the protagonist is a down-and-out bum, a man bitten by a transvestite's dog, a rapist, a man who is continually beaten by his wife, a father whose daughter has been brutally killed or a daughter who has disappeared when the father leaves her in the care of a friendly woman on the beach, then denies that he ever did. Mr. Dixon doesn't so much create characters as try them on. They often sound the same. Battered husband, distraught father, rejected or rejecting lover. For it is the style that continually calls attention to itself. The effects can be tremendously comic. The stories can also be tremendously repetitive.
Mr. Dixon deploys staccato sentences or sentences that feint and dodge and turn on themselves -- the aim is to evoke the implausibilities of ordinary life, its discontinuities, its incoherence and chaos, its erratic violence, its meaninglessness and banality, its consequential banter.
There are stories in which style does not dominate, where it serves its themes -- this is especially so in stories that deal with the aged or dead father and the irrevocable bond with his grown son.
"The Watch" and "Time to Go" are from earlier books; "Turning the Corner" in "Long Made Short" can take your breath away. A man comes into a store and complains, "You don't have it. How come, what's wrong, why you holding it up?" What "it" is, we don't know -- he then wanders into a dentist's office and the receptionist says they have it but he has to fill out a questionnaire.
Yet he cannot remember anything, not even who he is. But the receptionist is helpful and friendly. He gets an address of a man who may have the same name, who may be his brother, his father; perhaps he is Roland Hirsch Jr. He leaves the office and rings the intercom at the address he is given.
"Yes?" his father says on the intercom and he says "It's me, Junior," and his father says "God, you've been gone a long time. Do you really think it's worth it for me to come down to see what you look like?" and he says "How's Mom?" and his father says "Your mother? My dear boy, she's been gone a long time." "Gone where?" and his father says "Gone to rest my son, to rest," and he says "Not dead," and his father says "Dead my dear son, dead." "Dad please come down and help me. I don't think I'm ready to face this yet. I'm not. I'll never be. . . ." "I'll be right down."
He waits there: Day becomes night; warmth, cold. He's not dressed for it, he thinks, and rings the bell. Nobody answers. Rings and rings and nobody answers. If this were an apartment house, he thinks, he'd ring several bells to get in. But it's a private home, and he just sits on the steps hoping his father will come down.
As W. H. Auden said of publishing only the poems you were truly grateful for -- substitute stories here -- the volume would be depressingly slim. Mr. Dixon's work may be better served by Henry Holt, a New York publisher, in attracting more readers. Perhaps. His writing is an acquired taste, and my guess is that the readership may still be limited. His are fictions you cannot help but admire tremendously, though for me they are often difficult to love.
Mr. Leffler's second collection of poems, "After Light," will be published later this year. He lives in Takoma Park.
Title: "The Stories of Stephen Dixon"
Author: Stephen Dixon
Publisher: Henry Holt
Length, price: 642 pages, $25
Title: "Long Made Short"
Author: Stephen Dixon
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Length, price: 143 pages, $12.95