TELLING LOSS

The Baltimore Sun

Loss tunnels through Stephen Dixon's fiction, pushing up his words like so many clods of dirt.

Oh, the loss isn't there on the surface, which is flat and smooth and level. The loss isn't present in the spiky, black-footed letters stretching from one end of the page to the next.

Instead, readers soon begin to sense ... something. They press an ear to the ground, listen for a rumble.

"I teach my readers how to read my work while they're reading it," Dixon says.

And, so he does.

Readers immersed in Dixon's fictional world learn to delve beneath the sentences to grasp the whole story. What Dixon doesn't say is as important, or more important, than what he does.

Meaning and substance, flesh, bone and blood, accumulate gradually, word by word, cell by cell.

For instance, Phone Rings is a lightly fictionalized story about Dixon's attempt to grapple with the death of his oldest brother, Don, who is named Dan in the novel. The sentences are purposely uninflected, almost matter-of-fact. But readers begin to sense both the quality of the brothers' bond and the weight of the narrator's grief.

But Dixon's impact can't be measured solely by his 500 published short stories or his 26 novels, two of which were finalists for the National Book Award.

The author has spent the past 26 years teaching creative writing at the Johns Hopkins University, influencing a generation of talented young writers, including Michael Kun, Tristan Davies, Jean McGarry and Ben McGrath.

No more.

Next week, Dixon will celebrate his 71st birthday. His retirement will be official June 30. Soon, he will have even more time to devote to undermining the surface of American fiction.

"He's a genius," says Davies, a senior lecturer at Hopkins.

"I honestly do believe, and I say it to all my classes, that when we all are dead and gone and forgotten, people will still be talking about Stephen Dixon."

In honor of Dixon's retirement, the university's Eisenhower Library is mounting an exhibit of manuscript drafts and other artifacts from Dixon's 45 years as a writer. The exhibit will be on view through Aug. 31.

Dixon frequently has documented his life in his novels, but then, he has had more life to document than most.

In the 1940s, his dentist father was jailed for arranging illegal abortions. His 18-month imprisonment, and the subsequent loss of his license, pushed the family to the brink of poverty.

Stephen lost two of his six siblings before he turned 30, and a third, Don, more recently.

And Dixon has significant family responsibilities. His wife, Anne Frydman, who teaches Russian literature at Hopkins,

was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 20 years ago, when the couple's two daughters were ages 5 and 2.

She uses a wheelchair, and as the only mobile adult, Dixon assumed the bulk of the responsibility of caring for his wife and the girls, who now are grown. Sophia is a visual artist who also reads manuscripts part-time for a literary agency, and Antonia attends Brown University.

So it's no surprise that loss, or the threat of loss, never is absent from his writing, though it spends long periods lurking somewhere just out of sight.

"My brother, Jimmy, was a writer, too," Dixon says.

"He drowned in 1960, when the freighter he was traveling on went down in the North Atlantic. Sometimes I feel as though I'm writing for him. There have been times when I've had the feeling that he was leaning over my shoulder, giving me approval and directing my prose. His death is one of the most important experiences of my life. I've never gotten over it."

Pushing past barriers

The author stands, head tilted, in front of a self-portrait, which is part of the exhibit in the Eisenhower Library. The image on the piece of yellowing paper is far more forbidding and dour than the real-life version.

Dixon's sketches record his thinning, gray hair, but not its curl. They miss the distinctive shape of his eyebrows, which, appropriately, resemble question marks.

Mostly, though, the person in the pictures appears to be standing still, which is entirely deceptive. Dixon's foot jiggles; a hand drums the table.

The man seems to be constantly testing the limits of the physical world, as though he could actually rearrange an object's molecular structure with a well-placed poke or slight shove.

Few writers have an exaggerated respect for boundaries; it's practically part of the job description. And Dixon is no exception.

As a young man, he worked briefly as a radio reporter for the now-defunct News Associates and Radio Press and later for CBS.

When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made his famous visit to Washington in 1959, Dixon was among the pack of reporters cordoned off to one side of the Lincoln Memorial.

"I ducked under the rope and ran up the steps after him," Dixon says. "I could have been shot. I was calling, 'Premier Khrushchev! Premier Khrushchev!' He turned and said, through a translator:

"'Such a nice boy; such a nice boy. What do you want to ask me?'

"So I got a short interview. When I got back, all the other reporters wanted to know what he said, but I had to go back to my office and drop off the tape."

Because Dixon aggressively mines his past for material, the people in his life aren't always thrilled to find their exploits chronicled in his fiction.

"I used to warn my former girlfriends that I may write about this relationship somewhere down the road," he says.

"One woman I dated for four years was a filmmaker. I wrote about our relationship in Quite Contrary: The Mary and Newt Story. When we broke up, she told me she was going to complain to the publisher about the book unless I gave her the movie rights.

"I agreed - and then I wrote about my negotiations with her in a story I titled The Moviemaker. That book came out in 1983, and when she opened it, she said, 'Not again.' She was quite angry.

"A writer always gets the last word."

At one point, Anne Frydman asked her husband to stop writing about her illness and his response to it. Dixon agreed - and has kept his promise.

"I have a range of emotions about being part of his writing," Frydman says.

"On the one hand, I'm very complimented at being the subject of his work. On the other hand, his feelings about me aren't always flattering, and that can be painful. But over both of these is the realization that I have to let Steve be Steve."

If Dixon didn't continually probe and test and push, he wouldn't be the writer he is today. His writing is one continual experiment with style and form.

His stories often include instant replays, in which the same event is told multiple times from different perspectives: Did one character die from a fall? Was he the victim of a mugging? Was he running beneath a tree, only to be beaned by a falling branch?

But Dixon is perhaps best known for another writerly quirk: for fashioning paragraphs that are the narrative equivalent of stretch limousines.

In 30, which he considers his best novel, a paragraph that begins on page 552 doesn't end until page 612. Just try cornering one of those babies.

Some readers are exhausted by the unrelieved black type.

"I like playing around with tricks," Dixon says. "I like writing a sentence that goes on for 30 or 40 pages but that is absolutely clear.

"Besides, I find that the momentum of my writing is stopped by a new paragraph. I don't ever think I'll go back to writing linear dialogue. If some people find my writing daunting, they'll go on and read someone else."

Dixon makes an interesting point. What is intimidating about his prose is the way it looks. It's not the content, which usually is transparent and straightforward.

But when words are spoken, paragraphs, or the lack thereof, become meaningless. If readers first encountered Dixon's books by listening to them, perhaps through a recorded book, it seems unlikely that as many would complain that his writing is inaccessible.

Jerome Klinkowitz, an English professor at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, says that Dixon's novels and stories inevitably call attention to his materials: to words and paper and a manual typewriter with metal keys.

"Steve is like a stonemason," Klinkowitz says. "When you look at a well-made wall, every stone has been placed to fit perfectly with the stone next to it.

"Steve's books only could be written on a manual typewriter. They could never, ever have been written on a computer."

Dixon writes on one of three Hermes manual typewriters that he owns, on an oval dining-room table in his Towson home. The table, made of unfinished wood, is as worn, spare, rudimentary and aesthetically pleasing as his prose.

The other two typewriters are stashed in a closet in case the one assigned to active duty breaks and can't be repaired, or hurls itself off the table in despair from overuse.

"His readers constantly are reminded that a book is a physically made object that Stephen hammered onto a machine," Klinkowitz says.

"They are constantly reminded not to look past the materials and start watching mental movies.

"Otherwise, you lose the texture of the materials. Sentences and words are lovely things. It would be a shame to sacrifice them."

Getting the word

At Hopkins, Dixon is notorious for telling his students that if they change one word on a page, they must retype the entire page. "Alter one word," he says, "and you alter the relationships between all the words."

His approach to teaching was equally rigorous.

Most creative writing professors pen notes in the margins of student manuscripts, says John Barth, the distinguished novelist and professor emeritus at Hopkins.

Dixon wrote reams.

"He's extremely diligent and conscientious," Barth says. "I never heard anything but praise from the students about Stephen's fair-mindedness and the usefulness of his criticisms."

Colleague Tristan Davies has known Dixon since 1986, when the younger man was a graduate student.

"Steve is a great teacher," Davies says.

"His graduate students are extremely fond of him because he gives so much of himself, and his undergraduates are even more so. Steve treats every piece of fiction he reads as though it were important and potentially groundbreaking."

Court documents

Dixon was born in New York, the fifth of seven children. When he was about 5 years old, his father was incarcerated in Sing Sing Penitentiary, though it was years before the boy pieced together the story.

"They told me he was in the Army," he says.

But when Stephen was about 10, he discovered boxes full of depositions in the basement.

"There were about 500 pages, and they were quite interesting," he said.

"I'd sneak down to the basement, and eventually, I read them all. They had a great influence on me as a writer."

In fact, many of the characteristics of court transcripts - an emphasis on dialogue, on real words spoken by real people, and the complete absence of physical description and simile - are hallmarks today of Dixon's prose.

If Dixon's unusual choice of reading materials went undetected, it may have been because his parents were preoccupied with other matters. Dixon's younger sister, Carol, was diagnosed at age 4 with Elephant Man's Syndrome, a rare genetic disease that causes extreme physical abnormalities. She died in 1966, at age 26.

"Carol's death affected me because she went through so much and declined so slowly," he says.

There wasn't much attention left to spare for Stephen, and as a result, he drifted. Oddly, for someone who ended up as a career academic, he developed a pronounced distaste for formal education.

"I didn't like going to school," he says - and that extended through his years at City College, New York, where he earned a bachelor's degree in international relations. "I finished college only reluctantly."

What Dixon wanted to do was work, and work he did - tending bar, teaching junior high, selling underwear at Macy's.

It was during his two-year stint as a journalist that he first tried crafting fiction. Partly, it was his way of remaining close to his brother after the boat carrying Jimmy Dixon sank in 1960.

"The only thing they ever found from the boat was a life-preserver," he says. "That made it harder, because we lived with the illusion that Jimmy was alive and would knock on the door someday. I still dream about him."

In 1964, Dixon won a fellowship at Stanford University, on the strength of a short story that he had published in the Paris Review, and one unpublished novel.

Slowly, Dixon's short stories and novels began appearing in print. Occasionally, he even was paid enough to temporarily quit one of his odd jobs. In 1980, Barth helped bring the adventurous writer to Hopkins.

"Once Steve moved to Baltimore and began teaching, he really got on track with his writing," Klinkowitz says. "He got married and became a father. His writing became different, fuller, more humane."

Despite its perceived difficulty, Dixon's fiction began winning accolades.

He has been a finalist once for the PEN/Faulkner Award and twice for the National Book award for Frog (1991) and Interstate (1995).

His 27th novel, Meyer, is scheduled to be released in September. It's about a writer struggling with writer's block.

Umm, what would Dixon know about that?

"That's the joke," says Dennis Johnson, co-founder of Melville House, a small, independent publishing firm based in Hoboken, N.J.

"Stephen has never suffered from writer's block. That would be the ultimate horror story for him."

Words. That's all Dixon has to keep loss at bay.

One of the strangest and loveliest objects on display in the Eisenhower Library is a letter that Dixon wrote to Davies in 1998.

Dixon saves the discarded pages from his manuscripts and recycles them as stationery. So, one side of the paper is a letter to his friend.

On the other side, upside down, is a page from a novel that was typed on the author's trusty Hermes. The letter is what most people will see. The more observant will notice that the metal type from the other side of the paper is poking through.

The novel exists beneath the letter in a kind of ghost form. It's hidden, but it makes its presence felt.

If you were to close your eyes and run your hand over the page, you would feel tiny ridges. There are minute peaks and valleys. Once again, more lies beneath the surface of Dixon's prose.

mary.mccauley@baltsun.com

Excerpt from 'Interstate'

Daunting or delightful? You be the judge. Here's a sample -- just one sentence, really, and far from Dixon's longest -- from his acclaimed 1995 novel, Interstate:

He's trying to get in touch with an old friend about something; calls the number he has in his address book, it's no longer a working number; calls Manhattan Information, and there's no number for him or any number for anyone in the entire city for him or just with his last name and the first initial H; calls Harold's ex-wife, which is the same number Harold used to have when he was still married to her, and that number now belongs to someone who says he got it from the phone company two years ago; doesn't know how to reach Harold, and then remembers a mutual friend from college and about ten years after who became Harold's best friend and whom he last bumped into about four or five years ago -- at the time this guy said he was living on West 89th Street near the park -- and gets his number from information and dials; and a woman's recorded voice says Amber and Emmiline aren't in, please leave a message, and he says who it is and that she might even remember him -- "I'm an old friend of Andrew's from way way back" -- and could one of them have Andrew call him, and gives his phone number.

Stephen Dixon

Date of birth:

June 6, 1936

Residence:

Towson

Occupation:

Author of 26 novels and more than 500 published short stories

Former day job:

Taught creative writing at the Johns Hopkins University from 1980 through 2007

Honors:

Has been a finalist twice for the National Book Award for Frog (1991) and Interstate (1995.) Frog also was a finalist for the 1992 PEN/Faulkner Award

Education:

Bachelor's degree in international relations from City College of New York, 1958

Personal:

A wife, Anne Frydman. Two daughters, Sophia and Antonia

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