BECAUSE EVERYTHING HAS A REASONABLE EXPLANATION:

Stanley Elkin’s Magic Kingdom

The first Stanley Elkin book I read was The Living End (1979). I read it when it came out in paperback, in the early 80’s. He had the reputation for Joycean verbal pyrotechnics which, for some reason, I didn’t discern. I loved the book but I have to say I remember almost nothing about it. But I have always wanted to read more and regretted not having done so when he died in 1995.

My guess is that at 20, I was too young to get it, that is, if The Living End was anything like Stanley Elkin’s Magic Kingdom, which came out 6 years later. I read this book because of a brief exchange in the comments section of JR Lennon and Rhian Ellis’s blogh Ward Six. It is a stunning book, clownish, manic, built of free flights of verbal improvisation that wander away from but never abandon the narrative. Each of his digressions (and digression is his method) plunges the reader into the depth of the character but not into the character’s subconscious. What it does is find the racing voice in the head, the bee like bouncing from flower to flower, the buzzing fly of verbal consciousness as it lands on this or that memory, painful, significant, or NOT. There is no actual obscurity of content or method here and what is most remarkable, he has a story, however thinly conceived, and it is devastating. The devastation and the antic hilarity are never divorced. His touch is light.

So what is it about? An Englishman, Colin Bale, loses his 11 year-old boy to cancer. His wife leaves him. He decides to take a group of terminally ill children on a trip to Disney World. He selects seven children, each with a different disease, a doctor, 2 nurses and a governess and they head off for a week of fun. The doctor is obsessed with Jews, one nurse is gay (his name is Colin, and his boy friend’s name is Colin), the other nurse is a chronic masturbator (he always describes her placid demeanor and fingers) and the governess has a Mary Poppins complex. The children’s diseases are treated as the absurd and tragic joke of an indifferent, if not malevolent, deity. Life is pointless if you are looking for a point, other than love. Everyone dies. He never veers far from the fact that these children, who are lovingly and realistically dramatized, are dying, and dying young. No situation is avoided. We get the disintegrating bones and amputations, the blue skin, the sugary exudations, the tumor that makes a ten year old girl look pregnant, the senility of a boy aging 80 years in a decade, the gush of mucus of a 13 year old with cystic fibrosis. Elkin suffered from Multiple Sclerosis his entire adult life. He knew what he was talking about. He wrote a very funny book that at one moment becomes so shockingly sad, it can stand in for the entire book. What was a wild ride but perhaps had no end point, despite the constant invocation of young, unjustified death, constellates around this moment so perfectly I gasped even as I cried.

Here is an example of his style. It occurs when Colin decides to take the kids to a parade, so they can see that life has ruined everyone else too, that the panoply of human existence is equally distributed with ugliness, disease, stupidity. It is a medieval carnival he describes:

“It had begun now, the parade. A well-dressed man in a business suit stood at attention as the floats passed by. He held his hat over his heart. (And sanity, sanity too, marred, scuffed as a shoe, wrinkled as laundry.) It had begun now, but the children weren’t watching. They couldn’t take their eyes off the crowd. (‘This, this is the parade!’) They stared at the special area the park had provided for guests in wheel chairs, at the old men and women who sat in them, bundled against some internal chill on even this warm day, wrapped in blankets that tucked over their feet, in sweaters, in scarves, in wool gloves and mittens, covered by hats, by caps, Mickey Mouse’s eared beanies, dark as yarmulkes, on top of their other headgear; at, among them, an ancient woman in a rubber Frankenstein mask for warmth; at her nurse, feeding her cigarettes, venting her smoke through a gap in the monster’s wired jaws. At other women, depleted, tired, who sat on benches, their dresses hiked well above their knees, their legs (in heavy stockings the color of miscegenetic, coffee-creamed flesh) not so much spread as forgotten, separated, guided by the collapsing, melted lines of their thighs. At their husbands (or maybe just the men they lived with, for convenience, for company, for making the welfare checks go farther), their hands in their laps, incurious as people who have just folded in poker. (And everywhere those dark glasses. ‘It ain’t for the glare,’ Colin told them, ‘it’s for the warmth!’) At grown men and women in wearing the souvenirs of the Magic Kingdom: sweat shirts, T-shirts, with Eeyore, with Mickey Mouse, with Jimminy Cricket, Alice-In-Wonderland pinafores, Minnie Mouse dresses, carryalls with Dumbo, and Tigger and Tramp. At a woman in her sixties, inexplicably wearing a boa, a turban, a veil of wide, loose black mesh; at hands and arms and shoulders blotched by liver spots; at a man in baggy pants suspiciously, unscrupulously bulging. At a man in shorts, the enlarged veins on his legs like wax dripping down Chianti bottles in Italian restaurants.

“At a woman with oily skin and pores like a sort of gooseflesh, visible as the apertures of chickens where their pinfeathers have been plucked. At a still handsome woman with bare, shapely, but hairy legs (hair even on the tops of her feet), but carefully trimmed as sideburns or rolled stockings two inches below her knees; at a powerfully built man in his sixties whose chest hair, visible through his sheer tank top, had been as lovingly, patiently groomed as a high school boy’s. (Everywhere, everywhere hair—the strange feeling that they were among birds, the wigs, the boa, the babushka beneath the woman’s chin, the piled hairdos, the thinning hair, the penciled eyebrows, the tattooed mustache and sideburns of the strange westerner. Mudd-Gaddis’s [one of the kids] own baldness and the chemotherapeutic fuzz of several of the children. Because everything has a reasonable explanation, and almost all had heard that hair didn’t stop growing after you died. Because everything has a reasonable explanation and hair was the gnawed, tenuous rope by which they hung on to immortality).”

The kids then comment on this in a string of dialogue in which Elkin flashes all of his colours at once:

“Lord love a duck!” said Janet Order. “Just clap eyes on these gaffers.
“My word, Janet! They’re for it, I’d say so,” Rena Morgan agreed.
“Lamb turning to mutton.” Janet Sighed.
“Fright fish.”
“Blood puddles.”
“Lawks!” said Benny Maxine. “Look at the bint with the healthy arse.
I’m gone dead nuts on that fanny.”
“Ooh, it’;s walloping big, ain’t it?” Tony Word said.
“If it ever let off it wouldn’t ‘alf make a pongy pooh,” Benny asserted.
“Like Billy-O!” Tony said.
“Good gracious me!” said Lydia Conscience. “Say what you will, my heart goes out to the old biddy what looks like someone put her in the pudding club.”
“Yar, ain’t she dishy? There’s one in every village.”
Tony Word considered. “No,” he said. “She’s just put on the nose bag. It’s simply a case of your lumping, right grotty greedguts.”
“Only loads of grub then, you think?” Lydia asked.
“Oh yes,” said Tony. “Oodles of inner man. Tub and tuck.”
“Jesus weeps!” said illiterate Noah Cloth, looking about, his gaze settling on the little group of the retarded. “He weeps for all the potty, pig-ignorant prats off their chumps, for all the slow-coach clots and dead-from-the-neck-up dimbos, and wonky, puddle coots and gits, goofs and goons, for all his chuckleheaded, loopy muggings and passengers past praying for.”
“Put a sock in it, old man,” Bennie Maxine said softly.
“For all the nanas,” Noah said, crying now. “For all the bright specimens.”
“Many’s the nosh-up gone down that cake hole,” Tony Word said, his eye fixed on the fat woman Lydia Conscience had thought pregnant. “Many’s the porky pots of tram-stopper scoff and thundering stodge through that podge’s gob,” he said without appetite.
“She’s chesty,” Rena Morgan said, weeping, of a woman who coughed. “She should put by the gaspers.”
“She’s had her day,” said Janet Order.
“Coo! Who ain’t?” Rena, sobbing, wanted to know. “Which of us, hey? Which of them?”
“Are they all on the dream holiday then?” Charles Mudd-Gaddis asked.
“All, old son, and no mistake,” Lydia Conscience said wearily.
“A shame,” he said. “Letting themselves go like that. And them with their whole lives in front of them.”