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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 175
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PERSONAL
Born Stephen Ditchik, June 6, 1936, in New York, NY; died from complications of Parkinson’s disease and pneumonia, November 6, 2019, in Towson, MD; son of Abraham Mayer and Florence; married Anne Frydman , January 17, 1983 (died 2009); children: Sophia, Antonia.
EDUCATION:City College of New York (now City College of the City University of New York), B.A., 1958.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator, producer, and author. New York University, School of Continuing Education, New York, NY, instructor, 1979; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, assistant professor, 1980-83, associate professor, 1984-89, professor of fiction, beginning 1989. News Associates and Radio Press, reporter, 1959-60. Former staff for magazines such as True Police Cases and Startling Detective; has also worked variously as a technical writer, fiction consultant, middle school and high school teacher, tour leader, school bus driver, department store sales clerk, artist’s model, waiter, bartender, magazine editor, and assistant producer of a television show, In Person, for the Columbia Broadcasting System.
AVOCATIONS:Reading, writing, listening to serious music, “reading the New York Times over several cups of black coffee.”
AWARDS:Stegner fellow, Stanford University, 1964-65; National Endowment for the Arts grants for fiction, 1974-75 and 1991-92; O. Henry Award, 1977, for “Mac in Love,” 1982, for “Layaways,” and 1993, for “The Rare Muscovite”; Pushcart Prize, 1977, for “Milk Is Very Good for You,” and 1999, for “The Burial”; American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters prize for literature, 1983; Guggenheim fellowship for fiction, 1984-85; John Train Humor Prize, Paris Review, 1986; National Book Award finalist in fiction, 1991, and PEN/Faulkner finalist in fiction, 1992, both for Frog; Best American Short Stories award, 1993, for “Man, Woman, and Boy”; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1994-95; National Book Awards finalist in fiction, 1995, for Interstate; Best American Short Stories award, 1996, for “Sleep”; New Stories of the South award, 1998, for “The Poet.”
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Virtually Now: Stories of Science, Technology, and the Future, Persea Books, 1996; contributor to anthologies, including Making a Break, Latitudes Press (New York, NY), 1975. Contributor of more than 450 short stories to periodicals, including American Review, Atlantic, Boulevard, Chicago Review, Esquire, Glimmer Train, Harper’s, Paris Review, Pequod, Playboy, South Carolina Review, Triquarterly, Viva, Western Humanities Review, North American Review, and Nitty-Gritty.
Too Late was adapted to film in France as J’ai tué Clémance Acéra; Interstate was adapted to film in France as Dissonances; six of Dixon’s short stories were adapted in France into the movie Life Is a Joke; Work and another Dixon novel have also been adapted to film in France; ten of Dixon’s short stories have also been adapted to film; I is under option for a movie in France.
SIDELIGHTS
Stephen Dixon, who died in 2019 at the age of eighty-three, published hundreds of short fiction pieces and many novels. His work appeared in a wide variety of magazines, from the venerable Paris Review to such popular glossies as Playboy and Esquire, to little magazines with a few hundred subscribers. Some critics saw the success of his published short story collections as an indication of a “boomlet” of interest in that genre. Dixon, who worked odd jobs for years while trying to sell his fiction, was somewhat of a late bloomer in the world of fiction; though he had been selling short stories since his first sale to the Paris Review in 1963, it was not until he was in his forties that he first published his longer works.
Writing an appraisal of Dixon’s life and career in a New York Times obituary, Richard Sandomir noted that the author’s “hyper-realistic novels and short stories reflected his fascination with personal loss, sex, heartbreak, disaster, marriage and old age. … He never found fame or big sales, but his idiosyncratic storytelling drew praise.” Washington Post writer Harrison Smith also eulogized Dixon, remarking that his “humorous, freewheeling fiction traced the shocks and jolts of romance, aging and everyday life, in an experimental but plain-spoken style that brought readers deep inside the minds of his characters.” Harrison went on to note: “Mr. Dixon, a retired creative writing professor at Johns Hopkins University, published well over 500 short stories in the Paris Review, Playboy, Esquire and legions of small magazines across the country. His first book came out only when he was forty, but he made up for lost time in publishing thirty-five more novels and story collections, usually letting no more than a week or two elapse between projects.” Writing in the online HUB, Rachel Wallach commented on Dixon’s writing method and style: “He built his body of work by completing at least one finished page per day on his Hermes Standard typewriter. His stories blend truth and fiction, multiple versions of one event, and one time period with another, all glued together with humor, tragedy, sex, anger, cruelty, and dishonesty, often in exceptionally long sentences and paragraphs.” Wallach further noted Dixon’s contributions as an educator: “A popular teacher, he was generous with his time and his feedback, influencing during his twenty-six years as a member of the Johns Hopkins faculty countless successful writers.”
Pervasive themes in Dixon’s work include “relationships of couples, complexities of even the simplest jobs, and ways in which information so easily becomes misinformation or even disinformation,” according to Jerome Klinkowitz in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. A native New Yorker, Dixon often set his fiction’s action in that city. Paul Skenazy noted in the San Francisco Chronicle that Dixon “writes about people who live in rundown apartments. … He gives a reader the irritating, wearing feel of city life. He captures that rubbing of noise and excitement against the grain of one’s inertia, that constant intrusion of human traffic. But at its best the tone is less tough than worn-at-the-cuffs, frayed and slightly frantic from observing people who let their pride escape while they were watching TV or doing the laundry.” “Dixon’s imagination sticks close to home,” wrote John Domini in the New York Times Book Review. “His principal subject is the clash of the mundane and aberrant, those unsettling run-ins with wackos or former lovers all too familiar to anyone who’s ever lived in a city.” Skenazy felt that Dixon’s urban stories “frequently have a powerful impact that, while distasteful, is bracing; and there is something of the feel of that part of life too often ignored by fiction.”
Much of Dixon’s work also chronicles the pitfalls and problems of male-female relationships. This theme is apparent in Dixon’s novel Fall and Rise, in which the leading character tries, over the course of a long New York night, to woo a woman he met at a party earlier in the evening. It is also the controlling idea behind Dixon’s O. Henry Award-winning short story “Mac in Love,” in which a repulsed suitor yells wistful nonsense at his date’s balcony until the beleaguered woman calls the police.
Some critics have found fault with aspects of Dixon’s work. Reviewing Fourteen Stories, James Lasdun wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: “One has the feeling that Dixon begins most of his stories with little more in mind than a vague idea, a couple of characters, or a briefly observed scene, relying on his ready wit to transform it into a convincing piece of fiction. This is fine when it works, but occasionally the initial impulse is too flimsy and the story fails to take off.” In general, however, Dixon’s literary output has elicited considerable critical approval. Even Lasdun noted: “The best of these stories have a certain manic quality about them, caused largely by Dixon’s delight in speeding life up and compressing it, to the point where it begins to verge on the surreal.”
Long Made Short is a “shrewd and humorous collection by an inventive and skillful writer,” commented Donna Seaman in Booklist. Dixon’s work in this collection exposes the “absurdity and confusion underlying the most ordinary of circumstances,” Seaman remarked. In the story “Crows,” the narrator is alarmed to discover that he has apparently developed the ability to point his finger and shoot something, after he playfully “shoots” a crow, which falls dead out of the sky. The protagonist of “Flying” experiences vivid daydreams about what it would be like to be in an aircraft accident where he is sucked out of the plane along with his daughter, falling interminably. Throughout this stories in this collection and elsewhere, “no other writer can capture characters so distinctly wholly by their thought patterns and speaking styles,” asserted a Publishers Weekly critic.
The Stories of Stephen Dixon, a collection of many of the author’s favorite and most representative works, was published in 1994 and shows the writer playing “intelligent variations on a few great themes,” observed William Ferguson in the New York Times Book Review. Ferguson also noted Dixon’s penchant for characters who “reinvent themselves, time and again, in a retractile language that always seems to be more substantial than they are.”
In these multifaceted works, wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor, Dixon creates a “fictional world which, though often chillingly narrow in focus and perspective, manages also to be universal.” Praising Dixon’s stories generally for their depth of feeling and their technical merit, Klinkowitz stated: “Although their humor is often based on the inanity of human needs caught up in and mangled by the infernal machinery of systematics, his narratives can also use this same facility to convey great sensitivity and emotion.” Concluded Klinkowitz: “Like a jazz soloist improvising exuberantly, yet within the contours of melody and progressions of chords, Dixon uses the structures of language and circumstance to produce effective prose.”
Dixon’s Sleep includes twenty-two previously uncollected stories written by him during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. Klinkowitz wrote in American Book Review: “There’s plenty of well-made stuff in Sleep, and lots of deep thinking, too. One can imagine Dixon putting together this volume with an eye toward showing all he can do.” The title story, the closing piece of the collection, concerns a man troubled because, at the moment of his wife’s death, a thought flashes through his mind, “Now I can get some sleep.” His heartbreak is rendered all the more poignant by his self-perceived betrayal. A Publishers Weekly critic termed this story “powerful,” and Klinkowitz stated it “pulls all [the varied] themes and techniques together like a good repertory company’s signature performance, as a protagonist examines his feelings about his wife’s death. Are they love or just simple relief? To decide, he tries remembering the sequence of events, and in that memory comes the full panoply of Dixonian fictive techniques.” The two most traditional, straightforward narratives, “Heat” and “The Hairpiece,” are nestled at the book’s center, surrounded by some of the author’s edgier, more inventive fictions.
Several of the stories in Sleep are metafictional—“The Elevator,” “Tails,” and “The Stranded Man.” Frank Caso, writing in Booklist, remarked: “His style might not be to everyone’s taste, but the slow, deliberate pacing and self-reflection of these stories absolutely focus the reader’s attention on worries, neuroses, an even sentiments that other writers take for granted.” Klinkowitz felt that “Dixon works with language the way a painter handles paint and textures on a canvas—this way, that way, sometimes declaratively, as we’d hope to live our own lives, other times optatively or subjunctively, in the shoulda-coulda-woulda moods where too much existence resides. The truths of his subjects are not in their representations, but in how they are presented.”
The same distinctive style Dixon employs in his short stories can also be found in his novels. A reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review explained in an article about Garbage that Dixon “writes rapid-fire fiction; the action is fast and unceasing.” Once again mostly employing urban settings, the author often moves the action along via run-on sentences that imitate real-life speech and thought patterns, complete with pauses, self- contradictions, and digressions. “One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon, one submits to it,” claimed Alan H. Friedman in a New York Times Book Review of Frog. “An unstoppable prose expands the arteries while an edgy, casual nervousness overpowers the will.”
In one of Dixon’s longer works, Garbage, the quick-paced delivery intensifies the action of the plot, helping to create a dark and hopeless mood. An average bar owner, Shaney Fleet, has two choices when a garbage collection service tries to extort money—pay or fight. Fleet decides to fight, and in the process his apartment is burned down and he goes to jail, where he is so badly beaten that he ends up in the hospital. To add insult to injury, his neighbors help themselves to whatever he has left. The police are remote and unable to help. In the end, Fleet loses his bar but retains his fighting spirit. Library Journal contributor Albert E. Wilhelm called Garbage “a well- wrought parable of modern urban life.”
In the National Book Award finalist Frog, Dixon brings together a collection of short stories, novellas, letters, essays, poems, and two novels surrounding the life of one protagonist—Howard Tetch, a teacher and family man. The stories, or chapters, are arranged without regard to chronology, so Tetch’s marriage, childhood, anecdotes of his children’s lives, and aging and death intermix, creating a conglomeration of his fantasies and memories. Episodes overlap, variations on the same story are presented, and the reader is often left to decipher the “truth.” Within the space of two chapters, for example, Tetch’s daughter Olivia is lost forever at the beach, only to show up as a member of the family at his funeral, without the separation indicated. “Events rotate in a kaleidoscope, the bright fragments fall, and the author’s eye focuses on his protagonist’s self-absorption, through chains of immense paragraphs, each a story in itself,” observed Friedman.
Sybil Steinberg advised in Publishers Weekly: “Readers attuned to the author’s run-on style may warm to a cunning, sexy, audacious performance; others will find this an arty bore.” Jim Dwyer praised Frog in the Library Journal for its “labyrinthine structure, rapid-fire wordplay, vivid descriptions, and raw emotional power.” Washington Post Book World contributor Steven Moore concluded: “For readers who can see through such bad writing and relish the immediacy it offers, its vitality, its feel of catching life on the wing as Dixon’s characters endlessly try to explain themselves to others or to themselves, Frog will be a memorable experience.”
The same permutations of repetitious event and imagery form the basis of Dixon’s 1995 novel, Interstate. Through eight divergent versions of the story, a father named Nathan Frey grapples with the horror of losing a daughter in a freak murder on the highway. Over and over again the events of the shooting are revisited, each time from an entirely different perspective.
“Italo Calvino and Alain Robbe-Grillet have also written novels that begin again and again, revising themselves, but the subjects of these novels are only themselves,” observed George Stade in the New York Times Book Review. “Neither of them has brought off anything like the broken eloquence of Nathan’s voice, which is as distinct and original and American as Mark Twain’s, if otherwise very different.” In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Allen Barra commended Dixon for his experimental style, noting: “In this, his 17th book, Stephen Dixon has honed his radical techniques to their finest sheen.” Barra concluded: “There is the intriguing possibility that the narrator, in recounting the story, can’t recall all the details himself and keeps changing its landscape slightly. There is also the even more intriguing possibility that each narrative is simply a blueprint of the father’s subconscious fears for his children and his own helplessness to protect them in the outside world.”
Gould: A Novel in Two Novels presents the stories of Gould Bookbinder, a New York City college instructor and book reviewer, in a form typically Dixon’s: non-traditional and nonlinear, subverting the conformist expectation of the novel into fragments that, when studied and considered together, create a multifaceted whole. This time, the novel is comprised of two shorter works: “Abortions” and “Evangeline.” The first tells of five affairs over a span of forty years, from Gould’s first, fumbling, manipulative, and self-centered sexual experience at age seventeen, to a self-centered and manipulative affair in his late fifties—each of which produced an abortion or miscarriage. The second is a long flashback exploring his troubled relationship with Evangeline, a divorcee with a young son. Their relationship is held together primarily by good sex and his genuine affection for and devotion to her son, Brons, who is the reason why Gould fails to break off his affair with the unpredictably tempered Evangeline, who, among other endearing qualities, effusively hates New York and is casually anti-Semitic. All the while Gould maintains a marriage and two daughters, but he is insatiable in his urge to engender yet a third offspring, over the overt protestations of his seriously ill wife, Sally, suffering from multiple sclerosis. Gould is obsessed with the desire not only to have sex, but to actively procreate—generally achieved through coercion and trickery, increasingly aggressive in his attempts to block any objections to his desires, regardless of the consequences to the women embroiled in his life.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted: “Characteristically, Dixon … writes looping run-on sentences filled with dialogue, a style that captures the manic momentum of Gould’s consciousness. Dixon’s subject is human malleability. He excels at depicting men who try many versions of themselves.” Jim Dwyer stated in Library Journal: “Dixon has created a deeply flawed and fascinating character. Highly recommended.” And Anthony Quinn wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “Stephen Dixon’s novel seems at times to be paddling around in that stream of consciousness—sentences that snake on interminably, multiple elisions of speech and thought, a cavalier way with names and pronouns—but there is enough rigor and discipline in the writing to maintain a general coherence without sacrificing fluency. And while the book may not have an altogether reader-friendly style, its chronicle of one man’s life and loves is never less than absorbing.” Quinn further noted how “Mr. Dixon plainly is not entering his protagonist in a popularity contest; but he is creating an intimate, vivid, emotionally truthful and often funny portrait of an educated and sexually voracious American male in the second half of the 20th century.” Quinn concluded: “Given that his (anti)hero starts the narrative as a repellant, sex- driven creep, Stephen Dixon has effected a strange turnaround by the close of this remarkable book: we may not like Gould Bookbinder, but after being privy to the minutest contortions of his interior life, we may at least feel stirrings of forgiveness, if not outright sympathy.”
Thirty: Pieces of a Novel revisits the life of Gould Bookbinder, in thirty more chapters of Gouldiana, this time exploring the neuroses, regrets, hopes, and anxieties from his earliest childhood (in “The Dinner Table”) to his older years, his mother’s death, his divorce, and beyond. Actually, nothing ever being quite as it might seem at first when dealing with the ever- tricksterish Dixon, there are indeed twenty-nine stories, plus a thirtieth segment, which consists of fifteen additional stories, all with separate titles, gathered together under the subcategory “Ends.” The still sex-obsessed Gould may be obsessed with bedding nubile strangers, but he now displays he can be loving and loyal (albeit in his own peculiar fashion) in tenderly caring for his slowly dying mother and his wife, who, like his mother, is now wheelchair-bound, and in his relationship with his pair of sharp-witted daughters. The vignettes are connected by the common thread of sex: Gould is wolfishly ogling some female bypasser and engaging in elaborate, premasturbatory sexual fantasies—a waitress at a Maine vacation resort or a girl playing frisbee in the park—or trying to seduce the twenty-three-year-old daughter of an academic colleague, or chasing a belly dancer aboard a cruise ship, or remembering an episode from his youth where, on the way to his girlfriend’s house, he became uncontrollably aroused spying in the window of a parked car at a teenaged couple engaging in intercourse. The stories in “Ends” present alternate, incompatible endings to the novel, including variants on Gould’s own death.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer stated that “Dixon’s fiction never stops. Not only does he write lots of it … but his insights into motive, emotion, interaction, speech, and thought are as prodigious as his output.” This reviewer also noted that “Dixon’s prose can be brilliantly accurate, or draining, or excruciating, or all three. … Sometimes the novel feels vertiginously dense, like a three-hour movie consisting of all close-ups. At other times it’s simply more demanding, and more rewarding, than ordinary, ordinarily plotted novels.” In the New York Times Book Review, Vince Passaro criticized the author: “Dixon’s problem is that over a long career he has relied on [his] strengths too heavily and repeated them too often; he has turned them into mere effect. The run-on sentences, the rapid-fire but mundane stream of consciousness, the apparently frank but merely amphetamined dialogue that goes back and forth and back and forth within page after page of unbroken paragraphs that stretch as far as the eye can SEE: these devices are no longer energized by an author who has anything fresh to say.” He added that “Gould’s lascivious nature is supposed to propel these stories and give them what little power to shock they have. But the sexuality is bland and unsurprising; the cleaning up, one senses, takes longer than the act.”
In a New York Times Book Review review of Dixon’s novel I, critic Adam Baker remarked that “Dixon is known for his self-questioning metafiction, and in his new novel he offers yet another sprawling, autobiographical book about alternative paths.” The book, a collection of nineteen chapters that could each stand alone as a separate story, centers on the unnamed protagonist, who refers to himself only as “I.” He is a middle-aged writer who cares for his daughters and for his wheelchair-bound wife, who is slowly succumbing to a serious chronic disease. As “I” does his best to navigate the difficulties of his life and of those around him, he ponders topics such as what would have happened if he and his wife had never met, and what it would be like if he had her illness instead. In other sections, “I” considers his professional work and writer’s block; looks at what happens when social commitments are not met; and explores the emotional cost of failing to connect with a writer whose work he admires.
The “real triumph of Dixon’s work is the emotional power generated by close attention to the specificities of the protagonist’s interaction with his wife and family,” in tandem with his attempts to understand and come to terms with a pervading sense of anger he constantly feels, commented Aaron Gwyn in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Old Friends traces the life stories of Irv and Leonard, two writers who met as young men and who are rapidly reaching the precarious and uncertain years of late middle age. Neither writer has gained great renown, but they have made a living, and their friendship remains sound. They have encountered troubles and tragedies: Irv must care for his disabled wife, while Leonard is slowly slipping into a dementia caused by Lyme disease. Though his characters suffer, Dixon treats them with compassion as they continue to age, interact, and cope with the struggles and changes that inevitably befall them. “What makes this book so good is Dixon’s ability to invent characters just average enough that readers can identify with the banality of their pain,” according to a contributor to Publishers Weekly.
Phone Rings uses as its opening image the concept of the dreaded phone call informing someone of the death of a loved one. When Stu Fine answers his ringing phone, he learns that his much-loved brother Dan has died in a freak accident while out jogging. As the story unfolds, the reader learns of the brothers’ close relationship and the number of unnatural deaths that the family has suffered. Stu tells of his other siblings’ early, tragic deaths; his father’s hard-working life as a dentist that ultimately crumbles when he is imprisoned for involvement in an illegal abortion ring; and the dispersion of his mother’s belongings after her death. The phone metaphor returns again in an emotional scene in which Stu reaches for the phone to call his brother and tell him about an event from his day, but remembers with a jolt that Dan is dead. “This epic account of the life of a family ranks among Dixon’s most ambitious novels,” commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Though told in Dixon’s traditional dense style of long sentences, some reviewers felt the tragic story of the Fine family still worked. “Violating every sacred canon of narrative construction, Dixon has nonetheless fashioned an intimate, wrenching picture of loss—how the impossibly great value of a life can be taken away and never brought back,” remarked New York Times Book Review contributor Sven Birkerts. “In Phone Rings it’s death, ironically, that gives this prolific master’s inimitable voice new life,” observed Thomas Haley, writing on Time Out Chicago.
In his novel Meyer, Dixon tells the story of aging protagonist Meyer Ostrower, a sixty-eight-year-old writer and college professor whose obsessions include writing, death, his physical health, and, most important of all, sex. Though his sex life is moribund and unexciting, Meyer often occupies an almost Walter Mitty-like imaginary world in which his interactions, disputes, and sheer presence lead to vigorous bouts of copulation with wife, acquaintances, and strangers. When not dwelling on sex, he nurses an almost neurotic fear of death, obsessing about his own death and the demise of those around him, wondering if his latest ache or pain is a harbinger of doom, and wondering how death will eventually take him and those he knows and loves. In addition, Meyer struggles to overcome a rock-solid case of writer’s block before his writing career dwindles away to nothing. In telling Meyer’s story, Dixon “puts together a series of quirky and powerful vignettes about aging,” reported a Publishers Weekly reviewer. While Dixon’s dense writing style can be difficult to traverse, “it’s impossible to stop reading, in part because Dixon is so amazing at giving the sense of being inside somebody else’s head,” remarked Time Out New York contributor Craig Morgan Teicher. In assessing Meyer, Library Journal critic Jim Dwyer wrote that it offers more evidence that Dixon is “one of America’s finest storytellers.”
Dixon is “as inventive as he is prolific, his work as challenging as it is poignant and funny,” commented an interviewer on Failbetter.com. Dixon told that same interviewer that he possesses no particular method of planning, starting, or finishing a piece of fiction. Dixon told the interviewer, however: “I am a writer of comedy, drama, and tragedy. I am never maudlin. I write about the deepest things in me, fears and memories of loss. I try to get the tragedies right. I touch upon, or deal with, universal tragedies, just as I deal with universal joys. When I’m writing a tragic story or chapter, I sink into it deeply. I feel very deeply about the situations and characters I write about.” In terms of being a writer who did not publish much until after age forty, Dixon told the interviewer that although he always managed to sell his stories, he did experience some frustration at not being able to interest publishers in his longer work. “I thought of giving up a few times before I turned forty, but I was kidding myself. I never could have given up writing. It was the one thing I liked doing most. Why would I ever give it up?” Still, even after establishing his novelist credentials, he faced other disappointments. Thirty was not a commercial success, and thereafter his publisher, Henry Holt, silently ignored him, he told the interviewer. “They didn’t even return the last novel I sent them,” he remarked. Still, Dixon has persevered, and has seen some of his recent books published by Melville House. As he prepared for his retirement from Johns Hopkins University in May 2007, Dixon looked forward to leaving the world of academia behind, filing away the last student manuscript, and becoming, at last, a full-time writer.
In his sixteenth novel, His Wife Leaves Him, the author portrays a marriage through an elderly man’s loss of his wife. In fact, Dixon himself lost his wife in 2009, just two years after retiring from teaching. Anne Frydman was a fellow professor, poet and translator from Russian. Suffering from multiple sclerosis, she had been confined to a wheelchair for many years at the time of her death. This, in part, inspired His Wife Leaves Him. The novel opens with professor Martin Samuels learning that his wife, Gwen, has had a crippling stroke. Over the next two years, she suffers more strokes, and Martin dutifully and lovingly takes care of her. However, one night, stressed and impatient, Martin does the unforgivable. He shouts out, in earshot of his wife, that he wishes she would just die and leave him in peace. That night, she dies. The rest of the novel takes place the night of Gwen’s memorial service, and Martin is lying in bed, remembering the long arc of their courtship and marriage. “The reader’s knowledge of this couple becomes almost uncomfortably thorough. Mr. Dixon sedulously records every high and low of their relationship,” according to a Wall Street Journal reviewer. The reviewer went on to note: “You emerge from this difficult but enriching book feeling as weary as Martin when he finally rises from bed—and, like him, comforted by having brought the dead back to the world, if only for a night.”
Others also had high praise for His Wife Leaves Him. A Publishers Weekly contributor called this a “stunningly intimate” novel. The reviewer added: “Dixon excels at evoking the nature of memory with its lapses, intricately linked associations and emotional force.” Writing in the Jewish Book Council website, David Evanier added further praise: “[Dixon’s] work will stand as a penetrating record of what a man’s love for a woman can be, and what it means to be a humane, sensitive, flawed, passionate participant in life in our time.” Similarly, Boston Globe reviewer Rebecca Steinitz felt that His Wife Leaves Him “is a gem.” Steinitz added: “Here’s hoping it finally brings Dixon the wider readership he deserves.”
Dixon writes in a lighter mood in the 2016 novel, Letters to Kevin, an absurdist tale of a New Yorker, Rudy Foy, who badly wants to get in touch with his friend Kevin Wafer, who lives in Palo Alto. But try as hard as he can, Rudy’s attempts at connection are unsuccessful. Phone calls do not work; while calling from a payphone, Rudy is trapped inside as the call box is shipped off to Alaska. Letters are returned; a trip to the airport is foiled. Dixon accompanies his farcical text with his own line drawings. Writing in NPR.org, Jason Heller noted of Letters to Kevin, “As its title implies, [this] is an epistolary novel…. Wordplay and ludicrousness abound in ‘Letters.’ Rudy’s entire journey is a tower of absurdities, each one thrown precariously on the one that came before.” Heller further called this a ” breezy, goofily illustrated road-trip of a tale.” Writing in the Irish Times, Kevin Gildea was, however, less enthusiastic, commenting: “Despite moments of hilarity the resulting book is too often tiresome.”
In his 2016 story collection, Late Stories, Dixon offers thirty-one interconnected tales of an elderly narrator, Philip Seidel, dealing with, aging, death, and grief. These tales “offer moment-by-moment deep dives into longing and despair and forgetfulness, memory and fantasy,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic, who added: “Dixon is a master of the minor moments, the dreams and the disappointments, that transfigure every one of us.” Online Foreword Reviews contributor Peter Dabbene also had praise for this collection, noting, “Dixon’s work is deeply impactful.” Full Stop website writer Daniel Green was likewise impressed with Late Stories, concluding: “The act of processing experience, of attempting to bring to it a suitable form of aesthetic coherence, is Stephen Dixon’s most immediate subject. The myriad ways in which this might be done have been abundantly realized in Dixon’s fiction for over 40 years now, and Late Stories is an excellent illustration of this achievement. Through Dixon’s work we come to recognize what is most “real” about human experience: the effort to understand it.”
Dixon’s final story collections, Dear Abigail and Other Stories and Writing, Written, both from 2019, return to ruminations of his wife’s death. In the former, Philip Seidel, the narrator of Late Stories, returns in a series of stories in which he struggles to let go of his late wife. Writing, Written similarly deals with the struggles of Charles, a writer, to come to terms with his death of his wife, Eleanor.
Writing in the online Nervous Breakdown, Michael Mungiello noted that “these two collections are twin contributions to the canon of late-stage Dixon who has for years deeply and productively lingered on the single theme of writing loss.” Mungiello added: “Dear Abigail and Writing, Written are vital acts of preservation as well as the work of a master. … Sentence by sentence Dixon’s fiction takes us from death to home as surely as life takes us day by day in the opposite direction.”
Dixon once told CA: “My writing comes first in my work,” Dixon once said when he was still teaching: “But to get to my writing, I first must finish all my school work. And I have lots of school work to do, but I never feel free to write, and I have to feel free and unburdened of looming work of other kinds, so I do all my school work before I do my writing. That sometimes means I’ll stay up to 3:00 a.m. finishing student papers; I’ll go to bed tired but I wake up liberated, and ready to write. I must teach in order to pay the bills. I like teaching, but I’d prefer just to read and write. I’ve a lot to write and I write every single day. New ideas always come when I’m writing, so the process of writing is very important for me. … I write only for myself, my writing has to excite me or it’s worthless, boring, and I then have to try something else; and I must always do something new. If I ever find myself going over familiar ground in a familiar way, meaning my familiar or other writers, I’d give up writing—that wouldn’t be so hard; I’ve written plenty, more than anyone would ever want to read—and try something else, or just read, walk, think, and keep my manual typewriter polished and clean for possible future writing days.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 52, 1989.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 130: American Short-Story Writers since World War II, Gale, 1993.
Short Story Criticism, Volume 16, Gale, 1994.
PERIODICALS
American Book Review, January-February, 2000, Jerome Klinkowitz, “Little Things Mean a Lot,” p. 6.
Booklist, January 1, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of Long Made Short, p. 806; March 15, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of The Stories of Stephen Dixon, p. 1326; June 1, 1995, Janet St. John, review of Interstate, p. 1727; February 15, 1997, Jim O’Laughlin, review of Gould: A Novel in Two Novels, p. 1002; March 1, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Thirty: Pieces of a Novel, p. 1154; March 15, 1999, Frank Caso, review of Sleep, p. 1289.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2007, review of Meyer.
Library Journal, August, 1988, Albert E. Wilhelm, review of Garbage, p. 173; December, 1989, Frances Poole, review of Love and Will, p. 166; January, 1992, Jim Dwyer, review of Frog, p. 172; January, 1997, Jim Dwyer, review of Gould, p. 145; May 15, 1999, Edward B. St. John, review of Thirty, p. 124; October 1, 2007, Jim Dwyer, review of Meyer, p. 58.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 28, 1995, Allen Barra, “The Tales as Talisman,” review of Interstate, pp. 1, 11.
New York Times Book Review, October 14, 1984, John Domini, review of Time to Go, p. 16; July 7, 1985, John House, review of Fall and Rise, p. 16; June 4, 1989, Jennifer Levin, review of The Play and Other Stories, p. 19; December 17, 1989, Joyce Reiser Kornblatt, review of Love and Will, p. 23; July 1, 1990, Steve Erickson, review of All Gone, p. 18; November 17, 1991, Alan H. Friedman, review of Frog, p. 14; February 20, 1994, Linda Barrett Osborne, review of Long Made Short, p. 22; September 4, 1994, William Ferguson, review of The Stories of Stephen Dixon, p. 12; May 21, 1995, George Stade, review of Interstate, p. 46; April 20, 1997, Anthony Quinn, “The Jerk,” review of Gould, p. 12; May 16, 1999, Vince Passaro, “S.A.S.E.,” review of Thirty, p. 12; August 25, 2002, Adam Baer, review of I, p. 20; December 4, 2005, Sven Birkerts, “Partial Recall,” review of Phone Rings, p. 73.
Publishers Weekly, September, 29, 1989, Sybil Steinberg, review of Love and Will, p. 58; November 8, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of Frog, p. 48; December 13, 1993, review of Long Made Short, p. 66; January 24, 1994, review of The Stories of Stephen Dixon, p. 40; April 3, 1995, review of Interstate, p. 46; January 6, 1997, review of Gould, p. 64; February 1, 1999, review of Sleep, p. 74; February 15, 1999, review of Thirty, p. 85; October 11, 2004, review of Old Friends, p. 56; August 29, 2005, review of Phone Rings, p. 33; August 20, 2007, review of Meyer, p. 47.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1992, Marilyn Moss, review of Frog, p. 184; fall, 1997, Thomas Howe, review of Gould, p. 235; fall, 1999, Irving Malin, review of Thirty, p. 161; spring, 2003, Aaron Gwyn, review of I.
San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 1984, Paul Skenazy, article on Stephen Dixon.
Studies in Short Fiction, winter, 1990, Christopher Metress, review of Love and Will, p. 115; summer, 1990, Peter La Salle, review of All Gone, p. 421.
Time, August 13, 1984, Patricia Blake, review of Time to Go, p. B4
Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 1981, James Lasdun, review of Fourteen Stories, p. 606.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), June 11, 1995, review of Interstate, p. 6.
Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1988, review of Garbage, p. 129.
Washington Post Book World, February 22, 1981, review of Fourteen Stories, p. 10; August 5, 1984, review of Time to Go, p. 9; January 19, 1992, Steven Moore, review of Frog, p. 6.
ONLINE
Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ (October 12, 2013), Rebecca Steinetz, review of Hi Wife Leaves Him.
City Paper Online, http://citypaper.com/ (July 7, 2007), John Barry, “The End of U,” interview with Stephen Dixon.
Failbetter.com, http://www.failbetter.com/ (January 7, 2008), interview with Stephen Dixon.
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (December 13, 2019), Stephen Dixon.
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (September 1, 2016), Peter Dabbene, review of Late Stories.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (December 1, 2016 ), Daniel Green, review of Late Stories.
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (October 15, 2016), Kevin Gildea, review of Letters to Kevin.
Jewish Book Council, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (December 18, 2013), David Evanier, review of His Wife Leaves Him.
Johns Hopkins University, http://www.jhu.edu/ (October 16, 1997), “JHU’s Stephen Dixon Reflects on His Life’s Work.”
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (July 20, 2016), review of Late Stories.
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, http://www.mcsweeneys.net/ (June 11, 2002), Lee Epstein, “Stephen Dixon Week: For Intensity, an Interview with Stephen Dixon, on His Writing and His New Book,” interview with Stephen Dixon.
Nervous Breakdown, http://thenervousbreakdown.com/ October 14, 2019, Michael Mungiello, review of Dear Abigail and Other Stories and Writing, Written.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (May 22, 2016), Jason Heller , review of Letters To Kevin.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (September 16, 2013), review of His Wife Leaves Him.
Time Out Chicago Online, http://www.timeout.com/chicago/ (October 27, 2005), Thomas Haley, review of Phone Rings.
Time Out New York Online, http://www.timeout.com/newyork/ (September 20, 2007), Craig Morgan Teicher, review of Meyer.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (September 6, 2013), review of His Wife Leaves Him.
OBITUARIES
Baltimore Sun, https://www.baltimoresun.com/ (November 7, 2019), Jacques Kelly, “Stephen Dixon, Novelist and Retired Johns Hopkins Writing Professor, Dies at 83.”
HUB, https://hub.jhu.edu/ (November 8, 2019), Rachel Wallach, “Stephen Dixon, Prolific Writer and Longtime Writing Seminars Professor, Dies at 83.”
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (November 7, 2019), Kristopher Jansma, “Remembering Stephen Dixon: Writer, Teacher, Friend .”
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (November 10, 2019), “Stephen Dixon, Prolific Writer of Experimental Fiction, Dies at 83.”
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (November 6, 2019), Harrison Smith, “Stephen Dixon, Prolific Writer of Experimental, Unsettling Fiction, Dies at 83.”
Stephen Dixon
(1936 - 2019)
Stephen Dixon was the author of Old Friends, Phone Rings, and numerous other books. He was twice a finalist for the National Book Award and won honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Novels
Time to Go (1984)
Fall and Rise (1985)
Garbage (1988)
Frog (1992)
Interstate (1995)
Gould (1997)
30 (1998)
Tisch (2000)
I (2002)
Old Friends (2004)
Phone Rings (2005)
End of I (2006)
Meyer (2007)
Story of a Story and Other Stories (2012)
His Wife Leaves Him (2013)
Letters To Kevin (2016)
Collections
14 Stories (1980)
Movies (1983)
The Play and Other Stories (1988)
Love and Will (1989)
All Gone (1990)
Friends (1990)
Long Made Short (1993)
The Stories of Stephen Dixon (1994)
Man On Stage (1996)
Sleep (1999)
What Is All This? (2010)
Late Stories (2016)
Dear Abigail (2018)
Writing, Written (2019)
Dear Abigail / Late Stories (2019)
Anthologies containing stories by Stephen Dixon
Virtually Now (1996)
Short stories
The Hole (1994)
Stephen Dixon (author)
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Stephen Dixon
Born
Stephen Bruce Ditchik
June 6, 1936
New York City, U.S.
Died
November 6, 2019 (aged 83)
Towson, Maryland, U.S.
Occupation
Authoracademic
Alma mater
City College of New York
Stephen Dixon (June 6, 1936 – November 6, 2019) was an American author of novels and short stories.
Contents
1
Life and career
2
Works
2.1
Novels
2.2
Story collections
3
References
4
External links
Life and career[edit]
Dixon was born on June 6, 1936 in Manhattan, New York. He was the fifth of seven children of Florence Leder, a beauty queen, chorus girl on Broadway, and interior decorator, and Abraham M. Ditchik.[1]
Dixon was nominated for the National Book Award twice, in 1991 for Frog and in 1995 for Interstate.[2] He also was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize.
He graduated from the City College of New York in 1958 and was a faculty member of Johns Hopkins University. Before becoming a full-time writer Dixon worked a plethora of odd jobs ranging from bus driver to bartender. In his early 20s he worked as a journalist and in radio, interviewing such monumental figures as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.[3] He cited Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, and Anton Chekhov as his favorite authors.
Dixon died from complications of Parkinson's disease at a hospice center in Towson, Maryland on November 6, 2019; he was 83.[4]
Works[edit]
Novels[edit]
Work (Street Fiction Press, 1977)
Too Late (Harper & Row, 1978)
Fall & Rise (North Point Press, 1985)
Garbage (Cane Hill Press, 1988)
Frog (British American Publishing, 1991)
Interstate (Henry Holt, 1995)
Gould (Henry Holt, 1997)
30: Pieces of a Novel (Henry Holt, 1999)
Tisch (Red Hen Press, 2000) (his first completed novel, written 1961-1969)
I. (McSweeney's, 2002)
Old Friends (Melville House Publishing, 2004)
Phone Rings (Melville House Publishing, 2005)
End of I. (McSweeney's, 2006)
Meyer (Melville House Publishing, 2007)
Story of a Story and Other Stories: A Novel (Fugue State Press), 2012
His Wife Leaves Him (Fantagraphics Books), 2013
Letters to Kevin (Fantagraphics Books), 2016
Beatrice (Publishing Genius), 2016
Story collections[edit]
No Relief (Street Fiction Press, 1976)
Quite Contrary: The Mary and Newt Story (Harper & Row, 1979)
14 Stories (Johns Hopkins, 1980)
Movies: Seventeen Stories (North Point Press, 1983)
Time to Go (Will and Magna Stories) (Johns Hopkins, 1984)
The Play and Other Stories (Coffee House Press, 1988)
Love and Will: Twenty Stories (Paris Review Editions / British American Publishing, 1989)
All Gone: 18 Short Stories (Johns Hopkins, 1990)
Friends: More Will and Magna Stories (Asylum Arts, 1990)
Long Made Short (Johns Hopkins, 1994)
The Stories of Stephen Dixon (Henry Holt, 1994)
Man on Stage: Play Stories (Hi Jinx Press, 1996)
Sleep (Coffee House Press, 1999)
The Switch (Rain Taxi, 1999) (a single story; Rain Taxi Brainstorm Series, Number 3)
What Is All This?: The Uncollected Stories of Stephen Dixon (Fantagraphics Books, 2010)
Late Stories (Trnsfr Books, 2016)[5]
[6]Dear Abigail and Other Stories (Trnsfr Books, 2019)
Writing, Written (Fantagraphics Books, 2019)
QUOTE:
"hyper-realistic novels and short stories reflected his fascination with personal loss, sex, heartbreak, disaster, marriage and old age. ... He never found fame or big sales, but his idiosyncratic storytelling drew praise."
Stephen Dixon, Prolific Writer of Experimental Fiction, Dies at 83
The author of 18 novels and hundreds of short stories, he never found fame or big sales. But his idiosyncratic storytelling drew praise.
Stephen Dixon in 1986. He produced fiction at a daunting clip, but he once said that none of his publishers ever made money on his books.
Credit...
Baltimore Sun
Nov. 10, 2019
By Richard Sandomir
Stephen Dixon, whose hyper-realistic novels and short stories reflected his fascination with personal loss, sex, heartbreak, disaster, marriage and old age, died on Wednesday at a hospice in Towson, Md. He was 83.
His daughter Sophia Dixon Frydman said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease and pneumonia.
Mr. Dixon produced fiction at a daunting clip. Working on a portable typewriter, he published 18 novels and about 600 stories. His final story — about a man who was 80, like him, and who had a cat like his cat — was published in Heavy Feather Review last month, while he was in hospice.
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He never found fame or big sales, but his idiosyncratic storytelling drew praise.
“One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon, one submits to it,” the critic Alan H. Friedman wrote in his review of Mr. Dixon’s novel “Frog” in The New York Times in 1991. “An unstoppable prose expands the arteries while an edgy, casual nervousness overpowers the will.”
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Reviewing Mr. Dixon’s novel “Frog,” a critic wrote, “One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon, one submits to it.”
Mr. Dixon tinkered with syntax and diction and used an array of narrative tricks that made his fiction compelling, but sometimes challenging.
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His paragraphs could seem to run forever, as if the start of a new one would destroy his momentum. He recounted multiple versions of the same event in the novel “Interstate” (1991), in which a father imagines, eight different ways, the shooting of one of his daughters by a driver on a highway and its aftermath.
And in his very short short story “Wife in Reverse,” Mr. Dixon started with a woman’s death and ended years earlier, when she meets her husband.
“His wife dies, mouth slightly parted and one eye open,” Mr. Dixon wrote. “He knocks on his younger daughter’s bedroom door and says ‘You better come. Mom seems to be expiring.’”
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Mr. Dixon in 1998. Working on a portable typewriter, he published 18 novels and about 600 stories.
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Mr. Dixon started teaching at the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 1980 and remained there until he retired in 2007. Porochista Khakpour, a novelist and memoirist, said Mr. Dixon had been the reason she studied at Hopkins.
“He permanently alters how you approach storytelling,” she told The Hub, the university’s news website, after Mr. Dixon’s death. She added, “He continues to be the single greatest influence on my work, and I have his voice in my head with everything I write.”
Mr. Dixon’s honors include several O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment of the Arts grants. He was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1991, for “Frog,” and in 1995, for “Interstate.”
But Mr. Dixon did not become a boldface name in literature. He once said that none of his publishers ever made money on his books.
“He’s not better known because, I think, his writing was intimate and personal and cut so deeply,” Matthew Petti, an English professor who is writing a biography of Mr. Dixon, said by phone. “He didn’t tackle big worldly issues or talk about American culture. His guys were just men living a human life.”
Stephen Bruce Ditchik was born on June 6, 1936, in Manhattan, the fifth of seven children. His father, Abraham, was a dentist; his mother, Florence (Leder) Ditchik, was a chorus girl and beauty queen before her marriage and later an interior designer.
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Just before Stephen’s fourth birthday, his father was convicted of extorting money from doctors to protect them from prosecution for performing abortions. While Dr. Ditchik was imprisoned at Sing Sing, his wife changed the family name to Dixon and explained his father’s absence to Stephen by saying that he was in the Army dental corps in New Mexico.
When Stephen was about 10, he learned what his father had done when he found court documents and trial transcripts in the basement of his family’s brownstone.
Stephen made an attempt to follow his father into dentistry — he had regained his dentist’s license after leaving prison — by studying in a pre-dental program at the City College of New York. But he did not enjoy science and instead went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in international relations.
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Mr. Dixon at an exhibition of his papers and other memorabilia at Johns Hopkins University in 2007, the year he retired after teaching there for 27 years.
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The Baltimore Sun
After graduation he moved to Washington, where he worked for pulp crime magazines and as a radio reporter. Later, back in Manhattan, he was an editor at CBS News.
But after starting to write short stories — inspired by the example of his brother Jimmy — he knew he had found his métier. “It was like a cork popping out of my skull,” he told Johns Hopkins Magazine in 2007. “I was in ecstasy.”
After Jimmy, a magazine writer, died in 1960 when the freighter he was on in the North Atlantic disappeared, Mr. Dixon felt that he was continuing his brother’s work. Jimmy Dixon had a short story published after his death.
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“There have been times when I’ve had the feeling he was leaning over my shoulder, giving me approval and directing my prose,” Mr. Dixon told The Baltimore Sun in 2007.
He advanced his literary education with a fellowship at Stanford University in 1963 and published his first story that year in The Paris Review. Fiction began to flow from his typewriter; he wrote for major magazines like Esquire and Playboy and for literary reviews and journals, none of them too obscure for him to send pitches to.
In a review of two of Mr. Dixon’s books in The Times in 1999, the novelist Vince Passaro recalled working as a reader at Antaeus magazine and seeing story submissions from Mr. Dixon arrive regularly “in worn envelopes, hastily addressed,” with torn pieces of paper that were signed, “Here’s my latest, Stephen.”
“If you didn’t know who he was,” Mr. Passaro wrote, “you would have thought of him as an inmate with typewriter privileges, a desperate voice behind prison or asylum walls, so driven and copious was the prose.”
Mr. Dixon drew inspiration for his writing from his marriage to Anne Frydman, a poet, translator and Chekhov scholar who died of complications of multiple sclerosis in 2009, and his brother Don, whose death when a tree fell on him in 2002 is echoed in the freakish death of one of two brothers in “Phone Rings” (2005).
In addition to his daughter Sophia, Mr. Dixon is survived by another daughter, Antonia Dixon Frydman; a grandson; and his sisters, Marguerite Franco and Pat Dixon.
Mr. Dixon continued to write until recently, despite the effects of Parkinson’s and arthritis.
In “80,” the story published in Heavy Feather Review, he described an old man with wispy white hair, a pot belly and yearnings for a woman, looking at the day ahead at 3 a.m. He will do what he’s done for 60 years, as Mr. Dixon had done for about that long: write.
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“And that’s start a new story, or work on one of the unfinished ones till it’s finished, and on and on like that so he always has something to do and go back to every morning.”
“If that ever stops,” he added, “he doesn’t know what he’d do with his time other than go to the Y, shop for food, nap a lot, read, have lunch with a friend about once every six weeks and at night watch a movie his daughter arranged for him to get through her streaming service, if that’s what it’s called, on his wife’s old computer.”
Remembering Stephen Dixon: Writer, Teacher, Friend
Kristopher Jansma on the Two-Time National Book Award Finalist
By Kristopher Jansma
November 7, 2019
Stephen Dixon left us yesterday. The author of Frog (1991) and Interstate (1995) two National Book Award finalists, published some thirty other books, including collections of his over 500 short stories.
I first met Dixon on the final day of a class in my junior year of college called “Short Story in the 20th Century.” It was Spring of 2002, and our professor, Anne Frydman, had been teaching us all how to carefully dissect works of art by Anton Chekov, Flannery O’Connor, and JD Salinger. Each weekly session of three hours was devoted to picking apart just one short story by each master.
For that final class, we’d been assigned the story “Love and Will” by Stephen Dixon. I knew that Dixon taught in our writing program at Johns Hopkins University, and that he was married to Professor Frydman. She had multiple sclerosis and taught from a wheelchair. Once or twice, I had lingered after class to watch her husband come in to gently escort her away through the hallways.
Only entering our classroom that day did we learn that Frydman had invited him to join us in the discussion. There he sat—the author himself, wise and calm at the head of our long seminar table, interested in what 14 college juniors had to say about his work.
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I don’t remember what, if anything I said of substance about the story to Stephen Dixon that day. Very likely I kept my mouth shut in complete terror. What I do remember is that when we finished analyzing it, Dixon told us all about getting the story published in The American Review, when he was first starting out as a writer.
At 40, he’d already tried careers in dentistry, radio, and journalism, and while working as an editor at CBS News he’d begun to write fiction for his own amusement. His first few stories ran in The Paris Review, under the guidance of George Plimpton. He’d sent “Love and Will” to The American Review, but the editor there wanted him to make hundreds of edits.
Dixon told us how he’d fought each and every edit, one at a time, until at last the man surrendered and published the story without a single change. “You have to say what you mean,” he told us, and something about his tone made it like both a threat and a blessing. “And say it how you mean it.”
“Just keep writing,” he said, “Get a job tending bar or something and write and you’ll be fine.”
Was this practical advice to share with a room of aspiring writers? Perhaps not. But practicality never seemed to have anything to do with Stephen Dixon. He more than any other teacher I’ve known, embodied a kind of stubborn determination to his work that has gotten me back up off the mat again more than once in the years since.
The following year I enrolled in his one undergraduate workshop, a class called “The Long Work,” which was taught over two semesters and permitted a small number of undergraduate writers to bring in novels-in-progress. I’d written feverishly all summer to prepare, certain that Dixon was going to be a harsh critic. Instead I was surprised to find that, no matter how terrible our work was—and sometimes it was particularly terrible—he was infallibly kind to us, never failing to find something within it worth celebrating.
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Once, after a chapter of my novel was completely torn apart by my classmates (deservedly-so) Dixon drew everyone’s attention to a few short lines at the end, where my narrator described driving through his hometown late at night, and trying each time to get through all three stoplights in town without hitting a red. “Make the rest of it like this,” he said, “and you’ll be on to something.”
He was a mystery. I read his novels at home, or tried to—some, like Gould (1997), I loved without quite understanding why. Subtitled “A Novel in Two Novels” the book was filled with dense, unending paragraphs and sentences that spanned pages. It was about a writer who seemed a lot like Stephen Dixon, only a lot less likable than the man we encountered each week at workshop. The book was dark and funny. It was what I’d learned to call “postmodern” and “experimental” but unlike much of what I’d seen in that vein at that age, his book was not dry or obtuse or academic. He’d unlocked a kind of secret, deeply personal space within all those enormous, intimidating paragraphs.
We all loved him. Loved the doodles he’d make in the corners of his responses to our work, which were always typed on a typewriter back in his office. Sometimes, he’d disappear after a break for ten or fifteen extra minutes, and we’d wonder if he’d forgotten us. We’d walk down the hall and listen at his door for the typebars hammering away. He was always in the middle of something, but he never left us for long.
Later that year I went inside the office for the first time, to ask for a letter of recommendation for graduate school.
“Why would you want to do that?” he asked me, as if I’d just volunteered to run into a plate of glass.
I told him I thought I was getting better, but I wasn’t sure how I’d keep it up on my own.
“Just keep writing,” he said, “Get a job tending bar or something and write and you’ll be fine.”
I pointed out that he taught in a graduate writing program, and he conceded that some of them were all right, but I should never take out loans for one, and that I should never go to one with more than a dozen students. Really I should not go at all, and, again, tend bar somewhere instead.
I handed him the pre-stamped envelopes and thanked him. He asked me why I’d put the stamps in the wrong corner of all the envelopes. Was this some kind of a joke? I admitted that no—sadly, it was not.
*
I did end up going to graduate school, and I took out loans, and there were definitely more than a dozen students. But while I was there I thought about Dixon often, and somehow his warnings made me want to work even harder so I could show him it had not all been a waste of time. A few years later I got my chance, when I heard he was going to be in New York City to read from one of his books. A friend and I attended and I eagerly went up to him at the end to say hello. To my surprise he remembered me, and the advice he’d given me. How had it all worked out, he asked?
“I expect nothing, neither reviews or dough from my work. That can happen.”
In a rush, I told him that, yes, I had ignored all of his advice, but that I had gotten a tremendous amount out of my MFA program and was a much better writer now than I had been before—
He cut me off. “Of course you are,” he said.
“I am?”
“You’ve been writing for three more years. Of course you’re better now. But you’d be just as good if you’d stayed in Baltimore and tended bar.”
I left and wondered, each time I paid a monthly loan bill, if he’d been right after all.
*
Eight years later, I was still living in New York, still paying off the loans, and had begun a teaching career of my own. My first novel was due out in a few months, and my agent asked me for a list of names of people I knew who might want to read an ARC of the book and give it a blurb. I sent her every name I could think of—almost. She wrote back and asked why I hadn’t included Stephen Dixon, who I’d told her about many times. I said I wasn’t sure how to reach him, and that I was pretty sure he didn’t use email. The truth was that I was convinced he would not remember me after all this time, and that even if he did, he wouldn’t want to read my novel. She called my bluff, got his mailing address, and sent him a note on my behalf.
Three days later I got a letter in the mail. My name and address were typed on the envelope with a typewriter. The letter inside was typed, and short.
Dear Kris – I’m sorry I haven’t been able to finish your book yet. As soon as I do, I’ll send you something you can use on the jacket.
For a while I convinced myself that he had me mixed up with someone else. That in any case, I’d surely never hear from him again. The very next day I had a second letter in the mail. He’d finished reading, and he’d sent not just a blurb, but more words of encouragement. Then he emailed me the next day. “Good luck,” he wrote. “I mean every word I say.”
A writer has to mean every word they say. He’d taught me that, long ago.
He signed it, “Best, Stephen (no more ‘professor’).”
*
Over the years that followed I kept Dixon (I could never get the hang of “Stephen”) apprised of what felt like progress. He gave me advice on finding a full-time teaching job. I sent him a note when I heard that his wife had passed away. He sent his condolences when my sister died, telling me he’d lost his own sister to cancer at around the same age.
I tried to see him when I was doing a reading in Baltimore. He emailed that he’d try but, “I don’t get around much anymore—it’s nothing physical—so the chances are minimal.” A few days later, he wrote to say that he’d be coming up to New York for the publication of his new book His Wife Leaves Him…
…but I won’t be notifying anyone. I’ll just show up, and if for some reason people are there, then they’re there. I really have no interest in promoting my book, but will do what I can—show up; agree to be interviewed—for the sake of the luckless publisher.
Twenty years earlier, he’d been a finalist for the National Book Award twice in a row. Now, he said, he was publishing book after book without much notice from anyone.
I was entirely wrapped up in the beginnings of what I still only hoped would be an ongoing life as a writer. I couldn’t handle the idea that someone could get the kind of attention he’d once had and then see it all go away. I couldn’t hear him trying to explain that this was not the end of the world. “It means I can be alone with myself just to write. And I expect nothing, neither reviews or dough from my work. That can happen.”
My second novel came out and I kept on asking him for advice and reference letters. At one point he warned me against getting wrapped up in self-promotion and worrying about success, saying it would prevent me from ever being an artist. Embarrassed, and hurt, I stopped writing to him after that for almost a year.
Then one day I opened up a literary magazine I’d gotten a story into and discovered that just next to it was a piece by Dixon. He emailed me that same day, saying he’d just seen mine next to his, and that he’d liked it a lot.
*
We got back to our conversation about self-promotion—he said he had come around to my point of view to some degree. And with more distance from my pub date, I saw better what he’d been trying to tell me. That a writer can’t survive if they hang on every review or become obsessed by likes and retweets. That these things matter as little, in the span of a writing life, as being a finalist for a National Book Award, or two. “I guess I’m sort of infatuated with failure,” he told me. “it gets me going to write more. Success of any sort is a killer. But that’s just my feeling for me. […] The important thing, the only important thing to me, is that I keep writing. I love writing and I always seem to have something to write.”
More than once, he’d speculated that whichever book he was on then would probably be his last one. But he never stopped. Earlier this year he published two new collections of stories, Dear Abigail and Other Stories and Writing, Written just two weeks apart, with two different publishers.
I still think often of the day he came to talk about “Love and Will” and the story he’d told about fighting tooth and nail to preserve it from edits. By now I’ve had plenty of my own fights over edits. I’ve gone to the mat to save a single line from being changed. I’ve let hundreds of pages go without a whimper. I have begun to understand that both are necessary. I try my hardest every day to keep writing, to mean what I say, and say it how I mean. Do that, he taught me, and you can write anything.
*
There’s one other lasting memory I have of Dixon, back when he was still “Professor” to me. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if it is even my memory, or if it’s a story someone else told me that I loved so much I’ve now written myself into it, as I’ve written into the heart of my understanding of who he was.
One afternoon, on a drive near campus, I glanced out the window and saw a man pushing a woman in a wheelchair down a long hill. It took me a moment to recognize Dixon, and Anne. He was running pretty fast—a lot faster than I’d ever thought he could go. Her long white hair was flying up all around his face. They looked like two little kids, goofing around. They never knew we’d seen them.
Stephen Dixon, novelist and retired Johns Hopkins writing professor, dies at 83
By Jacques Kelly
Baltimore Sun |
Nov 07, 2019 | 11:23 AM
Stephen Dixon
Professor Stephen Dixon has never used an electronic or electric typewriter before. That also includes not using a computer to write his books. He is pictured using his manual typewriter to write his next novel. The computer in the background is his families, which he has never touched. (LLOYD FOX)
1 / 13
Stephen Dixon, a novelist who taught for decades at Johns Hopkins University, died Wednesday of Parkinson’s disease and pneumonia complications at Gilchrist Center Towson. The Ruxton resident was 83.
“Mr. Dixon was the most prolific short story writer of his generation, publishing well over 600 short stories in a remarkable career that spanned six decades and included multiple O’Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and appearances in Best American Short Stories,” said a family friend Matthew Petti, an English professor at the University of the District of Columbia who is writing a biography of Mr. Dixon.
[From The Archives] On the hook with author Stephen Dixon »
Mr. Petti also said that Mr. Dixon was twice nominated for the National Book Award and once for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
He also said, "He was the kindest man you would ever want to meet. He was the kind of person who would spot an elderly woman from a block away, sprint to her and help her cross a street. He took care of his wife for many years and gave his father shots for his diabetes. He said, ‘There was a job to do and I did it.’”
He recalled the help Mr. Dixon gave his students, “He would write pages of comments on their stories. There was always a line of students at his door.”
[Baltimore Sun Obituaries] »
He was born June 6, 1936 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the fifth of seven children whose grandparents emigrated from the Pale of Settlement in Poland, according to a family biography. He was the son of Abraham Ditchik, a dentist, and his wife, Florence Leder, a Broadway dancer who became an interior decorator.
He earned a degree at the City University of New York and had a fellowship at Stanford University.
In his 20s he was a radio reporter who eventually worked 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,” said the Sun’s 2007 story.
"I ducked under the rope and ran up the steps after him, " he said. "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.”
Mr. Dixon had been a professor for 27 years in the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. He moved to Baltimore in the early 1980s and lived in Charles Village, Mount Washington and later on Boyce Avenue in Ruxton.
Jean McGarry, a Johns Hopkins professor and writer, said her colleague was a “force of nature.”
“His love of writing was only exceeded by his love of family," she said. "Steve was fiery and impulsive. Widely read, he was a fierce critic...And yet, he was generous and encouraging to young writers and seemed to believe that he could teach anyone to write well.”
Ms. McGarry also said, “Absent of even a glimmer of vanity, Steve, according to his wife, had two outfits: in summer, shorts and a tee shirt; in winter, sweat pants and sweat shirt. Getting to his desk, and his typewriter, was the object of every single day.”
[Leapfrog To Fame] His 769-page book has thrust Stephen Dixon into a literary spotlight »
Baltimore Sun writer Ernest F. Imhoff described Mr. Dixon in a 1998 story: “The most prolific author in Baltimore, divides his 40 years of writing into three periods: The Olivetti Period. The Royal Period. The Hermes Period,” a reference to the brands of manual typewriters he used.
Mr. Dixon disliked digital keyboards. “This feels awful,” he said, when, on one occasion, he used a computer.
“He was revolted by the wishy-washy ease of the touch and never hit another key,” the 1998 Sun story said.
“There was nothing to it. Too easy. So ticky-tacky. I don’t like to work on anything electric. I feel creative on a manual. I love the keyboard action. It’s like playing the piano," Mr. Dixon said.
"He wrote [his works] on manual typewriters, his fingers flying fast and hitting hard. Composition time is usually 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., ... Dixon blamed automatic text checks in word processors for a decline in his students’ writing sophistication. ‘My students are becoming worse and worse in spelling and grammar every year. They’re just as creative, but less technical,’” the 1998 story said.
M. Dixon had no use for voice mail. “Students talk for eight minutes and say nothing and then garble the return phone number.”
When he retired in 2007, the Hopkins Eisenhower Library exhibited Mr. Dixon’s manuscript drafts and other artifacts from his 45 years as a writer.
A 2016 Kirkus review characterized his writing as “plainspoken and deceptively straightforward...the sort that sticks with you, because it cuts to the uncertainty of life.”
The review also said, “Dixon is a master of the minor moments, the dreams and the disappointments, that transfigure every one of us.”
He worked out daily at the Towson YMCA and jogged around Ruxton. He was a voracious reader and a vegetarian. He made his own soups and ate a salad every night.
His wife, Anne Frydman, a John Hopkins Russian studies scholar, translator and poet, died in 2009.
Survivors include two daughters, Sophia Dixon Frydman and Antonia Dixon Frydman, both of Brooklyn, N.Y.; two sisters, Marguerite Franco of New York City and Pat Dixon of Los Angeles; and a grandson.
Plans for a memorial service were incomplete.
QUOTE:
"He built his body of work by completing at least one finished page per day on his Hermes Standard typewriter. His stories blend truth and fiction, multiple versions of one event, and one time period with another, all glued together with humor, tragedy, sex, anger, cruelty, and dishonesty, often in exceptionally long sentences and paragraphs." Wallach further noted Dixon's contributions as an educator: "A popular teacher, he was generous with his time and his feedback, influencing during his 26 years as a member of the Johns Hopkins faculty countless successful writers."
Stephen Dixon, prolific writer and longtime Writing Seminars professor, dies at 83
Dixon, who authored 17 novels and more than 500 short stories during a writing career that spanned six decades, remembered by former students as a thoughtful, generous teacher who mentored countless accomplished writers
Image caption:
Stephen Dixon
By
Rachel Wallach /
Published
Nov 8
Stephen Dixon, a prolific powerhouse of an author and retired professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, died Wednesday of pneumonia and complications from Parkinson's disease at Gilchrist hospice center in Towson. He was 83.
Known for developing very human characters while experimenting—sometimes wildly—with various forms of storytelling, Dixon wrote 17 novels and more than 500 short stories, several of which were adapted into film. He built his body of work by completing at least one finished page per day on his Hermes Standard typewriter. His stories blend truth and fiction, multiple versions of one event, and one time period with another, all glued together with humor, tragedy, sex, anger, cruelty, and dishonesty, often in exceptionally long sentences and paragraphs. Absorbing his work is an art in itself; in 2007, he told The Baltimore Sun, "I teach my readers how to read my work while they're reading it."
"I learned more from him than any writer I've ever met. He continues to be the single greatest influence on my work, and I have his voice in my head with everything I write."
Porochista Khakpour
Novelist and Writing Seminars alum
A popular teacher, he was generous with his time and his feedback, influencing during his 26 years as a member of the Johns Hopkins faculty countless successful writers, including Jean McGarry, Michael Kun, and Ben McGrath. His critiques were thoughtful and extensive, rooted in his belief that every piece had groundbreaking potential.
"He was my absolute favorite writer who became my greatest mentor," says Porochista Khakpour, MA '03, herself now a celebrated writer and teacher. "I learned more from him than any writer I've ever met. He continues to be the single greatest influence on my work, and I have his voice in my head with everything I write."
Dixon was the winner of four O. Henry awards for fiction, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He was twice a National Book Award finalist, in 1991 and 2001, and was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1992 for his novel Frog.
"It's hard to believe such a force of nature as Steve Dixon could be gone. His love of writing was only exceeded by his love of his family: his late wife, Anne Frydman, and daughters, Sophia and Antonia," says McGarry, professor in The Writing Seminars. "He was a pillar of the fiction program in The Writing Seminars. Widely read, he was a fierce critic, admiring mostly stylistic originals like Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. And yet, he was generous and encouraging to young writers, and seemed to believe that he could teach anyone to write well.
Image caption:
Stephen Dixon came to Johns Hopkins in 1980 as an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars and remained on faculty until his retirement in 2007.
"Absent of even a glimmer of vanity, Steve, according to his wife, had two outfits: in summer, shorts and a t-shirt; in winter, sweat pants and sweatshirt. Getting to his desk, and his typewriter, was the objective of every single day.
"I will miss him. He was a true original as a writer, a husband, a father, a friend, a man."
Khakpour said she came to Hopkins because of Dixon, in appreciation of his New York hyperrealism and his Modernism.
"He permanently alters how you approach storytelling; you realize it's first and foremost about syntax and diction," she says. "To me, he was such a true artist. It reminds me to think about art first and to have integrity as writer; he never made the big bucks. His writing was extremely personal: We were all there, his students and his late wife. He didn't distinguish between life and art. You just don't get those writers anymore. It's the end of era for me with his passing.
"He was a ferocious lion of a man in every meaning of that word. A giant, but so tender and soft. He was incredibly contrarian, irascible, and difficult in a beautiful way you had to honor. And he was always right; it was infuriating."
Born Stephen Ditchik, he grew up on New York's Lower East Side. His mother changed the family last name after his dentist father was imprisoned in 1941 in connection with a physician who was performing illegal abortions. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1958 from City College of New York in international relations, and took a job as a radio reporter in Washington, D.C., where he began writing fiction on a whim. He described the new experience as ecstatic, and wrote just about every day thereafter.
His first story, "The Chess House," appeared in The Paris Review in 1963. He went on to work as a school teacher, artist's model, cabdriver, salesclerk, and bartender, among other jobs, continuing to publish stories and, in 1976, his first novel. In 1980, then-Writing Seminars chair John Irwin hired Dixon as assistant professor. He was named professor in 1989, and retired from the position in 2007.
As much as influencing his students' writing, Dixon influenced the way they came to carry themselves as writers.
"He was not what I'd expected," says John Barry, MA '01, recalling his entry into The Writing Seminars. "A quick read through Frog had led me to expect a French-looking guy in a beanie—but when I arrived I found an over-six foot, balding guy wearing grandma jeans.
"He drove me to work hard by example: he was a writer who had, more than anything, trust in the craft itself—even when it didn't seem to be bearing fruit, he pushed us to ride out the waves. Writers aren't always known for their cheerfulness, but he radiated a sense that we were lucky to be doing this, that engaging in the process was a gift itself. It sounds bland, but he was a truly good guy, and a teacher of rare generosity who taught writing as integrity: commitment to the truth, wherever it takes us."
Image caption:
Stephen Dixon (center) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1992 for his novel Frog, along with Paul Gervais, Allan Gurganus, Bradford Morrow, and Don DeLillo.
Dixon's former students speak fondly of the personal touch inherent in their very first encounter with him: their offer of admissions to The Writing Seminars master's program, made over the phone. For Betsy Boyd, MA '03, that call made all the difference in her decision to attend Hopkins.
"He's the one who called me to tell me I'd been accepted to Hopkins, and it was a thrill to hear his warm voice and learn the great news straight from a Hopkins professor's mouth. He was easily conversational on the phone, not in a rush," says Boyd, who today—as director of the creative writing program at the University of Baltimore—makes an effort to contact potential students the same way.
"That same easy and gentle vibe held true when we worked together in the classroom," Boyd adds. "Steve was an encouraging teacher who wanted students to succeed. He was a down-to-earth instructor, a fine line editor, who would make lots of small sentence-level notes and sometimes little drawings all over the story at hand."
Writer Jessica Anya Blau, MA '95, also recalls her first encounter with Dixon—this one at the cocktail party for incoming Writing Seminars students—for the way it set the tone for a quarter-century friendship. "There were two things that struck me about him from the start: he didn't engage in pointless small talk, and he was utterly genuine," she says.
"Steve felt familiar, like someone I was related to—I think that's what it's like when someone is utterly himself. In the 25 years that have since passed, Steve was never anything less than that. He was a true friend, a dear friend, a true person, and an inspiration to me. I love his work. And I loved him, his wife, and the girls, too."
QUOTE:
"humorous, freewheeling fiction traced the shocks and jolts of romance, aging and everyday life, in an experimental but plain-spoken style that brought readers deep inside the minds of his characters." Harrison went on to note: "Mr. Dixon, a retired creative writing professor at Johns Hopkins University, published well over 500 short stories in the Paris Review, Playboy, Esquire and legions of small magazines across the country. His first book came out only when he was 40, but he made up for lost time in publishing 35 more novels and story collections, usually letting no more than a week or two elapse between projects."
Stephen Dixon, prolific writer of experimental, unsettling fiction, dies at 83
By
Harrison Smith
November 6, 2019 at 3:31 p.m. PST
Stephen Dixon, a prolific novelist and short-story writer whose humorous, freewheeling fiction traced the shocks and jolts of romance, aging and everyday life, in an experimental but plain-
spoken style that brought readers deep inside the minds of his characters, died Nov. 6 at a hospice center in Towson, Md. He was 83.
The cause was pneumonia and complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter Sophia Frydman.
Mr. Dixon, a retired creative writing professor at Johns Hopkins University, published well over 500 short stories in the Paris Review, Playboy, Esquire and legions of small magazines across the country. His first book came out only when he was 40, but he made up for lost time in publishing 35 more novels and story collections, usually letting no more than a week or two elapse between projects.
His work was sprawling and sometimes manic, with run-on sentences, endless paragraphs and an immersive style that detailed the messy, meandering thoughts of protagonists such as Gould Bookbinder, a sex-
obsessed college professor, and Nathan Frey, a father whose young daughter is murdered by a highway gunman.
“One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon; one submits to it,” author Alan H. Friedman wrote in a New York Times review of Mr. Dixon’s novel “Frog” (1991), about a lecherous teacher named Howard Tetch. “An unstoppable prose expands the arteries while an edgy, casual nervousness overpowers the will.”
Mr. Dixon was sometimes described as an experimental realist, a writer who tinkered with storytelling conventions while remaining true to life. He was twice a finalist for the National Book Award, for “Frog” and “Interstate” (1995), and several of his stories were included in Pushcart Prize and O. Henry Award collections.
Nonetheless, he never cracked the bestseller lists and counted 14 publishers for his first 28 books. For decades, he was described as a seminal “writer’s writer” — “one of the great secret masters,” as novelist Jonathan Lethem put it — a devoted craftsman who kept working at his Hermes manual typewriter well into the digital age, refining an approach that mixed poignancy with humor.
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In his story “Crows,” a character realizes he can apparently point a finger into the sky and shoot a bird dead. A long-dead father in “Time to Go” hectors his son about the price and size of wedding rings, and in “Sleep,” a man is troubled by the selfish thought that flashes through his mind at the moment of his wife’s death: “Now I can get some sleep.”
Almost all of Mr. Dixon’s works began as stories. Some simply grew into novels, which generally retained the fragmentary, non-chronological format of his collections. Their narratives homed in on mundane, seemingly trivial details — the way a soiled diaper is removed from a baby; the collection of change for a basement washing machine — even as they were shadowed by tragedies and misfortunes that echoed Mr. Dixon’s own life.
His wife, a poet, translator and Chekhov scholar, had multiple sclerosis and used a wheelchair. His father, a dentist, was imprisoned as a middleman in an illegal abortion ring. A sister was diagnosed with Proteus syndrome, which causes physical abnormalities, and a brother disappeared at sea. Another sibling was killed by a falling tree, an accident that inspired the beginning of Mr. Dixon’s novel “Phone Rings” (2005), written as a kind of elegy to his brother.
Mr. Dixon’s protagonists were often neurotic, daydreaming fantasists — writers, frequently, with turbocharged sex drives and a tendency toward digression and contradiction. On the page, descriptions of their actions were peppered with dashes and ellipses, in a loose style that Salon reviewer Roger Gathman described as “writing that has come out in its undershirt.”
Conflicting perspectives unspooled in novels such as “Frog,” which included alternate accounts of the death of Tetch’s brother and the way his parents first met, and a dreamlike scene in which his family is transported to the Auschwitz death camp. Similarly, “Interstate” featured eight versions of the death of Frey’s daughter, in a senseless act of killing while they are driving down the highway.
His writing seemed to suggest “that reality has multiple aspects,” as Times reviewer William Ferguson once wrote, “that what we see is not fixed and unified but a jumble of competing versions.”
Stephen Bruce Ditchik was born in Manhattan on June 6, 1936, the fifth of seven children. His mother, Florence Leder Ditchik, was a beauty queen and chorus girl on Broadway, later an interior decorator.
His father, Abraham M. Ditchik, was accused by a special prosecutor of “collecting fabulous sums of money for public officials in a citywide abortion racket” and convicted in 1940 of conspiracy, extortion and attempted bribery. He was sentenced to up to four years and six months in Sing Sing prison and lost his dentistry license, leading Florence to change her children’s last name. She selected Dixon out of a phone book.
At City College of New York, Mr. Dixon enrolled in a dentistry program, planning to enter the family business. He found himself revolted by animal dissections and the smell of formaldehyde, then switched to international relations; nonetheless, he would later quip that he had likely written “more about dentistry than any writer alive.”
After graduating in 1958, he moved to Washington, where his oldest brother worked in journalism, and landed a job in radio. By his telling, he interviewed Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. On a whim one night, he began writing his first short story, about a man who flirts with women in Rock Creek Park.
“It was like a cork popping out of my skull,” he recalled in an interview with Johns Hopkins Magazine. “I was in ecstasy.”
In the early 1960s, he moved to New York, where he worked as an editor at CBS News and typed fiction alone at lunch. A colleague, journalist Hughes Rudd, asked to read some of his stories and sent two to George Plimpton, co-founder of the Paris Review. The magazine published Mr. Dixon’s first piece, “The Chess House,” in 1963.
Mr. Dixon received a Wallace Stegner creative writing fellowship from Stanford University and, when his funding ran out, supported himself with work as a schoolteacher, tour leader, bus driver, department store sales clerk, artist’s model, waiter and bartender.
In 1976, he published his first book, “No Relief,” and pocketed $600 in royalties. His publisher went bankrupt soon after the release of his second, “Work” (1977), leaving Mr. Dixon unpaid. The novel, about a New York bartender, was about the difficulties of finding a job and keeping it — an achievement that largely eluded Mr. Dixon until he joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1980.
Mr. Dixon, who retired in 2007, taught at the school alongside his wife, Anne Frydman, whom he married in 1982; she died in 2009. In addition to his daughter, survivors include another daughter, Antonia Frydman, both of Brooklyn; two sisters; and a grandson.
Mr. Dixon, a resident of Ruxton, Md., wrote two books about his Bookbinder character, “Gould: A Novel in Two Novels” (1997) and “30: Pieces of a Novel” (1999). His other novels included “I” (2002), a patchwork of 19 stories about an unnamed protagonist who reappeared in “End of I” (2006), and “His Wife Leaves Him” (2013).
He said he wrote compulsively, whenever he had a few minutes free, and had tried but failed to take an extended leave from his typewriter. “I get all pent up and frustrated and anxious and I feel worthless,” he told Johns Hopkins Magazine. “I’m not doing anything! How many books can you read without wanting to write one?”
QUOTE:
"The act of processing experience, of attempting to bring to it a suitable form of aesthetic coherence, is Stephen Dixon’s most immediate subject. The myriad ways in which this might be done have been abundantly realized in Dixon’s fiction for over 40 years now, and Late Stories is an excellent illustration of this achievement. Through Dixon’s work we come to recognize what is most “real” about human experience: the effort to understand it."
December 1, 2016
Late Stories – Stephen Dixon
by Daniel Green
[Trnsfr; 2016]
Reviewers of Stephen Dixon’s fiction often take note of the author’s continuing lack of widespread recognition, despite the high esteem for his work expressed by many writers and critics. By now it is no doubt unlikely that Dixon’s work will gain the kind of attention that would in any way equal its genuine achievement — and since Dixon is now 80, and has been forced to publish his most recent books with very small presses, there doesn’t seem much future opportunity for him to capture such attention. Dixon himself has long acknowledged this, telling interviewers — in the few he has given — that he writes for the sheer gratification of it, adhering to his own aesthetic standards and offering his stories and novels to available readers. Those of us who have accepted these offerings all along should ourselves be grateful he perseveres in spite of undeserved neglect and gives us his singular fiction with seemingly undiminished dedication.
On the other hand, it is certainly the case that new readers of Dixon’s fiction would find that his latest book, Late Stories, well-represents his most abiding strategies and assumptions and provides the kinds of satisfactions we can take from all of Dixon’s best work. They are satisfactions that are closely tied to the challenges and provocations of Dixon’s fiction, which on the one hand seems conspicuously unconventional, with its paragraphs that last for pages (sometimes the entire length of a story or even a novel), its run-on sentences that sweep in both exposition and dialogue in an undifferentiated rush, its narratives that seem to expand incrementally rather than develop; on the other hand, the ultimate effect of these initially disorienting devices is a very intense sort of realism — not the kind of unmediated, transparent realism produced by “normal” storytelling, but a kind of cumulative realism created by Dixon’s obsessive focusing and refocusing on specific events and details, often filtered through memory or alluded to in talk, sometimes through discursively drawn-out rumination.
In “The Vestry,” Philip Seidel, the writer protagonist of all of the stories in Late Stories, is contemplating going to a play being performed at a church in his neighborhood. Since his wife died, Seidel has rarely ventured out of his house, and surely nothing can be more convenient than an event held right across the street. Still, Seidel contemplates the prospect at length, first recalling his previous failed efforts to get out of the house and then attempting to fortify his resolve to make this one a success:
. . . Just try to get an aisle seat, if there’s a middle aisle, so he can see the stage better, though of course if nobody’s tall sitting in front of him. He doubts the seats are reserved, if they’re all the same price. And there’ll be refreshments there, he’s almost sure. In fact, he remembers now the sign saying so, the proceeds from it going to some medical research organization. No, a soup kitchen. But the point he’s making is he has to get out. He means, not doing just the same things every day. No, he doesn’t mean that. He means he has to stop giving himself excuses not to go to things. And the play’s right across the street. What could be more convenient? A two-minute walk. Doesn’t have to drive to it. No problem about coming home at night. And it’ll break the ice, sort of. If he goes to this, maybe he’ll go to other things like it . . . .
After Phil has made his way to the church vestry where the play is staged, he soon concludes the play is not worth his time and leaves after the first act. About the play and his response to it we learn only that “The play’s terrible. Everything about it: acting, writing, characterizations, laugh lines that aren’t funny, romantic and tender scenes and one tragic one . . . that are cloying, boring, totally unconvincing, something, but they’re awful. Fifteen minutes into the play, he wishes he hadn’t come to it.” That “something” may indicate Phil doesn’t have the right term to indicate his disdain, but it may also mean he’s searching for an excuse to leave, regardless of the play’s quality. The story is not about Phil Seidel’s trip to the theater but about his continuing inability to adjust to the death of his wife and resume something like a normal life without her, a state of affairs that Late Stories as a whole makes evident. Ultimately the book engages us precisely through its various inventive ways of reinforcing this hard reality.
Late Stories is obviously a book about the specter of old age and the shadows cast by declining vitality, but Dixon’s fiction has seemed autumnal for a while now. His last novel, (excluding the novella Beatrice and the uncharacteristic caprice, Letters to Kevin), His Wife Leaves Him (2012) dealt directly with the death of its protagonist’s wife, although in this case the writer’s name is Martin. Dixon has long drawn on what we must assume are the circumstances of his own life, although it would undoubtedly be a mistake to assume his fiction can be adequately labeled as autobiographical. (In his interviews, Dixon admits both grounding his work in his own life experiences and freely inventing when that seems necessary to the aesthetic integrity of the work.) Many of his stories and novels center around a writer character, presumably modeled on Dixon, whose wife is ill or disabled, as was Dixon’s own wife, Anne Frydman, who died of MS in 2007. His most recent fiction thus in a sense brings this broader story to a conclusion of sorts.
If Dixon’s subjects and situations usually remain familiar, each work a piece of what could finally be considered a single, expansive fictional canvas, both the stories and the novels can still surprise, especially in their formal strategies. The first story in Late Stories, “Wife in Reverse,” sounds its keynote by relating the story of Seidel and his wife’s lives together, in reverse order, beginning with her death — “His wife dies, mouth slightly parted and one eye open” is the first sentence — to their initial meeting at a party, all in slightly more than a page. Suggesting that his grief has severed Seidel’s ties with the ordinary course of events, the second story, “Another Sad Story,” finds Seidel in a gloom-fueled reverie in which one of his daughters has also died. Excursions into the explicitly dreamlike and fantastic are not unusual in Dixon’s fiction — Interstate, for example, recounts in multiple elaborated versions the story of the shooting of the protagonist’s daughter in a seemingly random event, unless it hasn’t, since in the end we can’t know what really happened, only that the father is clearly filled with dread at the prospect of losing his child. Similarly, what we take most forcefully from “Another Sad Story” is not the daughter’s death, which is just a waking nightmare, but Seidel’s emotional incapacitation: “I am a corpse,” he pronounces at the end of the story. “I can’t move.”
Other stories in the book depict Seidel imagining himself literally on his own deathbed, (one takes place in the aftermath of his imagined death), having conversations with the ghost of his wife (or dreaming about her), while others more straightforwardly portray him recalling the past or continuing to cope with his bereavement and what seems to him the impossibility of returning to a semblance of his previous life. In some he does attempt — or thinks about attempting — to begin a relationship with another woman. “Just What Is” shows the effort failing, while the follow-up story, “Just What Is Not,” show it apparently, if improbably, succeeding. “Remembering” is one of the more disturbing stories in Late Stories, as it relentlessly narrates a series of events clearly demonstrating that Phil’s short-term memory is failing, while “Feel Good” provides something of a breather from the prevailing atmosphere of melancholy and loss, as Phil experiences a day that seems to justify the story’s title. In “Therapy” he talks himself into consulting a therapist, again suggesting he might after all manage to persevere.
Perhaps the most affecting story in the book is “Missing Out,” a “what if” story in which Philip Seidel meets Abigail Berman at a party, but he is usurped in his attempt to ask her out by another man attending the party. Phil meets Abby a few additional times at the same annual party, where he learns that she married the man who had left with her at that first party. Years later he is told she has been diagnosed with MS, and eventually that she has succumbed to the disease, although her husband, unable to cope with her affliction, has treated her badly, divorcing her before the end. Phil expresses only regret that he missed his opportunity to become her husband instead, convinced as he is that he would have stuck by her through the bad years.
Seidel is clearly himself writing this story, although it is related more or less straightforwardly, without the sort of metafictional framing and interruption we often see in Dixon’s fiction. Perhaps Seidel is trying to assure himself through the telling of the story that ultimately he did do right by his wife, but the tone — and its ultimate effect — is wistful, as if the opportunity lost represents a profound impoverishment of Seidel’s life. None of the stories in this book really focus on the period of time in which Philip Seidel actually did care for his wife as her health declined, so we have no context, at least in this book, within which to judge the sincerity of the implicit declaration in “Missing Out” that Phil’s love for his wife eased the burden of caregiving. But in much of Dixon’s previous fiction, such caregiving, by characters generally similar to Philip Seidel, caring for wives very much in the same situation as Abby, is extensively depicted. Here the writer protagonist is sometimes prone to fits of anger and frustration at the tasks he is required to perform, although usually they are brief and do not lead him to abandon his responsibilities.
What is most notable, at least upon reflection, about Dixon’s collective portrayal of what we know must originate in the material circumstances of the author’s life is the disconcerting honesty of it. Even if we should remain cautious about attributing the characters and situations in the work to “real life” models, Dixon renders the Seidel-type fictional personae without flinching from their obvious flaws, at the very least taking the risk that readers will transfer their judgment of the characters to the author whose own behavior they presumably reflect. The impression of an autobiographical connection is perhaps reinforced by the habitual presentation of the characters as writers, although this feature of Dixon’s work actually introduces a destabilizing element into any final reckoning with both the formal and thematic implications of that work. The metafictional gestures are more than the perfunctory acknowledgement of the artifice of fiction but act to affirm such artifice as the means for getting a more truthful perspective on real life than can be provided by convention-bound realistic narratives, which in their way distort and reshape reality even as they ostensibly seek to faithfully reflect it.
While the life circumstances of characters such as Philip Seidel echo those of his creator, these characters themselves call attention to their acts of writing, so that we might say that writing stories is on one level just a character trait, their vocation. However, that the story we are reading is in the process of being composed is often made explicit through the activity of this character, who feels free to stop and start, to transform and transpose the details of the story being told — or just as often, not being told, due precisely to the fact that the narrative is in flux, subject to backtracking and revision. The act of processing experience, of attempting to bring to it a suitable form of aesthetic coherence, is Stephen Dixon’s most immediate subject. The myriad ways in which this might be done have been abundantly realized in Dixon’s fiction for over 40 years now, and Late Stories is an excellent illustration of this achievement. Through Dixon’s work we come to recognize what is most “real” about human experience: the effort to understand it.
Daniel Green is a literary critic whose essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, both online and in print. His new book, Beyond the Blurb, has just been published by Cow Eye Press and his website can be found at: http://noggs.typepad.com.
QUOTE:
"As its title implies, [this]is an epistolary novel. ... Wordplay and ludicrousness abound in 'Letters.' Rudy's entire journey is a tower of absurdities, each one thrown precariously on the one that came before." Heller further called this a " breezy, goofily illustrated road-trip of a tale."
'Letters To Kevin': What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate
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May 22, 20167:00 AM ET
Jason Heller
Letters to Kevin
by Stephen Dixon
Hardcover, 160 pages
purchase
Known mostly for graphic novels, Fantagraphics has ventured occasionally into prose — including His Wife Leaves Him, the 2013 novel by award-winning author Stephen Dixon. Letters to Kevin is Dixon's second book for Fantagraphics, and while it's also a work of prose, it veers a bit closer to the publisher's wheelhouse: It's profusely illustrated by Dixon himself. It's a risky move; most of Dixon's rudimentary sketches are of the don't-quit-your-day-job variety. But they bring an extra dose of loopy, madcap charm to a book that's already plenty unhinged — although not always in a good way.
The novel's premise is as simple as it is ripe with comic potential: a young New Yorker named Rudy Foy decides to get in touch with his friend Kevin Wafer in Palo Alto, only to be foiled at every turn — and always absurdly. Rudy attempts to call Kevin, only to realize his pillow doesn't work like a phone. He tries a payphone but gets trapped inside before it's whisked away to a warehouse in Alaska. Figuring he must see Kevin in the flesh if he ever wants to speak to him again, he tries convincing a cabbie to take him to the airport; a farcical exchange of currency, wit, and inverted logic ensues. From a cabin in the woods to a submarine that travels under the continent, Rudy finds himself in all sorts of bizarre settings and conveyances. One thing drives him: He must reach his friend at all costs and, you know, catch up with the guy.
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As its title implies, Letters is an epistolary novel. In a funny twist, the letters that comprise it — penned by Rudy and addressed to Kevin, documenting his odd odyssey across America — are all written on Rudy's antique typewriter, which he carries with him wherever he goes. Dixon notoriously writes all his novels (Letters included) on exactly such a typewriter, which makes it hard not to view Rudy as a surrogate for the author. If so, Dixon might be a very frustrated man: Poor Rudy is tripped up again and again by uncaring, intractable people, too wrapped up in their routines and institutions to offer him any real help. At one point he tries to catch a ride from a politician — and winds up, innocently enough, jumping on a literal bandwagon.
Wordplay and ludicrousness abound in 'Letters.' Rudy's entire journey is a tower of absurdities, each one thrown precariously on the one that came before.
Wordplay and ludicrousness abound in Letters. Rudy's entire journey is a tower of absurdities, each one thrown precariously on the one that came before. But the book's wackiness grows rickety as it moves along; much of it lapses into a repetitive, episodic rhythm that starts to make all the weirdness seem routine. "Let me write about it before I forget it," writes Kevin at on point, "because if I write about it after I forget it, there won't be anything to write about." It's one of many cute little brain-twisters; they just don't add up to much, especially after the book settles into its rambling groove.
If Letters' shaggy-dog status is ever in doubt, it's dispelled by the ending, an anticlimactic shrug of a conclusion that feels unsatisfyingly hollow. To make things worse, the final pages are rendered in an invented language called Giffiggof that comes across like an afterthought rather than an integral part of the story. At least Giffiggof isn't hard to read — no more so than, say, Pig Latin. Maybe it should be more difficult; the whole book cries out for a more challenging, better developed execution of its basic idea. A wide streak of the whimsical strangeness of Lewis Carroll and Shel Silverstein runs through Letters, but not enough profundity or poignancy. Dixon, however, does succeed in delivering a breezy, goofily illustrated road-trip of a tale, even if the book's bigger message — something about the futility of communication and the fruitlessness of pursuit and desire — gets a little lost in the lunacy.
Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.
QUOTE:
"offer moment-by-moment deep dives into longing and despair and forgetfulness, memory and fantasy," according to a Kirkus Reviews critic, who added: "Dixon is a master of the minor moments, the dreams and the disappointments, that transfigure every one of us."
Dixon's new collection explores the heart of an aging man's life.
Why isn’t Dixon a household name? The author of more than 30 novels and collections of short stories, he is regarded, when he is regarded, as a “writer’s writer,” which is about as backhanded as a compliment can get. Yet his writing, which is plainspoken and deceptively straightforward, is the sort that sticks with you, because it cuts to the uncertainty of life. His new collection is a case in point: 31 linked stories about a writer named Philip Seidel, who is wrestling with the depredations of age. Seidel’s chronology and Dixon’s overlap—both live and work in Baltimore (Dixon taught writing at Johns Hopkins for many years) and both are recently widowed (Dixon’s wife, the poet and translator Anne Frydman, died of complications from multiple sclerosis in 2009). But don’t let that confuse you into thinking these efforts are thinly veiled autobiography. Rather, they offer moment-by-moment deep dives into longing and despair and forgetfulness, memory and fantasy. In the opening story, “Wife in Reverse,” Dixon traces the dynamic of a marriage in a page and a half, beginning with the death of the protagonist’s spouse and ending with their first meeting three decades before. In the second, he imagines the paralyzing loss of an adult child. What he is evoking is possibility, conditionality, the sense that everything could change, or fall apart, in any given instant. That this is the essence of fiction goes without saying; it has been the impetus behind Dixon’s project all along. And yet, in this stirring and heartfelt book, Dixon goes beyond loss into the kind of preservation that only literature can provide. That’s not to say his stories traffic in illusion; perhaps projection is a better word. “Remember” delineates, in excruciating detail, the slow forgetting of its aging protagonist (“He feels his fly. It’s open; forgot again. Makes him even more worried about himself”), while the stunning “Just What Is” and “Just What Is Not” investigate two sides of an affair that never was, highlighting the tension between inner and outer life. In the end, nothing happens, although, of course, everything does. Or, as Dixon observes in the transcendent “Missing Out,” which imagines an alternate life in which Seidel never met the wife who has left him widowed: “Nothing. I told you. It was all in my head. Was I in dreamland? You bet. Not that she would have been interested in me.”
Dixon is a master of the minor moments, the dreams and the disappointments, that transfigure every one of us.
QUOTE:
"Dixon’s work is deeply impactful."
LATE STORIES
Stephen Dixon
Trnsfr Books (Sep 13, 2016)
Softcover $16.95 (250pp)
978-1-940430-87-4
Stephen Dixon’s work is deeply impactful, one tale blending into the next, building on elements from previous stories.
Stephen Dixon explores the world of a writer confronting the lingering impact of his wife’s death, in the collection Late Stories.
From the first story of this collection, “Wife in Reverse,” the prose is masterful. In a page and a half, the history of Philip Seidel’s relationship with his wife, Abigail, is traced backward from her death, in short, declarative sentences and brief quotations, ending with the words “That woman’s going to be my wife.” After this, the text falls into Seidel’s inner world, as he considers his health, his sociability, his children, and his career in the fading light of his wife’s memory.
Dixon delivers Seidel’s thoughts in a style that blends stream of consciousness with a meandering syntax earmarking a man who has grown older and more reclusive, but is still observant about his environment. In “Talk,” for example, Seidel reflects on his lack of human contact and imagines running into someone he knows in the food market:
Hi, hello, how are you? And so on. Maybe with someone whose hand he shakes, back or shoulder he pats, cheek, if it’s a woman, he kisses.
This effective technique allows Dixon to probe the problems of age and bereavement with a sense of humor, and without straying too far from the emotional center of the book. Toward the end, the stories take on a sense of greater desperation, as Seidel explores the fantasy and reality of his relationship with an ex-student, and heartrendingly plays a game “what if?” concerning his relationship with Abigail.
The stories in Late Stories, though they can be read individually and were originally published by a variety of literary magazines, seem more like a novel in final form. One blends into the next, building on elements from previous stories. Stephen Dixon’s work is deeply impactful.
Reviewed by Peter Dabbene
Fall 2016
QUOTE:
"[D]espite moments of hilarity the resulting book is too often tiresome."
Letters to Kevin review: not so much funny ha ha as funny peculiar
Kevin Gildea finds Stephen Dixon’s novel inventive in spots, but the riffs grow tedious
Letters to Kevin: Stephen Dixon’s line drawings are so rudimentary that they suggest children’s books and the contingent and fragile nature of the forms we accept as the foundation of our lives
Letters to Kevin: Stephen Dixon’s line drawings are so rudimentary that they suggest children’s books and the contingent and fragile nature of the forms we accept as the foundation of our lives
Kevin Gildea
Sat, Oct 15, 2016, 05:00
First published:
Sat, Oct 15, 2016, 05:00
Book Title:
Letters to Kevin
ISBN-13:
978-1606999172
Author:
Stephen Dixon
Publisher:
Fantagraphics Books
Guideline Price:
£15.99
The surrealist comedian Harry Hill once wrote a novel, Flight from Deathrow, that was so freewheeling, so crazy and irrational, that it came across more as a midair collision of riffs than a novel. It was grounded in no reality and so disappeared in an immensely unsatisfying puff of smoke.
Letters to Kevin, Stephen Dixon’s new novel, suffers from the same problem. Ostensibly the story of Rudy’s attempts to visit his friend Kevin in Palo Alto, in California, it eschews logic to follow riffs and ideas, like a dog chasing tissue in the wind. It reminds me of Harpo Marx – a cross between a child and Mr Hyde, half innocence and half id – in the way it ignores the everyday architecture of the rational.
Any logic here is a dream, or comic logic, and many scenes play out as vaudevillian routines or the wordplay duologues of, say, Abbott and Costello.
Comic confusion reigns. Rudy construes a bus driver’s use of the word “buddy” as the name Buddy:
“Do you mean me?”
“Well I don’t mean my Aunt Tilly.”
And suddenly the scene is about passengers asking each other about their Aunt Tilly and saying she’s fine and continuing the chain of inquiry until the final passenger answers: “I am your Aunt Tilly”. The chain obliterates novelistic structures and is the essential progression of childish storytelling: and then . . . and then . . . and then . . .
Following the thread of something to the nth degree, beyond the usual boundaries, can lead, like Stewart Lee’s stand-up, to unexpected places of laughter unreachable by other routes. There is a fantastic scene, for example, in which the elevator Rudy is in falls apart. The destruction and disintegration are hilarious in their completeness, like Laurel and Hardy pulling their surroundings down on their heads.
But this method, or lack of method, leads to many tiresome scenes and bad puns: “The only thing to do was hit the road. But there were no roads in this part of the city . . . So I went to South Road in Central Park and hit it with my fists till my hands hurt.”
Why the bad pun? Because Letters to Kevin also has a postmodern purpose: to explore the limitations of language, the inability to communicate and the notion of consciousness. The latter leads to some great images: a warehouse full of phone booths with people trapped in them; Rudy writing his letter from a mail sack that is being delivered.
The postmodern intent is advertised on the cover. Remove the dust jacket and there is an alternative title, Ways to Get to Palo Alto, which is crossed out: erasure. The dust jacket itself shows a winding pencil: communication as a twisted and complicated journey. Not so much from A to B as from A to A.
There is a particularly tedious 12-page interlude on communicating with logs that is as much fun as Noam Chomsky on generative grammar.
The book is dotted with line drawings by Dixon – a two-time National Book Award nominee and winner of a Guggenheim fellowship – that are so rudimentary that they suggest children’s books and the contingent and fragile nature of the forms we accept as the foundation of our lives. An illustration of a queue of people is of scribbled forms that look set at any moment to unravel in the absence of any grounding baseline.
There is a very funny scene in which Rudy travels on the “under-America American Submarine” (note the redundant repetition of words) under land (the anarchy of it is great), and the captain, who was earlier disguised as a beggar, changes from one costume to the other midsentence, from captain to beggar to captain to beggar, until “under the last one, which could be of either the captain or man, was the real face of the captain or man or of someone else”.
Here is the postmodern anxiety about language: whether it can effectively name reality or whether we are living in nothing but language itself. These words are endless signifiers, with no signified at the end of the chain. (There is even a riff on living in a place called Nowhere.)
Letters to Kevin offers more than Harry Hill’s madcap mayhem, but despite its flights of fancy it still induces torpor. True, the indiscriminate wordplay – “I’ve conned enough shifty deals for one day. I mean, I’ve dealt with enough shiftless cons for today” – may be seen as an examination of language. But despite moments of hilarity the resulting book is too often tiresome.
Kevin Gildea is a writer, comedian and actor
QUOTE:
"stunningly intimate" novel. The reviewer added: "Dixon excels at evoking the nature of memory with its lapses, intricately linked associations and emotional force."
His Wife Leaves Him
Stephen Dixon. Fantagraphics, $29.99 (600p) ISBN 978-1-60699-604-1
In his stunningly intimate 16th novel, Dixon delves into the consciousness of author Martin Samuels after the loss of his wife, Gwen. Paralyzed by shock and guilt over her death, Martin revisits the moments that make up a marriage and a life—from the couple's initial meeting through the birth of their two daughters and into middle age. Told breathlessly with few paragraph breaks, the novel assumes the shape of the inner workings of Martin's mind as he lingers in the past moving from memory to memory, conversation to conversation, sometimes chronologically but often not, unveiling the arguments, private jokes, intellectual banter, and tender moments that comprise a decade-long marriage. Through dozens of scenes both ordinary and remarkable, Dixon fully humanizes Martin who in turn does the same for his late Gwen, revealing passions, tendencies and flaws. A peek into the private world of their marriage proves the novel to be more than the sum of its parts as the reader is granted a panoramic view of the evolution of two characters and their relationship. Dixon excels at evoking the nature of memory with its lapses, intricately linked associations and emotional force. (Sept.)
QUOTE:
"The reader's knowledge of this couple becomes almost uncomfortably thorough. Mr. Dixon sedulously records every high and low of their relationship," according to a Wall Street Journal reviewer. The reviewer went on to note: "You emerge from this difficult but enriching book feeling as weary as Martin when he finally rises from bed—and, like him, comforted by having brought the dead back to the world, if only for a night."
Book Review: 'Enon' by Paul Harding | 'His Wife Leaves Him' by Stephen Dixon | 'Someone' by Alice McDermott | 'Dissident Gardens' by Jonathan Lethem
Four novels of aftermath.
Sept. 6, 2013 4:05 pm ET
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"His Wife Leaves Him" (Fantagraphics, 407 pages, $29.99), by the prolific and underrated novelist Stephen Dixon, delves even further in its exploration of the ways that grief seems to warp the passage of time. The book opens with writer Martin Samuels learning that Gwen, his wife of 25 years, has been crippled by a stroke. In the next two years, which pass in 10 pages, Gwen suffers more strokes, and Martin devotes himself to feeding, cleaning and helping her. One evening after an accident, he does the terrible thing—in her earshot he throws a screaming fit and wishes that she would die. During the night, she does.
The remaining 400 pages take place across the course of a single night, after Gwen's memorial, as Martin lies in bed and is flooded by a lifetime of memories. What passes is one of the most scrupulous attempts to transcribe the workings of a racing mind that I have ever encountered. The book contains almost no paragraph breaks, the un-indented columns of text conceding nothing to the contemporary reader's delicate attention span. One long sequence gives us Martin's tumult of semi-coherent dreams. Another, after he wakes and relinquishes sleep, microscopically re-creates his first dates with Gwen. In bringing these scenes forth, he tries to summon her voice for what he calls "Headtalk": "Help me; I want to go over as much of it as I can. To sort of relive it. Our first night, or night we first met. Because of what it led to."
The reader's knowledge of this couple becomes almost uncomfortably thorough. Mr. Dixon sedulously records every high and low of their relationship, from the tender (there is a transporting passage where Martin recalls the various positions that he and Gwen favored when they lay side-by-side in bed) to the excruciating (we get the fights and insults of nearly three decades, culminating in Gwen's final night alive). You emerge from this difficult but enriching book feeling as weary as Martin when he finally rises from bed—and, like him, comforted by having brought the dead back to the world, if only for a night.
QUOTE:
these two collections are twin contributions to the canon of late-stage Dixon who has for years deeply and productively lingered on the single theme of writing loss." Mungiello added: "Dear Abigail and Writing, Written are vital acts of preservation as well as the work of a master. ... Sentence by sentence Dixon’s fiction takes us from death to home as surely as life takes us day by day in the opposite direction."
A Review of Stephen Dixon’s Dear Abigail and Writing, Written
By Michael Mungiello
October 14, 2019
Fiction Reviews
Dear Abigail and Other Stories and Writing, Written are, arguably, two separate books. That’s what Amazon would say. Ostensibly the late wife in the former is Abigail and the man’s name is Philip while the late wife in the latter is Eleanor and the man’s name is Charles. In truth, these two collections are twin contributions to the canon of late-stage Dixon who has for years deeply and productively lingered on the single theme of writing loss.
The stories in both books catalogue Dixon’s grief and yearning in the wake of widowerhood and age. He knows what Donald Barthelme meant when he wrote “Revolves the stage machinery away from me, away from me.” Melancholy and anxiety tint the day-to-day doings of his overlapping stand-ins. He goes to the Y. He takes the dust cover off his typewriter. He puts it back on. He eats sandwiches and drinks coffee at diners. He talks to his daughter (or daughters). He wonders about getting a new girlfriend. He tries to write. He tries to sleep. He dreams about his wife. He writes it down. He remembers when he wrote it down the other day. He writes down remembering writing it down. These aren’t stories in the traditional sense (beginning, middle, end) but sites of feeling which you can visit like monuments. His sentences are organized into obelisks.
Dixon moves sentence by sentence (in paragraphs that go on for pages) from mundanity to misery to the balm of memory. But he doesn’t rely on anything as facile as “good” memories–picnics, rainbows, marching bands–rather, he draws comfort from remembering well. He remembers not only what “really” happened but also how he’s fictionalized these same moments in previous books. Underscoring the co-dependency of memory and imagination, Dixon comes into ever closer contact with what’s “really” real: the overwhelming desire that can only be articulated as obsession.
“Changed things around a little to a lot. The spit but not the soul kissing is new. Stout this time instead of the two of them in the novel clicking and then sipping from small snifters Israeli brandy her father had brought back from Israel that year. Another time, in one of the stories, only he having a juice glass of Armagnac.”
“So, I think while sitting there, newspaper now folded in half on my lap, gin and tonic on the side table to my right by the chair, is it a story? Going to go over that again? Then what is it, if it’s not a story, and I’m not saying it isn’t: a recounting through an isolated simple incident of some aspect of my life today, or an exercise, as I said before, and a little of its history, in perseverance to show the kind of person I am? I’m not sure of any of that, and surely I could have said that last sentence much simpler. Okay, then answer this: is this piece worth working on starting tomorrow morning and continuing working on the two to three weeks after that as a story? Because that’s all I do. Otherwise, the whole thing will have to be put away and probably eventually discarded, or thrown out in the next few days. Might be. A new kind of story, maybe, at least for me. We’ll see.”
The endless drive to reclassify and connect animates Dixon’s graphomania; he needs to “make it new” to keep it close. He tinkers with the facts of his past the same way you make small talk with someone you love who is leaving. Therefore, no detail in Dixon’s labyrinth of minutiae is small–the love undergirding each detail is so big. Said love not only animates Dixon’s writing but animates the late wife who reappears in the stunning story “All in All” for a talk with her husband.
“I’m in half your total literary output…which is an enormous amount. Many thousands of book pages in at least twenty books. You seem to have become more productive from the time we met and you’re now, since I died and the kids moved out of the house and you’re living alone and have no one to take care of but yourself and the cat, more productive than you’ve ever been. But let something else come in. Someone else. Anyone but me.”
A bit about the wife: she’s grounded. This is her second marriage. She loves her husband in a non-effusive way that he sometimes mistakes for hedging. She loves Russian literature and translates it. In fact, in “Once More” we read that the writer and his wife got married on the birthday of Anton Chekov, who most clearly demonstrates that he is Dixon’s precursor not in the stories but the letters. See if you recognize this tone.
“One must keep in training. My trip may be a trifle, the result of obstinacy, a whim, but consider and tell me what I lose by going. Time? Money? Comfort? My time is worth nothing, money I never have anyway, as for privations, I shall travel by carriage not more than 25 to 30 days…Suppose the trip gives me absolutely nothing, still won’t the whole journey yield at least two or three days that I shall remember all my life, with rapture or with bitterness? And so on, and so on. That’s how it is, sir.”
Elsewhere in the letters, Chekov writes “What is needed is continuous work, day and night, constant reading, study, will-power…Every hour counts….You will soon be thirty. It is time! I am waiting…We are all waiting…” Chekov’s example shows Dixon how to use writing’s constancy as a way to focus life, to literally fix it on the page. That said, while his words can fasten life in place, Dixon has no illusions: he knows he can’t make life better or use words to change anything.
His prose evokes a sense of ecstatic futility echoing Beckett. Here’s a folksy American version of “Fail again”: “Be honest. It’s going nowhere, can probably only go nowhere, and stinks too, and would be a waste of your time to try to make something out of it. So what am I going to do? What am I going to do? Ah, you’ll survive.”
He comes to relish failure and returns to it as compulsively as a kid wiggles a loose tooth. “So, want to try writing it again? What’s to lose, an hour or two? So much to gain, though. And longer you’re away from it, better chance you’ll forget it. But it won’t come out good. I know that. Listen, I’ve been doing this a long time. And these days, it’s almost all I do.” Many of his stories end with something along the lines of “But enough. I’ll probably tear all this up. It didn’t start off well and didn’t continue well either.”
Unlike Beckett, Dixon takes the “failure” of writing personally. It’s not just language or literature that’s lost but something that no amount of revision can repair; someone.
“Walks all the way home to West 75th Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. Just ‘West 75th Street.’ Stops at a bar on Sixth or Seventh Avenue for a beer but mainly to check the Manhattan phone directory there to see if she’s in it with the number she gave. One Eleanor Adler in the book—several ‘E. Adler’ listings—with the number she gave, at 425 Riverside Drive. Writes ‘425 RSD’ next to her name and phone number in his memo book. It’s in the Columbia University area—he knows because he went to a Christmas party last year at 405. Got off the subway at 116th Street and walked two blocks south on Broadway and then down to the Drive. But did she say she lived in Manhattan and that’s why he looked in that directory? Just assumed. Or he could work it into the conversation they had at the door. ‘If the place we meet at isn’t too far from my apartment in the Morningside Heights area.’ So what’s he getting at with all this? Going on eight pages and he isn’t sure. But he has to have some idea. He’s just bringing it back because he likes bringing it back, that’s about all. Especially the first night they met. The night they first met. And maybe also that it’s almost six years since she died and he can’t stop writing about her, though he’s tried, and that’s the story.”
There’s the Dixon trademark, the heartful straight-shot and the cerebral recursivity, the need to revise and the realization that the only revision that matters is impossible. The dramatic tension in his work flows from this fact: you can’t rewrite your wife back to life.
So, why write at all?
Freud suggested there’re two things: reality and us. Reality is made up of sex and death. Our two tools for surviving reality are love and work. When I say that Stephen Dixon is charting undiscovered territory in the inner world, mapping out the frontier where self-engrossment actually meets empathy (where you plumb your own conflicting feelings so thoroughly that you actually come into contact with whatever’s real about another person), what I mean is this: his stories trace and illuminate how sex turns to death which turns to work, which is the only lasting reservoir of love, resisting reality’s erosions. Absorbed in his mourning, Dixon gives us the gift of his wife’s life as it is now: in his mind and in the books.
Dear Abigail and Writing, Written are vital acts of preservation as well as the work of a master. I’ll leave you with what strikes me as the best passage from either book. In “They Used To,” the writer and his already sick wife pick up an order from their favorite restaurant and get ready to drive home.
“‘What’s wrong?’ he said, starting up the van to get the heat going. ‘It’s cold. I’m sad. I’m sick. I’m going to die. I can’t do anything for myself. Why am I still alive? You’re keeping me alive. I’m so useless. I’m sorry for you for having to put up with me and taking care of me every fucking day. Yes, fucking! I’m mad.’ He kissed her hands. ‘They’re warm,’ he said. ‘Warmer than mine, and I wore gloves. You’re all right. Want some soup? Black bean. And we’ll have a good dinner and wine. Not this one. It’s probably too cold by now for a red, but a fresh one off the rack. And it’s our lucky day. They had both fried oysters and brisket of beef.’ ‘Sure,’ she said; ‘sure. You should help me die and get yourself another wife.’ ‘Please don’t talk like that. You make it sadder than it should be. This is a good evening. We should be happy about a lot of things.’ ‘I know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘The kids. That I still have my mind, though it’s not what it used to be. That I can still translate, and the cat’s sweet too. Okay. I’ll have soup later. Let’s go home and eat. Did you make sure to get the dip for the oysters? They can be a bit dry without it.’ ‘I got everything. Enough food for two days.’ ‘Good. Because I forgot to remind you, so I was worried. Home, my sweetheart?’ ‘Home.’”
Sentence by sentence Dixon’s fiction takes us from death to home as surely as life takes us day by day in the opposite direction.
QUOTE:
"[Dixon's] work will stand as a penetrating record of what a man’s love for a woman can be, and what it means to be a humane, sensitive, flawed, passionate participant in life in our time."
The Best Overlooked American Jewish Novelist
David Evanier December 18, 2013
In November, David Evanier wrote about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the reissuing of his novel Red Love. He is blogging here this week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.
Stephen Dixon is, in my opinion, the best and most overlooked American Jewish fiction writer in the country. If I left out “Jewish,” he would still be the best. He has just published his 32nd book, a novel entitled His Wife Leaves Him, which is partly based on the death of his own beloved wife. Like Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Beller, Jennifer Belle, Jonathan Lethem, Bruce Jay Friedman, and such predecessors as Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Daniel Fuchs, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Wallace Markfield, Dixon’s Jewishness is not an orthodox or institutional one, but simply a fact that informs and haunts much of his work. It is hard to understand Dixon’s obscurity; he’s a two-time National Book Award finalist and has won four O. Henry Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. In 1994 the Boston Globe wrote that “It will take writers twenty years to catch up with what Stephen Dixon is doing.”
His output is mind-boggling: in addition to his novels, he has published hundreds of stories and is completing a new book, Late Stories, with hundreds more. Nevertheless, Dixon is not about quantity or longevity. Dixon is about freshness and quality. Among his gifts — which include narrative inventiveness without a trace of pretension or convolution, a hilarious sense of humor, and a memory that seems to evoke every single thing that has ever happened to him — he writes the most moving and lasting love stories I have ever read. Among them are his immortal story Sleep, in which the narrator imagines, with infinite pain and loss, the death of his wife.
And now we have in His Wife Leaves Him, perhaps the most complete love story ever written in the history of American letters. And it too is a story told in the face of death. Martin’s wife, still young, is diagnosed with a degenerative disease that, over the years, is unrelentingly cruel and ultimately fatal. I am certain that American literature has never created a husband who gives of himself so deeply, so fully, taking care of his wife even to the point of physical exhaustion. And it is a story told without false sentimentality or embellishment, which renders it all the more touching and believable.
Martin Samuels, the protagonist, has spent the first forty years of his life bumbling about — as a bartender, actor, reporter, wanderer in Paris, but always a dedicated writer — in search of a true love.
When he encounters Gwen, he finds everything he has been looking for: a truly beautiful, gentle but strong woman of exquisite kindness, sensitivity and literary sensibility, a person of the highest moral standards who shares his values and passions and is ready to start the family he has been yearning for.
She is a translator of the Russian literature he reveres, with a profound knowledge of the literature of the Gulag, Nazism and the inspiration of the Soviet Jewry movement. And she is Jewish, not a small matter to him. Gwen says, “Though I’m by no means a religious or observant Jew — at most, I’ll buy a box of egg matzos for Passover, though I’ll continue to eat bread and rice over the holiday — my Jewish identity is very strong and important to me because of my family history. In fact, the reason I’ve never been seriously involved with Gentile men since high school, or really only one and not for long, is because I never felt they could understand my experience of growing up as the daughter of Holocaust survivors.”
Although he is Jewish, he has not dated a Jewish woman seriously before. “That’s why I said before,” he tells her, “that I was glad you were Jewish. Fact is, for want of a better word this moment — maybe because I am so thrilled — I’m thrilled.” Everything about Gwen fills Martin with gratitude, and it will be a procreative life filled with their children, beautiful environments (Maine, Riverside Drive) and a passionate immersion in creative work — work they both engage in. Martin cries at his own wedding. His mother says, “It shows how sensitive you are and how much she means to you. I’m only saying I never saw or heard of any groom doing it before, and I’ve been to plenty of weddings. I can just imagine how you’ll react when your first baby comes out and you’re in the room.” This kind of dialogue, affectionate, funny and sad, richly steeped in a lived history, is totally representative of Dixon.
The novel is a summing up of the totality of a marriage, its incredible joys, epiphanies, smoldering sensuality, tenderness and moments of frustrated rage as Martin is engulfed, in the later stage of the marriage, in an endless round, night and day, of ministering to Gwen in her terrifying decline. And Dixon summons Gwen back to life unforgettably through her dialogue, and we see a precious person, a brilliant character, rendered real and palpable.
It’s hard to believe that Dixon’s encyclopedic memory has left a single thing out of this account of an extraordinary marriage. Dixon manages it not only through memory, but with a particularly intimate, vulnerable style of writing, a writing of deep feeling in which nothing is held back, even though it is artfully shaped and the ordinary details and tedium of life are transmuted by a master novelist. Dixon is an obsessed writer (great ones usually are) but he is not solipsistic; his work encompasses everyone he encounters and paints with vivid colors. He blankets the reader with specifics, but specifics so unique and compelling that they have universality. His work will stand as a penetrating record of what a man’s love for a woman can be, and what it means to be a humane, sensitive, flawed, passionate participant in life in our time.
David Evanier has published seven books and has received the Aga Khan Fiction Prize and the McGinnis-Ritchie Short Fiction Award. He was the founding editor of the literary magazine, Event, and the former fiction editor of The Paris Review. His novel Red Love was recently published as an e‑book.
QUOTE:
"is a gem." Steinitz added: "Here’s hoping it finally brings Dixon the wider readership he deserves."
His Wife Leaves Him’ by Stephen Dixon
By Rebecca Steinitz Globe Correspondent,October 12, 2013, 6:00 p.m.
1
ALISON SEIFER SPACEK FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
Though Stephen Dixon has written more than 500 short stories and published 16 novels, twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, won numerous fellowships, and taught for decades at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, he remains a hidden treasure whose credentials are regularly recited at the beginning of interviews and articles as if to establish that he is worth reading about, let alone reading.
But the real proof of Dixon’s readworthiness is his writing, which is superb.
His latest novel, “His Wife Leaves Him” begins with a knock on the door of a creative writing classroom. Martin Samuels, a fiction writer and professor, is pulled away from class because his wife, Gwen, has had a stroke. The ensuing 39-page paragraph (more about that in a moment) tells the story of Gwen’s initial recovery, her decline after a second stroke, Martin’s tender care and bouts of frustrated rage, including an outburst in which she overhears him shouting, “I wish you’d die, already, die, already, and leave me in peace,” her third stroke that very night and death a day later, Martin’s guilt over her death, and a memorial service organized by his daughters against his wishes, though afterward he characteristically admits, “Incidentally, this was very nice — cathartic in a way — and I’m glad you had it”
The rest of the book takes place the night after the memorial service, but covers the entire history of Martin and Gwen’s marriage, as Martin lies in bed with his memories.
“His Wife Leaves Him” has neither a MacGuffin nor a Rosebud, no dramatic plot arc, nor resolution. Rather, an aging writer dreams about, remembers, tries to remember, reimagines, and reflects upon the events of his marriage.
He begins at the end, then goes back to the very beginning: It takes 150 pages — six paragraphs — to get from Martin and Gwen’s first encounter at a party to their first date two weeks later, via the history of Martin’s previous relationships, his attempts to understand why it took him so long to call her, his daily life in New York, the Solzhenitsyn books he was reading at the time, accounts of subsequent conversations and events in the relationship, and more.
The narrative continues in similar nonlinear fashion, as shorter paragraphs recount discrete events, moving back and forth in time. In no particular order, Martin and Gwen break up, marry, have two daughters, spend summers in Maine, create homes and acquire household items, listen to classical music, drive, read, write, drink, fight, have sex, and pee (there has never been a novel with so much peeing).
Meanwhile, in his bed that night, Martin dreams, awakens, falls asleep again, gets up to pee, realizes he’s repeating himself, admits when he’s lying, struggles to remember names and the occasional word, and constructs his epic tale.
In short — or at length — as the novel progresses, its capacious representation of experience and thought accretes into a remarkable portrait of a man, woman, and marriage.
Short or lengthy, Dixon’s paragraphs encapsulate singular but interconnected episodes that reference other episodes, alternative possibilities, different recollections, not to mention actual events in the lives of Dixon and his own wife, Anne Frydman — who was, like Gwen, a wheelchair-bound translator, although Dixon began this novel several years before Frydman died in 2009 of multiple sclerosis.
Martin and Gwen, initially defined by their limitations, as struggling caretaker and invalid wife, gradually emerge as fully-realized characters in a strikingly happy — and typically imperfect — marriage.
This is Dixon’s longstanding modus operandi: fiction meticulously constructed to mirror the rambling complexities of real life, which in so doing reveals beauty and pain as only art can.
That he has been compared to James Joyce is no surprise: Language is his passion and the Upper West Side his Dublin.
But where Joyce becomes abstruse, Dixon remains fully grounded in the erratic yet ultimately cohesive rhythms of ordinary speech and daily life. Or, as Martin puts it, in a description of his first review in Newsweek, which could easily apply to Dixon: “An appealing and clearly written mix . . . of eros, thanatos, deep feeling and snippets of humor.”
There are certainly places where Dixon’s method palls, like an almost 50-page paragraph of mildly interesting but eventually monotonous dreams. Some might find his purposefully abrupt transitions less than “clearly written.”
But overall, whether Martin is circling around a forgotten detail or forthrightly proclaiming that “There wasn’t anything he didn’t like about her,” “His Wife Leaves Him” is a gem. Here’s hoping it finally brings Dixon the wider readership he deserves.
Rebecca Steinitz, a writer and editor who lives in Arlington, can be reached at rsteinitz@gmail.com.
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