What is All This?: Uncollected Stories (2024)

I’m not going to go easy on Dixon this time. But I will read more of his stuff and decide if he deserves the accolades and blurbs.

The stories here are artificial because the mechanics of what he is doing are never concealed by the writing. You can see the gears turning in his writerly mind, and in some cases, predict what he is going to type next. This is the writing of someone with a gun to his head. In a way, the urgency of the words is immense, you can barrel through a void of unmeaning – while he churns butter – the literary equivalent of it – out of the void.

Some tales are genuinely moving though. They are tales of American desperation. At the same time they convey a desperation for recognition and are too often about how to infiltrate female trousers.
The plight of writers, rarely writing, but always seeking to be known, is a consistent subject. The author tackles this concept repeatedly, while not forgetting to include the unsung heroes of our country’s formidable industries of food and manufacturing. The stories do not often attain a resolution, are fundamentally uneven, a crap-shoot, and contain too much mundane conversation.

His most traditional stories are his best in my opinion, which could just mean I’m not impressed by pure experimentation. When he isn’t fooling around, his writing plumbs deeper and provides memorable drama.

When he nails the voice, he’s mightily convincing. His clipped ticker tape style is very easy to read. Dixon sticks to 85% dialogue much of the time, when describing the petty squabbles of lovers, he can be alternately clever and puerile, exact and infantile, and slipping into jabbering nonsense too quickly. The longer stories are sometimes well-fleshed out, multi-dimensional, and affecting. In many others, he is simply exhausting narrative possibilities. The most radically different ones are obnoxious catalogs of internal checklists, or monologues eliminating various scenarios ad nauseum. Pointless speculations, mindlessly repetitive worrying, automatic writing, and the rest of it, as if Dixon were trying desperately to fulfill a word count quota. The psychology of blame recurs again and again, as does marriage, guilt, and the spats of cohabiting men and women, irreducibly selfish in nature, these characters enact combat theatrics as if their lives depended on it. Unfiltered, raw, frequently awkward, rhythmic, free associative, could all describe the prose style. It is usually futile to search for deeper meaning in these mundane snippets of existence, too inconsequential a glimpse into a life, haphazard, free form rambling, coming off as pseudo-autobiographical, uber-realistic, depicting inner storms, the psychological conceptualizations of imagined interactions, the visualizations of internal turmoil, details piling up like Tetris blocks, until unexpected humor arises in metafictional commentary.

It is a mind unraveling onto paper. What happens seems inevitable. Cause and effect is all it is. Concerned with accurate dialogue, and conveying a realistic passage of time, he passes muster - you can feel you are living in the story. Often hoping for a climax, I was only faced with anticlimax, with real life, and disappointment. If you enjoyed Queneau’s Exercises in Style, these will offer similar distraction. Subtle intuition may be required to determine some of the character motivations, especially if you are not accustomed to the sparse, dry, occasionally captivating style. Longing, frustration, bureaucracy, torment, despair, ridiculousness, Kafkaesque situations and more congeal into an impactful package, when he pulls it off.

I enjoyed the couple examples of dystopian society, but the fragmentary recounting of everyday human relationships, the intricacies of emotion displayed, the gestures, the psychological associations, all the tough days, hard times, and bleak prospects wore me down. There is plenty of evidence that he was writing the first thing that popped into his head. I cannot discourage that enough.

Ordinary, abundant clichés abound in the character speeches cropping up in almost every story, but the situations contrived subvert some expectations. I hated the discussion of semantics, found the selfishness blasé, was reminded of the pain of living with another human being, did not appreciate the demonstration of the art of the whiny argument. On top of this, he covers domestic violence, adults fighting like children, and adults fighting children. The demands of interacting with people in harsh reality, the pain of humility and why it is necessary in human interactions, people making poor decisions and suffering the consequences – all part of this circle of life. Dixon’s literary exploration of an imaginative environment yields a few gems. Mostly it is a bunch of goofy, gabbing, crabby men and women, irresponsible man-handling peddlers of quirky disturbances, co*ckamamie schemes, swagger, robust jiving, pin head roundtable debates, blustering blowhards, flimsy blokes with parasitic leanings, or Dixon’s typewriter had diarrhea.

What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories - A Stephen Dixon short story feast. Dozens of the author's previously unpublished stories now made available thanks to Fantagraphics Books.

As a way of providing a direct hit of what a reader can expect in this comprehensive collection, I offer my compressed retelling of Can't Win, a short-short story included that's crisp, clipped, tight, tough, edgy, so very classic Stephen Dixon. Here goes:

CAN'T WIN
Opening lines of this three page Dixon popper: "My agent calls and says "Meet me at the Triad Perry Publishing Company right away." I say "What's up?" and she says "It's very important. Just be there as soon as you can. I'm already on my way" and then she hangs up."

Oh God, the unnamed narrator/writer thinks, it has to be good news about his short story winning the annual Triad Perry cash prize. The writer, a mate I'll call Vic, races across town to the publishing house. In the reception area, people are sitting on couches and chairs and there's a secretary at her desk and a dog sleeping at her feet.

Vic's agent appears and introduce Vic to the managing editor of the publishing house, a Mr. Whithead. She turns to Whithead and says, "You tell him, not me." Vic says "It's bad news, isn't it? to which his agent replies, "Depends how you look at it or take it, but I'm afraid it is."

"Once more you've been chosen as one of the runners-up in our annual short fiction contest," Whithead says and hands Vic his manuscript. The managing editor continues, "If this will be any consolation to you, there were again more than four hundred applicants for the award. So take pride in knowing that for the fourth year in a row you were considered good enough to be one of the five finalists, a remarkable achievement, or at least record, I think."

"Goddamit!" Vic shouts and slams his manuscript on the receptionist's desk, slams it again and again and again, shouting Goddamit each time the stack of papers hits the desk. Vic points his finger at the managing editor's nose and demands to know what the hell stopped him from giving him the prize this year. Or last year. Or the year before that. Or the year before that. And why oh why did he have to come down to this damn office just to be told he lost? As a grand finale, Vic flings his manuscript across the room, pages floating down to the people on the couches and chairs. They start reading snippets of his story and begin a lively conversation about the quality of Vic's writing.

"Listen," Whithead tells Vic, "don't get all excited. I have other news: you've won this year's scarf design contest which entitles you to a thirty dollar check and mention in Scarf Designer News. Whithead hand Vic the check and holds up the six-foot scarf for all to see, a brightly colored six-color scarf with different colored fringes on the end.

Vic takes the scarf, sticks the check between his teeth, rips the damn thing in two and spits out the other pieces before grabbing a vase off the desk, shouting out, "Idiots. This scarf and check aren't what I came here for," and proceeds to throw the vase to the floor, smash, shards of glass going everywhere, one into the dog's rear leg. The dog yelps, jumps up and limps around the room, whimpering.

The infuriated receptionist stands up, shoves Vic hard enough he trips over a chair and falls to the floor. After a heated exchange, Vic agrees to take the dog to a vet.

We follow Vic to the vet, his return visit to the publishers' office (with bandaged dog that he paid for) and back to his apartment where he recounts the day's series of mishaps to his mother and sister. Then the unexpected. Here's Stephen Dixon's twist ending:

"That's my scarf," my sister says. "The one I designed and knitted myself. I've been looking all over for it. How come you took credit for it when I should have been the one who entered that contest and won?"

"What're you talking about?" I say. "I never entered this scarf in any contest," but she grabs it from me and calls the publishing house and says "Whithead; give me that chief man Whithead." When he gets on the phone, she says "Look, my brother before is a cheat, an out-and-out lying fraud. He didn't design that first-prize scarf or even knit it. I did, and I'm coming right down there now to get all the publicity I can out of winning that contest and also the thirty-dollar check. Some people might think they can't use the money, but, baby, I sure can."

Stephen Dixon reads Can't Win at a New York City bookstore. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee89x...

American novelist and short story writer Stephen Dixon, 1936-2019

Reading all sixty two of Stephen Dixon’s uncollected stories in a single five hundred and sixty page marathon is a challenging experience. But then, Stephen Dixon has been forcing readers to confront their own assumptions about literature, society, their complacencies and preconceptions, and ideas of how and what a writer should write, for more than fifty years. What Is All This? is an apt title. It expresses a kind of bewilderment about being human, and the world we live in, which is the question that connects diverse stories that span several decades from the 1950s to the present day, reflecting the output of one of America’s most undervalued writers.

They include a clutch published in Playboy, written before the mind-shift that accompanied the 1970s revolution in sexual politics. It’s difficult to identify what has changed in the way we expect women to be written about, but we’ve definitely moved on. A story like ‘Shoe Laces’, dating from 1959, and featuring an overweight, overbearing, passive-aggressive wife, dominating the husband on his knees before her in the street, tying her shoes, probably couldn’t be written now, or not quite in just that way.

In one of the early stories – ‘Storm’ – fact and fiction merge to produce two versions of the same rape. But however the protagonist tries to rewrite it, the ending is always the same – he’s alone on a rocky promontory telephoning the woman he’s obsessed with and listening to her put the phone down. Like some of the other stories that depict stalking and violence, it makes uncomfortable reading. It’s part of Stephen Dixon’s skill that you don’t close the book, but keep on reading. The deliberate omission of eroticism in Dixon’s depiction of the sexual act, even when abusive, makes it possible. He says that he doesn’t want to be salacious, doesn’t want people to become excited by his writing. But by detaching sex from its emotions and motivations, it often seems curiously sordid.

Stephen Dixon is one of America’s best exponents of the short story – his prose is bare, clipped down to the absolute minimum of words necessary to convey the meaning. And he chooses the words and arranges them like a poet. ‘The right words, in the right order, the right number of syllables’. Every sentence has its rhythm – staccato phrases rattling like hail on a tin roof, alternating with circuitous passages patterned with repetition. Sometimes there is nothing but dialogue. In ‘Biff’ we eavesdrop on a series of Pinteresque telephone conversations that seem innocent, but become increasingly sinister. It begins:

‘This weekend.’
‘What?’
‘I said let’s go this weekend.’
‘What?’
‘I said we’ll go again this weekend. For a trip. Just to be away.’
‘What?’
‘You telling me you still can’t hear?’

The subjects of his stories are people on the edge, and sometimes over it. In ‘The Bussed’, we’re translated into a future under a totalitarian regime where everything is done according to The Book. A man traveling home to his sick wife on the bus doesn’t have the right change for the fare and the incident escalates into full-blown revolt, violence and flight. It’s one of the more overtly political in the collection, alongside ‘China’, ‘Mr Greene’ (inspired by the Kennedy assassinations) and ‘The Leader’ (one of the few stories to be narrated by a woman), which relates Hitler’s visit to a brothel and addresses his rumored sexual deviancy.

The stories are almost always narrated by a male voice – alienated, emotionally detached, stating the facts without comment or judgement. The characters are often morally ambiguous, always the thickness of a sheet of paper away from real criminality. One small flaw in character, one moral slip and something unstoppable is put in motion. In ‘The Man Who Read Beautiful Books’, a student fraudulently collecting benefits, in order to finish his postgraduate thesis, is tempted by a woman’s lure of the nubile daughters she wants him to meet. He becomes involved in a scam that becomes deeper and more dangerous until he only has one option. Since the story’s original publication in Playboy, that option has changed and Dixon has now replaced the original ending.

All the stories have been re-written – some had lain in drawers unfinished, some published in long-extinct magazines – but all have been newly edited and revised. Stephen Dixon’s style is unique, and still experimental enough to give a nod towards the future. For myself I grew tired of lonely, alienated males in dubious situations. These stories are not an uplifting read. Stephen Dixon’s ‘American Urban Realism’ is a dystopian view of humanity; stalkers, pointless violence, messy relationship break-ups, Hitler defecated on by prostitutes, people fleeing from authority. But I never grew tired of his prose. Dixon is a master of the short story form and what you can do with it. Every story is beautifully crafted, despite the bleakness of the subject matter, and he breaks all the rules of creative writing in the process. His work is shocking, thought-provoking, always remarkable and should be required reading for students of the form.

(Review first shown on Book Munch)

A great vast tumbled river of a book. These are Dixon's uncollected stories, 563 pages of them. He writes like a man in slow exile, mulling over his life, each detail of it examined under his relentless, uncompromised gaze. The book is published by Fantagraphics, the graphic novel and comic publisher. It has an interesting look, both monumental and second-hand. Dixon is himself a skilled artist with pen and paper, and it would have been a delight to see some of his visual work alongside his prose. Dixon, a master of stripped down prose: he makes Bukowski look downright Baroque.

ADDENDUM: The book is riddled with typos and other editorial errors. I wonder if Fanatagraphics relied solely on spell check, or if it was even proofread at all.