Birth of the Blue-Collar Blues

By R.Z. Sheppard

GEORGE MILLS by Stanley Elkin; Dutton; 508 pages; $15.95

From his home in suburban St. Louis, not far from Mark Twain's Mississippi River, Stanley Elkin once remarked that "the consummate salesman also needs a customer who doesn't want to buy." He was talking about inspiration and performance, the challenge of turning accessory into necessity. He was also offering a fragment of autobiography.

Elkin is America's master literary pitchman. No fiction writer sells ideas and myths with more elan and imagination. His fantasies about popular culture and allegorical burlesques have been set in places as disparate as a department-store basement (A Bad Man), an all-night radio station (The Dick Gibson Show) and heaven and hell (The Living End).

At the heart of Elkin's work, one usually finds longing and pain as old acquaintances, pleasure as an embarrassing surprise, the inevitability of risk and the mysteries of power and chance. Says Ben Flesh in The Franchiser: "The world is a miracle, history's and the universe's long shot. It runs uphill."

This is the direction of George Mills, Elkin's longest, most complex novel. The burdens of the author's previous fictions are given full weight. The narrative path is steep, circuitous and mined with disease and humiliations. The voices of third and first persons mingle, and time runs in either direction. In the present, a terminal patient named Judith Glazer beleaguers family and friends with hostile honesty and acrid humor: "Neither will I be wired to any of those medical busy-boxes to extend for one damned minute what only a fool would call my life. If Jesus wants me He can have me. To tell you the truth, He can probably use me." Her friend, a gifted writer named Messenger, unaccommodated by big-league literary life and politics, feels that he is second-string.

Elkin, who suffers from a form of multiple sclerosis, has not received the recognition or income of lesser colleagues, desipite his overflow of talent and energy. So it is not difficult to see Glazer's trials and Messenger's messages as a form of special pleading. Fortunately, these episodes are not the whole story, merely parts of an epic that embraces 1,000 years of second-string citizenship. The novel's heroes are all named George Mills, from the Greatest Grandfather, an 11th century Northumbrian stableboy, to a furniture mover in East St. Louis, Ill.

The Millses represent an unbroken working-class line fated to perform the world's crummiest jobs. "I would take my place behind the horses . . . I'm into traffic," says one laborer shyly. Before settling down to shovel manure, George I takes a wrong turn on his way to the Crusades and does a stint in a Slavic salt mine. The following Georges are doomed to play follow the leader through the centuries, picking up the trash of kings and sultans, knights and janissaries. The last George graduates from shoving around middle-class furniture; now he repossesses the tables and chairs of ghetto blacks who default on their payments. In his off time, he accompanies the dying Mrs. Glazer to a Mexican Laetrile clinic where Elkin's patented mixture of slapstick and " strong emotions is administered:

I "Where's the harm in flaunting my pesos or flashing my jewelry? It's . . . too oblique a contingency that I might ever be killed doing good deeds. It passes the time. And perhaps some bad man will take the bait, and God never notice that it was entrapment."

The various Georges trek, parade and carom through a millennium.

Along the way, Elkin displays his unique gift for surreal parody. In a sultan's harem, the chief eunuch gives a sex lecture in the tone of a call-in therapist: "You could fault tonight, you could die. In any event, I trust a review can do no harm, and I enjoy our chalk talks." A crusading George speaks with Joycean extravagance: " 'We were friends,' he says again of the man he has just mutilated. . .'He was wily. I frisked his shift and groped his robes. I did his duds like a dowser. . .And it came to me he must have swallowed it. See,' Mills says, and he raises his arms still higher, bringing his palms together in which [his victim's] bowels slosh, collision and shift like so much damp, dark, swollen seaweed beneath his offering, the surgical, amputate bribegold steaming like carrots in soup."

Each Mills is delineated in chapters and episodes; all converge in the last Mills as collective blue-collar folklore: "A witness, in a dynasty of witnesses, one more chump who crewed history, whose destiny it was to hang out with the field hands, just there, you see, in range and hard by, but a little out of focus in the group photographs, rounded up when the marauders came, feeding the flames, one more wisp of smoke at the Inquisitions, doing all the obligatory forced marches, boat folks from the word go."

The People, Yes? No. Elkin is reaching for something bigger, a Fiddler on the Roof of Western civilization with self-deprecating navvies suffering every slight of outrageous fate, from wars to plagues and back again. Elkin's overview is encapsulated early on when the first George tarries too long before a glorious tapestry. The owner stays the blow of an impatient courtier, allows the stableboy an additional moment of art appreciation and then adds, "When you've done, go out quietly." That, implies the author, is the history of the commoner before his betters. But in Elian's retelling, everyman proves uncommon, and a mockingbird sits on his shoulder. When these Millses leave, they go noisily, and the echo they leave behind is the rocking sound of the last laugh. -- By R.Z. Sheppard

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