Stephen Dixon (1936–2019): An Appreciation

Abstract

Stephen Dixon (1936–2019): An Appreciation Matthew Petti (bio) American literature lost a much-underappreciated master when Stephen Dixon died on November 6th, 2019, at the age of 83, after a brief illness related to Parkinson’s disease. One of the most prolific and innovative writers of his generation, he wrote until the very end, hammering away on a manual typewriter with, as he liked to say, “the two good fingers Parkinson’s has left me.” The last two of his thirty-five books (eighteen novels and seventeen short story collections) were reviewed in November/December 2019 issue of ABR. Dixon — who was twice nominated for the National Book Award, and once for the PEN/Faulkner — published over 650 short stories in a remarkable career that spanned six decades and included multiple O’Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and appearances in the Best American Short Stories anthologies. Jonathan Lethem, J. Robert Lennon, Julia Alvarez, Daniel Handler, Dave Eggers, and Paul Maliszewski are among a generation of contemporary writers who acknowledge his influence on the craft. And for twenty-seven years, he was a professor in the storied Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, teaching, among his many students, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Esi Edugyan, ZZ Packer, Porochista Khakpour, David Lipsky, Fred Leebron, Jean McGarry, and Pagan Kennedy. Dixon’s immensely personal narratives drew heavily from his own life, and usually dealt with the least palatable aspects of what it means to be alive, relentlessly confronting heartbreak, loss, disappointment, and failure. As the critic Michael Silverblatt once said of Dixon: “He attempts to render reports of unbearable experience. The outside world is calling with its terrors, and he as a writer is responding to the onslaught.” Dixon spent the last decade of his life writing about the illness and eventual death of his beloved wife, the translator, Russian scholar, and poet Anne Frydman. This work, culminating in an exploration of living as a widower with Parkinson’s Disease in Late Stories (2016), Dear Abigail and Other Stories (2019), and Writing, Written (2019), is an incomparably faithful rendering of human suffering. Dixon created texts that were viscerally experiential for the reader by dispensing with traditional narrative structure: his protagonists don’t simply move through a story from discreet beginning to resolved end. Instead, they tend to pace back and forth, in and around and over their troubles, picking off scabs, and licking wounds to see how they taste. The result is an obsessively self-revising text that reflects experience as if through a funhouse mirror — paradoxically both truly felt and narratively twisted. The critic Alan Friedman said of the 1991 novel Frog, arguably Dixon’s masterwork, “One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon, one submits to it. An unstoppable prose expands the arteries while an edgy, casual nervousness overpowers the will.” As in his writing, a significant thread of tragedy ran through Dixon’s life. In 1939, his father, Abraham Ditchik, a member of a criminal ring extorting doctors who performed illegal abortions, was at the center of a corruption scandal that made the front pages of newspapers nationwide. One of his younger sisters suffered her whole life from von Recklinghausen’s disease. His oldest brother, Don Dixon, an International News Service war correspondent, was captured by the Chinese in 1952 and accused of being a spy. He was held for a year and a half without a word to the outside world before finally being released. Fifty years later, Don was killed by a falling tree while jogging. Another of Dixon’s brothers — the one he was closest to growing up — died in 1960 when the freighter he was traveling on sank in the mid-Atlantic. Anne Frydman, his beloved wife, contracted MS two years into their marriage, and suffered with it for over twenty-five years before passing away in 2009. Click for larger view View full resolution Young Stephen was three and a half when his father was sentenced, and he was told that his father was away from home because he was a colonel in the Army’s Dental Corps, stationed in Albuquerque. At the age of ten, Stephen came across court documents and transcripts hidden away in...