You can take the man out of Chicago, but you can't take Chicago out of the man—especially if you are talking about Western Michigan University English professor Stuart Dybek. Though Dybek has lived in Kalamazoo for almost 30 years, his gritty yet magical short stories are set almost exclusively in the Southwest Side of Chicago (overlapping neighborhoods known as Pilsen and Little Village, and later called El Barrio). Dybek's elegiac stories, with their strong sense of place in memory and interlinked characters, have been compared to Joyce's Dubliners and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. A regular contributor to literary magazines and anthologies, he's regarded with an almost cultlike reverence by his fans for his stories and poems.
Ten years after the publication of his last collection, readers are going to be surfeited with Dybek's prose and poetry this fall and next year. Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, originally published in 1980 by Viking and reissued in 1990 by Ecco, was released one more time by the University of Chicago Press last month. Coast of Chicago, first published in 1990 by Knopf, will be reissued this month by Picador. And a new collection of short stories, I Sailed with Magellan, will be published by FSG this month. Dybek's first collection of poems, Brass Knuckles, originally published in 1979 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, will be reissued by Carnegie Mellon Press in the spring. And in a not-too-common circumstance of one press publishing both an author's prose and poetry, FSG will simultaneously publish Dybek's second collection of poems, Streets in Their Own Ink.
PW and Dybek arranged to meet one rainy Friday afternoon in October at Shaman Drum Books, in the heart of Ann Arbor. It must have been football weekend: the streets were clogged with students and townies. Clutching a dog-eared galley of I Sailed with Magellan, PW walked through Shaman Drum, inquiring of every middle-aged man in the store if he was Stuart Dybek. He was nowhere to be found—until PW spied a slightly built male figure outside, leaning casually against the front of the store, wearing a battered green suede jacket. He looked exactly like one of the street-savvy, tough-guy, weather-beaten characters in a Dybek short story. And it was Dybek.
Like his I Sailed with Magellan alter ego, Polish-American teen Perry Katzek, Dybek grew up in a close-knit, working class ethnic neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and early '60s. Dybek's parents were immigrants. While the neighborhood now is populated mostly by Mexican-Americans, during Dybek's youth it was a neighborhood in transition. It had long been populated by Poles and Czechs, with Latinos newly added to the ethnic mix—disparate groups whose cultural differences were bridged by the Roman Catholic Church. "The South Side of Chicago has always been a quintessential neighborhood, the target of migrations. In writing about this little ethnic enclave, I am writing about America," he pronounces, as we sit in the kind of trendy, pseudohippie cafe that one finds only in American college towns like Ann Arbor, Ithaca or Chapel Hill.
Dybek's father, Stanley, was a foreman at the International Harvester plant, which manufactured trucks and farm implements. His mother, Adeline, worked as a truck dispatcher. Dybek recalls his youth as a "benevolent time." He describes the neighborhood as one with a "working-class ambiance, rather than a middle-class sensibility." He explains, "Because of the church, there was a strong sense of community. We all shared the same religion, though there otherwise was not a lot of assimilation in this so-called melting pot. There were also a lot of kids—so there was this huge tribal sense that transcended ethnic lines. We had huge amounts of unsupervised time. Our parents did not schedule after-school activities for us—they had other things to do. We created a world of our own, side by side with the adult world. They ignored us, and we ignored them. It was a 'might makes right' world that we created, straight out of Lord of the Flies. There was enormous joy and vitality, though mixed with fear, having so much freedom. This exhilaration provided a great counterbalance to the economic stresses and tensions that were such a part of our lives."
Dybek can pinpoint the exact moment when he realized the importance of language and imagination in his universe. "I remember the year, the day, the very moment that my life as a writer began," he declares with relish about an experience in the fourth grade. "One morning my mother was sick with the flu. My father had woken me up that morning and left a bowl of this awful stuff—they called it Ralston; on the table for me. I had not done my homework yet and had to write a one-page essay on Africa 'the Dark Continent' for school. So I pushed the Ralston away, and decided to do my homework instead. I tried to describe the trees in Africa. But I was a city kid—the highest things I'd ever seen in my life were the skyscrapers in Chicago. I wrote the phrase 'the tree-scraped skies.' It was as if a bolt shot through me. Literally, it was a moment of epiphany. I had discovered metaphor. It was the first time I felt this enormous connection to language. For me, writing no longer was just something that had to do with school."
Dybek obviously feels strongly about honing his writing to perfection as he leans forward, warming to the subject. "I try to make my prose tactile and sensuous. My writing contains a lot of images, a lot of smells. I try to make the rhythm of the language musical in my stories." Dybek compares his efforts to the poems of Eugenio Montale: "Montale describes a lemon grove in such a way... by god, you read that poem, you are there, you are there in that lemon grove in Italy. I want the reader to be there. I want the reader to feel sensually scenes I create on the page. I want life on the page. I want my writing to be like music, tactile and emotive. I want the reader to feel this stuff."
"Write what you know and the rest will follow" might be a time-worn cliché, but in Dybek's case, it's the truth. Dybek recalls not using his childhood memories as a springboard or Chicago as a backdrop in his early work. Instead, he tried to create conventional short stories with generic American characters. "I wanted to imitate my models—like F. Scott Fitzgerald," he admits. "My early stories did not have a particular place. They were more about..." Dybek pauses, embarrassed at the thought of his early efforts. "I can't remember. None were published."
Searching for his narrative voice, Dybek looked to his literary forebears for inspiration. "Funny thing about Chicago writers is how many come from the South Side," he declares. "James Farrell, Theodore Dreiser, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks.... The South Side of Chicago is a microcosm of America. All these big themes are available to you—they rise out naturally from the material. Themes like poverty, faith, prejudice, immigration, assimilation, race, class…. Instead of imposing my own biases or some kind of aesthetic agenda, I want them to come naturally out of the material—like Eudora Welty writing about the South or Joyce about Dublin."
Although Dybek recognizes that his work is greatly influenced by the Chicago style of realistic writing, his work goes beyond into a realm all his own that can only be called "Chicago magical realism." Certainly, Dybek's Chicago is a real place of garbage-strewn alleys, street vendors hawking their wares and rundown apartment buildings rocked by the rumblings of a passing El train. But there's also magic and joy in Dybek's Chicago, perhaps springing from that heady combination of ethnic folkways and Roman Catholic rituals that colored his childhood and now infuses his tales. Statues of saints may wink at schoolchildren, tulips bloom on an inner-city street, dead girls frozen in ice perform miracles and spontaneous parades of people wind through the streets. Dybek's tales are a seamless mixture of the real and the fantastic, the tangible and the mythic, the sacred and the profane.
Though his working-class characters live hardscrabble lives in the inner city, they never lose hope. They constantly look for and find beauty around them—even though the orchids two characters pick turn out to be irises, the dawn turns out to be the lights of Gary, Ind., and the ship's lights on Lake Michigan are those of a pumping station. While discussing the characters inhabiting his stories, Dybek says, "I really wanted there to be—even in the midst of the grittier side of life—humor, vitality, a full palate of human emotion. I don't think you can demonstrate humor or vitality except by testing it. Imagination allows people to survive. It's not just escape: imagination allows you to reject definitions imposed on you by redefining the world through the power of the imagination."
Dybek's entire life might be said to imitate his art. The story of how Dybek got his first collection of short stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, published by a major New York publishing house could be a story straight out of Stuart Dybek's metafictional world. It's a modern fairy tale—complete with fairy godmother editors and magical manuscripts—in a realistic and hard-boiled New York publishing house setting. "Back in those days, there were such things as junior editors and slush piles that these assistants actually combed through. My manuscript literally came over the transom at Viking. The story is that an editor's assistant at Viking was laughing hysterically while reading one of my short stories. The editor came out of her office and wanted to know what was going on. She then read the manuscript and laughed hysterically. My phone rang, and a voice said, 'Hey, we like your manuscript.' " Dybek pauses for emphasis: "I had no agent or anything. I was shocked, and remember thinking, 'How could this happen to me?' "
But like the Chicago of his youth that may or may not have ever existed, Dybek mourns the demise of publishing as it used to be. "I bridged that change in the publishing world. I came in when publishing was the way it was. Books were art, not 'product.' I've been around, and have seen the enormous changes in publishing that have occurred in the last two decades. What happened to me at Viking 25 years ago could never happen today. Now you send your manuscript to an agent, you don't just send it unsolicited to a publisher."
Dybek's recollections of his entrée into book publishing continue with yet more larger-than-life characters added into the mix. Dybek describes his longtime editor, Elisabeth Sifton, in reverential tones. "She was not that first editor at Viking who discovered me, but she became my editor at Viking. She is a kind of iconic figure in publishing, a real old-style editor. We started out at Viking. I followed her to Knopf, and then followed her to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She's a delight to work with, and it's a privilege to work with her. Almost any book she does I like. We have similar tastes. She is a great, great editor."
Asking about FSG publishing his newest collection of stories this fall as well as his new collection of poems, PW can see where Dybek's fantastic stories come from. Dybek's entire life and career seem to be based on cosmic coincidences. "Montale is one of my favorite poets. His primary translator in the United States is none other than Jonathan Galassi, the publisher at FSG, who is absolutely wonderful in his own right. This is absolutely amazing to me—to work with the same people who work with Montale." There is wonder in Dybek's voice as he says, "I am so lucky." Perhaps. Or maybe Stuart Dybek is just one hell of a raconteur, who can't help seeing the magic in the everyday world around him.
